Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 733
June 30, 2016
Turkey’s “double game” on ISIS and support for extremist groups highlighted after horrific Istanbul attack
Paramedics push a stretcher at Turkey's largest airport, Istanbul Ataturk, Turkey, June 28, 2016. (Credit: Reuters/Osman Orsal)
Istanbul’s popular Atatürk airport was plunged into chaos this week after a horrific attack by three suicide bombers killed at least 43 people and injured another 239.
Turkish government officials say they have strong evidence that the bombings were carried out by the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS.
The alleged ISIS attack has reignited concern about Turkey’s “double game” on ISIS in Syria. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has long been accused of indirectly and even directly helping ISIS and other extremist groups in Syria, in their fights against Kurdish rebels and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
For years, Turkey — a U.S. ally and NATO member — let ISIS and other violent Salafi (Sunni extremist) groups cross its open border with Syria, which some dubbed the “jihadi highway.”
A former ISIS member told Newsweek in 2014 that the so-called Islamic State saw Turkey as its ally. He explained that heavily armed ISIS fighters were allowed to freely cross the NATO member’s border, and “ISIS commanders told us to fear nothing at all because there was full cooperation with the Turks.”
The ex-ISIS militant said he “connected ISIS field captains and commanders from Syria with people in Turkey on innumerable occasions,” and added that ISIS commanders “mostly spoke in Turkish because the people they talked to were Turkish officials.”
“ISIS and Turkey cooperate together on the ground on the basis that they have a common enemy to destroy, the Kurds,” he explained.
Today, Turkey is technically fighting ISIS, having joined in the U.S. coalition against the fascist group. But this comes after years of alleged support for the Islamic State.
David L. Phillips, director of the Program on Peace-Building and Rights at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, has done extensive research on Turkey’s alleged collaboration with ISIS. Salon spoke with Prof. Phillips.
“Turkey was the midwife that created ISIS. Now ISIS has turned on its benefactor,” Phillips said.
Past Turkish support for ISIS was not just tacit, he argued. “Erdoğan and ISIS are both fighting the YPG and they cooperate.”
The YPG is a secular leftist Kurdish rebel group that has been both fighting ISIS and waging a revolution in northern Syria. The YPG is aligned with the PKK, a revolutionary socialist Kurdish group that has for decades fought for independence from Turkey.
The YPG itself has also accused Turkey of collaborating with ISIS. In 2014, a spokesperson for the Kurdish rebel group said, “There is more than enough evidence with us now proving that the Turkish army gives ISIS terrorists weapons, ammunitions and allows them to cross the Turkish official border crossings in order for ISIS terrorists to initiate inhumane attacks against the Kurdish people in Rojava.” Rojava is the northern Kurdish-majority area of Syria.
Although they have collaborated in their fight against the Kurds, Phillips argued that the Islamic State has since come to resent Turkey for allowing the U.S. to use its Incirlik air force base for anti-ISIS operations.
Phillips, who has also served as a former adviser to the United Nations Secretariat and an adviser to the U.S. State Department, has published a research paper detailing the many links between Turkey and ISIS.
Turkey may have given weapons and military equipment to ISIS and provided transport, intelligence, medical care and training to its fighters, according to media reports and documents cited by Phillips. Turkey has also been accused of supporting ISIS financially through the purchase of oil, assisting it in recruitment and helping it fight the anti-ISIS Kurdish resistance in Rojava.
Phillips said the airport bombings on Tuesday, June 28 look like an ISIS attack. He clarified that Kurdish rebel groups like the PKK and YPG do not usually target civilians; instead, they target Turkish soldiers and police, with whom Kurdish rebels have been at war.
Extremist groups like ISIS, on the other hand, frequently target civilians, not just government military or security forces.
It certainly looks like an ISIS attack. And there is no reason to think Turkish officials are being misleading by blaming the Islamic State. If the Turkish government wanted to exploit the attack for political gain, it would likely blame it on Kurdish rebel groups, against whom Erdoğan has been waging a brutal military crackdown. In fact, Turkey has in the past blamed attacks on Kurdish rebels that were later discovered to have been carried out by non-Kurdish groups.
This is not the first time Turkey has been attacked by alleged ISIS members. In October 2015, at least 128 people were killed and hundreds were injured after two suspected ISIS suicide bombers attacked a rally of leftist, pro-Kurdish political parties.
Erdoğan’s ruling right-wing nationalist Justice and Development Party, AKP, condemned the massacre, but was accused of not doing enough to protect the left-wing, pro-Kurdish groups. Moreover, there were even reports that Turkish police had been ordered to block ambulances from treating the activists who were bombed.
Free Syrian Army rebels in Aleppo in 2013 (Credit: AP/Abdullah Al-yassin)
“A double game in Syria”
Robert Naiman, policy director at Just Foreign Policy and the author of the chapter on Syria in the book “The WikiLeaks Files,” also told Salon he has a similar analysis of the situation in Turkey.
“Turkey has played a double game in Syria with respect to ISIS, as the Turkish government basically admitted when it tried to suppress the reporting of Turkish journalists about it,” he said, referencing the recent imprisonment of two prominent Turkish reporters who exposed how the Erdoğan government has directly armed Islamist rebels in Syria — in an incident one columnist described as “weapons to Syria, journalists to jail.”
“Turkey is certainly not the only country that has played a double game with respect to” extremist Islamist groups, Naiman noted. “So have the Gulf Sunni monarchies.”
“And so has the U.S., in the sense that the CIA is arming groups, as The New York Times has reported, that the president claims with little dispute that he could target under the 2001 AUMF as ‘associated forces to al-Qaeda,'” he explained, using an acronym for the Authorization for Use of Military Force.
“But Turkey is paying a higher price for the double game because it is closer to Syria,” Naiman added.
Pentagon officials have been reluctant to arm Syrian Islamist rebel groups who they say are linked to extremist groups like al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra. The CIA, which supports these groups, has butted heads with the Department of Defense in disagreement.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia, both of whom are close Western allies, are also supporters of the Salafi militant groups Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham. The founder of Jaysh al-Islam, Zahran Alloush, called for religious minority groups to be cleansed from Syria’s capital, Damascus, and Human Rights Watch says the extremist group likely put Alawite Muslims in cages to be used as human shields. Ahrar al-Sham has fought alongside al-Nusra, Syria’s al-Qaeda.
Despite their extremism, however, both Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham are members of the High Negotiation Committee, the Saudi-led alliance of some 34 rebel groups that are in peace talks to end the war in Syria. For several months, Mohammed Alloush, a cousin and brother-in-law of Zahran Alloush, was the opposition’s chief negotiator in the peace talks, although he later stepped down in frustration at the lack of progress.
