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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > Political control & influence > Political oppression & persecution > General
Soon to be a major film, co-written and directed by Angelina Jolie Pitt Until the age of five, Loung Ung lived in Phnom Penh, one of seven children of a high-ranking government official. She was a precocious child who loved the open city markets, fried crickets, chicken fights and being cheeky to her parents. When Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army stormed into Phnom Penh in April 1975, Loung's family fled their home and were eventually forced to disperse to survive. Loung was trained as a child soldier while her brothers and sisters were sent to labour camps. The surviving siblings were only finally reunited after the Vietnamese penetrated Cambodia and started to destroy the Khmer Rouge. Bolstered by the bravery of one brother, the vision of the others and the gentle kindness of her sister, Loung forged on to create for herself a courageous new life. First They Killed My Father is an unforgettable book told through the voice of the young and fearless Loung. It is a shocking and tragic tale of a girl who was determined to survive despite the odds.
LEAD TITLE PUBLISHING FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE UK THE LANDMARK, CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED BOOK HAILED BY ARIEL DORFMAN AND EDUARDO GALEANO, PUBLISHED TO COINCIDE WITH THE FIRST ARGENTINE WAR CRIMES TRIALS. News hook: Trials of high-level military officials, including the subject of this book, began in July 2004 in Spain. New introduction by the judge who declared the Argentine impunity laws null and void; the new epilogue is by the author Torrid aftermath of hardcover publication: The New York Times reported on its front page that the Argentine Navy captain whose story is at the heart of this book had had his face slashed by four attackers and was warned to stop speaking with journalists about military crimes - violent retribution for his breaking of the military's code of silence about the atrocities. Author's reputation: Verbitsky is Argentina's leading investigative journalist. He won a major award from the Latin American Studies Association when this book was first published in America in 1996. Author visit at the beginning of August for publicity and promotion. Argentine military's code of silence, stunning his compatriots and the world by openly confessing his participation in the hideous practice of pushing live political dissidents out of airplanes during Argentina's dirty war. Available for the first time in the UK, with a new introduction by Judge Gabriel Cavallo on the upcoming military trials and a new epilogue by the author, Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior includes the complete text of Scilingo's confession in the form of interviews given to Argentina's best-known investigative journalist, Horacio Verbitsky. The afterword by Juan Mendez, General Consel of Human Rights Watch, puts Adolfo Scilingo confession of atrocities committed during the 'dirty war' into a historical and international context.
During the Second World War, just under two thousand British
citizens were detained without charge, trial, or term set, under
Regulation 18B of the wartime Defence Regulations. Most of these
detentions took place in the summer of 1940, soon after Winston
Churchill became Prime Minister, when belief in the existence of a
dangerous Fifth Column was widespread. Churchill, at first an
enthusiast for vigorous use of the powers of executive detention,
later came to lament the use of a power which was, in his words, in
the highest degree odious'.
This fourth volume in the Hidden Voices Series is about Oukasie, a
township in the Madibeng municipality. At various times in its
history, its inhabitants have struggled against problems such as
forced removals, terrible living conditions and corrupt officials.
How were the Gestapo able to detect the smallest signs of non-compliance with Nazi doctrines, and how could they enforce their racial policies with such ease? Robert Gellately argues, controversially, that there was a three-way interaction between the Gestapo, the German people, and the implementation of policy; the key factor being the willingness of German citizens to provide the authorities with information about suspected `criminality'.
After working closely with the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation in shaping and writing his memoir, author Hassen Ebrahim and Jacana Media are proud to publish this important record of a life that was spent in service to South Africa. Writes Mac Maharaj in his foreword in the book: “Hassen Ebrahim is one of those many seldom heard of foot soldiers of the 1976 generation who joined the underground and was linked to the ANC structures operating from Botswana. He has been at the coalface of so many facets of South Africa’s march to freedom. He was there during the times when involvement in the struggle against apartheid carried the risk of death; he was involved in our negotiated transition to democracy; he was the chief executive of the elected Constitutional Assembly which wrote and adopted our Constitution; thereafter and until 2007 he served in the Department of Justice.” From Marabastad to Mogadishu: The Journey of an ANC Soldier chronicles an all-too familiar story of those unsung cadres from the struggle we’ve forgotten to honour for their sacrifices. Those foot soldiers do not feature in our collective memory, they do not find themselves or their stories recorded in the pages of history books, and they are not remembered for their selfless acts of bravery. The bravery and sacrifice of the ordinary teenager who dropped out of school, the cadre who risked life and limb, and the freedom fighter who exiled himself or herself to countries far and wide must be given a chance to live on book pages, find expression on film reels and all other mediums of historic memory collection. From Marabastad to Mogadishu: The Journey of an ANC Soldier signals the resolve by the author, his peers, Jacana Media and support organisations such as the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation to bring the ordinary cadre’s story to the fore, to acknowledge his or her sacrifices, and to recognise their contribution to South Africa’s democracy.
