A few hours outside of Cambodia’s capital, 58-year-old Taing Kim, a delicate woman who spent several years as a nun, lives in a gray concrete house in the middle of a quiet village amid a sea of rice paddies. She settled in Kampong Chhnang nearly 30 years ago and makes her living by farming and selling firewood. She was married in 1980 but says her husband left her when he learned of her past.
The Museum has launched “The Mladic Files,” a multimedia website providing reporting and analysis of the upcoming trial of Ratko Mladic in The Hague.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is scheduled to hold presidential and parliamentary elections on November 28, 2011. These elections could to lead to opportunities for peace, stability and growth—or plummet the country back into economic, political, and social upheaval.
Thomas Buergenthal, a Holocaust survivor and the American judge on the International Court of Justice in The Hague from 2000 to 2010, recently sat down with Michael Abramowitz, Director of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, for an interview.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum today welcomed the White House announcement of a new presidential directive aimed at strengthening the U.S. government’s ability to prevent genocide and mass atrocities.
The world’s newest nation—the Republic of South Sudan—was born July 9 amidst parades, speeches, and banquets attended by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, the Crown Prince of Norway, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, 29 other heads of state, and some 200,000 to 300,000 South Sudanese. I had the privilege of attending the ceremonies as a guest of the South Sudanese government. As I sat in the reviewing stand with others in the 95-degree heat, listening to 13 speeches of congratulations and the reading of the new nation’s Declaration of Independence, I had time to reflect on the extraordinary cost of creating this new republic. Four million Southern Sudanese lost their lives in two civil wars spread out over 49 years, with some of the most horrific atrocities—committed by the North against the South—in recent human rights history.
Monday, July 11, 2011 marks the sixteen-year anniversary of the fall of Srebrenica. During the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, Srebrenica was one of a few lone Bosniak holdouts in the east. Completely surrounded by Bosnian Serb forces, the town was declared a safe haven in 1993, to be protected and disarmed by United Nations soldiers.
On one of our first days after arriving in Juba last fall, former US Envoy to Sudan Andrew Natsios, photojournalist Lucian Perkins and myself sat down with Acuil Malith Banggol, a former political officer with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the rebel force in southern Sudan. He explained why southern Sudanese no longer wished to be part of Sudan, about how the Dinka, Nuer and other peoples of the south had been marginalized and persecuted by the authorities in Khartoum for three decades.
Civilians in Syria remain at grave risk of mass violence amidst ongoing human rights violations as the Syrian government continues its violent crackdown on protestors calling for democratic political reform and the end of the Assad regime. The government does not appear to be targeting people based on their group identity, but rather their political positions.
The above map is an excerpt from a larger map produced by the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) detailing displacement in Kordofan. More information about OCHA's work in Sudan can be found here.