The Shilluk of southern Sudan hold their kings responsible for drought. During prolonged periods of no rain the killing of kings is common.

Nicolae Ceausescu ruled Romania from 1974 through December 1989, when a revolution forced him and his wife Elena to flee the capitol. They headed by helicopter to Snagov, a commune north of Bucharest then fled again to Targoviste, an ancient city on the Ialomita River. Here the army ordered their helicopter to land and placed the pair under arrest. On Christmas Day, they were put on trial under charges that included illegal gathering of wealth and genocide. The trial lasted two hours; they were convicted and sentenced to death. Soldiers led the couple, whose hands were tied behind their backs with clothesline, outside the building then opened fire. The communist leader and his wife were dead.

Or were they? The entire episode was filmed but there is a brief break in the video, between the time when Ceausescu and his wife are led outside and the start of the shooting. By the time the camera comes back bullets have been fired and the couple lies on the ground. Fearing the tombs might be desecrated authorities brought the bodies during the night to Bucharest’s Ghencea Cemetery, where they were buried in simple plots. Aging communist sympathizers continue to place flowers beside the graves to this day. But based on evidence like the break in the tape, the couples’ three children and other critics have continued to question just who in fact was executed. For years, the group tried to obtain permission to unearth the grave but state officials wouldn’t allow it. But last month, saying they had nothing to hide, authorities agreed to the exhumation. Cemetery officials dug up the wooden caskets and a team of pathologists took samples from the corpses and placed them into plastic bags. DNA tests will be performed, although results won’t be available for up to six months.

In attempting to squash the rebellion that ultimately overthrew him Ceausescu and his political police killed hundreds of Romanians, brutality that seemed to justify his swift execution. One only has to look to examples like Saddam Hussein or Louis XVI of France to find other leaders, tyrants or not, who were put to death after public opinion turned against them. Sometimes, the killing of kings takes an invasion, sometimes a revolution from within, but in a remote stretch of southern Sudan, it takes a lack of rain.

Among Sudan’s Shilluk, when there is reason to believe the king is not acting in the communities best interest an assembly is convened. The people can ultimately put the king to death, an outcome especially likely during times of drought. It is believed that the king has the power to make rain, and so when no rain falls the king is blamed. During drought, the king, knowing his end may be near will try desperately to bring about rain by performing sacrifices and praying to his fathers for assistance. If drought continues the king faces an ultimatum, make the rains fall or die.

The social anthropologist Declan Quigley spent significant time in southern Sudan in the 1980s and collected more than two dozen cases of regicide (the killing of a king) from the past century and a half. In one case from 1981 a king was executed by his half-son and others after a long period of drought. A goat was then sacrificed on the grave to prevent the king’s posthumous revenge. Police later arrested 22 people in association with the killing, but all of them were deemed to have acted appropriately and were later released, except the half-son.

The Finnish anthropologist Marta Salokoski studied regicide among the Owambo of northern Namibia. Among this tribe, it is believed that if a king dies under his own power he will take the entire kingdom with him. Thus, in order to avoid ruination of the kingdom, a sick king is swiftly executed. The method is usually suffocation. Salokoski, quoting an earlier text by Iituku describes the process:

“The face is covered with a soft animal skin, one hand clenches the neck, the other presses the mouth and nose. Alternatively, a sitting cub is pressed on the throat. It is usually a slave who does the strangling.”

In 1943 U.S. Marines fought fiercely with the Japanese on the tiny Pacific island of Tarawa. The remains of hundreds of U.S. soldiers are still there, buried beneath the sand in mass graves and across Southeast Asia, more than 1,700 soldiers are still missing from the Vietnam War. The Department of Defense’s Prisoner of War and Missing Personnel Office is working arduously to recover them.

Thomas Rice’s chopper went down deep in the jungles of South Vietnam just before dawn on December 28, 1965. Several missions retraced his route but the helicopter was never found. His younger brother, James, also in the Army, asked to be stationed in the same spot, where he continued the search himself. In December of 1966, Rice was declared dead and the following May a memorial service was held for him, sans body.

The search for the crash site was resumed in 1993 by the Department of Defense’s Prisoner of War and Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) but came up empty-handed. Then four years ago two Vietnamese villagers admitted to having shot down a chopper in the mid-1960s in the same area where Rice’s craft had disappeared; a team of Defense Department officials trekked to the presumed crash site. Remains were recovered and identified and last month Rice and his comrades were finally laid to rest but there are still more than 1,700 American soldiers unaccounted for from the Vietnam War, according to DPMO stats. The lost bodies lie somewhere in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and China. Of the 1,332 American soldiers still unaccounted for in Vietnam, 614 are in a ‘no further pursuit’ status, reads a DPMO website. “We have conclusive evidence the individual perished,” says the site, “but do not believe it possible to recover his remains.”

