Remembering French massacre of Algerians

What: French massacre of Algerians

When: 8 May 1945

Where: Setif, Guelma and surrounding areas

What Happened?

As Europe celebrated the beginning of the end of World War II with Germany surrendering on 8 May 1945, thousands of Algerian men, women and children were mobilised by the French in Algeria to mark the victory of the Allied forces over the Nazis.

Anti-French sentiment and the anti-colonial movement had been building across Algeria for months, leading to protests prior to 8 May. Some 4,000 protesters took to the streets of Setif, a town in northern Algeria, to press new demands for independence on the colonial government and greater rights.

Many organisations joined the protest where they held up placards including “End to occupation” and “We want equality”. When a 14-year-old member of the Muslim Scouts, Saal Bouzid, held an Algerian flag, the French on orders from General Duval, opened fire on the unarmed protesters killing Bouzid and thousands of others.

Panic ensued and clashes between the Algerians and French quickly led to violence with the French using all attempts to control the population. The colonial forces launched an air and ground offensive against several eastern cities, particularly in Setif and Guelma.

The head of the temporary government of France at the time, General De Gaulle, ordered for farmers and villagers from surrounding areas to be killed in what quickly became lynching operations and summary executions.

Thousands of bodies accumulated so quickly that burying them was impossible so they were often dumped in wells or surrounding ravines.

The violence would continue until 22 May when the tribes surrendered. By then, 45,000 Algerian men, women and children in and around the region of Setif, Guelma and Kherrata had been killed along with 102 French casualties.

What Happened next?

The massacre by the French provoked the anti-colonial movement and nine years later Algeria began its War of Independence in November 1954 – a fight which would claim the lives of 1.5 million Algerians until independence was declared in 1962.

The 8 May is an official day of mourning in Algeria which contrasts heavily with the celebratory anniversary around Europe. On February 2005, Hubert Colin de Verdière, France’s ambassador to Algeria, formally apologised for the massacre, calling it an “inexcusable tragedy”. President of Algeria Abdelaziz Bouteflika has called the Setif massacre the beginning of a “genocide” perpetrated during the Algerian War by French occupation forces. France has denounced this description.

The computer pioneer who built modern China

Ask people to imagine a scientist, and many of us will picture the same thing – a heterosexual white male. Historically, a number of challenges have made it much more difficult for those who don’t fit that stereotype to enter fields like science, math or engineering.

There are, however, many individuals from diverse backgrounds who have shaped our understanding of life and the Universe, but whose stories have gone untold – until now. With our new BBC Future column, we are celebrating the “missed geniuses” who made the world what it is today.

The computer pioneer who built modern China
By Leila McNeill
20th February 2020

Isolated from the rest of the world, one woman pushed computing from a geeky obsession into a transformative industry.

In April 1960, China’s first home-grown electronic digital general purpose computer – the Model 107 – went live. Xia Peisu, the machine’s engineer and designer, had just made history.

After decades of war with Japan and the Chinese Civil War in the first half of the 20th Century, the country’s technological innovation had fallen behind much of the developed world. Later, caught in the politics of the Cold War, the newly established People’s Republic of China was cut off from aid and exports from capitalist nations in the West. Chinese scientists relied heavily on hardware and expertise from the Soviet Union to build up their computing power.

But when that relationship dissolved in 1959, China was once again isolated and it had to look inward for a way forward in an increasingly computerised world. Within a year of the Soviet Union withdrawing aid, Xia delivered the 107 – China’s first step on the road to independence in computing.

Today, China is a global leader in computer production. In 2011, China surpassed the US to become the world’s leading market for PCs, and the desktop PC segment of their computer industry alone is projected to bring in a revenue of over $6.4bn (£4.9bn) this year.

But there was more work to be done than making computers. To build a new computer industry – and a new field of computer science to support that industry – China needed trained personnel. Here, too, Xia was essential.

She helped shape some of China’s first computing and computer science institutions and developed their training materials. She taught the first computer theory class in the country. Over her career, she would usher hundreds of students into the country’s burgeoning field of computer science.

In the aftermath of war and political upheaval, Xia shaped a new field of science and a new industry in China. Through both her technological innovations and the many students she taught, Xia‘s influence resonates throughout China’s computing world today.

Born into a family of educators in the south-eastern municipality of Chongqing on 28 July 1923, Xia rarely went without an education. First attending primary school aged four and receiving private home tutelage at eight, she went on to excel at Nanyu Secondary School and graduated top of her high school class at National No. Nine in 1940.

China was in the throes of the Second Sino-Japanese War, an eight-year conflict that ravaged China and claimed the lives of millions of Chinese civilians. At the war’s onset in 1937, the Japanese captured Nanjing, the capital city of the Republic of China. Xia’s home of Chongqing became a haven for Nanjing refugees. It also became home to National Central University – an institution which, despite forced relocation from Nanjing, kept teaching students. In 1941, Xia joined as a student in electrical engineering.

Xia graduated with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1945. The same year she met Nanjing war refugee and fellow National Central alumnus Yang Liming, now a professor of physics at the university. They started and maintained a relationship even after Xia left for Shanghai for graduate studies at the Telecommunications Institute of Jiaotong University and Yang left to study under Nobel laureate Max Born at the University of Edinburgh.

Two years later, Xia reunited with Yang when she began to study for her doctorate in electrical engineering at the University of Edinburgh. In her dissertation, “On Parametric Oscillations in Electric Circuits and A Graphical Analysis for Non-Linear Systems”, she developed methodologies that could more accurately predict variations in frequency and amplitude within electronic systems, which led to wide-reaching applications for any system with an electrical frequency, from radios to TV to computers.

In 1950, she was awarded her PhD. Later that same year, she and Yang married in Edinburgh. Both scientifically-minded and deeply invested in putting those minds to work in their home country, the couple returned to China in 1951. They both took up positions at Tsinghua University (or Qinghua University), where Xia worked on telecommunications research.

The China that she and Yang returned to, however, was a changed one.

