| Payvand Iran News, August 1, 2009 | |
|---|---|
| Photos by Amir Kholoosi, ISNA; Report by VOA News About 100 Iranian activists and political moderates went on trial Saturday to face charges related to massive protests following the controversial presidential election. The semi-official Fars news agency published images of defendants sitting in a packed Tehran courtroom, some handcuffed in pairs. The IRNA news agency says the detainees are accused of conspiring against the ruling system, among other charges. Reports say some leading political figures on trial have retracted their claims that the June vote was rigged – the main rallying point of opposition demonstrators. Fars reports reformist former Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi said claims about vote violations in the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were baseless. Meanwhile, Abtahi’s lawyer, Salih Nikbakht, told VOA Kurdish service he was not told about the trial before it started, and says he was barred from entering the courtroom when he arrived. U.S.-based group Human Rights Watch says some prominent lawyers were arrested over past weeks to prevent them from representing activists in court. The group says authorities have used harsh interrogations and beatings in an effort to extract false confessions from detainees. According to Fars, some of the major politicians appearing in court Saturday are former parliament vice-speaker Behzad Nabavi and former government spokesman Abdollah Ramezanzadeh. The full list of defendants is not known.
… Payvand News – 08/01/09 … — |
Archive for the ‘Human rights’ Category
Photos: Trial Begins for Iran Election Protesters
August 3, 2009
India: Violent Gods
August 2, 2009A ZNet Book Interview
By Angana Chatterji | ZNet, July 31, 2009
Angana Chatterji’s ZSpace Page
A Book Interview on Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa
Can you tell ZNet, please, what your new book, “Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa” is about? What is it trying to communicate?
‘Violent Gods’is an exploration of Hindu nationalism in India today. It details the mobilization of Hindu militant organizations as an authoritarian movement manifest throughout culture, polity, state, and economy, in religion and law, and class and caste, on gender, body, land, and memory… across the nation. The book explores that ways in which Hindu cultural dominance is manufacturing India, an emergent empire, as a ‘Hindu-secular’/Hindu majoritarian state.
As a woman of postcolonial India, of Hindu descent, ‘mixed’ caste heritage, the book is a journey in speaking with history. In freeing itself from British dominion in 1947, the Indian nation was shaped, in great part, by the will of the Hindu majority. Hindu cultural dominance has substantially defined what constitutes the ‘secular’ and ‘democratic’ in India today. Accountability demands that those of us with privilege in relation to ‘nation’ speak up, intervene. Telling a story of Hindu dominance in India is an intervention, ‘telling’ is a call to action.
Can you tell ZNet something about writing the book? Where does the content come from? What went into making the book what it is?
This book maps what I have witnessed — the architecture of civic and despotic governmentality contouring Hindu majoritarianism and nationalism in public, domestic, and everyday life. It chronicles the sustained and unchecked violences against minority Christian and Muslim communities, Adivasis (tribals) and Dalits (former ‘untouchable’ groups), and women, as well as sexual identity groups and children.
The book is a genealogical exploration of Hindu nationalism in India, with an ethnographic focus on Orissa, in eastern India, where Hindu nationalism’s terror has been prevalent since the 1990s, and where planned riots against minority peoples were carried out in 2007 and 2008. The research was conducted between 2002-2008 in urban and rural settings across Orissa in 66 villages, 11 towns, and four cities. The book records spectacles, events, public executions, the riots in Kandhamal of December 2007 and August-September 2008, as we witness the planned, methodical politics of terror unfold in its multiple registers.
In writing the book, I have made eighteen research trips to Orissa, and engaged in advocacy work on the issue. In 2005-2006, I convened the Orissa People’s Tribunal on Communalism, which was targeted, and its women members threatened with violence, by Hindu militant groups. See Human Rights Watch:
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2005/07/12/does-rss-have-any-moral-standards
The book is situated at the intersections of Anthropology, Postcolonial, Subaltern, and South Asia Studies, and asks questions of nation making, cultural nationalism, and subaltern disenfranchisement. As a Foucauldian history of the present, this text asserts the role of ethical knowledge production as counter-memory. Through situated reflection, experimental storytelling, and ethnographic accounts, it excavates Hindutva/Hindu supremacist proliferations in manufacturing imaginative and identitarian agency for violent nationalism.
What are your hopes for “Violent Gods”? What do you hope it will contribute or achieve, politically? Given the effort and aspirations you have for the book, what will you deem to be a success? What would leave you happy about the whole undertaking? What would leave you wondering if it was worth all the time and effort?
