WORLD  

UN disappointed over lack of agreement on arms treaty

SouthAsia OneWorld – July 30, 2012  

Describing it as a ‘setback,’ Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has expressed his disappointment over the failure by United Nations Member States to reach agreement on a treaty that would regulate the conventional arms trade.“I am disappointed that the Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) concluded its four-week-long session without agreement on a treaty text that would have set common standards to regulate the international trade in conventional arms,” Mr. Ban said.“The Conference's inability to conclude its work on this much-awaited ATT, despite years of effort of Member States and civil society from many countries, is a setback,” he added. Ending on Friday without agreement, the four-week long Conference brought together the UN's 193 Member States to negotiate what is seen as the most important initiative ever regarding conventional arms regulation within the United Nations. According to media reports, some countries had indicated they needed more time to consider the issues. Despite the lack of agreement, in his statement, Mr. Ban said that he was encouraged that the ATT process was not over, with States having agreed to continue pursuing “this noble goal.”“There is already considerable common ground and States can build on the hard work that has been done during these negotiations,” Mr. Ban said, while also noting that his commitment to the pursuit of “a robust ATT is steadfast.”

“A strong treaty would rid the world of the appalling human cost of the poorly regulated international arms trade,” the Secretary-General said. “It would also enhance the ability of the United Nations to cope with the proliferation of arms.”At the end of 2010, an estimated 27.5 million people were internally displaced as a result of conflict, while millions more have sought refuge abroad. In many cases, the armed violence that drove them from their homes was fuelled by the widespread availability and misuse of weapons.I n his statement, the UN chief also commended the President of the ATT Conference, Ambassador Roberto Garcia Moritán of Argentina, for his persistence and skilful leadership of the process. In February, the heads of several UN agencies – including the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) – called for a comprehensive arms trade treaty that requires States to assess the risk that serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law may be committed with weapons being transferred; includes within its scope all conventional weapons, including small arms; and ensures that there are no loopholes by covering all types of transfers, including activities such as transit, trans-shipment, as wells as loans and leases.

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Aid Policy - New words, old challenges  

Irinnews - Gorgol/Johannesburg - July 30, 2012

Spending aid money on social initiatives like communal bore-wells, which affect and protect everyone’s lives, especially the poorest, will make people more resilient to climatic and economic shocks, says a new report. This is probably a truth as old as development science itself, but a fresh coat of paint and the use of new terms like “resilience” might revive interest in these vital issues. The report, Ending the Everyday Emergency, commissioned by NGOs Save the Children and World Vision and compiled by Peter Gubbels, tries to assess the progress, lessons learned, and challenges of promoting "resilience" in the Sahel. Such initiatives are needed all over, but are few and far between. Money spent on a bore-well, vegetable seeds, basic gardening skills and access to a communal patch of land near the water point in Diaout, a village in the Gorgol region of Mauritania, where most families cannot afford to eat more than once a day, has helped them withstand the drought that has killed animals and destroyed crops in their neighbourhood. The villagers want access to more land, and a water pump to draw water from the Senegal River, a few kilometres from Diaout, because they realize they can grow more food and sell what they don’t need. This initiative was set up by Oxfam, which is trying to extend the project to more villages but are stretched for cash. The Gorgol, Brakna and Assaba regions form Mauritania’s Triangle of Poverty, where at least 60 percent of the people live on less than one US dollar a day. Gubbels said the chronically food insecure population usually does not benefit from development, "and only gets enough support from humanitarian action to avoid famine - they do not get long-term support to get out of the debt-hunger trap." The lack of protection for such families has been dubbed the "resilience deficit", and has driven millions unable to cope with shocks into chronic hunger - at least 18 million have been affected by the food crisis brought by drought in the Sahel. "The current paradigm of development... [is based on the assumption that] increasing the overall supply of food will create jobs for 'unproductive' peasant farmers and also reduce food prices," Gubbels said. “I am not against investing in overall agriculture, and economic growth spurred by agriculture. But in the context of the Sahel, I argue that economic growth is leaving rising numbers of highly food insecure families and malnourished children - economic growth in the Sahel was over five percent in 2011, but we see increased vulnerability and malnutrition." Even in a "non-crisis" year, an estimated 645,000 children in the Sahel die of largely preventable and treatable causes, and 226,000 of these deaths can be directly linked to malnutrition, the report said. "Acute malnutrition affects 10 percent to 14 percent of children in Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Burkina Faso, and more than 15 percent of children in Chad." He suggested increased investment in social transfers - like communal bore-wells, seeds, and more inclusive extension services that filter down to the most vulnerable. Each actor has to think not only about their own work, but about how all the other actors fit together, so that impact on the ground becomes the centre of analysis, and not each person's pet projetNew words, old challenges There is not much to disagree with what Gubbels and the report are saying, said Simon Levine, an aid expert at the Overseas Development Institute, a UK-based think-tank. And the critique that interventions related to improving food security and livelihood needs are a development failure is "nothing new" - just that it is being called a "resilience deficit - but absolutely no less important for restating”, he noted.“If the new language helps to get attention with a wider development audience, then I have no problems at all. They [the report and its author] are 100 percent right that the challenges in the Sahel are not really about how to respond to crises, but how to prevent them." The report also suggests harnessing "small-scale agriculture for resilience", which… "will need careful operationalization if it is not to sit uncomfortably with the critique that too much attention has been paid to food production at the expense of other factors creating vulnerability". Levine said all aid agencies need to change their development planning [to] a strategic approach "that is not a jargon change - that's a very significant change indeed. Each actor has to think not only about their own work, but about how all the other actors fit together, so that impact on the ground becomes the centre of analysis, and not each person's pet project."

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Arms treaty, failure of negotiations puts pressure on great powers

Misna - July 30, 2012  

Four weeks of negotiations have failed to produce an agreement for the drafting and adoption of a treaty regulating the trade in conventional arms (ATT Arms Trade Treaty). “The inability of the Conference of New York to finish its work on the much anticipated Act, despite years of efforts made by UN member countries and civil society in many nations, is a defeat,” said United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon. The negotiations ended last Friday and according to representatives from NGOs who followed them, in the end the vested interests of some powerful nations – the United States, Russia and China in particular – prevailed. “With one person dying every minute due to armed violence, it should be imperative for the most powerful nations to take the lead. President Obama instead requested more time to reach an agreement. But how long is needed?” Asked Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International.

“These negotiations – said Shetty – have been an uncomfortable test for world leaders. Thw powerful few failed to disengage from their positions choosing instead to pursue a policy of national political interests. This minority may well have turned their backs to the world, but it cannot for much longer. The majority of governments which demand a strong ATT must continue now to exert pressure so that an agreement might be reached this year.

 “The Control Arms campaign – which includes several non-governmental organizations – has in turn emphasized its position expressing it in a joint statement from 90 nations which claimed to be bitter but not discouraged”, determined to achieve a treaty promptly. According to Control Arms it is necessary to start from the position adopted by these countries in order to achieve a breakthrough.  

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AFRICA

Tribe, land and politics - Africa's toxic mix by Peter Greste

Al Jazeera - July 31, 2012 

A wiser journalist that I once knew gave me a piece of advice, saying: "Beware of simple explanations for complex problems."It is a bit of wisdom that has proved profoundly true for the crisis that emerged on the Kenya-Ethiopia border over the past week.On Friday, fighting between two ethnic groups – the Borana and the Garre – erupted on the Ethiopian side of Moyale, a town that straddles the frontier.The brief but savage battle killed at least 18 people, and wounded a dozen more (the fact that so many more people died than were injured points to the ferocity of the fighting). More than 30,000 people fled over the border to take shelter in Kenya.The obvious and easy explanation is that it was a battle over land. The two tribes have competing claims over a stretch of territory in Ethiopia's arid southeast corner, and an ongoing drought has added pressure to the already scarce grazing land.Neither the Borana nor Garre refugees could agree on who started the fighting, or what triggered it.

Power-vacuum

The Borana, who had crammed into the dusty Somare Primary School, a few hundred metres south of the border, said the Garre attacked with weapons the government had given them to fight off an insurgency by ethnic Somalis.Across town, in another school, the Garre said another group of separatists linked to the Borana had taken advantage of an apparent power-vacuum in Addis Ababa to launch their offensive.But in a rare moment of consensus, when I asked the respective community elders what lay behind the crisis, all agreed that it was a problem of politics and not tribe.One Borana elder, Kefiyalewu Tikku, described it as a failure of governance, saying: "This business of tribe can be managed."We always had our traditional ways of solving our problems, but the central government (in Addis Ababa) has used a policy of 'divide-and-rule' to keep us marginalised."The government here is very weak, and so they use it to control us."In a way, that is encouraging. Tribe is, after all, an immutable characteristic in Africa. You can't change your tribe any more than you can change the colour of your blood, so any "tribal conflict" is by definition almost unsolvable.Describing a conflict as "tribal" also avoids the problem of assigning responsibility. It blames an entire ethnic community for the sins of a few protagonists.

Convenient diversion

And so, as is often the case in Africa, tribe becomes a convenient diversion from the deeper political malaise that seems to drive so many conflicts here.In the case of Ethiopia, human rights groups and ethnic minorities have repeatedly accused Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of trying to centralise power in Addis Ababa, at the expense of ethnic minorities who live on the fringes of this vast, and incredibly diverse country.That neglect has spawned separatist movements in the east and the south, and it is no coincidence that Moyale, where the latest fighting erupted, sits on the faultline that separates those two restive regions.Anyone who doubts this need only look over the border in Kenya. Both Borana and Garre live on this side of Moyale too, yet literally a few metres south of the frontier beacons that dot their way through town, there is no fighting.The geography and the ethnic mix are the same. The only difference is the way politics is done.That's not to suggest the Kenyans are immune from manipulating tribe for political ends though. The last time the Garre and Borana fought was in 2008, when Kenya last held its elections.So, the solution to the fighting between the two ethnic groups is not to change genetics; it is to improve the way they are governed.Of course, that needs courage and commitment by political leaders to sit down and discuss the problems that create friction in the first place.At the moment, that is not on anyone's agenda.

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Political Murders - It's About the Dough by Genevieve Quintal

Allafrica - Johannesburg - July 29, 2012  

Political killings in South Africa are not about political dominance but about getting to the trough first."Some of these guys literally come out of severe poverty and if they get kicked out they will be back there." said deputy CEO of the SA Institute of Race Relations Frans Cronje."The stakes are high... it's about money."The number of politicians murdered the past five years has escalated, especially between 2010 and 2012.KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga seem to be the worst affected -- with 41 and five killed respectively.Around the country, at least 46 officials from various political parties have been gunned down around the country.Cronje said: "Yes South Africa is a democracy... but I can't think of another country that has this problem."We [the institute] have been hard pressed to find a single person killed over an idea. It all depends on tenders and corruption."He said the issue had been swept under the carpet for far too long and was something that would become very controversial in the next five years.Historically, KwaZulu-Natal has been a test-bed since the late 80s, and to this day it is still seen as a political killing ground.ANC KwaZulu-Natal secretary Sihle Zikalala said the party had quite a few officials killed in the last two years, but was difficult to pinpoint motives."We have called for serious interventions to crack all these cases. It's destabilising the party."Zikalala said the ANC did not want to accuse another political party, especially not before a full investigation was conducted.IFP MP Albert Mncwango said political tension in KwaZulu-Natal was because of the IFP breakaway group the National Freedom Party.Mncwango said quite a number of councillors in his party had been killed the past five years."A rough figure, which is subject to verification, is around 10. We believe it was always politically motivated," he said."They took place especially around the Natal Midlands and these murders escalated when there were internal ructions which gave rise to the NFP."Former IFP chairwoman Zanele Magwaza-Msibi and her backers launched the new opposition to the IFP in January 2011.The NFP has said 22 of its members have been murdered since its launch.Many of these murders had been blamed on the IFP. Mncwango said this was unfortunate."In all their murders, that they say are politically motivated, I can't think of any IFP member who has been apprehended."NFP general secretary Nhlanhla Khubisa said the party had never blamed other political parties for the spate of murders."We say its politically motivated because it started immediately when the party was formed and of course in some cases there was some kind of political intolerance."Khubisa did however say that it was not NFP members killing other NFP members. "We a threat to somebody, somewhere."So is political intolerance in South Africa too high?

According to Zikalala it is."It is a problem and the problem of political assassinations is a serious one," he said. Mncwango said there was a new brand of political intolerance in the country. It was no longer about parties defending their political strongholds."We have a new kind of political intolerance which has to do with tenderpreneurship," he said."This is becoming a huge influence in politics and a source of internal ructions in parties."Because the IFP was not running government it did not hand out tenders and so it had minimal infighting, said Mncwango. Zikalala said the problem surrounding tenders could not be ruled out but that would form part of the ANC's investigation into the reason for political murders.Khubisa said there needed to be a change of mind set amongst members of political parties across the political landscape."At some point some kind of political education is needed across all parties," he said.Five politicians have also been murdered in Mpumalanga since 2007.There have been allegations of a hit list circulating in the province which had the names of provincial politicians on it.

The list apparently targeted people who stood in the way of access to 2010 Soccer World Cup tenders.It was said to be compiled, funded and executed by ANC members.Two people, Jimmy Mohlala and Sammy Mpatlanyane, whose names were on the alleged hit list, had been murdered in 2009 and 2010.Cronje concluded that ANC policy was killing off parts of the party."Look at the ANC... money has brought it to where it is."Material gain, said Cronje, went hand in hand with politics.T his was especially true in a country such as South Africa where the previously poor were now in power."The fight for tenders is desperate," Cronje said.

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New ICC prosecutor vows to focus on victims

Irinnews - London - July 30, 2012 

That a war crimes court should focus on the victims of war crimes sounds like a simple concept.

But many of those living in the African communities where most of the atrocities being prosecuted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) took place, have long complained they have been forgotten by this controversial and costly institution based thousands of miles away.The new ICC prosecutor has pledged that victims - particularly women and children - will be her priority, but analysts worry that shrinking budgets could make her promises difficult to keep.Fatou Bensouda said at her swearing-in speech in June that she would “focus on, and listen to, the millions of victims who continue to suffer from massive crimes…“The return on our investment for what others may today consider to be a huge cost for justice is effective deterrence and saving millions of victims’ lives,” said Bensouda as she took over the ICC’s highest profile job from Luis Moreno-Ocampo. Gambia’s former justice minister and attorney-general served more than eight years as Ocampo’s deputy.Sunil Pal, head of the legal section at the Coalition for the ICC, an advocacy organization comprising 2,500 civil society groups in 150 countries, expects Bensouda to bring her own unique approach to the role of prosecutor. He welcomes her diplomatic style and focus on victims.“The tone is very positive [with Bensouda],” he said. “There is a real emphasis on working with victims and ensuring that the process is meaningful for the direct beneficiaries of this process - the victims. It is about recognizing the importance that victims play in this process and an acknowledgement and strengthening of that role.”On paper at least the ICC is the most victim-friendly of all the international tribunals. Court-recognized victims are given lawyers and allowed to participate throughout a trial, including by questioning witnesses. Those who have suffered injury or harm from a crime for which someone is convicted are also eligible for restitution, compensation or rehabilitation. The reparations process is now under way in the Thomas Lubanga case, the only trial completed during Ocampo’s nine-year reign, but awards are many months away. Lubanga was a Congolese militia leader convicted of recruiting children.It is up to the court’s registry and judges rather than the prosecutor to explain the reparations procedure to victims. But analysts say it is Bensouda who should take responsibility for improving communications with victims who have often complained about the lack of information coming from the Hague-based court about the trials.“There has been a general insufficiency of information being passed to victims which leads to certain perceptions of how the court works which may be false,” said Carla Ferstman, director of Redress, a human rights group working with war crimes victims. “It’s not only about bad practices of the prosecutor, it’s about practices that are misunderstood.“Bensouda does have a role in reaching out and bringing victims in. She should see them as her stakeholders. These are constituents she should be working with and getting on board.”The ICC’s focus on African cases has been controversial and has led to charges of bias from the court’s vocal critics on the continent where cooperation has been patchy at best. Eleven ICC arrest warrants for African accused remain outstanding. Pal believes that by placing an emphasis on the importance of victims, Bensouda will bring greater relevance to the work of the ICC in the places it is investigating.“Communications is [a] priority, ensuring the process is relevant and meaningful for victims and communicating, educating and informing victims around its decision-making process, particularly in the case of preliminary examinations,” he said.  “This is about creating environments that are conducive to facilitating the court's work in-country, which will help them get buy-in and counteract accusations of bias.”  

Reduced budget

But with a reduced 108 million euro budget this year and an ever increasing caseload, the ICC could struggle to meet its obligations to stay in touch with victims. States are pressuring the ICC to reduce its budget, which would impact on victim participation and communication with those on the ground. “Outreach to victims and affected communities presents unique challenges, which will only become harder in the face of additional cuts,” said Pal. “These activities are critical to ensuring that victims and victim communities understand what the court is trying to achieve in their name. It's also critical to facilitating their participation in proceedings, in terms of explaining their rights in the ICC process.”  

Kenya

Bensouda’s task of improving relations in Africa could also be complicated by the upcoming trials of four prominent Kenyans accused of orchestrating post-election violence in 2007. The case has generated huge interest in Kenya where debate has raged over whether the court is striking a blow for impunity or targeting innocent victims.

Former Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga’s conviction was the ICC’s first verdict Nick Kaufman, a former ICC prosecutor turned defence lawyer who has represented Congolese clients accused of war crimes, says negotiating a smooth prosecution should be her main priority.

“I think it is a good thing there is an African prosecutor in charge of the court at the moment, because she will be able to bring her own cultural outlook to bear in the case, especially when negotiating the minefield of Kenyan politics which avidly follows the developments in the cases,” he said. “Hardly a day goes by without some sort of reference to the cases in the Kenyan media.”  
   

Lubanga case

Elsewhere in Africa, Bensouda will expected to explain to victims and others the recent sentencing of the DRC’s Lubanga. Bensouda, a member of the prosecution team, was in court on 10 July as judges sentenced the militia leader to 14 years while praising him for enduring prosecution misdeeds during the trial which twice came close to collapse. Reaction was mixed among victims, according to Bukeni Waruzi, an expert on child soldiers and the programme manager for Africa and the Middle East at the NGO Witness.  “You have some who actually are happy that at least he was sentenced,” said Waruzi. “But there are some who believe it should be more. If he was prosecuted in DRC, with the gravity of the crimes, it could have been more than 14 years.” Ocampo, in one of his final acts as prosecutor, had asked for the maximum penalty of 30 years. However, with six years already served, Lubanga could be out in less than eight. Kaufman says this puts Bensouda in an awkward position with victims. “She is being forced to defend a previous sentencing policy that was promoted mistakenly by her predecessor - and I say mistakenly because it was completely wrong for the prosecutor to ask for the maximum sentence, bar a life sentence, for a crime of this nature,” said Kaufman.

He expects a different ICC under Bensouda who endured a rocky start to her tenure with the arrest by Libyan authorities of defence lawyer Melinda Taylor on charges of spying for her client Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. “She is the complete opposite of Ocampo. I don’t think we’ll see any of Ocampo’s antics with Fatou - for example courting film stars and other totally irrelevant figures to the conduct of international justice,” said Kaufman who also represents two of Muammar Gaddafi’s children, Aisha and Saadi. “She will be far more professional in her outlook. She’s a very competent orator and is also very courteous and respectful.”  

Taking on too much?

Though confidence in Bensouda is high, analysts worry she could be spreading herself too thin.

The ICC has14 cases before judges, ongoing investigations in seven countries and preliminary investigations under way in countries including Afghanistan, Colombia and Korea. On 18 July, Bensouda announced that the government of Mali had asked for an investigation into violence which erupted there earlier this year. “How many more situations can they take on?” said William Schabas, a professor in international law at Middlesex University.  “Have they taken on already more than they can actually manage? You see how complicated this is. Look at Lubanga - one trial chamber basically full time for four years and they are not finished. They still haven’t done the reparations stuff.” Back in the Congo, where new fighting alleged to have been orchestrated by ICC fugitive Bosco Ntaganda has broken out, expectations that the new prosecutor can help end the violence and impunity remain high. “There is a huge amount of expectations - from victims, from activists, from everyone,” said Waruzi. “This will be a challenge, how to meet those expectations while fulfilling her mandate.”

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New Words, Old Challenges

Allafrica - July 30, 2012  

Spending aid money on social initiatives like communal bore-wells, which affect and protect everyone's lives, especially the poorest, will make people more resilient to climatic and economic shocks, says a new report. This is probably a truth as old as development science itself, but a fresh coat of paint and the use of new terms like "resilience" might revive interest in these vital issues.

The report, Ending the Everyday Emergency, commissioned by NGOs Save the Children and World Vision and compiled by Peter Gubbels, tries to assess the progress, lessons learned, and challenges of promoting "resilience" in the Sahel. Such initiatives are needed all over, but are few and far between.

Money spent on a bore-well, vegetable seeds, basic gardening skills and access to a communal patch of land near the water point in Diaout, a village in the Gorgol region of Mauritania, where most families cannot afford to eat more than once a day, has helped them withstand the drought that has killed animals and destroyed crops in their neighbourhood.

The villagers want access to more land, and a water pump to draw water from the Senegal River, a few kilometres from Diaout, because they realize they can grow more food and sell what they don't need. This initiative was set up by Oxfam, which is trying to extend the project to more villages but are stretched for cash. The Gorgol, Brakna and Assaba regions form Mauritania's Triangle of Poverty, where at least 60 percent of the people live on less than one US dollar a day. Gubbels said the chronically food insecure population usually does not benefit from development, "and only gets enough support from humanitarian action to avoid famine - they do not get long-term support to get out of the debt-hunger trap." The lack of protection for such families has been dubbed the "resilience deficit", and has driven millions unable to cope with shocks into chronic hunger - at least 18 million have been affected by the food crisis brought by drought in the Sahel. "The current paradigm of development... [is based on the assumption that] increasing the overall supply of food will create jobs for 'unproductive' peasant farmers and also reduce food prices," Gubbels said.

"I am not against investing in overall agriculture, and economic growth spurred by agriculture. But in the context of the Sahel, I argue that economic growth is leaving rising numbers of highly food insecure families and malnourished children - economic growth in the Sahel was over five percent in 2011, but we see increased vulnerability and malnutrition."

Even in a "non-crisis" year, an estimated 645,000 children in the Sahel die of largely preventable and treatable causes, and 226,000 of these deaths can be directly linked to malnutrition, the report said. "Acute malnutrition affects 10 percent to 14 percent of children in Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Burkina Faso, and more than 15 percent of children in Chad."

He suggested increased investment in social transfers - like communal bore-wells, seeds, and more inclusive extension services that filter down to the most vulnerable.  

New words, old challenges

There is not much to disagree with what Gubbels and the report are saying, said Simon Levine, an aid expert at the Overseas Development Institute, a UK-based think-tank. And the critique that interventions related to improving food security and livelihood needs are a development failure is "nothing new" - just that it is being called a "resilience deficit - but absolutely no less important for restating", he noted. "If the new language helps to get attention with a wider development audience, then I have no problems at all. They [the report and its author] are 100 percent right that the challenges in the Sahel are not really about how to respond to crises, but how to prevent them."

The report also suggests harnessing "small-scale agriculture for resilience", which... "will need careful operationalization if it is not to sit uncomfortably with the critique that too much attention has been paid to food production at the expense of other factors creating vulnerability".

Levine said all aid agencies need to change their development planning [to] a strategic approach "that is not a jargon change - that's a very significant change indeed. Each actor has to think not only about their own work, but about how all the other actors fit together, so that impact on the ground becomes the centre of analysis, and not each person's pet project."  

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ASIA

Red Tide Rising

Daily Star - July 25, 2012 

Intolerance, fuelled by a variety of causes, is leading to increasing violence worldwide  

In the wake of the most recent mass killing in the United States, several people tweeted that they hoped the Colorado killer wasn’t a Muslim. Some asked on email why James Holmes wasn’t being referred to as a “terrorist” instead of as a “gunman”. Although the semantic difference means little to the victims, the generally accepted meaning of a terrorist is somebody who targets civilians indiscriminately to spread mayhem and fear. His purpose is to make a political statement. A lone gunman, on the other hand, kills at random for largely irrational, non-political reasons. Often, he is a lone wolf with paranoid fantasies. Although terrorism is not a new phenomenon, it is being deployed across the world by a growing number of violent but dedicated groups and individuals ranging from neo-Nazis in Germany to Islamist extremists in Pakistan and elsewhere.

Recently, a BBC special report fo­cused on a German group calling itself the National Socialist Underground that killed seven Turks, plus a Greek and a German police officer over a 10-year murder spree. Despite the similarity in its methods, police failed to make a connection between these killings until a botched bank robbery last November revealed the truth. It appears that the German police had barely tried to investigate the murders, attributing them to an unknown Turkish mafia. In the subsequent uproar, federal agents discovered that some documents had been destroyed, leading to suspicions of a cover-up by right wing sympathisers.

In the BBC report, one racist activist said that he could understand—and sympathise with— the motive behind these killings. He then trotted out the same drivel about the need for racial purity that so many extreme nationalist right-wing groups use. The term “Nazi”, of course, is the abbreviation for National Socialist German Workers Party, the formal name given by Adolf Hitler to his party.

Leading to resentment

It is useful to recall that the rise of the Nazi Party coincided with a period of acute economic misery in Germany after its defeat in the First World War. Hyperinflation reached such a level that it took a suitcase full of cash to buy a loaf of bread. Unemployment was rife, and middle-class Germans found themselves fighting for survival.

