A new report from the agency says the landmine and explosive legacy in Myanmar (formerly Burma) killed or maimed at least 210 children last year.

Those children represent over 20 percent of last year's 1,052 civilian casualties in the conflict-torn Southeast Asian nation.

UNICEF's 3 April report says the number of people injured in landmines and explosive ordnances in Myanmar tripled last year, compared with the 390 people who died from their use in 2022.

The report - released on the International Day of Mine Awareness and Assistance - says in 599 explosions last year 188 people were killed. A further 864 were maimed.

Children most vulnerable

UNICEF says children are particularly vulnerable to landmines. That's because they are less likely to recognise them and may be unaware of their dangers.

The use of explosive weapons is widespread in the country, which means children can encounter landmines practically anywhere. They have been placed near their homes, schools, playgrounds and farming areas UNICEF says.

"The use of landmines is not only reprehensible but can constitute a violation of international humanitarian law," UNICEF's Regional Director for East Asia and the Pacific says.

"It is imperative that all parties to the conflict prioritise the safety and well-being of civilians, particularly children, and take immediate steps to halt the use of these indiscriminate weapons."

Mines everywhere

UNICEFs report says apart from Myanmar's capital city Naypyitaw, most of the country's states and regions are ridden with landmines.

UNICEF says landmine and explosive use has increased as the conflict has expanded in recent months.

Myanmar is among 32 countries that have not signed the 1999 UN convention banning anti-personnel mines.

Civil war

The Myanmar civil war - aka the Burmese Spring Revolution, the Burmese civil war or the people's defensive war - is fierce and ongoing.

It followed the country's long-running insurgencies. These escalated significantly after a military coup d'état in 2021 and the military junta's subsequent violent crackdown on anti-coup protests.

Key players in the civil war are the military and ethnic armed groups and the newly emerged People's Defence Forces.

Catholic help

The Catholic Church has been supporting victims of landmines in Shan state, a Catholic social worker says.

"We have a programme on cash support to the victims of landmines when cases are referred to us by the NGOs and civil society groups."

He says the people they helped support last year were both adults and children.

War crimes

In July 2022, Amnesty International accused the Myanmar military of committing war crimes.

The military has been manufacturing and laying landmines on a massive scale in and around villages and near churches.

These include the M-14, which typically blows off the victim's foot at the ankle.

There's also the more powerful MM-2, which often blows off the victim's leg at the knee and causes injuries to other parts of the body.

There is a severe risk of death due to blood loss from the injuries caused by the MM-2, Amnesty says.

Source

• UCA News

The outrage follows the death last month of a 59-year-old Orthodox priest, Fr Stepan Podolchak (pictured). The Tablet reports he was tortured to death by Russian soldiers.

Human rights groups condemned his death and those of other priests as egregious violations of religious freedom and as potential war crimes.

Arrests and torture for refusing Russian demands

Maksym Vasin, executive director of the Institute for Religious Freedom, revealed disturbing accounts from Ukrainian clergy detained by Russian troops.

He said they reported being tortured, beaten and subjected to inhumane treatment for refusing to collaborate with Moscow's religious authorities.

"Ukrainian religious leaders were subjected to beatings, arbitrary imprisonment, torture and even attempted rape...for refusing to submit to Russian religious centres" Vasin stated.

Some testified they were abused for declining orders to learn the Russian national anthem.

Lethal strikes on places of worship

The scale of the Russian military assault on Ukraine's spiritual fabric is staggering.

Yevhen Zakharov, director of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, said at least 30 priests have been killed and 26 imprisoned by Russian forces since the invasion began in February 2022.

Ruslan Khalikov, head of the Religion on Fire project documenting attacks, confirmed that over 550 religious buildings across Ukraine have been damaged or destroyed, with many deliberately struck despite there being no military targets nearby.

"There are cases when a church is the only building...and there is no nearby object that the Russians could aim at and miss" Khalikov said, emphasising such strikes likely constitute war crimes under international law.