Major Russell C. Goodman is another one of the missing. He was a member of the Thunderbirds, an air demonstration squadron from Nellis Air Force Base, in Nevada. During the Vietnam War he flew with a Navy air combat unit, aboard the USS Enterprise. In February of 1967 Goodman and his navigator, Gary Thornton, flying in an F-4B Phantom fighter jet, earned a Silver Star for rescuing a downed aircrew. Just days later, they received instructions to bomb a railroad in North Vietnam. About eight miles south of Thanh Hoa they were struck by enemy antiaircraft fire and their plane exploded. Thornton ejected at just 250 feet altitude but lived. He was captured and held as a prisoner of war until 1973. Goodman never escaped the jet. His remains were recently found and shipped back to Nellis Air Force Base. “That day, a husband, a father and a friend was lost,” said Thornton, at a service for his comrade held earlier this year. “I am honored to be here to see him come home.”

The U.S. military is still searching the Vietnam jungle for remains but some battles are so far in the past and so far away their victims will likely never be brought home. In Tarawa, a tiny island in the Central Pacific where in late November of 1943 the U.S. fought fiercely with the Japanese, some 1,000 U.S. Marines and nearly 700 Navy personnel were killed. One of them was 17 year-old James Johnson, the first and last military action he ever saw.  Johnson still lies somewhere beneath the sand. Because U.S. units had to move quickly across the Pacific there was no time for body bags and coffins. Graves were hastily excavated and locations sketched on a map. Several years ago, Johnson’s nephew set out to find him. He linked up with a professional crash site locator named Mark Noah and using burial maps retrieved from military archives located Johnson’s grave, which now lies beneath a gravel parking lot. The pair made the trip to Tarawa, but left Johnson’s remains there. “Those are sacred sites,” said Noah. “It’s not our role to touch or move anything.”

That’s not always the case. In May of last year the remains of Corporal Isaiah Mays, a Buffalo Soldier, were finally laid to rest, at Arlington National Cemetery. Mays was born in Virginia in 1858, a slave.  He traveled west, joined the famous black cavalry known as the Buffalo Soldiers and fought in the Indian Wars of the frontier. In 1889, he was part of a detachment assigned to protect a U.S. Army pay wagon. Bandits ambushed the convoy and a gunfight ensued, killing or wounding most of the soldiers. Mays was shot through both legs. He crawled two miles to a nearby ranch and survived.

For this, he was awarded a Medal of Honor. Several years afterward, he left the Army and was committed to an Arizona state hospital that cared for the indigent and mentally ill. Mays died in 1925, he was buried in the hospital cemetery in a grave marked only with a number. Decades later, hospital staff and several veterans located his grave and arranged for a formal burial, which took place on Memorial Day 2001. A few weeks ago, after receiving court permission, volunteers dug up Mays’ remains and transported them to Washington D.C., where he was finally given the honorable military funeral he deserved. “One more out of 6,000 has his day of recognition,” said William McCurtis, a regimental sergeant major of a Buffalo Soldier group that attended the memorial. “We need to get the rest recognized.”

The Westboro Baptist Church has protested more than 42,000 events in the last two decades, including more than 200 funerals of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Earlier this week, the Supreme Court announced they will hear a case involving the father of a Marine who says the group caused him emotional distress by picketing his son's funeral.

Pastor Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church have protested the Academy Awards, gay pride parades, museum exhibitions, synagogues, the 2008 Sichuan China earthquake and more than 200 funerals of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. They gather outside memorial services waving provocative colored signs that read “God Hates Fags”, “America Is Doomed” and “Thank God For Dead Soldiers” and taunt mourners with chants and jeers.

The Topeka Kansas-based church has only about seventy members, nearly all of them related to Phelps, yet they have caused quite a stir. Patriot Guard Riders, a nationwide network of motorcyclists that congregate at soldier funerals to keep the peace, formed solely to counter the Phelps’s and the family has had several police confrontations and minor court appearances. Earlier this week they were issued a major one; the Supreme Court announced they will hear the case of whether the father of a Marine killed in Iraq can sue Westboro protesters for the emotional distress they caused him by picketing his sons’ funeral.

Funerals have long been fertile ground for protests, and not just in the United States. Two years ago in Greece, the funeral of 15 year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos sparked riots across the country. Grigoropoulos was shot to death by police while in the process of hurling a homemade bomb at a group of officers. A candlelight vigil for him was held in Athens and schools shut in honor of his burial. Students, teachers and parents marched on parliament, a protest that began peaceful but turned rowdy when youths assaulted riot police with stones and bottles. Thousands of mourners gathered at the cemetery itself, where rubbish bins were set ablaze and more stones were thrown. Police clashed with youths in Thessaloniki, the country’s second largest city, and in the western port town of Patras, rioters attacked the main police station with stones and petrol bombs.

