genocide

Gripping tale of Ireland’s most polite bank robber: I’m Not Here To Hurt You reviewed

19 August 2023 9:00 am

There should really be a special word for it: that vicarious fragility you feel when hearing of a minor decision…

Putin is copying the propaganda playbook of Serbian war criminals

1 April 2023 11:57 pm

A year ago, Ukrainian soldiers discovered evidence of the Bucha massacre in which Russian forces slaughtered hundreds of Ukrainians in…

Pre-crime has arrived in China

29 January 2022 9:00 am

The idea of ‘pre-crime’ was popularised by Philip K. Dick’s story ‘The Minority Report’ and the 2002 Steven Spielberg film…

When it comes to Africa, the media look away

20 November 2021 9:00 am

Kenya Each time I sit in St Bride’s on Fleet Street during the memorial of another friend, I look around…

Truss fails her first big test

16 November 2021 10:40 pm

Can anything stop the irresistible rise of Liz Truss? The power-dressing insta lover reinvented herself at International Trade, becoming the…

Interpreting for a dictator: Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura, reviewed

21 August 2021 9:00 am

If this is a cautious and circumspect novel, it’s because it involves a cautious and circumspect job: that of interpreter.…

The dictator of the dorm: Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga, reviewed

10 April 2021 9:00 am

In the cloud-capped highlands of Rwanda, even the rain-makers sound like crashing snobs. When two teenage pupils from Our Lady…

The making of a monster: Paul Kagame’s bloodstained past

27 March 2021 9:00 am

We have all become Paul Kagame’s useful idiots, says Nicholas Shakespeare

Africa’s invisible epidemics

14 March 2020 9:00 am

Africa   ‘Ah, Africa,’ the French scientist sighed contentedly. This was 1995 and all around us was an Ebola epidemic…

A force for good: Samantha Power is driven by a deep sense of idealism

21 December 2019 9:00 am

In the spring of 2008 I spent a fine day in the company of Samantha Power. She had come to…

The lessons I learned cycling across Rwanda

23 November 2019 9:00 am

The backmarker of the peloton was Eric, a tall, stick-thin Rwandan. Under his cycling helmet he wore a baseball cap…

Author Nathan Englander (Photo: Getty)

The great betrayal

14 October 2017 9:00 am

They were at sea for more than two months in desperately cramped conditions. The battered ship, barely seaworthy, pitched violently…

Ratings war

30 September 2017 9:00 am

Planning for the ‘war of the future’ is something generals and politicians have been doing for the past 150 years.…

Mykola Bokan’s photograph of his family, including a memorial to ‘Kostya, who died of hunger’, July 1933. Bokan and his son were arrested for documenting the famine — both died in the gulag

The hunger

23 September 2017 9:00 am

In 1933 my aunt Lenina Bibikova was eight years old. She lived in Kharkov, Ukraine. Every morning a polished black…

Don’t forget the Yazidis

12 August 2017 9:00 am

As the floodwaters subsided, the Ark drifted across northern Iraq. Finally, with a crunching jolt, it hit dry land. Its…

Members of the Hitler Youth clear debris after an air raid on Berlin, August 1944

The swastika was always in plain sight

24 October 2015 9:00 am

Ordinary Germans under the Third Reich did have wills of their own, argues Dominic Green. Most actively embraced Nazi ideology, and were aware of the extermination of the Jews. As the war worsened for them, what did they think they were fighting for?

The long shadow of genocide: Armenia’s vengeance years

27 June 2015 9:00 am

One morning in March 1921 a large man in an overcoat left his house in Charlottenburg, Berlin, to take a…

Spectator letters: England’s defining myth, and another forgotten genocide

25 April 2015 9:00 am

Enemies within Sir: I thought Matthew Parris was typically incisive in his last column, but perhaps not quite as much…

Scotland knows the power of a common enemy. We English don’t

18 April 2015 9:00 am

When last Sunday Pope Francis took the brave step of acknowledging the Armenian tragedy as the ‘first genocide of the…

There are echoes of Turkey and Armenia in the revisionist view of the Rwandan genocide

22 November 2014 9:00 am

Kenya It’s a long time since I thought of Thaddee, our Kigali stringer when I was covering Rwanda for Reuters.…

Before you talk about 'Lessons from Rwanda', read this

5 April 2014 9:00 am

Twenty years ago, I was a witness to the Rwandan genocide. Those who speak of lessons from it are deluded

‘There was no better way’: Ancient Celts or Gauls go into battle against the massed ranks of Rome, and are slaughtered for the good of posterity

War is good for us

5 April 2014 9:00 am

The argument that mankind’s innate violence can only be contained by force of arms may make for a neat paradox, but it fails to convince David Crane