The twentieth century saw major advances in technology and communications, economy and human rights. It was also the bloodiest century in history. Think of the mass deportations, starvation and extermination of perhaps 14 million people in Stalinist Russia and even more in Maoist China; the Holocaust of 6 million Jews under the Nazis, as well Read more
The Armenian and Assyrian genocide that took place between 1914 and 1923, along with the Pontian Greek mass murders, provided the template for the Holocaust: forced emigration, expulsions, property confiscations, forced labour, public torture and executions, medical experiments, elementary gassings, starvation and death marches. These resulted in the deaths of up to 1,500,000 Armenians, perhaps Read more
When Pope Francis described the killing of more than a million Armenians a century ago as “the first genocide of the 20th century,” he was widely regarded as making a political statement. Certainly that was the view of Turkey, which recalled its ambassador to the Vatican and expressed its “great disappointment and sadness” over the pope’s Read more
Turkey has recalled its envoy to the Vatican after Pope Francis described the mass killing of Armenians under Ottoman rule in World War One as “genocide”. Turkey has reacted with anger to the comment made by the Pope at a service in the Armenian Catholic Rite in Rome on Sunday. Pope Francis said that humanity Read more
Vatican officials and diplomats have expressed support for US airstrikes in Iraq amid fears of genocide against religious minorities. Islamic forces have swept northern Iraq in recent weeks, killing or expelling Christians and religious minorities like the Yazidis in a campaign that some consider tantamount to genocide. The Vatican’s nuncio in Iraq, Archbishop Giorgio Lingua Read more
The Catholic Church is the only institution still functioning in the war-torn Central African Republic, an African archbishop says. “The state no longer exists,” said Archbishop Samuel Kleda from Cameroon. “The only institution that is functioning [in the CAR] is the Catholic Church,” he said. “Actually, the displaced are living in Catholic parishes,” Archbishop Kleda Read more
I first became involved in Rwanda in July 1994, some two or three months after the start of the horrific events in that landlocked country, the full scale of which had not, by that time, reached the wider world. My lasting memory of that time is the chaos of the situation. There was a camp that was Read more
A massacre of the innocents is taking place in the heart of Africa as the world looks the other way. The humanitarian emergency in the Central African Republic (CAR), a landmass bigger than France where the average male life expectancy is 48, remains a blind spot for most of the international community. Samantha Power, the US Read more