Genocide

What if the conflict many call the "first genocide of the 21st century" weren't one at all? In the United States, many see the six-year war in Darfur as a bloody campaign by a Sudanese Arab-dominated government against rebellious "African" tribes in western Sudan. Two consecutive American presidents and several activist groups have defined it as genocide. But others, while acknowledging the severity of the violence, question whether it meets the legal definition of genocide.

The army of grievers climbed to the hilltop at dawn, waiting for the 365 flag-draped coffins to arrive. Some sat weeping in the stony dirt amid row after row of empty graves; others lined the streets for blocks. They clutched framed pictures of husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters -- all victims of Saddam Hussein's 1988 genocidal campaign against the Kurds. When the coffins came, carried up the hill on the backs of soldiers, the lamentation could wait no longer.

A Spanish judge Wednesday indicted 40 Rwandan army officers on charges of mass murder and crimes against humanity in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, asserting a concept of justice championed by his nation known as "universal jurisdiction." Judge Fernando Andreu of Spain's National Court said he also had sufficient evidence to implicate current Rwandan President Paul Kagame in a long string of reprisal massacres after he and his forces seized power, ending the genocide.

President Bush, expressing frustration that the United Nations has had a difficult time raising and deploying a sufficient peacekeeping force in Darfur, said Tuesday that the 1994 Rwandan genocide should have taught the world not to ignore signs of budding brutality. Bush said Rwanda would receive $12 million of the $100-million contribution the U.S. is making this year to U.N. peacekeeping efforts in Darfur.

Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's office lashed out Friday at the Iraqi presidential council for refusing to approve the executions of two of the three men sentenced to hang for the genocidal campaign against Iraq's ethnic Kurdish minority during Saddam Hussein's rule. The public dispute highlighted the persistent rancor between Iraq's major ethnic and religious factions, which continues to paralyze the highest levels of government nearly five years after Hussein's fall.

The nominee to be the U.S. ambassador to Armenia avoided using the phrase "Armenian genocide" in her Senate confirmation hearing Thursday, but she acknowledged that Armenians had suffered mass deaths, rapes and forced exile at the hands of Turks between 1915 and 1923. Marie L.

Plagued by long delays and corruption allegations, the special court prosecuting Cambodia's former Khmer Rouge leaders on genocide charges is running short of money months before its first trial is set to start. The court, which was set up by the United Nations and Cambodia's government two years ago, needs $43.8 million to continue operating through 2009, administrators said Tuesday in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital.

Sudan's diplomatic offensive against the International Criminal Court is gaining momentum in Africa, but faces stiff odds before the U.N. Security Council. The government of Sudan has been waging a high-profile political campaign since the court's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, last week filed charges of genocide and crimes against humanity against the country's leader.

Thirteen years after he was indicted on charges of waging a campaign of ethnic genocide, Radovan Karadzic made his first appearance Thursday before the war crimes tribunal at The Hague, complaining that he had been "kidnapped" and vowing to serve as his own attorney. The former Bosnian Serb leader quickly signaled the tactics he could use in court by attempting to shift the discourse from his own alleged crimes to what he claimed were assassination plots and other dark conspiracies.

Nearly 700 Ivory Coast farmworkers alleging that they became sterile from exposure to a U.S.-made pesticide can't claim to be victims of genocide because the producers didn't intend harm, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. The pesticide, known as DBCP for dibromochloropropane, has been banned in the United States since 1979. The Africans' suit against Amvac Chemical Corp. of Newport Beach, Dole Food Co. of Westlake Village, Dow Chemical Co. and Shell Oil Co.