Monthly Archives: October, 2009
To protest the murder of 19 year old Ramphanchy Hongray by an IIT student from Patna, the Naga Students’ Union, Delhi and the North East diaspora held a demonstration in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar and marched up to Parliament street today and demanded that the Government hear the plight of the North East people residing in the capital.
Delhi Chief Minister Smt Shiela Dikshit, along with Oscar Fernandes, MP, heard out the grievances of the students.
Dikshit promised that she will ensure that such incidents do not recur and invited the student union and the community leaders for a one to one talk including the Delhi Police to chart out various measures on Monday.
In a press statement, the student body stated that “our voices must be heard and suitably addressed. (more…)
The Government of Bangladesh’s decision to conduct a land survey in the CHT region has raised concern amongst the indigenous people and human rights and minority rights groups in Bangladesh. This is because land holdings belonging to the ethnic communities have been taken over by settlers from the plains or appropriated illegally, and if the ownership is decided on grounds of present possession, it would legalise illegal holdings and deprive the ethnic community of their communal right to land. The land survey would not therefore resolve the disputes in ownership and would violate the terms of the CHT Peace Accord. Several Human rights organizations and activists have urged the Government to with justice to restor the lands belonging to the original owners.
In a recent study Dr. Abul Barak has highlighted that about 38 percent of Adivasi households in the Chittagong Hill Tracts were forced to relocate at least once in the period from 1977 to 2007. About 22 percent of households were forcefully evicted from their homesteads at least once during this period. The research also shows that in 82 percent of cases, the land grabbers were Bangali. On average, every household in CHT lost at least 115 decimals of land during this period. (more…)
The members of South Asians for Human Rights strongly condemn the Taliban’s attack on a guesthouse hosting staff from the United Nations in Kabul on Wednesday 28th October 2009, which killed at least six and injured nine civilian UN staff.
Suicide bombers stormed a guesthouse used by UN employees and killed 12 people during a two-hour battle with security forces. According to media reports weapons, fire and explosions pounded the heart of the capital of Afghanistan. The fighting began as sporadic gunfire, but intensified over time, lasting more than an hour. The attack took place in a relatively secure section of the capital, in the vicinity of a number of government buildings, and it is reported that the firefight, which included machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades, appeared to be concentrated near the guesthouse.
The Pakistani government and armed forces should ensure that civilians who cannot escape the intensified fighting in South Waziristan have sufficient access to food, health care, and other necessities, Human Rights Watch said today.
“People trying to get away from the fighting are already reporting civilian casualties and food shortages,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, senior South Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The approaching winter is only going to make a bad situation worse, especially for those left behind, unless aid reaches them.”
For more: http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/10/28/pakistan-get-aid-civilians-caught-fighting
Veero will receive a 2009 Freedom Award during a prestigious ceremony in Los Angeles. She will then travel to Washington to brief the U.S. Congress and State Department about efforts to end slavery in Pakistan. She departed for America on Sunday.
Experts estimate that more than a million Pakistanis work as slaves at farms, factories and brickyards. They are forced to work-off illegal debts. Slaveholders use brutal tactics to keep them frightened. Veero remembers the terror of living on a farm where women were guarded around the clock and men were kept in leg irons.
“The slaveholder hired men armed with guns and axes, and they guarded us the entire day,” Veero recalls. “They would fire their guns into the air at night to terrorize us so we wouldn’t try to escape.”
A local farmer cheated Veero’s family by claiming a debt had never been repaid. Then the farmer demanded more than money.
“The slaveholder kept an eye on my daughters,” Veero says. “He wanted to use them for sex.”
With the safety of her children at stake, Veero took a terrifying risk. Alone and on foot, she quietly slipped away from the farm and walked to the nearest town. She staged a three-day sit-in at a police station to demand that authorities take action. Her daring escape worked. Police freed her entire family.
Debt bondage slavery is illegal in Pakistan, but illiterate villagers don’t know how to stand up for their rights. Veero now shows them how. First, she helps slaves overcome fear. Then, just as she had done to free her own family, Veero walks slaves to police stations to begin the legal process.
Veero has earned the trust of local slaves, and she’s respected by police and community organizations.
“She’s brave, she’s intelligent and she’s kind,” says Ghulam Hyder of the Green Rural Development Organization, a group that has been fighting slavery in rural Pakistan. “I think she’s a hero.” Hyder departed for the United States with Veero, and he will also brief Congress and State Department officials.