In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had prevailed over the Kuomintang party (Chinese Nationalist Party) in the Chinese Civil War, driving the Republic of China to Taiwan and replacing it with People’s Republic of China led by Mao Zedong. In the wake of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the transfer of political parties, China’s economy, industry, and infrastructure was languishing and lagging behind many Western nations.

The Second Sino-Japanese War had hit the country particularly hard. “In essence, all institutions of higher learning, all centres of finance, the main centre of industrial production and the government of China has fled, first to the city of Wuhan, and then after Wuhan [was] lost, to the city of Chongqing in [the] more remote and much poorer area of Sichuan,” says Tom Mullaney, historian at Stanford University and author of the forthcoming book The Chinese Computer. “[The government of China is] basically living a kind of survival existence, but it’s definitely not in any kind of position to invest in electrical engineering, weapon design, and so forth.”

When the CCP came to power, they attempted to rebuild the lost infrastructure, but it wasn’t easy. The US had supported the defeated Kuomintang party in the Chinese Civil War, and they, along with other capitalist nations in the West, denied the newly formed communist country assistance and exports. Mao and the CCP turned to their Soviet neighbours to the north. Seeing an opportunity to bring China into the communist block in the East, the Soviet Union entered into a partnership with China, agreeing to assist China in bolstering its economy, science and technology, including computing.

Xia became intricately tied to Sino-Soviet partnership when, in 1953, mathematician Hua Luogeng visited her place of work at Tsinghua University and recruited her into his computer research group at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). She was now one of the three founding members of China’s first computer research group. The CAS would become ground zero for computing technology and research and Xia would be at its centre.

Even though Luogeng’s and Xia’s research group had been developing plans of their own to design electronic computers for three years, the CCP didn’t adopt an official in this area of technology until 1956, with the formalisation of the Sino-Soviet agreement “Long-term Protocol for Developing National Sciences and Technology between 1956 and 1967” – also known as the 12-year plan. Together with Soviet experts, the CCP and the CAS identified computing technology as one of four fields in science and technology key to building up China’s national defense.

An electronic computer would have wide-reaching applications in support of China’s infrastructure and national defense, including development and testing of nuclear weapons, management of large-scale complex transportation systems and development of a satellite program or space program, says Mullaney. “All of these things, and more, were domains in which other powers – the Soviet Union, the US, Great Britain and later France – were developing electronic computing in support of. And China knew that it needed to be able to enter that space if it was going to become competitive on the global stage, economically and militarily.”

China had a long way to go before they could produce a computer. For one, rather than having a single field of computer science, the industry’s fundamental parts were spread out over mathematics, engineering and physics. These would need to be consolidated and then taught to a workforce before a computer could be built.

With her knowledge of electronics and mathematics, Xia was an ideal choice for this part of the plan.

In 1956, she joined a delegation to Moscow and Leningrad to explore Soviet research, production and education in computing. When she returned that same year, she undertook translation of Soviet computer design from Russian into Chinese, including a 1,000-page manual that became the course text for teaching Chinese students Soviet computing.

That same year, under the auspices of the CAS’s Institute of Mathematics and Institute of Physics, Xia taught the country’s first computer theory class. She also helped the CAS in its first major step in establishing a computer science department with the Institute of Computer Technology (ICT). The ICT was quickly followed by the CAS’s founding of the University of Science and Technology. Xia was involved in developing the computer science courses at both institutions, and as a course developer and lecturer, she oversaw the training of hundreds of students between 1956 and 1962.

 “What [China] needed above all was a training program,” Mullaney notes. Xia gave them one.

By 1959, China had succeeded in replicating two Soviet electronic computer designs; the 103 model and the 104 model, each based on the Soviet M-3 and BESM-II computers respectively. But just as China began making progress in producing computers, the Sino-Soviet relationship was in dissolution. The two countries’ leaders sparred over whose nation was the centre of the communist world and whose path to global communism was the right one.

The relationship had become so bad by 1960 that the Soviet Union withdrew all support, both material and advisorial, from China, says Mullaney. After the Soviets withdrew, many other countries assumed that China’s computing industry just stopped.

It didn’t.

CAS researchers continued to pursue computing technology and computer science on their own. Xia’s 107 model was the first computer that China developed after Soviet withdrawal, and unlike the 103 and 104 models based on Soviet design, the 107 was the first indigenously designed and developed computer in China. The 107 was soon reproduced and installed in training institutions around China.

Throughout the 1960s, China continued to develop more powerful and sophisticated computers at the CAS in isolation, progressing from tube circuits like that of the 107 to transistors and, in the 70s and early 80s, to integrated circuits. When a delegation of US computer scientists visited China in 1972, they didn’t expect to find China’s computer industry humming along. “All of the members of that delegation, in the few testimonials we have, all express surprise at how far [China had come],” Mullaney says.

Throughout this time, Xia continued a balance of research and development in high processing speed computers and training new computer scientists and engineers. In 1978, Xia helped found the Chinese Journal of Computers as well as the Journal of Computer Science and Technology, the first English-language journal for computing in the country. And in 1981, she developed a high-speed processor array called the 150AP. Compared to the earlier Soviet-based model 104 that performed 10,000 operations per second, her 150AP boosted a computer’s operations to 20 million per second.

Due in large part to Xia, computer science coalesced into an independent field of study in China and the country’s computer industry emerged despite a tumultuous beginning. “In terms of someone who held her position and was such a central actor in a leadership role, I have not come across other women of her stature at that time,” Mullaney says.

Although her design of the 107 made history, it was Xia’s founding of institutions and cultivation of cohort after cohort of students that ultimately made China’s future. “Those are students who… would lay groundwork for what we see today,” says Mullaney.

One of those students later became the chief architect of Loongson CPUs, and in 2002, he personally honored his mentor by naming the processing chip of China’s first CPU computer “Xia 50”.