In 2014, former U.S. ambassador to Turkey Francis Ricciardone also accused Turkey of directly supporting al-Nusra.
“The Turks frankly worked with groups for a period, including al-Nusra, whom we finally designated as we’re not willing to work with,” Ricciardone said. The U.S. government considers al-Nusra a terrorist organization. Yet Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been accused of supporting the extremist group.
The U.S. is also playing its own double game in Syria and Turkey. In Syria, it is supporting Kurdish rebel groups that are fighting ISIS — and, to further complicate it, the Pentagon is arming Syrian Kurds, which are secular leftist forces fighting Islamist extremists, while the CIA is arming Syrian Islamist rebels, which are actively fighting both the Kurds and Assad.
Meanwhile, in Turkey, the U.S. supports the government and opposes Kurdish rebels, even though Turkish Kurdish rebels are, for the most part, allied with the Syrian Kurdish rebels that the U.S. supports.
Moreover, a recent report by The New York Times detailed how millions of dollars of weapons sent by the CIA and Saudi Arabia to Syrian rebels were “systematically” stolen and sold to arms traffickers on the black market.
This is the kind of twisted web that the war in Syria has morphed into in the past five years. Dozens of countries are fighting for their piece of the pie, and the harsh repression of the Assad regime and the intense fighting from foreign-backed rebels has turned Syria into an imperial battleground that has destroyed the once middle-income country and plunged it into a level of extreme destruction, chaos and desperation that will take decades to fully recover from.
Destruction in the Kurdish-majority city Cizre after an attack by Turkish forces, March 2, 2016 (Credit: Reuters/Sertac Kayar)
Internal war against Kurds
“Turkey is isolated and enfeebled,” David L. Phillips told Salon. “It’s at war with its neighbors and, by virtue of its unjustified attacks against the Kurds, Turkey is at war with itself.”
He pointed out that Kurdish rebels are on the verge of connecting the Syrian cities Azzaz and Jarablus, which would allow them to form a security buffer along the Turkey-Syria border. “Turkey wants to establish the security buffer but its arch-enemy, the YPG, controls this route,” Phillips explained.
Erdoğan has become increasingly authoritarian and repressive in recent years. His regime has seized control of opposition newspapers, brutally clamped down on reporters and press-freedom advocates and claimed journalists who undermine his government are terrorists.
Prosecutors have opened more than 1,800 cases against people on charges of insulting Erdoğan since he took office in 2014. Young students have been imprisoned for accusing him of corruption, and people have been sued for comparing him to “Lord of the Rings” character Gollum on social media.
Moreover, for months, Turkey has literally been at war with itself. The Erdoğan regime has waged a destructive military campaign against Kurdish rebels within Turkey proper, displacing hundreds of thousands and killing hundreds of civilians in the process.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has said Turkey is killing, torturing and displacing large numbers of Kurdish civilians in “highly disproportionate” attacks.
According to the U.N., the Turkish military has “deliberately” killed innocent Kurdish civilians, shooting them with snipers or with gunfire from tanks. In one instance cited by the U.N., more than 100 people in the Kurdish-majority city of Cizre were burned alive.
Large parts of Kurdish-majority areas in Turkey resemble the blood-stained rubble in Syria, although the crimes of Erdoğan, a close Western ally, have received little media coverage.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned the “black-out” of information, which it said “fuels suspicions about what has been going on.”
German human rights activists and lawmakers filed a civil suit against Erdoğan this week, accusing the Turkish regime of committing war crimes against Kurds.
With the region on fire and extremism on the rise, some say the Turkish government’s policies are coming back to haunt it. Unfortunately, it is the Turkish people who are paying the price.
June 29, 2016
“Turkey is at war with itself”: Experts on the Istanbul bombing and Turkey’s policy toward the Islamic State
A police officer guides people outside Istanbul's Ataturk airport, Tuesday, June 28, 2016. Two explosions have rocked Istanbul's Ataturk airport, killing several people and wounding others, Turkey's justice minister and another official said Tuesday. A Turkish official says two attackers have blown themselves up at the airport after police fired at them. The official said the attackers detonated the explosives at the entrance of the international terminal before entering the x-ray security check. Turkish authorities have banned distribution of images relating to the Ataturk airport attack within Turkey. (AP Photo) TURKEY OUT (Credit: AP)
One day after three suicide attackers killed 41 people and injured more than 230 others in a brutal assault on Istanbul’s Ataturk airport Tuesday evening, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said early signs indicate that the operation was carried out by the Islamic State.
“I hope that the Ataturk Airport attack, especially in Western countries [and] all over the world, will be a milestone for the joint fight against terrorist organizations, a turning point,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Wednesday.
Tuesday’s events in Istanbul are the latest in a series of at least 14 terrorist attacks that have occurred in Turkey over the past year, which have been attributed to ISIS and Kurdish militants.
Salon asked experts on Turkey and the Middle East to explain the conditions that led to the airport bombing and reflect on how the attack might impact regional geopolitics going forward.
Mohamad Bazzi, associate professor of journalism at NYU, former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday, and former adjunct senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations
Basically, one of the reasons that ISIS was able to grow and get to the stage it has gotten to in Syria is because in the early part of the war, elements of the Turkish government were allowing militants and volunteers and jihadists to enter Syria through the Turkish border. These radicals would travel from Europe and other places and they would travel through Turkey and then they would enter Syria
A little over a year ago, Turkey began to clamp down on the border. Part of it was a response to U.S. and European pressure to stem the flow of fighters to ISIS. And once the Turks began to do that[…] ISIS began to turn against Turkey and target Turkey. So, as far as any change, we’ve already seen some change from the Turkish government, which is the series of changes that led us to this point.
Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Because Turkey has increased border cooperation with the U.S. and because Turkey is fighting the Islamic State through Turkey-backed rebels in Syria, I think ISIS really wanted to up the battle. But this might be a miscalculation on their behalf, because it will align Turkey more closely with the U.S. I think the silver lining of the cloud is that this is going to be the end of U.S.-Turkish discord over whether or not ISIL is a primary threat. It was a primary threat for the U.S. before yesterday. It was considered a secondary threat to Turkey, after [Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad.
Now I think Turkey will prioritize ISIS and focus on that, because Erdogan cannot let this group, which has hit the country’s economic capital, get away with it. He’s a guy who runs on a strong man right-wing presidential image, and he won’t let ISIS get away with an attack which would tarnish that image.
Robert Naiman , policy director at Just Foreign Policy
Obviously, the attack is horrible. It’s certainly true that Turkey has played a double game in Syria with respect to ISIS, as the Turkish government basically admitted when it tried to suppress the reporting of Turkish journalists about it.
