“Activists allege forced abortions, sterilizations in China”

Taken from: http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/30/world/asia/china-forced-abortions/index.html?hpt=hp_bn2

May 1, 2012

When Ji Yeqing awakened, she was already in the recovery room.

Chinese authorities had dragged her out of her home and down four flights of stairs, she said, restraining and beating her husband as he tried to come to her aid. They whisked her into a clinic, held her down on a bed and forced her to undergo an abortion.

Her offense? Becoming pregnant with a second child, in violation of China’s one-child policy.

“After the abortion, I felt empty, as if something was scooped out of me,” Ji told a congressional panel in September. “My husband and I had been so excited for our new baby. Now suddenly all that hope and joy and excitement disappeared. … I was very depressed and despondent. For a long time, whenever I thought about my lost child, I would cry.”

As she lay unconscious, she said, an IUD to prevent future pregnancies was inserted.

The issue of forced abortions — and in some cases, forced sterilizations — in China has seized the spotlight in recent days with news of escaped activist Chen Guangcheng.

Chen, a blind, self-taught lawyer, rose to fame in the late 1990s because of his advocacy for what he calls victims of abusive practices, such as forced abortions, by Chinese family planning officials. He investigated forced abortions and sterilizations in eastern China — a practice China denies — and helped organize a class-action lawsuit on behalf of victims, for which he served four years in prison.

A fellow activist, Hu Jia, said Chen has taken refuge at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

“Chen may be safe for the moment, but the women for whom he risked everything are not,” said Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, a California-based organization that describes itself as a “broad-based, international coalition that opposes forced abortion and sexual slavery in China.” ”Forced abortion is not a choice,” Littlejohn said. “It is official government rape.”

On a January 2011 visit to the United States, Chinese President Hu Jintao reportedly denied that China was forcing women to submit to abortions. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Florida, who gave Hu a list of human rights concerns, said that Hu insisted a forced-abortion policy did not exist, according to media reports.

China’s population is the largest on earth, with more than 1.34 billion people. Since its implementation in 1979, the one-child policy has prevented more than 400 million births in China, according to China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission.

About 13 million abortions are performed nationwide each year, the commission has said — about 35,000 a day. It is unknown how many of those are coerced.

But the one-child policy has been blamed for abuses. In some cases, advocates say, fetuses identified as female are aborted, or midwives strangle a female infant with the umbilical cord during delivery, identifying the baby as “stillborn,” according to All Girls Allowed, a nonprofit group that aims to end female “gendercide,” educate abandoned girls, rescue trafficked children and defend women’s reproductive rights.

Other females are abandoned, left to die or raised as orphans. Chinese traditionally prefer boys over girls because they are seen as better able to provide for the family and carry on the family bloodline. As a result, the practice of aborting female fetuses or abandoning infant girls continues, particularly in rural areas.

In November, according to state-run news agency Xinhua, Premier Wen Jiabao, in a speech to the National Working Conference on Women and Children, “urged banning illegal fetus gender identification and illegal abortion.” ”The social status of the female population indicates the level of social progress (of a nation), while children are the future and hope of a nationality and a nation,” Wen said.

Last summer, Xinhua reported that “millions of Chinese men of marrying age may be living as frustrated bachelors by 2020″ because of the gender imbalance. In 2010, China’s sex ratio at birth was 118 boys for every 100 girls, the news agency said.

China kicked off a national campaign “to significantly curb non-medical sex determinations and sex-selective abortions to balance the gender ratio,” Xinhua said. Also during the campaign, “efforts will be made to raise awareness of gender equality, to severely punish those involved in cases of non-medical sex determinations and sex-selective abortions, and to strengthen monitoring.”

Liu Qian, vice minister of the Ministry of Health, said that doctors violating the ban would be stripped of their licenses or penalized, and involved medical institutions would also be punished, according to Xinhua.

The one-child policy could contribute to China’s high rate of female suicide, according to All Girls Allowed.

China is the only country in the world where the female suicide rate is higher than that of men — some 500 women a day, the group said, citing statistics from the World Health Organization and the U.S. State Department.

In its 2009 Human Rights Report, the State Department noted that “many observers believed that violence against women and girls, discrimination in education and employment, the traditional preference for male children, birth-limitation policies, and other societal factors contributed to the high female suicide rate. Women in rural areas, where the suicide rate for women was three to four times higher than for men, were especially vulnerable.”

Sometimes the consequences are even more severe. In October 2011, a woman who was six months pregnant died during a forced abortion in eastern China, according to Women’s Rights Without Frontiers.

Last month, a woman in the same region was forced to undergo an abortion while nine months pregnant, the organization reported. The baby was born alive, but then was drowned in a bucket, according to the organization. A photo of the infant’s body floating in the bucket was circulated on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, sparking widespread outrage.

Chinese officials are prohibited under law from “infringing on the rights and interests of citizens when promoting compliance with population planning policies,” according to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, created by Congress to monitor human rights and the rule of law in China. However, the commission in its most recent annual report noted “reports of official campaigns, as well as numerous individual cases in which officials used violent methods to coerce citizens to undergo sterilizations or abortions or pay heavy fines for having ‘out-of-plan’ children,” meaning a family’s second child.

