Canada’s Liberal Party, pushed into third place in recent elections, has appointed as interim leader Bob Rae. Rae was a prominent advocate of federalism who figured in the Norwegian-led peace process in Sri lanka between 2001 and 2006. In June 2009 he was denied entry and deported by Sri Lanka’s hardline regime, which was angered by Rae’s outspoken criticism of the mass killings of Tamil civilians in the preceding months. “ The world can't just sit back and let this death and destruction happen ,” Rae had said in April 2009 as Sri Lankan artillery continued to kill and wound hundreds of...
Thousands of residents have fled North Sudan’s offensive that captured the disputed Abyei region. As urgent talks began to try and defuse the situation, 110,000 people face a humanitarian crisis. Having occupied Abyei, Northern Sudan claimed that it had ceased military operations in the region. A column of northern Sudanese tanks and troops rolled into Abyei last week after weeks of hit-and-run clashes between northern and southern forces, sparking the worst crisis since South Sudanese overwhelming voted for independence. South Sudan is due to declare independence on July 19 after a...
It has taken sixteen years, but Bosnian Muslims finally have a chance to seek final justice with the capture of one of ‘ the most wanted man ’ in Europe. Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb commander charged with responsibility for the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre was caught in a small town in northern Serbia on May 26. Sixteen years after he was first listed as a wanted man for acts committed during the violent break-up of Yugoslavia, the Serbian national now faces The Hague on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. His arrest, so long after the crimes he commanded, underlines the powerful impact on international affairs of post Cold War norms of accountability – norms that presently also underpin international operations against Mummar Gaddafi in Libya. " His arrest is a clear message to accused like Omar al-Bashir and potential accused like Moammar Gadhafi that justice never forgets ," said Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch's International Justice Program, in an email to the AP. Last Friday the 69-year-old was declared fit to face trial and now faces extradition to Netherlands to face the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) Since the 2008 arrest of Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic, Mladic has been the most prominent Bosnian war criminal on the run. The Serb ultranationalist has been pivotal to the region’s politics for over two decades. First he commanded the brutal three year siege of Sarajevo (the longest of a capital city in modern warfare) and the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica. Then, after going on the run in Serbia, he became a litmus test of the country’s commitment to international codes of conduct. After the Kosovo crisis and the removal of Slobodan Milosovic Serbia’s rehabilitation into international society and its ascension to the European Union became de facto conditional on handing Mladic over to the ICTY.
In a historic speech in Britain President Barack Obama said Wednesday that US and UK leadership in the world is essential for the promotion of freedom and human dignity. “Our relationship is special because of the values and beliefs that have united our people through the ages,” Obama said in the first-ever address by a US president to both houses of Parliament. See report by Marketwatch here “The time for our leadership is now,” President Obama said. “ We are the nations most willing to stand up for the values of tolerance and self-determination that lead to peace and dignity. ” He also...
The most senior American diplomat yet to visit the rebels in Libya is holding talks in their strongold, Benghazi, the BBC reports Monday. US Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman has met the Transitional National Council, which rules the east of the country. His visit comes after the EU foreign affairs chief, Catherine Ashton, also visited the city to open an EU office on Sunday. Some countries - including France, Italy and Qatar - have already given diplomatic recognition to the TNC rebel leadership. The Libyan rebels failed to gain full recognition when they travelled to Washington a...
Below are some quotes on self-determination from a speech by Mahmood Mamdani, professor and director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) on the independence of South Sudan . The full speech can be found here . “Let me ask one question to begin with: who is the self in what we know as self ‐ determination? In 1956, when Sudan became independent, that self was the people of Sudan . Today, in 2011, when South Sudan will become independent, that self is the people of South Sudan . “That self, in both cases, is a political self. It is a historical self, not a metaphysical self as...
The below is an extract from Human rights Watch’s open letter to Canada’s newly elected government on human rights priorities (see full text here ). In June 2010, Canada's Parliament passed the Balanced Refugee Reform Act. Human Rights Watch is concerned about the act's "safe-country of origin" provision, which allows the minister of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism to designate certain countries or parts of countries as "safe." The application of this provision is problematic. It is impossible to make a blanket determination that any country is safe for everyone, and the criteria by which the minister would make such a determination are unclear.
The United States has launched a high-level initiative to make its military more ready and able to respond to potential mass killings in future , the Wall Street Journal reports. A senior Department of Defense official told the WSJ that the project, which is at an early stage, would help develop "a complete set of options that the leadership can consider in the preventive area before it comes to sending in the military, or not sending in the military." The emerging doctrine is a blueprint for an interventionist foreign policy that places such ideas as "responsibility to protect" on a par with...
An Iraqi tribunal has ruled that a 1983 attack on the Barzani tribe in the Kurdish provinces of Iraq was an act of genocide , the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) said. The KRG said as many as 8,000 members of the Barzani tribe, most of them men and boys, were rounded up and killed by the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein in 1983. The reprisal came five years before the 1988 chemical attacks on Halabja in which 5,000 more Kurds were killed by Saddam’s forces. The Kurds have been waging a decades long struggle, including a campaign of armed resistance, for self-rule from Arab-dominated Iraq...
A party advocating Scotland’s independence from Britain has won a surprising majority in the Scottish Parliament in last Thursday’s elections. It is the first time the Scottish National Party (SNP) has taken a majority in the devolved national assembly which was established in 1999. The head of the SNP, Alex Salmond, who will serve another term as Scotland's first minister, pledged to introduce a plebiscite on Scottish independence within the next five years. "The SNP can finally claim that we have lived up to that accolade as the national party of Scotland," he said. "That is why, in this...