Zionism in Arab discourses presents a ground-breaking study of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Through analyses of hundreds of texts written by Arab Islamists and liberals from the late-nineteenth century to the 'Arab Spring', the book demonstrates that the Zionist enterprise has played a dual function of an enemy and a mentor. Islamists and liberals alike discovered, respectively, in Zionism and in Israeli society qualities they sought to implement in their sown homelands. Focusing on Palestinian, Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian political discourses, this study uncovers fascinating and unexpected Arab points of views on different aspects of Zionism; from the first Zionist Congress to the First Lebanon War; from gardening in the early years of Tel Aviv to women's service in the Israeli Defence Forces; from the role of religion in the creation of the state to the role of democracy in its preservation. -- .
No issue in the Arab-Israeli conflict has proven more intractable than the status of the Palestinian refugees. This work focuses on the controversial question of the property left behind by the refugees during the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. Beyond discussing the extent of the refugees'losses and detailing the methods by which Israel expropriated this property, the book also notes the ways that the property question has affected, and in turn been affected by, the wider Arab-Israeli conflict over the decades. It shows how the property question influenced Arab-Israeli diplomacy and discusses the implications of the fact that the question remains unresolved despite numerous diplomatic efforts. From late 1947 through 1948, more than 726,000 Palestinians -- over half the entire population -- were uprooted from their homes and villages. Though some middle class refugees were able to flee with liquid capital, the majority were small-scale farmers whose worldly fortunes were the land, livestock, and crops they left behind. This book tells for the first time the full story of how much property changed hands, what it was worth, and how it was used by the fledgling state of Israel. It then traces the subsequent decades of diplomatic activity on the issue and publishes previously secret UN estimates of the scope and value of the refugee property. Michael Fischbach offers a detailed study of Israeli counterclaims for Jewish property lost in the Arab world, diplomatic schemes for resolving the conflict, secret compensation efforts, and the renewed diplomatic efforts on behalf of property claims since the onset of Arab-Israeli peace talks. Based largely on archival records, including those of the United Nations Conciliation Commission of Palestine, never before available to the public and kept under lock and key in the UN archives, "Records of Dispossession" is the first detailed historical examination of the Palestinian refugee property question.
Famine is an age-old scourge that almost disappeared in our lifetime. Between 2000 and 2011 there were no famines and deaths in humanitarian emergencies were much reduced. The humanitarian agenda was ascendant. Then, in 2017, the United Nations identified four situations that threatened famine or breached that threshold in north-eastern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen. Today, this list is longer. Each of these famines is the result of military actions and exclusionary, authoritarian politics conducted without regard to the wellbeing or even the survival of people. Violations of international law including blockading ports, attacks on health facilities, violence against humanitarian workers, and obstruction of relief aid are carried out with renewed impunity. Yet there is an array of legal offenses, ranging from war crimes and crimes against humanity to genocide, available to a prosecutor to hold individuals to account for the deliberate starvation of civilians. However, there has been a dearth of investigations and accountability for those violating international law. The reasons for this neglect and the gaps between the black-letter law and practice are explored in this timely volume. It provides a comprehensive overview of the key themes and cases required to catalyze a new approach to understanding the law as it relates to starvation. It also illustrates the complications of historical and ongoing situations where starvation is used as a weapon of war, and provides expert analysis on defining starvation, early warning systems, gender and mass starvation, the use of sanctions, journalistic reporting, and memorialization of famine.