Alleged motives

According to Vasin, clergy reported three key drivers fuelling the mistreatment by Russian military:

• Russian hatred and suppression of Ukrainian identity
• Persecution of denominations outside the Russian Orthodox Church
• Refusal to take orders from Kremlin-allied religious leaders

"The Russian military and representatives...could not believe that Ukrainian religious leaders...could be independent" Vasin added.

Global outcry "egregious violations"

While Moscow has denied the allegations, human rights groups have forcefully condemned Russia's actions, decrying the systematic campaign as an unconscionable attack on religious liberty.

On the invasion's second anniversary, Robert Rehak, chairman of the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance, revealed that over 50 Ukrainian clergy had been killed or imprisoned

Russia had committed "egregious violations of religious freedom" he said.

As the conflict grinds on, concerns mount over the indiscriminate targeting of Ukraine's sacred spaces and spiritual leaders defending their nation's sovereignty against Russian aggression.

Source

• The Tablet

Krajewski, was sent by Pope Francis to Ukraine to show the pope's "closeness" to the Ukrainian people.

"It would be good if you could go again to Ukraine, to the war zones, to visit and bring aid to those communities that are still there after almost 200 days of war," Francis told him during the recent meeting of cardinals in Rome.

Krajewski told the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, that he had gone into war zones where only soldiers entered.

Describing the task as bringing aid to people trapped in no-man's-land, Krajewski told Vatican News "No one besides soldiers enters anymore.

"While we managed to give the first portion of humanitarian help peacefully, during the second one they started to fire on us," said Krajewski.

"For the first time in my life, I didn't know where to run. Because it is not enough to run, you have to know where to go," said the Polish-born cardinal.

Krajewski was grateful to a Ukrainian soldier who guided the group to shelter and warned that they had 10 minutes before the second round of attacks would start.

"They say there are a lot of traitors in that terrain," Krajewski told Crux, referring to people who collaborate with Russian forces.

"When they spot humanitarian help being distributed, they give a location through their mobile phone and the gunfire starts."

Krajewski said that after taking shelter, everyone was well, adding "We managed to distribute papal rosaries to the soldiers.

"Almost all of the Ukrainian soldiers, no matter what their faith was, put the rosary on their necks immediately."

On Sunday Krajewski and his team went to visit the site of mass graves left behind by Russian occupiers, declaring "the entire world now knows they're real".

So far, officials of Ukraine's Defence Ministry say that at least 440 unmarked graves have been discovered in the wake of a Russian withdrawal from the eastern city of Izyum, despite repeated denials from Russian officials that their forces have targeted civilians or committed war crimes.

In the past, Moscow has suggested that purported images of civilian casualties or mass graves in conflict zones amount to Ukrainian propaganda.

Krajewski removed any doubt saying the mass graves were located in pine tree forests, and some victims displayed signs of torture, with their hands tied behind their backs.

Sources

• AP News
• Vatican News
• America Magazine
• Crux

It isn't just any war, of course, but a war of conquest perpetrated by Russia invading a sovereign nation.

And it is a war that has seen massive numbers of unspeakable war crimes.

These war crimes have included, among other things, the intentional and systematic targeting of civilians.

The evidence includes mass graves, intentional destruction of hospitals, execution-style shootings of civilians, and, yes, horrific sexual violence.

Sexual violence is being explicitly used as a tool of war, not only to motivate the grotesquely evil soldiers who are raping Ukrainian women and girls, but also to subdue the population in the short term and impact Ukrainian birth rates in the longer term.

Russian soldiers, apparently, hoped that "their captives would recoil from sex in the future and thus not bear Ukrainian children."

I hope that everyone reading these words is outraged that anyone could even contemplate (much less engage in) acts that are so evil.

I can barely write them without feeling rage in my heart.

The level of evil present in the acts is so overwhelming that one thought about whether anyone should ever engage in them is one thought too many.

But here is why academic arguments over ethical theory, though at times esoteric and deeply disconnected from reality, can be so important for the real world.

