by SAMIR BEHARIC & EMINA ZOLETIC

Their refusal to speak out undermines scholarly integrity and the field of genocide studies.

This year marks three decades since the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which an estimated 100,000 people lost their lives. The war culminated in the Srebrenica genocide in July 1995, in which the Bosnian Serb forces, led by General Ratko Mladi?, known as the “Butcher of Bosnia”, massacred more than 8,000 men and boys in a United Nations-designated “safe area”.

In the following decades, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia heard hundreds of witnesses and sentenced dozens of high-ranking Bosnian Serb political and military leaders, including those convicted of genocide. Meanwhile, the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina and foreign donors put significant funds into the study, victim recovery and remembrance of the genocide.

When the genocide in Gaza began, many Bosnians who survived the 1992-1995 war saw striking parallels between their own experiences and the suffering of Palestinians. Many took to the streets and spoke out against the genocidal war in Palestine.

However, many Bosnian intellectuals, especially those researching war crimes and genocide, have remained silent. Their refusal to speak out harms not just efforts to deliver justice for Gaza but also undermines the field of genocide studies.

Voices of conscience

Before we explore why Gaza has become such a taboo topic for Bosnian genocide scholars, it is important to point out that not all have remained silent. A relatively small group of Bosnian scholars who are not only academics but also active advocates for Palestine and human rights have chosen to speak up. Advertisement

University professors and researchers, such as Lejla Kreševljakovi?, Sanela ?eki? Baši?, Gorana Mlinarevi?, Jasna Fetahovi?, and Sanela Kapetanovi? have underscored that there is moral responsibility not to remain silent. They have led by example, participating in protests and speaking out in public.

Belma Buljubaši?, a professor at the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Sarajevo, has criticised European and other political leaders who express sympathy for Srebrenica while justifying Israel’s actions in Gaza as acts of “self-defence”. Such double standards, she has argued, reveal a troubling pragmatism that undermines both solidarity and accountability.

In a recent interview, Edina Be?irevi?, a genocide scholar at the University of Sarajevo’s Faculty of Criminalistics, Criminology and Security Studies, said the genocide in Gaza clearly mirrors the dynamics seen in Srebrenica, defined by dehumanisation, ideological mobilisation and international complicity.

Ahmet Alibaši?, the director of the Center for Advanced Studies and professor at the Faculty of Islamic Studies at the University of Sarajevo, has also been outspoken. Last year, he co-organised a seminar called From the Balkans to Gaza: A Critical Analysis of Genocide, which examined contemporary dynamics of mass violence through a “comparison between the Srebrenica genocide, the Sarajevo siege and the unfolding genocide in Gaza”.

Nidžara Ahmetaševi?, a Sarajevo-based journalist and media scholar, has also not hesitated to draw parallels between Gaza and the experiences of Bosnian survivors from besieged Sarajevo and Srebrenica.

Al Jazeera for more

by MAWADDA ISKANDAR

Gold pulled from Sudan’s war zones moves along hidden routes – passed between smugglers, militias, and middlemen – before reaching Dubai, where it is converted into money and influence. This trade, rooted in state collapse and empowered by armed groups, now binds the Persian Gulf to some of Africa’s most fragile fronts.

Before the guns piled up on the blood-soaked sands of Darfur, the story began in mid-2012 with three young men scanning the earth near Jeli using simple metal detectors. A faint signal drew them westward for 20 kilometers, until they stood at the foot of Jebel Amer – a mountain that would later be known as Sudan’s “Mountain of Gold.”

Their find proved fateful. Within days, word raced across the region: dirt roads thickened with travelers, tents and pumps multiplied across the hills, and thousands of prospectors poured in. What started as a lucky strike quickly altered Darfur’s balance, unleashing rival claims, sudden fortunes, and the violence that shadowed them.

The mountain that ignited Darfur

Jebel Amer sits in the Al-Sarif locality north of El-Fasher in North Darfur. It produces an estimated 50 tonnes of gold each year – one of the largest deposits on the continent – and holds other minerals, including iron, aluminium, and platinum. 

