Author: Trent

Washington Post:

“The militiamen, when they saw the American army, they fled at extraordinary speed,” said Abdul Sattar, who was too afraid to leave his house to go to work this day. “They jumped into houses. One woman saw one of them in her house and fainted.”

Abu Mohammed described jumping into houses as a tactical move that the Mahdi Army often uses because its members know U.S. troops rarely remain long inside a neighborhood. “We didn’t want to confront them,” he said.

When Abu Mohammed returned to his home, enraged, he fired at the houses of his Sunni neighbors, even though they were not Egheidat. A Sunni neighbor, on hearing the gunfire, came out clutching an AK-47 assault rifle.

“I shot at him,” said Abu Mohammed. “He bent down, and the bullet struck his mother in the arm. Then I walked out into the neighborhood and shouted: ‘Any Sunni I see in the street is my enemy. No Sunni will stay in Tobji. The Sunnis are infidels.’ ” Egheidat tribal leaders denied any involvement in the attack on the checkpoint, blaming radical Sunni insurgents seeking to deepen the divisions in Tobji.

“We’ll pay 10 times the amount — not four times, as tradition dictates — if what they are saying is true,” Egheidi said, referring to blood money. The reconciliation meeting was postponed. That night and the following day, the streets lay silent.

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NYT:

Strange to think that the flamboyantly lethal nut job Idi Amin died in Saudi Arabia just three years ago. About 80 at the time, he had fled Uganda in 1979 after murdering upwards of 300,000 souls. Larger than life physically and metaphorically, he was a former heavyweight boxing champion with a brilliant sense of leadership as a performance: as a dictator, his methods were brutally antediluvian, but his public relations cunning was consummately 20th century. Smiling into cameras, he dropped provocations like bombs: “I don’t like human flesh. It’s too salty for me.”

The queasily enjoyable new fiction film “The Last King of Scotland,” based on the novel by Giles Foden and directed by Kevin Macdonald, creates a portrait of this famous Ugandan dictator from inside the palace walls. Furiously paced, with excellent performances by Forest Whitaker as Amin and James McAvoy as the foolish Scotsman who becomes the leader’s personal physician, the film has texture, if not depth and enough intelligence to almost persuade you that it actually has something of note to say. It would make a terrific double bill with Barbet Schroeder’s mesmerizing 1974 documentary, “General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait,” of which Mr. Macdonald has obviously made a close and fruitful study.

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Moscow Times:

The notices were posted around the capital of Soviet Ukraine: All Jews living in the city of Kiev and its vicinity must report by 8:00 on the morning of Sept. 29, 1941, to the corner of Melnyka and Dokterivska streets (near the cemetery).

They were told to bring their ID cards, money and fresh clothes. Most thought the Nazi occupiers were deporting them to a Jewish ghetto. Some even arrived early in hope of getting a good seat on the train.

What met them that morning was death.

Forced to undress, the Jews were herded in groups — men, women and children — to the edge of a ravine. For 48 hours, the Nazis gunned down the crowd until at least 33,771 Jews had been massacred — a number recorded by the German shock troops — their lifeless bodies toppling down the embankment. In the ensuing months, the ravine would fill with an estimated 100,000 bodies, including other Kiev residents and Red Army prisoners.

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Moscow Times:

Prosecutors showed that Sivyakov forced Andrei Sychyov, a first-year conscript at the Chelyabinsk Armor Academy, to squat for several hours while beating him last New Year’s Eve. The incident led to the amputation of Sychyov’s legs and genitals.

Sivyakov, who has consistently maintained his innocence, was convicted on five charges, including “exceeding authority, resulting in grave consequences,” and sentenced to four years, less time served, in a medium-security penal colony. He has been in jail since mid-January.

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BBC:

The court heard that Momcilo Krajisnik helped arm Bosnian Serb civilians so that they could exterminate non-Serbs and drive them from large areas of Bosnia-Hercegovina.

Krajisnik said he knew nothing of the war crimes. But former Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Biljana Plavsic testified that he was “very powerful” and at times he had even “dominated” the overall leader, Radovan Karadzic.

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NYT:

But the darkest fears of a draconian Islam on Africa’s east coast have not come true, at least not yet. Boys are allowed to play soccer, and girls are allowed to go to school, despite rumors to the contrary. And businesses are not forced to close during prayer time, as has been widely reported outside of Mogadishu.

In fact, people were selling bread, biscuits and watermelon right in front of the Islamic forces’ headquarters during the noon prayer earlier this week. The teenage militia members standing guard regressed to the boys that they were, giggling over giant slices of watermelon and spitting seeds at each other, the juice running down their chins and dripping onto their guns.

“Nobody knows where we’re headed,” said Ahmed Mohammed Ali, chairman of a Mogadishu human rights organization. But, he added, the Islamists “pacified this place and brought the clans together.”

“Whatever you think about them,” he said, “you can’t overlook that.”

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He severed head of a corpse and claimed he pitied it and decided to do it a favour.

Daily Sun, Nigeria’s King of the Tabloids:

Azubuike, a native of Aguata in Anambra State, said: “I went to look for my friend at Alakuko on that fateful day. On getting there, I met his absence and decided to look for him at the motor park. On my way to the park, I saw three corpses on the road. They were all decayed and their skeletons were sticking out. I felt sorry for one of them and decided to cut off the skull.

I saw a machete by the roadside, which I used to sever the head. I put the head into a nylon bag and was going back to my friend’s house when I was intercepted by the police. I explained to them that I only took pity on the corpse. I would have even carried the whole corpse, but it was too heavy. My intention was to help the corpse by burying its head. I had no ulterior motive.”

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NYT:

That solitary drive would also give shape to “Train to Pakistan,” Mr. Singh’s slim, seminal 1956 novel whose opening paragraphs contain one of its most unsettling lines: “The fact is, both sides killed.” An estimated one million people were killed during the partition, and more than 10 million fled their homes: Hindus and Sikhs pouring into India, Muslims heading in the other direction, to Pakistan. The novel tells the story of an uneventful border village that gets swept up in that violent storm.

Now, in a new edition of the novel, Roli Books in New Delhi has paired his story with 66 unflinching black-and-white photographs of the Partition era, some never before published, by the American photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White. This new incarnation of “Train to Pakistan,” which Roli hopes to find international distributors for at the Frankfurt Book Fair next month, has given the book what its author happily calls “a new lease on life.” It has also given Mr. Singh, who at 91 has borne witness to several rounds of carnage in his country, an occasion once again to warn against forgetfulness.

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