Pieces of Hell

a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.

2009-09-29T18:27:11+02:00

The title of this postis a quotation of Neville Chmaberlain's about events in Czechoslovakia in 1938.
Of course, what's happening at the moment in Guinea, Central Africa, is not considered by the "great powers" to be of strategic importance. I only stumbled across this story by accident. No doubt thousands of other people have been killed by soldiers and policeman over the world this week. So it goes.

Police opened fire as about 50,000 protesters tried to gather in Conakry [AFP]
At least 157 opposition supporters are now believed to have died after Guinea's troops opened fire on a mass protest in the capital, Conakry, a human rights group has said.

"According to hospital sources that we have spoken to, 157 dead and 1,253 injured have been registered," Thierno Maadjou Sow, the president of the Guinean Human Rights Organisation, said on Tuesday.

Sow told the Reuters news agency that the figure did not include the bodies of an unknown number of demonstrators killed which were never delivered to hospital in the city.

Opposition parties, which organised the demonstration amid speculation that Moussa Dadis Camara, the country's military leader, would stand in forthcoming elections, had earlier said that at least 128 people had died.

The shootings took place on Monday after about 50,000 protesters gathered outside a stadium in defiance of an official ban on the demonstration

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The Unspeakable Horror of Revenge

2009-08-18T09:16:27+02:00

It is all to easy to get lost in one's own feelings of righteous indignation......

(guardian + agencies)
A fire that swept through a tent at a wedding party in Kuwait, killing at least 43 women and children, was started deliberately by the groom's ex-wife as an act of revenge, reports claimed today.

The yet to be named woman confessed to using petrol to set the packed tent alight, Kuwait's al-Qabas newspaper reported, adding that she had done so because of the way her former husband treated her.

The death toll from the blaze climbed to 43 after two severely burned victims died from their injuries yesterday, the country's fire department said.

The tent, set up for female guests at the wedding celebration in al-Jahra, a tribal area west of Kuwait City, became consumed by fire within three minutes of being lit on Saturday night. A number of those killed were believed to have been crushed as people attempted to flee. Fifty-two people are in hospital.

Colonel Mohammed al-Saber, a spokesman for the interior ministry, told state television that the blaze was caused by arson and that the culprit had confessed to carrying out the crime for personal reasons.

The English-language Kuwait Times said the arsonist was arrested after witnesses said they had seen a woman setting the tent on fire using kerosene-soaked rags. The new bride was uninjured but her mother and sister were killed, the paper reported, citing an unnamed source.

Kuwaitis celebrate weddings in separate parties for men and women, with children attending the women's event. In tribal regions the parties are often held in tents, a custom rooted in the country's nomadic heritage.

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Flogging a girl for walking out with a boy

2009-04-04T10:43:12+02:00

(from The Guardian website today. If you wish to see the video, visit the Guardian website)

The Pakistani government has ordered an inquiry into the flogging of a 17-year-old woman by Taliban militants in the troubled Swat valley, after public outrage triggered by shocking video footage of the punishment.

The images, played yesterday on private television channels, show a burka-clad woman being pinned to the ground by two men while a third whips her backside 34 times. The woman is seen screaming and begging for mercy as a crowd of largely silent men look on. She is accused of having had an illegal sexual relationship, according to local law. Her brother is among those restraining her.

President Asif Ali Zardari led a wave of public condemnation, and ordered the arrest of the perpetrators. Prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani termed it "shocking" and called for an immediate inquiry. At the supreme court, the newly reinstated chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, summoned officials to a hearing scheduled for Monday to investigate the incident.

"Our constitution allows no space for such public brutality, and our civilisation and culture have no tolerance for it either," said Sherry Rehman, a former information minister.

But the talk of arrests and inquiries are unlikely to amount to much. The Pakistan government's writ has all but collapsed in Swat, where armed militants loyal to a hardline preacher named Maulana Fazlullah have taken control. The teenage woman was flogged in Kabbal, a remote district where Taliban rule is the law. An order by the chief justice to produce the woman in Islamabad next Monday is unlikely to be heeded.

Muslim Khan, a Taliban spokesman, defended the punishment as appropriate under Islamic law, but said it should have been applied by a pre-pubescent boy in a private setting. "She had to be punished," he told Geo News. "The punishment administered by local Taliban was in our knowledge and they did the right thing, but the method was wrong."

That assertion was challenged by Islamic scholars who appeared on television chat shows throughout the day, often in between clips of outraged comments from ordinary Pakistanis. Harsh punishments such as flogging and stoning are considered to have been imported from the Middle East, and at odds with the milder version of Islam that is indigenous to South Asia.

Public outrage reignited debate over the merits of a controversial peace deal signed last February, under which the government ceded control of the valley's judicial system to the militants in an effort to buy peace.

Once a picturesque valley favoured by honeymooning couples, Swat is now better known as a centre of violence and repression. An estimated 1,200 people have been killed and at least 250,000 have fled since hostilities erupted almost two years ago.

Women have been particularly hard hit. The Taliban have burned or bombed 200 girls' schools, shot dead female performing dancers and dumped their bodies in the street, and imposed harsh restrictions on women venturing into public.

The peace deal has brought a measure of peace to Swat, and a hybrid judicial system mixing Islamic and traditional law has become operational. But Zardari has refused to sign a bill finalising Islamic law, saying he will only do so when peace becomes permanent.

Controversy also erupted over the timing of the video. Local reporters and human rights activists told the Guardian that the flogging had taken place within the past three weeks. But the provincial government and the Taliban insisted that it occurred long before the Swat peace deal was signed on February 16.

In different interviews Khan variously estimated the timing at between two, nine and 12 months ago. Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the provincial information minister, said the flogging took place on January 3, and accused those airing the tape of wanting to scupper the peace process.

Debate mostly focused on how to deal with the burgeoning Taliban menace, however. Some worry that the "Talibanisation" of the frontier could eventually spread into the rest of Pakistan.

The Obama administration has criticised Pakistan for striking peace deals with militants, worrying that they provide safe havens for extremists launching cross-border attacks against US and Nato troops in Afghanistan.

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"Worse than the Taliban" for Afghan Women

2009-03-31T20:15:20+02:00

The Guardian 30.3.09

Hamid Karzai has been accused of trying to win votes in Afghanistan's presidential election by backing a law the UN says legalises rape within marriage and bans wives from stepping outside their homes without their husbands' permission.

The Afghan president signed the law earlier this month, despite condemnation by human rights activists and some MPs that it flouts the constitution's equal rights provisions.
Jon Boone reveals Afghanistan's new law denying women's rights Link to this audio

The final document has not been published, but the law is believed to contain articles that rule women cannot leave the house without their husbands' permission, that they can only seek work, education or visit the doctor with their husbands' permission, and that they cannot refuse their husband sex.

A briefing document prepared by the United Nations Development Fund for Women also warns that the law grants custody of children to fathers and grandfathers only.

Senator Humaira Namati, a member of the upper house of the Afghan parliament, said the law was "worse than during the Taliban". "Anyone who spoke out was accused of being against Islam," she said.

The Afghan constitution allows for Shias, who are thought to represent about 10% of the population, to have a separate family law based on traditional Shia jurisprudence. But the constitution and various international treaties signed by Afghanistan guarantee equal rights for women.

Shinkai Zahine Karokhail, like other female parliamentarians, complained that after an initial deal the law was passed with unprecedented speed and limited debate. "They wanted to pass it almost like a secret negotiation," she said. "There were lots of things that we wanted to change, but they didn't want to discuss it because Karzai wants to please the Shia before the election."

