Tag: genocide

Michelle Bachelet, Who Helped Cover Up Uyghur Genocide, Visits China to Campaign for U.N. Chief

Former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Vice President Han Zheng on Wednesday, touring the country amid her campaign to become the next U.N. Secretary General.

Bachelet, a radical leftist, served as president of Chile before completing her term and taking over the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). She served two terms as president in the country, from 2006 to 2010 and, later, from 2014 to 2018. Her time leading the OHCHR spanned from 2018, shortly after the end of her time as president, through 2022, when she chose not to run for a second term amid global disgust and calls for her resignation for her poor handling of the Chinese genocide of Uyghurs and other Turkic people in the country.

Bachelet notably visited China in 2022 shortly before stepping down and, far from condemning the ongoing genocide, praised China’s human rights record and claimed that the concentration camps the Chinese Communist Party had been caught using to imprison as many as 3 million people were no longer functional.

Bachelet is one of five official candidates running to replace Antonio Guterres as the secretary-general of the United Nations. The other candidates are former General Assembly leader María Fernanda Espinosa, former Costa Rican Vice President Rebeca Grynspan, former Senegalese President Macky Sall, and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi. Bachelet initially enjoyed the endorsement of her country under leftist former President Gabriel Boric, but Chile withdrew its support after the inauguration of conservative current President José Antonio Kast.

Campaigning for the position is often less overt than a traditional political role, involving private meetings with the most powerful actors at the United Nations. Bachelet appears to have traveled to Beijing seeking support from China, though Chinese state media reports did not overtly describe her visit as a formal campaign stop.

Chinese government television networks published images of Bachelet receiving a warm welcome from Wang, the nation’s top diplomat.

Keep reading

Unearthing Namibia’s forgotten genocide through forensic archaeology

The Namibian genocide was one of the first genocides of the 20th century. Between 1904 and 1908, tens of thousands of Ovaherero and Nama people were killed under German colonial rule.

Despite the scale of these events, the material and human legacy of this genocide remains less understood than later atrocities. Historical accounts exist, but are often incomplete or shaped by the perspectives and priorities of the colonial period in which they were produced.

The landscapes of Namibia that testify to this violence still survive, but are under increasing pressure from urban expansion, infrastructure development and environmental change. Archaeological research is playing a key role in documenting and protecting this heritage.

The Centre of Archaeology at the University of Huddersfield has, in conjunction with community representatives, the research groups Forensic Architecture and Forensis and the Swakopmund Genocide Museum, conducted fieldwork in Namibia across two seasons (2023 and 2025). Our work has focused on sites linked to German colonial concentration camps in Swakopmund and Lüderitz.

Using forensic methods, our project seeks to locate, document and protect burial sites associated with the genocide. We aim to demonstrate how archaeology can confirm historical events, provide physical evidence, support commemoration and strengthen claims for reparations.

The research combines archival study with field methods including: GIS mapping (computer-based spatial mapping and analysis of archaeological data), walkover survey (systematic on-the-ground inspection of visible archaeological features), Ground Penetrating Radar (a geophysical technique that uses radar waves to detect buried structures without excavation), GPS survey, drone imagery and targeted excavation.

Keep reading

What went wrong in Israel? A genocide scholar examines ‘what Zionism became’

Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, when asked to explain the apparent about-face that led him to advocate the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, quoted a beloved Israeli pop ballad. “What you can see from there, you can’t see from here,” he said, referring to the shift in perspective he had supposedly undergone since coming to power.

Although the 2005 Gaza disengagement was perhaps less a change of heart than one of strategy, as his senior adviser later admitted, the lyric became a byword of Israeli politics, an oft-cited reminder that perspective is everything.

Israeli-born Holocaust historian Omer Bartov invoked the same line when he was asked how he had come to view Israel’s ferocious assault on Gaza as a genocide. Living in the US, where he has spent more than three decades, he said, had given him the necessary distance to see the annihilation of Gaza for what it was. “I think it’s very hard to be dispassionate when you’re there,” he said.

Bartov did more than simply apply the word genocide to Israel’s actions: he shouted it from the establishment-media rooftops, making the case in a lengthy July 2025 essay in the New York Times titled: I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. (He had addressed some of the arguments in a Guardian essay the year prior.) Bartov’s declaration cost him several close relationships, he told me, even though subsequent events have not only validated his analysis but further demonstrated the lack of concern for Palestinian suffering that has become prevalent in Israeli society.

Keep reading

Trump Sounds Alarm on Christian Genocide in Nigeria — Pledges to Take Action Against Islamist Atrocities

President Donald Trump is sounding the alarm on Christian persecution in Nigeria.

Posting on Truth Social, Trump spoke out about the threats faced by Nigerian Christians at the hands of Islamist militias.

He wrote:

Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria. Thousands of Christians are being killed. Radical Islamists are responsible for this mass slaughter.

I am hereby making Nigeria a “COUNTRY OF PARTICULAR CONCERN” — But that is the least of it. When Christians, or any such group, is slaughtered like is happening in Nigeria (3,100 versus 4,476 Worldwide), something must be done!

I am asking Congressman Riley Moore, together with Chairman Tom Cole and the House Appropriations Committee, to immediately look into this matter, and report back to me.

The United States cannot stand by while such atrocities are happening in Nigeria, and numerous other Countries. We stand ready, willing, and able to save our Great Christian population around the World!

This warning was underlined by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“The ongoing slaughter of thousands of Christians in Nigeria by radical Islamists and Fulani ethnic militias is both tragic and unacceptable,” he wrote.

”As President Trump said, the United States stands ready, willing, and able to act.”

Keep reading

Genocide in Nigeria: Islamic terror groups are killing en masse and aim to eliminate 112 million Christians and 13 million others by 2075

According to a report published in August by the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law (“Intersociety”), at least 7,087 Christians were massacred across Nigeria in the first 220 days of 2025. 

According to Intersociety, 19,100 churches have been destroyed, over 1,100 Christian communities displaced and more than 600 Christian clerics have been abducted.  Since 2009,  approximately 185,009 Nigerians have been killed, including 125,009 Christians and 60,000 “liberal Muslims,” Intersociety says.

The report attributes the killings to 22 Islamic terrorist groups, including Boko Haram, ISWAP and Fulani militias, which are accused of a genocidal campaign to eliminate Christianity and traditional religions.  It says these groups aim to eliminate an estimated 112 million Christians and 13 million adherents of traditional religions by the year 2075, or over the next 50 years.

In addition to uprooting and obliterating Christianity, “These Islamic terror groups are using violence and genocidal means to obliterate or wipe out Nigeria’s indigenous ethnic groups and their identities, especially the 3,475-year-old Igbo cultural heritage put in place [established] since 1450 BC,” the report states.

Intersociety and other groups, including Genocide Watch, have condemned the Nigerian military for its complicity in the violence, accusing it of protecting jihadist interests and failing to protect Christian communities.

Years ago, Genocide Watch raised the alarm.  In December 2022, it said, “The UNDP estimates that terrorists have killed over 350,000 people in Nigeria since 2009. 300,000 were children. Boko Haram, ISWAP, and Fulani jihadists have also forcibly displaced over 2.9 million Nigerians.  The genocidal massacres have mainly targeted Christians.” 

In March 2025, Nina Shea, an American international human rights lawyer, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa on the persecution of Christian farming communities by militant Fulani Muslim herders. 

“Nigeria now ranks 6 out of 66 on the 2025 Global Terrorism Index and the index does not even take into account the violence by militant Fulani herders … In recent years, more Christians have been killed for their faith in Nigeria than in all other places combined,” Shea said and urged the US Congress to recommend that Nigeria be designated a Country of Particular Concern (“CPC”).

Yet corporate media remains silent.

The Islamic terror groups want to turn Nigeria into “a country where Christianity is banned and brutally crushed, relegated and forced underground,” the Intersociety report says.

Adding, “Other countries lending anti-Christian crush to Nigeria are Libya, Algeria, North  Korea, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Somalia and Afghanistan – where it is high crime to be seen with holy bible or wearing Christian symbols or saying Christian prayers or singing praises and worship songs.”

Keep reading

State Department Accuses China of Genocide and Slavery — and Rape, Torture, Starvation of Dissidents

The U.S. State Department published its annual global human rights reports on Tuesday, featuring a profile on the Chinese Communist Party that accused that government of a host of atrocities including genocide, slavery, worker abuse, forced abortions, and various forms of torture against dissidents.

The State Department human rights reports are published annually and broken down by country. The 2025 report published this week covers the year 2024. The profile on China focused significantly on updates regarding the ongoing genocide of Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other non-Han ethnic groups in occupied East Turkistan. While widespread evidence indicates that the Chinese Communist Party has attempted to violently subjugate the Turkic peoples of East Turkistan for decades, human rights experts largely agree that dictator Xi Jinping dramatically expanded this effort in 2017, turning the region into a high-tech surveillance state and imprisoning as many as 3 million people in concentration camps.

Following a wave of negative publicity and action by human rights groups to raise awareness of the mass imprisonment of Uyghurs in concentration camps, the Chinese government began to describe the concentration camps as “vocational education” centers and claim that most of its victims had “graduated” from the prisons. Survivors of the abuse nonetheless persisted in reported experiences of beatings, psychological abuse, rape, and slavery at the hands of regime thugs at the camps.

Keep reading

Parks Canada quietly backtracks on ‘genocide’ claims against Manitoba residential school

The Government of Canada quietly dropped references to “genocide” regarding Indigenous residential schools in their latest statement after gaslighting Canadians for years.

According to an August 12 press release, Parks Canada, run by the Liberal government, discreetly removed all reference to “genocide” in its latest historic site designation of an Indian Residential School at Manitoba’s Portage la Prairie Residential School.

