Ninety years ago, millions perished in Ukraine in a manmade famine under Joseph Stalin that many in the country call genocide. For Ganna Pertchuk, the current Russian invasion is a case of history repeating itself.
At the tall candle-shaped Holodomor (Ukrainian for death by starvation) memorial center in central Kyiv, a dozen Orthodox priests in black and silver robes gathered Saturday for a religious ceremony for the victims of the famine.
The event was held outdoors despite sub-zero temperatures.
Before starting the ceremony, Archbishop Filaret, 93, laid a wreath of red carnations at the monument with a statue of an emaciated girl clutching some stalks of wheat against her chest.
“We pray for those who perished in the famine,” he said.
“The Holodomor was not a result of a bad harvest but the targeted extermination of the Ukrainian people,” he said.
“What happened in the 1930s was genocide and what is happening now is also genocide,” said Pertchuk, a pensioner, who attended the ceremony
“The parallels are very clear.”
Ukraine is known as the breadbasket of Europe for its abundant wheat crops, a product of its rich, black soil. But under Soviet rule it lost between 4 and 8 million citizens during the 1932-1933 famine. Some researchers put the figure even higher.
While some historians argue the famine was planned and exacerbated by Stalin to quash an independence movement, others suggest it was a result of rapid Soviet industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture.
Ukraine officially considers it a “genocide” along with a number of Western countries, a label that Moscow vehemently rejects.
‘Victory of Good over Evil’
Pertchuk, like many Ukrainians has heard horror stories from family members.
Her mother-in-law, remembered as a young girl hiding with her family in a village near Kyiv so “that she wasn’t eaten up,” Pertchuk said, speaking of a famine that fueled rare cases of cannibalism.
“Imagine the horror,” said the 61-year-old former nurse, with tears in her eyes.
She said she was “praying for our victory which will be a victory of Good over Evil.”
“It was an artificial genocidal famine…,” priest Oleksandr Shmurygin, 38, told AFP. “Now when we experience this massive unprovoked war of Russia against Ukraine, we see history repeating itself.”
Among those gathered to commemorate the victims of the famine was lawyer Andryi Savchuk, who spoke of its “irreparable” loss for Ukraine.
“Stalin’s system, the repressive state, wanted to destroy Ukraine as a nation,” he said. “Today we see that the efforts made by Stalin are continued by [President Vladimir] Putin.
“At that time, they wanted to exterminate Ukrainians through famine,” he added.
“Today, they are exterminating us with heavy weapons,” and bombing energy installations to deprive citizens of electricity, heating and water just as the punishing winter sets in.
But just as Ukrainians hold on in the 1930s, so they would against Moscow today, said Savchuk.
“We have an unyielding will and confidence. And the whole world is with us.”
Germany’s Bundestag is planning to pass a resolution declaring the starvation of millions of Ukrainians under Joseph Stalin a genocide, a move that parliamentarians hope will serve as a “warning” to Moscow as Ukraine faces a potential hunger crisis this winter.
The resolution, which will be jointly brought to the vote next week by the three governing parties and conservative opposition leaders, will describe the 1932-33 Holodomor as part of “a list of inhuman crimes by totalitarian systems that extinguished millions of human lives in Europe in the first half of the 20th century”.
“People across Ukraine, not just in grain-producing regions, were affected by hunger and repression”, the resolution will say. “This meets the historical-political definition from today’s perspective for genocide.”
The victims of the Holodomor – Ukrainian for “death by starvation” – are traditionally commemorated in Ukraine on the last Saturday of November.
Kyiv regards the historical event as part of a deliberate campaign by Stalin’s regime to collectivise agriculture and root out Ukraine’s fledging nationalist movement. Historians estimate between 4 million and 7.5 million people were killed in the human-made disaster.
Moscow has rejected Kyiv’s version of history, placing the deaths in the broader context of famines that devastated regions of Central Asia and Russia.