Turkey is certainly not the only country that has played a double game with respect to ISIS — so have the Gulf Sunni monarchies, so has the U.S., in the sense that the CIA is arming groups, as The New York Times has reported, that the President claims with little dispute that he could target under the 2001 AUMF as “associated forces to Al Qaeda.”
But Turkey is paying a higher price, obviously, for the double game because it is closer to Syria.
Bulent Aliriza, founding director of the Turkey Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
Turkey continues to argue, to a far greater extent than its Western allies, that the reason ISIS is a threat today is because the West did not provide the military means to achieve the common goal of ousting Assad, and eventually the frustration led to increased radicalization among the opposition groups and ultimately to the emergence of ISIS itself.
The Turkish position still remains that ISIS is an outgrowth of the failure to move against Assad, but Turkey’s Western allies have become focused almost entirely of the threat posed by ISIS, while de-emphasizing the need for Assad to leave. In Washington,that’s still stated as the objective, but the means for its realization have not been provided. The Turkish position after this attack, I think, is going to move more in the direction of its Western allies: that ISIS is a threat and maybe more of an immediate threat than the continued survival of Assad.
David L. Phillips , director of the Program on Peace-building and Rights at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights
[Editor’s note: The PKK and YPG are secular leftist Kurdish rebel groups that are fighting for independence from Turkey. Turkey sometimes blames attacks on Kurdish rebels that were actually carried out by non-Kurdish Islamist groups.]
It’s terrible that so many innocent civilians were killed.
ISIS kills civilians. The PKK targets security services with whom it is at war since Turkey attacked in July 2015.
ISIS resents Turkey for allowing the US to use Incirlik [air force base] for operations. Turkey was the midwife that created ISIS. Now ISIS has turned on its benefactor.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been accused of tacitly supporting ISIS in its fight against the Kurds. It’s not tacitly. Erdoğan and ISIS are both fighting the YPG and they cooperate.
The YPG is about to connect Azzaz and Jarablus, which would form a security buffer along the Turkey-Syria border. Turkey wants to establish the security buffer but its arch-enemy, the YPG, controls this route.
Turkey is isolated and enfeebled. It’s at war with its neighbors and, by virtue of its unjustified attacks against the Kurds, Turkey is at war with itself.
Brexit vs. Braveheart: Will the Celtic nations seek revenge on England for its historic blunder?
Edinburgh Castle (Credit: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters)
In the wake of Britain’s startling vote last week to leave the European Union — which even took most “Leave” supporters by surprise — the entire nation finds itself in an uproar. That very much includes the professional historians who will presumably be entrusted, somewhere down the line, with explaining what just happened. “Everyone I’ve spoken to is in a state of shock,” says Tom Bartlett, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and a leading authority on British-Irish relations. “No one has a clue where to go now.” Fearghal McGarry, a historian at Queen’s University in Belfast, adds, “Anyone who explains to you right now how Brexit is going to move forward is likely to look foolish in a year or two.”
Many people in Britain are already calling for a repeat referendum, apparently on the principle that the whole country got drunk last Thursday and now repents of its actions. (Anyone who has spent significant time in Britain would admit this seems plausible.) Others have observed that the British Parliament has no legal obligation to do what the public has apparently demanded. Even in a society still bound by the remnants of a centuries-old class system, I don’t think “yes, you silly people, we had a referendum but we didn’t really mean it” will play particularly well.
McGarry, who has written several major books on Irish history, observes that one possibility already floated by the victorious Leave campaign is negotiating a new deal with Europe that “might not look terribly different from the relationship that exists now.” If the deal that emerges “retains British access to the single market and freedom of labor across national borders,” he adds, that leads to an obvious question: “What was it all for?”
Both of Britain’s major political parties find themselves in a state of total meltdown: Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron bet his political future on a “Remain” vote, which I guess proves that an upper-crust upbringing and an expensive education doesn’t make you smart. On the other hand, Cameron sounded positively giddy about his impending resignation during the delightful British ritual of Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, quoting Smiths lyrics and challenging opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn to meet him “at the cemetery gates.” Whoever replaces Cameron as Tory leader will also become prime minister, at least for now, and faces the unpalatable choice between enacting a policy the party’s City of London financial backers abhor or ignoring the expressed will of the electorate.
Meanwhile Corbyn, the left-wing insurgent who has been at the Labor Party helm barely nine months, is embroiled in his own post-Brexit crisis. He was a tepid supporter of the “Remain” campaign at best, and is widely suspected of having followed his old-school socialist heart to “Leave” in the privacy of the voting booth. After losing a confidence vote among his own party’s members of Parliament this week, Corbyn now faces an intra-party insurrection and another leadership election, in which the mainstream Labor center-left hopes to regain power. That’s not going to end well no matter what happens: Either the party’s London power structure or its rank-and-file membership will come out of this struggle bitterly unhappy. (Which is, yeah, not entirely unlike the Democratic Party.)
All that London political soap opera is juicy. But I reached out to scholars like McGarry and Bartlett because Britain and England are not the same thing. One of the most intriguing post-Brexit subplots involves the other nations (or bits of nations, in the case of Northern Ireland) on what used to be called the “Celtic fringe” of the British Isles. Scotland, of course, voted overwhelmingly to remain in the E.U., although not quite as overwhelmingly as the “Remain” campaign had hoped. Scottish Nationalist leader Nicola Sturgeon has already suggested a new referendum on full independence for Scotland, less than two years after the last one was defeated. A leading JP Morgan analyst wrote to his financial clients this week that the firm now assumes a “base case” in which Scotland separates from the United Kingdom, sets up its own currency and rejoins the E.U., all before the year 2020.
But each of the three Celtic nations of Britain is a special case that underscores the fragility of that strange and antique political entity. If a wave of Celtic payback is on the way, to punish the smug “Little England” bigotry and nostalgia that (in some cases) drove the “Leave” campaign, it will take different forms in different places. Voting patterns across the U.K. defied any rational analysis, says McGarry. “Some of those who voted to leave will probably be most disadvantaged by the consequences, by what’s likely to happen,” he adds. “There’s a tendency to assume that people will vote in their rational interests, but factors like culture and identity tend to cut against that.” (Do I need to bring up the parallels to Trump and the contemporary Republican Party? I didn’t think so.)
