Cambodia marks UNESCO recognition of Khmer Rouge sites as places of 'peace and reflection'
The Tuol Sleng prison and Choeung Ek killing fields in Phnom Penh, and M-13 prison in Kampong Chhnang province were inscribed as "Cambodian Memorial Sites: From centres of repression to places of peace and reflection" during a UNESCO meeting in Paris on Friday.
"This is a model for the world, showing the long struggle of Cambodia, reconciliation, the spirit of national unity, finding justice for the victims and building peace," said interim Culture Minister Hab Touch.
The Khmer Rouge sites mark Cambodia's fifth World Heritage listing, and is the country's first modern-era nomination and among the first globally tied to recent conflict.
The sites are a stark reminder of the atrocities committed under Pol Pot's regime from 1975 to 1979, during which an estimated 1.7 million to 2.2 million people died, many from starvation, torture, or execution.
The Tuol Sleng prison, which held approximately 15,000 prisoners, is now a genocide museum.
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The National
2 hours ago
- The National
I've known Corbyn for years. I think he could help us to independence
The UK political landscape is fracturing. Labour won a Westminster landslide last year on only 31% of the vote. The Hamilton by-election showed that part of Scottish society is not immune from Reform. There are now six electorally significant political parties in Scotland, and a Corbyn party could make it seven. There is massive disaffection in Scotland with Starmer's Blue Labour regime in Westminster. Austerity, benefit cuts, more nuclear weapons, anti-immigrant measures, banking deregulation, authoritarianism and complicity in Genocide: What kind of Labour voter wanted these? Scottish Labour have been completely ineffective in distancing themselves from Starmer and are hampered by the uncharismatic Anas Sarwar. Scottish Labour are in absolutely no position to handle a serious popular challenge from the left. READ MORE: What we learned from the new poll putting Corbyn party on 15% Meanwhile the SNP are going nowhere. They once again comfortably lead the polls by default and will almost certainly be the largest party in Holyrood next year. But what good will that do the cause of independence? The SNP level of support now hovers at only about 60% of the level of support for independence itself. Many voters have – entirely rationally – lost belief in the SNP's connection to independence. If the SNP were to declare that victory in the Holyrood elections would be followed by a declaration of independence by Scotland's parliament, I would stop typing, go canvas for the SNP and not stop till election day next year. But in fact Swinney has no plan whatsoever to progress independence and his chosen advisers talk in terms of decades. There is precious little hope on the horizon. Alba show no signs of breakthrough. In a recent poll in which Alba was, for once, prompted as an answer, they still only showed 1% on the list vote. That is why non Reform-style change is welcome. Change brings possibility. It shakes the kaleidoscope. The key to progress is to embrace change and direct it towards Independence. The left in Scotland is overwhelmingly pro-Independence. Unionist socialists exist, who hanker after a cross-Union vision of working class solidarity. But they are few and declining. Even George Galloway has shifted. The realisation from the brutalist approach of Starmer, that Labour at Westminster will never again bring a left-wing UK government, has been key in stripping the delusions of 'socialist Unionists'. By contrast, Unionism is Scotland is overwhelmingly right wing, increasingly to a worrying extreme. Hatred of immigrants and support for genocide in Gaza are now a permanent feature of the most prominent Unionist social media accounts. The conclusion is that any new, genuinely left-wing Scottish political party must be pro-independence. READ MORE: Pro-Palestine protesters breach fence of Edinburgh arms firm factory It is a crucial fact that consistently in opinion polls, up to 40% of Scottish Labour's actual voters support independence; a fact that party has ignored to their peril. I have known Jeremy Corbyn for decades. I am confident that his view will be that it is for the new party in Scotland to determine the party's position on independence. (Which, when you think about it, is consistent with his stance when Labour leader, when he never challenged their branch office's view). It is also true that, in all the creative chaos surrounding the mooted formation of the new party, neither Jeremy Corbyn nor Zarah Sultana said anything about Scotland. Meantime we are told there is a rather mysterious steering group here. The only public name seems to be the poet Jim Monaghan. So far as I can learn, it seems to be in practice the anti-Sheridan SSP, the SWP and a couple of people connected to Bella Caledonia. This is fine. But bluntly it would not fill a church hall anywhere in Scotland without Corbyn's name attached; and still might struggle. I have been in touch with many of the respected and better known figures on the left in Scotland and not one of them has had any contact from the group. It is all peculiarly closed. A Google search on Collective Scotland brings up only the feminist consultancy of that name. There appears no public method of joining the group ahead of its launching as a political party. But I do predict that, if Corbyn indeed launches it as his new party, a mass membership will materialise very quickly. An opinion poll on Tuesday put a hypothetical Corbyn party on 15% in the UK as a whole. Political idealism is very short in the market at present. I believe in Scotland they would certainly cross the approximately 7% threshold needed to get into Holyrood. My own view is that Scotland's real left, which is independence-supporting, should pile into any new Corbyn-led party that emerges, should ensure internal democracy and make it an outright Independence vehicle. The unpalatable truth is that both the SNP and Alba have lost between a third and half of their membership over the last few years. That is an awful lot of disillusioned activists out there. The Collective – hopefully under a more sensible name – could succeed. It could rip off from the Labour Party the hundreds of thousands of genuine socialists and independence supporters in Scotland who voted Labour at the 2025 Westminster election. Ultimately it could destroy malignant, right-wing Scottish Labour and further consolidate the working class vote behind Independence. Think on it.
