While people across the globe are understandably focused on the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine, what many may not realize is that people in other parts of the world are also under siege.
Among some of the places where civilians regularly face mass rape, torture, and death, along with the destruction of their nations' cities and villages are South Sudan, Afghanistan, North Korea, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Myanmar, Iran, China, and parts of Nigeria and Ethiopia.
The situations vary greatly, with some regions facing crimes against humanity and/or war crimes, while others are facing genocide or circumstances seemingly slouching toward genocide.
Due to space constraints, the situations in three different countries in three different parts of the world shall be commented upon herein: South Sudan, Afghanistan, and North Korea.
For nine years, the people of South Sudan have been subjected to a catalog of horrors arising from a civil war that broke out in December 2013. First established in 2009 as a result of southern Sudan breaking away from Sudan, a dispute between President Salva Kiir (a Dinka) and former Vice President Riek Machar (a Nuer) propelled South Sudan into a nightmarish spiral of ceaseless viciousness.
More than 1.2 million people have been forced from their villages, becoming internally displaced or refugees primarily in Uganda, Sudan, and Ethiopia. Entire towns and villages have been virtually wiped off the map. It is estimated that tens of thousands of children have been forced to join one fighting force or another, with countless dying in attacks and battles raging across the nation.
The two main parties at war, along with breakaway factions and criminal gangs (which roam the country and kill at will since the land is virtually lawless) have committed horrific crimes: gang rape of females, slaughter of countless civilians, victims burned alive, children and adults lined up and executed, and more.
Life in Afghanistan under the Taliban for females constitutes a living hell. With every passing week, additional rights are denied. Businesses owned and operated by women have been banned, leaving countless families without the means to pay rent, purchase clothing, or even buy food. Upwards of 1.2 million girls are prohibited from attending secondary school. Girls as young as 9 are sold as that is the only way many families have enough money to exist.
Richard Bennett with the UN recently asserted that the Taliban are virtually attempting to make women (including teenagers) "invisible, by excluding them almost entirely from society." Females are facing such a horrendous situation in Afghanistan that, according to the UN's Human Rights Council, "they are committing suicide at a rate of one to two every day."
North Korea is virtually a prison and, in many ways, a human abattoir. A recent report by the International Bar Association's War Crimes Committee and the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea cited "evidence of arbitrary executions, infanticide, and forced abortions being commonplace in detention centers."
Furthermore, it is common for female detainees to be sexually assaulted, noted Forbes magazine. "Such abuse is said to occur 'virtually every day.' One witness testified to being 'brutally beaten and raped by the deputy head of a detention facility, who also raped most of the young women detained in the facility.'"
The report also noted that "detainees [are] intentionally deprived of food as a 'weapon of punishment and control' resulting in severe illnesses, malnutrition, and often death by starvation. One witness testified of being fed 'mostly skin of corn or potatoes mixed in with stones and coal.' Other witnesses testified to eating rodents, frogs, or snakes to survive."
A sadist, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un regularly inflicts mass atrocities. For example, periodically prisoners (sometimes in the thousands) are publicly executed by firing squad. He has also ordered women to drown their own babies in buckets.
Today, genocide is being perpetrated in at least two nations: South Sudan, where the Nuer and other ethnicities are being targeted, and in China, where the Uyghurs are targeted. It is quite likely that Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine. In Myanmar, where the Rohingya recently suffered genocide, the group continues to face brutality and extrajudicial killings. The same is true in Darfur, Sudan. Other nations that have been cited as potential risks for genocide are Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ethiopia.
Fortunately, numerous international human rights organizations track the myriad infractions of human rights perpetrated across the globe, and disseminate such findings to the United Nations, individual states, and the public.
Just as significant, many groups work assiduously to keep a spotlight focused on the leaders of the nations responsible for such human rights violations, calling for sanctions against the leaders, pushing for ceasefires where germane, and calling for the release of prisoners held on bogus charges and being treated in grossly unfair ways.
Among such organizations that individual citizens in free nations can and do support are, for example Human Rights Watch (headquartered in New York City), Amnesty International (NYC), Doctors Without Borders (NYC), Save the Children (Fairfield, Conn.), and CARE (Atlanta).
Samuel Totten, professor emeritus at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, is a scholar of crimes against humanity and genocide. His latest books dealing with such issues are "Centuries of Genocide," Fifth Edition, and "All Eyes on the Sky" (a novel about life and death in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan).