Arizona inmate could face death penalty
The man accused of murdering an Oklahoma couple after escaping from Arizona‘s Kingman state prison in 2010 could face the death penalty.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for New Mexico filed notice Thursday in U.S. District Court in Albuquerque that it will seek the death penalty on 14 separate counts against John McCluskey. He is accused of carjacking Gary and Linda Haas on Aug.2, 2010, from a New Mexico rest stop on Interstate 40, then shooting them to death and burning their bodies inside their camper.
McCluskey was one of three inmates who took advantage of lax security and faulty alarms to escape on July 30, 2010, from the Kingman prison, run by Management and Training Corp. of Centerville, Utah. The men cut their way out using tools McCluskey’s cousin and fiancee, Casslyn Welch, had tossed over the fence.
Escapee Daniel Renwick took off on his own and was recaptured in Colorado a day later, after a shootout with police. He is serving a 60-year term after pleading guilty to two attempted murder charges last year.
McCluskey, fellow escapee Tracy Province and Welch traveled together, coming across the Haases two days later. Welch and Province pleaded guilty Jan. 20 to a variety of charges in connection with the Haas killings. Province agreed to serve five consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. Welch faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
In their plea agreements and in prior interviews cited in FBI affidavits, Province and Welch said the trio carjacked the couple to take their pickup truck and camper. After pulling off the interstate onto a ranch road in eastern New Mexico, McCluskey ordered the Haases into the camper while Welch and Province rounded up three small dogs which had leaped out of the pickup truck.
According to the affidavits and plea agreements, McCluskey then shot and killed the couple. The trio drove the truck and camper to a remote spot where they unhitched the trailer and set it on fire with the two bodies inside
A week after the murders, Province separated from the other two. He was captured in Wyoming on Aug. 9, 2010. McCluskey and Welch were recaptured 10 days later at a campground in eastern Arizona.
In filing for the death penalty, Assistant U.S. Attorney Linda Mott alleged that the murders were intentional, and noted that McCluskey has prior convictions for attempted second-degree murder, kidnapping, armed robbery and three aggravated assaults, among others. The filing also alleged that in statements to police after his arrest, McCluskey said he would have killed more people if he hadn’t been recaptured, and that he is a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, a white-supremacist criminal gang.
White supremacist sentenced in Hardy firebombing
LITTLE ROCK — An Evening Shade man has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in a firebombing attack on an interracial couple‘s home in Hardy.
Jason Barnwell, a self-professed white supremacist, pleaded guilty in August to charges of conspiracy against civil rights, use of fire in the commission of a felony and being a felon in possession of a firearm in the Jan. 14, 2011 attack.
Authorities wrote in an arrest affidavit that the men participated in the Jan. 14 attack because the victim “was a black male living with a white woman” and because of comments the victim made to Barnwell’s girlfriend. Prosecutors have described Barnwell as the leader of a white supremacist group and a racist.
Two others involved in the attack – Dustin Hammond and Jake Murphy – pleaded guilty to similar charges and were sentenced to 54 months in prison. A fourth man, Gary Don Dodson, entered a guilty plea in the attack on the second day of his trial. He is slated to be sentenced on April 6.
Racist hate crimes in city mobilize community
With three alleged white supremacist hate group members facing trial, several groups are building an anti-racism campaign.
After a series of high-profile hate crimes in B.C., including damage to aJewish cemetery in Victoria last month – and recent criminal charges for the burning of a Filipino man and assaults on Black, Hispanic and Native people several years ago – anti-racist activists are organizing a renewed drive to stamp out racism in Vancouver.
With three alleged members of the hate group Blood and Honour facing trial – one of them tomorrow – for a string of attacks on people of colour, several groups are organizing around the upcoming February 13 trial of Alistair Miller and Robert de Chazal.
The pair – who were arrested in December – are accused of pouring kerosene over a sleeping Filipino man and lighting him on fire in 2009, and then attacking a black man who intervened. Tomorrow’s trial centres around another alleged Blood and Honour member, Shawn MacDonald, charged with separate attacks on an Indigenous women, a Hispanic man and a black man in Vancouver.