Demonstrations at Greek funerals actually have somewhat of a history. Four decades ago, the death of politician George Papandreou became the occasion for a massive rally against the then dictatorship. Papandreou was a leftist leader who narrowly avoided assassination in 1921, escaped to Egypt in the mid-1930s, briefly served as Prime Minister during World War II and in the 1960s became known as an uncompromising populist. In a 1967 military coup he was arrested and a year later he died of a brain clot following surgery performed for a perforated ulcer. More than 300,000 Greeks lined his funeral route, shouting “Down with the junta” and “We want freedom”. Some mourners were arrested but there was no serious violence.

In 1998, in Iraq, protests erupted during a funeral procession for children whose deaths were blamed on the stringent U.N. sanctions that had been in place for eight years. Sixty small white coffins were transported atop a convoy of Baghdad taxis. State officials said the total child death count caused by the sanctions was more than a million. The mourner’s chants were eerily similar to those now used by the Westboro group. “America is the enemy of God,” they shouted. “There will be a price to pay for the blood of our children.”

In South Africa in the mid-1980s, funeral protests became such a popular tool of expression against racial injustices that the Apartheid government banned them. The controversial law prohibited mass funerals—funerals for those who died from injustices brought about by the Apartheid system were regularly drawing as many as 50,000 mourners—and required rites to be held indoors to limit attendance. The display of flags, banners or posters and discussion of politics was forbidden and only ordained ministers were allowed to speak at services. Nobel Peace laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu was outraged.

“Don’t rub salt into our wounds,” he said in a speech at the time. “Don’t trample on us. Where else can we speak? We are not allowed into your Parliament. When we want to speak to the state president, he says he does not want to speak to us. And when we try to speak to our people at our funerals, you restrict us…Please do not try to find points of confrontation and make worse a situation that is already bad. If [you] try to promulgate laws that are unjust, I am going to break these laws.”

"The Ballad of Narayama", a 1983 Japanese film by director Shohei Imamura, refers to a custom called ubasute, in which an elderly relative is carried to a remote place and left to die of dehydration and exposure. The practice, couched in legend, is reminiscent of the infamous "death panels" that critics exaggeratedly claim President Obama wants to institute into his healthcare reform bill.

The elderly are a burden and should bow out, saving society money.

Critics of President Obama’s healthcare reform claim this is what was meant by a section of a proposed bill entitled “Advance Care Planning Consultation.” Advance care planning practitioners were called “death panels” by critics and a media volcano erupted.

Proponents of the bill argue that the disputed passage was actually intended to inform elders about end-of-life issues, such as access to a good hospice and how to create a living will.

At issue is the idea of senicide, or the abandonment to death of the elderly. The concept may seem outrageous to citizens of this country, but in some spots on the planet it’s a time-honored tradition, or at least a time-honored legend.

In the Dinaric Mountains of Serbia, lapot refers to the legendary practice of killing one’s parents or other elderly family members once they have become a financial burden. “In the area of Homolje, Zajecar, and Negotin Krajina, the ritual existed and was practiced on a large scale until the end of the nineteenth century, and even in the early twentieth century,” reads a passage from Branimir Anzulovic’s history of the region, “Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide”.

Elderly were killed with sticks and sometimes with rocks or an axe. Usually, the victim’s children committed the act. In a grisly passage from Heavenly Serbia, Anzulovic quotes an earlier lapot text: “In Krepoljin and some other places in eastern Serbia, members of the household used to prepare cornmush, put it on the old man’s or woman’s head, and strike it with an axe until the person died. They did it this way to make it appear that the mush was the killer, not themselves.”

The Inuit are often cited as a people that once practiced senicide. Early 20th century explorers such as Knud Rasmussen described how during times of hardship, elders who could not keep up were left alone on the land, to be finished off by the elements. In the 1950 novel “Top of the World”, by Hans Ruesch, inspiration for the film “The Savage Innocents”, which came a decade later and starred Anthony Quinn, an old woman named Powtee is left to die on the sea ice.

However, in a paper entitled, “Suicide Among the Canadian Inuit”, lead-author Antoon Leenaars, of the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands, says that “although suicide in the elderly occurred, later observers noted that both Weyer and Boas [anthropologists] may have exaggerated the reports from specific cases in specific communities.”

In Japan, ubasute refers to a custom in which an elderly relative is carried to a remote place and left to die of dehydration and exposure. One famous tale is of a son that carries his mother up a mountain on his back. She snaps twigs from branches of the trees they pass so he’ll be able to find his way home.

The 1983 film, “The Ballad of Narayama”, based on a 1958 film of the same title and an earlier novel by Shichiro Fukazawa, tells the story of Orin, a woman in a rural Japanese village that is approaching 70. After tying up the loose ends in her life, her son, Tatsuhei, drags her up Mount Narayama to die. The film is directed by Shohei Imamura and won the Palme d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival, in 1983. It brought many Americans face to face with a concept they knew little about.

“Watching Ballad of Narayama I was forced to confront my own feelings about the morality of suicide,” writes one reviewer, on the film website, IMDb. “Both during and since viewing the film, I have been haunted by the idea of a loved one slowly freezing to death on a mountain—for my benefit.”