“Putin is part of Stalin’s cruel and criminal tradition,” said Robin Wagener, the German Green party MP who initiated the resolution. “Today Russian terror is once again haunting Ukraine. Once again the plan is to use violence and terror to deprive Ukraine of livelihood, to subdue an entire country,” he told newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Knut Abraham, a Christian Democratic Union (CDU) ombudsman of the parliament’s committee on legal affairs and human rights, said the resolution was meant to send a signal to Moscow. “This recognition is even more important because Ukraine has once again become the target of Russian aggression.”
A spokesperson for the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said: “She welcomes very much that there is a lot of support in the German parliament for this.”
THE HAGUE, July 22 (Reuters) – The World Court on Friday rejected Myanmar’s objections to a genocide case over its treatment of the Muslim Rohingya minority, paving the way for the case to be heard in full.
Myanmar, now ruled by a military junta that seized power in 2021, had argued that Gambia, which brought the suit, had no standing to do so at the top U.N. court, formally known as the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
But presiding Judge Joan Donoghue said all states that had signed the 1948 Genocide Convention could and must act to prevent genocide, and the court had jurisdiction in the case.
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“Gambia, as a state party to the genocide convention, has standing,” she said, reading a summary of the 13-judge panel’s ruling.
The court will now proceed to hearing the merits of the case, a process that will take years.
Gambia took up the Rohingya’s cause in 2019, backed by the 57-nation Organisation for Islamic Cooperation, in a suit aiming to hold Myanmar accountable and prevent further bloodshed.
Gambia Justice Minister Dawda Jallow said outside the courtroom he was “very happy” with the decision and was confident the suit would prevail.
Gambia became involved after his predecessor, Abubacarr Tambadou, a former prosecutor at the U.N. Rwanda tribunal, visited a refugee camp in Bangladesh and said that the stories he heard evoked memories of the genocide in Rwanda.
A representative for Myanmar said that the state would do its “utmost” to protect the country’s “national interest” in further proceedings.
An exhausted Rohingya refugee woman touches the shore after crossing the Bangladesh-Myanmar border by boat through the Bay of Bengal in Shah Porir Dwip, Bangladesh, September 11, 2017. Picture taken September 11, 2017. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui/File Photo
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Protesters outside the court’s gates hoisted a red banner with the text “Free Burma” and yelled at cars carrying the junta’s representatives leaving the building after the decision.
A U.N. fact-finding mission concluded that a 2017 military campaign by Myanmar that drove 730,000 Rohingya into neighbouring Bangladesh had included “genocidal acts”.
Myanmar has denied genocide, rejecting the U.N. findings as “biased and flawed”. It says its crackdown was aimed at Rohingya rebels who had carried out attacks.
While the Hague court’s decisions are binding and countries generally follow them, it has no way of enforcing them.
In a 2020 provisional decision it ordered Myanmar to protect the Rohingya from harm, a legal victory that established their right under international law as a protected minority.
However Rohingya groups and rights activists say there has been no meaningful attempt to end their systemic persecution.
Rohingya are still denied citizenship and freedom of movement in Myanmar. Tens of thousands have now been confined to squalid displacement camps for a decade.
Bangladesh’s foreign ministry welcomed the judgment in a statement.
“For the victims living in the camps in Bangladesh as well as in Myanmar, they see the hope that justice will be delivered to them and that the perpetrators in the Myanmar military will be brought to accountability,” said Ambia Parveen of the European Rohingya Council outside the court.
The junta has imprisoned democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who defended Myanmar personally in 2019 hearings in The Hague.
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Reporting by Toby Sterling, and Poppy McPherson in Bangkok; Editing by Peter Graff and Alison Williams
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
In 1994, Hutu extremists in Rwanda targeted minority ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in a three-month killing spree that left an estimated 800,000 people dead, though local estimates are higher.
In the basement below the church — which today stands as a memorial to the 1994 genocide — the skulls of unidentified Tutsi men are suspended above the coffin of a woman from the same ethnic group who died following an act of barbarous sexual violence.