Dubbed in China the “Mother of Chinese Computing”, Xia is still recognised as a founding member of the country’s computer industry. The China Computer Federation awards the Xia-Peisu Award annually to women scientist and engineers “who have made outstanding contributions and achievements in the computing science, engineering, education and industry”. Chen Zuoning and Huan Lingyi received the award most recently in 2019: Chen for her work in developing domestic high-performance computing systems and Huan for her research in CPUs and other core computer devices. Continuing along the path Xia charted for them, Chen and Huan have strengthened China’s domestic computer technology.

Archeological findings from Fustat (Cairo, Egypt)

The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago recently proved the truth of the saying that some of the world’s richest archeological sites are museum basements.

In Fragments from Fustat, Glimpses of a Cosmopolitan Old Cairo
Written by Pamela D. Toler
Aramco, January/February 2016

Its 2015 exhibition A Cosmopolitan City: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Old Cairo introduced the urban world of Islamic Egypt, a world much closer to our own today yet often overlooked amid the spectacular wonders of the country’s deep Pharaonic past. The show focused on the now-obscure medieval city of Fustat through artifacts of daily life and items highlighting the art and literature of the period—many of which were brought newly to light out of the Institute’s own storerooms.

Fustat was the city that grew from the military base of Arab conquerors who arrived in 641 ce, just nine years after the death of Prophet Muhammad in the Arabian Peninsula. It grew to eclipse the older, nearby city named Babylon as the preeminent city at the head of the Nile Delta, and as it grew, it gradually welcomed Christian and Jewish communities as well as Muslims from across the new Islamic empire. Cairo as we know it today was founded to the north of Fustat in the late 10th century. Fustat suffered from famine and fire in the 12th century and continued to decline over the next 200 years—but its core remained a vital industrial neighborhood. Today, Fustat is called “Old Cairo,” its surviving mosques, churches and synagogues a reminder of the time when the city was the cultural capital of Egypt.

Between 1964 and 1980, archeologist George Scanlon carried out pioneering digs at Fustat for the American Research Center in Egypt (arce), and artifacts from his early excavations were featured in the show. Indeed, the exhibition coincided with the 50th anniversary of the 1965 dig; the Oriental Institute received a portion of its finds from the archeologist himself, who at the time had hoped the donation would inspire funding from the Institute. (It didn’t.)

In addition to artifacts from Scanlon’s excavations, A Cosmopolitan City used manuscripts from the Institute’s collection and several pieces borrowed from other museums to explore the ways in which Fustat’s particular mix of residents lived in an Islamic capital for about 500 years, from the seventh to the 12th century—separated by both religion and languages including Arabic, Hebrew and Old Coptic, yet connected by a shared way of life. The exhibition considered questions of tolerance, discrimination, diversity and multiculturalism—all familiar themes today—in a setting most people know little about.

“Globalization is not a new thing. Multicultural societies are not a new concept. Different communities living together created such an incredible community at Fustat,” says Emily Teeter, special-exhibits coordinator at the Institute. Oriental Institute Director Gil L. Stein noted in the exhibition’s catalog that Fustat was “a vibrant city … [where] different communities of faith lived and worked together in urban centers that were all the richer for tolerating and valuing the diversity of their citizens.”

The story of the exhibition’s own genesis is no less intriguing, as much of the material was on public display for the first time.

In 2011, the Institute commissioned Tasha Vorderstrasse, a research associate, to survey its Islamic collections. The Institute is famous for its ancient Middle Eastern collections from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syro-Anatolia, Israel, Iran and Nubia, but not so much for its substantial holdings connected to the relatively upstart, 1,400-year-old Islamic era. Vorderstrasse’s work, Teeter says,  “turned out to be a real eye-opener for us because we did not know how rich our own Islamic collection really was.”

“We did not know how rich our own Islamic collection really was.” —Emily Teeter

Vorderstrasse tapped the Institute’s database to identify possible Islamic items, and then she moved downstairs to open cases, boxes and drawers to see what was really there. She worked with Donald Whitcomb, associate professor of Islamic archeology at the Institute and the University of Chicago’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, with whom she had previously studied. Both were surprised to discover just how extensive the Islamic objects were.

Scholars at the Institute had always been aware that it had received material from Scanlon’s Fustat excavations, though with the Institute’s ancient civilizations emphasis, no one had studied it. The arce had received artifacts from the Egyptian Department of Antiquities in exchange for sponsoring Scanlon’s excavations, and Scanlon himself gave other shares of objects to institutions that had supported him, primarily Princeton University and the Akron Art Museum.

In 1983, Akron transferred its Fustat ceramics and other objects to the Oriental Institute. In 1986 a few items were published in a catalog of jugs, but for the most part these items, too—mostly pottery shards, coins, metal weights, small mummy-form statues called shabtis and the like—remained in the basement, cataloged but unstudied. 

The Fustat artifacts, for all their significance, represented only part of the material that Vorderstrasse brought to light.

She was particularly excited by a set of documents that were only described as having been purchased from a Dutch dealer who bought them in Cairo, with no further provenance. On closer examination, Institute experts believe they came from the genizah (repository) at the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, which contained thousands of documents, religious and secular, primarily from the 10th to the 13th century, making it one of the most important sources of information about the social history of the Middle East and the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. In sum, only a few of the objects Vorderstrasse discovered had been published, let alone exhibited. Neither the scholarly community nor the public was unaware of their existence, let alone the stories they might tell.

When Whitcomb saw Vorderstrasse’s discoveries, he urged her to propose an exhibition for the Oriental Institute’s museum. He connected her with Tanya Treptow, another of his former students, who had recently received her doctorate at the University of Chicago and had worked on other exhibitions in Chicago. It was a first step, and it would take two years to bring displays to the museum floor.

The first challenge was to determine a theme, a storyline that would make the exhibit meaningful to a modern audience while remaining true to the historical contexts of the objects.

Multiculturalism was one idea. Others included Scanlon’s excavations, which were unusual in the 1960s and ’70s in that he focused on an Islamic rather than a Pharaonic site; the history of Fustat and how it evolved over centuries into a modern urban neighborhood; and daily life in medieval Egypt. At one point, they photographed the available objects and spread them all out on the floor of Vorderstrasse’s apartment, grouping them to see what themes emerged using what Treptow called “a visceral rather than an academic approach.”