“We’re interested in building an anti-racist campaign,” said Krystle Alarcon with the Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance (FCYA). “People think of multicultural Canada, and of Vancouver as a beautiful and diverse city. But racism exists in Vancouver.
“These were very clear acts of outright racist ideology.”
The migrant justice group No One Is Illegal announced plans this morning to attend MacDonald’s trial tomorrow and is also rallying around the February 13 court date. The group said that hate crimes stem from systemic problems of racism in Canadian society – listing colonization of Indigenous peoples, Conservative immigration policies, and anti-Chinese and anti-Muslim sentiment as examples.
“Racism is an ugly truth about Canada,” said the No One Is Illegal statement. “The crimes of white supremacists are not exceptions, because they exist amidst an underlying racism that continuously places people of colour as Outsiders from an imagined White Canadian identity.
“We encourage our friends and allies to remain vigilant, to be pro-active in countering racism, to strengthen our communities of solidarity and resistance, and to never let the haters have power over us.”
Alarcon questioned why the Vancouver Police Department (VPD)’s hate crimes unit took more than two years to lay charges against the Blood and Honour members. In MacDonald’s case, his alleged 2008 beating of Papi Ngoqo, a South African man, was captured on video by a CBC camera. In de Chazal and Miller’s case, several witnesses came forward to describe the attack.
“The really slow reaction from the police – two years to actually respond – is the generally legal atmosphere where racism isn’t taken that seriously in Vancouver,” Alarcon said. “It seems the police know the group – there’s enough evidence for the police to shut them down, or investigate their operations.”
The VPD said it could not discuss details of its Blood and Honour investigation, but said that investigations often last years before charges are laid. In December, the department displayed white supremacist flags and materials seized by officers after the arrests of Miller, MacDonald and de Chazal.
“Incidents involving potential hate bias or prejudice are extremely important to the VPD,” said spokesperson Cst. Lindsey Houghton in an email. “We want to be able to investigate crimes and assist victims of crimes so we encourage anyone who’s been the victim of a crime to contact us. Everyone deserves to have the police investigate if they’ve been a victim of a crime.
“It is not uncommon for criminal investigations to last a significant period of time as evidence is gathered, a criminal case built up, and information compiled before it is submitted to Crown Counsel for their consideration.”
VPD’s hate crimes unit was asked about incident statistics but did not respond by press time.
Alan Dutton, chair of Canada’s Anti-Racism and Education and Research Society (CAERS), told the Vancouver Observer he is pleased the alleged Blood and Honour members were arrested – but questioned how seriously the legal system is taking hate crimes. He said members of Blood and Honour being released on bail raises many concerns.
“I can’t understand how or why these individuals are not in jail – why are they out on bail?” Dutton asked. “These are serious charges. It certainly looks like they’re hate-crime involved. Why are they out walking the streets?”
The veteran anti-hate researcher – who has documented racist groups for 25 years – told the Vancouver Observer that he believes hate crimes are on the rise in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland.
“In the early 2000s, we saw … the ebb of hate group activity,” Dutton said. “Now what we’re seeing is the growth again.
“This is spurred on by continuing fears about the economy – downturns in the economy always result in people blaming others, in particular minorities and immigration for the loss of jobs, when we know that’s not the case. That is one of the ways they mobilize young people and get them to join hate groups – by blaming other people for the problems we’re facing.”
Alarcon told the Vancouver Observer she witnessed exactly that phenomenon recently on a bus from Joyce Skytrain station.
“A guy walked onto the bus,” she recalled. “(He) said, ‘You guys’ – it was a bus full of immigrants from Joyce station – ‘You should go back and build our railway, this is our land, you’re stealing our jobs.’
“Nobody said anything except me … calling him out for being a white supremacist.”
Dutton said that Commercial Drive – where the Blood and Honour incidents occurred – has a several-decade history with organized hate groups. But many other parts of the city have seen activity, he said, citing New Westminster, Surrey and Richmond in particular.
He said that incidents of hate crimes reflect a growing acceptability of racial prejudice across class lines in Canadian society, and fears and resentments which can can be stoked by government policies such as the recent ban on Muslim face coverings at citizenship ceremonies and the deportations of thousands of allegedly “fraudulent” immigrants.
