Friday, November 2, 2012

Women's Views on News

Women's Views on News

Colombian mother tackles military over son’s murder

Posted: 01 Nov 2012 08:30 AM PDT

Guest post by Anastasia Moloney.

Moloney is the Latin America correspondent for Reuters AlertNet and TrustLaw.

Every morning Luz Marina would bathe her son, dress him and comb his hair.

She did this on 7th January 2008, the day her 26-year-old mentally and physically disabled son left their home in the poor neighbourhood of Soacha on the outskirts of Bogota.

"My son liked to help people. He'd carry people's shopping and work at construction sites carrying cement blocks. He was a special son and a loving child," Marina told TrustLaw. "But that day he never returned home. He just disappeared."

For eight months, Marina combed the capital's morgues, hospitals, prisons and slums looking for her missing son, Fair Leonardo Porras.

Her search ended when officials from the local morgue contacted her. They showed Marina a photograph of Porras, lying in an unmarked grave, some 560 kms (350 miles) from Bogota in Colombia's North Santander province.

"His body was riddled with 13 bullets, two in his face. You could see the terror in his face," she said.

Marina, her husband and their younger son and two daughters made the 20-hour bus journey to claim Porras' body. She stood "frozen" as the body was exhumed from a grave it shared with three others. The grave was marked "NN" or "no name".

DEFAMED

That was just the beginning of the family's nightmare.

They were informed that Porras had been classified in a military report as a member of the guerrilla group, The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and registered as a combat kill.

“I knew then that something was very wrong. I know my son wasn't a guerrilla. He couldn't hold a gun because of his impaired hand, so how could he even fight?" Marina said, sitting behind a large framed photograph of her son, a handsome man with piercing blue eyes dressed in his best.

Porras was a victim of what are arguably the worst human rights violations to have taken place in Colombia in recent years.

The abuses involve scores of innocent men, some as young as 16, killed by security forces, who then passed them off as guerrillas killed in battle to inflate the body count in the government's nearly 50-year war against FARC rebels.

"SYSTEMATIC" KILLINGS

The killings, known in Colombia as the "false positives" affair, first made local headlines just over four years ago.

Porras was one of 22 young men who were lured from their homes by the promise of work, and who all disappeared from Bogota's Soacha neighbourhood in 2007 and early 2008. Similar disappearances took place across Colombia.

"Victims wearing clean jungle boots four sizes too big for them, or lefthanders holding guns in their right hand, or men with a single shot through the back of the neck, further undermine the suggestion that these were guerrillas killed in combat," United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions Philip Alston wrote in a report in June 2009.

"The sheer number of cases, their geographical spread, and the diversity of military units implicated, indicate that these killings were carried out in a more or less systematic fashion by significant elements within the military," said Alston.

Some 3,500 people, mostly poor, unemployed or mentally disabled, fell victim to such extra-judicial executions from 2004 to 2008, rights groups say.

"One of the worst things about this is that the military and government labelled my son a guerrilla. They defamed and degraded my son's character," Marina said.

It was that accusation that motivated Marina to clear her son's name. Through a group she heads, the Mothers of Soacha, she also campaigns for justice for 21 other families who accuse security forces of killing their sons.

A gentle and unassuming woman who left school at the age of 15 but later earned a degree in human rights law, Marina never imagined taking on such a formidable opponent as the Colombian military.

In the family's small living room lie stacks of files containing letters, judicial evidence, photos and newspaper clippings, detailing Marina's ongoing fight for justice.

DEATH THREATS

The Mothers of Soacha have received death threats over the telephone and by email and menacing leaflets have been slipped under the doors of their homes.

"The military wanted to shut us up," Marina said in her determined voice.

Against immense odds, nearly five years after her son's disappearance, Marina got justice.

In June, after a weeks-long trial in a Bogota courtroom, six army officers and soldiers were found guilty of murder and the forced disappearance of Porras and were handed prison sentences of 35 to 52 years.

