From the BBC : For 14 years Elouise Cobell fought a legal battle to recover billions of dollars that had been systematically plundered from Native Americans by the US government. During the action it emerged that the government's Bureau of Indian Affairs had, over the previous 100 years, sold off Indian land to farmers and prospectors but failed to pass the money on. A qualified accountant, Yellow Bird Woman, as Cobell was known in her native Blackfoot nation, raised the huge sums of money necessary to fight the case. Along the way she encountered opposition from the various US...
Bosnian war crimes court charged two Bosnian Serb military commanders with involvement in the Srebrenica genocide on Monday. Judge Ljubomir Kitic, found the two commanders from the first battalion of the Zvornik brigade, Slavko Peric and Momir Pelemis, guilty of involvement in the detention and the systematic killing of at least 1000 Bosnian Muslim men in the region of Srebrenica. Kitic remarked, "Peric and Pelemis took part in a joint criminal enterprise with other members of the Bosnian Serb army and police , having a common plan and purpose to permanently and forcibly transfer the entire...
Staff Sgt Calvin Gibbs, an American soldier accused of committing war crimes in Afghanistan, has admitted taking fingers off bodies as war trophies, as his trial began on Monday. Gibbs is facing 16 criminal charges, including premeditated murder, before a court martial, all of which he has pleaded not guilty to. It is alleged that he led a rogue unit of the US Army the 5th Stryker Brigade, known as the “Kill Team”, into murdering innocent Afghan civilians, in Kandahar province in late 2009. Members of the unit then posed with their dead bodies for photos and kept body parts as mementos. Gibbs...
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has warned Western nations of an “earthquake” and of “another Afghanistan” if they were to take action against the country. In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph , Assad said, "Syria is the hub now in this region. It is the fault line, and if you play with the ground you will cause an earthquake … Do you want to see another Afghanistan, or tens of Afghanistans? "Any problem in Syria will burn the whole region. If the plan is to divide Syria, that is to divide the whole region." Assad went on to say that he believed the West would “definitely” increase...
The tribunal looking into allegations of war crimes committed in the brutal Bangladeshi war of independence has been deferred until the 20th of November. The lawyer for defendant Delwar Hossain Sayyidi, who is charged with crimes against humanity, genocide and rape, has asked for a review of the charges and the withdrawal of the tribunal’s chairman. Tribunal Chairman Nizamul Huq is accused by the lawyer of bias. Bangladesh’s main opposition, led by Khaleda Zia, have called the tribunal a ‘farce’ and claim a political vendetta is being carried out. Stephen Kay, who is an interntional court...
Republican presidential candidates have slammed Obama’s foreign policy moves on Iraq and Libya, as they gave an indication on what grounds next November’s elections will be contested. Herman Cain and Rick Perry criticised the pull-out of US troops from Iraq, although the deadline was first set by George Bush. "For the president to announce that we are going to do a drawdown on the troops by a date certain, that just leaves a power vacuum in Iraq," Cain said on "Face the Nation" on CBS. "It was irresponsible for George Bush to set a date certain," Cain added. "The idea that a commander in...
Uruguay’s Congress has voted to scrap an amnesty for military officials who have been charged with allegations of human rights abuses during the military rule crackdown of leftists between 1975 and 1983. After 12 hours of debate, the lower house of parliament voted 50-40 to eliminate the amnesty, which leaves Jose Mujica, the country's president left to approve the change. Luis Puig, a ruling Broad Front coalition legislator, said , "This is a historic night. The culture of impunity imposed during 25 years must be dismantled and turned into a culture of human rights." Mujica is expected to...
Why former Liban leader Muammar Gaddafi was ‘angry and disappointed’ in his final days: "He thought his people should love him until the end. He felt he had done so many good things for them and for Libya. He also felt betrayed by men who had seemed to be his friends, like [former British Prime Minister] Tony Blair and [Italian Premier] Silvio Berlusconi ." - Mansour Dhao Ibrahim , one of Gaddafi’s inner circle and one of the most wanted men in Libya, now in custody. See the BBC’s report here .
Poland has reopened investigations into crimes committed in several concentration camps connected to Auschwitz during the Second World War. It is thought over one million Jews and Poles were killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz alone. Polish authorities hope to track down any surviving members of the Nazis, complicit in the genocide. The original investigation was closed in the 1980s, due to Poland’s status as a Soviet satellite state, which created difficulties in questioning witnesses and hunting down the perpetrators abroad. Read AP report here .
Former Syrian ally Turkey has been housing members of the Free Syrian Army, an anti-Assad group who have attacked Syrian soldiers, at a guarded camp in Turkey according to the New York Times. The news comes as the Free Syrian Army claimed responsibility for an attack on Wednesday that killed 9 Syrian soldiers, including one officer. While Turkey insists their support for the group is purely “humanitarian”, Colonel As’aad of the Free Syrian Army was interviewed by the New York Times at a Turkish government official’s office, wearing a suit purchased by the Turkish Foreign Ministry and guarded...