Water, Food, Land and Genocide

September 16, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University and author, most recently of Bloodlands: Eastern Europe Between Hitler and Stalin contributed a very disturbing Op-Ed piece to the NY Times on Sunday.  This is just a part:

To expand Germany’s Lebensraum, Hitler aimed to seize Ukraine from the Soviet Union, starve 30 million Eastern Europeans and transfer the food to Germany. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the campaign had two major aims: the control of fertile Ukrainian soil and the destruction of Jews living there. It was this invasion that placed defenseless Jewish children at the mercy of the murderous Einsatzgruppen.

Climate change threatens to provoke a new ecological panic. So far, poor people in Africa and the Middle East have borne the brunt of the suffering.

The mass murder of at least 500,000 Rwandans in 1994 followed a decline in agricultural production for several years before. Hutus killed Tutsis not only out of ethnic hatred, but to take their land, as many genocidaires later admitted.

In Sudan, drought drove Arabs into the lands of African pastoralists in 2003. The Sudanese government sided with the Arabs and pursued a policy of eliminating the Zaghawa, Masalit and Fur peoples in Darfur and surrounding regions.

Climate change has also brought uncertainties about food supply back to the center of great power politics. China today, like Germany before the war, is an industrial power incapable of feeding its population from its own territory, and is thus dependent on unpredictable international markets.

Read all: The Next Genocide and plenty of comments from readers, as well.

For a NYRB article of his on the Holocaust and how it is often misapprehended see here. 

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Genocide Trial for Reagan’s Man in Guatemala

April 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

…for the first time “anywhere in the world,” according to the United Nations, a former head of state is being tried for genocide by his own nation’s justice system. That man is Efrain Rios Montt, an ex-military dictator who ruled Guatemala from 1982 to 1983. — And, a Pentecostal minister, friends of Pat Robertson and the later Jerry Falwell.

That’s the good news.

Ixil Mayan Indians are standing in court to testify what it was like during the years of Montt’s rule and that is the bad news, the grotesque news

Ixil-CU-600x337

 

 The soldiers killed Jacinto Lopez’s teenage daughter Magdalena by repeatedly stabbing her in the neck.

Then they shot and killed his sons, 13-year-old Domingo and 10-year-old Pedro.

His in-laws were not spared. Barely anyone in the village was.

These atrocities, which took place in the remote Guatemalan town of Santa Maria Nebaj in July of 1982, have never been described in a courtroom.

“They killed my family and destroyed our crops,” Lopez testified. “They took even my cows.”

CNN  and NY Times

“I was 12 years old,” said one woman, whose identity was protected by the court. “They took me with the other women and they tied my feet and hands. They put a rag in my mouth … and they started raping me … I don’t know how many took turns. … I lost consciousness … and the blood kept running. … Later I couldn’t even stand or urinate.”

And how is the United States involved?  Deeply. And this is the news which is floating off, forgotten, the news which shames the leaders at the time, those who knew and implemented or knew and did nothing.

“In ’82 and ’83, as Gen. Rios Montt was sending military sweeps into the northwest highlands, annihilating by their own count 662 rural villages, Reagan went down, embraced Rios Montt, and said Guatemala was getting a bum rap on human rights. The U.S. military general attaché at the time told me the sweep strategy was in large part his idea, and that he was working hand in hand with [the Guatemalan military] to carry it out. It’s hard to overstate the U.S. role, because the U.S. role was so extensive.”

Progressive  and Democracy Now  transcript of Charlie Rose show March 31, 1995

President Bill Clinton offered a rare half-apology for the support the United States had given the killers.

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