The annual Freedom Awards honor grassroots heroes of the anti-slavery movement worldwide. They are awarded by Free the Slaves, the U.S. sister organization of the British group Anti-Slavery International, the world’s oldest human rights organization. Veero was selected by an independent committee that judged nominations from 22 countries.
Veero will receive a Frederick Douglass Freedom Award, named after an escaped slave in America who helped persuade U.S. President Abraham Lincoln to free slaves in the 1860s by signing the Emancipation Proclamation. Douglass is often described as the founder of the American civil rights movement.
The prestigious awards ceremony will be held at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and will be attended by hundreds of authors, actors, musicians, politicians, business leaders, philanthropists and anti-slavery activists. The ceremony will be webcast live at 8:00 a.m. on 14 October 2009 Pakistan time at www.live.freetheslaves.net. Veero will also be honored at events in New York and Philadelphia. The Freedom Awards are funded by the John Templeton Foundation.
Veero lives a simple life and still works on farms to earn a living. But now, she is a free woman and gets paid for her work. She has founded the Saath Saharo Society to continue her work to free slaves.
“All people are equal, and I want to free others so they do not suffer what I have suffered, Veero says.”I believe the time will come when all slaves will be free, and I am fighting for them.”
Date: 10/12/2009
by V. Geetha
At first it seemed a huge, obscene lie, the news of his death. It did not seem possible—he had been busy as always the weekend before, at a human rights convention in Ananthapur, to mark 10 years of the Human Rights Forum, the organisation he and others started in 1998. That had become a pattern almost, that he would leave for the districts in the weekends, to enquire into rights violations—land grabbing by the state or private agencies for special economic zones; hazardous open cast mining, farmers’ suicides, health issues in adivasi communities…
Balagopal was not just another civil liberties man: a brilliant mathematician who gave up his academic vocation for a public life, a public intellectual, alive to ethical doubts and concerns, yet committed to being political and accountable in the here-and-now of history, he sought to link thought, action, consciousness… For many of us, the manner in which he lived his life was as important as what he said: he was like a moral compass that you turned to, to check your own political orientation and direction. Without intending or wanting to, he became a keeper of social conscience. In this sense, it was a great public life, but nevertheless one that mattered to many, in the intimate and silent corners of their hearts and minds. (more…)
American physician and human rights activist Ellyn Shander -known for her
outspoken views on the alleged atrocities on Sri Lankan
Tamils -was forced to cancel her trip to Delhi when India nixed her visa on the eve of departure. Her visa was valid till July 15, 2014.
Shander, awarded the Bruno Lima award for her work in disaster psychiatry and humanitarianism, was due to address a meet arranged by the Delhi Tamil Students Union on “genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka.”
A letter issued by the Indian consulate in New York on September 10 informed her that her visa was cancelled with immediate effect. Shanders was due to travel on September 11 for India. (more…)
The Bangladeshi government should investigate and prosecute the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) officers who on October 22, 2009, arrested and allegedly tortured F.M. Masum, a journalist at the New Age newspaper, Human Rights Watch said today.
The statement further states that “the country’s new government has promised to put an end to abuses by the unit, a paramilitary law enforcement agency long implicated in torture, including “crossfire” killings, a term regularly used in Bangladesh for thinly disguised extrajudicial executions. But the government has taken no action.”
For more: http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/10/23/bangladesh-bring-paramilitary-unit-torturers-justice
Two activists of a Hindu group were killed in Goa when explosives being ferried in their scooter went off in a traffic jam, police said Saturday. The group called the blasts “unfortunate”.
Elsewhere in the state, a favourite haunt of foreign tourists, three other bombs were detected before they could explode.
Police suspect the bombs were meant for a Hindu gathering which the Hindu group, Sanatan Saunstha, bitterly opposes.
The explosion in the scooter took place at about 2130 hrs IST on Friday near the Grace Church in Margao, about 35 km from Panaji, when the scooter was on a busy road. (more…)
The Sri Lankan government’s recent statements that it aims to return only 100,000 of the original 273,000 displaced civilians confined to camps by the end of 2009 breaks a promise to camp residents and the international community, Human Rights Watch said today. In May, the government announced that 80 percent of the displaced people would be able to return home by the end of the year.
Since the end of the fighting in May, the government has released or returned fewer than 27,000 people, leaving about 245,000 civilians in the camps.
For more: http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/10/19/sri-lanka-government-breaks-promises-displaced-can-go-home
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