In one example from October 2010, the commission said, a woman in southeastern China who was eight months pregnant with her second child was kidnapped and detained for 40 hours. She was forcibly injected with a substance that caused the fetus to abort. Her husband reportedly was not permitted to see her during this time, the commission said.

“Nothing in human history compares to the magnitude of China’s 33-year assault on women and children,” said Rep. Chris Smith, R-New Jersey and chairman of the commission, during the September hearing at which Ji Yeqing testified. ”Today in China, rather than being given maternal care, pregnant women without birth-allowed permits are hunted down and forcibly aborted. … For over three decades, brothers and sisters have been illegal; a mother has absolutely no right to protect her unborn baby from state-sponsored violence.”

“Out of plan” children whose parents do not pay fines may go without household registration, or hukou, which presents obstacles to social benefits including subsidized health care and public education, All Girls Allowed said, citing the commission’s 2010 report.

A woman’s family members, including her husband, parents, in-laws or siblings, may also be targeted for violations of the policy, according to Women’s Rights Without Borders, which published a 2005 report compiled from Chen’s notes into cases he was investigating before his arrest. The report alleges arrest, torture, beatings and fines of family members for the violations of relatives. It also documents a case where a woman suffered health problems after being forced to undergo a tubal ligation despite her high blood pressure.

Ji told lawmakers her first forced abortion was in 2003, after officials said she and her husband would be fined $31,000 for their second child and fired from their jobs. Her second came in 2006, despite the fact she and her husband at that time were willing to pay the fine and lose their jobs.

She continues to suffer consequences from the abortions. Her husband divorced her, she said, because she could not give him a son (the couple already had a daughter). After she remarried and moved to the United States in 2010, she said, she visited a clinic to have her IUD removed and undergo an exam. “The doctor told me that I had cervical erosion, likely due to the poor medical conditions of my forced abortions,” she said.

Liu Ping told a similar story to Congress last year. She said after giving birth to her son, she was required to undergo five abortions between 1983 and 1990. During the last procedure, an IUD was inserted. ”When I learned of the procedure, I protested that I had a kidney disease and could not keep the IUD, but they completely ignored me,” she said. “The doctor just gave the bill to my husband and told him to pay.” Her husband was later arrested, she said, and she was given a “serious administrative warning” at her job and fined six months’ pay. Liu had to report to the factory clinic each month for an exam to make sure she had not removed the IUD on her own or become pregnant again, she said.In 1997, she missed a monthly pregnancy check because she was caring for her terminally ill mother, she testified. ”Agents from the Family Planning Commission waited at my home to drag me to the exam,” she said. “When they pushed me to the ground, I fell and hurt my neck vertebrae. My spirit completely collapsed after this one. I attempted suicide, but was stopped by my family from jumping.” Liu was able to move to the United States and she and her husband reconciled after a divorce. ”I feel happiness and joyful,” she told lawmakers. “But I know in my homeland, China, there are millions of women who are suffering as I did. Each day thousands of young lives are being destroyed. I beg everyone to save them.”

“Shampoo ad using Hitler’s image sparks outrage, calls for removal”

Wrong on so many levels…

Taken from: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/shampoo-ad-using-hitler-image-sparks-outrage-calls-152755213.html

March 26, 2012

A new Turkish shampoo commercial featuring video of Adolf Hitler declaring the hair rinse a product for “real men” has been met with formal complaints from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and others who say it is deeply offensive.

“We follow with sadness and regret the use of Hitler figure in the Biomen Men Shampoo advertisement, which was brought to the screen in recent days,” the Turkish Jewish Community said in a statement.  ”It’s totally unacceptable to make use of Hitler, the most striking example of cruelty and savagery. … Using him in an advertisement for whatever reason is an unacceptable situation and could not be accepted by us at all. This is beyond all ethics as well as a huge insult to human rights.”

The ad has been running on Turkish television stations for about a week, AFP reports.

In the ad from shampoo maker “Biomen,” archived video of former Nazi leader Adolf Hitler is played in which he is seen yelling and gesturing wildly with his hands, while a fictional text translates his message across the screen. “If you are not wearing a woman’s dress, you should not use her shampoo either,” Hitler says in the ad. “Here it is, a real mens’ shampoo, Biomen.” The video then cuts to a picture of the shampoo bottle with the on-screen message, “Real men use Biomen.”

ADL National Director, and Holocaust survivor Abraham H. Foxman called the advertisement “disgusting” in a statement released by the group. ”The use of images of the violently anti-Semitic dictator who was responsible for the mass murder of 6 million Jews and millions of others in the Holocaust to sell shampoo is a disgusting and deplorable marketing ploy,” Foxman said. “It is an insult to the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust, those who survived, and those who fought to defeat the Nazis.

“Egyptian army doctor acquitted of giving virginity tests to arrestees”

Taken from: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/03/reporting-from-cairo-an-egyptian-military-tribunal-sunday-acquitted-an-army-doctor-of-giving-women-activists-virginity.html

March 11, 2012

An Egyptian military tribunal Sunday acquitted an army doctor of giving women activists “virginity tests” in a case that angered the nation over violent crackdowns on protests that included intimidating women with sexual abuse.

