The Tharwa Review

RECOGNITION FOR IMPRISONED ACTIVIST

Syrian activists say the international award which imprisoned human rights lawyer Anwar al-Bunni received last week could boost the morale of rights campaigners in the country but is unlikely to have any impact on the authorities.

Bunni, 48, won the annual Front Line Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk on May 1. His wife Raghida Issa accepted the award on his behalf from Irish president Mary McAleese at a ceremony held in Dublin.

Bunni, a father of three, is director of the Centre for Legal Studies in Damascus and one of Syria’s most prominent advocates of democratic reform. He has been a human rights activist since the early Nineties, when he began defending political prisoners in court and campaigned against the use of torture in detention.

In April 2007, Bunni was sentenced to five years in prison for spreading false information and joining a banned political group. He had been arrested in May 2006 after signing the "Beirut-Damascus Declaration”, which was drafted by Lebanese and Syrian intellectuals and called on Damascus to reform its relations with Beirut.

The award given to Bunni is especially significant as only a handful of Syrian activists have been given such recognition in recent years.

Colleagues of the jailed lawyer said he was pleased to be given the award, as it honoured every activist and every victim of human rights abuses.

BABY TRADE WORRIES TAJIKISTAN

STORY BEHIND THE STORY
By Salimakhon Vahobzade in Dushanbe

I first learned about baby trafficking in a conversation with my husband’s relative, who works for the Prosecutor General’s office in Tajikistan. She said that the trial of a woman who sold her child for 90 US dollars was about to begin.

Hearing this made me wonder what makes people try and sell their children, and also how society treats such parents. I called the IWPR office in Dushanbe to pitch this idea for a story, and they gave me the go-ahead to write it.

It took almost two weeks and a great deal of effort to gather the material for the report, which was written in the middle of February, when the weather was unusually cold and transport worked badly.

There was no electricity in our neighbourhood for a week –the transformer burnt out and we were left without light. Electricity at work was also cut off from 9 am till 5 pm and I had to go to the IWPR office to type up this material.

I also had some difficulties in securing interviews for the piece and had to make use of some of my existing contacts.

Voice for Abused Women Upsets Dubai Patriarchy

By ROBERT F. WORTH

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates ― For years, Sharla Musabih has fought a lonely battle to protect battered wives and victims of human trafficking here. She founded the Emirates' first women's shelter here and she became a familiar figure at police stations, relentlessly hounding officers to be tougher on abusive husbands.

She has also earned many enemies. Emiratis do not often take kindly to rights advocates drawing attention to the dark side of their fast-growing city-state on the Persian Gulf, better known for its gleaming office towers and artificial islands.

Still, no one was quite prepared for the stories that started appearing in Dubai newspapers this month. Suddenly, unidentified female victims were coming forward to say that "Mama Sharla" herself had abused them, forced them to work as servants and sold their stories to foreign journalists for thousands of dollars, pocketing the proceeds. She even sold one woman's baby, the articles said, hinting at criminal investigations.

To Ms. Musabih and her supporters, the accusations, which appear to be baseless, are the latest chapter in a long campaign of threats and defamation that began with angry husbands and has grown to include prominent clerics, and even the directors of a new government-financed women's shelter, who, she says, would like to silence her.

The ferocity of the dispute is unusual for Dubai, and underscores a major challenge facing this proudly apolitical business capital. The city's few rights advocates have always been quietly shunted aside. But as the conservative Muslim ethos of Dubai's native Arab minority rubs against the varied perspectives of a much larger foreign population, debates about how to approach taboo subjects like domestic violence and the city's prevalent prostitution are getting louder.

AZERBAIJAN: REFUGEES' MISERY NOT OVER YET

New housing settlements a disappointment for displaced Azerbaijanis.
By Shahla Abusattar in Zobuzhug, Azerbaijan

The Azerbaijani authorities kept their word to close all the tent camps housing people displaced by the Nagorny Karabakh war by the end of 2007. But for many of the displaced people, their new lives under roofs are not much better than they were under canvas.

At first sight, the meticulous row of houses in the new settlements in the Aghdam and Fizuli regions, close to the ceasefire line with Armenian forces, is a pleasing site. But as you get nearer to them, the defects become more obvious.