Northern Ireland, where McGarry lives and works, is a divided province of a divided country that has seen significant economic growth since the end of the sectarian civil war known as the “Troubles” in the mid-‘90s. It voted to remain in Europe, which may reawaken the nationalist dream of a united Ireland, almost a century after its political partition. McGarry says he’s surprised the result wasn’t even more one-sided. “A significant section of the Northern Ireland population voted to leave, about 45 percent,” he says. “It strikes me that was largely a Unionist vote [meaning Irish Protestants who want to remain in the U.K.], and that Unionists are putting their dislike of the E.U. ahead of a potential threat to the stability of the Union. I find that very surprising.” Although it’s unlikely that the bloodshed of the 1970s and ‘80s will return, the sectarian bitterness that fueled the Irish conflict lingers on under the surface, and this seems to be the decade when unlikely things happen with regularity.
Then there is the peculiar case of Wales, a beautiful country with a long tradition of working-class activism and a rich cultural and linguistic heritage, which once again finds itself Britain’s odd man out. If you look at the numbers, it appears that the Welsh voted to leave in virtually the same proportions as the rest of Britain did. But behind the raw vote totals lies a complicated tale of a small, struggling nation undergoing an identity crisis, well explained in this essay by Ellie Mae O’Hagan for the Independent. In brief, rural regions of the north and west, the home of Welsh nationalism and the Welsh language, voted to remain in Europe, while depressed industrial regions of South Wales, which are largely English-speaking and dominated by English culture, voted to leave.
“Across England and Wales,” says McGarry, “you can see a strong pattern of economically depressed areas with relatively little immigration voting to leave.” Wales has long been a stronghold of the Labor Party, which was clearly unable to get its supporters to vote Remain in large enough numbers. So while the voting patterns appear irrational, you can’t assume that racism and xenophobia were the only important factors. “A lot of people were voting for things that are not directly connected to Europe,” McGarry continues. “They’re voting out of their sense of political disconnection, they’re voting because they feel that they’ve lost out through globalization. I don’t think the political elite anticipated that all these things would converge around this referendum.”
People on the left, McGarry says, should resist the temptation to express “contempt toward these people who are responding to the economic predicament of being left behind, feeling not represented, feeling that they don’t have much of a future. When you look at the spatial map of how people voted, there’s nothing irrational about people in areas that have been left behind for decades now rejecting the current economic and political status quo.”
In the spirit of Celtic solidarity and to placate the ghost of my dad — who spoke both Irish and Welsh, and could probably fake Scots Gaelic and a little Breton as well — I would like to insist that we can’t overlook the true abandoned stepchildren of the Celtic world, the Cornish and the Manx. Except that there isn’t much to say about them. Cornwall, on the extreme southwestern toe of England, voted 56 percent “Leave,” significantly higher than the nation as a whole, even though it’s one of the U.K.’s poorest regions and receives about $82 million a year in direct E.U. subsidies for infrastructure, education and economic development. Which sums up the shortsightedness and stupidity of the whole Brexit phenomenon in one sentence. The Isle of Man is something called a “Crown dependency” and was never in the E.U. in the first place, so the Manx didn’t get to vote. I can only hope my aunts and cousins in Dublin can still go there to play the slots and buy cheap cigarettes.
Scotland has gotten plenty of attention both before and after the Brexit vote, including the bizarre spectacle of Donald Trump’s visit to his golf resort at Turnberry, which was attention most Scots could have done without. Voters in England were repeatedly told that Scotland might bolt the U.K. if Brexit actually happened, and apparently decided that if the whisky was still for sale and if they could pop across the border for a golfing holiday once in a while, they simply didn’t care.
Let me set aside the traditional rivalry between the Irish and the Scots to observe that Scotland has accomplished something remarkable, which may ultimately serve as an example for Britain, Europe and the world. Perhaps because of the long-running debate over independence — which is about to enter a new chapter — Scotland has built an identity as a 21st-century nation with traditional roots and a traditional culture, that is also multicultural, cosmopolitan and connected to the outside world. Lots of people in London and Manchester and Liverpool thought their nation was like that too, of course, but have just received a telegram informing them otherwise.
That’s a bit simplistic, no doubt. I don’t need Scottish readers to remind me that some areas of Glasgow are truly dire or that there’s too much Trump-style resort development or that not all immigrants have been welcomed with open arms. But with the rest of Britain (and, let’s face it, a whole bunch of America) trying to crawl into an imaginary past like frightened children, the nation of bagpipes and kilts and haggis looks to the future like grownups.
RIP, big 4th of July movie: “Independence Day” then and now and monoculture’s slow demise
"Independence Day," 1996 (Credit: 20th Century Fox)
If George of the Jungle had to worry about running into a tree, there’s an even more treacherous obstacle in Tarzan’s path: Watch out for that box office.
“The Legend of Tarzan” is set for a collision course this weekend when the David Yates-directed apeman reboot swings into 3,450 locations. Currently, BoxOffice.com is projecting that the film, which stars Alexander Skarsgård (“True Blood”) as Tarzan and Margot Robbie (“Suicide Squad”) as Jane, will open to just $23 million—en route to finishing with $50 million in the bank by the end of its run. For a movie with an $180 million tab, those numbers are abysmal, yet another of 2016’s pricey misfires.
Its fortunes will not be aided by reviews, which have ranged from bad to savage. The Wrap’s Alonso Duralde compared it to notorious bombs like “The Lone Ranger” and “John Carter.” David Ehrlich of IndieWire was even less kind: “There’s a whiff of desperation about pulling a literary figure like Tarzan down from the tree line and forcing him to live at our level—it’s why you’ve been laughing at the marketing of this film for months. And now the finished product is finally here, and it earns the worst of your preconceptions, reintroducing Edgar Rice Burroughs’ immortal character as just another overpriced commodity.”
If you’re asking yourself why we needed another Tarzan movie in 2016 (200 films with his name in the title have already graced screens large and small), there’s another question at hand: Whatever happened to the Fourth of July movie?
In the 1990s and early 2000s, our nation’s birthday became a lynchpin of the studio release calendar, arguably the centerpiece of summer movie season. The face of the moviegoing holiday was Will Smith, the former “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” star who made his name on the silver screen as a staple of mid-summer tentpoles.
After making his name as a major draw in Michael Bay’s “Bad Boys,” Smith launched the movie that would announce his status as “Mr. July”: the aptly-named “Independence Day.” Co-starring Bill Pullman (“Spaceballs”) and Jeff Goldblum (“Jurassic Park”), the Roland Emmerich-helmed disaster film all but printed its own money in 1996. At the time, Its $817 million worldwide haul was the biggest ever for a studio film (the unstoppable behemoth that was “Titanic” would be released the following year).