Charges filed by Samira Ibrahim against Dr. Ahmed Adel highlighted the army’s suppression of dissent as it struggled to keep order following the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak. The tribunal, which contradicted an earlier civilian court ruling, suspended Ibrahim’s accusations, citing contradictory statements by witnesses.

Two nurses testified that no virginity tests were given, saying that army officers only asked the women if they were married or pregnant. The tribunal also noted that Ibrahim and another woman gave different names for a prison guard, a discrepancy Ibrahim’s lawyers said was minor and should not have jeopardized her case.

Ibrahim reportedly ran weeping from the courtroom, telling her supporters: “In God’s name this is not fair. There is only injustice in our country now. . .This case has turned into a theatrical show.”

Dozens of members of the Egyptian Assn. for Women chanted outside against the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Ahmed Omar, an women association member, said, “Although an acquittal was expected, everybody was devastated and depressed.”

A civilian administrative court in December had found that 34 women were subjected to virginity tests in military hospitals. The court, which had no power to charge officers, ordered that such procedures be stopped. Ibrahim, who last year received a one-year suspended jail sentence for rioting, had accused the army of humiliating her in attempts to deter her from participating in anti-government demonstrations.

The army repeatedly stated that it had no policy to give such tests.  But an officer speaking anonymously to the media months ago said they had been done. Amnesty International said in June that Maj. Gen. Abdel Fattah Sisi, a member of the ruling council, had admitted that such tests were carried out “protect the army against possible allegations of rape.”

The tribunal’s verdict on Sunday “shows that Egypt’s judiciary is not independent,” said Bothaina Kamel, the country’s lone female presidential candidate. “Ibrahim represents all Egyptian women and this case was the last chance for [the military] to improve its image in the eyes of Egyptians. They failed the test.”

The military’s treatment of women was further criticized in December when soldiers attacked protesters, including one woman whose top was ripped off, exposing her blue bra, an image that went viral and embarrassed the nation. Human rights groups have also condemned the army for trying about 12,000 civilians in military courts.

The ruling council has vowed to hand power to a civilian government following the election of a new president in May. Some activists and members of parliament have called for an investigation into the military’s crackdown on protests, which left scores dead in unrest later last year.

“Police unable to prevent rising violence against gays, Emo youths in Iraq”

Taken from: http://news.yahoo.com/police-unable-prevent-rising-violence-against-gays-emo-201307745.html

March 11, 2012

Young people who identify themselves as so-called Emos are being brutally killed at an alarming rate in Iraq, where militias have distributed hit lists of victims and security forces say they are unable to stop crimes against the subculture that is widely perceived in Iraq as being gay.

Officials and human rights groups estimated as many as 58 Iraqis who are either gay or believed to be gay have been killed in the last six weeks alone — forecasting what experts fear is a return to the rampant hate crimes against homosexuals in 2009. This year, eyewitnesses and human rights groups say some of the victims have been bludgeoned to death by militiamen smashing in their skulls with heavy cement blocks.

A recent list distributed by militants in Baghdad’s Shiite Sadr City neighbourhood gives the names or nicknames of 33 people and their home addresses. At the top of the paper are a drawing of two handguns flanking a Quranic greeting that extolls God as merciful and compassionate.

Then follows a chilling warning. ”We warn in the strongest terms to every male and female debauchee,” the Shiite militia hit list says. “If you do not stop this dirty act within four days, then the punishment of God will fall on you at the hands of Mujahideen.” All but one of the targets are men.

It’s not clear why the killings have stepped up in recent months. Many Iraqis are religiously conservative and have struggled against the western influence that has infiltrated their once-closed society in the wake of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Like many places in the Muslim world, homosexuality is extremely taboo in Iraq. Anyone perceived to be gay is considered a fair target, and the perpetrators of the violence often go free. The militants likely behind the violence intimidate the local police and residents so there is even less incentive to investigate the crimes.

Emo is short for “emotional” and in the West generally identifies teens or young adults who listen to alternative music, dress in black, and have radical hairstyles. Emos are not necessarily gay, but they are sometimes stereotyped as such.

To Iraqis, “Emo” is widely synonymous with “gay.” John Drake, an Iraq specialist for the British-based AKE security consulting firm, said Iraqi Emos are getting their hair cut so they aren’t immediately identified, and therefore targeted, in the wake of the new threats.

In the southern Baghdad neighbourhood of Dora, a mostly-Sunni area, 35-year-old Hassan is afraid to leave his home. He plans on cutting his shoulder-length hair soon, but fears that his hormone-injected breast enhancements will be detected if he is stopped and patted down at one of the ubiquitous security checkpoints across the city. ”Today I went out of my house with a friend but we were severely harassed — some people told us that we need the double blocks,” said Hassan, referring to the cement blocks that attackers use to beat people. “I was scared so we returned home to hide.”

Hassan’s friend, a man who identified himself as 26-year-old Mustafa, called the recent hate crimes “the strongest and deadliest campaign against us.”

Hassan said he is gay but does not consider himself an Emo. He and Mustafa agreed to talk on condition that only their first names be used for fear they would be attacked if identified. One of Hassan’s friends, Saif Raad Asmar Abboudi, was beaten to death with concrete blocks in mid-February in a case that terrified gay Iraqis and panicked human rights watchdogs. “I feel very sorry for him,” Hassan said.

A Feb. 18 police report all but closes the case on Saif’s killing. It shows an initial investigation was completed and “the reason for the incident is unknown at the moment because the criminal is unknown.”

An Interior Ministry official said 58 young people have been killed across Iraq in recent weeks by unidentified gangs who accused them of being, as he described it, Emo. Sixteen were killed in Sadr City alone, security and political officials there said. Nine of the men were killed by bludgeoning, and seven were shot. No arrests have been made.

All officials spoke on condition of anonymity, as did many of the people interviewed for this article, in fear of violent reprisals.

The Qur’an specifically forbids homosexuality, and Islamic militias in Iraq long have targeted gays in what they term “honour killings” to preserve the religious idea that families should be led by a husband and a wife. Those who do not abide by this belief are issued death sentences by the militias, according to the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, a human rights watchdog group. The same militias target women who have extramarital affairs.

“There is a strong wave of campaigns by clerics against homosexuals now,” said Ali al-Hilli, chairman of Iraqi LGBT, a human rights group based in London that provides two safe houses in Iraq for gays. “The police do not provide protection for them.” He said an estimated 750 gay Iraqis have been killed because of their sexual orientation since 2006.

Iraqi lawmaker Khalid Shwani, a Kurd, said targeting Emos because of their alternative lifestyles reflects an a growing intolerance of Iraqis’ civil rights. ”Those people are free to choose what they wear, or to believe in, or how they choose their clothes or the way they think,” Shwani said. He called on parliament to address the issue. ”The Emo of today could be any person tomorrow who tries to follow a specific way of living,” he said.

The killings have drawn so much attention that even hardline Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr weighed in Saturday, calling Emos “crazy fools” and a “lesion on the Muslim community” in a statement on his website. However, al-Sadr did not condone the violence, telling his followers “to end the scourge of Emo within the law.”

Iraq’s government has been wary about the Emo allure among its youth for months.

An August 2011 letter from the Education Ministry urges schools to crack down on what it considered abhorrent behaviour, including allowing camera phones in school “because students would use it for dirty movies,” says the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. Similarly, it prohibited students from leaving their classes during school hours “for any reason, because they might gather in the nearby cafes or coffee shops to practice dirty activities.” The letter attributed the social atrocities to “Emo, which is an infiltrated phenomenon in our society began to appear in some of our schools.”

Iraqi police squads who are specifically assigned to protect social minorities say they are almost powerless to stop the threats against gays and Emos. One officer assigned to the so-called social abuse squads said police are meeting with clerics to ask for help in urging the public against killing what he described as “the Emo or the vampires or Satan worshippers.”

The police official said he had no statistics to show how prevalent the violence is. ”It is true that there have been killings in Sadr City targeting these young men,” he said. “It is not right to end their lives in this manner.”

“Women, children killed in violence-torn Syria city”

Taken from: http://news.yahoo.com/women-children-killed-violence-torn-syria-city-124812446.html

January 27, 2012

Fresh violence erupted Friday in the besieged Syrian city of Homs, a day after armed forces loyal to President Bashar Assad barraged residential buildings with mortars and machine-gun fire, killing at least 30 people including a family of women and children, activists said Friday.

The violence began Thursday, but important details were only emerging a day later. Video posted online by activists showed the bodies of five small children, five women of varying ages and a man, all bloodied and piled on beds in what appeared to be an apartment after a building was hit in the Karm el-Zaytoun neighborhood of the city. A narrator said an entire family had been “slaughtered.”

The video could not be independently verified.

On Friday, heavy gunfire again hammered the city, which has seen some of the heaviest violence of the 10-month-old uprising against Assad’s rule. Activists said at least 11 people were killed across the country, four of them in Homs.

Elsewhere, a car bomb exploded Friday at a checkpoint outside the northern city of Idlib, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, citing witnesses on the ground. The number of casualties was not immediately clear.

A “fierce military campaign” was also under way in the Hamadiyeh district of Hama since the early hours of Friday, according to the Observatory and other activists. They said the sound of heavy machine-gun fire and loud explosions reverberated across the area.

The head of Arab League observers in Syria said in a statement that violence in the country has spiked over the past few days. Sudanese Gen. Mohammed Ahmed al-Dabi said the cities of Homs, Hama and Idlib have all witnessed a “very high escalation” in violence since Tuesday.

In an attempt to stop the bloodshed in Syria, the U.N. Security Council was to hold a closed-door meeting Friday to discuss the crisis, a step toward a possible resolution against the Damascus regime, diplomats said. The U.N. says at least 5,400 people have been killed in the government crackdown since March, and the turmoil has intensified as dissident soldiers have joined the ranks of the anti-Assad protesters and carried out attacks on regime forces.

Details of Thursday’s wave of killings in Homs were emerging from an array of residents and activists on Friday, though they said they were having difficulty because of continuing gunfire. “There has been a terrifying massacre,” Rami Abdul-Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told the AP on Friday, calling for an independent investigation.

Thursday started with a spate of sectarian kidnappings and killings between the city’s population of Sunnis and Allawites, a Shiite sect to which Assad belongs and which is the backbone of his regime, said Mohammad Saleh, a centrist opposition figure and resident of Homs.