Attackers targeted churches like this one, on the outskirts of the capital Kigali. More than 10,000 people were killed here over two days, according to the memorial’s manager Rachel Murekatete. A mass grave behind the building is the final resting place of more than 45,000 people from the surrounding area killed in the violence.
Prince Charles appeared visibly moved as he was shown around the church grounds, where even now bodies discovered elsewhere are being brought, as former attackers identify other gravesites as part of the reconciliation process that began in 1999.
The heir to the British throne is in Rwanda for a Commonwealth leaders’ summit later this week.
After being shown the grave site, the 73-year-old royal laid a wreath in honor of the victims buried here. On its card, a note from the royal written in the local Kinyarwanda language: “We will always remember the innocent souls that were killed in the Genocide Against the Tutsi in April 1994. Be strong Rwanda. Charles”
The royal then visited Mbyo reconciliation village, one of eight similar villages in Rwanda, where survivors and perpetrators of the genocide live alongside each other. The perpetrators publicly apologize for their crimes, while survivors profess forgiveness.
The first day of his visit to Rwanda was heavily focused on learning more about the massacres nearly three decades ago. Rwandan footballer and genocide survivor Eric Murangwa had encouraged the prince to include Nyamata during his three-day visit to the country.
“We are currently living in what we call ‘the last stage of genocide’ which is denial. And having someone like Prince Charles visiting Rwanda and visiting the memorial … highlights how the country has managed to recover from that terrible past,” he told CNN earlier this month during a Buckingham Palace reception celebrating the contributions of people from across the Commonwealth.
Earlier Wednesday, Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall met Rwanda’s President Kagame and first lady Jeannette Kagame and visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial and museum at Gisozi, where a quarter of a million people are interred.
“This memorial is a place of remembrance, a place where survivors and visitors come and pay respect of the victims of genocide against Tutsi,” says Freddy Mutanguha, the site’s director and a genocide survivor himself. “More than 250,000 victims were buried in this memorial and their bodies were collected in different places … and this place [has] become a final destination for our beloved ones, our families.”
Those families include his own, who once lived in the city of Kibuye in the country’s western province.
Mutanguha told CNN he heard as attackers murdered his parents and siblings during the genocide, saying: “I was in hiding but I could hear their voices actually until they finished. I survived with my sister, but I lost four sisters as well.”
Keeping their memory alive is now what drives his mission at the memorial.
“This is a very important place for me as a survivor because apart from being where we buried our family, my mom is down here in one of the mass graves, it’s a home for me, but also [it’s] a place where I work and I feel that responsibility. As a survivor I have to speak out, I have to tell the truth of what happened to my family, my country and to the Tutsi people,” he continues.
Mutanguha was keen to welcome Prince Charles to learn more about what happened here and help counter a growing online threat from genocide deniers, which he compares to holocaust denial.
“That’s what actually concerns me because when the Holocaust happened, people didn’t learn from the past. When the genocide against Tutsi happened, you can see the deniers of the genocide … mainly those who committed genocide — they feel they can do it again because they didn’t finish the job. So, me telling the story, working here and receiving visitors, probably we can make the ‘never again’ the reality.”
A spokesperson for Clarence House said the royal couple were struck by how important it is to never forget the horrors of the past. “But also were deeply moved as they listened to people who have found ways of living with and even forgiving the most appalling crimes,” they added.
Prince Charles arrived in Rwanda on Tuesday night — the first member of the royal family to visit the country. He is in Kigali representing the Queen at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).
The meeting is usually held every two years but was rescheduled twice due to the pandemic. It is the first CHOGM he is attending since being selected as the organization’s next head at the 2018 gathering.
However, the royal trip to Kigali comes at a somewhat awkward time as a furor over the UK government’s radical plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda has erupted back home.
Britain’s government announced the deal with the east African country in April, however the inaugural flight a week ago was grounded after an eleventh-hour intervention by the European Court of Human Rights.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is also confirmed to attend the summit of Commonwealth leaders and is expected to meet with Prince Charles on Friday morning.
