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	Deliberate attacks on schools or hospitals are war crimes by Reliefweb, Human Rights Watch, agencies   10 Jan. 2019   Thailand: Insurgents Bomb School, Attack Hospital - Separatists should immediately Cease Attacks on Civilians. (Human Rights Watch)   Separatist insurgents in Thailand’s southern border provinces targeted a school and a hospital in renewed attacks, Human Rights Watch said today. Deliberate attacks on civilian structures are war crimes.   On the morning of January 8, insurgents detonated a bomb outside Thairath Wittaya School 52 in Pattani province’s Yarang district, severely wounding a 12-year-old student, Nuriman Naesae, and a guard assigned to guard the school. The same day, insurgents detonated a car bomb in Songkhla province’s Thepa district, seriously wounding a police medic. Thai authorities alleged that insurgents were responsible for the attack.   “Insurgents in southern Thailand attack schools and medical clinics to maim and terrify Buddhist civilians, control the Muslim population, and discredit Thai authorities,” said Brad Adams, Asia director. “Whatever the rationale, targeting civilians is morally indefensible and a war crime.”   On December 28, 2018, insurgents stormed Kalisa Hospital in Narathiwat province’s Ra-Ngae district, and used it as a stronghold to attack a nearby government security post. Before retreating, the insurgents tied up a doctor and other hospital staff.   Since the outbreak of armed insurgency in January 2004, ethnic Malay Muslim insurgents affiliated with the Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN) have targeted numerous schools, killing and wounding students, teachers, and other education personnel. The insurgents consider school officials to be symbolic of the Thai Buddhist state’s occupation of Malay Muslim territory. They have frequently targeted security personnel assigned to provide students and teachers safe passage to and from school, or protecting the school grounds.   Public health services in the southern border provinces – where the number of doctors and nurses per capita is among the lowest in Thailand – have also been affected by the violence.   The Public Health Ministry has reported that more than 100 public health volunteers and hospital staff have been killed and injured since 2004, and at least 28 community health centers burned down or bombed.   Many community health centers have reduced their working hours and started closing their gates early to avoid attacks by insurgents after dark. Doctors have become less willing to visit patients outside hospitals, leaving public health work in the villages to paramedics and public health volunteers.   Human Rights Watch has condemned laws-of-war violations by the separatist insurgents in the southern border provinces. The laws of war, also known as international humanitarian law, prohibit attacks on civilians and civilian objects or attacks that fail to discriminate between combatants and civilians. Anyone who commits serious violations of the laws of war with criminal intent is responsible for war crimes.   There is no justification under international law for insurgents’ claims that attacks on civilians are lawful because the victims are part of the Thai Buddhist state or that Islamic law, as they interpret it, permits such attacks. Of the more than 6,000 people killed in the ongoing conflict since 2004, approximately 90 percent have been civilians in Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat, and Songkhla provinces.   At the same time, Thai government security forces and militias commit violations of the laws of war and international human rights law, Human Rights Watch said. Extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture cannot be justified as reprisals for insurgent attacks.   This situation has been exacerbated by an entrenched culture of impunity for abuses by officials in the southern border provinces. The government has yet to successfully prosecute any officials for crimes against ethnic Malay Muslims alleged to be involved in the insurgency.   Human rights defenders and lawyers have faced intimidation, threats, and criminal libel charges after alleging abuses by Thai security forces.   “Violence has disrupted the lives of ordinary people in southern Thailand in almost every way,” Adams said. “Both insurgents and government forces have cited unlawful attacks and lack of accountability to justify carrying out more abuses. This vicious cycle of atrocity and retaliation needs to stop.” http://bit.ly/2M521IU   Aug. 2018   Pakistan: Authorities need to better Protect Students, Teachers from Violence after surge in Militant Attacks on Schools - Reports Human Rights Watch   Alleged militants attacked and burned down at least 12 schools in Diamer district of Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan region early on August 3, 2018, Human Rights Watch said today. At least half were girls’ schools. No group has claimed responsibility for the attacks.   The Pakistani government should take urgent measures to make schools safer, and fairly prosecute those responsible for attacks against students, teachers, and schools.   “The devastating attacks on schools in Diamer highlight the dangers that many students and teachers in Pakistan face on a regular basis,” said Bede Sheppard, deputy children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “The government should promptly investigate and prosecute these attacks and ensure that children have a safe place to attend school.”   Pakistan faces significant education challenges, with an estimated 25 million children out of school. Militant violence has disrupted the education of hundreds of thousands of children, particularly girls. Militant Islamist groups, including the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, and their affiliates, attack schools and universities to foster intolerance and exclusion, target symbols of the government, and particularly to drive girls out of school.   Militants have previously targeted girls’ schools in Diamer district. In February 2004, attackers destroyed nine schools, eight of them for girls. Explosives hit two girls’ schools in December 2011.   The nongovernmental awareness campaign Alif Ailaan reported that Diamer is the lowest-ranked district in terms of quality of education in the Gilgit-Baltistan region, and is among the 10 lowest ranked in the country. Only 3,479 girls are among the 16,800 students enrolled in government schools in the district, which has 88 government schools for girls and 156 for boys.   After the Taliban took over large parts of the Swat Valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in 2007, it began a violent campaign against education for girls. Over 900 girls’ schools were forced to close and over 120,000 girls stopped attending school. About 8,000 female teachers were driven out of work. For many girls, the loss was permanent, and they were not able to return to school even after the army displaced the Taliban.   The Pakistani government says it does not collect specific data on attacks on schools and universities, or on deaths and injuries from such attacks. However, according to the Global Terrorism Database, there were 867 attacks on educational institutions in Pakistan from 2007 to 2015, resulting in 392 fatalities and 724 injuries. The Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack recorded at least 203 attacks on schools in Pakistan between 2013 and 2017.   