There was also a string of attacks by gunmen on army checkpoints, Saleh said. Checkpoints are a frequent target of dissident troops who have joined the opposition.

The violence culminated with the evening killing of the family, Saleh said, adding that the full details of what happened were not yet clear.

The Observatory said 29 people were killed, including eight children, when a building came under heavy mortar and machine gun fire. Some residents spoke of another massacre that took place when shabiha — armed regime loyalists — stormed the district, slaughtering residents in an apartment, including children.

“It’s racial cleansing,” said one Sunni resident of Karm el-Zaytoun, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “They are killing people because of their sect,” he said.

Some residents said kidnappers were holding Alawites in the building hit by mortars and gunfire in Karm el-Zaytoun, but the reports could not be confirmed.

Thursday’s death toll in Homs was at least 35, said the Observatory and the Local Coordination Committees, an umbrella group of activists. Both groups cite a network of activists on the ground in Syria for their death tolls. The reports could not be independently confirmed.

Syria tightly controls access to trouble spots and generally allows journalists to report only on escorted trips, which slows the flow of information.

The Syrian uprising began last March with largely peaceful anti-government protests, but it has grown increasingly violent in recent months.

It has also seen outbreaks of bloody tit-for-tat sectarian killings. Syria has a volatile religious divide, making civil unrest one of the most dire scenarios. The Assad regime and the leadership of its military and security forces are dominated by the Alawite minority, but the country is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim.

Also Friday, Iran’s official IRNA news agency said gunmen in Syria have kidnapped 11 Iranian pilgrims traveling by road from Turkey to Damascus. Iranian pilgrims routinely visit Syria — Iran’s closest ally in the Arab world — to pay homage to Shiite holy shrines. Last month, 7 Iranian engineers building a power plant in central Syria were kidnapped. They have not yet been released. The Free Syrian Army — a group of army defectors — released a video on its Facebook page claiming responsibility for the kidnapping and saying the Iranians were taking part in the suppression of the Syrian people. The leader of the group could not be reached for comment.

In Switzerland, U.N. rights chief Navi Pillay said the “fragmentation within the country” was making it harder for the U.N. to update its death toll in Syria. ”Some areas are completely closed, such as parts of Homs, we are unable to verify much of the information that’s coming to us. We are watching the figures, working closely with civil society organizations, and sifting through all the information that’s coming to us,” she said at the Davos Forum. But she expressed “great concern that the killings are continuing and in my view it’s the authorities who are killing civilians, and so it would all stop if an order comes from the top to stop the killings.”

Assad’s regime claims terrorists acting out a foreign conspiracy are behind the uprising, not protesters seeking change, and that thousands of security forces have been killed.

International pressure on Damascus to end the bloodshed so far has produced few results. The Arab League has sent observers to the country, but the mission has been widely criticized for failing to stop the violence. Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia pulled out of the mission Tuesday, asking the Security Council to intervene because the Syrian government has not halted its crackdown. The U.N. Security Council has been unable to agree on a resolution since violence began in March because of strong opposition from Russia and China. A senior Russian diplomat said Moscow will oppose a new U.N. draft resolution on Syria because it fails to take the Kremlin’s concerns into account. Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov was quoted by the ITAR-Tass news agency as saying Friday that the draft worked out by the West and some Arab states fails to exclude the possibility of outside military interference. In Cairo, Arab League chief Nabil Elaraby told reporters that he and the prime minister of Qatar would leave for New York on Saturday to seek U.N. support for the latest Arab plan to end Syria’s crisis. The plans calls for a two-month transition to a unity government, with Assad giving his vice president full powers to work with the proposed government. Syria has rejected the proposal, saying it violates its sovereignty.

Bassma Kodmani, a spokeswoman for the opposition Syrian National Council, said the Arab initiative was a move in the right direction and urged Security Council members to shoulder their “moral and political responsibilities” in bringing emergency assistance to the Syrian people.

“Outrage over Indian islands ‘human zoo’ video”

Taken from: http://news.yahoo.com/outrage-over-human-zoo-indian-islands-114059047.html

January 10, 2012

Rights campaigners and politicians Wednesday condemned a videoshowing women from a protected and primitive tribe dancing fortourists reportedly in exchange for food on India’s Andaman Islands. British newspaper The Observer released the undated video showing Jarawa tribal women — some of them naked — being lured to dance and sing after a bribe was allegedly paid to a policeman to produce them.

Under Indian laws designed to protect ancient tribal groups susceptible to outside influence and disease, photographing or coming into contact with the Jarawa and some of the Andaman aborigines is banned. The tribe, thought to have been among the first people to migrate successfully from Africa to Asia, lives a nomadic existence in the lush, tropical forests of the Andamans in the Indian Ocean.

India’s Tribal Affairs Minister V. Kishore Chandra Deo on Wednesday said an investigation had been ordered. ”An inquiry has been ordered and it is being headed by the chief secretary and director-general of police of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands,” Deo told the Press Trust of India news agency. ”It’s deplorable. You cannot treat human beings like beasts for the sake of money. Whatever kind of tourism is that, I totally disapprove of that and it is being banned also,” the minister added.

Survival International, which lobbies on behalf of tribal groups worldwide, said the video showed tourists apparently enjoying “human zoos.” ”Quite clearly, some people’s attitudes towards tribal peoples haven’t moved on a jot. The Jarawa are not circus ponies bound to dance at anyone’s bidding,” said Stephen Corry, the group’s director, in a press release.

But state anthropologist A. Justin, who works on the Andaman islands, questioned whether the scenes were recent. ”Before the 2004 tsunami, people might have forced them to dance and there may have been some much smaller violations since then,” Justin said by telephone from the capital Port Blair. ”Since the tsunami, a policy of maximum autonomy with minimum intervention has been put in place. Things are being taken care of these days. There is a lot of (security) coverage there now.”

Justin said the video appeared to be several years old, while police in Port Blair also suggested it was taken some time ago. ”The video appears to be six to seven years old when Jarawas remained unclothed but now they wear dresses in public,” Director-General of Police Samsher Deol said. ”Nonetheless we have launched a probe because we want to know who is the videographer who has committed an offence and we also want to know who bribed and who has been bribed,” Deol said.

The Observer report said its journalist had recently seen tourists throw bananas and biscuits to tribespeople on the roadside, and had been told by local traders how much to bribe the police to spend a day out with the Jarawa. In June last year, Survival International accused eight Indian travel companies of running “human safari tours” so tourists could see and photograph the Jarawa.

The London-based group called for tourists to boycott the road used to enter the reserve of the Jarawa tribe, who number just 403 and are in danger of dying out. The Andaman and Nicobar tropical island chain is home to four other rare tribes — Onge, the Great Andamanese, the Sentinelese and the Shompens — each numbering fewer than 350 members.

“Mexican Rights Activists Seek ICC Investigation of President, Others”

This man has guts. It’s thanks to people like him that we can hope that “never again” is not an empty promise.

Taken from: http://www.voanews.com/english/news/americas/Mexican_Rights_Activists_Seek_ICC_Investigation_of_President_Others.html

November 25, 2011

A Mexican human rights lawyer has filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court accusing President Felipe Calderon, other top Mexican officials and drug traffickers of crimes against humanity. Netzai Sandoval filed the complaint Friday with the court in The Hague, calling for an investigation into the deaths of hundreds of people at the hands of the Mexican military and drug traffickers.  More than 20,000 Mexican citizens signed the document.

The prosecutor’s office said it had received the complaint and that a decision on the request will be made “in due course.” Mexico’s government denies the accusations listed in the complaint.

Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch released a report accusing the Mexican military and police of widespread human rights violations in efforts to combat organized crime.  The group’s Americas director, Jose Miguel Vivanco, has said that instead of reducing violence, Mexico’s “war on drugs” has led to a dramatic increase in killings, torture and other appalling abuses by security forces.  He said this makes the climate of lawlessness and fear worse in many parts of the country.

An estimated 45,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence since President Calderon took office in late 2006 and began a crackdown on the cartels.

“South Korea presses Japan at U.N. over ‘comfort women’”

Taken from: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2011/10/reporting-from-seoul-following-decades-of-frustration-personal-protests-and-governmental-declarations-south-korea-on-we.html

October 12, 2011

REPORTING FROM SEOUL — After decades of frustration, personal protests and government  declarations, South Korea on Wednesday appealed to the United Nations in its demand that Japan take “legal responsibility” for enslaving an estimated 200,000 Korean women as prostitutes during World War II.

Known euphemistically as “comfort women,” the victims were forced to provide sexual services for Japanese soldiers based on the Korean peninsula. For years, Japan has paid lip service to South Korean demands for monetary payments to surviving victims, leading South Korea to seek support through the court of world opinion.“This systematic rape and sexual slavery constitute war crimes, and also, under defined circumstances, crimes against humanity,” Shin Dong-ik, South Korea’s deputy chief envoy to the U.N., told a General Assembly committee.

The statement is the first time in nearly a generation that a Korean diplomat has raised the issue at the U.N.’s Third Committee. Each year since 1992, South Korea has broached the issue at the less influential U.N. Human Rights Council.

A Japanese representative at the committee hearing acknowledged the use of Koreans as comfort women during the war, and he  expressed remorse. However, Japan, which occupied the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945, has insisted that the issue was settled by a 1965 compensation package in which South Korea reportedly received $300 million.

Many surviving comfort women have waged regular protests at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. In December, the women will hold their 1,000^th protest. The issue will be revisited during an Oct. 19  summit here between South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda.

7 Billion Actions

Taken from: http://7billionactions.org/

By the close of 2011, the global population will reach 7 billion. A world of 7 billion has implications for sustainability, urbanization, access to health services and youth empowerment. It is also an opportunity to renew global commitment for a healthy and sustainable world. 7 Billion Actions, a global movement for all humanity, was established by the United Nations Population Fund to highlight positive action by individuals and organizations and inspire others to join the movement.

The initiative – Objectives

• Building global awareness around the opportunities and challenges associated with a world of seven billion people.
• Inspiring governments, NGOs, private sector, media, academia and individuals to take actions that will have a socially positive impact.