Although the ministry of justice confirmed the bill was signed by Karzai at some point this month, there is confusion about the full contents of the final law, which human rights activists have struggled to obtain a copy of. The justice ministry said the law would not be published until various "technical problems" had been ironed out.

After seven years leading Afghanistan, Karzai is increasingly unpopular at home and abroad and the presidential election in August is expected to be extremely closely fought. A western diplomat said the law represented a "big tick in the box" for the powerful council of Shia clerics.

Leaders of the Hazara minority, which is regarded as the most important bloc of swing voters in the election, also demanded the new law.

Ustad Mohammad Akbari, an MP and the leader of a Hazara political party, said the president had supported the law in order to curry favour among the Hazaras. But he said the law actually protected women's rights.

"Men and women have equal rights under Islam but there are differences in the way men and women are created. Men are stronger and women are a little bit weaker; even in the west you do not see women working as firefighters."

Akbari said the law gave a woman the right to refuse sexual intercourse with her husband if she was unwell or had another reasonable "excuse". And he said a woman would not be obliged to remain in her house if an emergency forced her to leave without permission.

The international community has so far shied away from publicly questioning such a politically sensitive issue.

"It is going to be tricky to change because it gets us into territory of being accused of not respecting Afghan culture, which is always difficult," a western diplomat in Kabul admitted.

Soraya Sobhrang, the head of women's affairs at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said western silence had been "disastrous for women's rights in Afghanistan".

"What the international community has done is really shameful. If they had got more involved in the process when it was discussed in parliament we could have stopped it. Because of the election I am not sure we can change it now. It's too late for that."

But another senior western diplomat said foreign embassies would intervene when the law is finally published.

Some female politicians have taken a more pragmatic stance, saying their fight in parliament's lower house succeeded in improving the law, including raising the original proposed marriage age of girls from nine to 16 and removing completely provisions for temporary marriages.

"It's not really 100% perfect, but compared to the earlier drafts it's a huge improvement," said Shukria Barakzai, an MP. "Before this was passed family issues were decided by customary law, so this is a big improvement."

Karzai's spokesman declined to comment on the new law.

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Gas Chambers back - in China

2009-03-31T07:29:29+02:00

By Clifford Coonan in Beijing Independent Tuesday, 24 March 2009

China is innovating in the market of death with a fleet of execution buses in which convicts are efficiently and cleanly put to death by lethal injection.

The mobile death chamber means executions can be ordered and carried out by courts in towns and villages around a particular province, with executioners and medical staff shuttling between different jurisdictions. Authorities say the initiative is a deterrent against crime.

"First, we established there was demand for execution vehicles. Then we designed the vehicles and applied to the government for certification. This procedure is a must," said Mr Zhang, from the marketing department of Jinguan Auto – a Chongqing-based maker of ambulances, police lorries, bulletproof shields and armour-plated limos. Mr Zhang, who did not wish to give his first name, said the execution bus is a refitted 17-seater minibus which is seven metres long. So far the company had sold 10 of the vehicles.
Related articles

* China spearheads surge in state-sponsored executions

Viewed in the online catalogue, the bus looks innocuous enough from the outside. Mr Zhang explained how criminals are tied hand and foot to a stretcher at the back, then injected with a cocktail of lethal toxins. The bus also features a video monitoring system, to ensure that executions comply with state rules, he explained.

The execution bus also makes it easier to use organs from prisoners for transplants, with doctors and nurses on hand to make sure they are transferred swiftly. This practice has been attacked as inhumane, although the Chinese government insists it takes place with the permission of the donors and their families.

China executes more prisoners than any other country, and non-violent crimes such as corruption and tax fraud, as well as the traditional capital offences such as murder, are among 68 crimes that carry the death penalty.

Before creation of the buses, the condemned were executed by being shot in the back of the head, but executioners were often forced to wear rubber boots, because of the large amount of blood involved in shootings, and occasionally prisoners had to be shot several times before finally dying.

One reason why executioners wanted a different method was because many of those killed were drug traffickers, and were said to have HIV/Aids. Executioners said they were worried they would become infected by spraying blood.

"Lethal injection reduces the pain and fear of the condemned. It is a more humane way to die," Mou Ruijin, associate professor of the Law School of Northeast University, told the Xinhua news agency after the province of Liaoning became the latest to switch to lethal injections.

The makers of the van say sales are steady, and urge any foreign governments interested to get in touch.

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raped and killed for being a lesbian

2009-03-12T19:08:43+01:00

from guardian.co.uk 12.03.09

The partially clothed body of Eudy Simelane, former star of South Africa's acclaimed Banyana Banyana national female football squad, was found in a creek in a park in Kwa Thema, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Simelane had been gang-raped and brutally beaten before being stabbed 25 times in the face, chest and legs.As well as being one of South Africa's best-known female footballers, Simelane was a voracious equality rights campaigners and one of the first women to live openly as a lesbian in Kwa Thema.

Her brutal murder took place last April, and since then a tide of violence against lesbian women in South Africa has continued to rise. Human rights campaigners say it is characterised by what they call "corrective rape" committed by men behind the guise of trying to "cure" lesbian women of their sexual orientation.

Now, a report by the international NGO ActionAid, backed by the South African Human Rights Commission, condemns the culture of impunity around these crimes, which it says are going unrecognised by the state and unpunished by the legal system.

The report calls for South Africa's criminal justice system to recognise hate crimes, including corrective rape, as a separate crime category. It argues this will force police to take action over the rising violence and ensure the resources and support is provided to those trying to bring perpetrators to justice.

The ferocity and brutality of Simelane's murder sent shockwaves through Kwa Thema, where she was much known and loved for bringing sports fame to the sprawling township.

Her mother, Mally Simelane, said she always feared for her daughter's safety but never imagined her life would be taken in such a way.

"I'm scared of these people that they are going to come and kill me too because I don't know what happened," she said. "Why did they do this horrible thing? Because of who she was? She was a sweet lady, she never fought with anyone, but why would they kill her like this? She was stabbed, 25 holes in her. The whole body, even under the feet."

The Guardian talked to lesbian women in townships in Johannesburg and Cape Town who said they were being deliberately targeted for rape and that the threat of violence had become an everyday ordeal.

"Every day I am told that they are going to kill me, that they are going to rape me and after they rape me I'll become a girl," said Zakhe Sowello from Soweto, Johannesburg. "When you are raped you have a lot of evidence on your body. But when we try and report these crimes, nothing happens, and then you see the boys who raped you walking free on the street."

Research released last year by Triangle, a leading South African gay rights organisation, revealed that a staggering 86% of black lesbians from the Western Cape said they lived in fear of sexual assault. The group says it is dealing with up to 10 new cases of "corrective rape" every week.

"What we're seeing is a spike in the numbers of women coming to us having been raped and who have been told throughout the attack that being a lesbian was to blame for what was happening to them," said Vanessa Ludwig, the chief executive at Triangle.

Support groups claim an increasingly aggressive and macho political environment is contributing to the inaction of the police over attacks on lesbian women and is part of a growing cultural lethargy towards the high levels of gender-based violence in South Africa.

"When asking why lesbian women are being targeted you have to look at why all women are being raped and murdered in such high numbers in South Africa," said Carrie Shelver, women's rights at Powa, a South African NGO. "So you have to look at the increasingly macho culture, which seeks to oppress women and sees them as merely sexual beings. So when there is a lesbian woman she is an absolute affront to this kind of masculinity."

A statement released by South Africa's national prosecuting authority said: "While hate crimes – especially of a sexual nature – are rife, it is not something that the South African government has prioritised as a specific project."

The failure of police to follow up eyewitness statements and continue their investigation into another brutal double rape and murder of lesbian couple Sizakele Sigasa and Salome Massooa in July 2007, has already led to the formation of the 07-07-07 campaign, a coalition of human rights and equality groups calling for justice for women targeted in these attacks.