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Russia is guilty of inciting genocide and having the intent to commit genocide in Ukraine, legally obliging other countries to stop it, according to a new report by more than 30 internationally recognised legal scholars and experts.
The report, compiled by two thinktanks, the New Lines Institute in Washington and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights in Montreal, found that there were “reasonable grounds to conclude” that Russia is already in breach of two articles of the 1948 Genocide Convention, by publicly inciting genocide, and by the forcible transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia, which the report notes is itself a genocidal act under article II of the convention.
The report concludes there is “a serious risk of genocide in Ukraine, triggering the legal obligation of all states to prevent genocide” under the convention. States will not be able to say they were unaware of the risk, it warns, but neither the report nor the 1948 convention stipulates what actions foreign governments should take. The report just notes “a minimum legal obligation on states to take reasonable action to contribute toward preventing genocide and protecting vulnerable Ukrainian civilians from the imminent risk of genocide”.
Joe Biden labelled Russian atrocities in Ukraine as genocide in April, and some other governments have followed suit, though the state department said it was ultimately up to a court to determine. The chief prosecutor of the international criminal court, Karim Khan, is leading an investigation of war crimes and has the authority to bring charges of genocide if he feels there is evidence of intent to “destroy, in whole or in part”, the Ukrainian people.
“I’ve never seen anything like this report this early during a conflict,” said Tanya Domi, one of the expert contributors to the report, and an adjunct professor at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. “I think the documentation of crimes in Ukraine outstrips anything that we’ve seen in the recent past.”
The report finds ample evidence of incitement to genocide, noting the Kremlin leadership and Russian state media commentators have consistently denied the existence of a distinct Ukrainian identity, “implying that those who self-identify as Ukrainian threaten the unity of Russia or are Nazis, and are therefore deserving of punishment”.
“Denial of the existence of protected groups is a specific indicator of genocide under the United Nations guide to assessing the risk of mass atrocities,” the report said.
It also looked at the language used by Russian officials depicting Ukrainians as somehow subhuman, with terms like “zombified”, “bestial” or “subordinate”, or as diseased or contaminated, using words like “scum” and “filth”.
“What they’re saying is: if you’re Ukrainian you’re a Nazi, and therefore we’re going to kill you,” Domi said. “They are saying this is a Nazi regime and that means that they are pursuing Ukrainians and the Ukrainian state for the purposes of elimination and destruction.”
By issuing blanket denials of the atrocities and by rewarding soldiers suspected of mass killings, as Putin did with the units that were in Bucha at the time of the mass killings of civilians there, the Kremlin is enabling Russian forces to commit more war crimes and conditioning the Russian public to condone them, the report said.
The public incitement at the time of the invasion points towards a genocidal plan, the experts argue, as does the pattern of atrocities committed: the mass killings, the shelling of shelters and evacuation routes, and the indiscriminate bombardment of residential areas.
In that category, the report points to the sieges of cities such as Mariupol, the 248 attacks on Ukraine’s healthcare system documented by the World Health Organization, and the destruction or seizure of basic necessities, humanitarian aid and grain.
A systematic pattern of rape and sexual violence is also part of an overall picture of atrocities that point towards genocidal intent, the experts said, as is the forcible transfer of over a million people to Russia, including more than 180,000 children. The report cites Ukrainian officials as pointing to planned reforms in Russian legislation to accelerate adoption procedures for children from the Donbas, while abducted Ukrainian children have been forced to take Russian classes.
“I think the forced transfers of people is just one of the most egregious crimes because that shows intent to remove them from their country. There is no ability of those individuals to resist,” Domi said.
The international court of justice ruled in 2007 that state parties to the Genocide Convention had an obligation to take preventive action when they learn of, or should have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed.
“Each state then will determine whether it has the means to help deter those suspected of preparing genocide and take action as the circumstances permit,” David Scheffer, a former US ambassador at large for war crimes issues and now a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, said. “There are many options: provision of military weaponry, humanitarian and refugee aid, economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, and even military intervention, that complies with the UN Charter.”
