Daily Brief Audio Series
As mass violence grips large areas of Myanmar’s Rakhine State, people have been trying to flee into neighboring Bangladesh. At least 18,000 Rohingya refugees have arrived in recent months – though some estimate the number may be twice that.
Yet thousands more are stuck at the border, pushed back by Bangladesh border guards and unable to get to safety on the other side.
Why they need to escape Myanmar is clear. In the armed conflict between the junta’s military forces and the ethnic armed group, Arakan Army, both sides are committing atrocities. These include mass killings, arson, and forced recruitment against Rohingya.
Rakhine State has suffered conflict and deep crisis for years. This is where, in 2017, Myanmar’s military committed crimes against humanity and acts of genocide against the ethnic Rohingya community.
The 630,000 Rohingya who remain in Rakhine State live under a system of apartheid that leaves them especially vulnerable to the fighting, with movement restrictions and aid blockages.
Successive waves of conflict in Myanmar’s Rakhine State have meant ever more Rohingya needing to seek refuge next door. Bangladesh now hosts about one million Rohingya refugees, most of them there since escaping the 2017 atrocities.
Bangladesh authorities say the country is not able to accept any more. Many may sympathize with this attitude, particularly as Bangladesh has been going through some political turmoil of its own and is now (hopefully) trying to rebuild democratic, rights-respecting institutions after years of repression and abuses.
Still, the government of Bangladesh is obligated by international law not to push the Rohingya back into danger.
What would help Bangladesh authorities make the right decision would be greater humanitarian assistance from international donors. Countries like the US, the UK, the EU, and Australia should step up and increase funding.
At the same time, the international community needs to address the roots of the problem here – which are not in Bangladesh. Myanmar’s generals have never had to pay any price or been held accountable for their atrocities against the Rohingya in 2017, and after the 2021 coup, they’ve continued their abuses.
This is an issue the UN Security Council has so far failed to address properly. Facing possible vetoes by China and Russia, other Security Council members have backed off rather than redouble efforts to negotiate what’s needed, like a global arms embargo on Myanmar, targetted sanctions on the junta, and a referral of the situation to the International Criminal Court.
The impact of atrocities in Myanmar should not be left to desperate Rohingya and nervous Bangladeshi authorities to sort out in isolation. This is an international issue, and it demands international responses.
As the government of Israel commits abuses and openly threatens more atrocities, Israel’s key allies – including the US, UK, and Germany – keep providing military assistance and arms.
What’s been happening in Gaza for nearly a year now has been apocalyptic for people living there. Following the Hamas-led, atrocity-ridden assault on southern Israel on October 7 last year, the Israeli government has been acting as if the laws of war no longer apply at all.
Civilian protection is a cornerstone of these laws, but the Israeli military uses explosive weapons in densely populated areas, raising the risk of unlawfully indiscriminate attacks. They’ve damaged homes, schools, hospitals, and shopping malls, without advance warning, caused death, severe injuries, and permanent disabilities.
Hamas continues to unlawfully hold hostages and even kill them.
Flouting international humanitarian law and in direct defiance of an order from the World Court, the government of Israel is also starving Gaza as a weapon of war. Its blockade restricts humanitarian aid, not only severely limiting food but also medicine and medical supplies.
A new report documents the impact on children with disabilities in particular. And the longer the bombing and blockade go on, the more children with disabilities there are, both physical and psychological.
More than 41,000 Palestinians, including more than 16,750 children, have been killed since October 7, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, the most reliable source for such numbers. As much as 90% of Gaza’s population has been displaced, the UN says.
Rather than taking serious steps to try to stem Israeli atrocities, however, many governments are instead nervously watching them expand to Lebanon, where indiscriminate pager attacks have killed civilians.
As in Gaza, civilians in Lebanon are paying the price for the escalation in hostilities. Since September 23, Israeli attacks have killed more than 1000 people in Lebanon, including more than 50 children. Hundreds of thousands people have been displaced in Lebanon, joining over 110,000 who have been forced to leave their homes since last October.
As with their year-long operations in Gaza, Israeli leaders have openly made calls and statements suggesting they are willing to commit more crimes in Lebanon. Hamas’ military wing has warned that if the Israeli military tries to rescue hostages, they’ll return to their families “in shrouds.” Yet, amid such threats, world leaders who might actually be able to rein in the parties are failing.
Any of the governments arming the parties could make a significant contribution to civilian protection by suspending military assistance – deciding to stop sending weapons to warring parties committing crimes and threatening more.
Israel’s key allies, including the US, the UK, and Germany, can and should immediately suspend all military assistance and arms sales to Israel, and Iran should stop arming Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They know the real risk that more arms will be used to commit more crimes.
What should nine-year-old girls be doing?
The vast majority of people in the world would answer this question the same way: nine-year-old girls should be playing with friends, reading books, going to school…
No one with any sense of decency would say, “getting married,” but that’s exactly what a group of lawmakers in Iraq want to see happen.
Some members of the Iraqi parliament are pushing forward an amendment that could legalize child marriage for girls as young as nine and boys as young as 15. The amendment would allow couples to choose whether religious law or the country’s Personal Status Law will govern their matters of marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance.
The politicians’ move to legalize child rape – because, let’s be frank, that’s what’s behind the euphemism “child marriage” – is sickening. But it’s not the only problem with the proposed amendments.
The changes would also undermine the principle of equality before the law by allowing religion, not citizenship, to dictate what rights an Iraqi has, and remove protections for women regarding divorce and inheritance.
