Opposition Leaders Arrested in Sudan

January 15, 2013

By Hannah Stewart
Impunity Watch Reporter, Africa

KHARTOUM, Sudan — On the night of January 14, Abdul-Aziz Khalid, Chairperson of the Central Council of the National Sudanese Alliance Party, was arrested at his home by Sudan’s National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS). Reports state that he is being detained incommunicado in an undisclosed location.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. (Photo Courtesy of IRIN)

Abdul-Aziz Khalid is the sixth political opposition member to be detained by NISS since a coalition of Sudanese political opposition parties and armed rebel groups attended political negotiations in Kampala, Uganda. Dr. Jamal Idris, Enstar Alagali, Professor Mohamed Zain Alabidein, Dr. Abdulrahim Abdalla, and Hisham Al Mufti are also reportedly being detained by the NISS. The African Centre for Justice and Peace Studies (ACJPS) fears that the six detainees are at serious risk of torture and ill-treatment

At the Kampala meeting on January 7, opposition leaders discussed the overthrow of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s regime in order to institute a national democratic alternative.

President al-Bashir has been under international scrutiny over the years for the events transpiring in Darfur. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued two arrest warrants for Al-Bashir for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur in 2009 and 2010. The warrants charge him with criminal responsibility on 10 counts, including murder, extermination, forcible transfer of population, torture and rape.

The Kampala negotiations culminated in the adoption of the New Dawn Charter. The charter calls on parties to work together to topple the regime through either “democratic civil peaceful means” or “revolutionary armed struggle.” Abdul-Aziz Khalid signed the “New Dawn” document on behalf of the National Sudanese Alliance Party.

The ruling National Congress Party (NCP) of Sudan has publicly opposed the charter. Sudanese authorities described the signatories as “traitors” and pledged that 2013 would be a year of “decisive action against armed opposition movements.” The authorities also accused Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni of playing a “dirty role” in the region, asserting that they are aware of his conspiracies.

The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) denounced the arrest of several opposition party leaders by security forces. ANHRI stated that “the security forces’ harassment of the opposition is a serious violation of basic human rights and their freedom to express their political opinions and stances freely and safely.”

This comes at a time when the presidents of Sudan and South Sudan will hold their second summit in a month. Sudanese President al-Bashir and South Sudanese President Salva Kiir are to meet on January 24, in an attempt to resolve tensions over oil, territory, military concerns and other disputes.

For further information, please see:

Sudan Tribune – Sudanese political opposition leaders detained incommunicado and at risk of torture – 15 January 2013

All Africa – Sudan: Security Forces Arrest Opposition Party Leaders – 9 January 2013

Al Monitor – Sudan Crisis Escalates as Dissidents are Arrested in Khartoum – 9 January 2013

Reuters – Leaders of Sudan, South Sudan to Meet in Second Push for Peace – 15 January 2013

Syrian Revolution Digest – Monday, 14 January 2013

January 15, 2013

Fahrenheit 40!

Fahrenheit 40 – the temperature at which skin freezes and children die, the temperature which some Syrian refugees will have to endure sheltered only by open skies and Heaven’s grace, as world leaders keep giving them cold shoulders, and hearts. Fahrenheit 40 – the temperature at which humanity loses all meaning, and neither God nor mammon seems to give a damn.

Today’s Death Toll: 151 (including 21 children and 12 women)

74 martyrs in Damascus and suburbs including 30 in Moaddamiya, 31 in Aleppo, 15 in Daraa, 9 in Homs, 8 in Hama, 7 in Deir Ezzor, 5 in Idlib and 2 in Raqqa (LCCs).

Points of Random Shelling: 329: including 24 by war planes, 8 by cluster bombs, 2 by vacuum bombs and 2 by explosive barrels. Artillery shelling hit 127 locations, mortar hit 103 and rocket shelling hit 63 locations allover Syria(LCCs).

Clashes: FSA rebels clashed with regime army in 126 locations. In Deir Ezzor, FSA shelled the military airport with mortars; in Aleppo, Hanano Barrack was targeted; in Daraa, FSA captured some soldiers and officers in Basr Alharir, and in Damascus suburbs the FSA liberated the meteorological center located in east of the town in the Widyan Al-Rabie area and arrested a number of soldiers. The center was being used as headquarters for pro-regime militias (LCCs).

News

Syria refugees say rape is a key reason they fled, report says Rape is one of the primary reasons that Syrian refugees say they fled their country, “a significant and disturbing feature” of the war raging between rebels and Syrian government forces, the International Rescue Committee said Monday. In a new report based on hundreds of interviews in Jordan and Lebanon, the assistance group said refugees recounted Syrian women and girls being gang-raped in front of their families or assaulted by armed men in public. Others were kidnapped, violated, tortured and killed, the refugee aid group was told.

Syria Launches Deadly Airstrikes in Damascus Suburbs The government has mounted attacks for days to push rebels out of Daraya and neighboring Moadamiyeh, trying to increase the buffer zone around the nearby presidential palace and the neighborhood of Kafr Souseh, where some key security offices are.

Syria: Airstrike on Market Kills and Injures Scores The attack in Azaz, a city near the border with Turkey, was particularly devastating. It followed earlier airstrikes that hit health facilities in the city, making it almost impossible for local medical staff to cope with the scale of the latest emergency. The injured were transported to medical facilities elsewhere in the region, including to an MSF field hospital in the Aleppo area.