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks during Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada April 27, 2022. REUTERS/Blair Gable
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April 27 (Reuters) – Canadian lawmakers voted unanimously on Wednesday to call Russia’s attacks in Ukraine a “genocide”, with members of parliament saying there was “ample evidence of systemic and massive war crimes against humanity” being committed by Moscow.
The Canadian House of Commons’ motion said war crimes by Russia include mass atrocities, systematic instances of willful killing of Ukrainian civilians, the desecration of corpses, forcible transfer of Ukrainian children, torture, physical harm, mental harm, and rape.
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said it was “absolutely right” for more and more people to describe Russia’s actions in Ukraine as genocide, supporting an accusation made by U.S. President Joe Biden a day earlier.
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Biden had said earlier in April that the Ukraine invasion amounted to genocide but had added that lawyers internationally would have to decide whether or not the invasion met the criteria for genocide.
Russia, which denies the genocide charges, calls its action in Ukraine a “special military operation” and said it was necessary because the United States was using Ukraine to threaten Russia. Moscow in turn accuses Ukraine of the genocide of Russian-speaking people, a charge that Ukraine dismisses as nonsense. read more
Canada is among a number of countries to have imposed sanctions on Russia after it invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. On Wednesday, it imposed further sanctions on 203 individuals whom it says are complicit in Russia’s attempted annexation of certain areas of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.
Late on Wednesday, Canada also updated its travel advice for Moldova, citing the risk of armed conflict in Transnistria, a breakaway Russian-occupied part of Moldova in the west.
The government of Canada asked travelers to exercise a high degree of caution in Moldova and avoid all travel to Transnistria.
The Canadian government has also said it will change its sanctions laws to allow for funds or property seized or sanctioned from Russia to be paid out to help rebuild Ukraine or to those affected by Russia’s invasion. read more
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Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Sandra Maler and Jacqueline Wong
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
“It is hard to deny this, of course. This is a crime which fulfills the features of a genocide, especially if you look at the context of different conversations that are being conducted,” Duda told CNN’s Dana Bash in an exclusive interview in Warsaw, Poland.
Duda said Russian propaganda about Moscow’s goal for the “denazification” of Ukraine shows that the country was looking for a false pretext “in order to carry out a massacre.”
“The fact that civilian inhabitants of Ukraine are being killed shows best what the goal of [the] Russian invasion is,” he said through a translator. “The goal of that invasion is simply to extinguish the Ukrainian nation.”
Duda, who was first elected Poland’s president in 2015 and has served through three US administrations, is leading the country as it plays a key role supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia, is grappling with an influx of Ukrainian refugees, is pushing for further sanctions on Russia and is providing weapons to Ukraine.
Millions of Ukrainians have fled across the country’s border into Poland. As a member of the NATO alliance, Poland has been one of the countries where US and NATO troops have deployed to bolster NATO’s eastern flank as a deterrent to Russia.
There have been some challenges, too. Ukraine sought Poland’s MiG-29 fighter jets to help in its fight against Russia, but the effort to get the planes to Ukraine fell apart after Poland publicly proposed providing them to the US through a German airbase to ship to Ukraine. The US said such a plan wasn’t feasible, and the planes weren’t sent.
US President Joe Biden said Wednesday that “major war crimes” were being discovered in response to the images from Bucha, though he’s stopped short of labeling Russia’s attacks genocide. The Biden administration announced another new round of sanctions against Russia’s largest financial institutions and number of individuals tied to the Kremlin, including Russian President Vladimir Putin’s two adult daughters.
‘The sanctions regime should be strengthened’
In the interview, Duda questioned the usefulness of diplomatic efforts with Russia at this point in the conflict. He said he wasn’t surprised at the criticism Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki leveled this week toward French President Emmanuel Macron, when Morawiecki said, “Nobody negotiated with Hitler.”
“Dialogue with Russia has no sense,” Duda said. “One has to present very tough conditions to Vladimir Putin. One has to say, ‘Unless you meet these conditions, we don’t have anything to talk about.’ We are going to provide support to Ukraine decisively, we are going to increase sanctions regime, because if you conduct a dialogue which does not achieve anything, it is only a game to buy time by Russia.”