Then they probed museum professionals and members of the public with interest in Egypt to learn what a museum audience might already know, and what questions would best hook visitors. While most in both fields felt familiar with ancient Egypt, few recognized the name “Old Cairo,” and “Fustat” elicited only puzzled stares.

What got interesting, says Treptow, were the questions that followed: “Who were these communities who lived side by side in Old Cairo?” and “How did they make it work?” These led to the exhibition’s overarching, ecumenically focused theme, which proved both more engaging and more sensitive than the broader questions with which the curators had started.

For the most part, it is impossible to tell which objects came from a Muslim, Christian or Jewish household.

The everyday objects from Scanlon’s excavations formed the heart of the exhibition because they demonstrated the similarities in the lives of Fustat’s Muslim, Christian and Jewish residents, explains Treptow. For the most part, it is impossible to tell which objects came from a household of any one of those communities. Everyone frequented the same merchants. Everyone ate much the same food. Everyone wore similar clothing, though texts tell us that some distinctive items were legally mandated for Christians and Jews—a fact that appears in the form of complaints that some among those populations were not complying. Only one piece of pottery has a religious symbol on it: A small clay flask is inscribed on its bottom with an equilateral cross, indicating it would have belonged to a Christian.

Because the special-exhibits gallery is small—not much bigger than a studio apartment—Vorderstrasse and Treptow settled on 75 display items, balanced between everyday ones from archeological sites and art-historical and intellectual ones to showcase the communities’ beliefs and differences. Among the latter were fragments from the Qur’an, the Bible and the Torah, a bowl fragment depicting the deposition of Christ and a door from a Torah shrine obtained on loan.

The two types of objects give different messages of common ground and difference. But Vorderstrasse stressed that even the art-historical objects distinctive to one group or another draw heavily on a common milieu: “If there wasn’t Hebrew [writing] on the Jewish objects, you wouldn’t know they were Jewish.”

Then, how to impart a sense of lived experience behind mostly small, fragmentary artifacts? No mummies, no monumental sarcophagi, no gold. Nor many people: Almost none of the domestic artifacts from Fustat includes human representations, except for a few small, abstract dolls. How, then, to humanize the past?

To bring alive the manuscript page from alf layla wa layla (1001 Nights), the curators gave it a voice—using an iPad.

For example, a manuscript page from the alf layla wa layla (1001 Nights) from the Institute’s collection is one of the most important objects in the exhibit. Dated to earlier than 870, it is the oldest known example of the famous tales and one of the oldest known literary manuscripts in Arabic. The calligraphy is well drawn but difficult to read. The fragment is dirty, it has holes in it, and it was overwritten in later centuries by people who used it as scrap paper.

To bring it alive, Vorderstrasse and Treptow gave it a voice. They mounted an iPad on the case that allowed visitors to click on a translation of the Arabic script. They did the same for other objects. For cases centering on everyday objects, the pair selected related written material of the period that had personal touches. One iPad for one case played varied reactions to the city recorded by two newly arrived visitors; another voiced a letter by a worried mother to her child who was on his own in the city.

Another display included music from the period, thanks to one of Vorderstrasse’s other talents: She recorded her own interpretations, played on the harp. She quickly found that of all the audio offerings, it was the Arabian Nights fragment that was the most popular. “That was one where the battery was always low,” Vorderstrasse says.

“The tours I led helped confirm we had hit on something important with our themes of Muslims, Christians and Jews,” says Treptow of the exhibit that ran for seven months; it included a lecture series and a live program for adults and families celebrating the history and culture of Old Cairo through music, hands-on activities and poetry.

“We had textual artifacts from the Bible, the Qur’an and the Torah. Being able to show all three of those documents in a respectful way sparked conversations that had a lot of depth—not just about their artistic significance, but more about the patterns of life of those objects.”

Among scholars, A Cosmopolitan City and its accompanying catalog was a “little jewel of an exhibit” that worked as “a nerve node to bring scholars into conversation with each other,” says Marina Rustow, professor of Near Eastern studies and history at Princeton University, who participated in the show’s lecture series. The catalog brought in new voices offering perspectives on the period that were both deep and broad, she says. For example, she adds, the staff asked for her opinion about a manuscript of the Hebrew Bible written in Hebrew using Arabic letters with Arabic commentary—an unpublished document with untapped potential.

Enlisting scholars this way is the first step to stimulating interest and securing funding to conserve previously underutilized objects, she points out. This, in turn, can bring in more scholars interested in the Institute’s Islamic collections.

Teeter is counting on just such a scholarly domino effect. Vorderstrasse’s research did far more than update records, Teeter explains, adding that she “re-unearthed” an important part of the collection.

“People think, ‘They don’t have this kind of stuff. They have Mesopotamian stuff, ancient Egyptian stuff,’” Teeter says of the Institute’s collections. “If anyone had bothered to type Fustat into the database, they would have found it. This is going to make that collection active again, and our other Islamic collections as well. We have more than just Fustat.”

Survivors mark 25th anniversary of Srebrenica massacre

The Srebrenica massacre is the only episode of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war to be defined as genocide. After murdering thousands of Srebrenica’s Muslims, Serbs dumped their bodies in numerous mass graves scattered throughout eastern Bosnia, in an attempt to hide the crime.

Body parts are still being found in mass graves and are being put together and identified through DNA
analysis. Almost 7,000 of those killed have been found and identified.

Newly identified victims are buried each year on 11 July, the anniversary of the day the killing began in
1995.

Srebrenica, 25 years later: Lessons from the massacre that ended the Bosnian conflict and unmasked a genocide
Tom Mockaitis, DePaul University
The Conversation, July 8, 2020

Europe’s worst massacre since World War II occurred 25 years ago this July. From July 11 to 19, in 1995, Bosnian Serb forces murdered 7,000 to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian city of Srebrenica.