"They should have been locked up for ever," Marina said. "There's no death penalty in Colombia but they carried out a death penalty in cold blood against my son and others."

The attorney general's office is investigating over 1,500 similar cases of alleged extra-judicial killings.

BODY BAG CULTURE

Even in a country hardened by nearly five decades of war, the false positives scandal continues to provoke horror and disbelief among Colombians – not least because soldiers brought to trial have spoken of being rewarded for killing innocent civilians, including bonuses, promotions and days off.

"They killed my son and put him in a mass grave so I wouldn't be able to find him, and then they were congratulated and given rewards," Marina said.

Most of the killings occurred during the previous government of Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010) in which the current president, Juan Manuel Santos, was defence minister when the false positives scandal exploded.

Uribe's all-out military offensive against the FARC meant the armed forces were under constant pressure to boost rebel body counts and show they were winning the war, and this helped fuel the practice of extra-judicial killings, rights groups say.

Dozens of soldiers and officers have been fired over the scandal since 2008.

The government offered Marina and other victims' families nearly $10,000 in compensation. She didn't accept the money.

“My son was treated like merchandise. It's not about the money. It's about dignity and truth. We victims deserve a public apology from the president," said Marina.

Extra-judicial killings are still being reported, though the number has fallen dramatically since 2008, say the Mothers of Soacha and other local rights groups.

Verdicts have been reached in about 170 of the 3,500 or so cases. But victims' families say the wheels of justice are grinding too slowly.

“We have to keep working so that every family whose son has been killed by a criminal enterprise run by the state knows what really happened and can bury their sons with dignity," Marina said.

This article originally appeared on TrustLaw. 

Afghani family behead daughter-in-law

Posted: 01 Nov 2012 07:10 AM PDT

An Afghani family has murdered their daughter-in-law for refusing to work as a prostitute.

In Herat province, 20-year-0ld Mahgul was beheaded after her mother-in-law attempted to make her sleep with a man,in her house.

Provincial police chief Abdul Ghafar Sayedzada told AFP. “We have arrested her mother-in-law, father-in-law, her husband and the man who killed her,” he said.

The murderer, 18-year-old Najibullah, is cousin to Gul’s husband of four months.

He said at a press conference that his mother-in-law lured him into killing Gul by telling him that she was a prostitute.

"My uncle's wife told me I should kill this person," he told reporters.

"I couldn't kill her. She told me, 'if you can't kill her, then help me do it.' She forced me and I helped her."

He described how his aunt held Gul down by the legs as he beheaded her. Najibullah said his aunt told him she wanted the bride dead “‘because she doesn't listen to me.’”

Mahgul’s immediately family discovered her body outside their home.

They took her body to the Department of Women’s Affairs to publicize her killing.

This is not the first case of its kind.

Only last year police rescued a teenage girl, Sahar Gul, who was beaten and locked up in a lavatory for five months after she defied her in-laws who tried to force her into prostitution.

Earlier this month, the body of a 30-year-old woman was found in the Herat region with her nose, ears and fingers removed.

She had been tortured before she was killed.

Abdul Qader Rahimi, the regional director of the government-backed human rights commission in western Afghanistan, said violence against women had dramatically increased in the region recently and many cases go unreported.

“There is no doubt violence against women has increased. So far this year we have registered 100 cases of violence against women in the western region.

But at least in Gul’s case, we are glad the murderer has been arrested and brought to justice,” he said.

The U.S. State Department says some “Afghan women and girls are subjected to forced prostitution, forced marriages –including through forced marriages in which husbands force their wives into prostitution, and where they are given by their families to settle debts or disputes.”

At a press conference, Victoria Nuland, a spokeswoman for the State Department, said that the United States would continue working with the Afghan government to advance women and girls' rights.

All of our international efforts are designed to create the structures and institutions of the Afghan state to help protect these rights going forward.

Williams wins final tournament of 2012

Posted: 01 Nov 2012 07:00 AM PDT

As Serena Williams takes another title, we look back on the 2012 season.

With the women’s tennis season drawing to a close, Serena Williams won the coveted Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) Championships in Istanbul last Sunday.

Williams faced Maria Sharapova in the final, hitting 40 winners to the Russian’s 13 to win 6-4, 6-3.

She did not drop a set throughout the tournament, to finish one of the best seasons of her career and extend an 11-match winning streak against players ranked in the top 2.

She has now won 48 of her last 50 matches.

In the doubles tournament, Maria Kirilenko and Nadia Petrova triumphed over Czech pair Andrea Hlavackova and Lucie Hradecka, 6-1, 6-4.

Despite being the last team to quality for the Championships, Kirilenko and Petrova beat the number one seeds Sara Errani and Roberta Vinci before facing the number two seeded Czechs in the final.

Williams’ singles victory caps off an imperious season, during which she won a total of seven singles titles, including Wimbledon and the US Open. Triumph at the Olympics completed her “Career Golden Slam” of all four major titles plus Olympic gold.

Williams is only the second woman in history to achieve this feat, after Steffi Graf in 1988.

Yet despite her historic achievement, Williams will not end the year as world number one. That honour goes to Australian Open champion Victoria Azarenka of Belarus; Williams comes in third behind Sharapova.

This situation has led to the resurgence of an old controversy. Some have called for changes to the ranking system, suggesting that it simply rewards those who play the most tournaments.

In 2010 and 2011, Danish player Caroline Wozniacki topped the rankings, despite never having won a Grand Slam title. Her status as world number one was often cited as evidence of declining standards in the women’s game.

However, this cannot be said of the 2012 season. In this Olympic year, the level of competition was ferocious.

Azarenka kicked off the year with her first Grand Slam title at the Australian Open in January.

Sharapova followed this with victory at the French Open, completing her career sweep of major titles.

They each went on to win Olympic medals, and reached the latter stages of every major.

Williams, by contrast, had a much slower start to the year, including a first round loss at the French Open. It was this lack of consistency which eventually cost her the number one ranking.

This was not the only controversy to hit women’s tennis this year. During Wimbledon, French player Gilles Simon ignited a row over equal prize money when he claimed that women should not earn as much as men.

"The male players spent twice as long on court at Roland Garros as the women," he said. "Equality in salaries isn't something that works in sport.”

He later defended his comments, saying that "men's tennis remains more attractive than women's tennis at the moment."

Female players pounced on his comments.

Sharapova drew attention to the battle women had fought to win equal prize money in Grand Slam tournaments.

Williams was a little more direct.

“You know I can’t bite my tongue,” she said. “Definitely a lot more people are watching Maria than Simon. She’s way hotter than he is.”

2012 also saw a huge leap forward in competitiveness from British women.

After winning Olympic silver in the mixed doubles with Andy Murray, 18 year old Laura Robson reached the fourth round of the US Open. In September, she reached her first ever senior final in Guangzhou, China, eventually losing in three close sets to Su-Wei Hsieh of Taiwan.

Just three weeks later, 20 year old Heather Watson went even further, winning her first senior title in Osaka, Japan.

Having started the year outside the top 100, Robson will finish ranked 53rd. Watson has entered the top 50 for the first time, at 49th.

The players now have seven weeks to recover and train before the 2013 season opens in Brisbane on December 31.

Looking ahead, more Williams dominance seems to be on the cards.

“If I’m playing well and doing everything right, it’s pretty difficult to beat me, without trying to sound too full of myself. And I hate to lose,” she said after her victory on Sunday.

The Williams era is not over yet.

War casualty recording proven possible

Posted: 01 Nov 2012 03:00 AM PDT

A new study may help war widows and orphans with closure – and with compensation claims.

The Oxford Research Group (ORG) has recently completed a two-year study into casualty recording practice worldwide.

In what is believed to be the largest ever study of casualty recording practice, the ORG found that violent deaths in conflict can be recorded.