“If you don’t have that underlying racism in society, then hate groups would never be able to recruit,” Dutton said. “When you have politicians that appear to be blaming people who are Muslim and who appear to be different, you are going to have resentment and fear – people will use that as a basis for mobilizing young people.
“What we see, across Western Europe and in North America, is the rise again of organized hate groups and political parties representing those hate groups. We are very concerned that we do not have the mobilization of the community at this point.”
Dutton, Alarcon and No One Is Illegal all agreed that mobilization many people to speak out against racism is essential to combatting the rise of hate crimes and white supremacist groups. Dutton cites previous mass rallies in Vancouver for the decline in hate activities in the late 1990s, and praised hundreds of Victorians who rallied in December against attacks on a Jewish cemetery.
“Mobilization – this is the critical factor – mobilizing the community against hate,” he said. “There were pickets, there were marches, there were massive demonstrations.
“We need to be aware of what’s going on and bring out large numbers of people to demonstrate against hate.”
French for genocide? Don’t ask
The French parliament has just passed a bill, proposed by President Nicolas Sarkozy‘s party, that will make it a crime to question whether the Armenian massacres in eastern Turkey in 1915 qualified as a genocide. Sarkozy will doubtless sign it into law next month, just in time for the presidential elections.
It won’t just be a crime in France to deny that hundreds of thousands of Armenians, perhaps as many as a million, were killed in eastern Anatolia in 1915, and that it was the responsibility of the Turkish state. That is a historical fact, and only fools, knaves and Turkish ultra-nationalists deny it. It will also be a crime, punishable by one year in prison and a fine of up to 45,000 euros ($58,000), even to question the use of the word “genocide.”
“Genocide” doesn’t just mean killing a lot of people, even a lot of civilians. If it did, then the United States would be guilty of genocide because of Hiroshima. Genocide is a deliberate attempt to wipe out much or all of a specific ethnic, linguistic or religious group.
Words matter. The descendants of the Armenians killed in 1915, most of whom now live in Lebanon, France, or the U.S., desperately want what happened to their great-grandparents to be defined as a genocide and not just a calamity of war. They have even been accused of “Holocaust envy,” which is the belief that they are being short-changed if the Armenian tragedy is not given the same status as the Nazi genocide of the European Jews.
About half of the Jewish population of Europe in 1939 was dead by 1945; about half of the Armenians living in eastern Turkey in 1914 were dead by 1918. But what distinguishes the Holocaust from most other atrocities is not the number of deaths, or even the proportion of the population that was killed. It is the motivation behind the killings. The European Jews were killed as an act of deliberate German policy. What happened to the Armenians of Turkey was less systematic, and probably unplanned.
The Armenian uprisings of 1915 were tiny and ineffectual, but the Dashnak and Hnchak revolutionaries had indeed been conspiring with both the Russians and the British to support planned invasions of eastern Anatolia. The British attack was switched west to the Dardanelles quite late in the planning process, but the Russian offensive actually happened.
The Turkish government was panicked by the uprisings behind the front and ordered the mass deportation of the civilian Armenian population to Syria. Regular Turkish troops could not be spared from the fighting, so most of the job of “guarding” the columns of Armenian deportees marching through the mountains to Syria was given to Kurdish tribesmen, who proceeded to rob, rape and murder them in huge numbers.
Successive Turkish governments have undermined their own case by insisting that it didn’t happen at all. That is dishonest and stupid. There were certainly horrendous massacres, though the exact numbers of dead cannot be known. However, the use of the word “genocide” remains open to question — but it will soon be a criminal offence in France to say so.
Have the French politicians gone mad? Not at all. It’s election time, and there are half a million voters of Armenian descent in France.
The Armenian massacres were officially recognized as a genocide in France just before the 2001 elections. A law criminalizing any questioning of that definition was passed by the National Assembly just before the 2007 elections but narrowly rejected by the Senate. This time it made it through the Senate, too. So if you’re in France, watch what you say.
Related articles
- Who remembers the Armenians now ? (panokroko.wordpress.com)
Twitter sent its digital street cred tumbling on Thursday night when it announced that it would being selectively censoring content as a way to enter countries with “different ideas” about freedom of expression. Though Twitter has never made promises along the lines of Google’s “Don’t Be Evil,” the move nevertheless comes as a surprise for a company that took pride in helping grease the wheels of last year’s Arab Spring uprisings.