After South Sudan’s secession in 2011 stripped Khartoum of roughly three-quarters of its oil revenue, the government pushed citizens toward artisanal mining as an economic lifeline. Instead, the rush for gold deepened instability and drew armed groups into an already-fractured region.

When major deposits surfaced in April 2012, the area became a magnet for wealth and influence – and a battlefield. Janjaweed militias moved to seize the mines, displacing local communities and igniting conflict.

By the end of the year, violence had spread across the region, and in January 2013, open fighting killed hundreds while mine shafts collapsed on dozens of workers. Truces came and went, but each collapse and clash made clear that the conflict was no longer just a tribal one but a struggle for control of one of Sudan’s most valuable assets.

By 2017, almost complete control of Jebel Amer had been settled in the hands of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) through the Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo-owned Al Junaid Holding Company, and gold became their main source of financial power, directly linked to their ability to finance their military activities and control the area.

The gold did not stop there. Its shine carried far beyond Sudan, drawing the interest of the UAE, whose ambitions in Africa were rising. From Darfur, the metal moved along smuggling routes, through commercial flights, and via corporate parcels into Dubai’s markets and refineries – feeding a network in which Sudan’s conflict became someone else’s gain.

Sudan: The Arab world’s gold giant

Sudan is the largest Arab gold producer, with more than 40,000 exploration sites and 60 refining companies spread across 13 states, with its focus on the Nile, the North, and the Red Sea. 

The UAE quickly became Sudan’s primary export destination. Deals flowed through companies linked to Dagalo (Hemedti) and his relatives, gold moved by land and air into Dubai, and the RSF used the profits to procure weapons.

Global Witness estimates that Sudan exports around $16 billion in gold to the UAE each year. Official production in 2024 reached 64 tonnes, yet only 31 tonnes were recorded as legal exports. Nearly half simply vanished into parallel channels.

Export documents reveal the involvement of Emirati firms such as Kaloti, which purchased 57 tonnes from Sudan in 2012 – far above the country’s official output. In 2018, Al Junaid Group, a business front of the RSF, partnered with Dubai-based Rosella, complete with accounts at First Abu Dhabi Bank.

When war erupted in 2023, the gold trade shifted from an economic pillar to a war chest. The US sanctioned 11 companies – many registered in the UAE – for facilitating RSF financing through gold.

The RSF’s gold highways to Dubai

Before the war expanded, Darfur’s gold traveled quietly from Jebel Amer to Chad via land, then onward to Dubai through commercial shipments and corporate parcels, becoming part of a smuggling network linking the conflict’s mines to Persian Gulf markets. The RSF rapidly became the dominant player in this network, relying on front companies, routes that stretched through Chad, South Sudan, Libya, and new routes to Egypt.

The Chadian corridor remains the most lucrative: gold leaves Jebel Amer and Sango via secret pathways, crosses into N’Djamena, and is then exported as “Chadian” gold. Al Junaid’s front companies, along with previously documented ties to Dubai-based firms, operate at the heart of this system.

After Khartoum airport was destroyed and Port Sudan slipped beyond RSF control, the militia adopted new tactics. Motorcycles ferry gold across borders. Air shipments depart from Nyala in containers labeled as agricultural goods and livestock. Night flights – less than 90 minutes long – avoid detection.

A UN panel of experts exposed an African logistical chain linking gold shipments and weapons deliveries: arms arriving from Um Girass airport, traveling overland to RSF positions, supported by money raised from the sale of Sudanese gold in Dubai. An integrated war economy now spans from Darfur’s mines to Emirati refineries.

Abu Dhabi’s continental appetite

Talk of the UAE’s ambitions in Africa starts with Sudan, the continent’s third-largest gold producer and the second-largest proven reserve of about 1,550 tonnes. But Sudan is not an isolated case, as the picture extends to the entire continent. 

The Cradle for more

by ALIA CHUGHTAI

It’s a day to give thanks. But for millions of Indigenous Americans, it also serves as a reminder of loss.

