State terrorism refers to acts of terrorism which a state conducts against another state or against its own citizens.
Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of intentional violence and fear to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants. The terms "terrorist" and "terrorism" originated during the French Revolution of the late 18th century but became widely used internationally and gained worldwide attention in the 1970s during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Basque conflict, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The increased use of suicide attacks from the 1980s onwards was typified by the 2001 September 11 attacks in the United States.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was a court-like restorative justice body assembled in South Africa in 1996 after the end of apartheid. Authorised by Nelson Mandela and chaired by Desmond Tutu, the commission invited witnesses who were identified as victims of gross human rights violations to give statements about their experiences, and selected some for public hearings. Perpetrators of violence could also give testimony and request amnesty from both civil and criminal prosecution.
Genocide denial is the attempt to deny or minimize the scale and severity of an instance of genocide. Denial is an integral part of genocide and includes the secret planning of genocide, propaganda while the genocide is going on, and destruction of evidence of mass killings. According to genocide researcher Gregory Stanton, denial "is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres".
uMkhonto we Sizwe was the paramilitary wing of the African National Congress (ANC), and was founded by Nelson Mandela in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre. Its mission was to fight against the South African government.
The Sierra Leone Civil War (1991–2002), or the Sierra Leonean Civil War, was a civil war in Sierra Leone that began on 23 March 1991 when the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), with support from the special forces of Liberian dictator Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), intervened in Sierra Leone in an attempt to overthrow the Joseph Momoh government. The resulting civil war lasted 11 years, enveloping the country. It left over 50,000 dead.
Afshin Ellian is an Iranian-Dutch professor of law, philosopher, poet, and critic of political Islam. He is an expert in international public law and philosophy of law.
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is a British investigative journalist, author and academic. He is editor of the crowdfunded investigative journalism platform INSURGE intelligence. He is a former environment blogger for The Guardian from March 2013 to July 2014. From 2014 to 2017, Ahmed was a weekly columnist for Middle East Eye, the London-based news portal founded by ex-Guardian writer David Hearst. He is 'System Shift' columnist at VICE covering issues around global systems crises and solutions. Ahmed is now Special Investigations Reporter at Byline Times.
Transitional justice is a process which responds to massive human rights violations through judicial redress, political reforms in a region or country, and other measures in order to prevent the recurrence of human rights abuse. Transitional justice consists of judicial and non-judicial measures implemented in order to redress legacies of human rights abuses. Such mechanisms "include criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations programs, and various kinds of institutional reforms" as well as memorials, apologies, and various art forms. Transitional justice is instituted at a point of political transition classically from war to positive peace, or more broadly from violence and repression to societal stability and it is informed by a society's desire to rebuild social trust, reestablish what is right from what is wrong, repair a fractured justice system, and build a democratic system of governance. The core value of transitional justice is the very notion of justice—which does not necessarily mean criminal justice. This notion and the political transformation, such as regime change or transition from conflict are thus linked to a more peaceful, certain, and democratic future.
The Sri Lankan state has been accused of state terrorism against the Tamil minority as well as the Sinhalese majority, during the two Marxist–Leninist insurrections. The Sri Lankan government and the Sri Lankan Armed Forces have been charged with massacres, indiscriminate shelling and bombing, extrajudicial killings, rape, torture, disappearance, arbitrary detention, forced displacement and economic blockade. According to Amnesty International state terror was institutionalized into Sri Lanka's laws, government and society.
Pamela Yates is an American documentary filmmaker and human rights activist. She has directed films about war crimes, racism, and genocide in the United States and Latin America, often with emphasis on the legal responses.
Communist terrorism is terrorism perpetrated by individuals or groups which adhere to communism and ideologies related to it, such as Marxism–Leninism, Maoism, and Trotskyism. Historically, communist terrorism has sometimes taken the form of state-sponsored terrorism, supported by communist nations such as the Soviet Union, China, North Korea and Cambodia. In addition, non-state actors such as the Red Brigades, the Front Line and the Red Army Faction have also engaged in communist terrorism. These groups hope to inspire the masses to rise up and start a revolution to overthrow existing political and economic systems. This form of terrorism can sometimes be called red terrorism or left-wing terrorism.
The Wagalla massacre was a massacre of ethnic Somalis by the Kenyan Army on 10 February 1984 in Wajir County, Kenya. Government troops were ordered to stop clan violence in the area, and did so by first detaining some 5,000 locals at an airstrip, denying them food and water for a week, and then shooting them. The massacre was not investigated by Kenya's government until 2011.
Several scholars have accused the United States of involvement in state terrorism. They have written about the US and other liberal democracies' use of state terrorism, particularly in relation to the Cold War. According to them, state terrorism is used to protect the interest of capitalist elites, and the U.S. organized a neo-colonial system of client states, co-operating with regional elites to rule through terror. This work has proved controversial with mainstream scholars of terrorism, who concentrate on non-state terrorism and the state terrorism of dictatorships.
Founded by Pamela Yates, Peter Kinoy and Paco de Onís in 1981, Skylight is a media organization based in Brooklyn, NY that has been making feature-length documentaries and short digital projects for over 30 years. Skylight is a member of New Day Films.
Peter Kinoy is an American documentary filmmaker and film editor. Four of his films were nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and When the Mountains Tremble won the award in 1984. State of Fear: The Truth about Terrorism, which he co-wrote and edited, won the 2006 Overseas Press Club Award for "Best Reporting in Any Medium on Latin America". He co-wrote the 1986 documentary Witness to Apartheid, which was nominated for an Academy Award, with Sharon I. Sopher, the film's producer and director.
Joshua Milton Blahyi, better known by his nom de guerre General Butt Naked, is a Liberian evangelical preacher, writer and former warlord best known for his actions during the First Liberian Civil War. During the conflict, Blahyi led a group of soldiers which fought on the side of rebel group United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy (ULIMO) before converting to Christianity and becoming a pastor in 1996.
Human rights abuses in Chile under Augusto Pinochet were the crimes against humanity, persecution of opponents, political repression, and state terrorism committed by the Chilean Armed Forces, members of Carabineros de Chile and civil repressive agents members of a secret police, during the military dictatorship of Chile under General Augusto Pinochet from 1973 to 1990.
The Truth and Reconciliation process in Cambodia refers to efforts to create other truth-seeking and reconciliation mechanisms in the country, in addition to the hybrid tribunals established by the Cambodian government and the United Nations in 2001.
Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a truth and reconciliation commission established by President Alejandro Toledo to investigate the human rights abuses committed during the internal conflict in Peru between 1980s and 1990s. The TRC was a response to the violent internal conflict between 1980 and 2000 during the administration of Presidents Fernando Belaúnde (1980–1985), Alan García (1985–1990), and Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000). The commission's mandate was to provide a record of human rights and international humanitarian law violations committed in Peru between May 1980 and November 2000, as well as recommend mechanisms to promote and strengthen human rights. The TRC reported on the estimated 70 000 deaths, assassinations, torture, disappearances, displacement, employment of terrorist methods and other human rights violations executed by the State, Shining Path, and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. The report concluded that there is both institutional and individual accountability, as well as identifying racial and cultural factors that became a catalyst for conflict.
