RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-in-central-america-again-1531074911

Sometimes it seems that Central America is unwilling or unable to make the connection between strong institutions and a free and just society. The privation in the northern triangle—Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador—that has sent thousands of migrants to the U.S. border in search of work and a better life is ultimately the result of failed institutions.

The bloody upheaval in Nicaragua is another case in point. Since April 19 more than 300 people have been killed while protesting against strongman Daniel Ortega, according to local human-rights groups. The U.S. Treasury last week imposed sanctions on three Ortega henchmen—the national police commissioner and a Sandinista Youth official for human-rights violations, and the head of Nicaragua’s state-owned oil company for corruption.

Central America is strategically important to enemies of the U.S., and Russia’s role is particularly notable. It has a large and secretive satellite compound at the edge of the Nejapa lagoon on the outskirts of Managua, and its Interior Ministry has a large “police training center” in the capital’s Las Colinas neighborhood. The Soviet Union was an Ortega ally in the 1980s, and Russia today has every incentive to help him prosper as a dictator.

Nicaragua hasn’t had a fair, transparent national vote since the one that brought Mr. Ortega to power in 2006. He and his unpopular wife Rosario Murillo, now Nicaragua’s richest couple, are often called “the new Somozas,” a reference to the ruling family Mr. Ortega’s Sandinista movement removed in 1979.

When it’s all over except for carting away the dead, as in Venezuela, U.S. diplomats and legislators are good at tsk-tsking abuses of power. But when something can still be done about it, they are mostly AWOL and sometimes complicit. Witness U.S. funding of the U.N.’s International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12645/christians-genocide-nigeria

This brings the death toll of Christians to more than 6,000 since the start of 2018.
“The Islamists of northern Nigeria seem determined to turn Nigeria into an Islamic Sultanate and replace Liberal Democracy with Sharia as the National Ideology. The object of course, is to supplant the Constitution with Sharia as the source of legislation.” — National Christian Elders Forum, a wing of the Christian Association of Nigeria.
The Nigerian government and the international community, however, have from the start done little to address the situation. This lack of participation is not surprising: they cannot even acknowledge its roots, namely, the intolerant ideology of jihad.

In what the Christian Association of Nigeria is calling a “pure genocide,” 238 more Christians were killed and churches desecrated by Muslims last week in the west African nation. This brings the death toll of Christians to more than 6,000 since the start of 2018.

According to a joint statement by the Christian Association, an umbrella group of various Christian denominations, “There is no doubt that the sole purpose of these attacks is aimed at ethnic cleansing, land grabbing and forceful ejection of the Christian natives from their ancestral land and heritage.”

The statement condemned the recent attacks, “where over 200 persons were brutally killed and our churches destroyed without any intervention from security agencies in spite of several distress calls made to them.”

The statement adds that the majority of those 6,000 Christians massacred this year were “mostly children, women and the aged… What is happening in … Nigeria is pure genocide and must be stopped immediately.”

The details of the murder of these thousands, though seldom reported, are often grisly; many were either hacked to death or beheaded with machetes; others were burned alive (including inside locked churches or homes); and women are often sexually assaulted or raped before being slaughtered.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12660/iran-khuzestan-paradise

At the time no one could imagine that the dreams we all had for our beloved Khuzestan would become a nightmare. But it has, thanks to four decades of misrule, incompetence, corruption and sheer brutality by the Khomeinist regime.

When he seized power, Khomeini said in a notorious speech that the Shah had offered Iranians paradise in this world to deprive them of paradise in the next world, boasting that his Islamic Republic will provide both.

Naturally, we don’t know about the next world; but in this world the ayatollah turned a corner of paradise that was Khuzestan into a veritable hell.

In the late 1960s when the concept of “development” and “economic take-off” was all the rage in academic and media circles, many experts insisted that the so-called “developing nations” needed to showcase at least part of their territory as a model for progress and an inspiration for modernization.

Being one of those so-called “developing nations” Iran, under the Shah, chose its southwestern province Khuzestan as that showcase.

The choice wasn’t difficult. For, Khuzestan was a resource-rich province and already dotted with some of the modern infrastructures that other provinces had to wait a decade or more to acquire. Thanks to the oil industry, Khuzestan was the first province to have a modern electricity generating system and piped water in most of its cities, at least 20 years before the capital Tehran did. The province was also the hub of Iran’s sole railway network, the famous Trans-Iranian which connected it to the Caspian Sea via Tehran.