The ethical theory that dominates so much of our secularized culture — whether we are talking about medicine, whether we are talking about finance, and, yes, whether we are talking about foreign policy — is utilitarianism.

This is the theory that explicitly says that all acts are in principle morally acceptable if they can produce the greatest good (pleasure, preference-satisfaction, happiness, etc.) for the greatest number of people.

Now, there are several deep problems with this ethical theory.

There is, for instance, no way to peer into the distant future to determine what will in fact produce the greatest good for the greatest number.

Human beings are notoriously bad at making these calculations — just look at the super confident and longstanding (but deeply misguided) worries about so-called "overpopulation."

Also, some goods just cannot be compared with each other in ways that can be made to fit into a utilitarian calculation. Ethicists call this the "incommensurability problem."

We just lived through several examples of this problem in the early part of the pandemic.

How, for instance, should we have compared the utility of young children learning how to communicate through facial expressions versus the utility of masking children in school?

How should we have compared the utility of the elderly not dying alone versus the utility of keeping healthy people away from those infected with COVID?

The answer is that these goods cannot be compared in any meaningful way — for the goods involved are incommensurable. But comparing them is exactly what utilitarianism requires.

Perhaps the central problem with utilitarianism, however, is that it cannot simply say an act is wrong because it is an act of injustice against another person. So, Russian soldiers executing or raping a 12-year-old girl might be wrong on this view, but one would need to first show that the act produces less utility.

Now, the best advocates for utilitarianism are what are sometimes called "rule" utilitarians.

They agree that it is silly to make a comparison of net utility for every single act but instead insist that, over time, we have learned which rules produce the most utility.

It is bad to execute or rape a 12-year-old girl, not because it violates fundamental justice but because — in the long run — it will produce less utility than if we didn't have a rule against it.

But it just isn't clear that these practices don't "work" in very similar ways to other kinds of tried-and-true war-time tactics. Indeed, Russia has been taught that these practices "work" in multiple circumstances, including the horror show of the war on Chechnya, in which they used the massacre of civilians in a "deliberate campaign to terrorize the population into submission."

Ultimately, however, the question of whether killing the innocent and engaging in violent nonconsensual sex are wrong must not be a question of whether or not they "work."

Some acts are just so heinous, so evil, so utterly inconsistent with the good that they can never be done under any circumstances.

In my world of Catholic moral theology, we call them "intrinsically evil acts," actions that have such evil, such grave evil, at their heart or object such that there can never be exceptions.

Basic, fundamental justice and human dignity require that the act is always and everywhere deeply wrong.

This doesn't mean doing away with complexity and gray areas.

Plenty of Catholic moral theologians who reject utilitarianism still engage in difficult moral questions on a host of matters, from abortion to save the life of the mother to the use of large doses of pain medication at the end of life to when one can legitimately foresee that one's actions will lead to the death of the innocent without intending that death.

But the horrific war crimes perpetrated by Russia should be yet another reminder of the morally impoverished vision of utilitarianism.

We must stand for fundamental justice in ways that deem certain actions always and in every circumstance deeply, profoundly evil. And this means rejecting utilitarianism in favour of fundamental justice, especially for the most vulnerable.

• Charles Camosy is a professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University.
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission.

The Associated Press reports that a member of Sudan's sovereign council announced Tuesday that transitional authorities and rebel groups from Darfur have agreed that those charged by the ICC for atrocities in Darfur should be prosecuted.

The ICC opened an investigation into the abuses committed by the Sudanese government in 2005. Bashir's government was accused of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity committed in Darfur beginning in 2002. It's been estimated that over as 300,000 people have been killed in Darfur. Read more

Syrian opposition activists and a war monitor say five people died and 21 were wounded on Sunday as the government continued its air campaign against the region.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, says two of the dead were members of the same family.

The day before, an airstrike hit a busy market killing 11 people.

The weekend's deaths add to the fast-growing list of victims. By last Friday over 100 people had been reported dead in the previous 10 days. About a quarter of those were children.

UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet blamed the attacks in rebel-held areas on the government and its allies.

