Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

An article by Kevin Sieff earlier this month in The Washington Post about the victims of Boko Haram’s rape camps in northern Nigeria has once again shed light on a topic all too often swept under the rug by the international media and by society in general. In his article, Sieff discusses how, on the heels of sound victories by Nigerian troops that have forced the radical Islamist terrorist organization from areas that it had claimed as part of its international caliphate, many women and girls have been liberated from their Boko Haram rapist captors, only to return home to a continuing nightmare of stigma, ostracism and distrust in which they remain prisoners of their horrific destiny. So-called "Boko Haram wives" and children The women about whom he writes were part of a systematic policy by which the caliphate has sought to disarticulate the societies that it invades through the kidnapping of women and girls en masse and forcing them into “marriage” (sexual slave...

Buenos Aires, March 24, 2016 Yesterday I asked myself a rhetorical question on Twitter: “Wonder what motivated an American president, any American president to come to Argentina on the 40 th anniversary of the 1976 coup d’état?” I think it was a fair question. Surely, sufficient evidence has come to light over the last four decades of both early and later US complicity with the bloody military regime that came to power in 1976 and ruled Argentina until 1983—first, under the administration of US President Gerald Ford and, later, under that of President Ronald Reagan, with the conspicuous exception to this policy of tacit support being the four years of the Jimmy Carter administration, which openly confronted the military junta over its human rights abuses. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one to ask myself that question, although others asked it less rhetorically. One was Obama’s fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, who was reported to have contacted the US p...

Fragile tightrope though it might be, the so-called "cessation of hostilities" in Syria was holding this past week, despite a smattering of truce violations. But the eyes of diplomats and other observers were more on the relationship between superpowers Russia and the United States than on the belligerents in the five-year-old Syrian Civil War—clearly a growing misnomer, considering the conflict’s grave international repercussions and implications. With the cessation of hostilities pact reached last month more between regional and global leaders than among the multiple belligerents in the actual war, Moscow and Washington suddenly find themselves having become strange bedfellows—an odd state of affairs after events not only in Syria but also in Ukraine and elsewhere that have had the two nuclear powers at each other’s throats more since 2014 than at any other time since the Cold War era of a quarter-century ago. On first glance, this should be good news. And to a certain...

Any inkling of some semblance of peace in Syria following the bombastic “cessation of hostilities” announcements by the men in charge of US and Russian foreign relations last week was short-lived indeed. Granted, in his public pronouncement of an agreement reached more by the Syrian War’s external agents than by its direct belligerents, US Secretary of State John Kerry did everything he could to dissuade anybody of the idea that what was to be implemented was “a ceasefire”. He said that the parties involved were more comfortable with the more ballpark term of “cessation of hostilities”. Even that term, however, proved a total misnomer. It quickly became clear that last week’s Syrian “peace” charade was really a case of unhelpful superpower intervention in a conflict that has gone from a warranted popular uprising against a tyrannical four-decade old regime to being the latest proxy-war battlefield for the new cold war between Russia and the West and for the burgeoning rivalries am...

“This is where the revolution happens first,” say Leila Al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab in their book, Burning Country (Pluto Press 2016), “before the guns and the political calculations, before even the demonstrations—in individual hearts, in the form of new thoughts and newly unfettered words.” The tragedy of the so-called “civil war” in Syria has become so unspeakably monumental and monstrous that, for the public at large worldwide, it has distilled into merely a set of grim statistics, a current titleholder for World’s Worst Conflict, the source of the bulk of Europe’s migration crisis, but unimaginable and, sadder still, unthinkable for the majority in terms of the horror taking place there on a daily basis. It is a country where the superpower-imposed family of dictators who have ruled for over four decades had, until 2011, stilled all opposition and autocratically governed generations brought up resigned to living mute. According to Al-Shami and Yassin-Kassab, “Syria...

With members of the class and faculty at Harvard's  Kennedy School.  I'm in the front row left, standing.  Dr. Kathryn Sikkink  (seated just to  my right)  and  Dr. Luis Moreno Ocampo  (standing, front row,  4th from right).   It was my honor this past week to accept an invitation to visit Harvard University. More specifically, I visited Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School and its Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, both of which are teaching programs and doing research that coincide with areas of investigation included in my latest book, War: A Crime Against Humanity. These areas include ways to reform and improve the United Nations and the International Criminal Court (ICC), as a means of making them more effective in establishing and maintaining world peace; strategies to bolster and protect the rule of law, democratic values, and human and civil rights; tactics for preventing torture and methods for imparting peace ed...