While “Independence Day” is undoubtedly cheesy, there’s a reason that the film has proven so iconic in the two decades since its release. Its cheerfully naïve optimism about the human condition is difficult to resist—from a presidential address delivered in accidental couplets (“We will not go quietly into the night!/We will not vanish without a fight!”) to a drunken Randy Quaid flying into the mothership to save humanity from destruction. “Independence Day” is brainless jingoism, but it’s damn fun, and the sight of DJ Jazzy Jeff’s bandmate beating up an alien (“Welcome to Earth!”) never gets old.
Following “Independence Day,” Smith put out a miracle string of films that did huge numbers on the July 4th holiday weekend. The next year boasted the release of “Men in Black” ($589 million worldwide), and in the next decade, Smith would have comparable success with “Men in Black II” ($441 million) and Hancock ($624 million). “Wild Wild West” ($222 million) would have been another feather in his cap if not for its hefty price tag and very poor critical reception; it won the Razzie for Worst Picture in 1999.
Smith’s success with the July 4th release date paved the way for a number of other blockbusters to launch on the day of barbecues, hot dogs, and family picnics. Bay released all four “Transformers” movies on Independence Day, while “Spider-Man 2,” “The Perfect Storm,” “Armageddon,” “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse,” “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,” and “War of the Worlds” all bowed over the holiday weekend.
The quality of these entries varies widely, but they had one thing in common: They put butts in seats.
Hollywood has struggled to match that success since. The last unqualified Fourth of July smash was “Despicable Me 2” back in 2013, while the holiday has been beset by a series of disappointments in recent years. “Earth to Echo,” Disney’s found-footage “E.T.” ripoff, finished with just $45 million in 2014, while its competition, “Tammy,” marked Melissa McCarthy’s first-ever critical and commercial clunker. Last year, a pair of sequels both underperformed: “Terminator: Genisys” and “Magic Mike XXL.”
“Tarzan,” which cost $180 million, looks to continue that trend. Meanwhile, none of this weekend’s Fourth of July entries—not even Steven Spielberg’s family-friendly Roald Dahl adaptation, “The BFG”—is slated to end its run with more than $100 million domestically. Even “Independence Day 2” couldn’t break the curse: The Liam Hemsworth-fronted sequel nobody wanted is likewise flailing in theaters.
To a certain extent, this is a matter of happenstance. Studios can’t control which movies make money and which don’t (or Taylor Kitsch would be a much bigger star than he is), and many of the movies that flopped were—at one time—expected to do well, or at least better than they did. Disney sunk $225 million into “The Lone Ranger,” and releasing it on Independence Day was a sign that the Mouse House hoped to milk it for every dollar the notorious bomb was worth. When it comes to making big-budget tentpoles, you market the hell out it and hope for the best.
But the fact that the July 4th holiday has been associated with so many duds in recent years may have convinced studios to push their surefire hits to other dates. In 2016, the biggest movies of the year so far all opened well before schools let out: “Captain America: Civil War” opened in early May, while “The Jungle Book” debuted in April. “Zootopia” was a March release.
This has to do with the strange voodoo of deciding when to release a movie—which is based less on exact science than outright superstition. For instance, when “The Help” made bank at the beginning of August, a number of other movies with black casts were all put out the very same weekend in the following years: “Get on Up,” “The Butler,” “Sparkle,” and “Straight Outta Compton.” This year’s contribution to the trend is “Morris From America.” The A24 release is about a 13-year-old boy who moves to Germany with his father, played by Craig Robinson of “The Office.” Is there a logic to that strategy? Not really. Black audiences want to see good movies whenever they open, not solely on one weekend a year.
But that’s how it works in Hollywood: When something does well, you replicate its success until it’s no longer profitable. That leads to a surfeit of industry dogma that’s based on nothing more than that’s the way things are done. For example, until recently, February was reserved for rom-coms and studio trainwrecks (see: “Jupiter Ascending”). The idea was that people don’t see movies in the winter a) because of the weather and b) they’re cutting back on expenses after the Christmas season. Then “Deadpool” and “The LEGO Movie” debunked that myth.
But if the industry is letting seasonal tommyrot guide its decision making, that’s a shame. During the Will Smith era, the Fourth of July was the third-biggest moviegoing day of the year, one of the few times that Americans were all expected to go to the movies together. When I saw “Independence Day” in the theaters 20 years ago, the movie was standing room only. People squatted in the aisles and sat on each other’s laps, breaking nearly every fire code imaginable to see humans fight off space evil.
That mass participation is also part of the film’s appeal. Lindsay Robertson, the former digital editorial director for the Tribeca Film Festival, argued in a critical round-up of 4th of July films that “Independence Day” is “less like a movie and more like a sports event.”
“I saw Independence Day five times in the theater,” Robertson said. “The reason I kept going back was the thrill of being part of an audience all experiencing the same emotions at the same time—and cheering, yelling, clapping, jumping up, whooping at the end together. … It’s easy to forget that one reason we go to the movies is to see them with other people.”
The universal experience of film (part of what’s often referred to as “monoculture”) is increasingly rare in a fragmented entertainment landscape where we have more options than ever. If yet another movie about a jungle boy being raised by apes doesn’t sound appetizing, audiences can stay home and watch Netflix, HBOGo, or Hulu. Movie theater attendance has been steadily declining since 2002, and if current ticket sales hold, 2016 will be one of the worst years since 1995, the year before “Independence Day” was released.
Don’t let the nostalgia fool you: “Independence Day” is no masterpiece. But facing down yet another year without an heir to its summer movie throne, it’s looking pretty good.
When “I’m sorry for your loss” doesn’t cut it: “Orange Is the New Black” explores the limits of easy apologies
Alan Aisenberg and Taylor Schilling, "Orange Is the New Black" (Credit: Jojo Whilden/Netflix)
Warning: Spoilers ahead for the season 4 of “Orange Is the New Black,” including the final episodes.
In “Toast Can’t Never Be Bread Again” the final episode of this season of “Orange Is the New Black,” Baxter Bayley, the baby-faced correctional officer who accidentally kills Poussey during a peaceful protest, runs into Piper, overwhelmed with the horror of what he has done. Out of uniform, his hoodie up and his eyes red and wet, he stammers like a little boy, “I have to get to them. I have to tell them I am sorry. I am so sorry.”
Piper is compassionate, but resolute. “You cannot go into C dorm,” she tells him. “They’re grieving. They are not ready to hear you.”
Season 4 of “OITNB” calls for responsibility over contrition, especially in the face of systemic injustice. “I’m sorry for your loss,” Caputo gently tells a distraught Taystee, who is understandably outraged that Poussey’s father hasn’t even been contacted about her death. “I’m so sick of people saying that, man, my loss,” Taystee replies. “Like it was my hundred-year old granny who kicked it, or like it was some tragic accident instead of cold-blooded murder.”