As part of those conditions, Duda called for additional sanctions against Russia and its energy sector, bemoaning Europe’s reliance on Russian energy that has continued even as crippling sanctions have been enacted in other sectors.
“The sanctions regime should be strengthened. I have no doubt whatsoever about this,” Duda said. “This is of course, a very complex task. … The problem however, is that for some countries, well, this is fundamental for them.”
Duda noted that Poland opposed the creation of gas pipelines between Russia and Germany, saying they were “political projects” designed to bypass Poland and the Baltic countries. He called for the dismantling of the new Nord Stream II pipeline.
“Russia is blackmailing not only Germany, right now, Russia is blackmailing, in fact, the entire Europe,” Duda said. “The fact that we’re saying it is impossible to impose embargo on Russian gas, it is not possible to impose embargo on Russian oil right away.”
‘He is my direct neighbor’
Duda said that he speaks to Zelensky perhaps most frequently among world leaders. “He is my direct neighbor. He’s my colleague,” Duda said. “I have this deep sense that we have to do everything to help Ukraine. Yes, this is the feeling that I have stemming not only from the necessity to provide security to Poland, we want the Ukrainian state to exist as independent, sovereign and free.”
The Polish leader said that he suspects part of Putin’s strategy is to try to destabilize Poland and other surrounding countries with a refugee crisis from Ukraine, but he said his country has been able to manage the influx of refugees fleeing Ukraine so far.
“To a certain extent, I’m proud with my compatriots who are helping, to thousands of political volunteers who are giving their hearts, they are not sleeping at night, in order to help the Ukrainian refugees,” Duda said. “I’m deeply grateful to them, for them. But on the other hand, I’m aware of how big an encumbrance it is for our country and for our society. And that is why I appeal for international assistance everywhere. And we are getting this assistance.”
Duda acknowledged he’s concerned about the war in Ukraine spilling into Poland and said there should be little doubt that Poland could be threatened by Moscow in the future.
“In a situation of Russian aggression on Ukraine, that military people call it a full-fledged invasion, I think that under these circumstances, nobody has any doubt that Poland is potentially threatened by a Russian aggression in a future,” Duda said. “So because of that, we need to spend on our defense potential.”
A ‘vivid’ and ‘fruitful’ relationship
During the 2020 campaign, Biden was critical of Poland, lumping it in along with Hungary and Belarus to warn about a rise in totalitarian regimes and to criticize then-President Donald Trump for embracing “thugs in the world.” But Duda had nothing but warm words for Biden in Wednesday’s interview, saying he valued his relationship with all three American presidents he’s served alongside.
“The friendship with the United States, this military alliance is of key importance to us,” Duda said, noting that US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division is currently in Poland. “I’m really delighted that my cooperation that I have today with the President of the United States is so vivid, it’s so good, so fruitful. And I deeply believe that President Joe Biden is glad with his visit to Poland, that he believes it was an important and good visit. That thanks to that visit, he also was able to see with his own eyes that picture of what the situation is like.”
Asked whether he can sleep well at night so long as Putin is in power, Duda said, “I don’t sleep soundly … because I know what is happening behind the border.”
“Can a leader of a neighboring country sleep well in such a situation? It is very difficult, and indeed there is a high tension, there is a big stress that I’m under,” he continued. “But precisely because of this, I believe I should be doing this. I should do everything I can in order to help in this situation. I should do whatever I can to make sure that Ukraine defends itself. I should do everything I can to stop Putin. Today, this is in the interest of Ukraine, but this is also in the interest of my country, of Poland, of my compatriots. It is also in the interest of the entire central Europe.”
After Russia’s attack on Ukraine, Duda said that he hopes the international community “will never again talk to Vladimir Putin.”
“I hope that nobody is going to consider him as a decent and fair leader, or politician simply,” Duda said.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will publicly announce the determination, which human rights groups have been advocating for years, at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, on Monday.
