Category World News

When we prevent or put an end to genocide, we honour the victims of past genocides and, in doing so, keep their memory alive. We draw a clear line between reasonable human behaviour and our capacity to inflict unimaginable violence on others. In doing so, we help ensure the suffering of the past is not repeated.

This is why it is painful for survivors of genocide, and those who have inherited the trauma from their parents and grandparents, to witness the atrocities currently being committed by the State of Israel against the Palestinian population. Naturally, one grieves for the tens of thousands of innocent people, including children, slaughtered in Gaza. But one also feels betrayed, because the repetition of genocidal violence once again dishonours the memories of loved ones lost long ago.

We write this column together because the horrors of genocide still reverberate within us every day: Jill’s father, Gene, was a prisoner at Auschwitz in 1944 at the age of 16, and Damir was a child in Bosnia during the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the 1990s. We have both lost dozens of family members, who vanished in gas chambers or across multiple mass graves.

How bystanders witness atrocity has changed over the generations. For Gene, it was the people in his hometown in Hungary who walked by while Jews were being mistreated, and the teachers who stood by when a Hungarian Nazi, invited to speak at his high school, shouted that Jews were the cause of all of Europe’s problems. One of those same teachers helped the Hungarian police identify the Jews in town so that they could be deported. Other townspeople watched through their curtains as the Jews were marched away.

In Bosnia in 1992, villagers saw the machinery of death at work as mass graves were dug, smelled the stench of decomposing bodies, and said nothing. Neighbours peeked between the curtains of their windows, but they remained silent. Europe watched the siege of Damir’s hometown, Sarajevo, on live television for 1,425 days straight. Fifteen hundred children were killed. Fifteen thousand children were wounded. And in 1995, in Srebrenica, which was declared a “safe area” under United Nations protection, the world watched as 8,000 men and boys were separated from their families in front of UN soldiers and systematically murdered over a weekend.

The ultimate betrayal of genocide is not only committed by those who do the killing, but by those who avert their eyes. Genocide requires not only perpetrators but also bystanders. The Bosnian genocide played out on the evening news, and so bystanders became global witnesses in the millions.

Today, social media allows us to hear from and communicate with victims as a genocide occurs. Imagine if Gene could have posted to anyone who would listen about the slave labour, the starvation rations, and his terror of the daily selections, where anyone could be chosen to be sent to the gas chambers. Or if 10-year-old Damir could have posted about his fear of death in the basement of his apartment block in Sarajevo, the terrifying sound a mortar shell makes on impact, and how easily a bomb shreds human flesh and bone.

Perhaps we could also imagine Damir reposting a video his 12-year-old cousin Ibrahim made of his parents and 10-year-old brother Omer as they fled their burning village, only to be intercepted by the Serbs in the mountains of southern Bosnia. The video would abruptly end as they were captured. Ibrahim and Omer were murdered with their family, their bones still scattered across separate unmarked mass graves.

Two years ago, we would have thought that such personal communications, received by millions, would have put an end to the suffering. We would have thought that it was the lack of visibility, the lack of personal connection, and the lack of detail about human suffering that allowed genocide to happen – that made it possible to stand by.

Did we have too much faith in humanity? The test is now. During the Holocaust, there were people who intervened to save lives. When Gene’s family was marched through town, he saw a different schoolteacher standing in sorrow on his front porch, tipping his hat in respect. After several months of starving in a slave labour camp, Gene was assigned to work with a German civilian engineer who fed him food stolen from the SS dining room. Bosnia was no different. Good people did brave things. Some could not bring themselves to execute their victims; they lowered their weapons and walked away. Damir’s friend was saved by a Serb neighbour who risked his life to smuggle her family out of a notorious concentration camp in eastern Bosnia, where they had been tortured for 17 months. Decades later, this friend named her baby after her Serb rescuer.

In 2000, shortly after he arrived in Australia as a refugee, Damir was walking on the campus of La Trobe University, where he was studying. Something caught his attention among the layers of posters glued to a pillar. Through slow excavation, he uncovered the words “Silence is Consent” and discovered a poster from 1993, calling for a Bourke Street protest against the killing in Bosnia. This relic of activism and resistance showed Damir that, while he and his family were struggling to stay alive, people on the other side of the world were trying to help.

Perhaps the weekly protests in Melbourne and around the world in support of Gaza send a similar message of solidarity. And now the Sumud flotilla is on its way to Gaza to do more than protest, but to intervene. They may not succeed in getting aid to those in need, but will others take their place? Will we form an endless line of ordinary people ready to sacrifice to bring an end to genocide – bystanders no more?

There are no curtains to hide behind. The victims are on our screens, in our homes, pleading for us to act. And the choice to act, or not to act, lies with us all.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was found guilty on Thursday of criminal conspiracy following a trial in which he was accused of accepting millions of euros in illegal payments from the late Libyan ruler, Muammar Gaddafi, between 2005 and 2007.

The Paris Criminal Court sentenced him to five years in prison: it is the first time a former French president has received a prison sentence.

Sarkozy, 70, was found not guilty of other charges, including illegal campaign financing and passive corruption.

Sarkozy has always denied all the charges. He claims the charges against him were politically motivated by Gaddafi’s inner circle in revenge for his backing of the antigovernment uprising in Libya in 2011.

Here is what we know.

Who is Nicolas Sarkozy?