Across the United States, November is synonymous with preparations for Thanksgiving. Classrooms and public areas are decorated with warm-, earthy-toned cutouts of turkeys; English settlers – the Pilgrims, as they are known – who made a new home in a country new to them; and “Indians” with colourful feather headdresses and vests made of construction paper.

Families come together from all over the country for a feast. And some arguments.

America’s pop culture dominance has meant that songs and movies have introduced these cultural staples to the rest of the world, even among those who don’t celebrate Thanksgiving or fully understand it.

But to millions of Indigenous Americans, the story of Thanksgiving is also closely intertwined with their history of invasion, occupation, displacement, death and devastation that their communities faced as waves of settlers arrived and took over what is today the US.

Here’s a look at what the historical journey of the US has meant to its Native American communities through maps showing where they once lived, how they had to move and the reservations they are now largely ghettoised in.

When did Thanksgiving become a national holiday?

In 1863, a proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln turned the last Thursday of every November into a national holiday for giving thanks.

This occurred in the middle of the Civil War in the United States between the Union, or northern part of the country, against the Confederacy, the southern states that wanted to preserve a system of slavery. The Civil War spanned from 1861 to 1865, and nearly 700,000 soldiers were killed.

The proclamation for the national holiday came about after a campaign led by Sarah Hale, a poet, editor and activist, that began in 1846. She’s most commonly known as the author of Mary Had a Little Lamb.

But long before Lincoln’s proclamation or even Hale’s campaign, the tradition that was formalised as Thanksgiving was common in the original settler communities of New England.

When and where was the first Thanksgiving?

In 1606, England’s King James I divided the east coast of what is now the US into the London Company, which later became the Virginia Company of London, and the Plymouth Company. Both were joint-stock trading companies, much like the British East India Company, which was set up in India in 1608.

This was still more than a century and a half before the US was born.

The goals of these British trading companies were to find gold, search for trade routes and compete with other European powers.

The first settlement by the English in the New World was in 1607 when the Jamestown colony was established on the banks of the James River in present day Virginia. This was the ancestral home of the Powhatan Indigenous people.

AlJazeera for more

Trump’s Gaza plan is in danger of going the way of the Oslo Accords, argues US journalist Chris Hedges: Never to be implemented beyond the first phase.

Hedges tells host Steve Clemons that there are no guarantees that the US-brokered deal “will actually thwart the genocidal project that Israel is intending to carry out in Gaza and … the West Bank”.

While a parade of US officials visited Israel to signify commitment to the ceasefire, Israel continued to restrict food and medicine to millions of Palestinians, and Israeli forces continued to occupy more than half of the Gaza Strip.

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by JINOY JOSE P.

Dear reader,

“This is so cool, like a Guy Ritchie film,” the boy told me.

“You sure? The whole movie?” I asked.

“Yeah, look at how it begins; the long shots, camera movements, the story with many ‘sides’, the many perspectives; it’s so Ritchie.” The 15-year-old was trying to explain a film he watched that week, and it was an unusual film for his age. It was Amma Ariyan, Malayalam cinema’s cult avant-garde film that had reminded him of modern pop cinema.

This was last year. The boy, an anime addict and Netflix native, fluent in Marvel timelines and Percy Jackson arcs, was decoding a black-and-white film made four decades ago by a director who despised categories. He saw in John Abraham’s restless, orderless frames the same energy he found in Ritchie’s slick narratives. That was a surprise for me. And what he said next stayed with me: “Everyone assumes we won’t like it.”

That sentence told me something about how we treat what’s often dismissed as “award cinema”, “art cinema”, or, in the Indian pejorative, budhijeevi cinema. Many assume it belongs to the elite, to scholars and festival audiences. But “difficult” cinema isn’t an indulgence of the few; it’s a cultural necessity. It moulds imagination in ways that commercial cinema later inherits, distils, and distributes.

November 4 ?is the centenary of Ritwik Ghatak, one of cinema’s most intense visionaries. His work—tragic, rough, political, lyrical—was never made for comfort. It was meant to puncture the complacency of viewing itself. Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha turned personal grief and the trauma of Partition into poetic fury. John Abraham, his student, translated that spiritinto a South Indianidiom where collective anguish met existential playfulness. These films rejected smoothness. They demanded time, silence, thought, and patience. They were difficult because they were honest, raw.