Reuters first reported on the administration’s recognition of genocide.
Until now, the US had stopped short of declaring the atrocities — including mass killings and rape — committed in 2017 against the Muslim minority Rohingya population a genocide. The violence forced nearly a million people to flee, and the United Nations recommended that top military officials face genocide charges.
“I applaud the Biden administration for finally recognizing the atrocities committed against the Rohingya as genocide. While this determination is long overdue, it is nevertheless a powerful and critically important step in holding this brutal regime to account,” Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement Sunday.
America, the Oregon Democrat said, “must lead the world to make it clear that atrocities like these will never be allowed to be buried unnoticed, no matter where they occur.”
A US State Department report released quietly in 2018 found that violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine State was “extreme, large-scale, widespread, and seemingly geared toward both terrorizing the population and driving out the Rohingya residents.”
The State Department has sanctioned a number of Myanmar military officials, including commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing, for their role in committing those human rights abuses.
This story has been updated with comments from Sen. Jeff Merkley.
Hospital hit by several Russian bombs, city council says
Russia’s foreign minister arrives in Turkey for talks
Russia had earlier agreed to ceasefire for evacuation
Moscow denies targeting civilians
LVIV, Ukraine, March 9 (Reuters) – Ukrainian’s president accused Russia of carrying out genocide after officials said Russian aircraft bombed a children’s hospital on Wednesday, burying patients in rubble despite a ceasefire deal for people to flee the besieged city of Mariupol.
The attack, which authorities said injured women in labour and left children in the wreckage, is the latest grim incident of the 14-day invasion, the biggest assault on a European state since 1945.
The Mariupol city council said the hospital had been hit several times in what the White House called a “barbaric use of military force to go after innocent civilians”.
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The destruction took place despite a Russian pledge to halt firing so at least some trapped civilians could escape the city, where hundreds of thousands have been sheltering without water or power for more than a week.
“What kind of country is this, the Russian Federation, which is afraid of hospitals, is afraid of maternity hospitals, and destroys them?” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a televised address late on Wednesday.
Zelenskiy repeated his call for the West to tighten sanctions on Russia “so that they sit down at the negotiating table and end this brutal war”. The bombing of the children’s hospital, he said, was “proof that a genocide of Ukrainians is taking place”.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, asked by Reuters for comment, said: “Russian forces do not fire on civilian targets.” Russia calls its incursion a “special operation” to disarm its neighbour and dislodge leaders it calls “neo-Nazis.”
Ukraine’s foreign ministry posted video footage of what it said was the hospital showing holes where windows should have been in a three-storey building. Huge piles of smouldering rubble littered the scene.
The U.N. Human Rights body said it was verifying the number of casualties at Mariupol.
“The incident adds to our deep concerns about indiscriminate use of weapons in populated areas and civilians trapped in active hostilities in numerous areas,” said spokesperson Liz Throssell.
The Donetsk region’s governor said 17 people were wounded in the attack.
Ukraine accused Russia of breaking the ceasefire around the southern port, which aid workers and officials say is running out of food and water after days of Russian bombardment.
“Indiscriminate shelling continues,” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on Twitter.
Satellite image company Maxar said images from earlier in the day showed extensive damage to homes, apartment buildings, grocery stores and shopping centres in the port city.
Russia blamed Ukraine for the failure of the evacuation.
Among more than 2 million total refugees from Ukraine, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Wednesday that more than 1 million children have fled the country since the invasion started on Feb 24. At least 37 had been killed and 50 injured, it said.
Around 48,000 Ukrainians have been evacuated through humanitarian corridors, Interfax Ukraine news agency said on Wednesday, citing a senior aide to Zelenskiy.
Debris is seen on site of the destroyed Mariupol children’s hospital as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 9, 2022 in this still image from a handout video obtained by Reuters. Ukraine Military/Handout via REUTERS
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Ukrainian officials said while some had departed from certain locations, Russian forces were preventing buses from evacuating civilians from Bucha, a town near Kyiv.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said houses had been destroyed all across Ukraine. “Hundreds of thousands of people have no food, no water, no heat, no electricity and no medical care,” it said.