This season, Litchfield is full of characters trying to make amends, from Mendoza attempting to do right by Sophia, to Donuts directly apologizing to Pennsatucky for raping her. But while Judy King, the Southern celebrity chef enjoying a relatively posh stay at Litchfield, firmly advises C.O. Luschek that apologies work as long as you really mean them, it’s clear that repentance is simply self-indulgent if not backed up by direct and tangible actions.
Caputo may be depicted as a well-intentioned man, for example, a person who genuinely wants his prison to be a place of rehabilitation, but he is also complicit in a system that outright abuses its inmates, from tolerating overcrowding and sadistic guards to accepting that prisoners are no longer afforded necessities like maxi pads. He even, sadly, allows his educational program to be transformed into straight unpaid labor, because he is confused and unable to stand up to the corporate board (and knocking boots with the colleague who helped pitch the initiative).
Likewise, well-intentioned guards may treat prisoners with dignity, but they also consistently turn a blind eye to abuse. Caputo may be proud when Bayley comes to him in order to report how a sadistic new guard forced inmates to fight one another, but his advice to Bayley to leave the prison compounds the sense that there is nothing he or anyone else can do to improve the status quo.
Over the past few years our society has already grown incredulous about apologies, from the ubiquity of #sorrynotsorry to the feminist rejection of how women are socialized to apologize constantly. This movement away from the easy sorry is more than about digging in your heels. It’s about who gets to say they are sorry, and who has to deal with the actual repercussions of a mistake. In particular, Season 4 highlights how deep seated and systemic racial injustice can’t be “sorry’d” away, even when people try to. Judy King is convinced that her racist puppet show from the ’80s is simply not reflective of who she is as a person, and tries to erase this history with some staged interracial lesbian photos she leaks to the press, but is quick to abandon her black friends when any kind of strife emerges, happily locking herself away in her private jail cell complete with a seltzer machine.
The flagrant privileges granted to white inmates, especially pretty, blonde, blue-eyed white inmates like Piper, who doesn’t really get the damage she is causing until she has a swastika branded on her arm, is especially painful to watch. Yoga Jones might be embarrassed and troubled by the fact that she is the recipient of newfound advantages after being selected to be Judy’s roommate, but despite her awareness that the treatment she is receiving is unfair, she ends up buying into it too, seltzer machine and all. Likewise, Piper might try to make amends by standing in solidarity with the other prisoners, but her body has also never been in the same explicit danger as the women of color in Litchfield. From the way that Sergeant Healy tried to make Piper’s stay at Litchfield comfortable when she first arrived, to the way that Piscatella trusts her initial declaration that the C.O.s should be aware of a Latina gang, Piper’s wealthy white WASP background has given her a tangible advantage over other prisoners.
When Bayley tries to apologize to Poussey’s friends, he tells Piper, “I’m a good person—you know that.”
He may be, and it also doesn’t matter. As part of a system, which is abusing its power and perpetuating injustice, Bailey’s tears are both genuine and frustrating. His backstory provides similar examples of the ways in which his character is shown to have good intentions, but is also easily swayed by peer pressure. He eggs the house of the manager who fired him for giving out too many free ice cream cones to pretty girls, and throws eggs at Litchfield inmates too, when being goaded on by his friends.
It’s telling that Bailey was let off with a slap on the wrist for a crime similar to the one that Poussey was actually convicted for—a low-level drug arrest. Both Bailey and Poussey are presented in the show as kind-hearted people who are operating in a world with immense double standards when it comes to race, class and gender. In this season’s bleak finale, we don’t yet have the resolution of what happens in the minutes after Daya points a gun at an abusive C.O. who has been terrorizing inmates, especially the women of color. We end instead with a shot of Poussey’s smiling, exuberant face looking out onto the bright lights of New York City, knowing that neither apology nor vengeance will ever bring her back.
Holocaust escape tunnel discovery a blow against deniers: “It was dug out by spoons. By people who were shackled around the ankles”
Dr. Richard Freund and Dr. Harry Jol at the lip of the WWII-era pit at Ponar. (Credit: Ezra Wolfinger/NOVA)
The awful story of the Nazi treatment of European Jews may be most awful in Lithuania, then a part of the Soviet Union in which 95 percent of the Jewish population was killed. But a recent discovery near the nation’s capital, Vilnius, offers a glimmer of something a bit brighter: a tunnel through which a handful of Jews, awaiting execution underground, were able to escape.
The tunnel’s exact location was only confirmed this month, as archeologists investigated near the place where 100,000 people, 70,000 of them Jewish, were killed by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators.
The full story will be told through a NOVA documentary next year on PBS. For now, we spoke to Paula Apsell, a NOVA senior executive producer, at her office at Boston’s WGBH. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
So before this month, what did we know or suspect about this Lithuanian tunnel? Did we have hard evidence? Just rumors?
Eleven people actually escaped, and survived the war. We’re trying to hunt down their families, but we haven’t done it yet. But they told the story. Additionally, there was a team in 2004 that located the mouth of the tunnel, which they then for some reason left unmarked.
But as time passed, according to the archeologist Richard Freund, people were starting to say, “Well, maybe it never happened, maybe it was an exaggeration, maybe they tried to escape, and could never make it.” And you know what happens to memory, and with all the Holocaust denial… It fits into that category very well.
So there was a kind of uncertainty around it. It was a story, with an incomplete finding. The fact that this was found by ERT — electrical resistivity tomography — and then confirmed by another technique, GPR — ground penetrating radar…
Before we get into the technical issues, tell us a little about the tunnel — how it was made, what it looks like, how long it took to dig.
Well, it was dug out by spoons. By people who were shackled around the ankles. Which eventually, in order to escape through the forest, they filed off their shackles. I believe it was 100 feet, somewhere between five and nine feet below the surface. One hundred feet doesn’t sound that long, but when you remember that it had to be dug out by hand, and with spoons, which were the only instruments they had, it’s pretty amazing. I believe it took them 76 days to do it.
And you’ve seen the tunnel and the mouth of it yourself. What’s the setting like?
It’s a woods. If you didn’t know there were 100,000 bodies burned there, and buried there, you’d think it was a beautiful and peaceful park. Then you see these circles enclosed by walls. You’d think it was a great setting for family picnics. It’s only when you begin to realize it’s a graveyard…
Before the war, when the Russians controlled Lithuania, they thought this would be a good location for oil and gas exploration, so they dug these pits, and got them all ready to put oil and gas in. But that never happened. And when the Germans decided that they were going to kill all the Jews from Vilnius, plus 30,000 other people — homosexuals and dissidents and undesirables — they thought, “Oh, this is really convenient, what a place, we can store the bodies here.”