At the release of the book in Orissa in April 2009, I was asked if the book would provide solutions for undoing Hindu militancy and dominance in India. Books, if we are so fortunate, complicate matters further. I remain hopeful that “Violent Gods” will energize discussion, debate, contemplation about India’s present and future, the role and violence of majoritarian states and groups globally, about privilege and subalternity, security, rights, and entitlements, about freedom and dissent. I remain hopeful that the many and powerful subaltern voices and narratives in the text will compel reflection.
The learning and advocacy that led to the book has engulfed and motivated me since 2002, and facilitated shifts in my thinking, empowered me to act, to take risks as an intellectual and activist. And, for people with prolific courage that supported its writing, with their stories, their lives, at risk of reprisal — I am grateful.
In India, we witnessed the ethnic cleansing of Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere in 1984, genocidal violence against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, calculated and sustained brutality against Christians in Orissa in 2007 and 2008, and the continued subjugation of Indian-administered Kashmir. On and on… We need to think, act, change. NOW.
“Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present” by Angana P. Chatterji, from Three Essays Collective, released March 2009. More information at:
http://www.threeessays.com/titles.php?id=40
To look inside the book:
http://www.amazon.com/Violent-Gods-Nationalism-PresentNarratives/dp/8188789453/ref=ed_oe_h
British Foreign Secretary: Clinton threatened to cut-off intelligence-sharing if torture evidence is disclosed
August 1, 2009Glenn Greenwald | Salon.com, July 31, 2009
I’ve written several times before about the amazing quest of Binyam Mohamed — a British resident released from Guantanamo in February, 2009 after seven years in captivity — to compel public disclosure of information in the possession of the British Government proving he was tortured while in U.S. custody. At the center of Mohamed’s efforts lie the claims of high British government officials that the Obama administration has repeatedly threatened to cut off intelligence-sharing programs with the U.K. if the British High Court discloses information which British intelligence officials learned from the CIA about how Mohamed was tortured. New statements from the British Foreign Secretary yesterday — claiming that Hillary Clinton personally re-iterated those threats in a May meeting — highlight how extreme is this joint American/British effort to cover-up proof of Mohamed’s torture.
‘More than 1,000 Afghan civilians killed this year’
August 1, 2009
KABUL (AFP) – Afghanistan‘s intensifying conflict killed more than 1,000 civilians in the first six months of 2009, an increase of nearly a quarter over the same period last year, the United Nations said Friday.
This year has been the bloodiest in a Taliban-led insurgency that has drawn thousands of international military reinforcements, most of them deploying into areas where a strong militant presence could prevent August 20 elections.
The boost in troop numbers — now roughly 90,000 — was one reason for the higher toll of 1,013 dead civilians, according to the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) Human Rights Unit.
UN: Sharp rise in Afghan deaths
July 31, 2009| Al Jazeera, July 31, 2009 |
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The civilian death toll in Afghanistan has risen by 24 per cent this year, the United Nations has said. In a new report released on Friday, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) blamed bombings by the Taliban and air raids by international forces for the majority of the killings. The report said that 1,013 civilians were killed on the sidelines of their country’s armed conflict from January to the end of June, compared to 818 in the first half of 2008 and 684 in the same period in 2007. Commenting on the report, Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said it was critical that steps be taken to shield Afghan communities from fighting. |
Tehran police attack protester memorial
July 31, 2009
EmailIranian police have fired tear gas and beat anti-government protesters with batons to disperse thousands of people attending a memorial of a woman whose killing made her an icon of the opposition movement.
The memorial service marked the end of the 40-day mourning period under Islam for 10 people killed in protests and clashes on June 20.
The service took place at the grave of one of the victims Neda Agha Soltan, who was shot to death on that day.
The 27-year-old music student’s dying moments were filmed and circulated widely on the internet and her name became a rallying cry for the opposition.
“Neda is alive, Ahmadinejad is dead,” some of those at the ceremony chanted, referring to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who the opposition claims won the June 12 election by fraud.
Plain-clothes forces charged at them with batons and tear gas, some of them chanting: “Death to those who are against the supreme leader.”
Police also barred opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi from joining the crowd around her grave.
When Mr Mousavi arrived at the site, hundreds of police surrounded him.
As several hundred supporters chanted his name, police forced him to leave the vast cemetery on Tehran’s southern outskirts where many of those killed in the nearly seven-week-old crackdown have been buried.
Before the clashes, police arrested two prominent Iranian filmmakers when they tried to lay flowers at Ms Soltan’s grave.
One of them was Jafar Panahi, best known for his film The Circle, which was critical of the treatment of women under the Islamist government and was banned in Iran.
Female documentary maker Mahnaz Mohammadi was arrested with him.
Anger over the abuse of opposition supporters has spread even to conservative government supporters.