In China, where Twitter is blocked but still accessible to those with the technical know-how to skirt the country’s Web filters, the revelation seems to have hit particularly hard.
Among the first to comment on the announcement was Wen Yunchao, one of many Chinese dissidents who’ve embraced Twitter as an uncensored alternative to China’s own heavily managed microblogging services:
Oh no! @twitter says going to start censoring tweets in certain countries. Pls RT!act.demandprogress.org/act/twitter_ce… 通过@demandprogress
It didn’t take long for speculation to spread that Twitter had announced the change because it planned to make a play for the China market. A number of Chinese users promptly declared their intention boycott the service. Among those leveling the boycott threat was activist artist Ai Weiwei, who wrote in a characteristically pithy post, “If Twitter starts censoring, I’ll stop tweeting”:
推若审查，我即停推。 RT @wenyunchao: @aiww 商人在商言商，道这东东，能像谷歌那样最好，不能也不能强求。
艾未未 Ai Weiwei@aiwwBut how likely is it that Twitter’s proposed changes are aimed at earning access to the world’s largest population of Internet users?
“Unlikely” says the answer from Beijing- based investor and Internet watcher Bill Bishop.
As Mr. Bishop notes, a large part of the speculation that Twitter might be getting ready to kow-tow to China’s censors stems from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s visit to Shanghai earlier this month, during which he complained about not being able to read his tweets. That trip came almost exactly a year after the founder of another social-media site banned in China, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, visited Beijing amid talk of trying to tap the Chinese market.
But for all the salivating over China’s potential in board rooms across Silicon Valley, Mr. Bishop says Twitter would have to be “incredibly naive” to think they could wedge their way into the country.
“It would be stupidity,” he says. “One, I don’t think the government would go for it. And two, the market is already saturated.”
Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The key issue, Mr. Bishop says, is whether or not the government would be able to trust Twitter. One sign that Twitter isn’t likely to do what it takes to earn that trust is its plan to partner with Chilling Effects, an Internet freedom advocacy website, to publish government take-down notices — a problematic strategy in a country where banned keywords are treated like state secrets.
Even if Twitter were somehow able to get in Beijing’s good graces, Mr. Bishop says, it would have almost no shot at competing with home-grown “weibo” microblogging products from Sina and Tencent that are already well-established and offer more features. “Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo are better products,” he says. “Twitter’s only competitive advantage here is freedom of speech. Once you start censoring, what do you have left to offer?”
Indeed, Mr. Dorsey himself quashed the idea of Twitter being able to break into China inan interview in Hong Kong in October in which he said his company “just can’t compete” in China “and that’s not up to us to change.”
In developing the ability to censor tweets by region, Twitter more likely has different markets in mind. The only countries mentioned by name in the blog post announcing the new policy were France and Germany, both of which, the post notes, ban pro-Nazi content. How to handle that ban is a dilemma that Yahoo, Google and Facebook have all struggled with in Germany.
Mr. Dorsey visited Germany earlier this week to announce his desire to hire a team there.
Twitter’s announcement also acknowledges there are some countries with severe restrictions on speech where the company simply cannot exist.
That’s not to say Twitter’s latest move won’t have an impact on China. Implausible as it may be for the company to establish itself in the country, Mr. Bishop notes, its embrace of content filtering could aid Beijing in making the argument that the Internet is a space in need of censorship.
Sydney, Jan 24: A new research in Australia has suggested that people who carry national flags on their cars tend to be ‘more racist’.
University of Western Australia (UWA) sociologist and anthropologist Professor Farida Fozdar and a team of assistants carried out the new research.
They examined 513 people during last year’s Australia Day fireworks on Perth‘s Swan River foreshore to discover any link connecting car flag flying with racist mind-set.
The team found that out of the 102 people surveyed on the day with attached flags on their cars on the national holiday, 43 per cent approved with the statement that the now-abandoned ‘White Australia Policy‘ had protected Australia from many troubles faced by other countries.
Only 25 per cent of people who did not fly Australia car flags agreed with the statement, according to Fozdar.
Under the ‘White Australia Policy’, which was a non-official government policy until after World War II the non-Europeans were debarred from migrating to Australia, The Perth now reports.