The Ku Klux Klan established a significant foothold in Arkansas in the 1920s, boasting more than 150 state chapters and tens of thousands of members at its zenith. Propelled by the prominence of state leaders such as Grand Dragon James Comer and head of Women of the KKK Robbie Gill Comer, the Klan established Little Rock as a seat of power second only to Atlanta. In The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas, Kenneth C. Barnes traces this explosion of white nationalism and its impact on the state's development.Barnes shows that the Klan seemed to wield power everywhere in 1920s Arkansas. Klansmen led businesses and held elected offices and prominent roles in legal, medical, and religious institutions, while the women of the Klan supported rallies and charitable activities and planned social gatherings where cross burnings were regular occurrences. Inside their organization, Klan members bonded during picnic barbeques and parades and over shared religious traditions. Outside of it, they united to direct armed threats, merciless physical brutality, and torrents of hateful rhetoric against individuals who did not conform to their exclusionary vision. By the mid-1920s, internal divisions, scandals, and an overzealous attempt to dominate local and state elections caused Arkansas's Klan to fall apart nearly as quickly as it had risen. Yet as the organization dissolved and the formal trappings of its flamboyant presence receded, the attitudes the Klan embraced never fully disappeared. In documenting this history, Barnes shows how the Klan's early success still casts a long shadow on the state to this day.
The LGBTI community in Turkey face real dangers. In 2015, the Turkish police interrupted the LGBTI Pride march in Istanbul, using tear gas and rubber bullets against the marchers. This marked the first attempt by the authorities to stop the parade by force, and similar actions occurred the following year. Here, Fait Muedini examines these levels of discrimination in Turkey, as well as exploring how activists are working to improve human rights for LGBTI individuals living in this hostile environment. Muedini bases his analysis on interviews taken with a number of NGO leaders and activists of leading LGBTI organisations in the region, including Lambda Istanbul, Kaos GL, Pembe Hayat, Social Policies, Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Studies Association (SPoD), and Families of LGBT's in Istanbul (LISTAG). The original information provided by these interviews illuminate the challenges facing the LGBTI community, and the brave actions taken by activists in their attempts to challenge the state and secure sexual equality.
The 2011 Arab Spring is the story of what happens when autocrats prepare their militaries to thwart coups but unexpectedly face massive popular uprisings instead. When demonstrators took to the streets in 2011, some militaries remained loyal to the autocratic regimes, some defected, whilst others splintered. The widespread consequences of this military agency ranged from facilitating transition to democracy, to reconfiguring authoritarianism, or triggering civil war. This study aims to explain the military politics of 2011. Building on interviews with Arab officers, extensive fieldwork and archival research, as well as hundreds of memoirs published by Arab officers, Hicham Bou Nassif shows how divergent combinations of coup-proofing tactics accounted for different patterns of military behaviour in 2011, both in Egypt and Syria, and across Tunisia, and Libya.
'A remarkable set of essays unlike anything else' - Kadish Morris, Guardian As in her fiction, the essays in Out of the Sun demonstrate Esi Edugyan's commitment to seeking out the stories of Black lives that history has failed to record. Written with the death of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the background, in five wide-ranging essays Edugyan reflects on her own identity and experiences as the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants. She delves into the history of Western Art and the truths about Black lives that it fails to reveal, and the ways contemporary Black artists are reclaiming and reimagining those lives. She explores and celebrates the legacy of Afrofuturism, the complex and problematic practice of racial passing, the place of ghosts and haunting in the imagination, and the fascinating relationship between Africa and Asia dating back to the 6th Century. With calm, piercing intelligence, and a refusal to think on anyone's terms but her own, Edugyan asks difficult questions about how we reckon with the past and imagine the future, and invites the reader to think alongside her in working out what the answers to these may be.
Jan Gross describes the terrors of the Soviet occupation of the lands that made up eastern Poland between the two world wars: the Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia. His lucid analysis of the revolution that came to Poland from abroad is based on hundreds of first-hand accounts of the hardship, suffering, and social chaos that accompanied the Sovietization of this poorest section of a poverty-stricken country. Woven into the author's exploration of events from the Soviet's German-supported aggression against Poland in September of 1939 to Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, these testimonies not only illuminate his conclusions about the nature of totalitarianism but also make a powerful statement of their own. Those who endured the imposition of Soviet rule and mass deportations to forced resettlement, labor camps, and prisons of the Soviet Union are here allowed to speak for themselves, and they do so with grim effectiveness.
The moving story of Sheila Cassidy, who as a young doctor went to work in Chile and became caught in the terrible injustice of the country - injustice which led to her own arrest, imprisonment, torture and expulsion.
