Joshua Evangelista

Gariwo Press office and Communication

Articles

Is genocide happening in Gaza? What is a crime against humanity? Words to understand the conflict

12 January 2024

On Thursday 11th January, at the UN International Court of Justice in The Hague, hearings started on the case presented by South Africa, according to which the war in the Gaza Strip constitutes an act of genocide against the Palestinian people. Can one say that a genocidal act is taking place in Gaza? If not, how can one define what is happening? After Hamas attack last 7th October and the subsequent war waged by Israel, the use of the terms “genocide”, “war crimes”, “crimes against humanity”, “pogrom” has increased exponentially in the media and social networks. We asked Professor Marcello Flores, one of Italy’s leading experts in Genocide Studies, to give us his views on each of these terms and how they apply to the Middle Eastern context.

Conversation with Piotr M.A. Cywinski

31 May 2023

The director of Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum Piotr M.A. Cywiński told us about the responsibility he feels in running such an important place (“not sacred but of death”, as Wlodek Goldkorn defined it), where over a million men, women and children lost their lives. He mainly spoke of visits to Auschwitz as “the awakening of moral restlessness that has no meaning unless it is a ritual of passage”, through which the life of those who pass through that gate as ‘tourists’ cannot remain the same.

Serving the community, despite the threat of Islamist extremism, corruption, and drought

15 March 2023

If there is a Garden of the Righteous in Halabja, much of it is due to the determination of Qayssar Ahmed. A survivor of the 1988 genocide, once he returned from the tent cities in Iran, Qayssar became a journalist and communications expert. Director of Radio Dangi NWE, a community radio station for young people and women, he is a member of the Kurdistan journalists' union and the International Federation of Journalists. But above all, together with his wife Hero, he is the driving force behind the NWE organization, which pioneeringly fights to connect the memory of the genocide to today's struggles: freedom of expression, women's rights, environmental protection. On the eve of the 35th anniversary of the Halabja genocide, where over 5,000 people lost their lives at the hands of Saddam's troops, Qayssar tells Gariwo about the biggest challenges facing this border community - between Islamist threats, corruption, energy crisis and drought - at one of the most delicate moments in the history of the region.

Is genocide taking place in Afghanistan?

15 June 2022

More and more scholars and activists claim that genocide against the Hazara community took place in Afghanistan at the end of the nineteenth century. And that the genocidal intentions have been evident through massacres and violations to date, for over a century. At an international conference in Milan, an attempt was made to take stock of the role of the International Criminal Court and how to prevent new genocides in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.