The Srebrenica massacre occurred two years after the United Nations had designated the city to be a “safe area” for civilians fleeing fighting between Bosnian government and separatist Serb forces, during the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Some 20,000 refugees and 37,000 residents sheltered in the city, protected by fewer than 500 lightly armed international peacekeepers. After overwhelming the UN troops, Serb forces carried out what was later documented to be a carefully planned act of genocide.

Bosnian-Serb soldiers and police rounded up men and boys ages 16 to 60 – nearly all of them innocent civilians – trucked them to killing sites to be shot and buried them in mass graves. Serbian forces bused about 20,000 women and children to the safety of Muslim-held areas – but only after raping many of the women. The atrocity was so heinous, that even the reluctant United States felt compelled to intervene directly in – and finally end – Bosnia’s conflict.

Srebrenica is a cautionary tale about what extremist nationalism can lead to. With xenophobia, nationalist parties and ethnic conflict resurgent worldwide, the lessons from Bosnia could not be timelier.

Perpetrators must be held accountable

Bosnia’s civil war was a complex religious and ethnic conflict. On one side were Bosnian Muslims and Roman Catholic Bosnian Croats, who had both voted for independence from Yugoslavia. They were fighting the Bosnian Serbs, who had seceded to form their own republic and sought to expel everyone else from their new territory.

The carnage that ensued is epitomized by one street in one town I visited in 1996, as part of my study of the Bosnian conflict. In Bosanska Krupa, I saw a Catholic church, a mosque and an Orthodox church on a narrow stretch of road, all left in ruins by the war. Fighters had targeted not only ethnic groups but also the symbols of their identities.

It took more than two decades to bring those responsible for the atrocities of the Bosnian civil war to
justice. Ultimately, the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, a UN court that ran from 1993 to
2017, convicted 62 Bosnian Serbs of war crimes, including several high ranking officers.

It found Bosnian Serb Army Commander General Ratko Mladic guilty of “genocide and persecution, extermination, murder, and the inhumane act of forcible transfer in the area of Srebrenica” and convicted Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžic of genocide. The tribunal also indicted Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic on charges of “genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, and violations of the laws or customs of war” for his role in supporting ethnic cleansing, but he died during his trial.

Though many other people have never been tried, the criminal indictments that followed Srebrenica show why the perpetrators of wartime atrocities must be held accountable, no matter how long it takes. Criminal convictions provide some closure for victims’ families and remind the guilty they can never be certain of escaping justice.

It also emphasizes that guilty individuals must be held accountable after war – not entire populations. “The Serbs” didn’t commit genocide. Members of the Bosnian Serb Army and Serbian paramilitaries, led by men like Mladic, did the killing.

Denialism is dangerous

Despite the landmark international convictions and painstaking documentation of the crimes against humanity that occurred in Bosnia, some in Serbia still claim the genocide never happened.

Using arguments similar to those made by deniers of the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust, Serbian
nationalists insist the number of dead is exaggerated, the victims were combatants, or that Srebrenica is but one of many atrocities committed by all parties to the conflict.

During wartime, it is true, belligerents on both sides will do terrible things. But evidence from Bosnia
clearly demonstrates that Serb forces killed more civilians than combatants from other groups. At least 26,582 civilians died during the war: 22,225 Muslims, 986 Croats and 2,130 Serbs. Muslims made up only about 44% of Bosnia’s population but 80% of the dead. The Hague tribunal convicted only five Bosnian Muslims of war crimes.

In 2013, the president of Serbia apologized for the “crime” of Srebrenica, but refused to acknowledge that it was part of a genocidal campaign against Bosnian Muslims.

Indifference is complicity

Srebrenica is a stark warning that any effort to divide people into “them” and “us” is cause for grave concern – and, potentially, for international action. Research shows that genocide starts with stigmatization of others and, if unchecked, can proceed through dehumanization to extermination.

Srebrenica was the culminating event in a yearslong campaign of genocide against Bosnian Muslims. In 1994, over a year before the massacre, the U.S. Department of State reported that Serb forces were “ethnically cleansing” areas, using murder and rape as tools of war and razing villages.

But the Clinton administration, fresh from a humiliating failure to stop a civil war in Somalia, wanted to
avoid involvement. And the United Nations refused to authorize more robust action to halt Serb aggression, believing it needed to remain neutral for political reasons. It took the slaughter in Srebrenica to persuade these international powers to intervene.

Acting sooner could have saved lives. In my 1999 book, “Peacekeeping and Intrastate Conflict,” I argued that only a heavily armed force with a clear mandate to halt aggression can end a civil war.

The U.S. and UN could have supplied that force, but they dithered.

Massacres continue

Remembering past genocides like Srebenica will not prevent future ones. Marginalized groups have been brutally persecuted in the years since 1995, including in Sudan, Syria and Myanmar. Today, the Uighurs – a Muslim minority in China – are being rounded up, thrown into Chinese concentration camps and forcibly sterilized.

Nonetheless, remembrance of past atrocities is critically important. It allows people to pause and reflect, to honor the dead, to celebrate what unites humanity, and to work together to overcome their differences.

Remembering also preserves the integrity of the past against those who would revise history for their own ends.

In that sense, commemorating Srebrenica 25 years later may, in some small measure, make us more willing to resist the evil of mass murder going forward.

CIA's regime change in progress in Belarus!

Imperialists Run The Same Tired Old Script Day After Fucking Day
Caitlin Johnstone, Aug 14, 2020

... Two months ago Moon of Alabama published an article titled “Belarus – A U.S. Sponsored Color Revolution Is Underway” documenting all the telltale signs that the Moscow-aligned nation would soon be overrun with protests in opposition to its Soviet-style government. Here’s an excerpt from that June 16th article:
    
"On August 9 Belarus will hold presidential elections. Lukashenko will do his best to win again.
 
    Color revolutions are usually launched over controversial elections. The results are publicly put into
doubt even before the election begins. When the results finally arrive western media will claim that they
diverge from the expectation it created and therefore must have been faked. People will be pushed into the streets to protest. To increase the chaos some sharp shooters may be put to work to fire at the police and at protesters like it was done in Ukraine. The revolt ends when it is flogged down or when the U.S. favorite candidate is put into place.