The Guardian
9 hours ago
- The Guardian
The BBC has alienated everyone with its Gaza coverage. After this latest failure, who will be left to defend it?
For a genocide to occur, everything that people think is wrong has to first be turned on its head. There have been endless examples of this gruesome phenomenon in the past 21 months; Monday's report on the BBC's scrapped documentary about the plight of children in Gaza is just the latest instance. Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone was a rare example of the unbearable experiences of Palestinians being properly investigated by Britain's public broadcaster. But within the media, this documentary has become a bigger scandal than the suffering of Palestinian children. When a researcher named David Collier, who has written widely in defence of Israel, discovered that the 13-year-old narrator of the film, Abdullah, was the son of the deputy agriculture minister in Hamas's government, all hell broke loose. After a deafening chorus of condemnation from pro-Israel lobby groups, British newspapers and the government, the documentary was taken off iPlayer. Monday's review states that the failure to disclose this connection violated the BBC's editorial guidelines, which stipulate that the corporation must 'provide full transparency to its audience'. But it concludes that Hoyo Films, the independent production company that made the film, did not intentionally mislead the BBC. It says Hoyo's view had been – rightly – that Abdullah's father had a 'civilian or technocratic' position within Hamas as opposed to a political or military role, and that it had simply 'made a mistake' in not informing the BBC. Here is the crucial point. All of Abdullah's words were scripted by the production company, since he was the narrator. The report '[does] not consider that anything in the narrator's scripted contribution to the programme breached the BBC's standards on due impartiality', and found no evidence that Abdullah's father or family influenced the script in any way. In other words, it was completely irrelevant who his father was. There was no substantial justification for taking this documentary off air. The immediate repercussions were that the young narrator and his family were inundated with abuse and harassment, with Abdullah declaring that the BBC was to blame if anything happened to him. Such fear is hardly baseless: thousands of children have been slaughtered by Israeli troops, including the 12-year-old Mohammed Saeed al-Bardawil, one of the only witnesses to Israel's killing of paramedics and first responders in March. In the past few days, Israeli forces have killed Palestinian children waiting to collect nutritional supplements and others waiting for water. The latter incident, they claimed, was a 'technical error'. Is this the explanation for how one of the world's most sophisticated militaries, with technology allowing it to know exactly who it is about to kill in its strikes, has plausibly killed tens of thousands of children since October 2023? Still, in Britain there is infinitely more scrutiny of this documentary than of these historic crimes. The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, has even demanded to know why no one has been sacked at the BBC after its decision to air the documentary. In Nandy's upside-down world, a single detail in a documentary that exposes the killing of children should destroy careers. What about her colleagues who have supported the continued supply of military equipment for Israeli forces as they commit a livestreamed genocide? The media backlash against this documentary prompted the BBC to pause another documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, which investigated Israeli attempts to destroy Gaza's healthcare system (so far, this has killed at least 1,580 healthcare workers). The BBC pulled the film despite it having been approved at every level, with no factual objections to anything in it (the documentary was ultimately broadcast on Channel 4). According to Ben de Pear, the documentary's executive producer and a former Channel 4 news editor who wrote about the decision in the Observer, BBC script meetings were dominated by discussions about potential objections from Collier and the lobby group Camera. Collier's pro-Israel social media output is instructive: he has written that 'Jewish people have every reason to see the Palestinian flag as a flag of genocidal hate', and that 'the Palestinian identity, and especially the 'refugees' were developed ONLY as a weapon against Israel'. The furore has been used to justify the idea that the BBC is biased against Israel, yet the exact opposite is true. In a damning report, the Muslim Council of Britain's Centre for Media Monitoring found that the BBC gave Israeli deaths far more coverage in its articles when measured on a per-fatality basis – and using the overly conservative official Gaza death toll. The vast majority of emotive words, such as 'massacre', 'atrocities', 'slaughter', 'barbaric' and 'brutal', were reserved for Israeli victims. Israeli voices were heard far more often than those of Palestinians. This has angered many within the BBC, too, who want to report fairly on the conflict: more than 100 have signed a letter criticising the choice not to air Gaza: Doctors Under Attack. Meanwhile, the historic context for Israel's crimes against Palestinians has been ignored and erased. The numerous statements of genocidal and criminal intent by Israeli leaders have barely been acknowledged. Like other western media outlets, the BBC has stripped Palestinian lives of their worth, ignored and whitewashed Israeli crimes and repeatedly treated Israeli denials of atrocities as credible, even when those denials are repeatedly exposed as lies. Morality has been turned on its head. The BBC must be perceived as pro-Israel, despite the overwhelming evidence of its crimes. The scandals must be reserved for documentaries about Palestinians, rather than the horrors those Palestinians endure. But here lies the problem. Thanks not least to the work of Palestinian journalists, much of the world has already witnessed the atrocities that are being committed by the Israeli state. They can see the mismatch between what they know to be true and what media outlets such as the BBC report. The BBC has alienated its natural supporters and is detested by the right because it's a public broadcaster. Its journalistic failures in the Conservative years increasingly undermined faith in its editorial standards. Now, its failure to accurately report on the great crime of our age has only deepened that outrage. Who, then, will be left to defend this ailing beast? Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
Our Médecins Sans Frontières staff are being killed in Gaza. Why are UK ministers enabling that?
Our colleague Abdullah Hammad was killed last week by Israeli forces as he waited to collect flour from an aid truck in Khan Younis. He is the 12th Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) colleague to have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. The Israeli-US food distribution scheme forces people in Gaza to choose between starvation and risking their life for minimal supplies. With more than 500 people killed and nearly 4,000 wounded while seeking food, this scheme has had the effect of luring desperate people in with aid, only for them to be slaughtered by the Israeli armed forces. This is part of the genocide that is being committed in Gaza. And the UK government is complicit. At the beginning of April, we at MSF UK wrote to the foreign secretary, David Lammy, detailing our first-hand observations in Gaza. We described the massive influxes of wounded patients and dead bodies being received by MSF teams in medical facilities across Gaza on 18 March, as Israeli forces unleashed attacks of unprecedented intensity, shattering the short-lived ceasefire. We explained that MSF medical staff and their patients had already had to evacuate 17 health facilities and had endured a massive number of violent incidents, including airstrikes damaging and destroying hospitals and health facilities, tanks opening fire on humanitarian shelters, ground offensives being conducted in medical facilities, and humanitarian convoys and ambulances being fired upon by the Israeli military. We noted that not a single hospital in Gaza was currently fully functional, and that about half of them were no longer functioning at all. And we described the complete siege imposed by the Israeli authorities on Gaza. We noted that this evidence was consistent with the description of ethnic cleansing and genocide provided by legal experts and human rights organisations. We requested a meeting to brief the foreign secretary further and to hear what concrete actions the UK planned, to hold Israel to account for its atrocities against the Palestinian people. We did not receive a response. So on 7 May, MSF wrote an open letter to the prime minister describing the use of starvation and collective punishment as weapons of war by the Israeli government against an entire population. We implored the UK government to uphold its obligations as a permanent member of the UN security council to act under international humanitarian law to protect all civilians in Gaza. We also called on the UK government to publicly condemn the Israeli government for the atrocities it is inflicting on the people of Gaza. We warned that failure to take immediate action and to adopt a clear position on these extensively documented and flagrant war crimes and breaches of international law would leave the UK government at high risk of charges of complicity. We did not receive a response. In fact, since 1 November 2023 we have repeatedly contacted the government to provide evidence of atrocities directly witnessed and experienced by our hundreds of colleagues in Gaza, to remind the UK of its power and its obligation to act, and to request an urgent high-level meeting. We never received clear acknowledgment of the evidence that we have provided, nor have we ever been offered that meeting. We can only conclude that the UK government just does not want to admit what everybody else can see: that genocide is being committed in Gaza, and it is being committed with the military, diplomatic and material support of the UK. Eventually, on 23 June, we did receive a letter from the parliamentary under-secretary of state for the Middle East, Hamish Falconer. It was woefully inadequate and did not address any of our points. It said only: 'We need further action from the Israeli government now to lift all restrictions on aid, to enable the UN and aid partners to do their work, and to ensure that food and other critical supplies can reach people safely.' But aid will not stop a genocide. We also need the Israeli government to stop the ethnic cleansing, the war crimes and the crimes against humanity, and to abide by international law and the advice of the international court of justice (ICJ). Since October 2023, the entire population of the Gaza Strip has been subjected to relentless bombardment by the Israeli armed forces. Gaza's healthcare system has been destroyed, and medical workers, including our MSF colleagues, are systematically targeted by the Israeli military. Due to the siege imposed by Israel and the obstruction of humanitarian aid, more than 2 million people are currently on the brink of starvation as part of a calculated strategy aimed at eradicating Palestinian society. The UK government must acknowledge and respect the rulings of the ICJ, and abide by international law and the advisory of the ICJ regarding the plausibility of genocide. MSF has a responsibility to act with moral clarity and humanitarian consistency in the face of mass atrocities. The same should apply to the UK government. Dr Natalie Roberts is the executive director of Médecins Sans Frontières UK Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