Sigasa and Massooa were tortured, gang raped and shot near their homes in Meadowland, Soweto in July 2007, shortly after being verbally abused outside a bar.

Human rights and equality campaigners are hoping that the public outrage and disgust at Simelane's death and the July trial of the three men accused of her rape and murder will help put an end to the spiralling violence increasingly faced by lesbian women across South Africa.

Despite more than 30 reported murders of lesbian women in the last decade, Simelane's trial has produced the first conviction, when one man who pled guilty to her rape and murder was jailed last month.

On sentencing, the judge said that Simelane's sexual orientation had "no significance" in her killing. The trial of a further three men pleading not guilty to rape, burglary and murder will start in July.

In Soweto and Kwa Thema, women seem unconvinced that Simelane's case will change anything for the better.

Phumla talks of her experience of being taught a "classic lesson" by a group of men who abducted and raped her when she was returning from football training in 2003. She says that "practically every" lesbian in her community has suffered some form of violence in the past year and that it will take more than one trial to stop this happening.

"Every day you feel like its a time bomb waiting to go off," she said. "You don't have freedom of movement, you don't have space to do as you please. You are always scared and your life always feels restricted. As women and as lesbians we need to be very aware that it is a fact of life that we are always in danger."

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Is this what Christianity is about?

2009-03-07T22:04:07+01:00

Vatican backs abortion row bishop from the BBC
(see also previous post)
A senior Vatican cleric has defended the excommunication in Brazil of the mother and doctors of a young girl who had an abortion with their help.

The nine-year-old had conceived twins after alleged abuse by her stepfather.

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re told Italian paper La Stampa that the twins "had the right to live" and attacks on Brazil's Catholic Church were unfair.

It comes a day after Brazil's president criticised the Brazilian archbishop who excommunicated the people involved.

Brazil only permits abortions in cases of rape or health risks to the mother.

Doctors said the girl's case met both these conditions, but the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho said the law of God was above any human law.

He said the excommunication would apply to the child's mother and the doctors, but not to the girl because of her age.

'Sad case'

Cardinal Re, who heads the Roman Catholic Church's Congregation for Bishops and the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, told La Stampa that the archbishop had been right to excommunicate the mother and doctors.

“ Life must always be protected, the attack on the Brazilian Church is unjustified ”
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re
"It is a sad case but the real problem is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons, who had the right to live and could not be eliminated," he said.

"Life must always be protected, the attack on the Brazilian Church is unjustified."

The abortion was carried out on Wednesday.

Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, himself a Catholic, said on Friday that he regretted what he described as the cleric's deeply conservative attitude.

"The doctors did what had to be done: save the life of a girl of nine years old," he said.

The girl, who lives in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, was allegedly sexually assaulted over a number of years by her stepfather, possibly since she was six.

The fact that she was four months' pregnant with twins was only discovered after she was taken to hospital in Pernambuco complaining of stomach pains.

Her stepfather was arrested last week, allegedly as he tried to escape to another region of the country.

He is also suspected of abusing the girl's physically handicapped 14-year-old sister. He has not been excommunicated by the church.

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Abortion for 9yr old rape victim is murder says Catholic archbishop

2009-03-05T18:43:24+01:00

By Gary Duffy
BBC News, Sao Paulo

A Brazilian archbishop says all those who helped a child rape victim secure an abortion are to be excommunicated from the Catholic Church.

The girl, aged nine, who lives in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, became pregnant with twins.

It is alleged that she had been sexually assaulted over a number of years by her stepfather.

The excommunication applies to the child's mother and the doctors involved in the procedure.

The pregnancy was terminated on Wednesday.

Abortion is only permitted in Brazil in cases of rape and where the mother's life is at risk and doctors say the girl's case met both these conditions.

Police believe that the girl at the centre of the case had been sexually abused by her step-father since she was six years old.

The fact that she was pregnant with twins was only discovered after she was taken to hospital in Pernambuco complaining of stomach pains.

Her stepfather was arrested last week, allegedly as he tried to escape to another region of the country.

He is also suspected of abusing the girl's physically handicapped older sister who is now 14.

Intervention bid

The Catholic Church tried to intervene to prevent the abortion going ahead but the procedure was carried out on Wednesday.

Now a Church spokesman says all those involved, including the child's mother and the doctors, are to be excommunicated.

The Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, told Brazil's TV Globo that the law of God was above any human law.

He said the excommunication would not apply to the child because of her age, but would affect all those who ensured the abortion was carried out.

However, doctors at the hospital said they had to take account of the welfare of the girl, and that she was so small that her uterus did not have the ability to contain one child let alone two.

While the action of the Church in opposing an abortion for a young rape victim is not unprecedented, it has attracted criticism from women's rights groups in Brazil.

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Is this a war of extermination?

2009-01-17T10:58:08+01:00

By Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif, reporting from close to the border with Gaza - The Guardian 17th January

Everyone says something new is going on here; something different. The residents of Egyptian Rafah are used to the sounds of rockets and shells exploding on the other side of their border, but they've never heard the sounds they've been hearing over the last 20 days. Twenty-five miles further into Egypt the general hospital at el-Arish is used to receiving the Palestinian wounded. The staff have never seen injuries like these before. The hospital forecourt is swarming with ambulances, paramedics, press. The wounded are raced into casualty.

The Palestinians are mostly silent; each man working out where he finds himself and what he's going to do. Fearing for their wounded and fearing for those they've left behind, they are silent but unfailingly courteous.

They try to answer questions. They must be exhausted? "The people of Gaza," they say (not "we"; they're too proud for that), "the people of Gaza just wish for an hour's sleep." The case you're accompanying? "I'm here with my nephew. He's 19. Shrapnel in his head. He was sitting with his friends. He's a student. Architecture. The helicopter dropped a bomb and seven of the group were killed and six were injured. They found a boy's hand on a 3rd floor balcony."

Later, I see a boy sitting up in bed with a bandage round his head. He has wide brown eyes flecked with green and he frowns a little, as though he was trying to remember something important. In the next bed a 12-year-old also with a bandaged head is not quite conscious yet. He is flushed and fretful.

The Palestinians say: "This is a war of extermination." They describe bombs which break into 16 parts, each part splintering into 116 fragments, the white phosphorus which water cannot put out; which seems to die and then flares up again.

No one I spoke to has any doubt that the Israelis are committing war crimes. According to the medics here, to reports from doctors inside the Gaza Strip and to Palestinian eye-witnesses, more than 95% of the dead and injured are civilians. Many more will probably be found when the siege is lifted and the rubble is cleared. The doctors speak of a disproportionate number of head injuries - specifically of shrapnel lodged in the brain.

They also speak of the extensive burns of white phosphorus. These injuries are, as they put it, 'incompatible with life'. They are also receiving large numbers of amputees. This is because the damage done to the bone by explosive bullets is so extensive that the only way the doctors in Gaza can save lives is by amputating.

One of the nurses said to me that the nurses and paramedics were horrified by what they were seeing. "We deal with cases all the time," she said. "But what we're seeing these days we've never seen before or imagined."

Upstairs a professor of economics, accompanying his brother, sees me staring at my notes and says: "Exaggerate. Whatever you write will not be as bad as the truth."

In the silence that followed someone put a mobile in my hand.

"Look!" On a rubble-strewn street lay the body of a roasted and charred child. Two bones were sticking out where her thighs had been. "The dogs ate her legs," he explains. For a moment I put a hand over my eyes. The phone goes round the table, each man gravely contemplating the burned child on the screen. Then someone asks: "What will it take to make the Israelis stop?"