But the attacks were met with "apparent international indifference" she said.

Syria and its ally Russia have both denied targeting civilians in air strikes in the Idlib region.

Like the opposition activists and the war monitor, Michelle Bachelet also blames the attacks on the Syrian government and its allies.

Bachelet is also critical of the "failure of leadership by the world's most powerful nations".

The rising death toll in the north-western province of Idlib had been met with a "collective shrug" and the conflict had fallen off the international radar. In the meantime the UN Security Council was paralysed, she says.

She says in her view the civilian targets were unlikely to have been accidental and warned that those carrying out the attacks could be charged with war crimes.

"Intentional attacks against civilians are war crimes, and those who have ordered them or carried them out are criminally responsible for their actions," she says.

Source

• RNZ News
• Starts Stripes
• Image: Politico

Last August the United Nations (UN) found actions taken by the Saudi- and UAE-led coalition in Yemen might amount to war crimes. They include rape, torture and using child soldiers as young as eight.

Save the Children wants an immediate ban of Australian defence export licenses to Saudi Arabia and other parties to the Yemen conflict, as the Australian government has been underwriting weapons purchases.

These purchases include providing tens of millions of dollars to Electro Optic Systems (EOS), which has designed a remotely operated vehicle-mounted platform.

The platform holds cannons, machine guns and missile launchers.

Australian Defence officials have confirmed the government spent taxpayer funds to support developing weapons systems.

Save the Children Director of Policy and International Programs Mat Tinkler is concerned about Australia's weapons' exports.

"Australia is becoming increasingly isolated in our support for the Saudi-led coalition in this way," said Mr Tinkler.

"The world over, nations have taken steps to end arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE in light of the UN's finding of possible war crimes".

The Australian Government announced in January 2018 its ambition to become a top 10 defence exporter in the world.

The Australian Department of Defence's Senate Estimates confirm the government had granted export permits to an Australian company that sold 500 weapons mounting systems to Saudi Arabia.

Tinkler says the fact that Australia is "still exporting defence equipment to Saudi Arabia and the UAE raises serious questions about what role we're playing in prolonging this war, in prolonging the suffering of children in Yemen.

"Many Australians would be rightly be shocked to learn that Australia could potentially be contributing to the world's worst humanitarian crisis."

Australian news outlet, ABC, claims it has seen confidential EOS board minutes which describe signing a Letter of Intent for the sale of 500 remote weapons systems units destined for the Saudi Ministry of Interior.

Following the ABC's report, Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne told a Senate Estimates hearing that a ban on the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia was under review.

Source

• Save the Children
• ABC
• Image: www.alarby.co.uk

Malcolm Ranjith, the archbishop of Colombo, said he was urging President Mahinda Rajapakse and the main ethnic Tamil party to hammer out a political settlement or risk an international probe.

"Foreigners should not tell us what to do... We are not a pack of fools," the cardinal said. "But if we do not resolve these issues, then we open ourselves to foreign intervention."

Sri Lanka has resisted international calls to investigate allegations that up to 40,000 ethnic Tamil civilians were killed by security forces in the final months of fighting in 2009.

At a Commonwealth summit hosted by Colombo last month, Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron warned that he would push for an international inquiry under the auspices of the UN unless Sri Lanka ensures accountability by March.

In a pastoral letter, the Church warned that failure on the part of Colombo to ensure accountability for alleged war crimes could trigger international investigations that will be a "serious threat to the sovereignty of the country".

Christians are a small minority in the mainly Buddhist country, but the Catholic Church wields considerable influence over the government and Ranjith is regarded as close to Rajapakse.

Since the 37-year separatist war ended in May 2009, there have been no attacks blamed on the defeated Tamil Tiger guerrillas who fought for independence for the island's ethnic Tamil minority.

The cardinal said the majority Sinhalese and Tamils should ensure reconciliation and politicians on both sides should be flexible and hammer out a political power sharing deal.

Source

AFP/UCA News
Image: Wikimedia Commons