Since he seized power in Syria two decades ago, President Hafez Asad has subjected his people to continuous repression. Violence reached a peak in the early 1980s, when Asad's Ba'thist regime crushed its opposition, killing at least ten thousand citizens and jailing thousands more. And today, despite some gestures of liberalization, the practices of Asad's government remain repugnant. Security forces routinely arrest citizens without charge, torture them during interrogation, and imprison them without trial for political reasons. At least 7500 political prisoners are currently held under appalling conditions. Persecution of the country's minorities - notably Jews, Palestinians, and Kurds - is rampant. Syria is also a serious rights offender in Lebanon where, since 1976, its army has controlled more than half of the country and has imprisoned, tortured, and massacred hundreds of innocent civilians. This book by Middle East Watch describes the various forms of oppression in Syria and gives details about the three institutions that help Asad maintain his control - the Ba'th Party, the military, and the security forces. The book provides information not only on the violent acts perpetrated by the government but also on such topics as the censorship of mass media, the banning of opposition political parties and professional associations, and the country's foreign relations. Based in large part on confidential interviews with Syrian emigres and sources encountered during an unauthorized visit to Syria - all of whom risked harassment from their country's security forces for providing information to Middle East Watch - this book presents Syria's dismal human rights record powerfully and thoroughly.
Stephen Haliczer has mined rich documentary sources to produce the most comprehensive and enlightening picture yet of the Inquisition in Spain. The kingdom of Valencia occupies a uniquely important place in the history of the Spanish Inquisition because of its large Muslim and Jewish populations and because it was a Catalan kingdom, more or less "occupied" by the despised Castilians who introduced the Inquisition. Haliczer underscores the intensely regional nature of the Valencian tribunal. He shows how the prosecution of religious deviants, the recruitment and professional activity of Inquisitors and officials, and the relations between the Inquisition and the majority Old Christian population all clearly reflect the place and the society. A great series of pogroms swept over Spain during the summer of 1391. Jewish communities were attacked and the Jews either massacred or forced to convert. More than ninety percent of the victims of the Valencian Inquisition a century later were descendants of those who chose conversion, the conversos. Haliczer argues convincingly against those who see all the conversos as "secret Jews." He finds, on the contrary, that a wide range of religious beliefs and practices existed among them and that some were even able to assimilate into Old Christian society by becoming familiares of the Inquisition itself. Nevertheless, it was controversy over the sincerity of the converted which spawned the first proposals for the establishment of a Spanish national Inquisition. That very same controversy, persisting in the writings of history, may be resolved by Haliczer's stimulating discoveries. Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia is a major contribution to the lively field of Inquisition studies, combining institutional history of the tribunal with socioreligious history of the kingdom. The many case histories included in the narrative give both Valencian society and the Inquisition very human faces. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.
Protectors of Pluralism argues that local religious minorities are more likely to save persecuted groups from purification campaigns. Robert Braun utilizes a geo-referenced dataset of Jewish evasion in the Netherlands and Belgium during the Holocaust to assess the minority hypothesis. Spatial statistics and archival work reveal that Protestants were more likely to rescue Jews in Catholic regions of the Low Countries, while Catholics facilitated evasion in Protestant areas. Post-war testimonies and secondary literature demonstrate the importance of minority groups for rescue in other countries during the Holocaust as well as other episodes of mass violence, underlining how the local position of church communities produces networks of assistance, rather than something inherent to any religion itself. This book makes an important contribution to the literature on political violence, social movements, altruism and religion, applying a range of social science methodologies and theories that shed new light on the Holocaust.
Acclaimed author Andrey Kurkov gives powerful insight into life in Kyiv following the 2013 protests and before the 2022 Russian invasion. -16 DegreesC, sunlight, silence. I drove the children to school, then went to see the revolution. I walked between the tents. Talked with rev olutionaries. They were weary today. The air was thick with the smell of old campfires. Ukraine Diaries is acclaimed writer Andrey Kurkov's first-hand account of the ongoing crisis in his country. From his flat in Kyiv, just five hundred yards from Independence Square, Kurkov can smell the burning barricades and hear the sounds of grenades and gunshot. Kurkov's diaries begin on the first day of the pro-European protests in November 2013, and describe the violent clashes in the Maidan, the impeachment of Yanukovych, Russia's annexation of Crimea and the separatist uprisings in the east of Ukraine. Going beyond the headlines, they give vivid insight into what it's like to live through - and try to make sense of - times of intense political unrest, on the path to the current crisis.