Much of this economic shambles was caused by the harsh reparations forced on Germany by the victorious allies. Billions flowed out of the exchequer in Berlin to London, Paris and Washington. The resultant anger that built up was channelised by Hitler against the allies abroad, and the Jews at home. Millions of Germans flocked to Hitler’s banner, and the National Socialists won 37.3

per cent of the votes in the 1932 elections that propelled Hitler to the position of Chancellor.

In the following year, the Nazis had upped their share to 43.9 per cent following a campaign marred by extreme violence and bullying. Thousands of communists were locked up, and several left-wing candidates murdered.

The point here is that a sudden economic collapse and a feeling of resentment against the “other” can trigger a transformation in political and social attitudes. This lesson from history is relevant in an era of a crisis of capitalism. As unemployment in many European countries soars and social benefits are slashed, right-wing forces expand by focusing public anger against immigrants.

In France, the National Front gained its highest number of votes ever, with close to 20 per cent. Once widely rejected as a gang of racist goons, the party has now attained a level of support and respectability. If Hollande’s Socialist Party has to impose unpopular spending cuts, Le Pen and her National Front would be the major beneficiaries of the ensuing backlash. Needless to say, the party stands for severe restric­tions on immigration.

In Greece, months of fiscal belt-tightening imposed by the EU and the IMF has resulted in shocking levels of poverty in a well-off European country. Almost overnight, millions of Greeks see an uncertain future as jobs and pensions disappear. Here again, attacks against  immigrants have risen sharply, with the neo-Nazi group Golden Dawn  leading the way.

Increasing Violence

In a post-religious Europe, ex-tremism takes the path of violence against non-white foreigners. Because race and colour is the defining identity of many, anger  is directed against those from other ethnic groups. In Muslim countries where all too often, faith forms the first and most  important  layer of  identity, those not subscribing to the majority creed are being  increasingly targetted.In Pakistan, for  instance, Ahmadis, Christians and Hindus and also Shia Muslims are being attacked and killed  in growing numbers. In Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Christians have had to flee their homes. In Egypt, Copts have been discriminated against for decades. And now in northern Mali, we have the spectacle of people being lashed by extremist thugs.It seems that rising  intolerance, fuelled by a variety of causes, is leading to increasing violence. In some cases, as in Kashmir and Chechnya, nationalism feeds freedom movements. In Balochistan, state repression has sparked off a low-level but deadly separatist struggle. After the collapse and break-up of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, many of us had expected a safer and saner world to emerge. Over two decades later, we learned to our cost that actually, the stand-off between the two superpowers acted as a force for stability, barring in the areas where they clashed through proxies.Now, in a world awash in weapons, it seems that violence  is the first—and not the  last—recourse to settle any difference of opinion. All manner of  ideologues want to  impose their ideologies on the rest of us. Sadly, it is a warped belief in political Islam that motivates so many of these extremist groups. But religion is not the only motive for violence. As we have seen all too often, people  like the Norwegian killer Anders Breivik can slaughter 77 people in cold blood without claiming any divine right to kill.

We should all be worried about this trend. In the West, security forces are so preoccupied by the Is-lamist threat that they often overlook the far deadlier danger posed by homegrown nuts  like James Holmes who, with easy access to arms, gun down so many  innocent people.

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In Himalayan arms race, China one-ups India by Frank Jack Daniel

Reuters - July 30, 2012  

Asia's two great powers are facing off here in the eastern Himalayan mountains. China has vastly improved roads and is building or extending airports on its side of the border in Tibet. It has placed nuclear-capable intermediate missiles in the area and deployed around 300,000 troops across the Tibetan plateau, according to a 2010 Pentagon report. India is in the midst of a 10-year plan to scale up its side. In the state of Arunachal Pradesh, new infantry patrols started on the frontier in May, as part of a surge to add some 60,000 men to the 120,000 already in the region. It has stationed two Sukhoi 30 fighter squadrons and will deploy the Brahmos cruise missile.

"If they can increase their military strength there, then we can increase our military strength in our own land," Defence Minister A.K. Anthony told parliament recently.

Reuters journalists on a rare journey through the state discovered, however, that India is lagging well behind China in building infrastructure in the area. The main military supply route through sparsely populated Arunachal is largely dirt track. Along the roadside, work gangs of local women chip boulders into gravel with hammers to repair the road, many with babies strapped to their backs. Together with a few creaky bulldozers, this is the extent of the army's effort to carve a modern highway from the liquid hillside, one that would carry troops and weaponry to the disputed ceasefire line in any conflict with China. India and China fought a brief frontier war here in 1962, and Chinese maps still show all of Arunachal Pradesh within China's borders. The continuing standoff will test whether these two Asian titans - each with more than a billion people, blossoming trade ties and ambitions as global powers - can rise peacefully together. With the United States courting India in its "pivot" to Asia, the stakes are all the higher.

FIGHT AN INSURGENCY

"With the kind of developments that are taking place in the Tibet Autonomous Region, and infrastructure that is going up, it gives a certain capability to China," India's army chief, Gen. V.K. Singh, told Reuters the day before he left office on May 31. "And you say at some point, if the issue does not get settled, there could be some problem."

Indian analysts and policymakers went further in their "Non-Alignment 2.0" report released this year. It argues India cannot "entirely dismiss the possibility of a major military offensive in Arunachal Pradesh," and suggests New Delhi should prepare to fight an insurgency war if attacked.

"We feel very clearly that we need to develop the border infrastructure, engage with our border communities, do that entire development and leave our options open on how to respond to any border incursion, in case tensions ratchet up," Rajiv Kumar, one of the report's authors, said in an interview. Indian media frequently run warnings of alleged Chinese plots, and both militaries drill near the border. In March, while China's foreign minister was visiting Delhi, the Indian air force and army held an exercise dubbed "Destruction" in Arunachal's mountains. Three weeks later, China said its J-10 fighters dropped laser-guided bombs on the Tibetan plateau in high-altitude ground-attack training.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Some policymakers play down the Arunachal face-off. Nuclear weapons on both sides would deter all-out war, and the forbidding terrain makes even conventional warfare difficult. A defense hotline and frequent meetings between top Chinese and Indian officials, including regular gatherings at the border, help ease the pressure. Bilateral trade, which soared to $74 billion in 2011 from a few billion dollars a decade ago, is also knitting ties.From China's perspective, the border dispute with India doesn't rank with Beijing's other border or military concerns, such as Taiwan. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin struck an optimistic tone. "China and India are in consensus on the border issue, will work together to protect peace and calm in the border region, and also believe that by jointly working toward the same goal, negotiations on the border will yield results," Liu said.

Hu Shisheng, a Sino-India expert at the government-backed China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said the border dispute casts an oversized shadow in the Indian media - where the China threat is perceived to be strong. But any voices within the Chinese military that advocate seizing the region are weak, he said.

"China's military could take the territory by force, but maintaining the gains in the long term would be exceptionally difficult," Hu said, noting the tough terrain.

Yet with both nations undertaking massive naval modernizations and brushing up against each other's interests across South Asia and in the South China Sea, the festering dispute risks being the catalyst for a violent flare-up, some security analysts say.

STRING OF PEARLS

For thousands of years, Chinese and Indian empires were kept apart by the Himalayas. After years of fast economic growth, the rivals now have the resources to consolidate and patrol their most distant regions. India is starting to feel fenced in by Chinese agreements with its neighbors that are not strictly military but could be leveraged in a conflict. Indians sometimes refer to these as a "string of pearls," which includes China's force deployments in Tibet, access to a Myanmar naval base, and Chinese construction of a deepwater port in Hambantota, Sri Lanka, and another in Gwadar, Pakistan.

Some in the Chinese government worry that India is becoming part of a U.S. strategy to contain China. The United States has sold $8 billion in weapons to India, which is spending about $100 billion over 10 years to modernize its military. The two nations are unlikely to go to war, but have no choice but to add to their military strength on the border as they gain clout, a senior Indian official with direct experience of Sino-Indian relations told Reuters. "It is the currency of power," he said. In the border negotiations, "we are ready to compromise, but up to a point."

MUDDY COIL

The road to Tawang, a center of Tibetan Buddhism by the border, is one of India's most strategic military supply routes. Growling convoys of army trucks bring troops, food and fuel through three Himalayan passes on the 320-kilometer (199-mile) muddy coil to camps dotted along the disputed border. On a road trip in late May and early June, Reuters found much of the 14,000-foot-high road to be a treacherous rutted trail, often blocked by landslides or snow, despite years of promises to widen and resurface it. At its start in the insurgent-hit tropical plains of Assam state, the Tawang road is guarded by soldiers armed with Israeli rifles and shoulder-mounted rocket launchers who sweep for roadside bombs. Near the end - a tough two-day drive - is the 300-year-old white-walled Tawang monastery. In the higher reaches, the army convoys struggle along rock-walled valleys to bases near the McMahon Line, the border agreed to by India and Tibet in a 1914 treaty and now the de facto frontier with China. It is the only way in. Supplies are taken to even remoter army posts by 50-mule caravans on three-day treks. Along the tortuous road, soldiers can be seen shooting at targets on a firing range. Rows of ammunition sheds behind barbed wire dot the landscape on a chilly plateau shared with yaks. New fuel depots and small bases are springing up. In addition to deploying extra troops, missiles and fighter jets in Arunachal, India plans to buy heavy-lift choppers to carry light artillery to the mountains.

BUILDING AIRPORTS

China rules restive Tibet with an iron hand, and tightly restricts visits by foreign media, making independent assessments of the military presence in the region hard. But all signs indicate much more sophisticated infrastructure on the Chinese side of the border. During the last government-organized visit to Tibet, in 2010, a Reuters journalist saw half a dozen Su-27 fighters, some of the most advanced and lethal aircraft China owns, operating from Lhasa's Gonggar airport. China has been building or extending airports across vast and remote Tibet, all of which have a dual military-civilian use. Meanwhile, residents on the Indian side of the border report the Chinese have built smooth, hard-topped roads stretching to Tibet's capital of Lhasa. Chinese border posts, like India's today, were once only reachable by horse or mule. Now they are connected by asphalt. Beyond the frontier, the Chinese improvements include laying asphalt on a historic highway across the region of Aksai Chin, which is claimed by India. The construction of the Xinjiang-Tibet national highway 50 years ago shocked India and contributed to the 1962 war. China's rails are improving, too: Beijing opened a train line from Tibet to the region in 2006, and an extension is planned into a prefecture bordering Arunachal. In a 2010 cable released by Wikileaks, a U.S. diplomat concluded that infrastructure development in Lhoka prefecture, which according to China includes Tawang, was in part to prepare a "rear base" should a border clash arise. For years, India deliberately neglected infrastructure in Arunachal Pradesh, partly so it could act as a natural buffer against any Chinese invasion. That policy was dropped when the extent of development on China's side became clear.

PRAGMATIC APPROACH

In 2008, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made his first trip to Arunachal and promised $4 billion to build a 1,700-kilometer (1,055-mile) highway joining the valleys of the state as well as a train line connecting to New Delhi. These would also make troop movements easier. Around the same time, former army chief Gen. J.J. Singh was appointed governor of the state and is ramping up infrastructure, power and telecom projects. "Never before in the history of this region has such a massive development program been conducted here," he said, sipping tea at his residence.

Singh, who spent much of his army career in Arunachal, said India and China both realize "there is enough place and space for both of us to develop. A very mature and pragmatic approach is being taken by both." But despite 15 rounds of high-level talks, the border issue looks as knotty as ever. Indian media often whip up anger at Chinese border incursions, played down by both governments as a natural result of differing perceptions of where the border lies. India's defense minister told parliament 500 incursions have been reported in the last two years.

Unable to match China's transport network, India's focus is now on maintaining more troops close to the border. "India struggles to build up infrastructure," said Ashley Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has written extensively on the India-China relationship. "They have been trying to do this for the past six or seven years now, and it is progressing far more slowly than they would like. What they have done in the interim is build up the troop strength."

COURTING THE LAMAS

One of main irritants in India-China relations, and a key part of China's claim to Arunachal, is Tibetan Buddhism. Beijing claims a centuries-old sovereignty over Arunachal and the rest of the Himalayan region. India hosts the Dalai Lama and his Tibetan government-in-exile. When the Dalai Lama fled Chinese rule in Tibet in 1959, his first stop was the Buddhist monastery in the Arunachal town of Tawang near the border. Three years later, China occupied the fortress-like hilltop monastery in the 1962 war before withdrawing to the current lines. In the 17th century, Tawang district was the birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama. Deified as his latest incarnation, the current Dalai Lama visited the monastery in 2009 and has hinted his next reincarnation will be born in India. Some say in Tawang.

Tibetan Buddhists see the Dalai Lama as a living god; China sees him as a separatist threat. Many in the Indian security community worry that instability in Tibet after his death could endanger India.

So, New Delhi is wooing the locals. The intermingling of the Indian army and the Tawang monks is striking. War memorials on the road are built in the style of Tibetan Buddhist stupas, with prayer wheels and flags. Soldiers frequently visit the temple, and advise the lamas about troop movements and developments on the border. Lobsang Thapke, a senior lama at the monastery, says India's troop buildup has made the monks feel safe, but that India was far from matching China's road-building prowess. "From our side, we have to go through a lot of difficulty," he said in a carpeted room above the main hall, where child monks chanted morning prayers. "They (India) have not black-topped. Gravelling has not been done."

ANGER AND ANXIETY

The Indian footprint here isn't always welcome. India's new wealth is seen in the multi-storey hotels mushrooming between traditional wood-and-stone houses in town, and new Fords and Hyundais on the hilly streets. But anger is rising about a lack of jobs and perceptions that government corruption is rampant. Student movements have organized strikes in the state capital. Hotel worker Dorjee Leto says educated young people like himself feel forgotten by India. There is almost no mobile phone coverage, power cuts that last days, and just that long muddy road to the outside world. Anxiety over China, however, outweighs the irritation with India, says Leto, who like most in Tawang is a follower of Tibetan Buddhism. "It's a fear, because already China has annexed Tibet. We feel part of India, we are used to India," he said.

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Built In defiance

Asianews Magazine - July 27/Aug 9, 2012

Despite widespread protests, Laos pushes through with a controversial dam in Mekong’s waters  

To Sysavan*, the river is his playground. Armed with nets and bamboo baskets, the boy rushes to the riverbank every afternoon after school. Whatever fish he catches will feed his family who has lived by the Mekong River for years.But then his father tells him he would have to  let go, as his village must be cleared, bulldozed and crushed to the ground to make way for the multimillion dam  in Xay-aburi in northern Laos.

“My father told me we will have to move when the dam construction starts. I don’t know why but I don’t want to move. I don’t know how to find food there,” Sysavan tells a team of visitors last May. This June, the entire village was stripped down, some 300 residents robbed of their homes and relocated to a new community 35 kilometres away, where there is no farm to till, and no river to fish from. Despite protests, Sysavan’s village is the first of the 15 communities to be resettled for the construction of the Xayaburi dam, a widely criticised US$3.5 billion project that will provide electricity to  its neighbour Thailand.

The proposed 1,285 megawatt dam is first of 11 dams proposed for the Lower Mekong Mainstream. Environmentalists predict the dam “would  irreversibly alter” the Mekong River’s ecology, affecting water levels and fish migration in the entire basin.  International Rivers reported the project would directly affect 202,000 living near the dam, and “jeopardise the  lives and food security” of tens of millions more in Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia.

Lao villagers like Sysavan, mean-while, will be witnessing more resettlement activities, as construction of the dam continues despite  it being “illegal” and with calls for more studies being made by other Mekong governments, and recently, even US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself, during her July visit in Laos.

Construction Goes

On Visitors who were  invited by the Lao government last July 16 to 18 to inspect the site saw significant progress being made. A team of visitors told AsiaNews that “it appears the project  is  in an advanced preparation stage with substantial site establishment activities and exploratory excavation  in and around the river completed. However, no permanent structure has been built in the river”. During the visit, The Cambodia Herald reported that Lao vice min-ister for Energy and Mines Viraphon Viravong made  it “clear that the construction would go ahead”. But just days before the visit, Lao Foreign Minister Thongloun Sisoulith said the Xayaburi dam had been postponed, as further environmental studies still need to be undertaken. However, he also said the government has allowed Thai dam builder Ch. Karnchang to continue  its activities,  including the resettlement of affected villagers.“Laos has been saying for months that  it has agreed to suspend the dam, while at the same time allowing Ch. Karnchang to continue to move forward. We expect the Lao government to order Ch. Karnchang to  immediately stop all construction-related activities at the Xayaburi site and cancel plans to resettle more villages until a regional agreement has been reached,” said Kirk Herbertson, Southeast Asia policy coordinator for International Rivers. As of yet, member countries of the Mekong River Commission (MRC)—the inter-governmental river basin organisation—have not decided whether to proceed with the project or not.

Following Clinton’s historic visit to Vientiane, Thailand Prime Min-ister Yingluck Shinawatra assured that Ch. Karnchang “will not begin” any construction until studies are completed. Whether or not Yingluck can actually make that happen remains to be seen. The most recent statement from the company’s top official stated that it is confident Xayaburi will be built on time in 2020 despite hitches.

Better design?

Both Ch. Karnchang and Xayaburi dam consultants Swiss firm Poyry and French company Companie Nationale du Rhone are confident that the dam would not have “unacceptable negative effects” on the environment and to the people down south. In their presentation to visitors, they said the dam has been redesigned to minimise negative environmental  impacts. They assured that sediments would not be rushing down the river and that fish can now travel up and down the Mekong mainstream via fish ladders and lifts. But International Rivers said such “heroic statements” bear no weight. It said that while technical recommendations had been made, additional baseline data are still needed to fully assess the damage wrought by the dam.

“The full extent of the dam’s transboundary impacts remains unknown (thus) the proposed mitigation measures cannot necessarily be deemed effective,” International Rivers said.

Widespread Protests

Affected countries like Cambodia and Vietnam will soon be drafting a letter to the Lao government asking it to halt work  in Xayaburi, The Phnom Post said. In April, the MRC member countries decided to delay the decision on Xayaburi due to concerns raised by Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Under the countries’ 1995 Mekong Agreement, everyone should be consulted before any project on the Mekong will be given a go.  But Laos’ defiance had the governments up in arms and activists staging protests. The recent one involves a call to Yingluck to cancel the dam’s Power Purchase Agreement, or else the Thai People’s Network of Eight Mekong Provinces will file a lawsuit against the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand and Xayaburi Power Co. for  illegally signing the agreement in 2011, said Ame Trandem of International Rivers.

“The signing took place discreetly,” the group said, without proper public consultation and assessment of the dam’s impact to the people of Thailand. Laotians like those from Sysavan’s village clamour for the same thing. Interviews by the Living River Siam revealed villagers around the dam had not been properly consulted, with no sufficient information provided, and no written record of promised compensation. As a result, Sysavan and the other villagers are now housed  in half-finished,  leaky wooden structures, with little or no electricity and water. Also, not everyone has received the cash compensation promised to them for their loss of home and land, a team of visitors said. With no jobs to help them get by, each person  is supposed to get 120,000 kip (US$14) a month. “But that’s not enough to buy them food. Before,   they would  just go out the sea and fish or take vegetables from their farms,” Teerapong Pomun, director of Living River Siam, told AsiaNews. On act of equal defiance, he said at  least four households have now gone back to the old village where they can freely live, in the meantime at least.

*The boy’s name has been changed to protect his identity.

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Drug detention centers offer torture, not treatment

HRW - July 24, 2012

UN, Donors Should Push for Immediate Closure and Community-Based Services

 “There are proven ways to address drug dependency consistent with human rights, but beatings, forced labor, and humiliation are not among them. These centers need to be closed, and voluntary, effective drug treatment provided in their place.”

Hundreds of thousands of people identified as drug users in China and across Southeast Asia are held without due process in centers where they may be subjected to torture, and physical and sexual violence in the name of “treatment,” Human Rights Watch said in a briefing paper released today. International donors and United Nations agencies have supported and funded drug detention centers that systematically deny people rights to effective HIV and drug dependency treatment, and have ignored forced labor and abuse.

The 23-page document, “Torture in the Name of Treatment: Human Rights Abuses in Vietnam, China, Cambodia, and Lao PDR,” summarizes research with individuals who had been detained in Vietnam, China, Cambodia, and Lao PDR. More than 350,000 people identified as drug users are detained in the name of “treatment” in these countries for periods of up to five years. In many centers, drug users are held alongside homeless people, people with psychosocial disabilities, and street children, and are forced to perform military drills, chant slogans, and work as “therapy.”

 “There are proven ways to address drug dependency consistent with human rights, but beatings, forced labor, and humiliation are not among them,” said Joe Amon, director of the Health and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. “These centers need to be closed, and voluntary, effective drug treatment provided in their place.” Individuals in drug detention centers in all four countries are commonly held against their will. They are picked up by police, or “volunteered” by local authorities or family members who buckle under social pressure to make their village “drug free.” Once inside, they cannot leave. No clinical evaluation of drug dependency is performed, resulting in the detention of occasional drug users as well as others merely suspected of using drugs.

International health and drug-control agencies, including the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), and the World Health Organization, recommend comprehensive, community-based harm reduction services, including evidence-based drug-dependence treatment and access to sterile syringes as essential to protect the health and human rights of people who use drugs. Drug detention centers that hold drug users for long periods of time without providing evidence-based treatment violate these standards and are widely believed to be ineffective. Research in China and Vietnam has found high rates of relapse among individuals held in drug detention centers, as well as increased risk of HIV infection from being detained.

Depending on the country, so-called treatment consists of a regime of military drills, forced labor, psychological and moral re-education, and shackling, caning, and beating. Human Rights Watch documented forced labor in detention centers in China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, though the nature and extent of forced labor varied within and between countries.

In Vietnam, “labor therapy” is stipulated as part of drug treatment by law, and drug detention centers are little more than forced labor camps where tens of thousands of detainees work six days a week processing cashews, sewing garments, or manufacturing other items. Refusing to work, or violating center rules, results in punishment that in some cases is torture. Quynh Luu, a former detainee who was caught trying to escape from one center, described his punishment: “First they beat my legs so that I couldn’t run off again... [Then] they shocked me with an electric baton [and] kept me in the punishment room for a month.”

Access to drug dependency treatment within the centers was either restricted to a small subset of the center’s population, who were also required to adhere to a rigid and punishing forced labor regimen, or nonexistent. Huong Son, who was detained for four years in a drug detention center in Vietnam, said, “No treatment for the disease of addiction was available there. Once a month or so we marched around for a couple of hours chanting slogans.”

Human Rights Watch also found evidence that children were detained in drug detention centers in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Lao PDR, and subjected to the same “treatments,” including forced labor, military exercises, and physical and sexual abuse.

 “Drug detention centers jeopardize the health and human rights of detainees,” Amon said. “They are ineffective, abusive, and are detaining people in violation of international law.” Mandatory HIV testing was common in China’s drug treatment centers, but test results were not always disclosed to patients. A former detainee in Guangxi Province, China, said, “I was tested in detox twice for HIV but was never told the result. Then when I got out I was so sick that I went to the clinic. I was scared of getting arrested, but I have a son and I didn’t want to die. They tested me and told me I have AIDS.” Unprotected sex and unsafe drug use occur in the treatment centers, but condoms and safe injecting equipment are not available.

In March 2012, 12 United Nations agencies, including the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the World Health Organization, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and UNAIDS, issued a joint statement calling for the closure of drug detention centers and the release of detained individuals “without delay.” But international donors continue to provide funding and other support to many centers, despite the human rights consequences. For example, in June the US Government pledged $400,000 to support the Lao National Commission for Drug Control and Supervision to “upgrade” facilities at a detention center which had been the focus of one Human Rights Watch report. Research in drug detention centers – such as a recently published study partially funded by the United States National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in two Chinese drug detention centers – often fails to acknowledge the legal context of individuals, and the conditions they face, inside the centers.

 “Donors should recognize that they cannot credibly call for the immediate release of all individuals in drug detention centers while continuing to conduct research and provide support and assistance as if these are legitimate treatment centers,” Amon said. “Individuals in these centers are being held illegally, abused, and denied care.”

Selected accounts from “Torture in the Name of Treatment: Human Rights Abuses in Vietnam, China, Cambodia, and Lao PDR”

 “If we opposed the staff they beat us with a one-meter, six-sided wooden truncheon. Detainees had the bones in their arms and legs broken. This was normal life inside.”

–Former detainee, Ho Chi Minh City, 2010

 “They try to teach not to use drugs, that it isn’t good to use [drugs], while showing that normal people have a good future. I don’t think the classes helped me stop using drugs… Some people use more drugs when they come out of Somsanga.”

–Former detainee, Vientiane, late 2010

 “There are lots of people and not enough food. It was hard to sleep there because in my room there were 60 people. There was not enough water for the showers, only a few minutes to shower every day.”

–Former detainee, Vientiane, late 2010

 “I tried to run away, and in the process, I broke both feet. When I went to the hospital for treatment, I was arrested and sent back to the drug addiction center… Inside I was given very little food, and they never gave me any medicine at all to treat my feet. I was locked up for about half a year and my feet became crippled.”

–Written account from former detainee, Yunnan, 2009

 “All drug detention is, is work. We get up at five in the morning to make shoes. We work all day and into the night. That’s all it is.”

–Former detainee, Yunnan, 2009

 “There were about seven children in my room but maybe about 100 children altogether. The youngest was about seven years old. The children are not drug users but homeless, like beggars on the street.”

–Former detainee, Vientiane, late 2010

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Holding Asean Hostage  

Asianews magazine - July 27/Aug 9 2012

Key players’ interests in territorial claims have led asean to lose its consensus voice

Which countries are holding Asean hostage? This has been a frequently asked question since the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) failed to issue the joint communiqué during the July meeting in Phnom Penh.

There are multiple choices, please pick one or more: a) The Asean claimants; b) The Asean non-claimants; c) The concurrent Asean chair; d) The US; e) China; and f) all of the above. Here are explanations for each answer.

For the answer a), there are many reasons. Asean claimants are divided and lack unity—the grouping’s weakest point. Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei seldom hold meetings among themselves to discuss their common strategies. Back in 1995 they used to back and watch out for each other. As national stakes are getting higher, they clamour for cooperation. However, when they deem fit, they would use Asean as a front to counter external pressure. This time around in Phnom Penh they went on their own different way protecting their turfs.

For the first time in the Asean’s 45-year history, the joint communiqué was not released because there were too many details on the dis­putes in South China Sea.

Conflicting Interests

Such divergent views provided an ideal opportunity for the Asean chair, Cambodian Foreign Minister Hor Namhong, to go for a kill and cut short the whole debate. He proposed to the claimants that all of the incidents raised by them should be referred collectively as “recent developments in the South China Sea”. Take it or leave it. Bang, bang, nothing came out.

It was very interesting why he was not in the mood to find a common ground—the virtue normally displayed by all previous Asean chairs. At the last minute, Philippine Foreign Minister Roberto del Rosario even softened his wording with an offer of just mentioning “the affected shoal”.

Now the Asean leaders must be seriously pondering what would happen when the region’s longest reigning leader, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, chairs the November summit.

It was clear for those who opted for the answer b) that the non-claimant countries are equally problematic apart from the Asean chair.

There are two kinds of non-claimants Asean countries—those who are concerned parties and those who are not. The concerned parties are Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand, and the rest are not. The trio wants to see progress but they are now caught in a dilemma as their views and positions could impact on the future of Asean and the whole gamut of Asean-China relations. Singapore stressed from time to time that as concerned parties in the disputes both within the Asean and international context, it must be engaged to ensure freedom and safety of the sea-lane of communications. So is Indonesia, which also wants Asean to show solidarity over the dispute. Thailand’s position is a bit tricky. It depends who is the “real” foreign minister. These core members backed the issuance of a separate statement on South China Sea at the ministerial meeting. But the idea was later squashed as the Asean chair said that both China and the Philippines hold bilateral talks and the tension over the Scarborough Shoal or Huanyan calmed down. So, there was no need for such a statement. Thailand, which is a coordinating country for Asean-China relations for 2012-2015, was lobbied hard by both China and the US for support on their positions. There was even a suggestion that if there was such a statement on South China Sea, both China and the Philippines should be mentioned and deplored for height­ening the tension in the South China Sea. Asean Chair Explanation for the choice c) must be that the Asean chair this year at the Asean annual meeting is a veteran politician, Foreign minister Hor Namhong. He knows exactly when to pull the trigger. This time he managed to block the joint communiqué—it will be his legacy. His action upset several foreign ministers attending the meeting. The reporters widely quoted Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa’s comments saying that he was “disappointed” with the outcome and some Asean members acted “irresponsibly”. Of course, he did not mention Cambodia by name. It remains to be seen how this will affect the role of Indonesia as observers in the Thai-Cambodian dispute over the Preah Vihear/Khao Praviharn Temple. There has been very little progress on this initiative when Indonesia served as chair last year.In the next two years, Brunei Darussalam and Myanmar will take up the Asean chair after Cambodia in 2013 and 2014 respectively.

Truth be told, both countries supported Cambodia on the South China Sea issue. Although Brunei  is one of the Asean claimants, the oil-rich country has never raised any voice or stated  its position outright  in this squabbling. But Brunei and Myan-mar have distinctive positions that the overlapping claims should be settled among the claimants without using force and through dialogues. Such views augur well with China’s long standing argument.

Us, China

For the answer d), reasons are simple. Everybody knows the US has shown more support for Asean even though  it  is cutting  its defence budget in the future. With troops dwindling down  in Afghanistan, the US is shifting the attention to the Asia-Pacific, which could be the next battleground. The Pentagon plans to  increase the troop level from the current 50 per cent to 60 per cent  in the next 10 years. Where will the extra 10 per cent of American troops be making their first home base or rather ro-tational base? With the US becoming more en-thusiastic  in associating with the ongoing Asean efforts on security matters, some Asean members are feeling gung-ho while others are feeling uneasy as they know they could become pawns  in the big power games. After all, Southeast Asia will re-main in China’s backyard.

Those picked e) for an answer must be non-Chinese. Throughout the Asean ministerial meeting, the Chinese media in China all blamed the Philippines for holding Asean hostage and wondered aloud why Asean allowed such a behaviour. Interestingly, only few Chinese commentators mentioned Vietnam though. The South China Sea row comes at the time when China  is promoting new diplomatic approach of peaceful rise and development. It will be further consolidated as a plan for regional harmony with the new leadership  lineup  later this year. Therefore Beijing does not understand why Asean would allow the Philippines and Vietnam to turn things upside down in Asean-China relations.Beijing has already placed relations with developing countries in South-east Asia as the number one foreign policy priority following the South China Sea tension. China’s ties with major powers especially the US, Russia and Europe are predictable and stable. However, now any tension between China and Asean could harm their major powers’ relations.

All Players

Finally, the explanation for the last answer f) is rather self-fulfilling. All of the above mentioned players have effectively held Asean hostage one way or another. Many decisions are now stuck because there was no joint communiqué to officially state their deliberations. All players have used Asean as a toy for their own benefits, utilising the rhetoric and tactics that Asean leaders are familiar with.The Asean chair knows full well his pejorative power to shape the agenda and content. He exercised  it with prudence. Likewise, Asean claimants and non-claimants understand deep in their heart they would never be able to unite again on a common position on South China Sea as  in March 1995.That was why the Philippines has taken all necessary steps to boost its own position,  including  increased defence cooperation with the US, much to the chagrin of other Asean members. The US and China will compete, confront and cooperate within the Asean frameworks. In the past, no-body was worried about such engage-ments because Asean spoke with one voice. From now on, all hell can break loose. Good luck Asean.

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Manila to auction off three areas disputed by Beijing

AsiaNews - Manila - July 31, 2012

The area of contention is off the western island of Palawan. For the Philippine government the area, rich in natural gas, is located within its national territory. Energy Secretary: "our rights are not negotiable." Local and foreign companies expected to attend auction, including Total, Eni and Shell.

The Philippine government launched a tender for the exploration of three areas rich in oil and natural gas in the South China Sea - which Manila calls West Philippine Sea - an area in the center of a bitter dispute with Beijing. The auction should see the participation of various national and international companies, including the French energy giant Total, Exxon USA, the Italian Eni and Dutch Royal Shell. It is an attempt by Manila to reduce dependence on foreign imports and to counter Beijing's expansionist ambitions in the Asia-Pacific region, which in the past has promoted bids for sea exploration (see AsiaNews 28/06/2012 South China Sea, tension between Manila, Hanoi and Beijing. A code of conduct useless), triggering protests from the Philippines and Vietnam.

The Philippine Energy Secretary Jose Layug states that all three blocks covered by the contract belong to the national territory and are located off the western island of Palawan, where large reserves of underground natural gas were recently discovered. The official also rejected Beijing's assertions that the area is within China's maritime boundaries.

"All the areas we have offered - adds Layug - are well within the 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone of the Philippines under the UNCLOS", the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Seas. The Secretary concludes that "the Philippines exercises exclusive sovereign rights and authority to explore and exploit resources within these areas to the exclusion of other countries. There is no doubt and dispute about such rights."

The archipelago in the South China Sea, potentially rich in undersea oil fields, is disputed by China, Vietnam, Brunei, Taiwan, Philippines and Malaysia and there have been various attempts by all parties to take possession of an atoll or other produce friction. The Philippines and Vietnam accuse Beijing of being overly aggressive in claiming sovereignty over the archipelago . In recent weeks there have been clashes between Filipino, Vietnamese and Chinese vessels. In particular, the tension between Beijing and Manila peaked last April when a Chinese patrol vessels blocked - off Scarborough Shoal - Philippine navy boats, as they were about to stop Chinese vessels that had entered Filippino territorial waters.

The hegemonic ambitions of Beijing also worry that the United States which has increased its naval presence in the Pacific. According to experts at Brussels based organization the International Crisis Group (ICG), the prospects for settlement of disputes "are declining" and although a war is "unlikely", all signals "are going in the wrong direction."

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EUROPE

Why a Euro-Zone crisis can’t be avoided very much longer by Michael Sivy

Time - July 30, 2012

Each postponement of financial disaster in the euro zone seems likely to last for a shorter time, and the U.S. won't be able to escape the fallout indefinitely

Stocks rallied powerfully late last week after European Central Bank President Mario Draghi declared that the ECB stands ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. That was mighty tough talk, but analysts remain skeptical about the outlook for the common European currency. No one doubts that the ECB can provide short-term support for euro-zone economies. But even so, most forecasters believe that the euro zone is heading for a crisis. And whatever form that crisis takes, the impact on the U.S. would be negative. So why did the Dow gain more than 400 points in two days, rocketing through the 13,000 mark to a three-month high, after Draghi’s speech on Thursday? The answer is that the euro’s eventual failure has been predicted for so long that it has become conventional wisdom. Each postponement creates a burst of optimism — not that the crisis has been solved but simply that it has been delayed. But each respite is likely to last for a shorter period of time. And what has finally happened, in my view, is that the euro has passed the tipping point. From where things stand now, it seems as though the situation will only get worse — and the deterioration will probably accelerate.

There are three seemingly unavoidable problems:

The next round of losses in Greece cannot be charged mostly to private-sector lenders. When Greece was bailed out in March, banks and other private investors took most of the losses, which they were willing to do because they also stood to lose a lot if Greece defaulted. But now that the share of Greek sovereign debt held by commercial banks, insurance companies and investment funds has been greatly reduced, future bailouts will necessarily diminish the value of debt owned by government banks and international financial institutions. In some cases, those lenders may be restrained by law from cooperating with any such devaluation, and at the very least the costs that result will ultimately fall on taxpayers. Austerity and ECB lending have not been able to hold down interest rates. Bailouts and budget cuts have been enough to persuade investors to keep lending to overindebted countries. As a result, bond yields were reduced for a time in key countries, such as Spain and Italy. Within the past month, however, yields on 10-year Spanish bonds climbed back up to 7.6%, well above the 7% that is generally considered to be the danger mark. Yields on Italian bonds also rose, reaching 6.6%. Since Draghi’s speech, yields in both countries have come down a bit. But it is notable that recent euro-zone rescue policies have been unable to hold Spanish and Italian bond yields anywhere close to a safe 5% level, where they were in March.

The growing magnitude of the problem will run up against political constraints. There is a limit to the amount of money the ECB, the International Monetary Fund and other such lenders have available for bailouts. As those institutions use up their reserves, they will need large amounts of new money if they hope to keep postponing a euro crisis. But where will that money come from? The number of countries in trouble keeps growing. Both France and the Netherlands, which supported and helped pay for previous bailouts, now have financial problems of their own. And resistance is growing in Germany against taking on further liabilities (not to mention the fact that contributing to larger bailouts may raise constitutional problems).

Of course, there is no way to know precisely when the scale of euro-zone financial problems will exceed the resources available to keep postponing them. But it is clear where the process is heading. And as soon as investors begin to think that endgame has started, interest rates will probably shoot up in Spain and Italy and accelerate the process.

Moreover, in any likely scenario, troubles in the euro zone could have a substantial negative impact on the U.S. before the November elections. Economies have been slowing in much of the euro zone — indeed, the private sector has actually been shrinking for six months. Outside the euro zone itself, the U.K. economy has been in recession for three quarters. In addition, China’s growth has dropped from double digits to 7.6%, the lowest level in three years.

Exports account for less than 14% of the U.S. economy, compared with more than 30% for the U.K. and almost 50% for Germany. Nonetheless, foreign business is extremely important for many of America’s largest multinationals and technology companies. Apple, Coca-Cola, Intel and McDonalds all get more than 60% of their sales overseas. As a result, any slowdown in foreign economies is a major drag on important parts of the U.S. economy. That’s one of the reasons that tech stocks have underperformed the broad market since April. And further weakness overseas would likely affect even more of the U.S. economy. None of the possible outcomes for the euro zone augur particularly well. If some of the financially weak countries are forced to abandon the euro or the euro zone breaks apart, there will be shocks to the international banking system that would slow most major economies. And if international bureaucrats are able to sustain the euro for more than a few months through brilliant management, the austerity policies needed to do so would only push economies closer to a global recession. Either way, it’s hard to see how the U.S. can escape the fallout from a European financial crisis for very much longer.

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BANGLADESH

Slum eviction violates whole circle of rights'

BSS - Dhaka - July 30, 2012 

The eviction of slum dwellers in big cities and towns is nothing but a sheer violation of the whole circle of human rights, say urban and extreme poverty experts, insisting the government to think alternative for long term solutions."Demolishing slums, you are violating fundamental rights of poor human being, denying their rights to survival and marginalizing poor and the poorest again," Kishore Kumar Singh, an extreme poverty expert of UNDP, said on Monday.Kishore, who have been working for urban partnership for poverty reduction (UPPR) since 2008, said evicting people from slums have never brought any positive results anywhere in the world, other than bringing miseries to the 'have- nots', while benefiting a rich class.His comments came months after thousands of slum dwellers were evicted in two major Dhaka slums-Korail and Shattala-yielding little or no results as poor people did neither gone back to their villages nor they left the slums."Hardly four or five families have returned to their villages after the Korail eviction in April, while rest of 2,000 evicted families resettled in the slums" Shahin Islam, a socio-economic assistant, told BSS at Dhaka City Corporation (North) office. He said the eviction has rather turned the existing slums more crowded and increased the house rent as demand goes high. On January 25, the High Court directed the government to demarcate the city's Gulshan Lake and remove the illegal structures from it in next two months. A mobile team cleared 170 decimals of land owned by BTCL (80-Decimal), PWED (43-decimal) and the rest by ICT.Households and shops within twenty meters of the road were bulldozed, with approximately 2,000 structures and 800 families affected along Gulshan Lake in Korail slums, while 2,000 households evicted from Shattala in 2010. According to a research done by the Department for International Development (DFID), at least 60,000 people were displaced due to the evictions from 27 slums between 2006 and 2008 in Dhaka, home an estimated three million people. Shahin said the problems regarding slums could never be solved so long the demand for poor people remains active for household works, car driving, low-cost public transportation, and home security. Te government should rather, he said, earmark areas for low-income people and share hands with donors to build low cost housing for the slum dwellers. The idea was, however, denied by an official with the ministry of works, who said the poor people should be provided adequate employment and other facilities in rural areas and deter rural-urban migration. He said building low cost housing would invite rural poor in urban areas. Asked if poor is not in cities and town, who would serve the rich and middle class, the official said the people in cities should be self dependent in phases like developed countries, where individuals have to do their own duties. Kishore said the government should focus on increasing 'housing stocks' or number of houses for people in the country as urbanization has been growing in the country at an average of five percent per annum. Nearly 30 percent people now live in urban areas in Bangladesh, he said, while half of the country's total population will be in cities and towns by 2050."City needs the poor, but it never provides any space for them," he said, referring to Malaysia, a country which has introduced low cost hosing for the poor people in cities and towns. The problem of slum dwellers might be eased by this time provided model towns such as Gulshan, Uttara and Purbachal have strategic areas for poor people's accommodation.

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Building castles in the air by Syed Mansur Hashim

Daily Star - July 31, 2012  

The drama of the proposed Padma Bridge building keeps getting more mysterious with the passage of time. On the one hand, we find the ministry of finance informing us that the last "objectionable" character has been removed from office and now there are no more obstacles standing in the way for the stalled funding to move ahead. Simultaneously, we have mixed signals coming from the top tiers of government telling us that Bangladesh is not interested in external funding -- that we will build the bridge using own resources. The ground realities of building a bridge utilising funds other than that which had been on offer from multi-donor consortium including the World Bank constitute multifarious problems and costs.

First of all, there is the question of finance risk. It is going to be a monumental task for the government to get hold of an international construction company with proven track record of completing mega projects such as the Padma Bridge. As pointed out by Dr. Akbar Ali Khan in a recent seminar, having the World Bank on the project will provide the financial security any global construction company will demand prior to getting involved in a project that will span many years. In the absence of 1st tier construction companies responding to the bid, we will be left with inexperienced contractors with dubious track record, in which case neither a timeline for project completion nor the risk of cost overruns can be ruled out.

On the question of mobilising local funds, there are a number of impediments. To what extent can the government draw upon its foreign exchange reserves remains a major question. This is primarily so because the International Monetary Fund has set strict conditions on the Extended Credit Facility (ECF) loan amounting to $987 million. The Quantitative Performance Criteria and Indicative Targets in the ECF agreement stipulate that the government, under no circumstances can issue sovereign guarantee and take non-concessional loans exceeding $1 billion by December, 2012. So, if the government were to move ahead with construction in 2012, it will have to find alternative sources of funding. Any commercial loan will carry a hefty interest rate and shortened repayment period. According to an article published in the Financial Express recently, a five-year loan to the tune of $1.8 billion carrying an 8% interest rate would cost the national exchequer $455 million per annum, whereas a seven-year loan would cost $349 million per annum. Hence, going with Option A, Bangladesh ends up paying an estimated $2.23 billion for the five-year option and $2.44 billion for the seven-year package. In comparison to commercial loans, the now largely-defunct credit line would have carried a 0.75% service charge and a maturity repayment period of 40 years. What is of more import is that Bangladesh would have had a 10-year grace period after completion of construction before making any payments. It would however have been able to collect toll money from Day 1. For the next decade after grace period, Bangladesh would have been required to pay interest @2% per annum and for the remaining two decades, a mere 4%. The country would have paid the Bank an estimated $27 0million over a 40 year period.

From a financial perspective, moving ahead on the Padma Bridge construction without the World Bank consortium fails to make sense. Given that, without a transparent system to oversee allocation of funds, the government will face a monumental task in getting the international banking system to agree to provide a syndicated loan. In light of the fact that the World Bank minced no words in pointing the finger of corruption at Bangladesh and the government's reluctance to move forward on cases of alleged graft, there is little to indicate international financiers, even commercial ones will be in a hurry to fund the project. While it may make perfect sense for the government to go on beating its nationalistic drum on how the contributions of school children's lunch money will build the "great bridge," construction of Padma Bridge will require serious funds and a system of checks-and-balances, neither of which is at present available to the state. At the end of the day, it is up to the government to decide on whether it is serious about moving ahead with the single largest infrastructure project of its tenure -- whether it will be based upon economic realities, or whether it will subject its citizens to yet another round of economic hardship through imposition of irrational surcharges in the hope of getting the stillborn project off the ground.

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Chevron announces $500 million for Bibiyana gas field expansion

Thebangladeshtoday - Dhaka - July 30, 2012  

Chevron Bangladesh on Monday announced a US$500 million expansion plan for its Bibiyana gas field operation that includes drilling of a number of additional development wells, expansion of natural gas processing plant and setting up enhanced gas liquids recovery unit.

Announcing the mega plan at a function at the city's Ruposhi Bangla Hotel, Chevron Bangladesh president Geoff Strong said the new investment will boost gas production by 300 million cubic feet per day (mmcfd) by 2014. At present, Chevron Bangladesh, a subsidiary of US oil major Chevron Corporation, is producing about 1,122 mmcfd gas from its three gas fields in Sylhet region while the country's total natural gas production is about 2,239 mmcfd. Chevron's production is about half of the country's total gas production. The three fields which Chevron has been operating for a decade are Bibiyana, Moulvibazar and Jalalabad fields.

Geoff Strong said US$ 500 million is the largest investment by a single foreign company ever in Bangladesh. He said the new gas production will provide more affordable energy to the country that will help reduce poverty.

Finance Minister AMA Muhith, who was the chief guest at the function, said that Chevron's investment plan is very important for the country as it will provide larger supply of gas to meet the essential needs of the country.v He said providing gas to people involves a number of additional activities like gas pipeline building and compressor installation.

Muhith said if the gas exploration continues without any break, it results in getting additional gas to the existing reserve. "But unfortunately, in Bangladesh, we've not been continuing gas exploration for which today's gas crisis persists." He said gas exploration activities will have to be strengthened. This will lead the country to a new level of development and existence.

The Finance Minister said though the country is producing 2239 mmcfd gas per day, still four large fertiliser factories remained closed for gas shortage.

Prime Minister's Advisor Dr. Tawfiq-e-Elahi Chowdhury, State Minister for Power Mohammad Enamul Haque, US Ambassador in Dhaka Dan W Mozena, Power Secretary Abul Kalam Azad and Petrobangla chairman Dr. Hussain Monsur also spoke at the function.

Dr. Tawfiq Elahi said the government had taken some important decisions three years back on gas exploration, gas compressor installation and pipeline building which are now giving results.

Dan Mozena said the Chevron's investment will help resolve energy crisis in Bangladesh and also help it become a real Royal Bengal Tiger of the economy.

Abul Kalam Azad said the power sector is eagerly waiting Chevron's gas for its power sector. UNB

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CHT land dispute settlement commission law (amendment) to be placed in next JS session

Thebangladeshtoday - Dhaka - July 30, 2012

The Chittagong Hill Tracts Land Dispute Settlement Law (Amendment) bill will be placed before the parliament in its next session.

The Bangladesh Bar Council (BBC) is an independent entity and controls the practice of lawyers in the country and their appointments, bars appointing foreign lawyers for the war crimes accused being tried at International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) 1 and ICT 2 that follows the Bar Council law regarding appointment of foreign lawyers in the ICTs for any accused.

Minister for Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs Barrister Shafique Ahmed told journalists after presiding over the inter-ministerial meeting on the draft of CHT Land Dispute Settlement (amendment) Law, held at the Secretariat on Monday.

Replying to a question that some war crimes accused are negotiating with foreign lawyers to appoint them for the war criminals to fight their cases at the ICTs, Shafique said that although the ICTs are international tribunals but the trial of the war crimes accused are being held in Bangladesh under the law of the country which is international standard.

"The Bar Council decides appointing lawyers for any accused facing trial in any court in the country. So appointment of foreign lawyers by anyone who is undergoing trial at the ICTs also falls under the purview of the Bar Council", he stated. About the CHT land dispute law the minister said that a final decision has been taken about the amendments made to the draft of the CHT Land Dispute Settlement Commission Act-2001 at the inter-ministerial meeting and it will be placed for review and ratification before the JS in its next session.

The meeting, held in the conference room of the CHT Affairs Ministry, was attended among others by Land Minister Rezaul Karim Heera, Advisor to the Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs Dr Gowher Rizvi, State Minister for Law Advocate Quamrul Islam, State Minister for Land Advocate Mostafizur Rahman, State Minister for CHT Affairs Dipankar Talukder, Chairman of the Taskforce on Refugees in Khagrachhari Hill District Jatindra Lal Tripura, Secretary of Land Ministry Md Mokhlesur Rahman and Acting secretary of the Law and Justice Ministry Abu Saleh Sheikh Md Jahirul Haque. UNB

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Minorities discriminated in Pak, Bangladesh

UNBConnect - July 31, 2012

The US on Monday expressed concern over continued religious discrimination against religious minorities in particular the Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh, citing instances of violence against them.While Hindus in Pakistan continue to face the threat of abduction and forced conversion, the members of this minority religious community and Christians in Bangladesh are experiencing discrimination and sometimes violence from the Muslim majority population, a report on international religious freedom released by the State Department said.In Pakistan less than five per cent of the total population are religious minorities including Hindus. "Religious minorities claimed that government actions addressing forced and coerced conversions of religious minorities to Islam by societal actors were inadequate," the report said."According to the HRCP (Human Rights Council of Pakistan) and the Pakistan Hindu Council, as many as 20 to 25 women and girls from the Hindu community were abducted every month and forced to convert to Islam," it added.The State Department said on November 9, four Hindu doctors were shot and killed in Chak town of Shikarpur District, Sindh. According to reports the attack was in reaction to an alleged relationship between a Hindu man and a Muslim woman. The investigation was pending at year's end, it said.Minorities in Bangladesh have also been discriminated against, according to the report. "Hindu, Christian, and Buddhist minorities experienced discrimination and sometimes violence from the Muslim majority population," the report said, but quickly noted that abuses declined in comparison to the previous year in Bangladesh.In Bangladesh, the report said many Hindus have been unable to recover landholdings lost because of discrimination under the defunct Vested Property Act. Although an Awami League government repealed the act in 2001, the succeeding government did not take any concrete action to reverse the property seizures that occurred under the act.The Vested Property Act was an East Pakistan-era law that allowed the government to expropriate "enemy" (in practice, Hindu) lands. "Under the law the government seized approximately 2.6 million acres of land, affecting almost all Hindus in the country," the report said.

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TIB slams government nod to illegal housing projects

UNB Connect - July 31, 2012  

Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) on Tuesday condemned the government’s reported decision to legalise some illegal housing schemes defying a High Court directive and ignoring environmental concerns. Expressing deep concern over the decision by an inter-ministerial body to ‘provisionally’ approve the projects that were declared illegal by the High Court in June last year, TIB urged the government to cancel the decision immediately and refrain from doing the same for any other similar project.In a statement on Tuesday, TIB executive director Dr Iftekharuzzaman said, “The decision is as regrettable, illegal and unacceptable as it is damaging for the reputation of the government. It raises questions about the government’s commitment to the rule of law, public interest and environmental justice.”He said the government decision on the one hand defies the court directive to take action against illegal schemes in wetlands, water bodies and croplands, and on the other undermines the credibility of the government in terms of its commitment to environmental sustainability. “It is common knowledge for all including the Department of Environment that the projects in question, lying within the jurisdiction of the Detailed Area Plan (DAP) has been declared illegal particularly for their adverse environmental implications,” he said. “No words can sufficiently condemn the apparent collusion of a section of the government with the powerful lobbies of housing companies at the expense of future sustainability of life and living.”Dr Iftekharuzzaman said such moves are bound to erode the environmental credibility of the government and raise doubts about the moral and ethical basis of its high-sounding commitment to confront environmental degradation and climate change using national and international funds. “We urged the government to cancel the approvals without fear or favour to anybody and refrain from giving approval to any other similar illegal project,” he said.

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Increasing torture on women, children in Rajshahi

New Age - August 1, 2012

Human rights activists concerned

Torture on women and children has increased in Rajshahi city as well as the whole district in the recent time, sending wave of concern among civil society and human rights activists.

Some 35 women and 20 children were tortured in the city and nine upazilas of the district last month, according to human rights organisation Association for Community Development.

The ACD gathered the information from reports published in various newspapers of the country and their own investigation, said a press release of the organisation Tuesday afternoon.

The release, signed by Masum Billah, documentation cell officer of ACD, also described a number of sensational cases of women and child torture.

According to the press release some 35 women were tortured in the district, among them 13 in the city and 22 in nine upazila.

Among those five women were tortured at Bagha, same numbers at Durgapur and Charghat, one at Bagmara, 3 in Godagari, one at Tanore, one at Mohanpur and one at Puthia.

Among the incidents six women committed suicide, one attempt to suicide, four women became victim of sexual harassment, 4 were raped and killed, 2 women were victims of rape attempt and one was abducted.   

Among them, on 3 July, a degree college student was ganged raped at a union council building under Tanore upazila.

On July 17, a so-called pir stabbed a housewife at Bagha as victim resisted the pir’s rape attempt.

On 16 July one Omar Ali tried to rape a seven-year old child at Bagha in the district and a case has been filled in this connection with Bagha station.

The press release also said that 20 children were tortured in the city and nine upazilas of the district last month and among them 7 incidents took place in the city and others 13 in the nine upazilas.

Talking to New Age the civil society men and human rights activists expressed their grave concerned as the incidents of torture on women and children had increased.  

Zamat Khan, general secretary of Rajshahi Rakkha Sangram Parishad, a pressure group, blamed lax role of law enforcement agencies for increasing the incidents of torture on women and children.

Bangladesh Mahila Parishad Rajshahi chapter general secretary Kalpona Ray told New Age that the law enforcement agencies as well as the news media should come forward to end repression against women.

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Religious freedom not abused in Bangladesh in 2011: US report

New Age - August 1, 2012  

The US State Department has said although there were scattered reports of societal abuses or discrimination based on religious affiliation, belief, or practice in Bangladesh but incidents of abuses declined in 2011 in comparison to the previous year.

‘There were no reports of abuses of religious freedom. In general, government institutions and the courts protected religious freedom,’ said the 2011 International Religious Freedom Report released in Washington on July 30.

It said, in contrast to previous years, there were no instances of missionaries reporting monitoring of their activities by intelligence agencies.

This US congressionally mandated report reviewed the status of religious freedom in 199 countries and territories of the world.

Quoting observers, the report said the government’s treatment of religious minorities improved during the year, citing the increase in government funds for minority welfare trusts and police protection of minority groups facing societal attacks.

It said an amendment to the constitution passed on June 30, 2011 established Islam as the state religion but reaffirmed the country as a secular state.

The constitution provides for the right to profess, practice, or propagate all religions, subject to law, public order, and morality. Citizens were free to practice the religion of their choice.

The report said although government officials, including police, were sometimes slow to assist religious minority victims of harassment and violence, there were notable examples of timely and effective police intervention.

It said the government and many civil society leaders stated that violence against religious minorities normally had political or economic dimensions as well and could not be attributed solely to religious belief or affiliation.

‘There were scattered attacks on religious and ethnic minorities perpetrated by non-governmental actors, and because of the low social status of religious minorities, they were often seen as having little political recourse.’

The report said Hindu, Christian, and Buddhist minorities experienced discrimination and sometimes violence from the Muslim majority population. Harassment of Ahmadis continued, it added.

Since 2001, it said the government routinely posted law enforcement personnel at religious festivals and events that were at risk of being targets for extremists.

Through additional security deployments and public statements, the government promoted the peaceful celebration of Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, and secular Bengali festivals. Durga Puja, Christmas, Easter, Buddha Purnima and Pohela Boisakh (Bengali New Year) all received these kinds of government support.

It said the government took a number of steps to promote religious freedom and secure peace. The government appointed members of minority communities to higher ranks of government and supported minority religious trusts.

Besides, parliament passed the Christian Religious Welfare Trust (Amendment) Act 2011, increasing the amount of fixed deposits from 10 to 40 million taka ($122,000 to $488,000).

The government also took administrative action to raise the amount of the Buddhist Religious Welfare Trust from 30 to 50 million taka ($367,000 to $610,000).

Additionally, the report said the government made several important religious policy decisions. First, the Appellate Division Court ruling that fatwas could not be punitive nor run counter to existing secular laws upholds the country’s secular nature.

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Six-month maternity leave for the future of Bangladesh

New Age - August 1, 2012  

There is a solution. Maternity leave is an essential employment benefit that can save lives, improve health, and embolden our economic future by ensuring that all mothers in Bangladesh can give their children the best nutrition, writes Prof. Dr. Md. Ruhul Amin

In our country, the condition of child nutrition is facing a crisis. Almost half of the children aged five and younger suffer from poor nutrition. Thirty-six percent are underweight, and forty one percent are too short for their age. Too many children have weak immune systems, stunted growth and development, impaired physical, mental and brain developments, and more infectious diseases—largely because they are not nourished properly during the first two years of their life.

All this lead to a lifetime of reduced productivity. Poorly nourished children are more likely to drop out of school early and earn significantly less money as adults. But the impacts of poor nutrition go far beyond individuals and families. When multiplied across the nation, it takes a devastating toll on the health and economic development of our entire country. It’s estimated that undernutrition can cost up to 3 percent of a country’s gross domestic product.

But poor nutrition is also preventable.  In fact, nearly every family in Bangladesh has all the food they need to feed a child for the first six months of their life.  According to most major international health organizations, including the World Health Organization and UNICEF, breast milk is the unparalleled first food for babies during the first six months of life—no other food or drink is needed, not even water. In fact, research shows that if all mothers initiated breastfeeding within one hour of birth, it could prevent one in five newborn death. But balancing between work demands and child feeding prevents many mothers from being able to breastfeed exclusively.  And no mother should have to choose between saving her job and feeding her child.

There is a solution. Maternity leave is an essential employment benefit that can save lives, improve health, and embolden our economic future by ensuring that all mothers in Bangladesh can give their children the best nutrition. Early last year, the government of Bangladesh demonstrated leadership and vision by implementing six months of paid maternity leave for public service personnel.This expansion of a key government policy is an example of leadership that will protect the health and well-being of thousands of government employees and their children. Soon after, in an address at the inaugural ceremony for World Breastfeeding Week 2011, the prime minister implored private employers to implement the very same policy.

One year later, we are observing World Breastfeeding Week again—yet mothers who work in the private sector still aren’t guaranteed the same benefits as government workers.  In fact, some business leaders now suggest that the policy for private sector workers should be rolled back from 16 weeks to 12 weeks. But to achieve the policy’s full scale health, and economic impacts, it’s vital that every employer across Bangladesh adopts thehighest possible standards to protect our entire workforce. We must protect this important policy.

Breastfeeding has widespread benefits for both mothers and their families: it helps children grow, prevents the high costs of formula feeding, and reduces the risk of a mother experiencing diabetes, breast cancer, and anemia. Maternity leave further benefits the employer . Research shows that it can reduce employee turnover and absenteeism due to child illness, which leads to a more stable and loyal workforce. And women are more likely to participate in the workforce when guaranteed employment security and a continued source of income following delivery, which results in more income tax and government revenues.

It should come as no surprise that the maternity leave expansion for government workers was supported by high-level officials within the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Establishment, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, and the Ministry of Women’s and Children’s Affairs. It had broad support because poor nutrition affects us all—and its impacts cut across issues of poverty, health, and ultimately, our nation’s very economy.

The economic development of Bangladesh rests on a healthy, educated, and productive workforce—so it’s imperative that our business sector play a key role in promoting the health of its workers. This World Breastfeeding Week, let’s join together to ensure that working mothers can provide the best possible nutrition for their children and for the children of Bangladesh.

Prof. Dr. Md. Ruhul Amin is a Professor of Paediatrics and Child Heath at the Bangladesh Institute of Child Health (BICH), Dhaka Shishu Hospital & President of Bangladesh Paediatric Association (BPA)

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PM blasts Dr Yunus

Daily Star - July 30, 2012

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has strongly criticised Nobel Laureate Prof Muhammad Yunus for charging high interest rates by the Grameen Bank he founded.

She came down heavily on Yunus in an interview with the BBC's HARDtalk. The interview was taken during her five-day visit to London that ended Sunday.  

Here is the text of a part of her interview.

BBC: It seems a shame for the Bangladeshi people that your relationship with one of the most respected business leaders in your country, Noble Laureate Mohammad Yunus, has also soured so badly. Why did you call him a bloodsucker of the poor?

PM: You go to Bangladesh, you see in your eyes then you will see. But how could he say I said it? Did I mention his name? I didn’t. I said someone. But why it occurred in your mind…

BBC: Sorry, so let’s be clear about this. So are you now denying that you have said Mohammad Yunus is a bloodsucker of the poor?

PM: No I am not denying anything. I am putting a question to you, why it occurred in your mind that it is him? Why?

BBC: I have been reading the Bangladeshi press, everybody, it seems, in the Bangladeshi media believes that you referred directly when you used this phrase ‘a bloodsucker of the poor’. If you want to retract or if you want to tell me you didn’t mean him, then that’s fine.

PM: Listen, listen, I am telling one thing. Taking interest 40 percent, 30 percent or 45 percent from these poor people – is it fair? It is not. How can these poor people stand by themselves? If you lend money and take 35 to 45 percent interest, it’s a shame.

BBC: So the entire model built by Grameen Bank and Mohammad Yunus which has been celebrated around the world as a way of lifting poor people out of poverty – you are saying you do not accept it, you do not want it.

PM: I want there should be an enquiry that how many people come out of poverty because of that. If there’s one village, how many people? Poverty reduction is done by my government. Within three years we reduced 10 percent poverty. So, it is our government. And about this Grameen Bank, it is a government statutory body.

BBC: Isn’t it the truth that you forced Mohammad Yunus out of his role in Grameen Bank after he tried to setup an independent political party in 2007, that’s why you turned against him?

PM: Listen, that time I was in custody, I was in jail when he tried to form his political party. He was such a big person so why he failed? He has every opportunity, why he couldn’t form his own party?

Have you ever thought about it? Well, having said that, I am telling you I didn’t oust him from the Grameen Bank, he himself did it.

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CHINA

Beijing plays up the carrot while still wielding the stick by Willy Lam

AsiaNews - Hong Kong - July 31, 2012

What happened in Shifang and Wukan could lead people to think that Communist authorities have changed the ways they address the growing number of social protests in China. But they would be wrong. Although the party wants to show that it is close to the people, it is also trying to keep young people away from politics and stop the action of dissidents and human rights activists. Beijing must be careful though. Young people have been the real driving force of every revolution and young Chinese are increasingly working for change. Here's an analysis by Willy Lam, an expert in the matter, which AsiaNews is publishing with permission from the Jamestown Foundation.

The relatively swift resolution of the protests in Shifang in southwestern Sichuan Province could mark a turning point in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) administration's handling of the estimated 150,000 or so cases of mass incidents that erupt every year. While continuing to boost its formidable "preserving stability" (weiwen) apparatus, Beijing appears to be putting at least as much emphasis on conciliatory gestures in tackling very public and large-scale disturbances. No change, however, is expected in the CCP leadership's draconian measures to stamp out frontal challenges to its one-party rule, including those posed by dissidents and human rights activists such as Liu Xiaobo, Gao Zhisheng and Ai Weiwei.

On July 1, several thousand residents-including scores of high-school students-in Shifang, a county-level city in Sichuan, held a rally to voice their opposition to the planned construction of a $1.6 billion molybdenum copper plant. Municipal officials immediately deployed anti-riot police against the protestors, many of whom had surrounded party and government buildings. Tear gas was fired at the demonstrators of whom 27 were arrested (Ming Pao [Hong Kong] July 2). It was soon apparent that authorities not only in the provincial capital of Chengdu but also in Beijing decided to adopt a softer and more flexible approach to quickly defuse this largely environmentally-based protest. Barely two days later, Shifang cadres buckled under pressure and indicated they had scrapped plans for the plant, which the officials had claimed earlier would help revive the economy by bringing in huge employment opportunities. Beijing-based national newspapers began berating Shifang officials for their failure to make proper consultation with its people, most of whom were scared of the pollution that the factory might generate. On July 5, Chengdu dispatched the Zuo Zheng, Vice Mayor of Deyang City, which has jurisdiction over Shifang, to "supervise" local Party Secretary Li Chengjin in handling the aftermath of the incident (CNN, July 6; China News Service, July 5).

It is probably not a coincidence that the same week, the CCP Central Political-Legal Commission, which is in charge of the nation's police, domestic intelligence, prosecutors' offices and courts, laid down instructions on so-called "innovation in preserving stability [methods]" (chuangxin weiwen). While the leadership has yet to spell out details of chuangxin weiwen, Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang, who heads the Central Political-Legal Commission, asked law enforcement cadres to emulate the so-called "Wukan Village Model" (CNTV.cn, July 4). This was a reference to Guangdong authorities' placatory treatment of "rebel peasants" in Wukan Village in southern Guangdong. Late last year, residents there threw out local officials who were accused of illegally confiscating the household family plots of peasants and then selling them to developers at huge profits. Fresh elections at Wukan were held in January and a few of the protest organizers were elected as the village's new administrators ("The Grim Future of the Wukan Model for Managing Dissent," China Brief, January 6). After discussions with Guangdong Deputy Party Secretary Zhu Mingguo, who personally negotiated with the Wukan rebels, Zhou praised Zhu and his colleagues for their "bold exploration" in political-legal work. "I hope Guangdong will continue to establish path-breaking experience in chuangxin weiwen," Zhou said. How to use the "Wukan Model" to handle confrontation between police and citizens was also featured in a training camp for 1,400 newly appointed municipal- and county-level police chiefs.

There are other examples of Beijing's new-found readiness to enforce an "innovative" style in upholding stability. Feng Jianmei, the woman from rural Shaanxi Province who was forced to undergo a late-term abortion was last week promised an unprecedented compensation of $11,000. The grisly picture of her killed fetus was widely circulated in China's Cyberspace as well as in the foreign media. Two local officials were sacked and five others penalized for their overzealous - and illegal - methods in enforcing China's stern one-child policy .

If it is indeed true that part of the spirit of chuangxin weiwen includes a more placatory way to deal with protests, what are the factors behind this turn of events? Apart from an obvious desire to stop the number and intensity of anti-government mass incidents from increasing, a key consideration could be the enhanced activism of the so-called post-80 and, in particular, the post-90 generations-references to Chinese born after 1980 and 1990, respectively. While the participation of the post-90 generation was already evident in the Wukan insurrection in Guangdong, this phenomenon first attracted nationwide attention during the Shifang incident. Particularly noticeable was the unusually enthusiastic involvement of several dozens of students from Shifang Middle School. The slogan of these teenagers resonated among the tens of millions of the country's post-80 and post-90 Netizens: "We are not afraid of making a sacrifice; we're of the post-90 generation!" .

That the authorities are nervous about the political awakening of the post-90 generation was evidenced by the speed with which the CCP propaganda machinery swung into action. The popular Global Times ran an editorial entitled "We should not encourage high school students to show up at the frontline of [social] conflicts." The official paper warned different social sectors "not to unreservedly praise the [political] participation of high school students." The paper went further, noting "Nobody should encourage high school students to plunge into different types of mass incidents, not to mention going to the frontline of political confrontation...It is immoral for adults to make use of youths to attain their political goals" .

The party leadership has good reasons to be disturbed by the destabilizing potentials of politicized youths. During the Cultural Revolution, teenage high school students as well as college students in their early 20s figured prominently in some of the bloodiest "armed struggles" among rival Red Guard factions. The post-90 generation's eagerness about "rights protection" (weiquan) and defending the rights of the underprivileged has demonstrated that "patriotic education" about the party's supposedly glorious achievements is not working well. More significantly, even compared to their post-80 forebears, members of the post-90 generation seem to have less economic and political baggage. They do not yet need to worry about jobs and saving enough money to pay for their first mortgages. Most importantly, the Internet-especially social media platforms such as the Chinese versions of Twitter and Facebook-has more influence on their way of thinking than government propaganda. As famed writer and blogger Han Han wrote of the post-90 youths who starred in the Shifang demonstrations: "It's wrong to call them future leaders of the country; they are already today's movers and shakers".

Shifang also marked one of most obvious instances of the CCP Propaganda Department's inability to contain public discourse critical of the government in cyberspace, where more than 500 million Chinese Internet users congregate virtually. More than 200 nationally known bloggers and Internet-based social critics defied orders from the authorities by penning pungent commentaries on how cadres' arrogance and insensitivity had contributed to the Shifang mishap. Han Han and popular commentator Li Chengpeng also praised the increasing maturity of young protestors nationwide. Beijing's apparent inability to control Internet-based opinion leaders also may have prompted central and provincial authorities to take quick action to mollify Shifang residents .

There is little evidence, however, that the political-legal apparatus will contemplate more enlightened methods in dealing with dissidents who are deemed to pose the most serious threat to CCP authoritarianism. Dissidents, such as human rights activist Hu Jia and avant garde artist Ai Weiwei, are still placed under 24-hour surveillance. This is despite the fact that Chinese courts have not convicted them of any offenses. Even though blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng left China two months ago, his nephew Chen Kegui is still held by police in Shandong Province. Attorney Song Ze, one of dozens of human rights lawyers who have helped the Chen family, has lost contact with his family members or associates. International human rights watchdogs believe, like famed lawyer Gao Zhisheng, Song has "disappeared" and is believed to be held in an undisclosed location somewhere in China .

Beijing's decision not to yield an inch regarding widespread demands that party authorities pay hefty compensation to victims of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, let alone overturn the official verdict on the June 4 "counter-revolutionary turmoil," is also telling. A case in point is the mysterious death of Hunan Province labor activist Li Wangyang, who was imprisoned for 22 years because of his role in the 1989 democracy movement. Li was detained again in late May shortly after he had given an interview to a Hong Kong television station. On June 6, authorities claimed he had committed suicide. The 62-year-old's body was incinerated immediately despite queries and protests lodged by relatives and lawyers about the circumstances of his demise. Last week, Hunan authorities released a report confirming that Li had taken his own life. Li's closest kin-his sister and brother-in-law-were kept under house arrest in an apparent attempt by the police to prevent them from talking to foreign media .

Chairman Mao Zedong said it all with this telling remark about the incendiary nature of popular protest: "A spark from the heavens can set the whole grassland on fire." While party authorities might have been forced into using relatively rational and placatory weiwen tactics in the wake of the Wukan and Shifang incidents, there is slim evidence that the leadership under outgoing President Hu Jintao is ready to introduce radical measures to promote social justice and ensure ordinary citizens' rights in political participation. The world-and the increasingly politicized post-80 and post-90 generation in China-waits with impatience for signs that the new leadership to be endorsed at the 18th Party Congress this autumn may bring real reformist zeal to repairing the party's sorely strained relationship with the citizenry.

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CONGO DR

Mobile gender courts. delivering justice in the DRC by Lily Porter

Thinkafricapress - July 30, 2012   

Can mobile gender courts' swift justice tackle impunity in the DRC's remote regions?

Since 1996, as many as 500,000 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have been victims of rape and sexual violence, according to UN estimates. To compound this, these brutal crimes, which have devastated countless lives and communities in the DRC, are widely conducted with impunity. There is a culture of silence around rape, victims are often stigmatised by their own communities, and most attempts to bring perpetrators to justice have so far suffered from under-funding, lack of reach and questions over integrity. A project using mobile gender courts in South Kivu is, however, seeking to use innovative ways to finally put an end to impunity and injustice. These courts travel to remote regions to deal with crimes of sexual violence and have so far enjoyed relative success, although the limitations of their approach cannot be ignored.

Impunity in the Congo

While victims of sexual violence in the DRC number in the hundreds of thousands, only a handful of people have been put on trial and even fewer have gone to prison. In South Kivu in 2005, for example, less than 1% of the 14,200 recorded cases of sexual violence went to court.

Numerous measures have been taken to address violence in DRC but these do not always include sexual violence. In the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) landmark trial of Thomas Lubanga, for example, the rebel leader was convicted of using child soldiers but there was disappointment that he was not also charged for rape and sexual violence, which can be tried under international law as a war crime. Moreover, the trial was lengthy, costly and carried out in The Hague, thousands of miles away from the site of his crimes and his victims. The DRC’s national courts have similarly fallen short in delivering meaningful justice for victims of sexual violence. Despite a strong legal framework, years of conflict and corruption have rendered a large portion of the country’s judicial system lacking in both capacity and integrity. There has been some progress, particularly in the Ituri district where a court has held prosecutions resulting in 10 convictions on rape charges, but at the moment the DRC’s judicial system simply cannot deal with the scale of the crimes. And even with a more robust and transparent system, there remain practical problems, such as the fact that many victims cannot easily reach courts or police stations and often cannot afford the direct and indirect costs of a trial.

Mobile gender courts

It was with these numerous weaknesses in mind that mobile gender courts were conceived. Launched in October 2009 and focused in South Kivu, mobile gender courts are an enhanced version of existing mobile courts in the DRC which, unlike most national and international measures of delivering justice, primarily seek to bring justice to victims of gender violence. Supported by the Open Society Justice Initiative, American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative and Open Society Institute for Southern Africa in collaboration with the Congolese government, these itinerant civilian and military courts emphasise local-led justice and the rule of law. The project is active in the larger cities of Baraka, Bukavu and Uvira, but also uses plane travel and long hours of driving along muddy potholed roads to reach more remote places like Kamituga, Kalima and Mwenga. In areas such as these where justice had previously remained elusive, these courts bring justice to the people. Most court sessions are public and audiences come from far and wide to see the trials first-hand. Listening to these cases helps break down the stigma that has encouraged impunity and educates locals on the rule of law and how victims should be treated, something the ICC and national courts typically fail to do. The mobile gender courts nevertheless operate within the national judicial system, and use entirely Congolese staff, including police, judges, prosecutors and defence counsel, and court administrators. This is important for promoting the project as one aspect of improving the country’s judicial system as a whole rather than creating a parallel externally-led judicial structure.

Delivering justice

From their initiation in October 2009 to May 2011, these courts have handed out 195 convictions, 75% of them being for sexual crimes and 25% for crimes such as murder and theft. Punishments come in form of punitive justice, with up to 20 years in prison. In some cases, financial penalties are awarded. One of the most prominent cases to date has been the Fizi mass rape trial, which found Colonel Kibibi Mutware guilty of rape as a crime against humanity and sentenced him to 20 years in prison. He is the first commanding officer to be convicted for such a crime in eastern DRC, marking an important moment for justice in South Kivu. Trials typically last two weeks and are, according to Judge Mary McGowan Davis who was invited by Open Society Justice Initiative and the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa to assess the courts, “perhaps better adapted [than international courts] to the actual task of providing timely redress to individual victims in communities still struggling with the chaotic aftermath of war and political upheaval”. The speed of the trials also makes them more effective than national courts. Under national law, courts have 3 months to conclude sexual violence cases, and under-resourced national courts are often too slow to process cases which then get thrown out. Alongside the trials, the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative also works in conjunction with local civil society groups and the South Kivu Bar Association to provide sustainable training on the rule of law, educate people about their rights, and offer medical help and counselling to victims. This offers a more holistic approach to dealing with the problem of sexual violence and goes beyond mere justice and begins to address victims’ other needs.

No silver bullet

Despite the positive work of these mobile gender courts, they have limitations. The speedy nature of the trials, while beneficial in one way, can also make summoning witnesses in time difficult. There is also a lack of resources for basic equipment like writing paper or computers, the prison system is inadequate, and the state has failed to pay out for any form of reparations as of yet. Overcoming these problems, however, requires addressing other areas of the DRC’s judicial system. Mobile gender courts are no quick fix to the problems surrounding impunity and injustice in DRC. Just as the scope of the ICC and the national courts are limited, these courts can only reach out to some of the many victims. These itinerant courts could, however, be a crucial foundation upon which the national judicial system and restoration of rule of law can be strengthened. In conjunction with the ICC and national courts, mobile gender courts can help tackle impunity at various levels and inculcate a sense of accountability around sexual violence. By reaching victims in remote areas and delivering justice quickly, these courts offer perhaps the most optimistic indication to date that justice for victims of sexual violence in the DRC could be an achievable reality.

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HAITI

Concern over gold rush by Rachel Levin

Al Jazeera - July 31, 2012   

It's a Haitian Gold Rush - that's the rumour we were hearing as we made our way to Trup du Nord in the northern part of the country.

After an eight hour car ride on mainly dirt roads, we finally arrived at our destination. Or at least that's what we thought. Once we got to the small town we realised that few locals were willing to take us to the rivers where people panned for gold. It turns out that over the past year dozens of foreigners - mostly Canadians and Americans had been poking around the same area trying to convince Haitians to allow them to drill on their land to take samples. For centuries, Haitians in these parts have panned for gold and it's a secret they don't want to get out. One local woman told us that she's worried the white people will steal her gold. "Since I was a kid I have been panning for gold. I don’t want any company to come here and take our gold away. Gold is my life!"It took about an hour to convince her to show us the river where she pans, so worried was she that we would reveal the location to a mining company. According to an investigative report by Haitian Grassroots Watch - a Haitian organisation which works with journalism students from the University of Haiti - foreign mining companies have already invested more than $30 million dollars collecting samples, building roads and digging.Nearly 15 per cent of Haiti’s territory is now under license to North American mining firms and their partners. In the neighbouring Dominican Republic, mining companies believe they’ve found the largest gold reserve in the Americas: 24 million ounces. They are hoping the gold rush extends to Haiti – a country where the average person earns about a dollar a day. Laurent Lamothe, the country's prime minister, is hopeful that a gold rush could help his country, which is still struggling to recover from the devastating earthquake in 2010."It gives us the opportunity to have our financial independence with programmes against extreme poverty and programmes to create jobs. "Keeping those potential profits in the country, however, will be a challenge - Haiti has one of the lowest royalty rates in the western hemisphere — only 2.5 percent of the value of each ounce of gold extracted. The question of who will benefit from a potential windfall of profits if large quantities of gold are found is one that worries Jane Regan, a professor of journalism who is involved with Haiti Grassroots Watch."There is absolutely no transparency and in the meantime Canadian and American companies now control more than 1,100 square miles (2,849 sq. km) of Haitian territory and I think that would make anybody nervous. "Environmental impact from possible future open pit mining projects is also a major concern. It's still a question whether or not a country which ranks in the bottom ten of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index can provide the necessary oversight to ensure that both profits and the environment can be preserved. Many Haitians we spoke to are divided on the issue. Some locals like Jean Igo, who has been unemployed for months, says he would welcome a job working in a mine. However, after he allowed a Canadian company to drill on his land he is now having second thoughts about doing business with foreigners."I don’t trust doing business with them. They did not give us a good guarantee. They gave us a little cash but it was nothing. They promised they would give people jobs operating the machines and they did not fulfill any of their promises."The reality, however, is that big companies will most likely create thousands of jobs for locals. A fact that might just convince many that it's worth taking the risk.

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INDIA

The poverty of the tribal Bodo, victims of violence in Assam by Nirmala Carvalho

AsiaNews - Mumbai - July 30, 2012

In Kokrajhar, the epicenter of the riots between Muslim settlers and natives, a Salesian priest describes the conditions of 15 thousand tribal refugees in the camps of the diocese. Burned houses, killed livestock and devastated land. The risk of spreading diseases, especially among the elderly, children and pregnant women.

A "pathetic" situation of absolute "poverty and despair": thus Fr. Sebastian SBD, parish priest of Don Bosco of Kokrajhar, describes the condition of over 15 thousand tribal accommodated in 10 camps in the parish following the violence between indigenous Bodo and Muslim settlers to AsiaNews. Currently, tensions appear to have calmed, and P Chidambaran, the interior minister, is set to visit the people of Assam. Yet, the Salesian priest said, these people are facing "an uncertain future, bleak and grim, especially for their children. They have lost everything."

The riots erupted in the night between 21 and 22 July, when unidentified gunmen killed four young people in Kokrajhar district, an area populated by tribal Bodo. According to preliminary police reports for revenge, some tribes attacked Muslims, suspected of being responsible for the killing. Since then, violence has escalated, with different groups who have set fire to cars, homes and schools, shooting at people and among crowds. Between 22 and 23 July, the riots spread like wildfire, reaching the district of Chirang. The final toll is about 53 deaths and more than 170 thousand people (tribals and settlers) who have fled from their villages. These days, Don Bosco Parish has set up 10 refugee camps, where over 15 thousand tribal Bodo found refuge and support. "The families - says Fr. Sebastian - have left the villages, bringing with them only the clothes on their backs, such was their fear. Their homes were reduced to ashes, their lands were ravaged, their cattle killed. These people are traumatized physically and psychologically". Now the main danger concerns the spread of diseases, especially because the country is in the grips of the monsoon season. "We have  emergency tents - said the priest -, in which we distribute medicines, basic sanitation, clean water and clean sheets. Pregnant women, small children and elderly are most vulnerable, and we want to limit the contagion." The northeastern state of Assam is not new to such violence. In general, the disorders arise from disputes of an economic nature, in which ethnic diversity is an aggravating circumstance. On several occasions, Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC), a non-autonomous territorial authority that administers the Bodo-majority areas, has denounced the abuses committed by Muslim settlers, who illegally enter India from the border with Bangladesh and take possession of the land of the indigenous .

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Govt and Maoists target civil society activists

SouthAsia OneWorld – July 30, 2012  

In a report released by Human Rights Watch, Indian authorities and Maoist insurgents have threatened and attacked civil society activists, undermining basic freedoms and interfering with aid delivery in embattled areas of central and eastern India.

The 60-page report, “Between Two Sets of Guns: Attacks on Civil Society Activists in India’s Maoist Conflict,” documents human rights abuses against activists in India’s Orissa, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh states. Human Rights Watch found that grassroots activists who deliver development assistance and publicize abuses in Maoist conflict areas are at particular risk of being targeted by government security forces and Maoist insurgents, known as Naxalites. Maoists frequently accuse activists of being informers and warn them against implementing government programs. The police demand that they serve as informers, and those that refuse risk being accused of being Maoist supporters and subject to arbitrary arrest and torture. The authorities use sedition laws to curtail free speech and also concoct criminal cases to lock up critics of the government.

Human Rights Watch called for an immediate end to harassment, attacks, and other abuses against activists by both government forces and the Maoists.

“The Maoists and government forces seem to have little in common except a willingness to target civil society activists who report on rights abuses against local communities,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch and the author of the report. “Aid workers and rights defenders need to be allowed to do their work safely and not be accused of having a political agenda simply because they bring attention to abuses.”

The report is largely based on more than 60 interviews with local residents, activists, journalists, and lawyers who were witnesses to or familiar with abuses by Indian security forces and the Maoists primarily in Orissa, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh from July 2011 to April 2012.

While human rights defenders have rarely come under direct attack from Maoists, they operate in a climate of fear and are at great risk if they criticize Maoist abuses. The Maoists have been particularly brutal towards those perceived to be government informers or “class enemies” and do not hesitate to punish them by shooting or beheading after a summary “trial” in a self-declared “people’s court” (jan adalat). Jan adalats do not come close to meeting international standards of independence, impartiality, competence of judges, the presumption of innocence, or access to defense.

For instance, in March 2011, Maoists killed Niyamat Ansari, who helped villagers access the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in Jharkhand. The Maoists abducted him and later admitted to his killing by claiming that he was punished for “being under the influence of the police administration, carrying out anti-people, counter-revolutionary activities, and challenging the party.”

Government authorities in Orissa, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh have arbitrarily arrested, tortured, and otherwise ill-treated many civil society activists, Human Rights Watch said. They have frequently brought politically motivated charges against them, including for murder, conspiracy, and sedition. Sedition charges are brought despite a 1962 Supreme Court ruling that prosecution under the law requires evidence of incitement to violence. Often these cases are dropped only when prosecutors are unable to support the allegations in court. But by then the activists have already served unnecessarily long periods in detention because their bail pleas are routinely denied. Police have often attempted to justify these actions by discrediting activists as Maoists or Maoist supporters.

For example, Rabindra Kumar Majhi, Madhusudan Badra, and Kanderam Hebram, activists with the Keonjhar Integrated Rural Development and Training Institute in Orissa, were arbitrarily arrested in July 2008. All three were severely beaten until they falsely confessed to being Maoists. Majhi was hung by his legs from the ceiling and so badly beaten that his thigh bone fractured. However, when James Anaya, the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous people, expressed concern about their safety, the Indian government, relying on police claims, insisted that the men had confessed to committing crimes. All three were later acquitted, exposing the government’s failure to independently investigate police claims, but each suffered two-and-half years in pretrial detention.

“Anyone, including activists, who engage in criminal activities should be fairly prosecuted,” Ganguly said. “However, local authorities should act on specific evidence of criminal activity, not a blanket assumption that critics of the state are supporting Maoist violence. The national government needs to step in and bring an end to politically motivated prosecutions.”

Activist Himanshu Kumar had to stop his grassroots work with the predominantly tribal population in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh because of state intimidation. He had built a network of local activists to implement government food and healthcare programs, and work on other development projects. After the Chhattisgarh government began to support the Salwa Judum vigilante movement against the Maoists in 2005, he started filing complaints against Salwa Judum abuses. He became visible in the media and during protests. In retaliation, the district administration declared that his organization’s office was located illegally in protected forest land. In May 2009, police demolished the structure. Unable to secure any other space in the area, and because of threats and arrests of several of his workers, Kumar had to leave Chhattisgarh.

“The Indian government has repeatedly asserted that a parallel approach is needed to resolve the Maoist problem by delivering development while undertaking security operations against Maoists,” Ganguly said. “However, the government has failed to stop local authorities and the security forces from attacking and intimidating civil society activists who are often implementing the very programs that could deliver development in these remote and long ignored areas.”

Accounts:

“The police say, ‘You travel all over the place. Why don’t the Maoists kill you?’ But the thing is the Maoists are angry with me, too. The local leaders say I am inciting people against Maoists. All I am doing is telling people that they should protest to protect their lives. They are stuck between two sets of guns, and they should say that they are suffering. I was told by the police, ‘We are watching. You talk too much, and you will be in jail, defending murder charges.’”

– Human right activist in Chhattisgarh, August 2011 (details withheld)

“They [the police] started beating me… They kept asking, ‘Are you a Maoist?’ I said, ‘No.’ They said if you deny it, we will beat you more. Finally, I said, ‘Yes.’”

– Madhusudan Badra, Orissa, July 2011

“My colleagues were arrested under false charges, even murder…. The number of violent reprisals kept increasing. I began to feel my strategy had backfired – instead of protecting them, I had made these tribal people more vulnerable. Continuing to work in Dantewada would only bring more harassment, more attacks, more arrests of people I was trying to help. I decided to leave Dantewada.”

– Himanshu Kumar, Chhattisgarh, August 2011

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INDONESIA

Low health awareness deadly for children

Irinnews - Jakarta - July 30, 2012  

Poor knowledge of basic healthcare and lack of sanitation are contributing to the high number of deaths among children under the age of five in Indonesia. Among poorer households child deaths are more than three times higher than in richer ones.

According to Countdown 2015, a global collaboration to achieve health-related Millennium Development Goals, 151,000 Indonesian children died in 2010 before they reached the age of five - 35 out of every 1,000 live births. To reach the target of reducing child deaths by two-thirds of the 1990 death rate, seven more children out of every 1,000 births need to survive.

Causes of children under five years dying in 2010 included pneumonia, which accounted for 14 percent of deaths, preterm births caused 21 percent, injuries 6 percent, and measles and diarrhoea 5 percent each, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The agency noted that 48 percent of children's deaths took place in their first 28 days of life.

 “Poor nutrition and lack of clean water are important contributors to child mortality in Indonesia,” said Isni Ahmad, a spokeswoman for the NGO, Plan International, in Indonesia. 

 “Efforts to prevent death from diarrhoea or to reduce the burden of diseases will fail unless people have access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation,” she told IRIN.

The 2010 Indonesia Health Profile revealed that 80 percent of the population were using clean water sources, but only 52 percent used hygienic, or “safe”, sanitation facilities.

The Indonesian Health Ministry says only around 12 percent of children aged between 5 and 14 wash their hands with soap after defecating, while 14 percent do so before eating. Improving the skills of health workers, especially those at community health clinics, is key to reducing child mortality.

A study by WHO noted in 2007 that diarrhoea cases could be reduced by 32 percent if more people practiced basic sanitation, 45 percent washed their hands with soap, and 39 percent treated household water. The government adopted a child illness management policy that focuses on disease prevention in addition to treatment.

Volunteers trained by local health departments organized monthly check-ups for mothers and children at more than 260,000 community health posts, but a perceived lack of support and waning volunteer interest have led to a decline in these services. 

Plan Indonesia is working in 10 of the country’s 33 provinces where infant and maternal mortality rates are high by providing clean water, helping children access quality health services, and educating parents about child rearing, including nutrition.

Improved health policy and legislation, a renewed focus on reducing malnutrition, improved coverage of key maternal and child health services, such as antenatal care and control of common childhood illnesses; are all contributing to reductions in overall mortality, said the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

Nuraini Razak, a UNICEF information officer in Jakarta, the capital, said the government is working with UNICEF to expand exclusive breast feeding, community newborn care, vaccinations, complimentary feeding, and access to clean water and sanitation.

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IRAQ

The U.S. started the war in Iraq. It’s time to finish it.

Newsweek - Jul 30, 2012  

Want to know why the world so often distrusts America? Because we’re a nation of amnesiacs. Our leaders get all hyped up about the need to remake some country halfway across the world, a country whose political pathologies, we are told, violate American values and menace American security. The American press joins in, the American people get dragged along, and next thing you know, American missiles are raining down on the place.

The tyrants flee; some other folks take over, and they seem like a big improvement at first. Then the locals grow unhappy with our presence; they begin killing U.S. soldiers in attacks that shock Americans and prompt an angry debate about getting out, which America eventually does. And then it’s done. The curtain goes down, the show is over, and barely anybody in America pays any attention to country X anymore. Public conversation, in fact, quickly moves on to countries Y and Z, where evil rulers or civil strife may or may not pose an intolerable threat to American values and American security. Of all the tools used to conduct American foreign policy, perhaps none is as pervasive as the Etch a Sketch.

So it was that last week terrorists killed more than 100 people in Iraq—a country that obsessed us just a few years ago—and barely anyone in America seemed to notice. The Obama adminstration issued a one-sentence statement. Prominent Republicans didn’t even do that. Neither Sean Hannity nor Bill O’Reilly mentioned it on their TV programs. The New Republic, which supported the war during my time as editor, didn’t mention the attacks either. The Weekly Standard, to its credit, did, noting that “whatever one thinks of the war in Iraq, the simple fact of the matter is that without some U.S. combat forces on the ground America has no ability to fight AQI [al Qaeda in Iraq] and affiliated groups directly.” All of which may well be true. But the opening clause—“whatever one thinks of the war in Iraq”—is oddly agnostic for a magazine that campaigned relentlessly for Saddam Hussein’s overthrow between 1997 and 2003.

So why should we still care about Iraq? First, because although al Qaeda terrorists detonated this week’s bombs, it was our invasion that created the chaos that has allowed them sanctuary; the blood is partly on our hands. Hours after the bombs hit, President Obama addressed the National Convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars, where he bragged that “I pledged to end the war in Iraq honorably, and that’s what we’ve done ... We brought our troops home responsibly. They left with their heads held high, knowing they gave Iraqis a chance to forge their own future.” The crowd applauded. Imagine yourself as an Iraqi, hearing Obama’s banal, self-congratulatory words on CNN while living the blood-stained future that America’s invasion helped you forge. Or imagine you heard Mitt Romney’s speech the following day that barely mentioned Iraq but declared that “throughout history our power has brought justice where there was tyranny, peace where there was conflict, and hope where there was affliction and despair ... Our country is the greatest force for good the world has ever known.” Think how you’d feel about the United States.

The second reason we should care is that America’s foreign-policy debate desperately needs some measure of accountability. I’m not suggesting that politicians and pundits who got Iraq wrong be banished from public life. (This standard would leave me looking for other work). But neither should they be able to flee the scene of the disaster. Imagine if every time Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or John Bolton or John McCain or William Kristol was interviewed about military intervention in Iran or Syria, the interviewer began by asking what they’ve learned about the subject from their experience supporting the war in Iraq. Simply asking the question would inject a much-needed humility into our foreign-policy discussion. Asking might also make viewers wonder why they so rarely hear from experts who did not support one of the greatest disasters in the history of American foreign policy. Who knows? If Mitt Romney knew that his foreign-policy surrogates were going to have to own up to their record on Iraq, he might even think twice before stocking his foreign-policy team with Bush holdovers.

The Iraq War didn’t end just because our troops left a little more than six months ago. Hundreds have died, and the number is likely to rise. The war is ongoing and it’s horrific, and the least we owe the people whose country we pulverized is to notice. And if we do notice, perhaps we’ll be slightly better able to understand why the world doesn’t always see us the way we see ourselves.

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MALI

Investigate disappearances, killings and torture of Junta opponents

Amnesty - 31 July 2012

Amnesty International has documented brutal abuses committed by soldiers loyal to Mali's military Junta against soldiers and police officers involved in an attempted counter-coup.©  

The Malian authorities have a duty to investigate all the cases we have documented. Those responsible for these brutal efforts to avenge the attempted counter-coup must be held accountable for their actions. Mali must halt its slide into human rights chaos and open investigations into dozens of cases of enforced disappearances, extra-judicial killings and torture documented by Amnesty International. In a report released today following a 10-day mission to Mali in July 2012, Amnesty International details brutal abuses committed by soldiers loyal to the military Junta against soldiers and police officers involved in an attempted counter-coup on 30 April 2012.

In the days that followed the attempted counter-coup dozens of soldiers were arrested and taken to Kati military camp, 20 kilometres north of Bamako, the capital. They were held for more than 40 days in appalling conditions and subjected to torture and sexual abuse. Twenty one detainees were abducted from their cell at night and haven't been seen since.

“The Malian authorities have a duty to investigate all the cases we have documented. Those responsible for these brutal efforts to avenge the attempted counter-coup must be held accountable for their actions,” said Gaetan Mootoo, Amnesty International’s West Africa researcher.

“These vengeful acts fly in the face of Mali’s international human rights obligations and action must be taken to ensure the military Junta doesn’t continue to operate with impunity.”

Amnesty International’s report details the enforced disappearance of at least 21 named individuals on the night of 2 to 3 May from the cell they were being held in.

One of the inmates of these disappeared people prisoners told Amnesty International:

“Around two in the morning, the door of our cell opened. Our wardens stood at the door and began to read a list. One by one, the soldiers called, went out. We haven’t seen our cellmates since that date.”

 Amnesty International is also concerned about a number of soldiers being treated for wounds in Gabriel Touré Hospital in Bamako who were abducted by the military junta on 1 May. Despite its requests, Amnesty International has not obtained the list of these soldiers and has not been able to establish their whereabouts. While held in Kati military camp prisoners described inhumane and degrading conditions including 80 inmates wearing just their underwear crammed into a five metre square cell. The detainees were forced to relieve themselves in a plastic bag and were deprived of food during the first days of their detention. Some detainees were regularly taken from their cell to be beaten and interrogated.

One prisoner described the following torture used to extract a confession from him:

“They asked us to confess that we had wanted to carry out a coup. They made us lie face down, they tied our hands behind our backs and then tied them to our feet. One of them forced a cloth in our mouths using a stick. We couldn’t talk let alone scream. They put out cigarettes on our bodies, one of them put out his cigarette in my ear.” In some cases sexual abuse was carried out against prisoners in Kati. One police officer said:

“We were four, they asked us to undress completely, we were ordered to sodomize each other otherwise they would execute us…During the act, our guards shouted us to do it harder.”

In 2009 Mali ratified the International Convention prohibiting enforced disappearances and therefore has an obligation under international law to make known immediately the whereabouts of all those soldiers and policemen who disappeared in the crackdown following the failed counter-coup. A list of names is available in Amnesty International’s report. “The transitional government in Mali is failing in its task to protect the human rights of its citizens and this lawlessness cannot be allowed to continue,” said Gaetan Mootoo.  “Malian judicial officials must launch an immediate investigation into these very serious events and restore stability to a country that has suffered immeasurably over the past six months.”

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MAURITANIA

Funding shortfall affects refugee response

Irinnews - M'bera - July 30, 2012 

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says it is “woefully underfunded” to help Malians fleeing fighting who have sought refuge across the border in Mauritania’s M’bera camp, and other neighbouring countries.

UNHCR has received only 20 percent of the US$153.7 million it asked for to help more than 380,000 Malians who have fled to the neighbouring countries of Algeria, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Niger, Guinea and Togo, spokesperson Sybella Wilkes told IRIN. More than 90,000 refugees are sheltering in M’bera, which has now become a contender for Mauritania’s second largest town.

Mauritania shares its longest border with Mali, where the situation remains very unstable, with the northern region under the control of a fractious coalition of Islamists and Tuareg separatists since April. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is reportedly preparing a fresh request for military intervention in Mali to the UN Security Council.

Wilkes highlighted the urgent need for funding. “Time is crucial, given the food crisis in the Sahel region, the rainy season, the menace of cholera and the instability in Mali,” she said. A cholera outbreak in the region has killed more than 60 people, and although rains in Mauritania are expected late this year, aid agencies are concerned. According to UNHCR, the nutrition status of Malian refugees in Mauritania, Burkina Faso and Niger is “satisfactory”, and at a “level comparable to the host populations. But for both the host populations and the refugees, there is a threat of worsening acute malnutrition over the coming months due to food shortages and the rainy season.

“A lethal combination of the rainy season and poor sanitary conditions in many of these camps risks outbreaks of cholera and other diseases,” said a UNHCR release. “Cases of cholera have been reported in a camp in Niger. Funds are needed to improve the basic infrastructure of these camps, with a priority being increased numbers of latrines and improved water provision.”

M’bera is short of more than 2,000 latrines, which are being constructed on site by UNHCR with the help of partners Solidarités International and Intermon Oxfam (Spain), but the camp will still be short of 1,500 latrines at the end of August.

Adolf Bushiri Lukale, the Humanitarian Action Programme Manager at Intermon Oxfam, said they did not have enough money, and getting construction materials across the sandy terrain in the Sahara was extremely difficult.

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MIDDLE EAST

Egypt opening doors to Gaza, slowly

Ipsnews - Cairo, July 31 2012

Analysis by Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani

With the election of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi as Egypt’s first-ever freely elected president, the Gaza file – especially as it pertains to Egypt’s border with the besieged enclave – is fast becoming one of the new president’s first major foreign policy challenges.

 “Morsi knows that the Gaza issue is intimately linked to Egypt’s relations with Israel and the U.S.,” Tarek Fahmi, director of the Israel desk at the Cairo-based National Centre for Middle East Studies told IPS. “He understands well that any unilateral change to the status quo on the Egypt-Gaza border would have serious international repercussions, for which Egypt isn’t currently prepared.”

Therefore, Fahmi added, the new president “is likely to tread very, very cautiously on the issue.”

In May of last year, three months after Mubarak’s ouster, the closure of Egypt’s border with Gaza – first imposed by the Mubarak regime in 2007 – was eased slightly in a nod to post-revolution public pressure. A limited number of passengers from the strip were allowed to pass through the Rafah international border crossing, albeit only during certain hours and on certain days.

The crossing was, however, kept firmly closed to anything resembling commercial traffic. The flow of desperately needed commodities from outside – including foodstuffs, fuel and cement (the latter being necessary to rebuild the strip’s infrastructure, largely destroyed during Israel’s 2008/2009 war on the enclave) – continued to rely on subterranean tunnels under the Egypt-Gaza border.

In the months following last year’s Tahrir Square uprising, the complete opening of the Rafah crossing to all forms of traffic had been one of the political demands voiced by a number of Egyptian revolutionary groups. The country, however, was soon convulsed by domestic political upheaval, which included days-long street battles between the army and protesters, along with hard-fought parliamentary and presidential elections. The festering Gaza issue was relegated to the backburner.

But Morsi’s election in hotly contested June presidential polls appears to have brought the issue back to the fore. In statements made shortly before his election, Morsi, a long-time member of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, of which Palestinian resistance group Hamas is a loose affiliate, stated that “the time has come to open the Rafah crossing to traffic 24 hours a day and all year round.”

Recent statements emanating from Hamas, which has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007, certainly suggest that a major change at the border is imminent. On Jul. 13, two week’s after Morsi’s inauguration, Hamas political chief Khaled Meshaal expressed confidence that, along with “protecting the Gaza Strip from any would-be Israeli aggression,” Egypt’s new president “will open the border and end the commercial siege of the strip.” On the same day, Ismail Heniya, head of the Hamas-run Gaza government, also voiced that confidence that Egypt under Morsi “would never provide cover for any new (Israeli) aggression on the Gaza Strip,” in a clear reference to the policies of Egypt’s ousted Mubarak regime. Nor would a Morsi-led Egypt, Heniya added, “continue to take part in the siege on Gaza.” Statements by officials from the Muslim Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) likewise suggest that the days of the five-year-old border closure are drawing to a close.

“The FJP believes that Israel’s oppressive siege of the Gaza Strip must be eased and that Egypt’s participation (in the siege) must end,” leading FJP member Saad al-Husseini told IPS. “Egypt must take a firm position vis-à-vis Israel in this regard.” Al-Husseini added that the FJP – which controls roughly half the seats in the lower house of Egypt’s (currently dissolved) parliament – had “no objections to opening the Rafah crossing to both passengers and commercial traffic, or even establishing a free-trade zone.” But in light of geo-political realities – namely, Israeli and U.S. opposition to the notion of relaxing pressure on Hamas – some analysts believe that Morsi will adopt an extremely gradualist approach to the issue. “Morsi is likely to run into resistance from Egypt’s deeply-entrenched intelligence apparatus, which views the Gaza border file as a security, political and intelligence issue, over which it – not the president – has jurisdiction,” said Fahmi.

Initially at least, Fahmi added, Morsi “is only likely to take a series of half-measures aimed at the gradual easing of restrictions on cross-border traffic.” On Jul. 23, new procedures came into effect allowing Palestinians entering Egypt from Gaza to stay in the country for up to 72 hours. Previously, Palestinians under the age of 40 entering Egypt had been escorted by Egyptian security personnel directly from the border to the airport. Egyptian security feared their possible affiliation with Hamas.On Saturday, Jul. 28, Heniya, having met with Morsi two days earlier, said that the latter had agreed to “several measures” aimed at improving conditions in the Gaza Strip. These included increasing the Rafah crossing’s working hours to 12 per day and raising the daily limit on passengers from Gaza to 1,500.Fahmi predicts that Morsi will also eventually open talks with other parties involved aimed at eventually opening the border up to commercial traffic.“Morsi can’t just unilaterally open the Rafah crossing to commercial traffic without first discussing it with other relevant parties, namely, Israel and the (West Bank-based) Palestinian Authority,” he said.“If the new president makes any serious changes in terms of Egypt’s Gaza policy, he will likely make them later on down the road,” Fahmi added. “But he will not make any dramatic moves in the short term while Egypt is facing so many domestic crises, political and otherwise.”The FJP’s al-Husseini appeared to confirm this.“Strategic decisions (like those regarding the Gaza border) aren’t the president’s to make alone,” he said. “Opening the crossing to commercial traffic, and thus ending the longstanding siege on Gaza, requires careful study of the political, economic and security-related implications of such a move.

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Berlin and Washington to sell weapons to Mideast nations to boost Mideast stability

AsiaNews - Berlin - July 30, 2012

The German government confirms talks are underway to sell tanks to Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The US plans to strengthen Kuwait defence with missile and radar systems. Some experts warn this might harm human rights and increase the power of local dictatorships.

Germany and the United States continue to sell weapons to their allies in the Middle East, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. In recent months, the latter have expressed interest in acquiring more arms, including missiles and tanks worth billions of dollars.

After reports indicated that Qatar wanted to buy 200 Leopard-2 tanks worth 2 billion Euros (US$ 2.5 billion), German government spokesman Georg Streiter today confirmed a statement of interest by the emirate. Last month, Saudi Arabia expressed a similar interest in buying up to 800 Leopard-2 tanks worth 10 billion Euros (US$ 12.5 billion).

As a result, the German government has come under fire with Chancellor Angela Merkel's foreign policy described as two-faced, pro-peace at UN and NATO summits, and pro-war and arms sales to countries that do not respect human rights and religious freedom.

The United States is not doing much different. Last week, the US Defence Department, Pentagon announced plans to sell 60 PAC-3 systems, 20 launching stations, four radar systems and control stations. Last year, it reached a 30-billion-dollar arms deal with Saudi Arabia.

German news weekly Der Spiegel said that Chancellor Merket and her government wanted to sell weapons to key countries in the region to maintain stability and avoid outside troop deployments in cases of conflict like those in Iraq and Syria.

This is part of a broader German strategy to hold back the Iranian threat through strategic alliances with Sunni regimes. However, some wonder what would happen if weapons fell in the wrong hands.

Markus Kaim, a security expert at the Berlin-based German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) has doubts about the strategy.

Selling weapons to totalitarian regimes like that of Saudi Arabia or factions, like those in Syria, could actually increase instability.

In the 1980s, the US outfitted the Taliban in Afghanistan with modern weapons to resist Soviet invaders, only to find themselves with one of the cruellest Islamic regimes in the world.

Western powers, including Germany, sold tanks and other heavy weapons to Indonesia, which used them against West Papua rebels.

The latest example is Saudi Arabia, which sent troops and tanks into neighbouring Bahrain to crush pro-democracy protests.

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“Israel’s heavy-handed abuse of palestinian children is unacceptable” by Thalif Deen

Ipsnews - United Nations - July 30 2012 

After a fact-finding tour of the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip – and following hearings in Amman and Cairo – a three-member United Nations committee has lambasted Israel for the harsh treatment of Palestinian children held in custody.The Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices (facetiously called the Israeli (mal)practices committee) in the Occupied Territories has unleashed a scathing attack on the Jewish state for its continued denial of fundamental human rights of the Palestinians and describing the harshness as totally “unacceptable”.The chairman of the Special Committee, Ambassador Palitha Kohona, Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, has specifically blasted Israeli security forces for the rigorous crackdown on children, mostly accused of hurling rocks at a fully-armed military.“Children’s homes are surrounded by Israeli soldiers late at night, sound grenades are fired into the houses, doors are broken down, live shots are often fired, and no warrant is presented,” he said.Worse still, children are tightly bound, blindfolded and forced into the backs of military vehicles, he added.In an interview with IPS U.N. Bureau Chief Thalif Deen, Kohona said the situation in the Occupied Territories has not improved in any significant manner since his last three official visits to the region.He said witnesses reported that children in detention are often denied family visits, denied access to legal representation, held in cells with adults, denied access to education, and even at the age of 12 tried in Israeli military courts.The Committee was informed by witnesses that there were 192 children in detention, and 39 were under the age of 16, said Kohona, a former chief of the U.N. Treaty Section.He also said Israel’s practice of demolishing Palestinian homes continues, and Israeli settler violence against Palestinians has increased.The Special Committee which was created by the General Assembly back in December 1968 also includes Ambassador Dato Hussein Haniff, Permanent Representative of Malaysia to the United Nations; and Ambassador Fod Seck, Minister Counsellor of the Permanent Mission of Senegal to the United Nations in Geneva.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: How best would you describe the harsh treatment of Palestinian children by Israeli authorities?

A: The Committee took the view that the occupying authorities were not discharging their international legal obligations towards the people of the Occupied Territories.

For example, the principal result of Israel’s blockade of Gaza has been to render 80 percent of Palestinians in Gaza dependent on international humanitarian aid. The resilience of Gazans for being able to survive on so little, especially in the face of the inadequate health care, severe constraints on their normal occupations, frequent power outages, and not infrequent incidents of violence that mark their daily lives, is admirable. Israel’s blockade of Gaza is illegal.

Israel’s security needs can surely be met adequately without resort to some of these harsh policies. The blockade, in the view of many, amounts to the collective punishment of 1.6 million Palestinians. It has had a devastating impact on the lives of people.

Many witnesses asked whether some of these harsh policies were really necessary to maintain security or were they actually exacerbating feelings of hopelessness.

Q: Since these human rights violations are taking place in occupied territories, do they amount to a violation of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners in conflict situations?

A: There have been many eminent persons who have taken this view, and the Committee agrees with this assessment.

Q: Has Israel ever permitted the Special Committee to visit Israel and record its side of the story? If not, what is the excuse given by Israel for barring the Special Committee?

A: The Special Committee has not been permitted to visit Israel, the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem or the occupied Golan. Israel has a policy of not cooperating with the Committee.

Q: Since you have visited the region three times as chairman of the Special Committee, what is your assessment of the Occupied Territories?

A: The situation has not improved in any significant manner. In Gaza, imports remain at less than 50 percent of pre-blockade levels. Eighty-five percent of schools in Gaza work on double shifts.

And Israel’s near total ban on exports from Gaza stifles economic growth and makes job opportunities scarce. Between 30 and 40 percent of Gazans are unemployed. Over 1.2 million Gazans received food aid from the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

And 90 percent of the water in Gaza is unsafe for drinking. Business has ground to a standstill with little possibility of importing new equipment or exporting products.

Unemployment stands at around 31 percent and the poverty level at 39 percent, according to the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Q: What can the United Nations do to improve the situation of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories? Or do you think the U.N. remains helpless against Israeli intransigence?

A: U.N. agencies are playing a major role in keeping the humanitarian situation from deteriorating further but they have also come under stress due to funding shortfalls caused by the global financial crisis. They need further funding from donors.

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By Ceding Northeastern Syria to the Kurds, Assad Puts Turkey in a Bind  by Piotr Zalewski

Time - July 27, 2012

Ankara has been a key backer of Syria's rebellion, but the prospect of an Iraq-style autonomous Kurdish zone has Erdogan threatening to intervene

The retreat of President Bashar al-Assad’s forces from parts of northeastern Syria along the Turkish border might have been welcomed by Turkey, a key supporter of the Syrian rebellion, except for one thing: The region is predominantly Kurdish, and Ankara fears the resulting power vacuum will be a major boon to its number one enemy, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) whose three-decade separatist insurgency has seen some 40,000 people killed.

Until recently, Syria’s Kurds had been divided. A coalition of roughly a dozen Kurdish parties had tentatively backed the popular uprising against Assad, while the PKK’s Syrian ally, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), appeared to align itself with the Syrian regime, intimidating opposition activists and quashing popular protests. Others sat on the sidelines, wary of closing ranks with a Sunni Arab-dominated opposition that turned a deaf ear to Kurdish demands for new rights in a post-Assad Syria. Two weeks ago – perhaps sensing that the regime’s fall was imminent – the rival Syrian Kurdish political currents put aside their differences, under the coaching of Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani. In Irbil, capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish Regional Government, they signed a unity agreement that has allowed them to take control of several northeastern towns, Assad’s forces mostly retreating without a fight. The news sparked a Turkish media and political clamor about the imminent rise of a “PKK Republic” or a “Western Kurdistan” on Turkey’s southern flank. Commentators fear that the rise of a second  Kurdish statelet, following the emergence of the one in neighboring Iraq in 2003, would embolden Turkey’s own 12-15 million Kurds to pursue their own dream of autonomy. Worse still, it could potentially provide the PKK — branded as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the U.S., and the EU — with sanctuaries from which to launch cross-border attacks. Picking up where the media left off, Turkey’s fiery leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, banged the war drums. Though he and his government proclaim the Kurds a “brother nation,” Erdogan told a TV interviewer on Wednesday, a Kurdish state in northern Syria would likely become a “terrorist entity”. If need be, he warned, Turkey would not hesitate to hit the PKK inside Syria, as it has done repeatedly in northern Iraq. “If a formation that’s going to be a problem emerges, if there is a terror operation, an irritant, then intervening would be our most natural right.”

It would not be easy. In northern Iraq — where the PKK has come under pressure from a Barzani government that seeks to improve ties with Ankara — the rebels remain ensconced in remote mountain  hideouts, making it easier for Turkish forces to target them with relative impunity. In Syria, the PKK-aligned PYD is an urban-based outfit. To bring the fight to them, Turkish troops would have to operate in large population centers, many of them within a stone’s throw of the common border. Syrian Kurds are quick to counter Turkish alarmism. Ankara is overstating the PKK’s influence in Syria, Abdulhalim, a Kurdish activist in Syria, told TIME via Skype. Even if it is the strongest and best armed of the Kurdish factions in Syria, the PYD is in no position to overwhelm its local rivals. “People will not allow the PYD to control the area,” Abdulhalim insists. “All people here, Arabs, Christians, and other ethnicities, will be in control.” The radicals would also have to contend with Barzani, whose government has provided training to Kurdish defectors from Assad’s army.

But, Abdulhalim warns, nothing would unite the Kurds of Syria more than resistance to a Turkish incursion. “We are strongly refusing Erdogan talking about any invasion of Syria to protect Turkey from the PYD,” he says. When the sabre-rattling dies down, writes Oral Calislar, a commentator for Radikal, a Turkish newspaper, Ankara will do the same with a Kurdish quasi-state in Syria as it did with the one in Iraq – learn to live with it. “We used to say we’d never tolerate an autonomous Kurdistan on our border,” Calislar writes. “It was one of our ‘red lines.’ And now we’re buddy-buddy with Barzani.” For the time being, the most that Turkey can do to contain the fallout from Syria is to make amends with its own Kurds, says Hugh Pope, an analyst with the International Crisis Group. If Erdogan wants to ensure Turkey’s security, he adds, his government will have to do so by addressing the Turkish Kurds’ main grievances – adequate political representation, mother tongue education, some degree of devolution, and a partial amnesty for PKK members.

The situation across the border might be “alarming” for Turkey, says Pope, “but only because Turkey has not solved its own Kurdish problem.”

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Israeli Group Maps Palestinian Removals by Jillian Kestler-D'Amours

Ipsnews - Occupied West Bank - July 30, 2012  

Sitting in an airconditioned car along Road 60 in the heart of the occupied West Bank, Ovad Arad explained how he goes about his job: driving unannounced into Palestinian towns and villages, taking photographs, having coffee with families, and leaving almost as quickly as he arrived.“I don’t lie. When they ask me what I’m doing there, I say I’m doing research into the area. I try not to go into deep conversation. I do the work and go,” Arad told IPS. But he adds that he doesn’t reveal who he works for, or the real reason he takes photos. A resident of the Israeli settlement Mero Horon, Arad is head of the Judea and Samaria (West Bank) division of Regavim, a right-wing Israeli organisation whose work focuses primarily on using legal channels to have demolition orders on Palestinian homes and other structures carried out.Asked whether he feels bad when a Palestinian family has their home destroyed as a result of his work, Arad responded: “No. Really, no.” And what about Israeli settler homes being destroyed? “I don’t feel good. It actually hurts me when I see Jews being thrown out of their house. But I’ve never seen Palestinians thrown out of their house; I’ve seen Jews being thrown out of their house.”Regavim works mainly in the Negev desert in southern Israel and Area C of the occupied West Bank, which covers approximately 60 percent of the territory and, according to the 1995 Oslo Accords, is under complete Israeli military and administrative control. Approximately 150,000 Palestinians and 300,000 Israeli settlers currently live in Area C. Israeli settlements are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, and settlement outposts are illegal under Israel’s own laws. Under international law, Israel – as the occupying power in the area – is also responsible for providing for the needs of the population living under its control, namely the Palestinians. For Regavim, however, the applicability of international law to Israel’s control of the West Bank is up for debate. “The position of Regavim (is that) there is no (Israeli) occupation,” said Ari Briggs, director of Regavim’s International Department. Regavim relies on the legal framework of the Oslo Accords in carrying out its work in the West Bank, Briggs explained. He said that Regavim gets most of its information through freedom of information requests submitted to the civil administration. Using geographic information systems (GIS) software and detailed aerial photography, Briggs said Regavim can map out virtually every inch of Israel – which, he said, encompasses both Israel proper and Area C.“Hundred percent of Jewish illegal building will get a demolition order; only a third of illegal Arab building will get a demolition order,” Briggs, a native of Australia who has lived in Israel for 18 years, said. He added that the Civil Administration often retroactively legalises Palestinian construction, something that, he said, isn’t done for Jewish building.“There are too many lies flying around that actually there’s discrimination against Arabs, and (that) the government and the civil administration is fully pro-Jewish. And we’re saying actually it’s the opposite.”On its website, Regavim describes itself as “a social movement established to promote a Jewish Zionist agenda for the State of Israel” that “protect Israel’s lands and national properties.” Despite this mission statement, Briggs told IPS that Regavim’s work isn’t politically motivated, but rather guided by “moral and ethical” considerations.“Regavim is not using the law for political purposes. We’re using the law to try and bring a rule of law and put a rule of law in place. Our opponents are using the law courts to make political gains and political points to an ideological point of view that they have,” he said.  

Not everyone is convinced.

“We are concerned about Regavim’s involvement because we see them as a very, very political organisation,” said attorney Tamar Feldman, director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) department of human rights in the occupied territories.“They are not concerned about human rights. They’re not concerned about international law. They’re just out to promote their political agenda and of course this is very worrying when one is trying to promote human rights within the territory.”Feldman explained that Regavim petitions have sped up legal processes and awakened cases dealing with Palestinian building and planning in Area C, in particular in the South Hebron hills, one of the poorest and most disadvantaged regions in the area.While Briggs was unable to provide exact data about the number of demolitions executed as a result of Regavim’s work, the organisation recently appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court to carry out 162 interim orders on Palestinian constructions, which have been frozen since 2008.One of the most prominent cases of Regavim’s influence has been in Susiya, a Palestinian village in the South Hebron hills, which, after Regavim appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court to carry out demolition orders, now faces the prospect of being completely razed to the ground.“They portray the situation in Area C as if Palestinians don’t have any rights there, they are just stealing the land, it belongs to Israel and the Jewish people and (the Palestinians) are outlaws. This has very little to do with reality,” Feldman said.“The Palestinians in those areas, (like the) South Hebron Hills and Jordan Valley, have been sitting there for many decades, and for generations on.”According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA) in the occupied territories, the Israeli Civil Administration rejected 94 percent of Palestinians’ building permit applications in Area C between 2000 and 2007.

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Lebanon Heading for Failed State Status? by Mona Alami

Ipsnews - Beirut - July 30, 2012   

Every day Lebanon is being plunged further into a state of general insecurity, as chaos from the war in Syria seeps across the border.

Repeated kidnappings, multiple Syrian incursions resulting in the death of Lebanese citizens, and the widespread use of weapons are just some of the indicators pointing to the slow meltdown of the country’s public institutions. Following the release of three officers and eight soldiers linked to the deaths of Sunni Sheikh Ahmed Abdul Wahed and his companion – who were shot and killed at a military checkpoint in Kweikhat – gunmen stormed the streets of the northern Akkar region in protest. The gunmen’s deployment was accompanied by the erection of multiple roadblocks and heavy gunfire, in an obvious show of militant force.“The security situation is definitely spinning out of control due to the government’s disagreement on a unified security approach. Public institutions and the state are losing their credibility,” a high security officer, clearly discontent with the current condition of the country, admitted to IPS. The repeated infiltration of Syrian security forces into Lebanese territory – whose diverse population is split between supporters of the opposition Free Syrian Army and communities loyal to the Alawite regime of President Bashar al-Assad – without any condemnation from the Lebanese government, has gradually jeopardised the sovereignty of the state.Syrian troops have also carried out a number of cross-border raids into Lebanon since the outbreak of the revolt against Assad’s regime in March 2011, sparking fears of a spillover of the conflict.In the northern region of Wadi Khaled, the most recent incidents involved Syrian security forces kidnapping a member of Lebanese customs and two general security members in the Buqaiaa village.Last week, 30 Syrian state troops entered Lebanon’s eastern border region of Masharii al-Qaa and opened sporadic fire on residents of the area.Masharii al-Qaa (the Qaa Projects) consists of Ersal, a Sunni village, and Qaa, which is predominately Christian. Ersal supports Syrian opposition fighters, whom Qaa residents view with great suspicion. As a result the area has become both a hub for Syrian refugees and a town under fire from Syrian government forces. This month, three people were killed and another seven injured when Syrian troops fired shells and rocket propelled grenades into Wadi Khaled during clashes between gunmen on the Lebanese side of the border.“We (don’t understand) why the state is so hesitant to send military troops to the borders.

It is not normal that a nation refuses to protect its own territory,” Rateb Ali, a local resident, told IPS.Others sources in the area admit they have lost faith in Lebanon’s institutions, including the police, army, judiciary and government.The political vacuum in the north has led local residents to divert their trust to local political figures and charity organisations. “No one wants the Syrian crisis to spill over into Lebanon. They want to avoid the emergence of radical movements, which could easily exploit the state’s absence in the region,” sociologist Talal Atrissi, referring to the various Salafist groups that have established themselves in north Lebanon, told IPS.Mistrust in the government has been exacerbated by other unresolved security incidents, including the unsolved assassination attempt of MP Boutros Harb, a member of the ‘March14’ anti-Syrian and Iranian coalition.

Local residents aborted the attempt, wrangling with three suspects that were installing an explosive device in Harb’s residence before they managed to flee the scene.“We have clear leads in that particular attempt, which we cannot share for political reasons. This is exactly why we need to be given the political means to fight back, which will only happen if there is a clear consensus among all government figures. If not, the situation will spin out of control, and it will be too late to fix things,” the security source warned.Many fear that Lebanon is slowly turning into a failed state, which is usually defined by several key indicators including: loss of control of its geographical territory and the use of physical force within it; implosion of the structures of power and authority; and the internal collapse of law and order. The current political situation is pushing Lebanon inexorably to face all three.“Lebanon is a soft state. There was an international decision to build the country in a way that the state will always have limited power in order for different communities to prevail,” Dr. Hillal Khashan, political science professor at the American University of Beirut, told IPS.

Since its independence in 1943, Lebanon has been a democracy, home to 18 religious communities.“Lebanon’s system was not designed to work in the first place. It (experiences) phases of functionality and breakdown, without totally collapsing – a situation that we are now facing,” Dr. Karim Makdessi, associate professor at the Issam Fares Institute, a local think tank, told IPS, adding that public institutions are still operating while admitting that their credibility has been tarnished.

Both political scientists agree that when the state weakens and the power of public institutions diminishes, religious sects strengthen.“Chaos is a way of life in Lebanon. People are used to it,” stressed professor Khashan. “I still believe that we are far from being a failed state, like Afghanistan. In spite of worrying indicators, I do not think the country will reach a state of total collapse.

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”Romney backs Israeli stance on threat of nuclear Iran by Stephen Crowley

The New York Times - July 29, 2012

Mitt Romney, on a seven-day overseas trip, met with President Shimon Peres of Israel at his residence in Jerusalem on Sunday.

“We have a solemn duty and a moral imperative to deny Iran’s leaders the means to follow through on their malevolent intentions,” Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, told an audience of about 300, including a large contingent of American donors who flew here to accompany him. “We must not delude ourselves into thinking that containment is an option.”

The speech, delivered at dusk overlooking the Old City, was short on policy prescriptions, as Mr. Romney tried to adhere to an unwritten code suggesting that candidates not criticize each other on foreign soil. But there were subtle differences between what he said — and how he said it — and the positions of his opponent. While the Obama administration typically talks about stopping Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, Mr. Romney adopted the language of Israel’s leaders, who say Tehran must be prevented from even having the capability to develop one.

And while President Obama and his aides always acknowledge Israel’s right to defend itself, they put an emphasis on sanctions and diplomacy; Dan Senor, Mr. Romney’s senior foreign policy aide, went further on Sunday, suggesting that Mr. Romney was ready to support a unilateral military strike by Israel. “If Israel has to take action on its own,” Mr. Senor said in a briefing before the speech, “the governor would respect that decision.”

The visit to Jerusalem, in the middle of a seven-day overseas tour that began in London and continues on Monday in Poland, was largely a series of photo opportunities intended to shore up support among evangelical Christians who have been wary of Mr. Romney’s candidacy, and to peel off some votes from American Jews dissatisfied with Mr. Obama’s handling of Israel. It went smoother than the London stop, in which Mr. Romney appeared to be insulting his hosts by questioning their preparations and enthusiasm for the Olympic Games, but the campaign struggled somewhat with the delicate diplomacy of being a candidate abroad.

After reports of Mr. Senor’s comments were published, he issued a new statement that did not mention unilateral action, and later he said he was not necessarily referring to a military strike. In an interview with CBS News, Mr. Romney stuck with the softer stance, saying only, “we respect the right of a nation to defend itself,” and also hinted at the strained choreography of the day.

“Because I’m on foreign soil,” he said, “I don’t want to be creating new foreign policy for my country or in any way to distance myself from the foreign policy of our nation.”

A few hours later, his 15-minute speech did include one vague shot at Democrats.

“We cannot stand silent as those who seek to undermine Israel voice their criticisms,” he said. “And we certainly should not join in that criticism. Diplomatic distance in public between our nations emboldens Israel’s adversaries.” He also referred pointedly to Jerusalem as “the capital of Israel,” something Obama administration officials are loath to do, because Palestinians also imagine the city as the future capital of their hoped-for state. The line drew a standing ovation from some in the crowd and, later, an echo from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who underscored, “Jerusalem will always be the capital of Israel.” Mr. Netanyahu, whose relationship with Mr. Obama has been rocky, was generous in his praise of Mr. Romney. “Mitt, I couldn’t agree with you more, and I think it’s important to do everything in our power to prevent the ayatollahs from possessing the capability” to develop a nuclear weapon, the prime minister said earlier in the day. “We have to be honest and say that all the sanctions and diplomacy so far have not set back the Iranian program by one iota.”

The visit, Mr. Romney’s fourth to Israel, coincided with the solemn fast day of Tisha B’av, which commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Jewish Temples of Jerusalem. Between meetings with Mr. Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad of the Palestinian Authority, Mr. Romney and his wife, along with several of the donors, made a pilgrimage to the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism and a central symbol of the holiday.

Standing with the chief rabbi of the wall, Mr. Romney, in a black velvety skullcap, was handed Psalm 121 — “He who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep” — and later inserted a note into a crack between the stones, as is traditional (campaign aides declined to reveal its contents).

The scene was more like a campaign rally than a solemn place of prayer. Women stood on chairs to peer over the fence that divides them from the men, many of whom clapped and waved as the candidate and his entourage snaked through; people actually praying were pushed to the back as security officers cordoned off a space for the candidate.

“Jerusalem, the capital of Israel,” one man called out. “Beat Obama, Governor!” said another.

Shepherding Mr. Romney at the wall was J. Philip Rosen, a Manhattan lawyer who owns a home in Jerusalem and helped organize a $50,000-per-couple fund-raiser scheduled for Monday morning. Mr. Rosen said Sunday he expected up to 80 people for the breakfast, up from his estimate on Friday of 20 to 30, because of the influx of Americans.

A one-stop destination for the latest political news — from The Times and other top sources. Plus opinion, polls, campaign data and video.

Among those who flew here for the event were the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who has vowed to spend $100 million this political season to defeat Mr. Obama and wore a pin that said “Romney” in Hebrew letters; Cheryl Halpern, a New Jersey Republican and advocate for Israel; Woody Johnson, owner of the New York Jets; John Miller, chief executive of the National Beef Packing Company; John Rakolta, a Detroit real estate developer who led the finance committee for Mr. Romney’s 2008 presidential bid; L. E. Simmons, the owner of a private-equity firm in Texas with ties to the oil industry; Paul Singer, founder of a $20 billion hedge fund; and Eric Tanenblatt, a Romney fund-raiser in Atlanta who had never visited Israel. Scott Romney, the governor’s brother, and Spencer Zwick, his national finance chairman, also were on hand.

They were greeted at the King David Hotel here on Saturday night with gift baskets that included white skullcaps, which many wore to the Western Wall, and Israeli chocolate bars made with Pop Rocks. Some spent Sunday touring Jerusalem, while others observed the fast; after the speech, Sander Gerber, a hedge fund financier, and Mr. Rosen were among those who made a makeshift minyan for the evening service, standing between lines of alternating American and Israeli flags and overlooking the Old City. As they have for months, Mr. Romney and his aides played up the relationship between the candidate and Mr. Netanyahu, who worked together in the 1970s at Boston Consulting Group. During the morning meeting, according to someone who was there, Mr. Netanyahu at one point showed Mr. Romney a PowerPoint slide show with detailed information about Iran, and joked about how it was reminiscent of their consulting days. Later, the two men and their families shared a post-fast dinner at Mr. Netanyahu’s home, which Mr. Romney pointed out he had visited before. Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, said in an interview that any closeness between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Romney — or distance between the prime minister and the American president — was irrelevant.

“Netanyahu and Romney may be of the same cut ideologically, but this is beside the point when it comes to leading countries,” said Mr. Ayalon, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States. “For us it shouldn’t and it does not matter at all who will be the next president. We should not get involved, and I am happy to see that we are not involved, even though there are those who are trying to look microscopically to see if there is any favoritism. It is folklore more than anything else.”

David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Dallas.

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MYANMAR

Sectarian clashes could fuel fresh Rohingya militancy by Nirmal Ghosh

The Straits Times - July 31, 2012  

Security situation in Myanmar's Rakhine state very volatile, says observer

As tension continues in Myanmar's northern Rakhine state, regional security and intelligence sources are worried that it could sow the seeds of fresh Rohingya militancy. Sectarian violence between local Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims claimed at least 78 lives in Rakhine last month. Some 90,000 people have been displaced by the violence which started after a Buddhist woman was allegedly raped by Muslim men. From the security perspective, "it is a very volatile situation", said a foreign diplomat in Yangon who is tracking the Rakhine state issue closely.

Asking not to be named, he said on the phone there were worries across the region that funds and support from overseas Islamic groups to Rohingya groups could "snowball into something larger".

Myanmar has an estimated 800,000 Rohingyas. They have lived in the state for generations but are considered to be foreigners by the government, while many citizens see them as illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh and view them with hostility. Commonly referred to as Bengalis, they do not figure on the country's official list of more than 130 ethnicities, and have been discriminated against for decades. Rohingya militancy in the 1980s-1990s was short lived. Unconfirmed reports last month said two Rohingya refugees detained by Bangladesh security agencies last month had links with the Bangladesh branch of the banned radical group Jamiat- ul-Mujahideen. Bangladeshi security agencies had in the past moved against Rohingya organisations, and Bangladesh intelligence agencies are concerned that militant Rohingyas using Bangladesh as a safe refuge would sour relations with Myanmar. After the recent violence, Pakistani Taleban sought to present itself as a defender of Muslim men and women in Myanmar, saying "we will take revenge of your blood".

Hizbollah and Afghan Taleban have also expressed support for the ethnic group.

Government officials from neighbouring India to Myanmar are likely fearful that radical Islamic groups may exploit the Rohingya situation for their own ends, according to a report in International Business Times. The foreign diplomat who spoke to The Straits Times said: "The situation needs constant attention." The United Nations views the Rohingyas as one of the most persecuted minority groups in the world. Myanmar's Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin yesterday rejected accusations of abuse of the Rohingyas by security forces. At a media conference in Yangon attended by UN Special Rapporteur Tomas Ojea Quintana, he said the government had exercised "maximum restraint" in Rakhine. "Myanmar strongly rejects the accusations... that abuses and excessive use of force were made by the authorities in dealing with the situation," he said, accusing some quarters of trying to internationalise the situation as a religious issue.

Quintana, who is on a week-long visit to Myanmar at the invitation of the government, plans to visit Rakhine today. Myanmar President Thein Sein had said that only a third generation descended from those who came into the country before its independence in 1948 are recognised as citizens.

He also said the Rohingyas should be repatriated to another country.

But hundreds of thousands of them would not have requisite paperwork. Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has also disappointed some rights campaigners by not offering stronger support to them.

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Dying Muslim Rohingyas everyday in Arakan due to artificial Famine created by Myanmar security forces by Nurul Islam

Newsfrombangladesh - July 30, 2012

On 10th June,2012 Myanmar quasi-civilian government declared emergency in Arakan which is imposed only on Muslim Rohingyas. Since then Muslims are totally confined in homes. But without going out how can they buy Rice because Rice is the only food of the people of Arakan. Few days ago the security forces allowed Rohingyas to go out for in day time in towns to buy necessary commodities. But the rice traders are denying to sell rice to Muslims because the security forces(Police, Nasaka and Lun Tin ) strictly instructed the rice traders to stop selling rice to Muslims. In fact, rice traders are Buddhist Rakhines because no restriction of movement has been imposed on them. That`s why Rakhines could carry rice from other towns of the Arakan, even from Yangon to Akayab, Buthidaung and Maungdaw. In the rural area of Arakan the Muslims are facing same problem causing to embrace artificial Famine and now dying Muslims in Arakan almost every day due to starvation. The Muslims whose homes burnt down during deadly Riot are now getting rice and other commodities from UNHCR and other NGOs insufficient. Staff of UNHCR and other NGOs are unable to distribute relief goods to Rohingya Riot victims independently because the security forces interfering them and the Rakhines are getting relief materials more than their daily necessity.

If such a situation continues Rohingyas in Arakan would be completely exterminated. Now a lot of Mosques were sealed and about 20 Imams(Religious teachers ) were arrested and have taken to unknown place and torturing them. All the religious schools were also sealed.

Rakhine state is a no-go area for journalists and independent observers, making it difficult to verify conflicting versions of events. UN inquiry team and immediate Rice supplying for Muslim Rohingyas is dire necessary in Arakan. Also Immediate intervention of Muslim world and the international community is most crucial and imperative in Arakan state because the implementation of Thein Sein`s Rohingya cleansing policy is applying in humanely. In fact, Muslim Rohingyas are not demanding separate independent state, rather they are peace loving people and always maintaining peaceful co-existance with other ethnic groups in Arakan. Their demand is only to return them their citizenship in order to enjoying equal rights in their ancestral land, Arakan.

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NORTH KOREA

As Kim Jong-un plays in the park, uncle takes the country by Joseph Yun Li-sun

AsiaNews - Seoul - July 30, 2012

Hamlet takes centre stage in Pyongyang. With North Korea's young dictator, Kim Jong-un, playing happy husband with wife at the amusement part for the greater joy of photographers, Uncle Jang Song-taek purges the top echelons of the regime to assert his power. However, he is taking big risks because North Koreans will not let a non-Kim rule them.

Jang Song-taek, North Korea's eminence grise, is vying for power. Brother-in-law of the late Kim Jong-il (he married the latter's sister, Kim Kyong-hui) and uncle of Kim Jong-un, the current dictator, Jang is responsible for reforms currently underway in Pyongyang, this according to South Korean and Us intelligence sources. Last night, North Korea media reported a statement by the regime. "The puppet group (South Korea)... tried to give (the) impression that the present leadership of the DPRK (North Korea) broke with the past. This is the height of ignorance," a spokesman said. "To expect policy change and reform and opening from the DPRK is nothing but a foolish and silly dream, just like wanting the sun to rise in the west." Although such rhetoric corresponds to what we might expect from the world's last Stalinist regime, it is clear that the power structure in Pyongyang has been changing in the past two months, not the least the behaviour of the supreme leader.

Unlike his father (who spoke publicly twice in 17 years) and grandfather (who was a hardnose ideologue), the new marshal is seen by the population every day, unafraid of walkabouts.

Since he came to power, Kim Jong-un has allowed the opening of a pizzeria and a fast food joint in the capital. He has also inaugurated an amusement park, showed off his bride and allowed live Olympic broadcasting. What's more, he went along with his uncle's decision to remove General Ri Yong-ho, Chief of the General Staff of the Korean People's Army.

The late Kim Jong-il appointed Jang Song-taek in January 2009 as his son's tutor. Gradually, from this position, Jang has built up a power base, taking advantage of his brother-in-law's stroke.

"He has removed top military commanders from the old guard," a source told AsiaNews, and "pushed for economic reform." "His nephew is not stupid, but is not well-versed in the regime's power system. So he needs his uncle as an ally. The alliance might break but appears to be working for now."

The only danger "is that North Koreans see the Kim family as the only one with the right to rule," the source noted. "Kim Il-sung is still much loved and his descendants are seen as legitimate and can do as they please. Jang however must be careful because as soon as his wife dies, he might be purged."

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PAKISTAN

Trading across the line of control by Athar Parvaiz

Ipsnews - Srinagar - July 30, 2012 

As part of recent confidence building measures aimed at minimising tensions between India and Pakistan, which arose largely due to conflicting claims over Kashmir, the two countries have decided to make the Valley an economic bridge, rather than a bone of contention.

But merchants who have long been trading across the Line of Control (LoC), which separates Indian-controlled territory from Pakistan Administered Kashmir (PAK), are fearful that efforts to normalise relations between the two countries will be disastrous for small traders, who will effectively be cut off from the benefits of bilateral trade. Soon after the inception of a composite dialogue in 2004, initiated after a war crisis in 2001-2002, both states agreed to reopen the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad road in April 2005 to allow families splintered by the LoC to visit each other. Still, merchants continue to lament the lack of adequate trade-related infrastructure, which they say limit what could otherwise be a highly lucrative flow of goods. The nuclear neighbours have already fought three full-scale wars over Kashmir while an armed insurgency and counter-insurgency in Indian Kashmir that erupted in 1989 has claimed 47,000 lives to date, according to official estimates. The insurgency fanned hostility between the two states, but in recent years, especially in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks on the United States, the relationship has been changing.

In October 2008 a series of confidence building measures (CBMs) that included resumption of cross-LoC trade for the first time in over 60 years began to ease restrictions in the flow of agricultural and horticultural products like rice, maize, fresh fruits, vegetables, wooden furniture, medicinal herbs, handicrafts, mattresses, pillows and cushions out of Kashmir. At the close of 2011 trans-LoC trade amounted to roughly 37 million dollars. But more than three and a half years down the line, cross-LoC traders say they are yet to enjoy basic trade facilities. “When trade between the two sides was first announced, international media equated it with the falling of Berlin Wall,” Rashid Wani, a trader who uses the barter system to send consignments of wooden handicrafts to PAK in exchange for mattresses, cushions and pillows, told IPS. “But nothing much happened after that media-hype. Doing trade without basic facilities in the 21st century makes no sense.”

“Our traders can’t even make a phone call to their counterparts in PAK as the government of India is yet to lift the ban on telephonic communication from this side to Pakistan,” Mubeen Shah, president of the Joint Chamber of Commerce and Industries (JCCI), a committee comprised of members from both sides of the LoC, told IPS. “Similarly, we can’t make any transactions through banks.”

Cross-LoC Traders at Risk

Late last year, Pakistan granted India Most Favoured Nation (MFN) trade status, evoking mixed reactions from residents in the valley. “This is the first time since 1965, when India and Pakistan fought the second war, that trade ties seem to be improving between them,” Khursheed Mahajan, professor of commerce at the Kashmir University, told IPS. Early this year, the two countries decided to phase out the negative-list trade regime, which had previously included thousands of items, and limited the number of restricted products to just 1,200. The move was a bid to normalise trade relations between the two sides, but it only caused consternation among Kashmiri traders who fear that competition from large-scale industries will threaten cross-LoC trade. “We have been observing that both the countries are working towards improving bilateral trade, which will have a negative impact on cross-LoC trade,” said Zulfikar Abbassi, former president of the JCCI. Earlier this month, Abbassi led the traders’ delegation from Pakistan Administered Kashmir to Srinagar for a two-day conference to discuss the two sides’ future trade strategy.

“The principles that are applicable to Indo-Pak trade should be made applicable to cross-LoC trade also. They have developed bilateral trade to the extent that few items are in the negative list now. We hope the same policy is applied to our trade as well,” Abbassi told IPS.

However, early signs indicate that this may not be the case. “Even among the 16 items that they have declared (legal) for cross-LoC trade, three to four of them, like gabba (woolen mats) and khraw (wooden footwear) have absolutely no demand on our (Pakistan’s) side of the LoC.”

According to Abbassi, the two-decades long conflict in Kashmir has turned the paradise on earth into a hell of extreme poverty. According to the 2011 census, 3.2 million people, 21 percent of the total population of Kashmir, live below the poverty line, while the unemployment rate is a staggering 11 percent. “So the governments of India and Pakistan need to encourage trans-LoC trade. This would enable Kashmiris to overcome the economic deprivation of decades,” Abbassi said. While no comprehensive research exists, modest estimates say cross-LoC trade could be in the millions of dollars if allowed without restrictions, employing thousands of youth.

Abbassi’s counterparts in Indian Kashmir are equally vehement in their demands.

“The traders from this part of Jammu and Kashmir are not being allowed to visit PAK. There has to be actual trade and it would only happen when the traders of both the parts of the State are allowed to interact and meet each other,” Shah told IPS. Currently, the entire LoC trade system operates on a barter basis. Since bartering requires physical marketplaces, the entire operation is held hostage by restrictions on freedom of movement. Only those 10,000 “broken” families, with members on either side of the LoC, manage to barter their goods on a regular basis. If not for the many hurdles, cross-LoC trade would have created “great economic dividends”, Shah told IPS. “During the 18th century, this route would handle trade worth millions of dollars in present value.”

According to Shah, the trading community in 2008 supported opening cross-LoC trade on the premise that transit trade would eventually be allowed. “We had hoped that our goods would travel to central Asia, Russia, China, Turkey, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Iran and the Middle East. This would surely have made trade flourish. But nothing of the sort happened,” Shah added.

After the joint conference, traders from both sides of the LoC prepared a list of recommendations for the meeting of the India-Pakistan working group on cross-LoC confidence building measures, held in Islamabad on Jul. 19. The final statement of the Joint Working Group read: “The two sides reviewed the progress since the last meeting of the Joint Working Group on cross-LoC CBMs and discussed modalities for strengthening and streamlining the existing trade and travel arrangements across the LoC.” But Kashmiri traders say that they have heard these statements several times, though without any positive action. “We still hope that something positive emerges. Let us wait and see,” Shah told IPS.

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Days under the Taliban

A schoolgirl who chronicled in a diary the horror unleashed by Talibans is seen as beacon of hope

Asianews Magazine - July 27/Aug 9, 2012  

With the first su-light removing the darkness of the night, a darker fear would grip thousands of people living in Swat valley. Men would start their work with their hearts trembling what new edicts the Talibans might issue. Many had already fled Swat—once a paradise on earth, a peaceful land of roses and gushing rivers in northwestern Pakistan—to escape from the horror unleashed by the Talibans who had taken control of the area in July 2007. For those still living there, the idyllic spot on the Pak-Afghan border was a valley of destruction and death. While the world waited anxiously for news from inside the valley, few Swat people were ready to speak out, fearing retribution by the Talibans. Seeking to impose their austere interpretation of Sharia law, the militants banned girls’ education in 2008.

By early January, the world looked at the miseries and pain of Swat through a beautiful pair of eyes. An 11-year-old schoolgirl from Mingora dared to defy the fear, as she was uncomfortable with the ban. In her diaries, which first appeared on BBC urdu service’s website on Jan 9, 2009 under the pseudonym “Gulmakai”, she described how the ban affected her and her classmates. Her father, 43-year-old Ziauddin heads the Khushal Khan School and College in Swat (for boys and girls). He was the spokesman of the national Jirga, a tribal assembly of elders which takes decision on consensus, in Swat at the time of Talibanisation when Abdul Hai Kakar, then a correspondent of BBC, reached out to him and asked him to find a female teacher in Swat who could write about the cruelties of Taliban. To his disappointment no one agreed to do so. His only daughter, Yousafzai was just 11 years of age when he first asked her to write about Swat and the Talibanisation in 2008. She did it. not for the sake of her father’s wish, but for the sake of the safety and peace of her land. “no one was willing to write the inside stories, the cruelty, the terror and the sufferings of the people of Swat because of the life threats by Taliban,” Ziauddin said during 8th International Conference on Women Leadership in Islamabad on July 7.

A beacon of hope for thousands of other girls who dare to dream of education and ambition, Yousafzai was given the excellence award in the category of “The Future of Pakistan” during the conference. “I remember the first time I saw someone print the diary, I could not tell them that it’s my daughter who has written this. Today, I am happy that the world knows who Gulmakai is,” the father said. To Yousafzai, writing the diary was not an easy experi-ence. She was scared. “I remember the first time when I heard the announcement on the Radio by Shah Dauran, a spokesperson of Taliban. On Dec 29, 2008, he announced that girls would not go to school from the next day. Then he announced Taliban achievements which included beheading of those who they found were involved in “un-Islamic” activities like wearing shirt-pant instead of shalwar-kameez, and people who stayed at homes or shops during the prayer hours. He clearly said girls were absolutely not allowed to go to school, because if they get educated, they will write love letters to boys.

”The girl first thought she would never be able to go to school again. “At the same time, I was sure that I am a part of a struggle, and trying to get back to school was what my struggle asked for. My parents were always very encouraging to me. At that time, some of our progressive-minded family members and neighbours gave me strength. This boosted my spirit, and I started writing the diary.”After the diary was published on BBC website, Shah Dauran threatened Ziauddin over radio. But he ignored it.“Every person has to die at some point, whether there is terrorism or not. This does not mean that we should stop walking on the path of truth. My husband and my daughter both have proven that no terror can hinder the way of truth. She is making us proud since the day she was born,” Yousafzai’s mother said during the conference.

The recognition would work as appreciation and encouragement to complete her long and tough journey that is ahead, Yousafzai said upon receiving the award.When she grows up, she wants to be a politician. “The only way to power is politics, and the only way to politics is education...I want to study law and dream of a country where education prevails and none sleeps hungry.”Swat is peaceful now. “But I don’t understand why the government is not showing any interest in rehabilitating the people who suffered displacement. They are not even building schools for us. It’s just the Pakistan Army with the cooperation of UAE government, which is helping recover Swat from the horrific aftermath of Talibanisation,” she said.Looking back, Yousafzai smiles.

“I believe that it’s a duty of everyone to raise a voice against violence and terror. There was a constant race between my courage and my timidity. I was scared but I always believed that my strength, my faith and my courage will win this race.

”I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taliban. I have had such dreams since the launch of the military operation in Swat. My mother made me breakfast and I went off to school. I was afraid going to school because the Taliban had issued an edict banning all girls from attending schools. Only 11 students attended the class out of 27. The number decreased because of Taliban’s edict. My three friends have shifted to Peshawar, Lahore and Rawalpindi with their families after this edict. On my way from school to home I heard a man saying “I will kill you”. I hastened my pace and after a while I looked back if the man was still coming behind me. But to my utter relief he was talking on his mobile and must have been threatening someone else over the phone. (Jan 3, 2009)

The night was filled with the noise of artillery fire and I woke up three times. But since there was no school I got up later at 10:00 a.m. Afterwards, my friend came over and we discussed our homework. Today is January 15, the last day before the Taliban’s edict comes into effect, and my friend was discussing homework as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. (Jan 15, 2009)

I woke to the roar of heavy artillery fire early in the morning. Earlier we were afraid of the noise of helicopters and now the artillery. I remember the first time when helicopters flew over our house on the start of an operation. We got so scared that we hid. All the children in my neighbourhood were also very scared. One day toffees were thrown from the helicopters and this continued for some time. Now whenever we hear the choppers flying we run out and wait for the toffees but it does not happen anymore. (Jan 26, 2009)

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Rough ride for bomb blast victims and their families

Irinnews -  Islamabad - July 30, 2012  

With bombs causing nearly 600 deaths and over 1,400 injuries in Pakistan in the first half of 2012 alone, a new scheme to help those directly affected by such explosions is being put to the test.In November 2011 the government decided to provide an assistance package for victims of “terrorist” attacks under the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), which was set up in 2008 with initial government funding of US425 million and is designed to help the needy. Muhammad Ahsan, a media assistant at BISP, told IRIN: “We are currently assisting some 1,500 blast victims with a stipend of Rs 1,000 [US$11] per month. He said the amount was the same as that offered to other families across the country - and was given out as cash. Ahsan explained that the verification process to determine who is a victim is carried out by the National Database and Registration Authority. “There are some problems involved in this, as many terrorism victims come from tribal areas, and may lack documentation. This is especially true for women. In this case we seek help from local union councillors or other officials to ensure the claim is correct,” he said, adding: “The stipend helps support family income and offers some help.”Thousands of victims need help, with violence “peaking in the country after 2001, when Pakistan made the crucial decision to join the US as an ally in the war against Taliban militants,” according to Peshawar-based analyst Rahimullah Yusufzai. He told IRIN: “Civilians have become caught up in this conflict.”According to the South Asian Terrorism Portal maintained by the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, 598 people were killed and 1,453 injured in various blasts up to 22 July. Previous years have also been violent, with 1,508 killed in 2009, for example. The figures are based on news reports.“It is vital for the future of our country that the militants are defeated, Mian Iftikhar Hussain, minister of information for Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa Province, who lost his own son in a 2010 attack, told IRIN.But many families of victims are most concerned about their own future. Kulsoom Bibi, 50, who lost her husband and eldest son in a 2009 blast at a Peshawar bazaar, now lives with her sister in Rawalpindi, a city adjoining Islamabad. “We lost two wage-earners in that blast. My son was only 22. My two teenage daughters and I now sew, to keep my youngest son, Arsalan, 13, at school as I do not like to depend on my brother-in-law, but we earn little and I worry my son may have to drop out of school.” She said she had not heard of the BISP programme, but commented: “What can such a small amount bring us anyway?”  

Livelihoods lost

Livelihoods have been lost as a result of blast injuries. Hazar Gul, 60, who says he was injured in both legs following a 2006 blast in Bajaur, now begs on a Rawalpindi roadside. “I used to drive a wagon, but of course I can no longer do that. My sight has also been affected by the explosion,” he told IRIN. Sometimes the authorities “compensate” blast victims by distributing cheques among the heirs of victims or those injured in such attacks.  “In some cases cheques handed over at ceremonies have proved very difficult to cash, as these victims - especially women - lack documents like national ID cards… Also [some] people have no bank accounts so cheques in their names are very hard to cash,” a government official in Peshawar who asked not to be named, told IRIN, adding: “I have seen families of those killed in bomb blasts suffer - sometimes for years.

Psychological problems

Twelve-year-old Adnan Hussain, who lost nine family members in the same Peshawar blast, says he is “very depressed” and feels today that there is no point in building “any life for myself”. “Psychological problems are common among people caught up in blasts, or those who have lost relatives in them, but sadly, mainly because of their socio-economic backgrounds, few seek professional help,” Rubina Shaheen, a psychologist at a private hospital in Rawalpindi, told IRIN. I have seen families of those killed in bomb blasts suffer - sometimes for years. There have also been concerns about delays by patients injured by blasts in seeking treatment, leading to serious medical complications, or poor treatment offered by hospitals in remote areas. Fawad Khan, health director for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), told the media in 2010: “A combination of medical facilities destroyed by militants, poverty and a lack of education among FATA residents are why people are not getting the treatment they need right away, resulting in amputations and deformities,” he said. The situation remains largely unchanged today. Fruit vendor Muhammad Dawar Khan, 40, was injured in both legs in a blast targeting a bus in Peshawar in June 2012.

“Doctors at the time just bandaged both shins, but I have been feeling sharp pain continuously and have now been told after X-rays that I have metal embedded in one leg and will need surgery to remove it. I need to find a way to pay for this surgery, and also make up for the time taken off work,” he said.

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RWANDA

Why Kagame and Rwanda are under attack over DRC by Joseph Rwagatare

Allafrica - July 31, 2012  

"We have finally got you' seems to be the gleeful cry of the foreign media and rights groups. They are extremely happy that Rwanda, and President Paul Kagame in particular, are accused of unspeakable crimes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In some of the media, the president has even been convicted. This "got-you-this-time" attitude and the unconcealed joy at the supposed cutting of development support borders on the obscene They are even happier that some countries have "cut" aid to Rwanda , or "delayed, suspended, or withheld" it, or whatever term they prefer to use, This does not come as a shock since they have shouted themselves hoarse calling for such action. But as it turns out some of the claim of cutting aid is false as in the case of the African Development Bank.

This "got-you-this-time" attitude and the unconcealed joy at the supposed cutting of development support borders on the obscene. But it is also perfectly understandable and that explains why Paul Kagame and Rwanda have been singled out for sustained attack.

To be blunt, there are some uncomfortable truths about DRC and Africa that few want to face. There are well-known problems in DRC which the media and rights groups gloss over, and the UN and some countries which have caused them run away from. At the same time none of these groups is comfortable with an African country being successful and charting an independent course, or an African leader with an independent mind. If Rwanda had been a failed state, as some hoped it would be after 1994, it would enjoy the goodwill of many and there would be a rush to help, even if that ended up entrenching the failed country status. NGOs would be trampling all over the place, setting up this or that project and using the hapless people to raise money in rich countries to finance their lavish lifestyle and hopefully gratify their moral delusions masquerading as activism.

The media would carry reports of famine and pictures of huge expanses of land laid to waste and skeletons of starving children. They would run stories of huge amounts of aid money stolen by government officials and stashed away in Swiss bank vaults. Stories of conflict and turmoil, and citizens tearing each other apart would abound. That doomsday story so beloved of the foreign media is not happening in Rwanda. Instead, you have reports of food self-sufficiency and surplus for export (incidentally, most of it to the resource-rich DRC). You read stories of more than a million people lifted out of poverty in the space of five years. You learn the country's economy has been growing at an average of eight percent per year for the last ten years. You are informed of zero tolerance to corruption and holding everyone to account. All boring stuff - not good copy for the media hungry for its staple of misery, strife and scandal from Africa; not good enough for the army of NGOs seeking the lost Garden of Eden in Africa or to satisfy some moral fantasy. Western politicians, inept UN staff and incompetent Congolese government officials running away from the responsibility of messing up countries like DRC, find willing accomplices in the media and do-gooders.