The government’s failure to keep consistent and transparent national data about such attacks raises serious concerns about its ability to track repairs of damaged schools, identify trends that could help create measures to protect schools, or investigate and prosecute the people responsible, Human Rights Watch said.   The attacks on Malala Yousafzai, who later became a Nobel peace Prize laureate on October 9, 2012, and on the Army Public School in Peshawar on December 16, 2014, which killed at least 145 people, mostly students, directed international spotlight on the threat to education in Pakistan.   In some areas, government forces have used educational institutions, including both schools and college housing, as temporary or permanent barracks or military bases. When educational facilities are used for military purposes, it places them at increased risk of attack. The government should issue clear and public orders to Pakistan security forces to curtail the military use of schools.   Pakistan should develop a comprehensive policy for protecting students – especially girls – as well as teachers, schools, and universities from attack and military use, and involve all concerned ministry staff at central and local levels in carrying out this strategy, Human Rights Watch said.   Securing schools has been largely left to the provincial governments, whose efforts have been sporadic, varying across provinces with little attention to protecting girls’ education. In most cases, responsibility for enhancing and maintaining security has fallen to hard-pressed school authorities.   Pakistan’s federal government should cooperate with provincial and regional authorities to create a rapid response system for attacks on schools. Schools should quickly be repaired or rebuilt, with destroyed educational material replaced, so that children can return to school as soon as possible. Schools should operate in alternate sites during reconstruction, and students should have mental health support as needed.   Pakistan should join the 80 countries that have endorsed the Safe Schools Declaration, a non-binding political agreement opened for state support at an international conference in Oslo, Norway, in May 2015. Countries that endorse the Safe Schools Declaration pledge to restore access to education when schools are attacked and undertake measures to make it less likely that students, teachers, and schools will be attacked. They agree to deter such attacks by promising to investigate and prosecute crimes involving schools, and to minimize the use of schools for military purposes so they do not become targets for attack.   “The Pakistani government should do all it can to deter future attacks on education, beginning with improving school security and providing the public with reliable information on threats,” Sheppard said. “Attacks on education not only harm the students and families directly affected, but also have an incalculable long-term negative effect on Pakistani society.”   http://reliefweb.int/report/pakistan/pakistan-surge-militant-attacks-schools http://www.protectingeducation.org/news/80-states-have-now-joined-safe-schools-declaration Visit the related web page
	Peoples under Threat index by Minority Rights Group International   The threat of mass killing, genocide and other violence is rising in countries where governments are resorting to repressive measures to suffocate dissent, according to new data analysis by Minority Rights Group International (MRG) and the Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights.   The analysis, known as the Peoples under Threat index, seeks to identify those countries around the world that are most at risk of genocide, mass killing or systematic violent repression. This year''s index shows the threat level has particularly increased in countries where creeping authoritarianism and oppression of journalists and civil society continue to define government responses to political opposition.   ''This year''s survey underscores how repressive government responses are now key contributors to the risk of mass killing and other violence,'' said Claire Thomas, MRG''s Interim Executive Director.   ''Increasingly, risks are not only in failed states where governments are unable or unwilling to protect their populations, but also where governments use perceived threats as an excuse to crack down on specific groups as well as on civil society more generally.''   In Ethiopia, for example, the government has used violence to quell intensifying protests in the marginalized Oromia region. Security personnel continued to quash political opposition, killing more than 1,000 protestors during the course of the year and arresting tens of thousands of others. A state of emergency was announced in February, resulting in severe restrictions on freedom of expression and association. Arbitrary detention and torture remain pressing issues.   The threat level has also increased in Turkey, where Recep Tayyip Erdoğan consolidated control of the country amidst a mass purge of journalists, public officials and teachers, following the failed coup attempt in 2016. Turkish armed forces have repeatedly clashed with Kurdistan Workers'' Party (PKK) fighters, particularly in Diyarbakir governorate, leading to large-scale displacement and hundreds of civilian casualties, particularly affecting the country''s Kurdish community.   A similar pattern can be seen in Venezuela, which has also risen up the Peoples under Threat ranking, as the government under Nicolas Maduro has violently suppressed protests against its rule.   Non-state armed groups play a central role in the escalation of conflict in many of the highest-ranking countries on the list, such as Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Somalia, driven by political rivalries, extremist ideologies or competition over resources.   Niger, for example, is experiencing major upheavals as a result of ongoing violence perpetrated by the Boko Haram insurgency. In March, the government declared a state of emergency in the western areas bordering Mali and launched a major military operation after attacks on soldiers and civilians by armed groups in Tillabéry and Tahoua. Hundreds of journalists, protestors and opposition politicians were arrested last year in the government''s crackdown against dissent.   In Iraq and Libya, also both ranking high in the index, the threat from the so-called Islamic State (IS) may be more contained but the proliferation of other militias leaves populations at grave risk.   ''The response of the international community to threats against civilian populations has ranged from inaction to disastrous military intervention. Both have exacerbated the situation in many countries,'' said Mark Lattimer, Director of the Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights.   In Myanmar, for example, the recent forced displacement of the Rohingya minority has been met by a weak response from the international community and looks unlikely to be resolved in the near future. And in Syria, ranked once again at the very top of the index, the military support offered by Iran and Russia to the Assad regime has contributed to a spike in civilian deaths, while bombing by the international coalition against IS has also led to an undisclosed number of civilian casualties.   This is the 13th year that the Peoples under Threat index has been released by MRG. Based on current indicators from authoritative sources, the index provides early warning of potential future mass atrocities. Visit the related web page
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