Thousands continued to flood into neighbouring countries. After hiding in the basement to shelter from Russian bombing, Irina Mihalenka left her home northeast of the Black Sea port of Odessa, she told Reuters in Isaccea, Romania.
“When we were walking, a bridge was blown up. And when we crossed over the wreckage, because there was no other way out, there were corpses of Russian people (soldiers) lying there,” she said.
RUSSIA’S ECONOMIC ISOLATION
Russia has been hit by Western sanctions and the withdrawals of foreign firms. Nestle, cigarette maker Philip Morris and Sony on Wednesday joined the list of multinationals stepping back from the country.
The United States is weighing sanctions on nuclear power supplier Rosatom, a senior Biden administration official said on Wednesday.
The World Bank’s chief economist said Moscow was edging close to defaulting on its debt. The Kremlin is taking measures to shore up the economy and planned to respond to a U.S. ban on its oil and energy exports as the rouble dropped to record lows.
There was not much hope for diplomacy as Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov arrived in Turkey ahead of talks on Thursday with Kuleba in what will be the first meeting between the pair since the incursion.
Ukraine is seeking a ceasefire, liberation of its territories and to resolve all humanitarian issues, Kuleba said, adding: “Frankly … my expectations of the talks are low.”
Moscow demands that Kyiv take a neutral position and drop aspirations of joining the NATO alliance.
Zelenskiy told VICE in an interview on Wednesday that he was confident Putin would at some stage agree to talks. “I think he will. I think he sees that we are strong. He will. We need some time,” he said.
The West says Russia is inventing pretexts to justify an unprovoked war. Russian President Vladimir Putin has called Ukraine a U.S. colony with a puppet regime and no tradition of independent statehood.
The White House on Wednesday said Russia’s claims about alleged U.S. involvement in biological weapons labs and chemical weapons development in Ukraine were false.
Russian forces hold territory along Ukraine’s northeast border, the east and the southeast. Fighting has taken place in the outskirts of Kyiv, while Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv is under bombardment.
A Russian assault force is stalled north of Kyiv and Western countries say the Kremlin has had to adjust its plan to swiftly topple the government.
The International Monetary Fund on Wednesday approved $1.4 billion in emergency financing for Ukraine to help meet urgent spending needs.
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Reporting by Reuters bureaus; Writing by Costas Pitas and Stephen Coates; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Michael Perry
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
French lawmakers have condemned the Chinese government’s treatment of the Uyghur people with an official resolution calling it a “genocide.”
On Tuesday, France’s National Assembly adopted the non-binding resolution that “officially recognizes the violence perpetrated by the People’s Republic of China against the Uyghurs as constituting crimes against humanity and genocide,” reported Agence France-Presse.
Filed by the opposition Socialists Party, the motion gained support from President Emmanuel Macron’s Republic on the Move (LREM) party, receiving 169 votes in favor and only one vote against.
The parliamentary resolution urges the national government to protect the Uyghur minority group by taking “the necessary measures within the international community and in its foreign policy towards the People’s Republic of China.”
Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure recalled how the Uyghur survivors testified in the French parliament that those detained in internment camps in Xinjiang suffered abuse such as rape and torture.
“China is a great power,” Faure was quoted as saying. “We love the Chinese people. But we refuse to submit to propaganda from a regime that is banking on our cowardice and our avarice to perpetrate a genocide in plain sight.”
China has long denied allegations of abuse, claiming they use the camps to provide vocational training and to fight extremism, reported Reuters.
The Chinese embassy in France published a statement on its website, saying, “The sensationalist allegations concerning Xinjiang such as ‘genocide’ are pure lies based on prejudices and hostility towards China.”
Lawmakers in Britain adopted a similar resolution last year, while the Netherlands and Canada parliaments have also officially recognized the Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs as “genocide.”
Featured Image via France 24 English
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