Sarkozy is the right-wing, former president of France, who served from 2007 until 2012. In 2017, Sarkozy retired from active politics.

From 2004 to 2007, he was the leader of the liberal-conservative Republicans party, then called the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP). During that time, he was also minister of the interior in the government of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin under President Jacques Chirac.

He won the 2007 presidential election with 53 percent of the vote, beating Segolene Royal of the Socialist Party (PS).

He married model and singer Carla Bruni in 2008 following a widely publicised courtship while he was president.

Since the end of his presidential term, Sarkozy has remained an influential figurehead for the political right in France. However, he has faced a litany of legal troubles, including several trials relating to various corruption charges and two convictions, and was stripped of France’s highest award, the Legion of Honour, this year.

What was Sarkozy accused of?

In his latest trial, which began in January this year, French prosecutors claimed that when he was interior minister, Sarkozy made a corrupt agreement to support Gaddafi’s government on the international stage in return for financing worth millions of euros to help pay for his presidential campaign.

The agreement was alleged to have been carried out via a network of Libyan spies, a convicted terrorist, arms dealers and millions of euros shipped to Paris in suitcases.

Overall, the charges he faced in his trial, which came after a 10-year anticorruption probe, were:

• Concealing the embezzlement of public funds.
• Passive corruption.
• Illegal campaign financing.
• Criminal conspiracy with a view to committing a crime.

Besides Sarkozy, there were 11 other defendants, including the late French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine; Claude Gueant, a former close aide of Sarkozy; Eric Woerth, Sarkozy’s former head of campaign financing; and Brice Hortefeux, a former minister.

Takieddine fled to Lebanon in June 2020 after a French court sentenced him to five years in jail in a separate corruption case. He died earlier this week, just two days before the verdict.

What has Sarkozy been found guilty of?

The Paris court found Sarkozy guilty of criminal conspiracy between 2005 and 2007, but acquitted him of the other charges. Sarkozy has presidential immunity against prosecution for actions after he became president in 2007.

The judge stated there was no evidence that Sarkozy struck a deal with Gaddafi or that funds sent from Libya ended up in Sarkozy’s campaign, even though the timing aligned and the money’s routes were “very opaque”.

However, she found Sarkozy guilty of criminal conspiracy for allowing close aides to contact Libyan individuals in an attempt to secure campaign financing.

How did the evidence against Sarkozy come out?

The allegations first came to light in 2011 when a Libyan news agency reported that the Gaddafi government had provided financing to Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign.

In 2014, news channel France 24 reported that Gaddafi had said, “Sarkozy is mentally deficient … It’s thanks to me that he became president … We gave him the funds that allowed him to win,” during a recorded interview with another French broadcaster, France 3 TV.

Al Jazeera was not able to verify these claims.

The same year, Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, told Euronews that Gaddafi’s government had provided campaign funding to Sarkozy. He said: “The first thing we ask of this clown is that he return the money to the Libyan people, but he let us down.”

In 2012, Mediapart, a French online news outlet, published a note reportedly from the Libyan secret services from December 2006. The note allegedly mentioned Gaddafi’s agreement to provide Sarkozy with 50 million euros ($52m at current exchange rates) for campaign financing. Sarkozy claimed the document was fake.

In 2016, French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine, a co-defendant accused of acting as a “middle man” but who has since died, told Mediapart that he had delivered 5 million euros ($5.2m) in cash from Libya to Sarkozy and his former chief of staff. However, Takieddine retracted this statement in 2020, the year he fled to Lebanon.

What was Sarkozy’s relationship with Gaddafi?

In 2007, Sarkozy welcomed Gaddafi to the Elysee Palace in Paris. But when pro-democracy protests erupted during the Arab Spring in 2011, Sarkozy was among the first Western leaders to advocate for military intervention in Libya.

Gaddafi was killed by opposition forces supported by NATO in 2011, ending his four-decade rule.

How has Sarkozy reacted to this week’s verdict?

On Thursday, Sarkozy claimed again that he is innocent and will appeal the five-year prison sentence, which could take immediate effect.

The judge stated that Sarkozy will have only a brief period to settle his affairs before prosecutors require him to report to prison, which will likely be within a month.

“If they absolutely want me to sleep in jail, I will sleep in jail, but with my head held high,” Sarkozy said to reporters after the ruling was announced.

What else has Sarkozy been accused of?

In October 2023, French prosecutors charged Sarkozy with witness tampering in relation to this case. His wife, the model and singer Carla Bruni, was charged with hiding evidence related to the same case the following year.

Sarkozy has also been convicted in two other legal cases.

In December last year, the highest court in France, the Court of Cassation, upheld a 2021 conviction against Sarkozy for bribery and “influence peddling”. He was sentenced to one year of house arrest and was ordered to wear an electronic bracelet over that period. This has since been removed. Sarkozy has said he would bring this case to the European Court of Human Rights. This case was revealed through a wiretapped phone call during the Libya financing investigation.

Israel now controls more territory in the Palestinian territories than ever, despite the recognition of the State of Palestine. Virginia Pietromarchi from Al Jazeera examines the reasons why acknowledging this fact may not be as important as it may be on the ground.

Before Israel’s war, Amira Mohamed Mousaan, a Palestinian mother who used to organize weddings in Gaza, her home, her livelihood, and her mental health were all raped by Nelson Mandela’s grandson Nkosi Zwelivelile Mandela.