The Rwanda of today does not fit the chosen image of an African country. It is not weak or failing. It is not your typical example of a supplicant - down on its knees, holding out the bowl and saying: "Please, help". And so, this country that refuses to behave to type and do the reasonable thing of paying homage to the mighty of this world must be cut to size. It must be punished for the arrogance to refuse to fit into the narrative crafted for it by others. And what better way to do that than humiliate its leaders and citizens by reminding them that they depend on the largesse of others for existence. So aid to the upstart nation must be cut and the appropriate lessons learnt.

And then you wonder: why is aid given in the first place? The naive among us have always thought it was genuinely meant to raise the less fortunate of our earth to a reasonable standard of life. The more practical have always known it for what it is - a tool to control the behaviour of recipients so that they remain docile and toe the line.

Just like his country, President Kagame does not fit the media definition of an African leader. He does not, or permit anyone, to plunder his country. He cares about all its citizens and works for their prosperity. He has no luxurious villas on the Riviera or on some paradise island. The man is plain-spoken, not given to expansive or colourful rhetoric. Actually, the president is a regular guy who puts in a normal day's shift like his fellow countrymen and retires to his home to enjoy a normal family life. This, too, is not exciting to the media used to villains and scoundrels that they often create to suit the script they write for us. To them, the clean image, the passion and urgency to move the country forward, and insistence that Rwandans must do their bit to earn their livelihood and keep their dignity, cannot be allowed to stand. And it must surely hide other terrible traits. And yes, he is an autocrat and war criminal, who, like his country, must be punished.

And so, with a pail of mud and brush in hand, they proceed to paint him as a villain and write a script in which he acts the part. The truth, however, is different and the painters and scriptwriters know it but will not admit it. The truth is that President Kagame has been urging Rwandans to be who they are and strive to be the best they can be. That means Rwandans defining themselves and rejecting definition by others. With self-definition also comes decisions about what is best for Rwandans. That, too, will not come from outside. He has also said many times that the story of Rwanda, its national interests and aspirations of its people can best be told by Rwandans, and as such, they cannot leave the narrative of their country's progress to others to tell. The president has made self-reliance, respect for sovereign decisions and mutual respect central to relations with others, including development partners.

The independence that President Kagame urges and the refusal to bow and scrape before anyone threatens the continued control of our countries. It also hurts the interests of some people - mainly the so-called Rwanda (Africa) experts in the media, academia, governments and NGOs who find their presumed expertise irrelevant and whose livelihoods are therefore challenged.

And so, the mudslinging begins, a web of lies is woven and made into a narrative whose aim is to stop Paul Kagame from propagating "dangerous" ideas of liberty and development. He must be stopped at all costs lest his example becomes contagious. The price to stop him and Rwanda's forward movement are the millions of lives in DRC.

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SRI LANKA

Buddhists ban on vasectomy and tubectomy

AsiaNews - Colombo - July 31, 2012

An organization of Buddhist monks believed that the population is "at risk" because of family planning programs promoted by the government. No mention of minorities in the country. Buddhists account for 70% of the state population.

The Bodubalasena, an organization of Buddhist monks, is calling on the government of Sri Lanka to ban vasectomies and tubectomies "to increase the Buddhist population." According to the association in fact, the national laws do not protect or safeguard the rights and identity of Buddhists, but campaigns promoting family planning in exchange for money. Yet, Sri Lanka has a total population of over 20.2 million people, of which 70% are Buddhist.

The Bodubalasena prohibition of male and female sterilization came during the group's first national conference, held last July 28 at the Bandaranayake Memorial International Conference Hall (Bmich). Besides this issue, the association has addressed other questions, mostly related to proposals in the field of education. However, they only concern the Buddhist community, secular and religious.

Several times the Buddhist community in Sri Lanka has been shown to have "two souls": on the one hand, there are those who seek dialogue and the encounter with the Christian and Muslim minorities in the country, on the other, there are many who want to "preserve" a position of greater power and strength within society, given the fact that they are the religious majority. Thus, the country is no stranger to incidents of discrimination - sometimes resulting in reprisals and violence- by radical Buddhist groups and parties.

However, this trend is associated with a problem of ethnic and cultural nature, which contrasts with the poorer Tamil population (12.6%), concentrated in the northeast of the island, the Sinhalese (74%), richer and widespread in the rest of the State. (MMP)

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SUDAN

Sudanese struggle to ignite their own uprising by Sarah El Deeb

Thebangladeshtoday - July 30, 2012

"We have more reasons than any other Arab country for an uprising."  

I think my country Sudan has really hit rock bottom." Those were the last public words uttered by Usamah Mohamad, a 32-year-old Sudanese Web developer-turned-citizen journalist, in a video announcing he would join protests against the government.

Mohamad, popular under his Twitter handle "simsimt," was arrested the same day his video was aired. For the next month, his family had no idea where he was. Finally they learned he was in Khartoum's high security prison and were allowed to visit him last week.

He was skinnier and darker, a sign he had been left to bake in the scorching Khartoum sun, people close to his case say. The family itself is saying nothing.

Mohamad and hundreds of others - no less than 2,000, activists say - have been detained the past month in a campaign unleashed by the Sudanese government. The crackdown aims to crush a new attempt to launch a protest movement calling for the ouster of Omar Bashir, inspired by the Middle East's uprisings that toppled the leaders of Sudan's neighbors Egypt and Libya as well as Tunisia and Yemen.

Anti-government activists see Bashir's 23-year-old regime as the ripest in the region to fall. He has been weakened by the loss of oil-rich South Sudan, which became independent last year after two decades of Africa's bloodiest civil war. His regime has had to impose painful economic austerity measures to make up for the loss of revenues from the south's oil, sending inflation up to nearly 40 percent this month. The years-old rebellion in the western Darfur region continues to bleed the country. Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in that region.

"We have more reasons than any other Arab country for an uprising," said Siddique Tawer, of an opposition umbrella group. "No other country was split. Sudan was. No other country has a civil war ongoing in Darfur and (fighting along the border with the South)."

"These are enough reasons to topple a regime, aside from the corruption, oppression and the rising cost of living," he said. "The continuation of this regime is dangerous for the rest of the Sudan."

But those troubles could also prolong the life of Bashir's regime. Bashir has showed a survivor's talent for using external threats to keep key parts of the public behind him. He is backed by a security machine and a network of interests built on religious ideology, economic ties and tribal politics.

At an inauguration of a factory in central Sudan on July 11, Bashir ridiculed prospects for an uprising.

"They talk of an Arab Spring. Let me tell them that in Sudan we have a hot summer, a burning hot summer that burns its enemies," Bashir said, waving his cane threateningly. So far, his prediction has borne true. Many are wary of new turmoil after the long civil war and are bracing for a worsening economy. Sudanese also remember how unrest against Bashir's predecessors led to military coups, bringing Sudanese "back to square one," he said.

Sudanese and the region worry of further fragmentation, with separatist movements not only in Darfur but also in the east and in the south.

"What remains of Sudan may not hold as one bloc and may become so unstable it reflects on neighboring countries," including South Sudan, said Haj Ali. As a result, regional powers - and the United States, he said - may prefer "to deal with the regime in its current condition and not be embroiled in further crises."

Khartoum came close to war with South Sudan early this year. With the two sides in torturous negotiations over oil sharing and borders, Bashir's regime can drum up public support with anti-South rhetoric. Sudan's crushing economic crisis has given youth groups a tool to galvanize the public behind their protest movement.

After years of a boom fueled by southern oil, Sudan has reeled since the south's independence. The crisis is threatening to worsen under austerity measures recommended by the International Monetary Fund to deal with shrinking resources.

Inflation is expected to rise further, electricity bills are going up, and consumer groups are urging a boycott of meat and poultry because of rocketing prices. The currency lost nearly half its value the past year, reaching 4.4 pounds to the dollar officially and six on the black market, according to media reports.

The youth groups, some of them working since 2009, put together a movement through social media and university activism, linking with disgruntled communities of Darfuris and others who live in Khartoum.

On June 16, protests erupted. Female students marched in Khartoum University, were joined by male students, and together they moved into the streets of the capital. Over the next six days, protests broke out at universities in Khartoum and other cities. On the Friday of that week, the strongest day of protests, regular citizens in Khartoum joined, coming out from mosques in marches that numbered several thousand. "The people demand the downfall of the regime," some chanted, a refrain heard in other Arab uprisings.

Throughout the week, police struck back with tear gas and rubber bullets and - in at least one case - live ammunition, according to the London-based Sudanese rights group the African Center for Justice and Peace Studies. Several students were seriously injured. Student militias helped security agents in seizing protesters, according to ACJPS. Finally, Khartoum University's vacation was moved up to prevent more protests.

The movement planned nationwide protests on June 30, coinciding with regime celebrations for the anniversary of al-Bashir's coming to power. Under a security clampdown, protesters managed only a small turnout. But with so many troops in the streets, anniversary parades were not held.

Mohamad, the Web developer, was seized at the Friday protest as he tweeted about arrests by agents of the notorious National Security Services in Khartoum's Burri district.

But friends say he may have been targeted because of his video aired the same day on Al-Jazeera English TV. "After 23 years of oppression and injustice, poverty and crime that are all committed under the current regime, change now is an inevitable must," he said in the video.

His detention without charge, while others have been freed, shows how the regime sees information about the protests as the biggest threat, said a friend of Mohammed who was held twice in custody, including once for 11 hours without water.

"He is detained for a month, a treatment reserved usually for a ringleader," the friend said.

Activists report arbitrary arrests of protesters and bloggers and their families in the middle of the night, beatings and humiliation in detention. Two Egyptian female journalists reporting for foreign media amid the unrest were deported.

Some detainees were forced to call fellow activists to arrange meetings that were really sting operations to arrest them. Interrogators threatened to release pictures of women activists wearing revealing clothes to scandalize them in Sudan's conservative society.

One student told ACJPS that an officer threatened to snap his neck while another scraped off his eyebrows, moustache and hair with a blade. "Now we've marked you and if we catch you again protesting we will cut other parts of your body," they told him.

Two activists face serious criminal charges including inciting violence against the regime. One of them, Rudwan Dawoud, who is married to an American and holds US residency, was labeled a spy and could face the death sentence.

Nagui Moussa - a 26-year old activist from the protest group Girifna, or "We are fed up" - left to Cairo after being detained twice, deciding he was of more use outside spreading information about the protests. He says protests may have waned - because of both the crackdown and the fasting month of Ramadan - but "people have changed. Why? Because they are seeing the continuous lies of the regime."

Protests in Khartoum make those in the core of Sudan realize that "the injustice is all over, in the center as in the periphery."

"People will see that the one who strikes and tortures in the south, or in Darfur, is the same as the one who strikes and tortures in the north," he said.

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Mired in the Nuba Mountains and Beyond by Ilona Eveleens

Allafrica - July 27, 2012  

A civil war continues to rage in Sudan's Nuba Mountains. Life there is fraught with violence and, making daily survival even harder, a rainy season that keeps aid from reaching the area. Just a few kilometres across the border in South Sudan, refugee camps have sprung up. Yet their appalling circumstances are causing aid organizations to sound alarm bells, signalling that those who flee are not necessarily finding refuge. Ali Mrjan, his wife and three children plough silently through the deep, sticky mud. They don't bother stopping to watch how one car struggles to pull another four-wheel drive out of the black sludge.

"We want to get to Yida. There is food in that camp. We have been walking for six days and tomorrow we should arrive," says Mrjan. The children are lethargic. The family has not had a decent meal since leaving their small hamlet close to Kauda, a strategic town in Sudan's Nuba Mountains that has been in the hands of the rebel movement SPLA-North (SPLA-N) since the 1990s.

The Nuba Mountains are more or less encircled by the armed forces of Sudan (SAF). There is no trade with the rest of Sudan. Every day some 500 people arrive at Yida camp alone, just across the border in South Sudan. Yet arrival there is no guarantee for relief. There is a lack of sanitation and clean water. Children are malnourished. Malaria is rampant because of the rainy season. In the stores along the Yida airstrip, food is piled up, but their stock hardly grows because this only means of reaching the camp is often closed - it is too muddy for planes to land.

Rain as a weapon

Access to South Sudan is very limited. For a quarter of the year, roads are simply impassable due to heavy rains. In fact, some believe the rainy season is being used by the SPLA-N to start an offensive against the SAF. The rainy season is always a lean time in the Nuba Mountains. Produce can only be harvested in September and October. That means the population must rely on their food stores. The war, however, hindered last year's planting season and the stores here are already empty.

"I planted on my land, but the rains were late," explains Mrjan. "By the time it started to rain, the seeds were destroyed. I have no money to buy others. Besides, it's very hard to find seeds in the Nuba Mountains." Mrjan says he could not find any other form of income.

Aid late to come

Khartoum only recently gave aid organizations permission to offer help in rebel-held territory. But the Sudanese government threw many obstacles in the way. The mud notwithstanding, it remains difficult for official help to reach the Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile state. Meanwhile, fighting and food insecurity drive more and more people into the camps. "The aid organizations are too late," says Mrjan, while he and his family take a rest, drinking water from a nearby stream. "They knew the roads would become impassable. They knew there would be a lack of food. Why did they not make seeds more available sooner?" In the last months, Father Francis and other priests from the towns of Kauda and Gidel have made up to three trips a week from Yida to the Nuba Mountains, delivering food and other provisions. Lately, though, Francis has been sitting around in a tent in Yida. He is waiting for a mechanic to fix the starter motor of an ancient truck that he plans to use to bring more seeds and medicine."It's still not enough. I need to get in there again and soon," the parish priest of Gidel sighs. "But look at the sky. There is so much more rain coming. And I need at least three dry days before I can

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THAILAND

Ambivalent about needle exchanges

Irinnews - Bangkok - July 31, 2012

Needle exchanges for injecting drug users and the decriminalization of people who use drugs are the most effective ways of preventing HIV and hepatitis C infections in Thailand, say experts.

“When users do not have access to sterile injecting equipment they will share needles, [and] that will lead to HIV transmission as well as to hepatitis C,” said Pascal Tanguay, programme director in the Thailand office of the international NGO, Population Services International (PSI).

Providing free clean needles and syringes has proven to be the safest and most effective way to prevent new infections among injecting drug users (IDUs). But the Council of State, Thailand’s central legal advisory body, has interpreted any needle distribution programme as promoting drug use, Petsri Siriniran, Director of the National AIDS Management Centre in the Public Health Ministry’s Department of Disease Control, told IRIN.

Nevertheless, the ministry is collaborating on a pilot project, run by PSI since 2009, in which counselling and sterile syringes are provided through drop-in centres and outreach services in 19 of Thailand’s 76 provinces. PSI has partnered with various local NGOs and support groups for people living with HIV to distribute clean needles to the country’s estimated 40,000 IDUs, 20 percent of whom share needles, according to 2010 government figures. 

The Urban Health Research Initiative of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS and the local Thai AIDS Treatment Action Group released a survey of 468 injecting drug users from a community in Bangkok, the capital, in 2012.

The study found that 30 percent of participants borrowed needles from other drug users, largely because there was nowhere to buy new ones or because pharmacies refused to sell them syringes.

A 2011 World Bank review of HIV prevention among IDUs in Thailand indicated that needle exchange programmes could be one of the key factors in decreasing HIV infections among them.

HIV prevalence among Thai IDUs dropped from 49 percent in 2008-2009 to 22 percent the following year. However, this is still among the highest in the Southeast Asia region, according to the Global AIDS Response progress report by the UN Joint HIV/AIDS Programme (UNAIDS).

Anne Bergenstrom, regional adviser on HIV/AIDS at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), questions the apparent drop. “Some of this reduction may be due to deaths in this population. There is no recent national survey on drugs, so we do not know how many initiate drugs and how many are HIV positive,” she said.  In Bangkok, Sak Aim Kien, 47, said, “When I am with friends and I have money, I still inject heroin, although I try hard to quit.” He has attended government drug rehabilitation programmes for the past eight years with faltering success. “My family does not know about my addiction and I tell my children I have a lung disease to hide it.”

Drug user drop-in centre Another man at the same local drop-in centre who went by the name of Aun, 37, went from injecting heroin to midazolam - a legally available psychotropic drug that alters brain function by affecting the central nervous system - after completing a methadone treatment programme five years ago.

Daily doses of methadone, a pain reliever, have been shown to help wean injecting drug users off heroin by blocking drug-induced euphoria and blunting their withdrawal symptoms, but in some cases, users have simply substituted one addiction for another.

Government “ambivalence”

Since 2009, PSI has distributed more than 300,000 needles and syringes, reaching up to 8,000 drug users, but workers say they operate on the margins of the law. “We currently run the only needle and syringe distribution project in Thailand, but the Thai government refuses to implement needle and syringes distribution, proclaiming falsely that such projects would encourage drug use,” said Tanguay. “Sometimes the police are waiting outside our premises, arresting people who come here,” Piyabutr Nakaphiw, the manager of O-Zone, a drop-in centre for drug users in Bangkok, told IRIN. The centre employs drug users as outreach workers to distribute clean needles to other users in their communities. “They stop our outreach community workers, and if they are tested positive for drugs, the police either ask for money or arrest them,” said Nakaphiw. UNODC’s Bergenstrom noted that “The government always had an ambivalent attitude towards the needle exchange. If we try to achieve HIV reduction, then coverage to needle exchange, access to rehabilitation programmes and to counselling services should be increased.” The 2012-2016 national AIDS strategy calls for a review and amendment of current legislation that prohibits needle exchange and criminalizes drug users. A past effort to change the relevant laws failed. Although the Drug Addict Rehabilitation Act  passed in 2002 promotes the treatment of people who use drugs as patients, under the 1979 Narcotics Act drug addicts can still be arrested. “It will be virtually impossible to halt HIV transmission as long as the national legal and policy framework around drug issues focuses on punishment and deterrence at the expense of the health and human rights of citizens,” said Tanguay.

Hepatitis C infection is another concern. A recent study published by the UK medical journal, The Lancet,  reported that almost 90 percent of IDUs in Thailand are living with hepatitis C, which is transmitted through needle sharing, and can lead to liver failure and cancer.

Tanguay said although needle exchange programmes alone will not halt the spread of HIV and hepatitis C, it can be a major part of the solution if combined with the decriminalization of drugs and drug users.

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TIBET

Who sheds tears for Tibet?

Asianews Magazine - July 27/Aug 9, 2012  

The world has become attuned to the sufferings of Tibetans and does not even say anything about the daylight murder of the old culture and heritage.

One more monk burns himself at Lhasa. People have lost the count. Yet such fiery protests take place throughout Tibet, almost every other day. This is the way the monks are registering their defiance to Chinese communist culture. Yet Beijing is relentless in imposing its way of life on them, seen clinging to their Buddhist heritage fiercely. Self-immolation is considered the highest type of sacrifice in Buddhism, although their religious leader, the Dalai Lama, has advised them strongly against such a practice. He has said in a press interview that he understands their pain and feels guilty in criticising them. But if he doesn’t, there would be innumerable monks taking their lives. Against this backdrop, the world conscience remains dead. A few who protest in the West are silenced by their governments forcibly. The almighty yuan has suppressed the expression of truth beneath the mercantile considerations. The emerging China is too powerful and too rich to be boycotted for the intangible value of religious freedom and human rights. The preachy West has told the Dalai Lama explicitly not to visit them because it realises which side of the bread is buttered.

The government in India is too scared to support the Tibetans’ cause. Even when its request to reopen its mission was rudely rejected, New Delhi did not even voice its protest. The Dalai Lama has said many a time that India “can do more” for his people but it prefers to keep its distance from them because of Beijing’s sensitivity. Yet the Tibetans have not given up the fight.

Camp Hale at Colorado in the US was a long way from Tibet. What joined the two was the training of some 2,000 Tibetan warriors in the guerilla warfare to fight the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China. The warriors failed to make any headway. Yet they have kept the powerful army on its pins all the time. Unfortunately, Beijing sees the hand of New Delhi behind Tibet’s independence struggle. China is more convinced about this after Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna told it recently that Tibet was like Kashmir, “our core problem”.The Tibetans, however, continue to harbour grievance against India for having accepted China’s suzerainty over Tibet after the British left India in 1947. Their complaint is that New Delhi never consulted them. The Dalai Lama, who took refuge in India in 1954 when he could not see the Communist shoes trampling upon the spiritual and traditional ways of his people, too believes that since New Delhi had no locus stand in Tibet, it had no right to accept China’s suzerainty without consulting his people. Suzerainty does not mean independence. It is government’s political control over a dependent state. What New Delhi transferred to China is over lordship, not sovereignty. Yet it is apparent that for the sake of India’s good relations with China, the Dalai Lama who became 77 this week, has to face hard living conditions. Along with his people, he has been sent to stay rooted at Dharamshala, a small hill station in Himachal Pradesh. And the Tibetans have been warned many a time against having any contact with the outside world without New Delhi’s prior permission. Even local people have been told not to interact with them.

The Dalai Lama too has restrictions on his movement and even pronouncements. Even otherwise, he speaks rarely. In an interview, he said, “meaningful autonomy is the only realistic solution”. He made the same offer some time ago, but Beijing rejected it. This time too he doesn’t expect China to change. The Dalai Lama has noted that even during the 1962 war of India against China, Jawaharlal Nehru did not utter a word about Tibet. Nor did he draw the world’s attention to the ethnic cleansing going on in Tibet at that time. On certain occasions, the Dalai Lama has felt “suffocated” and has raised protest over New Delhi’s attitude.

No successor to Nehru, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, has been any different even when Beijing is hauling thousands of Chinese to Tibet to settle them there so as to change the ethnic complexion of Tibet.A lonely Dalai Lama goes on pointing out that Beijing is sedulously destroying the centuries old culture of Buddhists in Tibet. On the other hand, the world has become attuned to the sufferings of Tibetans and does not even say anything about the daylight murder of the old culture and heritage. The purpose of Beijing is to squeeze out even the last bit of religious practices and rites which the Tibetans still defiantly follow. Washington may be willing to appeal to the world conscience to help save the Tibetan culture. But how far it is willing to jeopardise the trade and economic ties with China is the question. After all, President Barrack Obama kept the Dalai Lama waiting to placate Beijing. Even when he met him, Obama looked like going over an exercise.

Strong Chinese economy gives more comfort to US citizens than a few drops of tears that the irking conscience of some may shed. When Beijing lays its claim on Arunachal Pradesh and when the visa for people of Jammu and Kashmir is given on a separate paper, although stapled to the passport, New Delhi gives in more than it imagines. It should introspect whether it was correct in accepting China’s suzerainty over Tibet when Beijing is not prepared to take into account the sensitivities of either Tibet or India. Tibet today is like an occupied territory, without the people there having any say in governance. Lhasa is directly under Beijing’s control. Unfortunately, the Dalai Lama is thinking of retiring when he is needed the most. He should, in fact, go around the world and awaken its conscience to garner support against China’s brutalities. Beijing must let the Tibetans live the way they want to because that alone gives them their entity.

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VIETNAM

Catholic dissident’s mother sets herself on fire by J.B. An Dang  

AsiaNews - Hanoi - July 31, 2012

Anger and bewilderment of Vietnamese

Dang Thi Kim Lieng's self-immolation in front of government offices in the southern province of Bac Lieu. Her daughter Maria Ta Phong Tan, a former policewoman converted to Christianity, is in jail awaiting trial. She faces up to 20 years in prison for propaganda against the state. Human rights activists and bloggers: specious accusations.

The Vietnamese Catholic community is in shock over the death of Dang Thi Kim Lieng, mother of Mary Ta Phong Tan (pictured), a famous dissident in jail awaiting trial who faces up to 20 years in prison. The woman set herself on fire in front of government offices in the southern province of Bac Lieu, to protest against abuses by the prison authorities who hold her daughter, depriving her of basic rights. The mother died from severe wounds inflicted by the flames sparking the reaction of many bloggers in the country, who accuse the Communist Party and government leaders of a policy of repression and of systematically violating the freedom of religion and thought, with trumped-up charges including "spreading propaganda against the state."

Without saying a word to family and friends, Dang Thi Kim Lieng went to the government offices in the province of Bac Lieu and self-immolated. Activists and lawyers who fight for human rights in Vietnam say that the woman died during her transport to the hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. However, neither police nor the official authorities have commented on the case or confirmed the event. Some relatives report that Dang recently appeared very concerned about the fate of her daughter Maria Ta Phong Tan, locked in a prison in the former Saigon, whom she has not seen since last September, the date of her arrest. The police maintain she is guilty of "subversive activities" and of having written "slander" published online, discrediting the Hanoi government and the Communist Party.

The hearing in court against Mary Tan, 44, should begin on 7 August and there is a very real possibility she will be sentenced to decades in prison. She is a former police officer well known in Vietnam, because she denounced abuses and distortions of the prison system online. Her decision to convert to Catholicism also weighs against her, after an adolescence and childhood characterized by continuous "brainwashing" in Communist ideology. However, her encounter with a lawyer and activist for human rights sparked her desire to rediscover the faith that, over time, led her to baptism.

The Vietnamese government has implemented tight control over religious activities, and Catholics are often victims of violence and abuse, both individuals and entire communities. Among the many examples are the Montagnards in the Central Highlands and the Redemptorist Fathers, in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, whose pastoral commitment is choked with systematic regularity. However, this violence did not prevent them from playing a key role in the spread of Catholicism and the teachings of the Church, especially among the poor and the abandoned.  

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