Prince Harry’s memoir Spare provoked an avalanche of commentary. Newsrooms, who rarely questioned London and Washington’s occupation of Afghanistan in the first place, suddenly find it objectionable that an unpopular prince should confess to killing dozens of Taliban fighters. However, the Royal family’s overt or implicit collaboration with the arms
What initially began last month as a backlash against an entrenched “coal mafia” has snowballed into a trenchant critique of Mongolia’s inability (and unwillingness) to provide a better future for its country’s youth. Corruption revelations involving the state-owned Erdenes Tavan Tolgoi (E.T.T.) mining company have sparked enormous protests in the
Remembrance Day was a solemn occasion decades ago, but it has since degenerated into a commercialised and hollow fashion statement, an empty ritual blindly enforced without conviction. Worst of all, since 2011 Red Poppy merchandise, owned by the Royal British Legion, is deployed to justify recruitment drives for Britain’s ongoing
On November 28, 2022, Bocchit Edmond, Haiti’s ambassador to the United States, urged the international community to send a strike force to help overwhelmed police quell unruly gangs in Port-au-Prince. These demands came a month after embattled Prime Minister Ariel Henry begged foreign leaders to deploy a “specialized armed force,
In May, journalists Celine Klint and Anne Pilegaard Petersen revealed in a podcast that Danish medical authorities had placed contraceptive intrauterine devices (IUDs) in the uteri of 4,500 Greenlandic women and girls, often without their informed consent, in order to stop pregnancies and curb population growth in the sixties and
On June 14th, labour prosecutor Rafael Garcia Rodrigues pressed charges against the German car-manufacturing giant Volkswagen for having owned a farm worked by slave labour in the 1970s and 1980s. Law professor and cleric, Father Ricardo Rezende, told Le Monde that he has spent four decades gathering information on Volkswagen’s
In May, Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Bryan Newland released the first volume of an investigative report examining hundreds of American federal boarding schools’ complicity in the destruction of Indigenous nations across what we now call the United States. This is the perfect occasion to revisit and shed a light
The Guardian reported in May that descendants of 21 out the 3,400 Republicans executed in Valencia after the Spanish Civil War will finally recover the remains of their ancestors, whose bodies were flung into mass graves in Paterna Cemetery. The war began in 1936 after Nationalist military leaders, convinced that
In May, Voice of America reported that a court in Resistencia held the Argentinian state responsible for committing “crimes against humanity” in July 1924, when police and settlers massacred around 400-500 indigenous Qom and Moqoit peoples for protesting slave-like working conditions in the Napalpí reservation. Judge Zunilda Niremperger ordered the
Amnesty International warned last month that oil and mining companies are condemning Ecuador’s Indigenous peoples to total annihilation. This report will delve deeper into this harrowing story. Indigenous tribes like the Cofán have legitimate reasons to fear the intrusion of cocama (non-Indigenous Spanish speakers and other outsiders) onto their territory.
On April 27th, Union of Catholic Asian News reported that separatists affiliated with the Free Papua Movement (Organisasi Papua Merdeka, O.P.M.) in the Indonesian province of Papua murdered a construction worker, more than likely in response to security forces killing an O.P.M. commander a few days prior. Father John Bunay,
Anti-Haitian sentiments in the Dominican Republic are spiralling out of control. The Guardian reported in February that construction of a 196km-long Trumpian wall to stem the flow of migrants, gangs, and contraband is well underway. In addition, Haitians fleeing destitution and a crumbling healthcare service at home face appalling mistreatment
The United States, the European Union, Britain, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, and Japan have imposed wide-ranging and crippling economic sanctions, travel bans, and other restrictions in response to Russia’s relentless assault on Ukraine. Unfortunately, they are unlikely to make a difference. Political scientist Robert Pape proved beyond doubt, in an expansive
On January 10th 2022, an anti-tank mine killed three deminers affiliated with the NGO Cambodian Self-Help Demining in northern Cambodia. This tragic incident is a reminder that despite considerable progress, deminers have yet to clear 2,034 kilometres strewn with landmines and cluster bombs, according to the Phnom Penh Post. The
The Chittagong Hill Tracts (C.H.T.) are home to Bangladesh’s indigenous Jumma tribes, which consist of eleven ethnicities and predominantly Buddhist, Christian, and animist believers and which are, like Indigenous and Aboriginal groups in the United States, Canada, and Australia, battling an encroaching oblivion. The Bangladeshi government at Dhaka’s brutal crusade
The Acholi people in northern Uganda weathered unimaginable suffering for decades, yet their story has rarely been told. This report will shine a light on their past and present plight. The Acholi’s harrowing ordeal began under Idi Amin’s dictatorship in the seventies. Historian Mark Curtis says that after Amin instigated
On January 24th, Burkina Faso bore witness to its third destabilizing coup in less than a decade. It also marked the eighth successful putsch American soldiers launched in multiple West African countries since 2008. The Intercept reports that Ouagadougou’s new leader, Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, took part in many United
The nomadic Sami peoples, who have inhabited the northernmost regions of Fenno-Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula in Russia since the Stone Age, endured terrible oppression for centuries at the hands of various regimes. Governments in contemporary Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Russia remain hesitant to make amends for what historian Kyösti
Burundi’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), established in 2014 to ease ethnic animosities between the Hutu majority and Tutsi minority, has caused controversy ever since. Development and Cooperation states that Tutsi politicians still accuse TRC members of being too one-sided in their investigations of Burundi’s troubled past. The TRC discovered
In 1983, Robert Mugabe, then Prime Minister and leader of ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front), launched the final phase of his plan to turn Zimbabwe into a one-party state. He sent the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade (called “Gukurahundi” in Shona) into Matabeleland to exterminate “dissidents.” What arguably