• Ahdaf Soueif is a writer whose novel The Map of Love was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker prize

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13-year-old rape victim stoned to death in Somalia

2008-11-03T00:40:00+01:00

* Chris McGreal, Africa correspondent
* guardian.co.uk,
* Sunday November 02 2008 12.27 GMT
* Article history

An Islamist rebel administration in Somalia had a 13-year-old girl stoned to death for adultery after the child's father reported that three men had raped her.

Amnesty International said the al-Shabab militia, which controls the southern port city of Kismayo, arranged for a group of 50 men to stone Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow in front of a crowd of about 1,000 spectators. A lorryload of stones was brought to the stadium for the killing.

Amnesty said that Duhulow struggled with her captors and had to be forcibly carried into the stadium.

"At one point during the stoning, Amnesty International has been told by numerous eyewitnesses that nurses were instructed to check whether Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow was still alive when buried in the ground. They removed her from the ground, declared that she was, and she was replaced in the hole where she had been buried for the stoning to continue," the human rights group said.

"Inside the stadium, militia members opened fire when some of the witnesses to the killing attempted to save her life, and shot dead a boy who was a bystander."

Amnesty said witnesses originally reported that Duhulow was 23-years-old, based on her appearance. But the human rights group found out from her father that she was a child.

Duhulow's father told Amnesty that when they tried to report her rape to the militia, the child was accused of adultery and detained. None of the men Duhulow accused was arrested.

"This was not justice, nor was it an execution," said Amnesty's Somalia campaigner, David Copeman. "This child suffered an horrendous death at the behest of the armed opposition groups who currently control Kismayo.

"This killing is yet another human rights abuse committed by the combatants to the conflict in Somalia, and again demonstrates the importance of international action to investigate and document such abuses, through an international commission of inquiry."

Amnesty said al-Shabab had created a climate of fear in which government officials, journalists and human rights activists faced death threats and killing if they spoke against the militia.

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children for sale

2008-06-30T20:36:45+02:00

Darfur's child refugees being sold to militias

Julian Borger, diplomatic editor The Guardian, Friday June 6, 2008

Thousands of child refugees from Darfur, some as young as nine, are being abducted and sold to warring militias as child soldiers, a British human rights group reports today.

The organisation, Waging Peace, has filmed testimony in refugee camps in eastern Chad, describing how children, mostly boys between nine and 15, have been forcibly taken from their families by camp leaders, who are then trafficking them to militias.

Today's report singles out the Darfur rebel group fighting the Khartoum government, the Justice and Equality Movement, as the main offender. But it says a variety of groups, including the Chadian army and opposing rebels, are also involved.

"This recruitment is taking place every day, in full view of the CNAR [Chadian government body in charge of refugees] and Chadian armed forces, who turn a blind eye to what is going on, and despite the presence of EU troops," the report says.

The EU force in Chad, Eufor, will be made up of more than 4,000 troops, half of them French, and is due to be fully deployed by next month. Waging Peace is calling on the force, led by an Irish lieutenant general, Patrick Nash, to protect the refugee camps from the militias and to help stop the trafficking.

Louise Roland-Gosselin, the head of Waging Peace, said: "The deployment of the EU force means there is supposed to be security in the camps, but it hasn't come true. People feel deceived."

Roland-Gosselin said it was impossible to know how many children were being abducted, but the UN estimated last year that between 7,000 and 10,000 child soldiers had been forcibly recruited in Chad, where more than 250,000 refugees from Darfur are in camps. She said the problem had worsened since then, despite attempts by UN agencies and aid groups to negotiate an end to trafficking.

One of the refugee leaders opposed to the practice told Waging Peace: "Now it's worse, it's not only aggressive but worse ... They are selling anybody, you know, the boys from nine to 15 in the camp they are just selling them."

He accused other senior men in the camp of being involved in the trade.

Another refugee leader told Waging Peace: "We are very concerned about the future of our children who have survived the killing in Darfur. We want them to study and have a future. We don't want them to join the fighters and become useless."

Serge Male, the head of the UN's refugee agency UNHCR in Chad, said: "For a good while we have been trying to call attention to child recruitment in the camps, both forced and voluntary. We definitely condemn this and we are dealing with the Chadian authorities, the UN agencies and all the parties who have something to do with this."

The report says that, in part because of their role in kidnapping, the Justice and Equality Movement rebels are losing support among the Darfuri refugees in the camp. Efforts to negotiate a peace deal between the rebel groups and the Khartoum government have faltered because the rebel side has splintered and the government has pursued an aerial bombing campaign against rebel strongholds

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Memo Regarding the Torture and Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held Outside the United States (3/14/2003)

2008-04-11T21:31:41+02:00

Memo Regarding the Torture and Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held Outside the United States (3/14/2003)

File Attached - click here for more info

Description: Memorandum for William J. Haynes IT, General Counsel of the Department of Defense, authored by John Yoo, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel. Download Open File in Browser

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Smells Suspicious

2008-04-10T20:49:46+02:00

Dogs have long been used by police forces to detect drugs and explosives. But now animals and machines are being trained and developed to sniff out a person's potential for aggression, if they are feeling guilty - even their race. Amber Marks reports

* The Guardian,
* Monday March 31 2008

I was walking into Fulham Broadway underground station a couple of years ago when I saw police officers holding dogs on leashes, encouraging them to sniff the crotches of passing commuters. What, I asked one of the policemen, was the purpose of this operation?

"I can't say," he replied.

I explained that I was a lawyer with a professional interest in crime. He looked at me with something approaching interest. "Well, you know that most crime is caused by drugs?"

"Yes," I lied.

"These dogs can smell the smallest trace of a drug on a person. Once the dog has picked up a scent of drugs on them, we have the right to search them. If we find drugs on them, we can then search their homes and in their homes we usually find all manner of incriminating articles."

Who needs a warrant when you've got a dog? Olfactory surveillance - the monitoring of personal odour - is on the increase. The number of dogs trained in the detection of criminal suspects and substances is growing. But dogs aren't the only tool envisioned for the future. The Home Office is known to have funded at least one study into the feasibility of releasing swarms of trained bees to search out target odours. The US has similar plans for moths, bees, wasps and cockroaches, and Russia has cross-bred jackals with dogs for an enhanced sense of smell. Even yeast has been genetically manipulated to react to molecules of interest to the security services. Companies across the globe are designing and touting "electronic noses", machines that seek to mimic the mammalian sensory apparatus, in an attempt to satisfy new security demands.

"Headspace" (a term borrowed from the beat generation, where it connoted psychological privacy) is the technical term for the area surrounding an object or person in which their odour can be analysed. But odour detection is not limited to the discovery of drugs and explosives. Scientists and electronic nose entrepreneurs claim headspace analysis can reveal everything from the substances people have been in contact with and their emotional state, to their personal identity and ethnic origin. Although the science behind this field is nascent and the scientific validity of such claims is hotly disputed, they are gaining in stature. Researchers believe the unique smell that we each emit is tied to the makeup of the major histocompatibility complex, a group of genes found on the surface of T-cells that are crucial to the immune system. Several police dog handlers attribute their dogs' knack for identifying criminals to an ability to detect the scent of fear emitted by the guilty, and a synthesised version of this scent is available as a training aid. Scientists are undertaking research into how potential aggressors - or even, for instance, people with schizophrenia - might be identified by the odours they emit. In the 90s an electronic nose company based in the UK was approached by the South African police for the "odour signature" of black people. A company representative told me they refused to supply it, but could have done. He said that ethnic signatures are quickly obtainable by finding patterns between the molecules present in the headspace of different ethnic groups. He added that his electronic nose had already been trained to detect at what stage a woman was in her menstrual cycle, "just by sniffing her from the other side of the room".