According to the survey, total of 56 per cent of people with car flags were scared for the Australian culture and thought that the country’s most vital principles were in danger, in contrast with the 34 per cent of non-flag car flyers.
Around thirty-five per cent of flag flyers think that anyone who is born in Australia an only be a true Australian, compared with 22 per cent of non-flag flyers.
An overpowering 91 per cent of people with car flags approved of the fact that people who migrate to Australia should implement Australian values, compared with 76 per cent of non-flaggers.
A total of 55 per cent of flaggers believed migrants should leave their old ways behind, compared with 30 per cent of non-flaggers.
PHOENIX — One of two white supremacist brothers accused of bombing a black city official in suburban Phoenix told a government informant shortly before his arrest that once his mother died, he would return to a life of “bomb throwing” and “sniper shooting” because he had nothing to lose, according to a recording played for jurors Wednesday.
The recording of 61-year-old Dennis Mahon was made by a government informant, identified in court records as civilian Rebecca Williams, after he left her a voicemail on March 29, 2009, about three months before he and his identical twin brother, Daniel Mahon, were arrested at their Illinois home.
Prosecutors played the tape and others for jurors Wednesday as Williams sat on the stand and confirmed that the voices on the recordings were hers and Dennis Mahon’s.
The Mahons have pleaded not guilty to the February 2004 bombing of Don Logan, Scottsdale‘s diversity director at the time. Logan’s hand and arm were injured, and a secretary was hurt.
But prosecutors are arguing to jurors that phone conversations between Dennis Mahon and Williams, and other in-person recordings of Daniel Mahon, prove that they admitted their involvement to her.
“Once my mother passes away, I go back to my radical bomb-throwing, sniper-shooting realm,” Dennis Mahon said. “Look out because I’ve got nothing to lose.”
In the same voicemail, he goes on to say that he knows how to take down the U.S. electrical power system during the coldest part of winter or hottest part of summer using explosives and high-powered rifles, and once he does that: “The non-whites shall destroy each other,” he said.
During a May 4, 2006, phone call, Dennis Mahon mentions Logan by name and continues telling Williams that Scottsdale police officers were responsible for bombing him, but that he helped. He also suggests that next time, Logan wouldn’t survive.
“He doesn’t understand – they’re not going to get him where he works. They’re going to get him where he lives,” he said. “They’re going to tail pipe the son of a bitch and blow up his car while he’s
In other conversations, Mahon speculates about his own eventual arrest, saying that he’d be armed when authorities come knocking on his door.
“They’ll find out they’ve got a big problem with something called white terrorists,” he said during a Jan. 5, 2009 phone call with Williams.
Earlier in the trial, prosecutors played for jurors recordings of the brothers using racial slurs for black people and pointing out the bombing site to Williams while they were in Scottsdale under a ruse that she had to pay a speeding ticket.
Williams met the Mahons in January 2005 after federal investigators recruited her to become an informant. They hoped that Williams could use her feminine wiles while acting like a white supremacist and a government separatist to get the brothers to admit to the bombing.
Over a four-and-a-half-year period, she spent several weeks in person with the brothers, but many of the recordings were made over the phone while she lived in Arizona and the brothers were in Illinois.
Defense attorneys have heavily criticized her behavior with the brothers, referring to her as a “trailer park Mata Hari” – a reference to the Dutch exotic dancer who was convicted of working as a spy for Germany during World War I.
Prosecutors say that Williams never had sex with either brother, but did flirt with them and send racy photos to them in order to allay their suspicions that she was not to be trusted.
Among the racy photos she sent them was one that showed her in a white bikini with a grenade hanging between her breasts and a swastika and pickup truck in the background. Another showed her from behind wearing Confederate flag bikini bottoms, a black leather vest, thigh-high black boots and ripped fishnet stockings.
Defense attorneys have shown the photos to jurors.
Williams appeared in court for the first time Tuesday, testifying under questioning by prosecutors that the Mahons fell for her so much that Dennis Mahon even said he wanted to father her child and marry her.
Under tense cross-examination by defense attorney Deborah Williams on Wednesday, the informant acknowledged previously being an exotic dancer and became bashful when asked whether she knows how to use her body around men.