Some critics have even compared the government crackdown to the torture and oppression under Iran’s former ruler, the US-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was overthrown in the 1979 revolution that led to the creation of the Islamic Republic.
The Urumchi Unrest Revisited
July 31, 2009By James Millward | The China Beat, July 29, 2009
The ugly mob violence that roiled the western Chinese city of Urumchi in Xinjiang on July 5th was rather quickly suppressed, and Urumchi is now quiet. Thanks to an unprecedented degree of openness to the international press, moreover, we have a better idea specifically what happened than we have for other such incidents in China.
Re-imagining Palestine
July 30, 2009Self determination, Ethical De-colonization and Equality[1]
By Omar Barghouti | ZNet, July 29, 2009
[Contribution to the Reimagining Society Project hosted by ZCommunications]
INTRODUCTION
With Yassir Arafat’s departure, the doubling of the population of Jewish-Israeli colonial settlers in the occupied Palestinian territory, the latest Israeli slow genocide in Gaza and the fast disintegration of the last vestiges of Israeli “democracy,” the two-state “solution” for the Palestinian-Israeli colonial conflict is finally dead. Good riddance! This was never a moral or practical solution to start with, as its main objective has always been to win official Palestinian legitimization of Israel’s colonial and apartheid existence on top of most of the area of historic Palestine. It is high time to move on to the most just, morally sound and sustainable solution: the secular, democratic unitary state.
Peace and Justice Post 
U.S. condemns eviction of Arab families from East Jerusalem
August 3, 2009By Nir Hasson and Barak Ravid, Haaretz Correspondent | Haaretz/Israel, Aug. 3, 2009
The United States and the United Nations sharply condemned the eviction of two Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and their replacement with Jewish families on Sunday.
Diplomats from the U.S. Embassy sent a protest letter to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, stressing the move went against the spirit of the road map. The diplomats said a high-level protest will be communicated to Israel later on Monday.
A large force of several hundred police officers evicted the two families from their homes in the early Sunday morning. Hours later the families’ possessions were cleared from the homes and two Jewish families moved in.
The eviction came at the end of a long legal process. The families, Hannun and Gawi, say they are refugees from Palestinian neighborhoods in West Jerusalem who lost their homes in the War of Independence.
They were housed by the UN and the Jordanian authorities in East Jerusalem homes that previously belonged to a Sephardic community committee. Israeli courts acknowledged the committee’s ownership of the houses, but provided a protected tenant status for the residents.
However, the committee, which supports the Jewish families’ bid for the homes, had since claimed that the Palestinian families violated the agreement and demanded their eviction. Several families have been evicted over the years, the last – before Sunday – in November 2008. That family’s protest tent was demolished during Sunday’s eviction.
“They blew up the doors with small charges, walked in, and dragged us out like sacks,” said Nasser Gawi. “We are 38 people in the family. Now the skies are our blanket and the earth is our bed.”
His neighbor, Majhad Ganun, who was evicted with 16 members of his family, said the police came at 5 A.M.
“We were dragged out of our beds, and told to wait outside. They brought a truck and loaded everything we had on it. They took it somewhere, and didn’t tell us where. I’m going to sleep on the pavement, we have no place to go.”
Some of the Israeli and foreign activists who were staying with the families before the eviction were detained and released after a few hours.
UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness said UN staff later saw vehicles bringing Jewish families to live in the homes.
Robert Serry, the United Nations envoy to the Middle East, criticized the eviction of the Palestinian families, saying “Israel’s actions are unacceptable.”
“I deplore today’s totally unacceptable actions by Israel, in which Israeli security forces evicted Palestinian refugee families registered with UNRWA from their homes in the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem to allow settlers to take possession of these properties,” Serry said in a statement. “These actions are contrary to the provisions of the Geneva Conventions related to occupied territory. They also contravene the united calls of the international community, including the Quartet’s, which in its recent statement urged the Government of Israel to refrain from provocative actions in East Jerusalem, including house demolitions and evictions. The UN rejects Israeli claims that this is a local matter dealt with by the courts.” Serry added the move undermined efforts at reaching a peace deal.
The British consulate also issued a statement condemning the move, saying that the evacuation and other such moves come in contrast to Israel’s declarations regarding its desire to achieve peace with the Palestinians. The British statement also called on Israel not to allow extremists to control the government’s agenda.
The eviction was also slammed by the Jerusalem organization Ir Amim.
“Israel must consider the future implications of the move, which allows Jews to claim rights over property dating back to before 1948, but prevents the execution of the same rights by Palestinian residents. A re-opening of all ownership cases by Palestinians and Jews in Jerusalem could place Israel in an impossible situation in the city,” a statement from Ir Amim said.
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