Once referred to as the "neglected sense", the science of olfaction is experiencing a resurgence of interest and researchers predict that, in the near future, our knowledge of it will rival that of the visual sciences. Biologist Lyall Watson outlines the pivotal role played by the olfactory system in his book Jacobson's Organ and the Remarkable Sense of Smell: "There is a general and universal system of chemical communication in which all living things are involved. The result is a coordinated ecological mechanism for the regulation of who goes where, and how many can afford to do so." The security services want to tap into this primordial information, then exchange and use it in border controls and the wars on crime, terrorism and antisocial behaviour. Watson predicts that a heightened olfactory consciousness will enable us to "get to know who the good guys are". The security services seem to think the science of olfaction is already sufficiently advanced to enable them to do this.

Last summer, Der Spiegel magazine revealed that the German police had been collecting human scents from political activists to enable their dogs to trace persons they believed might try to violently disrupt the G8 summit. China has established a "scent bank" of odours sampled from criminal suspects and crime scenes. According to a document leaked to the Observer, GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, has been evaluating the merits of odour as a means of personal identification.

Common law jurisdictions across the world are struggling to come to terms with this sensory mutation of police searches and interrogations. The case law is strewn with conflicting decisions on the extent to which olfactory surveillance requires regulation. So far, New South Wales in Australia is the only state to have put it on a statutory footing. The Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Act 2002 specifies the limited circumstances in which drug detection dogs can be used and requires regular parliamentary review of the exercise of these powers.

The supreme court of South Australia dismissed the argument that a dog "sniff" is an invasion of privacy on the basis that odours emitted from a person are routinely exposed to the perception of the public at large. But this reasoning ignores the fact that odour detection "tools" - such as trained dogs and electronic noses - enable the police to perceive information beyond the range of the human senses, placing them firmly within the category of "new surveillance" techniques first identified as a threat to legal regulators by Gary Marx, professor emeritus of sociology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. According to Marx, in extending the senses, new surveillance "challenges fundamental assumptions about personal and social borders that have been maintained not only by values and norms and social organisation but by the limits of technology to cross them". The threat is obvious: these new methods promise to render traditional investigatory techniques obsolete.

The New South Wales supreme court refused a request in 2001 to regulate olfactory surveillance on the basis that a dog's nose is no more than "an extension of the police officer". But this is a dangerous argument that ignores the privacy issues linked with the expanding range of information sought by olfactory surveillance, as well as the invasive threat of other technologies under development. We are right to fear the new surveillance, even when we have nothing to hide, because it reaches beyond the rule of law, stripping us of our privacy (the right to determine the extent to which we release personal information about ourselves) and leaving us vulnerable to arbitrary state interference.

In 2001, the US supreme court recognised this new threat to privacy. In Kyllo v United States, the police had aimed a thermal-imaging device at Danny Kyllo's residence to detect heat emanations associated with high-powered marijuana grow-lamps. The court held that when the police obtain by sense-enhancing technology any information regarding the interior of a home that could not otherwise have been obtained without physical intrusion, it constitutes a search. The court observed that this would ensure preservation of that degree of privacy and protection from government intrusion that existed when the US constitution was drafted. Justice Souter has since stated that "if constitutional scrutiny is in order for the imager, it is in order for the dog".

In Britain, there has yet to be any challenge to the legality of sniffer dog operations. The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) is adamant that a sniff does not amount to a search and that an indication from a trained dog amounts to reasonable grounds of suspicion for a stop and search. Acpo reasons that because the dog is deployed to "scent the air surrounding an individual person" and indicate the presence of the smell "in the close vicinity of an individual" no search of the person takes place. In this way, Acpo distances the subject from the source of the scent, to justify its denial that the sniff amounts to a search - and then re-links the subject to the scent to justify a tactile search.

Acpo guidance on the use of sniffer dogs concedes that a police-dog sniff could amount to a search if a person is "funnelled" past the dogs. The guidance clearly states that the police should not funnel people past a sniffer dog because officers have no powers to insist that a member of the public submit to a dog sniff. But commuters, confronted with police dogs at the top of escalators, are faced with little choice on exiting a station. "We don't have any power to tell people to walk past the dog," one senior dog handler conceded. "But we can take advantage of the natural environment." Officers treat attempts to evade a dog as grounds of reasonable suspicion for a stop and search.

Smell has historical associations with sin, which may explain why some people find the experience of being sniffed by a police dog offensive. The devil has often been described as identifiable by his "sulphurous stink". In the late 1500s, odour was used to identify witches in Europe. Odour remains a deeply personal attribute, which most of us seek to disguise. Patrick Süskind sums up the accusatory nature of a nasal interrogation in his novel Perfume: "All at once he felt as if he stank ... The child seemed to be smelling right through his skin, into his innards. His most tender emotions, his filthiest thoughts lay exposed to that greedy little nose ... "

The suspicion generated by an alert from a sniffer dog is difficult to dissipate, as the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann and the supposed "scent of death" illustrates. Three months after Madeleine's disappearance, dog handler Martin Grime (then working for South Yorkshire police, now for Jersey police on a freelance basis in the search for human remains at Haut de la Garenne) flew out to Portugal to help review case evidence. He was accompanied by his "advanced dog" Eddie. Up until then, corpse-detection dogs had only ever been used in this country to help the police to locate human remains. Eddie the dog reportedly reacted to Mrs McCann's clothing. Almost overnight, the McCanns turned from victims into suspects, and the crowds who had surrounded them in support began to boo and jeer at them in the street. Seemingly as a result of the dog's reactions, the Portuguese police made the McCanns official suspects.

However, the accuracy of sniffer dogs is hugely exaggerated in the popular consciousness. Even the courts in England and Wales appear to have taken the reliability of the dog for granted. In Devon in 1999, the police were called to a house because a slice of fruitcake had been stolen from it. The police attended with a dog. The dog sniffed around the kitchen area and then appeared to follow a track 100m away from the house. The dog stopped and indicated at an abandoned car, in which a homeless man was sleeping. No fruitcake crumbs were found on the man or in the car. The man was interviewed and denied involvement. He said he had been sleeping rough in a barn. It was cold and he had found the car unlocked. He was convicted on the basis of the dog indication and inferences from his decision not to give evidence in court. In 2000 the Court of Appeal upheld his conviction for burglary.

In the US, scent line-ups are used. People have been convicted of robbery, rape, and even murder when the primary evidence against them is, in effect, a bark.

In fact, remarkably little is yet known about how the sense of smell works and there is a shocking shortage of reliable empirical research on the accuracy of detection dogs. The only substantial body of research was conducted in Australia. The Privacy Ombudsman of New South Wales reported its review on the use of drug-detection dogs to parliament in 2006. His research revealed that 74% of those searched following an indication by a dog were found not to be in possession of illegal drugs. This statistic adds weight to Justice Souter's statement that the "infallible dog" is a "legal fiction".

While many police dog handlers appear to hold a genuine belief in the "magic powers" of the dog (Russell Lee Ebersole was convicted of fraud for selling police officers in the US dogs said to be able to indicate which substances they were detecting by pointing their noses at letters of the alphabet), others are even more sanguine. A senior police dog handler told me that the dog's heightened olfactory sensitivity is not its only asset: "Admissions flow out of people indicated like a gush of air - they're so relieved not to have anything on them." A police sergeant who has received national recognition for his drug work laughs at the exaggerated portrayal of drug dogs' abilities in the street addict's mind: "They think they can detect drugs from 300m away!'

For now, the principal advantage of olfactory surveillance to police forces may reside in the nose's mysterious reputation for infallible detection. The police and security services are constantly on the lookout for technologies that can be used to justify hunches, coerce suspects into confessing and legitimise the use of force with something that can be labelled intelligence. Right now, smell fits the bill.