As she was being questioned, Deborah Williams repeatedly displayed the racy photos that the informant had sent to Dennis Mahon for the jurors.
Rebecca Williams said that the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives recruited her as an informant after they worked with her brother, an informant himself who worked with ATF and the Arizona Department of Public Safety to infiltrate the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang.
At the time she was recruited, Rebecca Williams testified that she was about to be evicted from her trailer in Flagstaff and that she decided to become an informant for the money.
She said that she was paid $100 for in-person contact with the brothers on top of $300 every month for their phone conversations. She got a total of $45,000 for her work, including reimbursements for her expenses, and said that she was promised to be paid $100,000 upon the Mahons’ convictions.
Williams said that she planned to use the $100,000 to help set up a home for herself in Hawaii.
Her testimony will continue Thursday.
Bishop Joseph McFadden of Harrisburg has attracted criticism from the Anti-Defamation League and others for comparing the monolithic nature of the public education system to the education systems of 20th-century totalitarian regimes.
“In totalitarian governments, they would love our system,” the bishop said last week as he discussed his support for voucher legislation. “This is what Hitler and Mussolini and all those tried to establish a monolith so all the children would be educated in one set of beliefs and one way of doing things.”
Bishop McFadden defended his remarks after the Anti-Defamation League’s regional director said they trivialized the suffering of victims of the Holocaust.
“The reference to dictators and totalitarian governments of the 20th century, which I made in an interview on the topic of school choice, was to make a dramatic illustration of how these unchecked monolithic governments of the past used schools to curtail the primary responsibility of the parent in the education of their children,” Bishop McFadden said.
“Today many parents in our state experience the same lack of freedom in choosing an education that bests suits their child as those parents oppressed by dictators of the past. I intentionally did not make reference to the Holocaust in my remarks,” he added.
“Our support of a school voucher program has the goal of giving parents something that dictators never would, a choice in which school their children attend by being able to control the portion of the tax dollars that is designated for the education of each child.”
On the morning of 11 January, a police intervention against Romani people took place in the Ukrainian town of Uzhhorod. The special police commando unit of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, “Berkut”, broke into Romani dwellings in two localities, Radvanka and Telman, as well as other sites throughout Uzhhorod.
According to local Romani residents who witnessed the raid, police officers brutally beat men and women in their homes in front of their children while shouting racist insults and threats. Police are denying that any brutality occurred and have described the raid as a normal part of their investigation and prevention of crime. The Ukrainian media and the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) have been discussing the incident recently.
Several men beaten by the officers ended up in hospital, some with serious head injuries. Most were never charged with any crime and have since returned home. One man who had long suffered from tuberculosis passed away after the raid. News server Romea.cz was unable to learn whether the raid was the immediate cause of his death or not.
A resident of Uzhhorod who prefers to remain anonymous because he fears police reprisals confirmed the information reported by media outlets in the Zakarpattia region in a telephone interview with news server Romea.cz. According to his testimony, a raid was also performed in the Shachta quarter: “Police officers were not as brutal there and the local men managed to hide from the commando unit.”
The resident said he believed the purpose of the raid was to investigate a murder, but police did not apprehend the perpetrator: “The police collectively blamed all of the Romani people for the murder. This is their usual approach when such crimes are committed, even if no one Romani was necessarily involved.”
News server Chas Zakarpattia, in an article entitled “Berkut attacks Romani settlement in Uzhhorod” (available in Ukrainian only at http://chas-z.com.ua/crime/v-uzhgorodi-berkut-napav-na-romskiy-tabir-video), quotes Miroslav Horvát, the leader of the local Romani youth organization, Romaňi čercheň, as saying this was no ordinary search as police have claimed. Horvát said Berkut used tear gas and truncheons against peaceful, unarmed people “irregardless of the fact that there were children, disabled people, elderly people, and pregnant women present.”
Chas Zakarpattia has published a video online including testimony by residents of the settlement of Telman about the commando unit’s actions. “The police invaded the settlement and beat up my brother in our home. The officers beat us up and pulled me by the hair. They said we should all be slaughtered. A Gypsy has no rights here,” one of the residents of Telman says in the video footage.