It’s the latest in a series of attacks by certain political leaders in Iraq against women’s rights and gender equality issues. Already, they have succeeded in criminalizing homosexuality, banning use of the word “gender,” and stalling passage of a law on domestic violence.
The latest proposed amendment has rightly sparked condemnation and widespread protest in Iraq. Women in parliament have joined forces across the political spectrum to fight against passage of the amendment. Iraqi women and men have also taken to the streets in large numbers to demonstrate against it.
Such organizing and protests did manage to delay the second reading of the awful amendment in parliament but only by about two weeks. It continues to move along the process toward becoming law. Strangely, Iraq’s Supreme Court has said the amendment would be constitutional, despite Article 14 of the Constitution guaranteeing equality before the law.
There will be one final reading of the amendment in parliament before it goes to a vote. It’s not exactly clear when that will be.
It is perfectly clear, however, that the Iraqi politicians pushing to legalize child rape should come to their senses, listen to outraged Iraqis, and put a stop to this madness.
Ana left her home forever when she was just a teenager. The tiny village of her birth was far from anywhere and without electricity, without running water, and without paved roads.
A devastating war had just claimed countless lives and wrecked the region. The country she had lived in her entire life up to that point had just collapsed. It literally disappeared from the map. A new government of a newly invented country was struggling to take control of the region in the face of a violent extremist uprising. All the upheavals meant there was widespread famine.
Ana travelled across war-ravaged lands and stormy seas and eventually reached the US border. She arrived with nothing but 25 dollars to her name – all that was left of the money a young man in the US had wired to her for the trip. Ana was hoping to start a new life with him.
He was a not-too-distant relation of Ana’s whose parents were originally from a village near her birthplace. They wanted their son to have a “traditional wife” and helped arrange the marriage, which eventually resulted in eight children.
Ana looked after the kids in their traditional way, grounded in their religion, culture, food, and language. Ana didn’t speak a word of English when she arrived in the US, and she would never learn it.
I know people in the US today – perhaps even some relatives of mine – who would look on Ana’s story with dismay and even anger. They’d grumble about, “chain migration” and “refusing to integrate.” They’d say things like, “she should speak English!” And some might say a lot worse, as well.
It would start them off on a rant about immigrants in the US – how they were having too many children and taking over with their foreign ways. Some of my US relatives, too, might feel no compassion for Ana, a poor, foreign woman who managed to flee her crisis-torn homeland.
If some relatives of mine adopted this attitude, however, it would be strange, because Ana (not her real name) was also a relative of ours, my grandmother.
Her story is pretty much the story of millions of Americans’ grandmothers and great-grandmothers.
Oh, but, but – I hear someone quickly reply – but things were different back then, some one hundred years ago, when Ana left eastern Slovakia amid the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian empire after World War One. Things have changed.
But has anything changed, really?
There are still political upheavals, wars, and famines. There are still people who seek to escape them and build a more secure life elsewhere. There are still desperately poor people who get assistance to do so from slightly less-poor family members already in the US. People still bring their culture with them when they move.
Nothing’s changed. It’s simply that some folks in the US are forgetting their own humble immigrant roots.
Exploding thousands of electronic devices in people’s hands and pockets may be unique in the history of warfare, but the familiar laws of war still apply.
On Tuesday, pagers and other personal devices blew up across Lebanon and parts of Syria – in markets, grocery stores, and other crowded, public places. The explosions killed at least a dozen people, including at least two children and two health workers. More than 2,800 people were injured, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Health.
Then, yesterday, a new set of blasts likewise hit walkie-talkies across Lebanon, killing at least 20 people and wounding more than 450 others.
Hospitals in Lebanon have been overwhelmed with the victims. Adults and children were rushed to emergency rooms suffering from severe injuries consistent with the detonation of high explosives.
The intended targets of these widespread attacks were apparently members and associates of Hezbollah. In a statement, the Lebanese armed group said the pagers belonged “to employees of various Hezbollah units and institutions.” They blamed the Israeli government for the explosions.
US officials and former Israeli officials have also said Israel was responsible for the attack. The Israeli military has not commented.
Many questions are still swirling around these incidents, including technical ones. How is it even possible to put explosive charges in so many electronic devices unnoticed in the first place?
But one thing is clear enough: such attacks violate the laws of war. There’s at least one general and one specific point to make here.
First, the general. One of the foundations of international humanitarian law is that all warring parties must distinguish, or discriminate, between military targets, which are legitimate, and civilians, which are not.
You may be intending to kill an enemy fighter, but you cannot do it with an indiscriminate weapon, showing no regard for the civilians close to the device who may be killed and injured as well. Media report that one of the victims was a nine-year old girl who picked up her father’s pager when it beeped.
In this sense, setting off simultaneous explosives in thousands of personal devices without knowing where they are and who they are with runs the same risks as bombing from the skies without looking: other people – innocent people, civilians, including children – may be around.
The attacker can’t see who will be hit beforehand and where they are. Is the explosive about to go off in a crowded market? Is it on the table at a family meal? Did a child find the pager in the car and pick it up to have a closer look?
The mini-bombs were blown up in unknown circumstances, in unknown surroundings. It’s the very definition of indiscriminate.
There’s also at least one specific point regarding the violation of the laws of war here. As my expert colleague, Lama Fakih, has explained: “customary international humanitarian law prohibits the use of booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use.”
Indiscriminate attacks and booby traps are prohibited to avoid putting civilians at grave risk – to avoid the devastating scenes we’ve seen across Lebanon this week.
Any government concerned with upholding international humanitarian law ought to be concerned with helping to get justice for the innocent victims of these mass bombings.