To mark Ghatak’s centenary, Frontline released a beautifully curated e-book—essays and reflections from critics and filmmakers revisiting the master through today’s lens. While preparing its promotion, a younger friend asked, genuinely, “Do people care these days about such ‘difficult’ cinema? Why do they even exist anymore?” It’s a fair question in an age splintered by platforms, when we scroll faster than we breathe. Why care about slow, ambiguous films that refuse instant gratification?

The phrase “difficult cinema” hides an irony. What makes such films difficult is confrontation, not comprehension. They ask viewers to pause, to think and feel without tidy resolution. Bergman’s Persona, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes, Adoor’s Elippathayam—all unfold like long meditations. They invite you to wrestle with your own interiority. Their beauty lies in what they withhold.

Take Tarkovsky. His films are long and abstract, not for difficulty’s sake, but because they demand moral patience. In Solaris, when the planet reflects the buried guilt of scientists, we watch the fall of rational man before memory and time. In Kiarostami’s Close-Up, a man impersonates a filmmaker to find meaning in a world that ignores him—a blend of documentary, fiction, and plea for recognition. These works slow us to the pace of consciousness itself.

Frontline for more

by WALDEN BELLO

Trump’s grand strategy is America’s reindustrialization.

Last week may well go down as the week of humiliation for us in the Asia Pacific. At the beginning of the week, Trump landed in Kuala Lumpur to attend the ASEAN Leaders’ Summit, where he got a special ceremony to mark his allegedly successful brokering of the peace deal between Thailand and Cambodia, the heavy lifting of which was actually done by Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim of Malaysia, who gracefully yielded center stage to the egomaniac. Trump did not even bother to wait for the summit to end but flew on to Japan, with Prime Minister Hun Manet’s sweet promise ringing his ears that Cambodia will nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In Japan, Trump got a royal welcome from Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, a disciple of the late Shinzo Abe, the reactionary ideologue who was also Trump’s golf buddy. Takaichi, Japan’s first female top leader, thought that a fitting gift for Trump was the club the assassinated Abe used to put the ball into the hole. Trump also notched another promise of a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize from her.

Takaichi was, however, upstaged by Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, who presented Trump with a replica of a golden crown from the Silla dynasty that was discovered in a royal tomb in Gyeongju. I don’t know if this was fake news, but I find entirely consistent with Trump’s personality the report that upon being presented with the crown, he said to Lee, “Thanks, but I prefer the original.”

And what did these leaders get for their brazen displays of vassalage to King Donald? None of the ASEAN governments got any reduction from the punitive tariffs of 19 percent imposed on their exports to the United States imposed by Trump. Nor did Korea and Japan get any relief from the 15 percent levied on their exports. Indeed, in addition to meekly accepting the tariffs, they also had to make commitments to make hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the United States.

What Trump is up to is the question that has kept the world at the edge of its seat since he began his second term ten months ago. Trump is the epitome of unpredictability, but if you impose the zigzag pattern of his moves on what statisticians call a scatterplot, you will see that there is a trend line that fits the hypothesis of the imposition of a new paradigm in the U.S. relationship to the world. There is a coherence to most of Trump’s ostensibly madcap moves.

Trump’s “Grand Strategy:” A Smoke and Mirrors Act

What are the main elements of Trump’s “grand strategy”?

Trump definitely represents a sharp break from the eight decades-long U.S. imperial strategy of liberal containment, where Washington met perceived challenges to U.S. hegemony wherever they appeared with a combination of military intervention, political alliances, and a multilateral regime that favored its interests. Trump represents that sector of the right that sees the United States as overextended economically, politically, and militarily, and believes that this is one of the key causes of its decline. This isolationism is the dominant one in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” base.