Amber Marks is a criminal lawyer engaged in doctoral research on surveillance at King's College, London. Her book Headspace: On the Trail of Sniffer Dogs, Wasp Wardens and other Dumb Friends in the Surveillance Industry is published by Virgin, price £11.99.

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A Law that Kills

2007-10-16T07:14:45+02:00

Last November it became a crime for a woman to have an abortion in Nicaragua, even if her life was in mortal danger. So far it has resulted in the death of at least 82 women. Rory Carroll reports on the fight to have the law changed

Monday October 8, 2007
The Guardian

María de Jesús González was a practical woman. A very poor single mother, the 28-year-old's home was a shack on a mountain near the town of Ocotal in Nicaragua. She made the best of it. The shack was spotless, the children scrubbed. She earned money by washing clothes in the river and making and selling tortillas.

That was not quite enough to feed her four young children and her elderly mother, so every few months González caught a bus to Managua, the capital, and slaved for a week washing and ironing clothes. The pay was three times better, about £2.60 a day, and by staying with two aunts she cut her costs. She would return to her hamlet with a little nest-egg in her purse. She bought herself one treat - a pair of red shoes - but she would leave them with her family in Managua, as they were no good on the mountain trails she had to go up to get home.

During a visit to Managua in February she felt unwell and visited a hospital. The news was devastating. She was pregnant - and it was ectopic, meaning the foetus was growing outside the womb and not viable. The longer González remained pregnant, the greater the risk of rupture, haemorrhaging and death.

What González did next was - when you understand what life in Nicaragua is like these days - utterly rational. She walked out of the hospital, past the obstetrics and gynaecological ward, past the clinics and pharmacies lining the avenues, packed her bag, kissed her aunts goodbye, and caught a bus back to her village. She summoned two neighbouring women - traditional healers - and requested that they terminate the pregnancy in her shack. Without anaesthetic or proper instruments it was more akin to mutilation than surgery, but González insisted. The haemhorraging was intense, and the agony can only be imagined. It was in vain. Maria died. "We heard there was a lot of blood, a lot of pain," says Esperanza Zeledon, 52, one of the Managua aunts.

González was not stupid and did not want to die. She knew her chance of surviving the butchery was small. But being a practical woman, she recognised it was her only chance, and took it. The story of why it was her only chance is an unfolding drama of religion, politics and power that has made Nicaragua a crucible in the global battle over abortion rights. This central American country has become the third country in the world, after Chile and El Salvador, to criminalise all abortions. It is a blanket ban. There are no exceptions for rape, incest, or life- or health-threatening pregnancies.

González was told at the hospital that any doctor who terminated her pregnancy would face two to three years in jail and she, for consenting, would face one to two years. "Nicaraguan doctors are now afraid of going to trial or jail and losing their licence," says Leonel Arguello, president of the Nicaraguan Society of General Medicine. "Many are thinking that instead of taking the risk, it is better to let a woman die."

For the Nicaraguan rich, a problematic pregnancy need not be a death sentence. You can fly to Miami or bribe a discreet private clinic in Managua. But in this wretchedly poor country most young women do not have money. Their choice is to go through with a pregnancy that may kill them, or attempt a DIY termination that may kill them.

As a result of the blanket ban enacted last November at least 82 women have died, according to advocacy groups. "This new law intentionally denies women access to health services essential to saving their lives, and is thus inconsistent with Nicaragua's obligations under international human rights law," says Human Rights Watch.

Nicaragua is famous for its misfortunes: the Somoza dictatorship, the civil war, the impoverishment, the natural disasters. Pro-choice groups say article 143 of the new penal code should be added to that list since it bucks the international trend towards greater abortion access and drags women back to the dark ages.

The anti-abortion camp, in contrast, is euphoric. The new law, it says, is a beacon in the fight to protect the unborn. It is time to celebrate. "Now it is all penalised. And Catholics agree that is should be this way," says Roberto González, 50, a Franciscan priest in Managua. "The population sees the church as behind the law - behind the pressure that succeeded in getting the government to change the law."

Abortion has long been illegal in Nicaragua but there had been exceptions for "therapeutic" reasons if three doctors agreed there was a risk to the woman's life. Those exceptions were no longer necessary, said the Nicaraguan Pro-Life Association, because medical advances obviated the need to terminate pregnancies. "The conditions that justified therapeutic abortion now have medical solutions," says a spokesman. Pope Benedict XVI welcomed the ban but added that women should not suffer or die as a result. "In this regard, it is essential to increase the assistance of the state and of society itself to women who have serious problems during pregnancy."

Nicaragua provides no answer to the debate about when, between conception and birth, life begins. But in the case of González it is clear when it ended: at 28 years. According to Zeledon, the doctors left González with few illusions. "When she came back from the hospital she was very upset. They said they couldn't help her. She knew what this meant: I think she knew she was going to die." Her children have been taken into care and her mother now lives alone. The only mementos of González's visits to her aunts in Managua are some clothes and the red shoes.

No one knows how many other women have died, or are going to die, as a result of the law. The Pope seemed to acknowledge an increased risk to women's health but Nicaragua's government has made no formal study of the law's impact. Women's rights organisations say their 82 documented deaths are the tip of the iceberg. The Pan-American Health Organisation estimates one woman per day suffers from an ectopic pregnancy, and that every two days a woman suffers a miscarriage from a molar pregnancy. That adds up to hundreds of obstetric emergencies per year.

Human Rights Watch, in a recent report titled Over Their Dead Bodies, cited one woman who urgently needed medical help, but was left untreated at a public hospital for two days because the foetus was still alive and so a therapeutic abortion would be illegal. Eventually she expelled the foetus on her own. "By then she was already in septic shock and died five days later," said the doctor.

Another woman, named Mariana, said she obtained a clandestine abortion because her pregnancy aggravated a permanent health condition. "I was very afraid. It was very traumatic not to be able to talk about it, because it is a crime. The abortion saved both me and the two children I already have." The report said the potentially most harmful impact was that girls and women were afraid of seeking treatment for pregnancy-related complications, especially haemorrhaging, in case they were accused of having induced an abortion.

Doctors say they have been put in an impossible position. "We face extremely grave ethical conflicts, all because of politics," says Carla Serrato, a gynaecologist from Nicaragua's state-run Alemán Nicaragüense Hospital. Ligia Altamirano Gómez, an obstetrician, says they fear being overruled by the law. "We are pushed toward illegality."

In an attempt to clarify matters, the health ministry issued protocols last December that said doctors should respond to most obstetric emergencies, including ectopic pregnancies and post-abortion care. To terminate an ectopic pregnancy is legal, it turns out, because since the foetus is not in the womb the procedure would not be an abortion. But such is the climate of fear and confusion that the protocols are widely ignored and misunderstood. The doctors who turned González away from the hospital in Managua thought it was illegal, as did medical staff the Guardian interviewed in Ocotal, González's home town.

"The ban has people frightened. You could lose everything - that's the first thing on your mind," says Dr Arguello, a leading critic of the ban. So far there have been no prosecutions but many doctors are unwilling to take the risk on behalf of women who are often poor, uneducated and from a lower social class.

It is a grim irony that this is happening under a Sandinista government - a movement whose ranks once included advocates for feminism and abortion rights. That was in the 1980s, when the Sandinistas were secular marxists, wore combat fatigues and fought a bloody civil war against US-backed Contra rebels. Things changed. The war ended and the Sandinista leader, Daniel Ortega, lost the presidency in a 1990 election. Church and state were supposedly separate but clerics wielded political clout, none more so than Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo. His hostility sank Ortega's attempted comebacks in 1996 and 2001 elections.

In the run-up to last November's election, the cardinal spearheaded a campaign for a blanket abortion ban. Ortega, desperate to regain power, mobilised the Sandinistas behind the cardinal's campaign and helped get the ban enacted just days before the poll. The former revolutionary, now reinvented as a devout Catholic, was rewarded with the presidency.

Ortega, who did not respond to interview requests for this article, has stayed pious in power. Last month he whipped Sandinista assembly deputies into voting with rightwing parties 66-3 to uphold the ban. Many former officials are disgusted with a leader and party they no longer recognise. "It's cynical and it's sad, especially when you consider our high rate of sexual violence and very young mothers," says Moisés Arana, a former mayor of Bluefields. "Here there is a lot of religiosity but only a little Christianity."

The Sandinistas may have changed but Nicaragua's revolutionary heritage has left it with some of Central America's most outspoken feminists. That their former comrades-in-arms are the agents of conservative oppression, as they see it, has them breathing fire. "This is wrong, all wrong. And we are going to fight it all the way," says Ana María Pizarro, a doctor and leading activist. Earlier this month feminists interrupted mass in Managua's metropolitan cathedral to protest against the ban.

The legal strategy is to ask the supreme court to declare the law unconstitutional - while fully expecting to lose since it is stacked with government supporters - to clear the way for a campaign involving the UN and international courts of human rights. They expect to get a sympathetic hearing in Europe, not least at an abortion conference in London later this month organised by Marie Stopes. There are likely to be calls for donor countries such as Britain, Spain and Denmark to threaten to cut aid to Nicaragua. So far there has been so sign of that.

The campaign's problem is that at home it is politically outgunned and unpopular. Lobbying for abortion rights, however limited, is a hard sell to a population largely deferential to the pulpit. The taboo is especially strong in rural areas. Edith Morales, an extrovert mother of two in Sahsa on the Miskito coast, is loud and proud when discussing indigenous rights and her impoverished community's needs. But when discussing the termination of an ectopic pregnancy she had 15 years ago, an act that probably saved her life, she lowers her voice, as if it was something shameful. "People here are very conservative," she explains. Asked if she supports the ban on therapeutic abortions, she shakes her head, and murmurs no.

At the other end of the country, in Bluefields, Inspector Martylee Ingram has the same, almost apologetic tone. She is discussing the harrowing case of an 11-year-old girl, Vera, who has been raped and is now 27 weeks pregnant. Asked if Vera should have the baby, she hesitates. The law says yes and her job is to enforce the law. The inspector shakes her head. "But me, as a woman and policewoman, I'd say no. I feel like she shouldn't have it. It's a baby having a baby. She might not survive."

Last month an assembly vote on whether to uphold the law was an emotional and boisterous affair with dozens of girls and women in the public gallery chanting in protest. Separated by just a sheet of glass, the two sides were a study in contrasts. One comprised mostly elderly men in suits, some of whom opened their speeches by saying "I am a Catholic". The other comprised mostly young women in jeans and T-shirts. "Shame, shame, shame on you all," shouted one teenager. "Daniel Ortega is a rapist," shouted another, a reference to allegations the politican raped his stepdaughter. (He was acquitted of all charges.)

Among the police officers keeping an eye on the protesters was a twentysomething woman with a slight bump beneath her blue uniform. She was four months pregnant and anxious, it turned out, because she had been diagnosed with toxic plasmosis, a bacterium that enters the bloodstream during pregnancy and can gravely damage the foetus. She watched the votes stack up in favour of the blanket ban and shook her head, but said nothing.

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Military scientists tested mustard gas on Indians

2007-09-01T19:46:50+02:00

Rob Evans
Saturday September 1, 2007
The Guardian

British military scientists sent hundreds of Indian soldiers into gas chambers and exposed them to mustard gas, documents uncovered by the Guardian have revealed.

The Guardian understands that the British military did not check up on the Indian soldiers after the experiments to see if they developed any illnesses. It is now recognised that mustard gas can cause cancer and other diseases.

Many suffered severe burns on their skin, including their genitals, leaving them in pain for days and even weeks. Some had to be treated in hospital.

The trials have been thrown into the spotlight by newly discovered documents at the National Archives which have shown for the first time the full scale of the experiments.

The Indian troops were serving under the command of the British military at a time when India was under colonial rule.

The experiments took place over more than 10 years before and during world war two in a military installation at Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan. They were conducted by scientists from the Porton Down chemical warfare establishment in Wiltshire who had been posted to the sub-continent to develop poison gases to use against the Japanese.

The Indian tests are a little-known part of Porton's huge programme of chemical warfare testing on humans. More than 20,000 British soldiers were subjected to chemical warfare trials involving poison gases, such as nerve gas and mustard gas, at Porton between 1916 and 1989.

Many of these British soldiers have alleged that they were duped into taking part in the tests, which have damaged their health in the years after the trials.

The reports record that in some cases Indian soldiers were exposed to mustard gas protected only by a respirator. On one occasion the gas mask of an Indian sepoy (a private) slipped, leaving him with severe burns on his eyes and face.

The tests were used to determine how much gas was needed to produce a casualty on the battlefield.

In 1942 the Porton scientists reported that there had been a "large number" of burns from the gas among Indian and British test subjects. Some were so harsh that they had to be sent to hospital. "Severely burned patients are often very miserable and depressed and in considerable discomfort, which must be experienced to be properly realised," wrote the scientists.

Other soldiers were hospitalised for a week after they were sent into a gas chamber wearing "drill shorts and open-necked, khaki, cotton shirts" to gauge the effect of mustard gas on their eyes.

The trials had started in the early 1930s when Porton scientists wanted to find out if mustard gas inflicted greater damage on Indian skin compared with British skin. More than 500 Britons and Indians were exposed to mustard gas.

Alan Care, a lawyer representing British troops tested at Porton, said: "I would be astonished if these Indian subjects gave any meaningful consent to taking part in these tests, particularly as they were conducted during the days of Empire. No one would have agreed ... if they knew beforehand what was going to happen."

Porton officials have argued that trials took place in a different era, during a conflict, and so their conduct should not be judged by today's standards.

The Ministry of Defence could not say whether the Indian soldiers were volunteers in the experiments. It said: "The studies undertaken at the Chemical Defence Research Establishment in India included defensive research, weapons research and physiological research. These studies supported those conducted in simulated conditions in the UK in a different environment."

Chemical warfare

Porton Down, founded in 1916, is the oldest chemical warfare research installation in the world. Until the 1950s Porton developed chemical weapons such as mustard gas and nerve gas. In the 1940s and 1950s Porton also devised biological weapons, chiefly anthrax bombs.

Today Porton's primary task is to develop defensive equipment to shield the armed forces against chemical and biological weapons. Porton believes that the British armed forces are equipped with some of the best defensive equipment in the world.

Porton has always recruited members of the armed forces to take part in experiments. The most controversial resulted in the death of airman Ronald Maddison in 1953 when liquid nerve gas was dripped on to his arm. An inquest in 2004 found that he had been unlawfully killed.

Last year the government paid compensation to three servicemen who had been given LSD without their consent.

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Robot Wars a Reality

2007-08-20T10:35:13+02:00

Armies want to give the power of life and death to machines without reason or conscience

Noel Sharkey
Saturday August 18, 2007
The Guardian

The deployment of the first armed battlefield robots in Iraq is the latest step on a dangerous path - we are sleepwalking into a brave new world where robots decide who, where and when to kill. Already, South Korea and Israel are deploying armed robot border guards and China, Singapore and the UK are among those making increasing use of military robots. The biggest player yet is the US: robots are integral to its $230bn future combat systems project, a massive plan to develop unmanned vehicles that can strike from the air, under the sea and on land. Congress has set a goal of having one-third of ground combat vehicles unmanned by 2015. Over 4,000 robots are serving in Iraq at present, others in Afghanistan. And now they are armed.