Another witness in the video says: “It was 7:20 AM. I was sleeping and suddenly people started to shout that the police were there. They invaded our home, grabbed me and ordered me to lie or kneel on the ground. I told them I couldn’t kneel because one of my legs is injured. They started shouting at me: ‘We’ll cut off your other one!’ Then they beat me in the back and on the head.” The Romani residents giving video testimony also said police threatened to perform such house searches every day if they ever spoke to the media about what Berkut was doing.
The police raid involved two busloads of Berkut commandos. The Ukrainian Interior Ministry claims the operation was a normal one tasked with “stabilizing the situation, improving prevention and work in the fight against crime, detecting and apprehending persons involved in theft and in the illegal trade of arms and drugs, and identifying criminal elements”, according to news server Chas Zakarpattia.
Ukrainian Police say their analysis shows that “theft is mostly committed by persons of Romani nationality. In 2011 there were 14 thefts of cast-iron grills and manhole covers, 12 thefts of parts from elevators, three thefts of lights, and four thefts of parts from furnaces.”
The police information also states that in 2011, “25 people of Romani nationality” were prosecuted in Uzhhorod. “The prosecutions were mainly for theft, 20 robberies, and one narcotics sale.” Police add that the raid was “completely legitimate, ordinary, comprehensive detective work. Similar investigations are performed by police in other towns than Uzhhorod and not just in the Romani community,” the police statement reads.
The Uzhhorod resident told news server Romea.cz that Romani residents are afraid and that it is inconceivable to them that they could seek justice for the raid from official institutions. “They are afraid police would find them and beat them up,” he said.
Romani residents say that police harassment, wherein officers arrest people for no reason on the street and then beat them up at police stations, is very frequent. Those afflicted see no one in their environment to whom they might be able to turn with a demand for justice.
The European Roma Rights Center has issued reports on the situation in Ukraine in recent years which confirm this repeated police harassment of Romani people. According to these reports and testimony from the scene, the problem faced by Romani people in the Zakarpattia region is not neo-Nazi or ultra-right groups as it usually is elsewhere. Instead, Romani people in that region fear police the most. Another problem is that civil society is weak in the region, specifically, there is an absence of human rights counseling centers or functioning organizations for the protection of minorities that Romani people could trust enough to turn to.
After the police raid on 11 January, the ERRC wrote a letter to the Uzhhorod Police director and the state prosecutor (see http://www.errc.org/article/ukrainian-authorities-must-investigate-violent-police-raid-against-roma-says-errc/3961). In the letter, the organization urgently demands the relevant authorities officially investigate the “violent police raid” in Uzhhorod. The organization also points out that given the many testimonies as to what happened, it is likely that the officers violated regulations during the raid.
The ERRC is primarily protesting against the fact that the Ukrainian Interior Ministry and police are linking crimes committed by individuals to the entire Romani community in Uzhhorod. “This raises serious questions as to the impartiality and legality of the action,” the ERRC says in its letter.
Turkish public television will show an epic French documentary about the Holocaust, the first broadcast of its kind by national media in a Muslim state, it was announced Wednesday.
A spokesman for Turkish public television TRT said the 1985 film “Shoah” would be shown on one of the network’s 14 channels, but did not say when.
The director of nine-hour-plus documentary, Claude Lanzmann, called the Turkish move historic.
“We should acknowledge the courage and determination of the Turks,” said Lanzmann, who spent 11 years working on the documentary. “Turkey is a country people don’t know and understand very badly.”
Turkey’s broadcast of the film is the culmination of work by the Aladdin Project, a Paris-based group which tries to improve Jewish-Muslim relations.
The group said in a statement the film would be shown Thursday, the day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, adding that it had never before been shown in its entirety in a Muslim country.
Consisting largely of Holocaust-survivor interviews, the film examines the killing of European Jews in Nazi death camps during World War II.
Its broadcast comes at a sensitive time in Turkey’s international relations.
Ankara hopes to eventually join the European Union, but it is embroiled in a spat with Paris over the French senate’s approval of a law making it a crime to deny that the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman forces in World War II was genocide.
Ankara’s relations with Israel were damaged in 2010 after Israeli commandoes stormed a Turkish aid ship bound for the Gaza Strip in an operation that led to the deaths of nine Turkish activists.
