Articles by Super User

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Fleeing Myanmar

Super User April 9, 2018 Super User

Source: New Internationalist

The treatment of Myanmar’s Rohingya people has been seen as a genocide in the making. 

On her mind that day, in September 2017, was all that was immediate. And all that was immediate – the next meal, clean water, safe shelter, sleep without terror – clamoured for her attention but were things over which she had very little control. Rashida* wanted rest.

She was at an NGO-run medical facility at Balukhali refugee camp, Cox’s Bazar in southern Bangladesh, trying to get her five-year-old daughter examined for several ailments: cold, cuts to the knee, stomach pain. read more

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe (right) at the country's independence anniversary in 2016. From early 1983 to late 1987, the Zimbabwe National Army carried out a series of massacres of Ndebele civilians called the Gukurahundi, deriving from a Shona language term which loosely translates to "the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains". (Photo credit: Jekesai Njikizana/AFP/Getty)

The Dark Chapter of Zimbabwe’s History That Won’t Go Away

Super User April 9, 2018 Super User

With Zimbabwe’s new President Emmerson Mnangagwa just concluding a 100-day timeline to address what he considered the country’s most pressing issues, which focused on economic revival, human rights activists have their own timeline. Survivors of the 1980s Gukurahundi atrocities, where a campaign by government soldiers claimed thousands of civilian lives, are demanding that the new president address the country’s dark past.

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Iraq is a Reminder: US Crimes Against Humanity Predate Trump

Super User April 2, 2018 Super User

Source: The Guardian

With all the talk of ‘totalitarianism’ in the Trump era, let’s not forget what came before

People talk a lot about “totalitarianism” in the Trump era. I’ve never really loved the category: it seems to paper over some pretty deep differences between the entities one might call totalitarian. But if there was a “totalitarian” moment in my lifetime, it is unquestionably the period between 9/11 and the Iraq war.

It’s not simply that war criminals enlisted the aid of the press and every other ideological apparatus in our country to launch a massively destructive, destabilizing, and completely unwarranted war of aggression (the principal crime against humanity), although they did. read more

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Stand Up, Fight Back: The Rising Militancy of the Immigrant Rights Movement

Super User April 2, 2018 Super User

Source: Truthout

Activism for immigrant rights may be about to get much more militant.

Some 1.1 million undocumented people — beneficiaries of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) or Temporary Protected Status (TPS) — are slated to lose their protection against deportation over the next two years, along with the possibility of obtaining work permits or aid for higher education. The result will of course be devastating for them and for their relatives, friends and communities, but there will also be repercussions for the society as a whole, especially in areas with large immigrant populations. Meanwhile, the country’s other 10 million or so undocumented people continue to live in fear, with Trump administration policies increasing the pressure. “[Y]ou should be uncomfortable,” Tom Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), warned them last spring. “You should look over your shoulder.” read more