The searing accounts of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniia Ginsberg and Varlam Shalamov opened the world's eyes to the terrors of the Soviet Gulag. But not until now has there been a memoir of life inside the camps written from the perspective of an actual employee of the Secret police. In this riveting memoir, superbly translated by Deborah Kaple, Fyodor Mochulsky describes being sent to work as a boss at the forced labor camp of Pechorlag in the frozen tundra north of the Arctic Circle. Only twenty-two years old, he had but a vague idea of the true nature of the Gulag. What he discovered was a world of unimaginable suffering and death, a world where men were starved, beaten, worked to death, or simply executed. Mochulsky details the horrific conditions in the camps and the challenges facing all those involved, from prisoners to guards. He depicts the power struggles within the camps between the secret police and the communist party, between the political prisoners (most of whom had been arrested for the generic crime of "counter-revolutionary activities") and the criminal convicts. And because Mochulsky writes of what he witnessed with the detachment of the engineer that he was, readers can easily understand how a system that destroyed millions of lives could be run by ordinary Soviet citizens who believed they were advancing the cause of socialism. Mochulsky remained a communist party member his entire life-he would later become a diplomat-but was deeply troubled by the gap between socialist theory and the Soviet reality of slave labor and mass murder. This unprecedented memoir takes readers into that reality and sheds new light on one of the most harrowing tragedies of the 20th century.
Of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women were sentenced to the Gulag in the 1940s and 1950s, only half survived. In Survival as Victory, Oksana Kis has produced the first anthropological study of daily life in the Soviet forced labor camps as experienced by Ukrainian women prisoners. Based on the written memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories of over 150 survivors, this book fills a lacuna in the scholarship regarding Ukrainian experience. Kis details the women's resistance to the brutality of camp conditions not only through the preservation of customs and traditions from everyday home life, but also through the frequent elision of regional and confessional differences. Following the groundbreaking work of Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History (2003), this book is a must-read for anyone interested in gendered strategies of survival, accommodation, and resistance to the dehumanizing effects of the Gulag.
The genocide in Myanmar has drawn global attention as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi appears to be presiding over human rights violations, forced migrations and extra-judicial killings on an enormous scale. This unique study draws on thousands of hours of interviews and testimony from the Rohingya themselves to assess and outline the full scale of the disaster. Casting new light on Rohingya identity, history and culture, this will be an essential contribution to the study of the Rohingya people and to the study of the early stages of genocide. This book adds convincingly to the body of evidence that the government of Myanmar has enabled a genocide in Rakhine State and the surrounding areas.
According to the United Nations, Myanmar's Rohingyas are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. Only now has the media turned its attention to their plight at the hands of a country led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Yet the signs of this genocide have been visible for years. For generations, this Muslim group has suffered routine discrimination, violence, arbitrary arrest and detention, extortion, and other abuses by the Buddhist majority. As horrifying massacres have unfolded in 2017, international human rights groups have accused the regime of complicity in an ethnic cleansing campaign against them. Authorities refuse to recognise the Rohingyas as one of Myanmar's 135 'national races', denying them citizenship rights in the country of their birth and severely restricting many aspects of ordinary life, from marriage to free movement. In this updated edition, Azeem Ibrahim chronicles the events leading up to the current, final cleansing of the Rohingya population, and issues a clarion call to protect a vulnerable, little known Muslim minority. He makes a powerful appeal to use the lessons of the twentieth century to stop this genocide in the twenty-first.
In this innovative and revelatory work, Igal Halfin exposes the inner struggles of Soviet Communists to identify themselves with the Bolshevik Party during the decisive decades of the 1920s and 1930s. The Bolsheviks preached the moral transformation of Russians into model Communists for their political and personal salvation. To screen the population for moral and political deviance, the Bolsheviks enlisted natural scientists, doctors, psychologists, sexologists, writers, and Party prophets to establish criteria for judging people. Self-inspection became a central Bolshevik practice. Communists were expected to write autobiographies in which they reconfigured their life experience in line with the demands of the Party. Halfin traces the intellectual contortions of this project. Initially, the Party denounced deviant Communists, especially the Trotskyists, as degenerate, but innocuous, souls; but in a chilling turn in the mid-1930s, the Party came to demonize the unreformed as virulent, malicious counterrevolutionaries. The insistence that the good society could not triumph unless every wicked individual was destroyed led to the increasing condemnation of Party members as helplessly flawed. Combining the analysis of autobiography with the study of Communist psychology and sociology and the politics of Bolshevik self-fashioning, Halfin gives us powerful new insight into the preconditions of the bloodbath that was the Great Purge. |
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