    Last year the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy financed at least 34 projects and organizations in Belarus. The U.S. does not do that out of charity but to put its finger on the scale."

All the usual imperial narrative management operations were in place in the lead-up to the nation’s election this month, and now we’re seeing CIA cutouts like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the National Endowment for Democracy cheering on the protests and condemning the Belarusian government in sync with the US State Department.

“We support the protesters and condemn the brutal government crackdown against them,” said the government with no self awareness whatsoever.

So it’s all unfolding according to the same old patterns. A formula that is so tired and repetitive that those with an ear to the ground can predict them before they happen.

The Blob-reminiscent empire which constantly works to absorb or destroy all nations which are not aligned with it, it is completely normal and mundane. It’s the way establishment narrative managers consistently twist the story of what’s happening in our world in favor of the US-centralized empire and against governments which have resisted absorption into its gelatinous folds.

There’s really never anything new. It’s the exact same formula with the exact same depraved imperialists spouting the exact same script about nations which rotate in and out of their crosshairs from day to day. And what makes it even more tedious is the fact that everyone’s expected to treat each new “OMG this unabsorbed government must be opposed!” narrative cycle like it’s something new and different.

It isn’t new, and it isn’t different. It’s gotten to the point where it’s the exact same international
political news story every single day, and that news story reads as follows:

“US-centralized empire tries to grow larger by absorbing a nation which is fighting to maintain its military, financial, economic and/or resource sovereignty.”

That’s it. That’s all the international politics news you’ll ever see, in its entirety. The rest is just
frills laid over top it so you don’t realize you’re being fed the same exact bullshit every motherfucking day.

And the billionaire news media always march right along with it, because they’ve all got systems in place to boost narratives which maintain the status quo that those billionaires have built their kingdoms upon. The reporters who work for such mass media outlets have no loyalty to truth or facts, only to facilitating the expansion of the empire.

Don’t believe me? Read this Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting piece from last year documenting the fact that mass media coverage fixated uniquely on the anti-Beijing protests in Hong Kong while ignoring the protests against US-aligned governments like France, Israel, Chile and Haiti. Or this one from 2002 about the way The Washington Post editorial board was constantly shrieking about the need for regime change in Iraq because Saddam might have chemical weapons, but contented itself with a brief and mild finger-wagging during the Reagan administration when he actually used chemical weapons.

They have no principle at all. No interest in truth whatsoever.

If the government which exited the imperial blob didn’t have any particularly damning humanitarian abuses on its record, western intelligence agencies would make something up, and western media would uncritically report it as an absolute fact.

Mainstream pundits and reporters would make these shifts without skipping a beat. They’d pretend it had been their position the entire time. And when they went to bed at night, they’d sleep like babies.

As narrative control gets more tenuous we might start seeing people waking up from the puppet show. Until then all clear-eyed rebels can do is keep pointing at the gaps in the matrix of this one monotonous, repetitive news story in as many different ways as possible to help wake people up from the propaganda-induced dream.

Is a “Color Revolution” Possible in Belarus?

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

Global Research, August 12, 2020

The political crisis in Belarus is getting worse day after day. As a result of elections in the country, a violent wave of protests began in several cities. The focus of the demonstrations is Minsk, the country’s capital. In the most violent night so far, 40 more policemen and 50 civilians were injured, some seriously. More than 1,000 were arrested, according to data from the Ministry of Interior.

The western media is doing a great coverage of the events, however, the news are always published with a strong ideological rhetoric, in which Aleksandr Lukashenko (elected for a new mandate with 80% of the votes) is appointed as a “terrible dictator”, against who, according to media agencies, there is a major popular uprising. The truth, however, is that the situation is much more complex than that and it is not a mere conflict between dictatorship and democracy, but a real geopolitical clash.

Lukashenko accused Poland, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom of coordinating the protests in Belarus. This Monday at a meeting with the head of the Commonwealth of Independent States observation mission, Sergei Lebedev, Lukashenko said he had found links between the protesters and the authorities in these three countries, saying the groups involved in the protests were controlled by foreign nations. According to the Belarusian leader, these three European countries continue to order people to leave and negotiate with the authorities the voluntary surrender of power. Lukashenko went further and assured that there are also forces in the protests in Russia and Ukraine, giving no details on how he would have access to such information.

For its part, the Polish government has denied the allegations of being behind the protests, saying that these are unfounded and unproven allegations. The country’s foreign minister, Jacek Czaputowicz, said that the European Union is debating the approval of sanctions against Lukashenko, while the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, demanded an urgent meeting of the European Council, but involvement in the demonstrations was not admitted. The United Kingdom and the Czech Republic have yet to comment on the serious accusations. In line with Poland, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the violent unrest in Minsk as “cruel reprisals against peaceful demonstrators”, while European Council chief Charles Michel demanded policies from Lukashenko to guarantee freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and fundamental human rights.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin congratulated Lukashenko on his re-election and said he was committed to promoting relations between the two countries – relations that have been overshadowed since the end of July by the arrest of about thirty Russian citizens in Belarus, where they would have arrived to organize riots during the electoral campaign, which prompted Lukashenko’s harsh pronouncements about Russia. However, a recent journalistic investigation revealed that these people were the victims of a covert operation by the Ukrainian intelligence service, whose aim was precisely to destabilize ties between Moscow and Minsk. Belarus’ authorities continue to investigate the case.

One fact that seems to be being ignored by all analysts who have commented on the case so far, however, is the fact that the West has long been interested in carrying out a coup in Belarus. Lukashenko is commonly referred to among Western politicians and academics as “the last dictator in Europe” and his policies are highly disapproved in any western country. Still, the historical ties between Belarus and Russia are very disturbing to the Western powers, mainly the US, which see in the alliance between the two countries a great threat to the western strategy for Europe.