This was just the beginning of the Final Solution – they had concentration camps, but they didn’t have the kind of death-camp structure with gassing… The Germans ran this camp, but they had to go out and find Lithuanians to do the killing. They found 150 Lithuanians who were in a riflery alliance, and got them to do the killing, but they could only do 10 killings at one time. They weren’t set up to do the factory-style murder that they later did at Auschwitz and other concentration camps. It was a slow, torturous process. [Jews and others] would come in and be in these processing trenches – which you can see there – and then 10 by 10 by 10, they’d go to get shot. It took a long time to kill 100,000 people.
It’s kind of a horrible story wrapped around a triumphant story, or vice versa.
That’s right.
NOVA is a science series, and archeology is a science… But archeology is now being revolutionized with help of this technology. What it means to me, as a science journalist, is that while memories fade, we have hard evidence in the form [technology], data about exactly where the tunnel is. And that’s something you can never take away.
It presents irrefutable proof at a time where there is so much Holocaust denial, and survivors are dying out. That’s really important…. In 10 years when all the survivors are gone… Man’s inhumanity to man is always hard to fathom.
When I was there, walking around the ghetto in Vilna – that’s Yiddish for Vilnius… Jews made up 35 percent of the population of Vilna. This was a highly prosperous, highly cultured, vibrant society – just like we are. And I’m sure they didn’t have any idea this was coming. In a way it shakes your confidence about the future. It really haunted me when I walked around there.
How will NOVA tell the tale? And what kind of footage do you have?
We haven’t edited yet. But we deal with two sites. One site is the Great Synagogue, which is being excavated by the archeologists. They’ve found what they think are ritual baths… It was a community center.
Then they worked at Ponar, which were the pits, they found a twelfth pit where 7,000 to 10,000 people were buried and burned there, and you can see the ash.
The film will be on the archeological excavation, and on the history. One thing we will try to do is to recreate – take these haunted, empty streets and show how vibrant they were. They called it the Jerusalem of Europe. This wasn’t a dying community.
We’ll also be profiling the archeologists, Richard Freund and Jon Seligman, both of them had relatives in Lithuania. Jon Seligman lost an untold number of people. So this is a really personal mission for them. They are really invested in it, really emotional about it.
Piece by piece, through archeology, this place is being restored. That to me is really touching.
“I’m a little afraid”: Jessica Williams on exiting Trevor Noah’s “Daily Show”
Jessica Williams (Credit: Comedy Central)
Wunderkind “Daily Show” correspondent Jessica Williams is leaving the show after four years to begin working on her own show, according to Entertainment Weekly.
Williams, 26, was not only the youngest ever correspondent on the show, but also the first black woman to ever book the gig in 2012.
In addition to co-hosting (with Phoebe Robinson) her podcast, “2 Dope Queens,” Williams is poised to write, produce, and star in a half-hour pilot for Comedy Central “about somebody in their 20s who has all these social ideas, but still does not have it together.”
“I know that often for me, as a black woman of color, I feel like I’m supposed to represent these ideals and values that I was taught as a young lady,” she explained. “Like I’m supposed to carry myself in a special type of way, but oftentimes I’m, like… I’m still in my 20s, and still kind of a mess.”
Williams said she has trepidations about leaving punditry right before two (or at least one) of the most comedically lucrative candidates to ever run enter the general election, but ultimately thinks her departure is healthy.
“I’m a little afraid, a little terrified for what is about to happen. And I think that maybe it’s best for me to step aside for a minute and not get so fired up about it. I think it’ll actually be kind of good for me,” she said. “But we’re in good hands as long as we have Sam and Oliver and Trevor. I think they got it covered.”
Read her exclusive interview with Entertainment Weekly here.
The Internet is just embarrassing today: #HeterosexualPrideDay twists solidarity of LGBT+ Pride
(Credit: Lise Gagne via iStock)
Yeah, it’s some pretty ridiculous trolling. And no, as we march toward the finish line of one of the most heartbreaking Pride months ever, no one with half a brain is seriously trying to take anything away from the LGBT community’s moment. But also, because there really are some people out there who don’t have that half a brain, let’s just say it out loud: Straight people don’t need to announce their pride in their orientation. We’re here! We’re straight! So what?
In a bit of self-replicating and unofficial absurdity, the hashtag #HeterosexualPrideDay began trending on Wednesday, promptly leading to an outpouring of humor and sarcasm — with a smattering of embarrassingly serious declarations of straightness. The Huffington Post’s Hilary Hanson, calling the hashtag “just more proof the apocalypse is near,” traced its origins back to user JackNForTweets, who earlier this month replied to the question “Why do ‘straight’ men and women go to gay pride parades?” with the quip, “For moral support. Same reason i’m encouraging gays to join the celebration June 29. #HeterosexualPrideDay.”
Of course it’s stupid. It’s stupid because when pretty much all of cultural history, forever, has catered to the expectation of straightness, straightness is not something that requires its own parade. Most humans who’ve never had the threat of being ostracized by their families and sent away to endure harrowing experiments to try to change their sexual orientation, or who’ve never questioned that they’d be able to marry the person they love or who’ve always been able to pee in the bathroom consistent with their identity, or never had to fear becoming the victim of hate crimes or conversely, never been pleasantly surprised when their stories are represented anywhere, ever, don’t really feel a strong need to burst in on another community’s time for celebration and solidarity.
Yet as Joe Dziemianowicz points out in the Daily News, even as a goof, #HeterosexualPrideDay is still “making a mockery of a community that has faced real violence and oppression.” The Advocate also pointed out, this is “far from the first time hateful folks have tried to smear a day reserved for LGBT solidarity.” And in a laughable yet totally tragic inevitability, you will find out there plenty of folks on Twitter just unironically embracing their man-lady love and the babies that kind of union provides. It’s as awesome as when Piers Morgan says he loves being white (an actual thing Piers Morgan has done), or when a dude comes in to NOT ALL MEN all over a conversation about feminism! Worse, there’s been plenty of straight up bigotry spewed under the umbrella of a silly hashtag. If you want to see what ugliness looks like, just scroll a little around Twitter — oh and not just on Hetero Pride Day! Because in case you hadn’t noticed, homophobia, unlike heterosexual pride, is a real thing. And if God help you, you really need to believe in hetero pride, I direct you to the words of sportswriter Julie DiCaro, who said it all Wednesday when she noted, “When you’re used to privilege, equality can feel a lot like oppression.”
Hillary Clinton trounces Donald Trump in poll of seven swing states
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton greets workers at Galvanize, a work space for technology companies, in Denver, Tuesday, June 28, 2016. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) (Credit: AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton swept a recent Ballotpedia poll of seven swing states (Florida, Iowa, Michigan, N. Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia), in some cases topping GOP nominee Donald Trump by double-digits.
