ethnic cleansing

Before the Libyan Civil War, Tawarga was an agricultural city of some 10,000, mostly black people, with an economy centering around palm trees and date production. Today, it is entirely empty, and declared a “closed military area” by the rebels...

Tripoli residents near the camp report that the Tawargans had been in the camp at one point, but that the camp itself was attacked by forces from Misrata. They beat the men, rounded up the women and children and took them away in trucks. They believed the troops were taking them to another camp in another part of Tripoli. That camp too was empty.

It may be quite some time before we learn exactly what happened, but we have hints in media reports dating back to June, when Misrata rebels began openly talking about “cleansing” the region of blacks and were saying that black Libyans might as well pack up because “Tawarga no longer exists, only Misrata.”

Fast forward nearly three months from this proclamation, and we have an empty city where Tawarga once stood. The only sign saying Tawarga has been covered up with a new sign saying “New Misrata.”

A BP-led consortium is breaking international rules governing the human rights responsibilities of multinational companies in its operations on the controversial Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the UK Government ruled...

The ruling states that BP failed to investigate and respond to complaints from local people of intimidation by state security forces in Turkey guarding the pipeline. Local human rights defender Ferhat Kaya, for instance, has reported that he was detained and tortured by the paramilitary police for insisting on fair compensation. Villagers allege that they are routinely interrogated when they raise concerns over the pipeline.

The pipeline passes through an area of north-east Turkey with a substantial Kurdish minority who have been subject to state repression for decades. Since the pipeline's inception over a decade ago, human rights campaigners in Turkey and the UK have highlighted the risk of local people, particularly Kurdish minorities, being intimidated by state security forces. Today's ruling has found that, despite widespread awareness of this "heightened risk intimidation", BP failed adequately to respond to or investigate allegations of abuse that were brought to its attention.

The Complaint argued that such intimidation deterred local people from participating in BP's consultations about the pipeline's route and compensation negotiations for loss of land and livelihoods.

Milosevic tried to suppress an armed secessionist movement, secretly but effectively supported by neighboring Albania, the United States and Germany, which deliberately provoked repression by murdering both Serbs and Albanians loyal to the government. Like the Americans in similar circumstances, Milosevic relied too heavily on military superiority rather than on political skill. But even the NATO-sponsored International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia in The Hague had to abandon any charges of "genocide" against Milosevic in Kosovo. For the simple reason that there was never a shred of evidence for such a charge.

Ethnic Albanians in the Government [of Kosovo] have manipulated public funds and regulations to take over land belonging to Serbs. Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked, and flags have been torn down. Wells have been poisoned and crops burned. Slavic boys have been knifed, and some young ethnic Albanians have been told by their elders to rape Serbian girls.

The goal of the radical nationals among them, one said in an interview, is an "ethnic Albania that includes western Macedonia, southern Montenegro, part of southern Serbia, Kosovo and Albania itself."

As Slavs flee the protracted violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic Albanian nationalists have been demanding for years, and especially strongly since the bloody rioting by ethnic Albanians in Pristina in 1981--an "ethnically pure" Albanian region

New York Times correspondent David Binder filed a report in 1982 (11/28/82): "In violence growing out of the Pristina University riots of March 1981, a score of people have been killed and hundreds injured. There have been almost weekly incidents of rape, arson, pillage and industrial sabotage, most seemingly designed to drive Kosovo's remaining indigenous Slavs--Serbs and Montenegrins--out of the province."

Describing an attempt to set fire to a 12-year-old Serbian boy, Binder reported (11/9/82): "Such incidents have prompted many of Kosovo's Slavic inhabitants to flee the province, thereby helping to fulfill a nationalist demand for an ethnically 'pure' Albanian Kosovo. The latest Belgrade estimate is that 20,000 Serbs and Montenegrins have left Kosovo for good since the 1981 riots."

By the mid-1990s attacks on Kurds by Washington's Turkish ally reached new levels of violence; one index is the flight of over a million Kurds from the devastated countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital Diyarbakir from 1990 to 1994, many more later. 1994 marked two records: it was 'the year of the worst repression in the Kurdish prvinces' of Turkey, Jonathan Randal reported from the scene, and the year when Turkey became 'the single biggest importer of American military hardware and thus the world's largest arms purchaser', using the gifts in ways that Saddam doubtless appreciated. The mounting terror, still underway, made an impressive contribution to the ethnic cleansing of the 1990s, leaving about 3,500 villages destroyed, tens of thousands killed, some 2 to 3 million refugees, right within NATO and under the jurisdiction of the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights...