Archive for the ‘Children's Rights’ Category

by Stephen Lendman

Colombia, America’s closest South American ally, is a corrupted narco-state, a repressive death squad faux democracy, threatening regional neighbors, and reigning terror against trade unionists, human rights workers, campesinos, pro-democracy organizations, independent journalists, and legitimate resistance groups like the FARC-EP. Established in 1964, James Petras calls it the “longest standing, largest peasant-based guerrilla movement in the world,” persisting valiantly for decades. 

Thanks to Plan Colombia and other support, the state is heavily militarized, more than ever now serving as Washington’s land-based aircraft carrier against regional targets, including neighboring Venezuela.

The Pentagon got expanded access, former President Alvaro Uribe agreeing to US forces on seven more military bases (three airfields, two naval installations, and two army facilities), as well as unrestricted use of the entire country as-needed for internal and external belligerency, including out-of-control violence and human rights abuses, the region’s most extreme to keep two-thirds of Colombians impoverished, millions displaced, corruption endemic, wealth concentration growing, and corporate predators freed to exploit and plunder.

Also to facilitate record amounts of Colombian cocaine from government-controlled areas reaching US and world markets, new President Juan Manuel Santos embracing the “Uribe Doctrine,” now his. It’s extremist, hard right, corrupt, brutal, corporate-friendly, and militarized in lockstep with Washington.

As Uribe’s Defense Minister, James Petras explained that Santos was an assassin, deploying military forces and paramilitary death squads “to kill and terrorize entire population centers, (murdering) over 20,000 people….falsely labeled ‘guerrillas.’ ”

UN Special Rapporteur Report on “Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions”

Mandated by the Human Rights Council (HRC), Special Rapporteur Philip Alston issued his March 31, 2010 report, based on his June 8 – 18, 2009 Colombia mission, understating the reality by citing “important gains,” yet nonetheless damning, saying “very serious problems remain.” Calamitous for most Colombians more accurately describes them.

Under Uribe and Santos, they’re virulent, security and paramilitary forces “carr(ying) out a significant number of premeditated civilian murders,” fraudulently called “combat” deaths. Killings rage “around the country,” military commanders under pressure to show results by “kill counts.”

A culture of violence with impunity plagues Colombia, the military adopting a “you’re either for us or against us” doctrine, stigmatizing civilians as potential enemies to be targeted and eliminated. Paramilitaries also share fault, “carr(ying) out many killings and the numbers are rising.”

As a signatory to international human rights law conventions, including Geneva and its Additional Protocols, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Colombia is legally obligated, international treaties automatically state laws under its Constitution’s Article 93, ones the Uribe, Santos and other past governments spurned with impunity.

Calling resistance fighters “terrorists,” the phenomenon of “false positives” amounts to “unlawful killings of civilians, staged” to look legitimate, including by arresting them at home, by patrols, at roadblocks, or though other means. Sometimes, “informers” rat on them for a reward, usually monetary. Once assassinated, faked legitimacy is established by planting weapons on the scene, changing their clothes to combat fatigues, and other deceptions. If family members later know, they’re intimidated to silence, on threat of disappearing or death.

Government officials are in denial, claiming “civilian victims were in fact guerrillas or criminals,” calling unlawful killings a few “isolated cases.”

Clear evidence, however, shows a widespread problem, government and paramilitary forces responsible, a pattern “repeated around the country. There have been too many killings of a similar nature to characterize them as isolated incidents carried out by individual rogue soldiers or units, or ‘bad apples.’ ” The entire security apparatus is involved, eyewitnesses and soldier testimonies confirming it.

Cold-blooded murder and extrajudicial assassinations are state policy, many thousands affected, the practices continuing unchecked. In 2009, the Ministry of Defense issued bogus human rights mandates throughout the Armed Forces, for show, not serious change.

At best, it’s “too early to confirm the extent or nature of a drop in allegations. Past experience in Colombia shows that many (killings) remain unreported for long periods of time due to witness fear, lack of knowledge about how to make complaints and navigate the justice system, and significant communication and geographic impediments to making complaints.”

In regions visited, conditions look “significantly less positive” than reported, lack of accountability a key factor, impunity for state killers “as high as 98.5%. Soldiers (paramilitaries and police) simply (know) that they (can) get away with murder” because of no serious effort to prosecute or convict.

Yet, “important steps to reduce paramilitary killings and violence,” were attempted, including demobilizing and reintegrating the AUC. However, “the full picture of the demobilization….shows an alarming level of impunity for former paramilitaries.” In addition, no one has been sentenced nor a full accounting of crimes produced. As a result, truth and justice has been sacrificed, including for victims, “denied the right to restitution and reparation.”

In 2009, helpful legislation didn’t pass because of internal opposition, the failure and demobilization flaws causing a “rise in killings by new illegal armed groups (IAGs), composed of paramilitaries who didn’t demobilize and others joining new groups. They “may have spread across Colombia and, in the aggregate may number in the thousands.”

The “incontrovertible reality remains that (vulnerable people) continue to be disproportionately killed or threatened and are especially” at risk. Government efforts to curb violence are weak and ineffective, unmasking a faux democracy.

High level complicity and a culture of impunity are at fault, why Colombia remains the world’s most dangerous country for trade unionists, and one of the most hazardiys for human rights workers, pro-democracy supporters, independent journalists, or anyone challenging state power, Santos as militant, corrupted, and extremist as Uribe, most Colombians the worse off for it.

A Final Note

On August 17, the Constitutional Court of Colombia, its highest judicial branch, ruled 6 – 3 against granting the Pentagon more military bases (the October 2009 agreement), calling the deal unconstitutional because legislators didn’t approve it.

Chief Justice Mauricio Gonzales said the agreement is “an arrangement which requires the state to take on new obligations as well as an extension of previous ones and as such should be handled as an international treaty, that is, subject to congressional approval.”

The decision doesn’t affect previous US-Colombian accords, so until resolved, highly likely in America’s favor, US forces can be moved temporarily to permitted bases, effectively negating the high court ruling, a Santos congressional majority expected to affirm it.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

by Melinda Tankard Reist, Contributing Writer for AnaiRhoads.org

Miss Universe has come round again. The swimsuit parade is tomorrow. That’s where the competitors – all conforming to unrealistic body types and the thin ideal – get to parade in a swimsuit just before they tell us their plans for world peace and saving starving brown babies.

Despite the fact that this whole thing is about looks over substance and a narrow standard of female beauty, organisers and participants still claim the competition is about ‘personality and intelligence’.

Miss Universe 2008 Laura Dundovic ran this argument on  Channel 7’s Morning Show today (see below for video). I wasn’t exactly what you would call convinced, though I did love how she insisted on this as images of lingerie clad contestants flashed across the screen.

Miss Universe – and other pageants of their kind – promote a thin, hot, sexy body (as judged by prevailing beauty standards) as the only real valued quality of women.

Imagine a contestant who had not gone through a punishing beauty/diet/surgery/makeup/hair regime and didn’t fit the beauty pageant norm. But she has a sparkling and vibrant personality and scored ‘A’ for algebra and science all through her school years. She wouldn’t stand a chance.

Get a load of my personality and intelligence!

If it’s abou t’personality and intelligence’, why couldn’t this be determined with the contestant in a three piece suit and not a barely-there piece of fabric across groin and breasts? Check out the ‘intelligence and personality’ of this past contestant below.

While the organisers of these pageants would claim to care about women’s rights, really such events promote body judging, body comparison and surveillance: none of which advance the status of women.

Judging tweens and little girls on their beauty

US-style pageants for teens and children have made their way to Australia unfortunately. Miss Teen Australia also has a swimwear competition. In this section, “marks scored will be based on the Presentation, Cut and Style of the fabric”. So it’s the fabric that is being judged? Then why not just hold it up for the judges to see? Is this an attempt to pretend it’s not really about how a teenage girl’s body looks in a bikini?

Judging women on their beauty has extended to judging even little girls on theirs. We’ve all seen the many scarifying images that show what happens when little girls are seen as mini adult women and forced to conform to an extreme and artificial norm of female attractiveness.

These pageants make it even harder for girls to be valued for qualities other than their physical appearance. Miss Bayside Australia includes a modelling section  for children from 0-13.

Have a look at the impact on children in ‘Toddlers and Tiaras’

You can hear my thoughts on the subject on Channel 7’s Morning Show.

By Melinda Tankard Reist, Contributing Writer for AnaiRhoads.org

Recently, Xinran, the Chinese-English journalist and author of Messages from an Unknown Chinese Mother: the lives of women in contemporary China, visited Australia to talk about her new book. It is a collection of real life stories told by Chinese women forced to abandon their babies for social, political and historical reasons. You can hear an affecting interview with her here on ABC’s The World Today in a piece titled ‘Hidden Brutality of China’s one-child policy’.

Xinran’s documenting and speaking about the true life suffering of uncountable numbers of Chinese women brought to mind the real life sufferings of two Chinese women whose experiences were seared into my mind in the 1990s. I don’t want what happened to them to be forgotten or overlooked.

In 1995 a lawyer friend introduced a Chinese woman to me. She had failed in her original attempt to get asylum in Australia and was appealing. My friend, who worked for the Refugee Advice and Casework Service in Melbourne, was trying to stop her deportation.

I called her ‘Dr Wong’ in the pieces I went on to write about her, including in The Age (‘China’s children of the damned’, March 31, 1995) and here.

Dr Wong was a Chinese gynaecologist forced to carry out abortions almost up to birth, against her will, at a hospital in Jiangsu province.

She told me about how heavily pregnant women were brought to her kicking and screaming. They were tied by their hands and feet to the table for the abortion. Dr Wong estimated she performed at least 10,000 abortions in her seven years at the hospital. She was forced to kill almost full-term babies in the womb by lethal injection and put babies who survived abortion into rubbish bins to die. She showed me photos. I still have them. They are unbearable to look at. Fully formed babies in kidney dishes, covered with blood.

Dr Wong won her appeal on religious freedom grounds. A Christian, my friend successfully argued that being forced to perform abortions was a violation of her religious freedom. She was granted asylum.

On February 6, 1995, Dr Wong testified before a Senate Legal and Constitutional Legislation Committee (fearing reprisal, she would not use her real name and the hearing was closed). Part of her testimony appears here:

In the hospital, you can see the women suffer and have pain for this one-child policy. It is only for this one-child policy that they came to the hospital; like they are coming to jail. They kill her baby, and they make her suffer. They make your heart break. This happens every day in China – every day. You can see the bodies of the babies – like a mountain of rubbish. Every day you see babies who want to try to get breath and who want to live. They did not die at first. They want to live. You saw miles of blood go out, and the mother crying. Every day mothers saw dead babies. The mothers catch the bare babies and cry.

We stayed in touch for a few years. While settled in Melbourne, she was not at peace. She was tormented by what she had done and hated herself. Despite her faith, she could not find forgiveness. She said to me:

Every year at Christmas time we have a show for the birth of Jesus. When I saw the baby (who was playing the part of) Jesus, I think: “I kill this baby”…I don’t think I’m really Christian. I think I’m opposite to a Christian because I do so many bad things. I didn’t try and do something for Chinese women. I’m not a very brave woman, I’m weak. In my heart I know Christian always brave, the Christian dies for God, for human rights, for life, for the right things. These things I cannot do, so I am not a Christian. I am evil. I think if I say I am a Christian, no one believe me.

The last time I saw her she was contemplating plastic surgery to change her face. She could not look at herself in the mirror.

Only four years after this, Australia witnessed the shocking case of Zhu Quing Ping, deported from Australia after begging to be allowed to stay to deliver her “unauthorised” baby, due in 10 days.

“We have no obligation”, said then Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock about Zhu Quing Ping, on 60 Minutes, June 6, 1999 (though it was the then acting Immigration Minister, Amanda Vanstone, now Australia’s ambassador to Italy, who authorised the deportation).

Zhu Quing Ping had arrived by boat in 1994 and sought asylum. During three years detention at the Port Hedland detention centre in WA, she gave birth to a daughter. Requests to be allowed to marry the child’s father were refused. Ms Zhu conceived a second baby in November 1996. All avenues of appeal were exhausted. The pregnancy was dismissed by a departmental official as irrelevant in a claim for refugee status. The department took advice that the risk of abortion was “low”.

Ms Zhu pleaded not to be returned, at least not until her baby was safely delivered: her only request was to go home with a live baby. “The manager said I couldn’t. He said you must go back to China, all the procedures have been arranged. [He said] You won’t be persecuted when you return to China,” she said in a video interview.

The manager was wrong. Ms Zhu’s baby was returned to a State-sanctioned death sentence.

Seven days after deportation she was subjected to an injection through her abdomen to destroy the baby’s nervous system. Labour was induced, and the baby delivered. Some reports said the baby had been born alive and was strangled.

A video interview, the written order by family planning authorities to security officers to apprehend the woman on arrival, a medical certificate (“On July 21, 1997 the second pregnancy eight months plus has been induced to be terminated in our hospital”) and the bill for the abortion were smuggled out of China and exposed at a Senate committee hearing by (then) Senator Brian Harradine. I have this material.

A 60 Minutes team tracked Ms Zhu down and compiled a harrowing piece about her experience (aired June 6, 1999). She wept inconsolably as she spoke of the death of her almost-born son.

They forced me into a car and took me to the hospital. I told the doctors I am already more than eight months pregnant. I was begging them to wait for my husband to come and help me but they said no and they gave me the injection anyway and I went into labour. After the baby was born I couldn’t get out of bed. I asked the nurse what sex the baby was and she said he was a boy. A baby boy. The boy weighed three and a half kilos. When I heard this I just burst out crying and I cried so hard I actually passed out.

Concerned for her wellbeing, the journalists took her to the Australian consulate in Guangzhou, seeking protection for her and her three-year- old daughter Joycie. Efforts by refugee advocates and Senator Brian Harradine to secure Ms Zhu a visa by which she could leave China and by which Australia could make amends, failed. Attempts to bring her here to give evidence to two inquiries failed. So fearful was she of being forced to leave the consulate’s protection, she tried to harm herself, according to Australian Susan Murphy, who cared for her for almost two weeks.

It emerged that other pregnant Chinese women had been deported as well and were mostly likely aborted on arrival.

China perpetuates violence against women through the most barbaric fertility control plan in the world. Its policy has resulted in forced sterilisation, forced abortion, forced fitting of IUDs, female foeticide and infanticide and prenatal sex selection. A Chinese woman’s right to bodily integrity and her freedom of conscience are forfeited daily.

The Nuremberg Trials defined forcing a pregnant woman to submit to the killing of her unborn child as a crime against humanity.

The outcry has to be louder.