11 March 2013
The 2.000-strong contingent of Chad, which has played a leading part in the fight against jihadist militants in Mali, officially joined the regional African force that is deployed there on 9 March. The Chadian forces were not initially placed under AFISMA’s operational command.
8 March 2013
ABC News announced that former Dutchbat general Karremans, who commanded the Dutch peacekeepers in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica, and two other officers (Franken and Oosterveen), will not be prosecuted for their involvement in the genocide and war crimes that were committed by Bosnian-Serb fighters who overran the enclave and subsequently massacred around 8.000 Muslim men in 1995.
The surviving relatives of three victims of the massacre (the cases of Mustafić and Nuhanović) asked for a criminal case to be launched against the three officers. The relatives wanted Karremans to be held criminally responsible for the deaths of their loved ones, arguing that he turned them over to the Serbs (general Mladic), although he should have offered the men protection because they (or their relatives) had worked for the Dutch peacekeepers.
Source: ABC News | Associated Press | Dutch Peacekeeper Not Prosecuted for Srebrenica
Source: NOS | Karremans niet vervolgd (in Dutch)
8 March 2013
An investigation by The Guardian and BBC Arabic has revealed how two United States (US) special forces veterans played a key role in training and overseeing US-funded special police commandos who ran a network of secret torture centres in Iraq. The two veterans reported directly to General David Petraeus, who had been sent into Iraq to organise the Iraqi security services.
Source: The Guardian | Revealed: Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres
8 March 2013
On 5 March, a human rights trial began in Argentina to investigate the crimes committed during the so-called ‘Operation Condor‘, involving six states, in response to the populist and socialist movements emerging throughout Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.
The six participating states were Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina and Brazil. The operation resulted in tens of thousands of people being kidnapped, tortured and killed by military regimes across the continent. Those who fled repression in one state were often targeted in another state. Al Jazeera quotes from a United States (US) intelligence report from 1976: ‘Intelligence representatives from Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Chile and Argentina decided at a meeting in Santiago early in June to set up a computerised intelligence data bank – known as “Operation Condor”…’ Al Jazeera also notes that Operation Condor was executed with knowledge of the United States.
Source: Al Jazeera | Tracing the shadows of 'Operation Condor'
7 March 2013
At the Conference of the Parties of the of the Convention on the Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), eight states (Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and China) were identified as key to the trade in ivory and were threatened with trade sanctions if they do not address failures in protection against poaching, and failures in seizing illegal ivory trade.
Six of these states are states which most ivory passes through (Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam), the other two are the states were most ivory is bought (China and Thailand).
The news of threat of trade sanctions coincides with the publication of a report that details the increase in levels of poaching. The report concludes that illicit ivory trade activity and the weight of ivory behind this trade has more than doubled since 2007, and is over three times greater than it was in 1998.
Source: The Guardian | Two-thirds of forest elephants killed by ivory poachers in past decade
Source: UNEP, CITES, IUCN, TRAFFIC | Elephants in the Dust - The African Elephant Crisis | A Rapid Response Assessment
Source: The Miami Herald | Ivory trade nations face threat of sanctions