“Built in 1914-1915, the former Portage La Prairie Indian Residential School functioned within the residential school system whereby the federal government and certain churches and religious organizations worked together to assimilate Indigenous children as part of a broad set of efforts to destroy Indigenous cultures and identities and suppress Indigenous histories,” the press release read.

“The building has been given new meaning by the community as a site of commemoration and resilience that keeps the legacy of the residential school era alive and educates the public,” it continued.

This commemoration is a stark contrast to a February press release in which Parks Canada referred to the residential school system as a “cultural genocide.”

The current lack of reference to genocide marks a distinct shift in the Liberal government’s representation of the residential school system. For years, Liberals have clung to the story that Indigenous children were mass murdered and secretly buried in the schools despite the claims lacking substantial proof.

In 2021, the mainstream media began promoting inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran once-mandatory residential schools.

Canada’s Residential School system was a structure of boarding schools funded by the Canadian government and run by both the Catholic Church and other churches that ran from the late 19th century until the last school closed in 1996.

While some children did tragically die at the boarding schools, evidence has revealed that many of the children passed away as a result of unsanitary conditions due to underfunding by the federal government, not the Catholic Church.

To date, there have been no mass graves discovered at residential schools. However, following claims blaming the deaths on the Catholic clergy who ran the schools, over 100 churches have been burned or vandalized across Canada in seeming retribution.

Keep reading

Israel Also Sponsored a Genocide in Guatemala

Known as the “Silent Holocaust,” the genocide in Guatemala is seldom mentioned in modern history.

The United States, with support from Israel, backed yet another violent crusade against an indigenous population as well as against communism.

The Guatemalan genocide — preceded by a C.I.A.-instigated coup d’état of the Guatemalan government in 1954 and the ensuing civil war — saw hundreds of thousands of the Mayan Indigenous peoples and alleged communists massacred or disappeared.

Jennifer Harbury, an attorney, author and human rights activist, witnessed the horrors of the genocidal campaign waged by the U.S.-backed Guatemalan military. Included in these horrors was the torture and disappearance of her husband, Mayan rebel leader Efraín Bámaca Velásquez (known as Everardo) by C.I.A.-backed Guatemalan military officials.

Harbury joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to dissect the brutal history of the genocide as well as recount her own experiences, including several hunger strikes in Guatemala and Washington, D.C., that ultimately led to the exposure of the C.I.A.’s complicity in the atrocities.

Keep reading

British committed ‘genocide’ against Aboriginal Australians – inquiry

British colonisers committed “genocide” against the Aboriginal people in the Australian state of Victoria after arriving in the area in the early 1830s, a commission investigating injustices against the indigenous population has said.

The colonization of Victoria, Australia’s second smallest state, located in the southeast of the country, took place between 1834 and 1851.

During that period, its indigenous population suffered “near-complete physical destruction,” falling from around 60,000 to 15,000, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Yoorrook Justice Commission.

The crimes by the British in Victoria included “mass killings, disease, sexual violence, exclusion, linguicide [the death of languages], cultural erasure, environmental degradation, child removal, absorption and assimilation,” it said.

“This was genocide,” the commission ruled after holding more than two months of public hearings and listening to accounts by over 1,300 Aboriginals.

Keep reading

Rwandan Genocide Perpetrator Busted in Ohio After Fraudulently Entering the United States

A Rwandan national has been arrested in Ohio for hiding his role as a perpetrator of the 1994 genocide in his home country.

An estimated 500,000 to 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed during the three-month-long ethnic cleansing campaign.

Vincent Nzigiyimfura, also known as Vincent Mfura, 65, was arrested in Dayton on Wednesday after a federal grand jury returned a three-count indictment charging him with lying on his U.S. immigration and naturalization applications.

The Department of Justice said in a press release about the case, “Nzigiyimfura participated in the genocide that took place between April and July 1994, when members of Rwanda’s majority Hutu population killed hundreds of thousands of the country’s minority Tutsi ethnic group in an attempt to eradicate the ethnic group.”

“Nzigiyimfura, a Rwandan businessman and butcher, was allegedly a leader and organizer of the genocide against Tutsis in the area in and around Gihisi and Nyanza. Nzigiyimfura allegedly provided weapons, transportation, and material inducements to other Hutus and directed them to search for and apprehend people to be killed based on their status as Tutsis. He allegedly set up roadblocks to detain and kill Tutsis, using his personal vehicle to transport materials to build the roadblocks. According to the indictment, Nzigiyimfura devised a scheme to trick Tutsis in hiding to believe that the killings had stopped only to have them rounded up and murdered.”

The DOJ says that while submitting his immigrant visa and alien registration, Nzigiyimfura submitted an affidavit in which he claimed he “left Rwanda in 1994 due to the Genocide,” when in reality, he fled the country because of his role in the massacres.

Keep reading