In 2019, RAND Corporation, one of the largest Western think tanks, published a document in which it openly defended Belarus’ political destabilization through a colorful revolution or similar means, with the explicit aim of delivering a strategic blow against Russia. Western strategists – American and European – consider it important to neutralize Minsk in order to move forward with a siege agenda against Russia. In the publication, it is suggested that, before resorting to more aggressive means, such as a color revolution, the US should offer financial support to Belarus and try to encourage a break in ties with Moscow through diplomatic means, considering that Russia could take the maneuver in Belarus as offensive and organize harsh responses.

Little is known so far and it is difficult to predict what the situation in Belarus will look like from then on, however, whether or not there is foreign coordination behind these protests, it is necessary to consider the explicit fact that the West wants to neutralize Belarus as a National State to prevent a closer relationship between Minsk and Russia. It may not be happening now, but most likely a color revolution scenario will be fostered in Belarus in order to transform the country into a “new Ukraine”.

Israel hits Beirut with nuclear missile!!!

The probability of recent massive explosion at Beirut port being a tactical low-yield nuclear attack by Israel is confidently claimed by the folks at Veterans Today. The explosion has all the signatures of a nuke explosion - even Trump said so upon consultation with his military advisors but went silent thereafter -- may be due to pressure from Israel. Lebanese president Aoun did not rule out the possibility of rocket or bomb attach although the authorities previously stated that the ammonium nitrate stash had detonated.

MS Rhosus was designed to load cargo up to 1900 tons. So how could 2750 tons of Ammonium Nitrate be unloaded and the ship docked in Beirut intending to load more cargo, be it heavy machinery. The MS Rhodus sank in 2018 and is currently lying submerged against the breakwater on the seaward side of the harbour.

Ammonium Nitrate (NH4NO3) is an oxidising agent and explosive under the right conditions, but it is also very stable. The smoke mushroom observed in Beirut has nothing to do with what would have been caused by a conventional explosive. Another solid evidence now is the 141-feet crater created by this nuke-tipped missile.

The red smoke is from burning rocket fuel, warehouse full of Iranian/Hezbollah ballistic missiles, Israel did it in retaliation against Hezbollah.

There is a ten storey plasma ball, a white hot plasma ball, only a nuke or a star burn that hot.

As more info comes in, it’s becoming more and more obvious it was a nuke, seismographs in Jordan measured a 4.5, mushroom cloud visible from Syria, people in the mountains blown off their feet. Reporters in Beirut say they have never seen devastation like it before.

Gordon Duff of Veterans Today claims that "First explosion was caused by Gabriel anti-ship missile of Israel.

The second explosion was caused by Israeli Delilah missile from F16.”

Facebook & Twitter are censoring nuke attack related videos and posts using their bogus fact checkers while Youtube is fast removing such videos citing violation of content rules.

Israel immediately activated its networks in the international media to cover up its crime and lend credence to the idea of the accidental explosion of a fertilizer stockpile.

Israel hits Beirut with nuclear missile, Trump and Lebanese Govt. confirm (New infrared images from 2 cameras)

Trump confirms this was a bombing, not an accident and is immediately scourged by pro-Israel press... starting with the Daily Beast
By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor - Veterans TodayAugust 7, 2020

Absurdity squared: YouTube and Facebook “Fact Checkers,” employed by the people VT claims staged the attack are wiping the evidence from the internet … who would have guessed it.

By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor with

    Nahed al Husaini, VT

Bureau Chief Damascus
    Ian Greenhalgh, VT Editor
    Jeff Smith, VT Editor, IAEA Nuclear Inspector/Particle Physicist

This is the original video frame, never posted anywhere, that proves everything on Facebook and YouTube which was taken down is real.

This is an infrared video which shows, at 6 seconds, the missile coming in and hitting…

    This infrared video makes much more sense than ammonium nitrate on its own. Yes, NH4NO3 is an oxidising agent and explosive under the right conditions, but it is also very stable.

    Judge for yourself. Doctored video? Different location? Or #Beirut attacked?pic.twitter.com/T0LnUqDvoy
    — Darren of Plymouth ???? (@DarrenPlymouth) August 6, 2020

This is the video that was removed from Youtube for “violating content”.

"First explosion was caused by Gabriel anti-ship missile of Israel. The second explosion was caused by Israeli Delilah missile from F16. Our country is in complete jeopardy with this lazy and corrupt regime.”

This is the radiation signature of the explosion received from a source in Italy, submitted to VT by the
International Atomic Energy Agency (UN)

The first Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, authorized a strike against a Hezbollah arms depot using a new weapon that has been tested for seven months in Syria. It is not known whether the second Prime Minister, Benny Gantz, gave his consent.
Thierry Meyssan

The strike was carried out on August 4, 2020, at the exact location designated by Benjamin Netanyahu in his speech to the United Nations on September 27, 2018.

It is not known what weapon was used. However, it has already been tested in Syria since January 2020. It is a missile with a tactical nuclear component in its warhead that causes a smoke mushroom characteristic of nuclear weapons. It is obviously not an atomic bomb in the strategic sense.

Israeli test in Syria

The weapon was tested in Syria on a plain in the countryside and then in the Persian Gulf on the water against Iranian military vessels. This is the first time it has been used in an urban environment, in a particular environment that made the air blast and vibrations reflect off the water and the mountains. Far from destroying only the port of Beirut, it killed about a hundred people, injured at least 5,000 others, and largely destroyed the eastern part of the city (the western part was largely protected by the grain silo).

These satellite photos show the destruction of the Hezbollah warehouse and part of the port.

Israel immediately activated its networks in the international media to cover up its crime and lend credence to the idea of the accidental explosion of a fertilizer stockpile. As is often the case, false culprits are named, and the international media machine repeats this lie over and over again in the absence of any investigation. Yet there was indeed a smokestack incompatible with the thesis of a fertilizer explosion.

The smoke mushroom observed in Beirut has nothing to do with what would have been caused by a conventional explosive.

Just as neither Syria nor Iran had communicated about this weapon when they were hit, the Lebanese political parties immediately reached an agreement not to say anything in order not to demoralize their population. An investigation was opened, not into the cause of the explosion, but into the responsibility of the port’s personnel for the storage of the fertilizer allegedly responsible for the explosion. However, this lie soon turned against the political parties that had imagined it.