He encourages a perspective of victimhood that sees both enemies and allies as abusing American generosity and regards previous U.S. administrations as being suckers for tolerating this abuse, the consequences of which fell on the American people. Trump sees China as the worst offender when it comes to taking advantage of the United States, but it is not the only one. Punitive tariffs on practically all countries in the world are his way of rectifying what he sees as a fundamental injustice.

He doesn’t care about multilateralism and the institutions that the US erected to legitimize its hegemony, notably the World Trade Organization, World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He wants to deal with each country on a bilateral basis, though this is only bilateral in name since the reality is unilateral imposition of Trump’s wishes on the weaker partner in military and economic negotiations. From Trump’s point of view, there are no definitive agreements, only tentative ones that are subject to change in their terms if the other party displeases Trump, a lesson Canada learned the hard way when the government of the province of Ontario aired an ad featuring Ronald Reagan saying tariffs hurt every American. Trump did not like this and said he was adding a 10 percent increase to the 35 percent tariffs he had already imposed on Ottawa!

As for addressing planetary problems like climate change, forget it. The United States has pulled out of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and will boycott the climate summit in Belem, Brazil, this month, just as it pulled out of the fourth Financing for Development conference in Sevilla, Spain, in late June and early July this year.

FPIF for more

by MAJD ASADI

When a regime reaches a stage where its terror is overt, blatant and without masks, it is a sign that it has exhausted itself

The following exchange, reported from an Israeli cabinet discussion on enforcing the so-called Yellow Line – a boundary inside Gaza marking areas Israel says it will control militarily – captures the mindset of those overseeing the genocide. 

Major General Tamir Yadai, deputy chief of staff of the Israeli army: “When we see an adult suspect, we shoot; a child with a donkey, we arrest.”

Itamar Ben-Gvir, minister of national security: “Why not shoot a child with a donkey?”

David “Dudi” Amsalem, minister of regional cooperation: “Who should we shoot first: the child or the donkey?”

That seemingly shocking conversation, held in a cabinet room where senior officials joked about shooting Palestinian children, stripping speaker and subject alike of their humanity, is not merely a slip of the tongue.

To justify Israel’s sustained violence, a racist mechanism is required to provide psychological and political legitimacy. The question itself is a representation of that racist ideology in its most brazen form – one that equates Palestinians with animals. 

Such language has been deployed since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, during which various leaders referred to Palestinians as “human animals“.

It is a window into the nadir of dehumanisation: a linguistic method of legitimising institutionalised violence that does not distinguish between person and security object, because the goal is “annihilation, expulsion and settlement”.

When ministers speak this way, they do not address a person with a story; they invoke a faceless image severed from story and place.

This is a process in which the person becomes a worthless object, and the power to dispossess becomes the highest moral authority. Language precedes the bullet, preparing the ground for total erasure. It is a conversation among those who only appear human.

The deputy chief of staff tries to frame such violence as bounded by “orders” and “law”, but those phrases are an attempt to lend artificial order to a system whose limits have long been breached. When ministers join in, the mask is completely torn off: the violence is not a deviation but an essential means for establishing an ideological vision.

Linguistic erasure

This dialogue is not disconnected from its context. It follows the murder of tens of thousands of children in Gaza, after months in which the very concept of “child” was omitted from Israeli military and public language.

MEE for more

by B. R. GOWANI

August 24, 1814

At the peak of the US and British War of 1812, on August 24, 1814, 4,000 British soldiers entered Washington to retaliate US troops attack on the Canadian city of York, Ontario, by looting valuables from the Capitol (houses US Congress), and putting it, and the Library of Congress on fire. Many precious things went into flame, including 3,000-volume collection. The war lasted until 1815.

The British soldiers’ next stop was the White House. They self-served dinner and wine and set on fire the President’s House (now called the White House). The interior and most of the exterior of the White House was destroyed. It was rebuilt by 1817.

President James Madison and other government officials had left the White House as they were aware of the approaching British troops. First Lady Dolley Madison left a little later. Madison had intentionally got the food prepared for the British because he was very confident that the attackers would be captured as prisoners of war. No such luck.