Most robots currently in combat are extensions of human fighters who control the application of lethal force. When a semi-autonomous MQ-1 Predator self-navigated above a car full of al-Qaida suspects in 2002, the decision to vaporise them with Hellfire missiles was made by pilots 7,000 miles away. Predators and the more deadly Reaper robot attack planes have flown many missions since then with inevitable civilian deaths, yet working with remote-controlled or semi-autonomous machines carries only the same ethical responsibilities as a traditional air strike.

But fully autonomous robots that make their own decisions about lethality are high on the US military agenda. The US National Research Council advises "aggressively exploiting the considerable warfighting benefits offered by autonomous vehicles". They are cheap to manufacture, require less personnel and, according to the navy, perform better in complex missions. One battlefield soldier could start a large-scale robot attack in the air and on the ground.

This is dangerous new territory for warfare, yet there are no new ethical codes or guidelines in place. I have worked in artificial intelligence for decades, and the idea of a robot making decisions about human termination is terrifying. Policymakers seem to have an understanding of AI that lies in the realms of science fiction and myth. A recent US navy document suggests that the critical issue is for autonomous systems to be able to identify the legality of targets. Then their answer to the ethical problems is simply, "Let men target men" and "Let machines target other machines". In reality, a robot could not pinpoint a weapon without pinpointing the person using it or even discriminate between weapons and non-weapons. I can imagine a little girl being zapped because she points her ice cream at a robot to share. Or a robot could be tricked into killing innocent civilians.

In attempting to allay political opposition, the US army is funding a project to equip robot soldiers with a conscience to give them the ability to make ethical decisions. But machines could not discriminate reliably between buses carrying enemy soldiers or schoolchildren, let alone be ethical. It smells like a move to delegate the responsibility for fatal errors on to non-sentient weapons.

Human soldiers have legal protocols such as the Geneva conventions to guide them. Autonomous robots are only covered by the laws of armed conflict that deal with standard weapons. But autonomous robots are not like other weapons. We are going to give decisions on human fatality to machines that are not bright enough to be called stupid. With prices falling and technology becoming easier, we may soon see a robot arms race that will be difficult to stop.

It is imperative that we create international legislation and a code of ethics for autonomous robots at war before it is too late.

Noel Sharkey is professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield
noel@dcs.shef.ac.uk

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In Iraq, sex is traded for survival

2007-08-14T16:12:39+02:00

by Arif Sarham /Al Jazeera/todays date

The US invasion and the sectarian war have created thousands of widows in Iraq. When Rana Jalil, 38, lost her husband in an explosion in Baghdad last year, she could never have imagined becoming a prostitute in order to feed her children.

A mother of four, Jalil sought out employment, but job opportunities for women had decreased since the US invasion.

She begged shop owners, office workers and companies to hire her but was treated with what she calls chauvinistic discrimination.

Within weeks of her husband's death, a doctor diagnosed her children with malnutrition.

Fighting tears, she recalled the desperation which led her to the oldest profession: "In the beginning these were the worst days in my life. My husband was the first man I met and slept with, but I didn't have another option … my children were starving."

She left the house in a daze, she recalled, and walked to the nearest market to find someone who would pay her for sex.

She said: "I'm a nice-looking woman and it wasn't difficult to find a client. When we got to the bed I tried to run away … I just couldn't do it, but he hit and raped me. When he paid me afterwards, it was finished for me.

"When I came home with some food I had bought from that money and saw my children screaming of happiness, I discovered that honour is insignificant compared to the hunger of my children."

Iraqi widows desperate
Prior to the US invasion, Iraqi widows, particularly those who lost husbands during the Iran-Iraq war, were provided with compensation and free education for their children. In some cases, they were provided with free homes.

However, no such safety nets currently exist and widows have few resources at their disposal.

According to the non-governmental organisation Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), 15 per cent of Iraqi women widowed by the war have been desperately searching for temporary marriages or prostitution, either for financial support or protection in the midst of sectarian war.

Nuha Salim, the spokesperson for OWFI, told Al Jazeera: "Widows are one of our priorities but their situation is worsening and we are feeling ineffective to cope with this significant problem. Hundreds of women are searching for an easy way to support their loved ones as employers refuse to hire them for fear of extremists' reprisals."

She said the NGO has documented the disappearance of some 4000 women, 20 per cent of whom are under 18, since the March 2003 invasion.

OWFI believes most of the missing women were kidnapped and sold into prostitution outside Iraq.

Although few reliable statistics are available on the total number of widows in Iraq, the ministry of women's affairs says that there are at least 350,000 in Baghdad alone, with more than eight million throughout the country.

Bitter trade
As Iraqi families continue to fall on hard times, some have been forced to make the most painful of decisions – selling their daughters.

Abu Ahmed, a handicapped father of five who is himself a widower, sold his daughter Lina to an Iraqi man who came to Iraq to "shop" for sex workers. Abu Ahmed said he could not afford to buy food for his other children.

He told Al Jazeera: "I'm sure that whatever she is, at least she is having food to eat. I have three other girls and a son and what they paid me for Lina is enough to raise the remaining ones."

Abu Ahmed had been initially approached by Shada, the alias of a woman living in Baghdad, who sought young women for Iraqi gangs running prostitution rackets in neighbouring Arab countries.

She told Al Jazeera that her role was to convince young women from impoverished families that a better life awaited them beyond the country's borders.

She said: "Families don't want them and we are helping the girls to survive. We offer them food and housing and about $10 a day if they have had at least two clients."

"Our priority is virgin girls; they can be sold at very expensive prices to Arab millionaires."

Shada said she sleeps in a different house every few nights as armed groups have marked her for trial and assassination.

Escape from Jordan
OWFI's Salim says cases like Lina's have become very common as poverty is increasing in Iraq and desperate families sometimes sell their daughters for less than $500 to traffickers.

But increasingly, young Iraqi women arrive in neighbouring capitals to find that prostitution carries a heavy and dangerous price.

Suha Muhammad, 17, was sold to an Iraqi gang by her mother, herself a prostitute, after her father was killed.

When she arrived in Jordan, she was gang-raped by four men who told her they were teaching her the tricks of the trade.

She told Al Jazeera she had been sold to a gang that caters to VIPs in Syria and was often shuttled to Amman, the Jordanian capital, for high-profile clients.

After six months, she escaped: "I ran away and an Iraqi family helped me by driving me to the immigration department where they helped me get a passport to return to Iraq.

"My aunt is now taking care of me in Baghdad. She never imagined that my mother could sell me, but unfortunately women in Iraq are not important and respected."

Traffic
Mayada Zuhair, a spokesperson for the Baghdad-based Women's Rights Association (WRA), said Iraqi and Arab NGOs are trying to monitor the trafficking of young women from the war-ravaged country to neighbouring destinations.

She told Al Jazeera: "We are trying to find out the fate of many widows and teenager girls who were trafficked. Unfortunately it is not an easy process and without international support, funding, and resources, we fear more young Iraqi women will be taken abroad to work in the sex trade."

In the meantime, however, prostitution remains the only option for Nirmeen Lattif, a 27-year-old widow who lost her husband in an attack on Shia pilgrims south of Baghdad.

When she turned to her husband's relatives for financial support, they could not afford to help her.

She says she tries not to think of the gravity of what she does or the dishonour it carries in conservative Muslim society.

"I think of my children, only my children; without money we starve in the streets."

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