Eighteen months ago, IWPR visited new settlements for the internally displaced persons, IDPs, and heard negative comments on life there. (See Azerbaijan: New Setbacks for Refugees, CRS No. 357 14-Sept-06.) After the article was published, several of the people quoted in got into trouble with the authorities. In this article, therefore, interviewees are not named.

Those resettled still complain of problems with the supply of water and electricity and the poor state of the roads. Their biggest grievance, though, is the poor quality of the houses assigned to them.

Following the end of the Karabakh war in 1994, Azerbaijan led the world in the number of refugees and IDPs as a proportion of the total population, with more than half a million refugees from the Karabakh war joining 200,000 who had fled Armenia at the end of the Soviet period.

UZBEKS PREY TO MODERN SLAVE TRADE

As poverty and unemployment drive an increasing number of workers abroad, many become victims of traffickers who sell them into virtual slavery.
By IWPR staff in Central Asia

When Abror, an unemployed engineer at the locomotive depot in Urgench, in northwest Uzbekistan, lost all hope of getting a job at home, he left for the Volgograd region of Russia in search of a better life.

But he found no job that matched his skills. Unwilling to go back to Uzbekistan, where his family and aged mother depended on him returning with money, he took a job with a local farmer. In return for weeding vegetable patches, feeding the poultry and cleaning the hen house, the farmer promised him a small wage.

Abror’s new life as a servant rapidly turned into a form of slavery. Far from giving him any wages, the farmer seized Abror’s identity papers and told him he was not going to pay him any money as he would have "nowhere to spend it".

After eight months, Abror managed to get away. A fellow Uzbek who visited the farm warned the owner that he would tell the police he was harbouring an illegal immigrant.

But this rescuer was no Samaritan. He was a trafficker working in the flourishing twilight world of illegal migrants. After prising Abror out of the hands of the farmer, he demanded 300 US dollars for services rendered.

BABY TRADE WORRIES TAJIKISTAN

Poverty rather than greed drives women on low-incomes to sell newborn babies.
By Salimakhon Vahobzade in Dushanbe

A growing number of single mothers in Tajikistan are selling their newborn children because they are unable to get by in the poverty-stricken Central Asian state.

Gulchekhra, 34, recently found herself detained at a police station in the capital Dushanbe after trying to sell her baby.

The divorced mother-of-two says she was driven to this extreme step after giving birth to a child she could not support.

"I got divorced a long time ago and my husband doesn’t help me," she explained.

Gulchekhra lives in a small shanty with a worn-out roof on the outskirts of Dushanbe.

"We have electricity only for an hour a day and have no money for firewood or coal," she said. "When it rained in the autumn, my girls collected trash and we burned it for heating. But when the snows came and it got colder, we just stayed at home without electricity and heat."

People living on the margins of society like Gulchekhra have had a particularly hard time of this winter, as almost continual snowfalls and unusually severe frosts dealt a knock-out blow to the country’s run-down and under-resourced water and electricity networks.

ANFAL WIDOWS GET LITTLE RELIEF

Women widowed by Saddam’s ruthless Anfal campaign continue to struggle 20 years on.
By Barham Omar in Shorsh

Sabri Fatah has struggled to keep her head above water since 1988, when her husband disappeared after being arrested by Iraqi troops during Saddam’s Anfal campaign.

Fatah, 40, lives with her two daughters in Shorsh camp, which lies 80 kilometres west of Sulaimaniyah, in a small two-room house given to her by relatives.

"We can’t afford to rent a house," said 40-year-old Fatah, adding that their main source of income is a monthly pension from the Kurdish Regional Government, KRG, of 120 US dollars, which barely covers their basic needs.

During the summer, the widow and her two daughters aged 22 and 23, work in the fields, picking tomatoes and harvesting chickpeas to make some extra money. In winter, there is no work to be found in the town and they have no way of supplementing their government pension.

Fatah’s husband is thought to have been among an estimated 182,000 Kurds killed during the notorious Anfal operation of the late Eighties. Today, the survivors find it hard to makes ends meet.

Shorsh was built by Saddam's regime as an internment camp for Kurds whose homes were razed during the military onslaught. At least 2,000 villages were destroyed and tens of thousands were forcibly displaced during the campaign, according to Human Rights Watch.

Languishing at the Bottom of Yemen’s Ladder

By ROBERT F. WORTH

SANA, Yemen — By day, they sweep the streets of the Old City, ragged, dark-skinned men in orange jump suits. By night, they retreat to fetid slums on the edge of town.