Clinton trounced Trump in Michigan with a 17-point split. In Iowa, the race was closest, with the former-Secretary of State inching out a 4-point lead. On average, Trump trails Clinton in those seven states by 11 points.
Pollsters also matched Clinton head-to-head with Ohio Governor John Kasich and House Speaker Paul Ryan, who outperformed her by an average 4 and 1 point(s), respectively. (The margin of error for the polling is +/-4%.)
Results of a Washington Post/ABC News poll released Tuesday show Clinton (51%) leading Trump (39%) even more handily in a general election than in the aforementioned swing states.
Find the full swing state results and data here.
Rights groups: Suspend Saudi Arabia from U.N. Human Rights Council over war crimes
A Yemeni man flees a gas station after it was hit by a Saudi-led coalition airstrike in Houdieda, Yemen on February 5, 2016 (Credit: Reuters/Abduljabbar Zeyad)
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called on the United Nations General Assembly to immediately suspend Saudi Arabia from the Human Rights Council over its “gross and systematic violations of human rights abroad and at home.”
The leading human rights organizations also accused Saudi Arabia of using its position on the U.N. Human Rights Council “to effectively obstruct justice for possible war crimes.”
Representatives from Amnesty and Human Rights Watch spoke at a joint press conference at the U.N. on Wednesday.
“The credibility of the U.N. Human Rights Council is at stake,” warned Richard Bennett, head of Amnesty’s U.N. Office. “Since joining the council, Saudi Arabia’s dire human rights record at home has continued to deteriorate and the coalition it leads has unlawfully killed and injured thousands of civilians in the conflict in Yemen.”
“To allow it to remain an active member of the council, where it has used this position to shield itself from accountability for possible war crimes, smacks of deep hypocrisy. It would bring the world’s top human rights body into disrepute,” he added.
Since March 26, 2015, Saudi Arabia has led a U.S.-backed coalition that has rained bombs down upon Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch say the coalition has violated international humanitarian law in its attacks, indiscriminately and disproportionately killing and injuring civilians.
The rights groups also stressed that the Western-backed, Saudi-led coalition has repeatedly used internationally banned cluster munitions in civilian areas. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have documented 19 different attacks using at least six different types of cluster bombs, which were made in the U.S., U.K. and Brazil.
They condemned the U.S. and U.K., close allies of Saudi Arabia, for refusing to halt arms transfers to the coalition despite the thorough evidence of war crimes. Both the U.S. and the U.K. are providing support and intelligence to the coalition, and American and British military officials are physically in the command room for Saudi air strikes, where they have access to a list of targets.
In Yemen, hospitals, schools, weddings, residential neighborhoods, markets, refugee camps and even an Oxfam humanitarian aid warehouse have been bombed by the U.S.-back Saudi-led coalition.
Amnesty and Human Rights Watch also noted that, despite “the strong evidence of the commission of war crimes by the Saudi Arabian-led coalition in Yemen,” the UNHRC has not investigated, because the Saudi regime exploited its membership to undermine a resolution that would have created an international inquiry.
Instead, Saudi Arabia and its allies, led by the U.S., created a national commission of inquiry in Yemen, which is being carried out by the Saudi-backed government of Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, who fled to Saudi Arabia when the war began.
Richard Bennett, Amnesty’s U.N. officer, called this national inquiry “toothless” and emphasized that, after nine months, it “has failed to credibly investigate allegations of war crimes and other serious violations.”
The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates that at least 3,539 civilians have been killed and 6,268 more civilians have been wounded in Yemen since the Saudi-led coalition initiated its bombing campaign in March 2015.
A report by UNICEF found that an average of six Yemeni children have been killed or injured every day in the war.
According to U.N. figures, the coalition is responsible for twice as many civilian casualties as other forces in Yemen combined. For months, the U.N. has said the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition is responsible for two-thirds of civilian casualties.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said “we are possibly looking at the commission of international crimes by members of the coalition.”
In addition to, with the help of the U.S., blocking an international investigation into its war crimes, Saudi Arabia also financially blackmailed the U.N. in early June to remove it from the U.N.’s list of states and armed groups that have violated the human rights of children.
The oil-rich regime threatened to withdraw all of its financial support for humanitarian projects, holding hostage aid programs for Palestinians in particular. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gave in, and took the Saudi monarchy off the U.N.’s list of child-killers.
Amnesty and Human Rights Watch also highlighted the extreme human rights violations that take place within Saudi Arabia.
Domestically, the Saudi regime “has carried out hundreds of executions, put children on death row after grossly unfair trials and ruthlessly repressed opposition and human rights activists,” Bennett said.
“Saudi Arabia’s harsh crackdown on all forms of dissent at home has continued unabated throughout its current membership” in U.N. Human Rights Council, he added.
Since it was elected to the UNHRC, the Saudi regime has executed more than 350 people, mostly by beheadings. 2015 saw its highest record of killings since 1995.
Moreover, the Saudi regime regularly uses “grossly unfair trials” at so-called counter-terror courts to administer long prison sentences to human rights activists, the rights groups said. Human rights defenders who have worked with the U.N. Human Rights Council have been imprisoned by Saudi Arabia.
In fact, the Saudi Ministry of Interior stated clearly in 2014 provisions that contacting “any groups… or individuals hostile to” Saudi Arabia is a “terrorist crime.”
“Saudi Arabia also continues to discriminate against women in law and practice, including through the imposition of the male guardianship system, which treats all adult women as legal minors,” the rights groups added. And “discrimination against the Shi’a minority remains systematic and entrenched.”
They called on Saudi Arabia to release its prisoners of conscience immediately and unconditionally, and to cease using the death penalty.
Despite these thoroughly documented human rights violations, the U.S. remains a very close ally of the oil-rich Saudi regime. In September, when Saudi Arabia was chosen to head a U.N. Human Rights Council panel, to international outrage, the U.S. State Department “welcomed” the news, affectionately adding, “We’re close allies.”
U.N. General Assembly Resolution 60/251, the document that created the Human Rights Council, allows the General Assembly to suspend UNHRC members that commit “gross and systematic violations of human rights” with a two-thirds majority vote.
“What’s particularly shocking is the deafening silence of the international community which has time and again ceded to pressure from Saudi Arabia and put business, arms and trade deals before human rights despite the Kingdom’s record of committing gross and systematic violations with complete impunity,” said Bennett, head of Amnesty’s U.N. office.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch called on U.N. member states to vote to suspend Saudi Arabia from the UNHRC, and to create an independent, impartial international inquiry into violations of international humanitarian law in Yemen.