The United Nations Tribunal for Lebanon, which was due to make public its verdict in the case of the
assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005, decided to postpone it for a few days.

Identically in that case, the explosion of a pickup truck masked the firing of a missile with a new weapon, just as this time the explosion of nitrate masked the firing of a missile with another new weapon.

Five years later, five years too late, I revealed in a Russian magazine the manner in which Rafik Hariri had been killed [2], while Hezbollah published a video attesting to Israel’s involvement.

It is important to note that the 2005 assassination targeted a former Sunni Prime Minister and that the 2020 attack targeted not Shiite Hezbollah, but the Lebanese Resistance as a whole.

This time, several embassies carried out surveys, including taking grain samples and air filters from
ambulances that immediately went to the scene. They are already being examined in their respective countries.

The British role in America's tainted past

 This is something many people fail to realize...

The British role in America's tainted past
By Aleem Maqbool, Richmond, Virginia
BBC, 1 August 2020

Part of the soul-searching in the US in the two months since the killing of George Floyd has been focused on examining the history that led the country to this point.

Confederate statues have been pulled down in many cities and there are calls for a more honest look at the ways in which slavery, segregation and discrimination have shaped modern day America.

But there are those who feel that there are some beyond these shores who should be reflecting on their
country's role in it all.

"Britain put its stamp on America from the beginning. It was Britain who brought the first unfree Africans to this country and helped to start slavery in America," says Professor Cassandra Newby-Alexander, a historian at Norfolk State University in Virginia.

At Old Point Comfort, where people now fish on the nearby jetty, she points out the spot where it is believed the first ship carrying slaves came into what was then the colony of Virginia.

"It was late August of 1619, and it was the English vessel White Lion," Professor Newby-Alexander says of the ship that it is believed brought 20 men and women that had been ripped from their homeland in what is now Angola.

"Once they were here, they began to sell those individuals that they saw as part of their cargo to the
leadership in the colony."

So started a legacy that has reverberations still being keenly felt today.

Professor Newby-Alexander readily accepts the culpability of Americans in perpetuating that legacy, but says that by the time the British ceded control, society here had already been shaped around the institution of slavery.

"America didn't become officially America until 1783 when the Treaty of Paris was signed. Up until that point, everything that America created was English, including slavery, including laws on which slavery and inequality was built," she says.

"It came from England. It came from the English system.

"If you claim that America has its foundational culture based on England, then you've got to take it all. That includes the systemic racism in our laws, in our practices and in our culture."

Policing in the southern United States had its origins in slave patrols set up under the British in the early
1700s. Local laws started to be drawn up that regarded black people as inferior.

Professor Newby-Alexander draws a direct line to the issues America faces today.

"The policing that we see that automatically assumes that a black person is a criminal, is already guilty,
that started from the founding of our country that viewed Africans as systemically different."

Of course, centuries on, America needs to shoulder responsibility for where things are.

It won independence from Britain, but then there was civil war, with the confederate south fighting to keep slavery.

A lot of the British elite again found themselves on the wrong side of history. They sent supplies and arms to the confederacy, many wanting slavery to continue because of their own business interests. Their side was defeated.

But years later, in the former confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, that did not stop the building of
imposing statues of confederate leaders.

It was part of a movement that eventually became known as "The Lost Cause", a re-writing of the narrative of slavery as being just, and the war as being one fought on noble grounds.

The statues in Richmond and across the southern United States also performed another function.

"We were always told that they were built to intimidate," says Chelsea Higgs Wise, a community activist in Richmond.

"We were told don't look up at them, keep walking straight. You don't have to look up to that white man. They made it that big so that you would have to hurt your neck to look up to them. But we're done with that," she says.

Ms Higgs Wise has been one of those involved in tearing down the statues that she says have haunted
generations of black families here.

"We have been talking for years about removing the Confederate monuments. We've had commissions. We've had reports. We've had budget lines. But it was the young people that just came out with some rope and decided, we're going to do this tonight and we got it done," she says.

"If it was up to us to change the laws, the policies, and we could do it with rope, we would do that as well."

Ms Higgs Wise says that to this day the legacy of slavery pierces the consciousness of Black Americans in a way that is hard for others to understand.

She wants the plinths of those removed confederate statues, now daubed with graffiti of Black Lives Matter slogans and expletives, to remain.

Visit them now and you will see many people, young and old, including Black families posing for photographs in front of them.

"I think it's the most inappropriate thing to do to a statue no matter if it is Jefferson Davis or anyone
else," says Bertram Hayes-Davis.

One of the very statues that Chelsea Higgs Wise filmed on her phone as it came down was one of Jefferson Davis, the great-great-grandfather of Bertram Hayes-Davis. She can be heard cheering and says it was one of the most exhilarating moments of her life.

Davis had been the confederate president and after the war had his US citizenship stripped of him, but he died unrepentant.

His descendent now asks that the instrumental role in the battle to keep slavery played by his ancestor, and others who are having their statues torn down, be looked at in a broader context.

"None of the individuals that are being attacked today were solely slave perpetuationists. They had an
illustrious history associated with many more acts that may preclude that scenario of slavery," says Mr
Hayes-Davis.

"Our country is not perfect. Our individuals are not perfect. But at the same time, we have to understand the lens of perspective of the historic times of which these people lived."

A statue of Jefferson Davis is one of 11 confederate statues that stands in the hallowed halls of the US
Capitol Building in Washington DC.

It was put up more than 40 years before Davis had his US citizenship posthumously restored in the 1970s in what was described as an act of reconciliation. This month, the House of Representatives voted to remove all 11 statues from The Capitol.

The nearby Museum of African American History is one of few national institutions that tackles head-on the horrors of slavery. Across the southern United States in particular, even in schools, there is still a
reluctance to do that.

But there is growing impatience among many for this side-stepping of uncomfortable American history, from the country's origins to the present day.