October 2025

After two hundred and eleven years, the White House was once again attacked — not wholly but partially. The East Wing of the White House, built in 1902 and substantially developed forty years later, was totally destroyed.

Look at the above photo1 you can see East Wing on center right side. Now check out photo2 and you see the East Wing missing.

Of course, the US has been at war since before its birth with the Indigenous people and, after its birth, with many countries of the world.

The Wikipedia has a long list of attacks against the US. But all attacks, except for two were retaliations, including the bombing of federal building in Oklahoma City, there were many weak responses by smaller weaker countries, against US policies where, tragically, many lives were lost.

The two exceptions are:

• The US Civil War (1861 – 1865)
• Intentional Israeli attack on US spy ship USS Liberty killing 34 US sailors and injuring 174. Israel was exonerated in the US. If Israel can get away with murdering US sailors, it is almost impossible to expect them to be held accountable for the genocide of Palestinians.

The third attack on the US happened in October 2025 when the East Wing was absolutely wrecked. But who did it?

I did a thorough research checking out newspapers, magazines, US government sites, general websites, but I failed to find any foreign or domestic involvement. After pondering many hours over this destruction, the conclusion I reached was- or I should say my gut feeling is: “It’s an insider’s job.” That is, someone inside the White House has done it. Who? That I can’t disclose because that will be a breach of confidentiality against my source.

Coincidentally, the reliable eastern diplomatic sources informed me the same thing: no outsiders (individual or country) were involved. To all of them, it seems the work of an insider.

There is a Hindi/Urdu line:

“my house’s heir, burned down my own house”

In the future, given their impeccable record, the Aga Khan Cultural Service should be given the task to restore the White House to its original state — if the new leaders so desire.

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by MELISSA AIT LOUNIS

Scientists in Indonesia have discovered the world’s oldest cave art, featuring a surprisingly ancient pig painting.

Scientists have just unearthed the world’s oldest known cave art on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. At 51,200 years old, the painting, depicting a pig alongside human figures, pushes back the timeline for when our ancestors first began to tell stories through art.

Discovered by an international team of Australian and Indonesian researchers, the artwork is both a breakthrough and a puzzle. It’s the earliest known instance of figurative cave art, predating earlier discoveries by over 5,000 years. What makes this find particularly significant is that it gives us a glimpse into the cognitive leap that allowed humans to communicate in increasingly complex ways.

A Peek into an Ancient Tale

Inside the Leang Karampuang cave, there’s a wild pig—standing, its mouth slightly open—and three human-like figures interacting with it. One of the human figures is holding a stick, seemingly close to the pig’s throat, while another stands with its head near the pig’s snout. The third figure, oddly enough, is upside down with its legs spread out, reaching for the pig’s head. According to Professor Adam Brumm from Griffith University, the painting is:

“the oldest known dated, evidenced—currently—of a rock art depiction of wildlife. But it can be superseded by an earlier claim, either in this part of the world or somewhere else in the not so distant future.”

When Did We Start Seeing Things Differently?

If this artwork is truly over 51,000 years old, it suggests that early humans were capable of far more sophisticated thinking than we previously assumed. The researchers behind aScience Advances study that dates and describes it point out that the painting shows humans and animals interacting, indicating that people were already conceptualizing relationships, actions, and possibly even narratives in their minds.

Dr. Henry Gee, a senior editor at Nature, the publication that featured the detailsn speculates that:

“Something seems to have happened around 50,000 years ago, shortly after which all other species of human, such as Neanderthals and the so-called Hobbit died out.” He added, “It is very romantic to think that at some point in that time something happened in the human brain, but I think it is more likely that there are even earlier examples of representational art”.

Sulawesi: Where Early Art Found Its Roots

As more discoveries emerge from Sulawesi, it’s becoming clear that Southeast Asia was playing a pivotal role in the development of human creativity. In fact, the island has yielded some of the oldest known hand stencils and even other animal paintings. But this most recent discovery takes it a step further, revealing a more intricate level of artistic sophistication.

As stated by Brumm, one of the researchers involved in the study, what sets this new discovery apart is its narrative structure.

Daily Galaxy for more