The Geneva Convention of 1949, places on parties in international armed conflict a strict legal obligation to record details of the captured, dead, wounded and missing in conflict.

However, these obligations are only defined comprehensively and in binding fashion for individuals who are members of the official military forces of the parties involved.

Both the US military and the British Foreign Office, it seems, thought counting casualties in the 21st century was not possible.

For example, at a press briefing in Baghdad on 4 August 2003, US military spokesman Colonel Guy Shields said there was "no accurate way" to keep a record of civilian deaths.

And UK Defence Minister Adam Ingram, responding to a letter from then Labour MP Llew Smith, maintained that ‘Whilst the Ministry of Defence has accurate data relating to the number of UK service personnel that have been killed or injured during Operation Telic (the invasion of Iraq), we have no way of establishing with any certainty the number of Iraqi casualties.’

Smith could only really conclude:

"Surely this is both an inhumane and unacceptable  position.

“As at least part of our aid to postwar Iraq must be targeted at assistance to families left without breadwinners who have been killed or seriously injured by the invasion, then our planners are going to have to calculate the numbers of families left destitute by their loss."

The ORG study, however, shows that recording casualties is entirely practicable.

Authored by Elizabeth Minor, Research Officer on the ORG's Documenting Existing Casualty Recording Practice Worldwide project, the study was publicly launched in Washington, DC, at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), a co-funder of the project, together with the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs of Switzerland.

It investigates the work of 40 casualty recorder groups and individuals, based in different conflict and post-conflict environments.

The Iraq Body Count, for example, has been compiling the world’s most comprehensive set of casualty figures for deaths in Iraq since the invasion in 2003.

The ORG research has resulted in a policy paper and a collection of practice-focused papers.

One example of such good practice is "A dossier of civilian casualties in Iraq 2003-5" co-published in 2005 by ORG and Iraq Body Count. This was a "proof of concept" for the utility and feasibility of marshalling and disseminating high quality documentary evidence from an ongoing conflict.

ORG has also been undertaking a comprehensive investigation into the law as it applies to all aspects of casualty recording.

The aim was to demonstrate to the satisfaction of key legislative authorities, at state and interstate level, that the recording of casualties was consistent with the range of norms, laws and agreements to which the international community has already subscribed or committed itself.

ORG’s legal consultant, Susan Breau, was interviewed by ABC South Australia last year about the legal team's finding that an obligation exists in international law to record all the casualties of conflict, civilian and combatant.

The responsibilities include searching for and identifying civilian casualties, and notifying the family, as there is a "right of the family to know the fate of its relative, and that's an international human right".

To hear the interview, click here.

And a group of NGOs concerned with states' ongoing failure to record violent deaths launched A Charter for the Recognition of Every Casualty of Armed Violence at the British Academy on 15 September 2011.

This Charter was founded on the principle that no person should die unrecorded, and its authors and supporters call on states to uphold this principle for the victims of armed violence.

#PatsPetition! Less than an hour to sign it.

Posted: 01 Nov 2012 02:54 AM PDT

 

Stop and review the cuts to benefits and services which are falling disproportionately on disabled people, their carers and families

The government were embarking on wholesale reform of the benefit system when the economic crisis struck.

These welfare reforms had not been piloted and the plan was to monitor and assess the impact of the new untried approach as it was introduced in a buoyant economy. Unfortunately since then the economy has gone in to crisis and the government has simultaneously embarked on a massive programme of cuts. This has created a perfect storm and left disabled people/those with ill health, and their carers reeling, confused and afraid.

We ask the government to stop this massive programme of piecemeal change until they can review the impact of all these changes, taken together, on disabled people and their carers. We ask the government to stand by its duty of care to disabled people and their carers. At the moment the covenant seems to be broken and they do not feel safe.

Illness or disability could affect any one of us at any time, while many more of us are potential carers.

PLEASE sign #PatsPetition http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/20968