They are known as “Al Akhdam” — the servants. Set apart by their African features, they form a kind of hereditary caste at the very bottom of Yemen’s social ladder.

Degrading myths pursue them: they eat their own dead, and their women are all prostitutes. Worst of all, they are reviled as outsiders in their own country, descendants of an Ethiopian army that is said to have crossed the Red Sea to oppress Yemen before the arrival of Islam.

“We are ready to work, but people say we are good for nothing but servants; they will not accept us,” said Ali Izzil Muhammad Obaid, a 20-year-old man who lives in a filthy Akhdam shantytown on the edge of this capital. “So we have no hope.”

In fact, the Akhdam — who prefer to be known as “Al Muhamasheen,” or the marginalized ones — may have been in this southern corner of the Arabian Peninsula for as long as anyone, and their ethnic origins are unclear. Their debased status is a remnant of Yemen’s old social hierarchy, which collapsed after the 1962 revolution struck down the thousand-year-old Imamate.

But where Yemen’s other hereditary social classes, the sayyids and the judges and the sheiks, and even the lower orders like butchers and ironworkers, slowly dissolved, the Akhdam retained their separate position. There are more than a million of them among Yemen’s fast-growing population of 22 million, concentrated in segregated slums in the major cities.

“All the doors are closed to us except sweeping streets and begging,” Mr. Obaid said. “We are surviving, but we are not living.”

"Unknown, therefore unloved": An interview with Meutya Hafid

Wahyuana

Jakarta - Meutya Hafid is a global journalist. She was held hostage by a militant group while covering the war in Iraq, and recently travelled to Australia on a three-week exchange program after receiving Australia's Elizabeth O'Neil Award for Journalism. The award, granted to one Indonesian and one Australian, fosters mutual understanding between the two countries while promoting accurate and informed media coverage. Hafid speaks with journalist Wahyuana about her experiences in Australia and the Middle East, as well as her views on democracy, Jewish-Muslim relations and the role the media should play in encouraging dialogue instead of divisions.

What did you do while you were in Australia?

As we know, Australia is a country with a complex, multi-cultural migrant society. While I was there, I engaged in dialogue with Jewish and Muslim minorities, as well as certain racial minorities.

What is life like for minority groups in Australia, particularly Muslims?

Structurally, minorities receive equal treatment from the government, though socially they are often discriminated against by majority groups. For instance, Australian Muslim women are sometimes insulted and mocked because they wear hijab. However, minority groups have the right to bring up their concerns in public debate or before a human rights council, where the options are either negotiated settlement or going to court.

In Indonesia, there are many serious cases of discrimination that are mentioned only briefly in the media before being forgotten by the public. The case of Ahmadiyya, a Muslim community that believes the second advent of Jesus has been fulfilled, comes to mind. The community's mosques were recently vandalised by some groups that accused them of deviating from Islamic doctrine. Police took many Ahmadiyya followers "to safety", but in doing so gave the attackers virtual free rein to vandalise that property.

Do you believe that the issue of protection for minority rights is part of a clash of civilisations?

I don't see it as a clash of civilisations. It's a phenomenon that usually happens in countries with significant majority and minority groups. In Indonesia, this kind of racialism and/or discrimination sometimes emerges subconsciously, over ethnic and group differences.

AFGHAN REPORTER SENTENCED TO DEATH FOR BLASPHEMY

Link to original article by Hafizullah Gardesh and Jean MacKenzie in Kabul. Published in ARR No. 280, 22-Jan-08.
By Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi in Mazar-e-Sharif

It all started with a phone call in mid-October, when one of my brother’s classmates called to tell me that Parwez had been arrested by the National Directorate of Security, NDS.

But two hours later, Parwez, who is a few years younger than me, walked into the rooms we shared. He told me that the NDS had picked him up for the second time.

"They accuse me of writing a story that explains the Koran’s position on women," he said. "But I told them that I knew nothing about it, and they let me go."

Parwez told me that the text the NDS were interested had really been written by some Iranian on the Internet; he had had nothing to do with it, he said.

That very day my friends told me not to sleep in my rooms. They said that the rooms were being watched. But I did not take them seriously.

I was laughing and joking still; I did not know that our lives were about to get very, very complicated.

The next day a number of students threatened a demonstration against the writer of the article. They issued a statement and published it in thousands of copies.