Themes

• Poverty and inequality;
• Women and girls empowerment;
• Reproductive health and rights;
• Young people;
• Ageing population;
• Environment;
• Urbanization.

 

“Three women’s rights activists win Nobel Peace Prize”

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2011/10/cairo-three-womens-rights-activists-win-nobel-peace-prize.html

October 7, 2011

REPORTING FROM CAIRO – The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to three women from Africa and the Middle East who symbolized the nonviolent struggle to improve their nations and advance the role of women’s rights throughout the world.

The winners were Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first democratically elected female president; her countrywoman Leymah Gbowee, a peace activist who challenged warlords; and Tawakul Karman, a Yemeni human rights leader seeking to overthrow an autocratic regime as part of the so-called Arab Spring. “We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society,” said the citation read by Thorbjorn Jagland, head of the Nobel committee based in Oslo, Norway.

The award for Johnson-Sirleaf, who is known as the Iron Lady, comes as the 72-year-old president is facing re-election on Tuesday. A Harvard-educated economist, Johnson-Sirleaf has been criticized for supporting former Liberian President Charles Taylor. She has since backed his prosecution as a war criminal, turning him over to a United Nations tribunal. “Since her inauguration in 2006,” the Nobel citation read, Johnson-Sirleaf “has contributed to securing peace in Liberia, to promoting economic and social development, and to strengthening the position of women.” The Nobel committee praised Johnson-Sirleaf’s compatriot, Gbowee, for organizing “women across ethnic and religious dividing lines to bring an end [in 2003] to the long war in Liberia, and to ensure women’s participation in elections. She has since worked to enhance the influence of women in West Africa during and after war”. During the civil war, Gbowee organized a “sex strike” to urge men to stop fighting. She told National Public Radio in 2009:  “We didn’t have the power to go to peace talks, so we just thought, what else do we have to lose? Our bodies are their battlefield. Let’s just put our bodies out there because it was just about at that point in time, all of us, the mind-set was we need to do something to change the situation if our children must live in this country.”

The Nobel committee’s selection of Karman, a journalist and longtime human rights activist, is a nod to the democratic revolutions sweeping North Africa and the Middle East. Karman has organized anti-government protests against President Ali Abdullah Saleh and in 2005 founded Women Journalists Without Chains to demand wider freedom of expression. ”I am very, very happy about this prize,” Karman told The Associated Press. “I give the prize to the youth of revolution in Yemen and the Yemeni people.” A 32-year-old mother of three, Karman has inspired youth rallies for civil rights and economic opportunities in a conservative and impoverished Muslim nation. She has often criticized religious extremists, including those in the Islamic Islah Party, which she joined years ago. The party is run by radical Sheik Abdul Majeed Zindani. Karman stunned many in the country when she removed her face veil during a human rights conference in 2004. “I discovered that wearing the veil is not suitable for a woman who wants to work in activism and the public domain,” she told The Yemen Times. “People need to see you, to associate and relate to you. It is not stated in my religion [Islam] to wear the veil, it is a traditional practice so I took it off.” Her activism and protests have agitated Saleh’s regime. The government has refused to grant Women Journalists Without Chains a license to start a newspaper. The Ministry of Information blocked Karman from sending out SMS bulletins on human rights. Last winter, as the so-called Arab Spring spread across the region, Karman camped with tens of thousands of demonstrators in what became known as Change Square. Those peaceful protests, which have been eclipsed by tribal fighting and government offensives, have shaken the country but have not dislodged Saleh from his 33-year rule. The country is slipping closer to civil war and government soldiers and loyalists have increasingly fired on unarmed protesters. “I was threatened through phone calls, letters, and other means of communication. I was threatened to be imprisoned and even killed,” she told The Yemen Times in June. “So far, the threats have not been fulfilled although I consider that taking away my right to expression is worse than any form of physical violence.”

The many activists in the still unfinished revolutions in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and other countries complicated the Nobel committee’s efforts to award the prize to one person who would symbolize the impact the youth and social media have had on inspiring the uprisings.

In announcing the award, Prize committee Chairman Thorbjorn Jagland said of Karman: “Many years before the revolutions started she stood up against one of the most authoritarian and autocratic regimes in the world.”

“Bosnia’s rape babies: abandoned by their families, forgotten by the state”

Thought events may have passed, there is no reason to believe we can’t learn from them. “Never again” should not be a token phrase spoken at the onset of every ethnic cleansing/genocide; it cannot just be an empty promise. 

Taken from: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/bosnias-rape-babies-abandoned-by-their-families-forgotten-by-the-state-519257.html

 

December 13, 2005

Suzanna is 12 years old. In the eyes of the law she does not exist. She has no family, no birth certificate. The place that she calls home is the state-run orphanage in Zenica in Bosnia, a run-down building with broken windows.The orphanage is home to just over 150 children. Some of them have lost their families to war and sickness, others, like Suzanna, were abandoned as “rape babies” – children born during the war to women who had been raped – and left unacknowledged by families and state alike.

“She is a very loving child sometimes has problem socialising,” says Enisa Herzeg, a social worker at the orphanage. “We have had money donated for her care but we can’t open a bank account in her name because she has no birth certificate, because the Croatian authorities refused to register when she was born.” Suzanna’s mother abandoned her when she was born and has never visited. “We have no way of finding her,” Herzeg says. “There are many children here with equally sad stories .”

Ten years after the war in Bosnia ended we have come back with Channel 4 news to meet the forgotten victims of sexual violence. Despite the widespread publicity concerning the atrocities committed during that time little has been done to help the thousands of women who suffered extreme sexual violence and torture, or the children born as a consequence of this abuse.Abandoned by the state, many of these women are not only traumatised by their horrific experiences but also impoverished. Cast out from their communities, often abandoned by their husbands, few of them can hold down jobs. Only a handful have received compensation for their suffering, which continues in the form of nightmares, physical injury and mental ill-health.

“I was raped for over a year by Serbian soldiers,” says Mirella, a softly spoken woman of 33. “They kept me prisoner in my house and raped me day and night in front of my children. When I became pregnant I had an abortion – I never told my husband about it or about the other terrible things that happened, although I’m sure he knows.” Once the war had ended Mirella and her family, unable to return to their home town of Brcko, found their way to Sarejevo. Life is hard here. Mirella suffers from severe gynaecological problems as a result of her rape and has been diagnosed with depression.

“I have tried to take my life three times,” she admits. “I get 36km (£10) from the government every month and each child gets 26km. My husband gets 56km because he was in a war camp. I have to spend most of my money on medicines to stay calm and to help with the pain. I feel as though no one cares what has happened to our family. I only keep going because of my children.” Mirella’s experience is not unusual. In 1998 the International War Crimes Tribunal condemned rape as a crime against humanity, yet there is still no formal international or state response to sexual violence, the related trauma caused by rape or to what happens to the children born of it. In July this year, Unicef in Bosnia commissioned a report on the children born as a result of war rape. It is the first time any organisation has focused on these children. The report, however, remains unpublished.

Marijana Senjak, a psychologist working for the NGO Medica in Zenica, which assists women who have been abused, says ‘ A lot of politicians have taken advantage of the women’s plight and used the issues of war rape for their own ends. The state has done nothing to organise a unified response to women’s needs. ”It has used war rape as a political tool and a means to get money, nothing else.’

Amma was raped during the war when only 16 years old and became pregnant. Without the financial means to keep her child she was forced to place her in care. A frail woman now at 29 years old, tormented by her past and suffering from mental and physical health problems, Amma’s eyes fill with tears as she recalls the few precious years she had with her daughter. ”I remember celebrating her first birthday and the naming ceremony we had,” she says. “I kept her with me till she was five years old. I loved her. I had another child a few years later and that was hard – two young children, no job and the war going on which made everything very expensive. Nobody in the community wanted to help me because they knew where the first child had come from and hated me for it. I couldn’t work because no one wanted to look after the child. I went to the centre for support but they gave me nothing and took away my children.”

For women such as Amma the situation is made worse by the Bosnian government’s reluctance to recognise women as civilian victims of war. In October it agreed to pay compensation, but this has led to further problems as many within the government claim that women are falsifying claims of rape to receive money.

“In a traditional society with a huge stigma attached to rape it is unusual for women to report it, and at a later stage it is difficult to establish it medically,” says Slobodan Nagradic, Deputy Minister for Human Rights and Refugees. “So now women are coming forward and we have no way of knowing if they have really been raped or not. There are no living eyewitnesses and 10 to 12 years later it is difficult to establish the authenticity of these women’s claims. Many are very poor and may just be doing it for the money.”

Nagradic opposes publication of the Unicef report: “The children born of war rape are in a very vulnerable position compared to other children,” he says. “It is the obligation of our society to ensure that these children are not discriminated against and that is why we are being very careful about drawing attention to them. Women do not traditionally talk about rape here, he says, and those that do are using rape for political manipulation.”

It is not a line of argument with which Sanella would agree. Now 32, she was raped repeatedly by Serbian soldiers in her home town of Visegrad, became pregnant and then miscarried. She now works for a woman’s organisation in Bosnia, supporting fellow rape victims and says that she lives in fear that the soldiers who raped her will find her and refuses to testify in The Hague.

“I don’t believe that this war has stopped,” she says. “The war criminals are still around and we still have to see them. The police in charge know who they are and do nothing. We women, the victims of the war, have become its policemen. We have photographs of those who raped us and killed our men but there has been no care or help for women like me who have experience sexual violence on this level. “

Nadia made the difficult choice to keep her son, now aged 10. She became pregnant after being repeatedly raped by soldiers while interned in a concentration camp. She says that she wanted an abortion, but by the time she had escaped to Sarajevo it was too late. Her husband does not know that the child is not his.

“My husband and son were taken away during the war and I was put in a camp,” she says. “The soldiers would taunt me, calling me a Turkish whore. Then they began to rape me. I would cry every time and when I passed out I would wake up with a different soldier in the room and they would keep going until I didn’t come round any more. When they found out I was pregnant they put me on a truck and I arrived in Sarejevo. I had to take medicines to calm me down and I think this is why my son is so nervous and has to have therapy.”Nadia will not abandon her son as so many women have done with their children born of rape. “I love my son,” she says. “Sometimes I look at him and feel very angry though – I see him as a focus for what has gone wrong with my family and our lives.”