Human Rights

Human Rights Georgia is reporting Georgian IDPs housed in public schools in Tbilisi are not receiving adequate government attention.

Emzar Karkusov, an IDP at one of the schools told Human Rights Georgia: “We applied to every institutions but nobody pays attention to us. We have not had food for three days already. They brought bread only yesterday and gave only two loaves of bread for a family. We lack many other necessary items; Tbilisi population brought some stuff for us and that is all. Sewerage system does not work in the building. They came here and pretended to repair the system but broke it and went away.”

World Vision says there are around 160,000 people displaced from the most recent war.  The organization claims it will take anywhere from six months to a year before they can return.  In Gori, few people are receiving aid.

For anyone who has ever been to Abkhazia, the pot holed road from the Inguri Bride through the Gali region and up into Sukhum/i will be struck by the devastation of the 1992-1993/4 war*.  Buildings, houses, villas, remain in ruins.

The Gali region, mostly inhabited by some 45,000 Georgian retournees will have to endure yet another crisis.  The Georgians who live there are mostly farmers.   Hazel nuts and citrus fruit are their cash crops.  Farmers transport and sell their produce at the Zugdidi market across the border.  When I left Abkhazia on July 8, the border had officially been closed.  Georgian farmers rely on this market.

Without access their livelihoods are at stake.   I heard numerous stories of how Russian peacekeepers would extort monies from these farmers at checkpoints. These Georgians are caught in the crossfire between Abkhazia and Georgia.  Now that Georgia has lost hold of the region, the fate of the Georgians living in Abkhazia is even more uncertain.

Will Abkhazia increase its pressure on Georgians to renounce their citizenship?  Or will the Georgians continue to suffer abuse from both Abkhazia and Georgia?  The Georgians who have returned to this area have done so under insurmountable odds and they deserve greater international attention, aid, and security.

For those interested in this subject, I invite you to view a 2004 documentary (Abkhazia: one side of a conflict) about Georgians living in Abkhazia by the Georgian based Studio Re with the participation  of journalists from Abkhazia.

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*Correction.  I had written 1993-1994. The war was 1992-1993 and a ceasefire was signed in 1994.

Rwanda has cast a long shadow over France. Within that darkness lurks a web of lies and deceit.  If justice prevails then French ministers and military officers will stand trial at the International Criminal Court.

On Tuesday morning, August 5th, the Mucyo commission publicly released a 337-page report accusing France of complicity and participation in the killing of 800,000 Tutsi during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Commissioned by Kigali, the report compiles extensive research and testimonies from survivors, journalists, French soldiers and the Interahamwe. Thirty-three members of Mitterrand’s government, including Dominique de Villipin, Edouard Balladur, and Alain Juppé are indicted.

In June the French senate adopted a law reducing its commitment to uphold the International Criminal Court’s penal codes on crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.  This law, according to a press release by Amnesty International France, means Paris will not prosecute to the full extent people who have committed egregious crimes in other countries unless they choose to permanently reside in France.

I can still vividly picture Fergal Keane, an Irish journalist, as he describes in his own separate reporting how a young Tutsi girl, Valentina, miraculously survives a butchering at the Nyarubuye church and then lived among the corpses, stunned and disoriented, for over a month.

The truth has a way of manifesting itself. The haunting stories of Rwanda’s genocide, the ignored pleas of help, a world that turned its back on humanity, has now arrived exposed and eviscerated on the doorstep of the Elysée.

Going through the Mucyo report is a detailed reading into the face of horror. Page after page of testimonies of French soldiers raping young Tutsi girls at refugee centers and military barracks in Karama (Cyanika), Murambi and SOS Gikongoro. French soldiers supplying weapons and training to the Interahamwe, French soldiers leaving Tutsi civilians to their doom and so on.

Some resisted and helped. These courageous individuals have since come forward.  Ordered not to go to Bisesero valley, Sergeant Thierry Prungnaud along with several other French soldiers disobey and find themselves protecting and saving the 800 remaining unarmed Tutsi.  The bodies of thousands of Tutsi lay scattered among the survivors.

A year after the genocide, the then French president Francois Mitterrand famously told a reporter that “in country’s like that genocide is not so important” writes Andrew Wallis in the Guardian.   Mitterrand later blocked EU aid to Rwanda and banned their participation in the November1994 Franco-African meeting in Biarritz. Rwanda may have been a Belgian colony, but it quickly fell under the spell of France in the early 1960s.

Mitterrand feared Rwanda’s fall to English speaking Paul Kagame who is an ally Anglophone Ugandan leader Yower Museveni. France’s neo-colonial sphere of influence in this part of the world was to be protected at all cost, a contention supported by a 1998 French National Assembly inquiry.

France provided unconditional support to the racist Hutu President Habyarimana who seized power in 1973. By 1993, Habyarimana had driven out over 1 million Tutsi. It was at the time, Africa’s largest refugee problem.

France dismissed the report as nonsense and claim it is a politically charged response to their own indictment. In 2006 French judge Jean-Louis Bruguière issued arrest warrants for nine senior Rwandan officials. The judge also called on Kagame to be tried for allegedly killing Habyarimana whose death helped trigger the genocide. Diplomatic ties between the two nations have since been severed.

It took France 60 years to officially apologize for sending 100,000 Jews to the gas chambers. France cannot ignore these accusations. Human Rights Watch along with investigative journalists like Linda Melvern have independently documented some of the charges. Paris must assert itself and organize a commission to fully investigate the report that also implicates members of the United Nation’s Security Council and Belgium for allowing the butchery.

 When Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili traveled to the Georgian-Abkhaz ceasefire line last year, he promised a crowd of Georgian refugees their return to Abkhazia within a year. But Saakashvili’s promises to Georgian refugees rang hollow, even before the current crisis.

A combined total of some 250,000 Georgians fled Abkhazia following the 1992-1994 war and the two-week war in 1998. Any prospect of their return has now been lost. Instead, Tbilisi’s military venture and Russia’s disproportionate response in South Ossetia has augmented the number of internally displaced people in and around Georgia’s breakaway states by 100,000, according to the U.N. refugee agency, UNCHR.

Last month I spoke to numerous refugees in Zugdidi, a Georgian border town a few kilometres from the ceasefire line near Abkhazia. Mzia Shakaia and her husband live in an abandoned hospital and both have resigned any hope of ever returning to their former homes in Abkhazia. The two are unemployed and Mzia’s husband is confined to a wheelchair after a traffic accident. “We have no water, no electricity,” she said.

In the Abkhaz town of Gali, a day after a bomb exploded and killed four people in early July, a local resident told me that the instability serves Russia’s interest. Regional instability thwarts Georgia’s chances of NATO membership. Another complained of the harsh living conditions. “Look around,” he said. “Fuel and food (prices have) increased. How can I feed my children?” Russian soldiers were standing around the destroyed café as two investigators picked through the debris.

The current crisis involves more than geopolitical ramifications and a pipeline. It involves people, caught up in the misery of war and poverty caused in part by the manipulations of one impervious president in Tbilisi and a prime minister with a personal vendetta in Moscow.

Tbilisi used the return of refugees to Abkhazia as a condition for any peaceful resolution knowing full well that such a demand would never be accepted. “How can we accept or allow all the refugees to return? Some fought against us, some are innocent,” said Abkhazia’s de facto Deputy Foreign Minister Maxim Gunjia.

Fifteen years is a long time to wait for a crack in the status quo. Abkhazia, internationally isolated and forced into an ambivalent relationship with Russia, is driven to become independent and recognised. Russia now demands that the breakaway regions vote on their status.

Hawks inside Abkahzia’s de facto government, in particular inside the opposition parties, will want to push for a unilateral policy with Russia. Such a prospect has some Abkhazians worried. “Russia is not interested in promoting Abkhazia’s civil society,” said the chair of the board of the Association of Women in Abkhazia, Natella Akabar.

Everyone speaks of peace but under inconsolable and irrevocable terms. The reality on the ground is as one would expect, desperate. Inadequate housing, lack of infrastructure, unemployment and abuse are the daily realities of Georgians living inside the Gali district of Abkhazia. And now they have become the daily realities of Georgians in Gori and those who fled South Ossetia.

Georgian refugees in Zugdidi had to surrender to bleak conditions and national strategic interests as Saakashvili diverted a large part of the budget to military spending. And to what end? Within a matter of days Russia’s troops crushed Georgia’s army.

Tbilisi ignored Moscow’s repeated warnings of any military ventures inside the breakaway territories. And Saakashvili’s rash and naive decision to launch a surprise attack on August 8 on Tskhinvali has dashed any chance of making true on his promise to the Georgian refugees.

Georgia’s president gambled on Russian restraint, Western support and the lives of his fellow countrymen. And he lost. In Tbilisi, a number of Georgians are calling on Saakashvili to resign. His “democracy” has undermined his credibility and many inside the country see him as an authoritarian.

Since the Rose Revolution, Saakashvili has consolidated executive power and cracked down on media. The parliament is weak and ineffective.

The Open Society Georgia Foundation’s programme manager in Tbilisi, Mikheil Mirziashvili, said in June: “Unfortunately, I tasted real democracy in the West and I can see the differences here. “The main problem in Georgia is the lack of real self-government,” he said.

This blog entry was originally posted at Reuters AlertNet.

Ending his three day tour of Asia in Beijing, US President George Bush chided China on its dismal human rights record.  In July, Amnesty International released a report claiming human rights violations in China have increased in the lead up to the games.

Just hours before the Olympic ceremony is to kick off, Bush, standing in front of the US Embassy in Beijing said freedom of expression and religion are essential to fully develop the potentials of society.  Without indulging in the long list of human rights violations (i.e. torture, state executions) committed by the US, the messenger has no credibility.

Before his stopover in Beijing, Bush was in South Korea where he held summit talks on Wednesday. At the same time, South Korea’s  Truth and Reconciliation Commission released a report accusing the US military of indiscriminately killing South Korean citizens during the Korean War.  The commission is seeking compensation for the victims.

Charles Hanely, a Pulitzer prize winning correspondent for the Associated Press uncovered the slaughter of 400 civilians, mostly women and children, by 7th Cavalry Regiment at No Gun Ri hamlet. For three days, soldiers of the cavalry sought out and killed the refugees. Some soldiers, it is reported, refused to fire but others obviously didn’t. One US soldier who witnessed the massacre called it pure madness.

This is not to detract from China’s own scourge.  But if Mr Bush wants to preach human rights, then he needs to live up to his own country’s violations; past and present.

Memories continue to haunt those who suffered under the brutality of war. Children who witnessed atrocities and were themselves subjected to war crimes will struggle to cope with everyday life. Most live in abject poverty and face a future without prospect. The war these children faced is far from over.

Plan International released a study today that claims two-thirds of war orphans are at a high risk of suicide. Many have contracted HIV/AIDS. The study looked at 1,000 children aged 8 to 16 in six west African countries and revealed a cycle of poverty, prostitution, and sexually transmitted disease.

In Koindu, Sierra Leone, 16 year old Theresa lost her parents during the civil war. She’s been in and out of refugee camps but now lives with her aunt. She sold her body to feed herself and now has a two-year old son. The father is not known.

“I feel like I have no purpose, like there is no meaning to it,” she told IRIN news. “I have no idea who the child’s father is. I have to struggle just to get clothes for us. I beg to eat.”

On June 19, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution 1820 condemning sexual violence against women and girls as a tacit weapon of war that serves to “to humiliate, dominate, instill fear in, disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or ethnic group.” The resolution in itself is a recognition of the culture of impunity that often surrounds the abuse women and girls suffer. However, much is to be done.

Last year, Dr.Yakin Erturk, UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women released a thematic report (see A/HRC/4/34) on how culture based discourse fragment human rights issues facing women as a problem of the “other.” “We don’t need campaigns. We need action,” she says in a openDemocracy podcast.

Erturk says there is an increasing trend to view violence against women as a cultural phenomenon via cultural relativism especially in countries of the south. In the north, she says cultural essentialism promotes an image that violence against women is a problem of the south. These trends diverge from universal human rights standards and should not be categorized as “minority” issues.

Indeed, Theras’ story leads credence to this view.  War, poverty, and the dissolution of social relations are instrumental.

“People have lost their cultural values and their sense of community,” Lawrence James, a councilor who used to work in Koindu, tells IRIN news. He explains the lack of support for war orphans is a consequence of the breakdown of social relations in communities destroyed by war coupled with abject poverty.

Rape and sexual violence orchestrated towards women and girls is often used as tool to rip apart these communities. The former commander of UN peacekeeping troops in eastern Congo, Major-General Patrick Cammaert, says women and girls are specifically targeted to destroy communities.

Amnesty International has released a scathing report on China’s unfilled promises to improve human rights.

Worse, the report claims human rights abuses have deteriorated since its last report in April.

Published ten-days before the start of the games, Amnesty’s report claims Chinese authorities are persecuting individuals who may tarnish the sanitized image of the games.

The organization also claims its website is no longer accessible in China.

In a separate article by International Herald Tribune journalist Andrew Jacobs, China will officially censor the internet during the games with the complicit aid of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

Both IOC and China previously claimed 20,000 journalists covering the games would have unprecedented press freedoms.

Sites dealing with Tibetan succession, Taiwanese independence, the violent crackdown of the protests in Tiananmen Square and the sites of Amnesty International, Radio Free Asia and several Hong Kong newspaper are no longer accessible in China.

Intermediaries play a vital role in assembling information and bringing forward victims to help prosecute war crimes suspects in the Hague.

Lawyers representing victim of war crimes rely on intermediaries on the ground to facilitate outreach and provide a vital information link.

While the International Criminal Court (ICC) offers protection services to both prosecution and defense witnesses, intermediaries are left to fend for themselves.

Intermediaries, often activists, are now being threatened.  In one case, Kinshasa lawyer Carine Bapita who represents victims in a case against Thomas Lubanga said she had to fly one of her intermediaries out of the DRC because of the threats.

In another case, Women’s Initiative for Gender Justice had to relocate activists involved in ICC cases when DRC militias began targeting them.

In Darfur, intermediaries are facing threats on a daily basis.

“Even if we could reach them ourselves, we would put victims at risk by talking to them directly.We need an intermediary who is not only an interpreter, but a country person who understands the geography of Darfur and how the conflict unfolded,” Wanda Akin, a representative of Darfur victims in the United States told IWPR reporter Katy Glassboro.

In Tanzania, the body parts of albinos are believed to possess magical properties.   BBC journalist, Vicky Ntetema, has filmed (see video here) a witchdoctor in Tanzania discussing anatomy for potions.    There are anywhere between 4000 to 173,000 albinos living in Tanzania.

So far this year, a known 25 have been killed for witchcraft, most in and around the Lake Victoria area.  Fishermen weave hair from albinos into their nets.  Albino blood poured into a mine shaft will increase the spoils.

Albinos already suffer from discrimination and are treated as outcasts. Most die of skin cancer before the age of 30.  In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s capital, police are escorting albino children to schools.

Last month,  the New York Times ran a profile of Samuel Mluge, an albino living Dar es Salaam. “I feel like I am being hunted,” he said.

People are turning to the Tanzanian Albino Society for help. But with only $15,000 budget, the aid organization is unable to tackle the problem. The government appointed an albino to parliament to help change perceptions.

“This is serious because it continues some of the perceptions of Africa we’re trying to run away from,” Salvator Rweyemamu, a Tanzanian government spokesman, told the New York Times in April.

The increasing lack of security in Afghanistan is spreading throughout the country.  Even areas of Kabul considered somewhat secure are threatened. On July 7 a suicide bomber killed over 50 people in front of the Indian embassy in the capital.

The International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) says some 250 Afghani civilians were killed within a week earlier this month. Various militias, Taliban, and coalition forces are responsible for their deaths.

“Currently some 400,000 people in the country do not have access to basic health services because of attacks on health personnel and health centres, and also due to lack of security for health workers,” Abdullah Fahim, a spokesman for the Ministry of Public Health, told IRIN in Kabul on 23 July.