Syria rebels seize ‘game-changing’ arms cache Abu Hasan, a commander of Jabhat-al-Nusra, a group taking part in the capture of the base, told Al Jazeera that the weapons fighters seized will be a “game-changer” for the rebels. “These weapons will benefit us a lot in our work on the ground,” he said. “And by God’s will, we will capture more places like that one. They will have great importance on the battlefield.”

Syria: Army Using New Type of Cluster Munition Evidence indicates that Syrian forces used BM-21 Grad multi-barrel rocket launchers to deliver cluster munitions in attacks near the city of Idlib in December 2012 and in Latamneh, a town northwest of Hama, on January 3, 2013. These are the first known instances of Syrian use of ground-based cluster munitions.

Azeris Say Armenians Fleeing Syria Resettled in Separatist Area About 6,000 Syrians have sought refuge in Armenia, the New York Times reported last month, adding that an estimated 80,000 of Syria’s 120,000 Armenians live in Aleppo, where rebels have been battling government forces after pushing into the commercial hub in July.

Special Reports

6 Months Of Combat, And No Victor In Syria’s Biggest City
Some six months after Syria’s rebels tried to storm the country’s largest city, they can claim the eastern part of Aleppo and perhaps 60 percent overall. In the west, the government army has the remaining 40 percent of the city.

Aleppo Dispatch: The Dark Side of the Syrian Opposition
Ibrahim’s plight is indicative of the growing anarchy gripping Syria’s liberated areas. In a country where the rule of law is vanishing as the state increasingly recedes, every fighter is policeman and prosecutor. Some have embraced their newfound powers judiciously. Most, however, have abused it. This exploitation of the war has reduced support for nationalist FSA units. Instead, Syrians are increasingly backing Islamists who largely eschew the material spoils of war.

War crimes in Syria: Time to appeal to International Criminal Court?
Fifty-seven countries on Monday urged the UN Security Council to ask the International Criminal Court at The Hague to investigate possible war crimes in Syria. The call comes as other groups report a spike in sexual violence in Syria.

Syria’s ruined cities (VIDEO)
Six months ago the city of Maarat al-Nu’man was still functioning. Today it’s rubble. It’s a process that has played out over and over across Syria.

Syrian Purgatory
As winter clutches northern Syria, thousands displaced by the civil war take cold comfort in a temporary tent city.

IRGC Shows Its (True) Hand in Syria
By learning the positions of IRGC personnel operating in Syria, however, we can draw at least three important conclusions: first, the IRGC is deploying active duty combat commanders to Syria; second, the Quds Force is drawing from IRGC-GF personnel, indicating that they seek to draw on the Ground Forces’ training and experience conducting internal security and conventional or counter-insurgent operations; finally, several of the IRGC-GF personnel deployed to Syria hail from provincial units that face tribal and ethnic unrest (East Azerbaijan, Khouzestan, and Fars), further indicating that the Quds Force has tapped specific elements of the IRGC-GF for their unique experience in combating internal uprisings.

Fallout from the Fall of Taftanaz
For the rebels, the airbase capture indicates that major regime positions in the provinces are vulnerable. But it also suggests that better-defended areas — such as Damascus and environs, where regime forces are relatively dense and well supported — will remain a serious challenge. In addition, the battle raises questions about the regime’s strategy of maintaining some military presence, in every province. Although this approach allows Assad to maintain the image that he has not lost any province, it is costing the regime a good deal of personnel and equipment while providing the rebels with better arms and ammunition. Currently, several other northern airfields are under attack; if the rebels can overcome their organizational limitations and capture those bases as well, it would be a still greater, even strategic, defeat for the regime.

The Struggle for the Fertile Crescent
Syria’s sectarian civil war has upended the political equation across the region, from Baghdad to Lebanon.

Video Highlights

Leaked video: pro-Assad militias torture a captive by dragging his body around the streets of his neighborhood. At minute 4.44, the man asks: “For the sake of God, just let me say goodbye to my children.” The answer: “Would you let me fuck your wife? If you let me fuck your wife, I’ll let you see your children.” The man says: “My wife is my soul and the crown on my head.” The man gets struck a few more times for his trouble, the video ends with the men deciding to consult their colonel as to what to do next. We do not see the execution, but local activists report that the man was indeed executed. http://youtu.be/_KI_t3IpmU0

Treating the wounded women and children of Kfarzeiteh, Hama http://youtu.be/xV72vJXOQFM ,http://youtu.be/mkmb_F-74FQ

Locals in Mouadamiyah Suburb in Damascus sift through the rubble in search of victims in aftermath of an aerial raid that killed 30 locals http://youtu.be/0_Bgh5VmWCg , http://youtu.be/pAfi5QfLd3M Dead children http://youtu.be/gyHExsuXxKs , http://youtu.be/8tDjgH1Clfg

Meanwhile, to the East, the suburb of Saqba and other towns in Eastern Ghouta are also pounded http://youtu.be/rjTR74ZcurE

Locals sift through the rubble in Haydariyeh Neighborhood in Aleppo City, in search of victims in the aftermath of an aerial bombardment http://youtu.be/gh67U6Krro0 , http://youtu.be/0e2MwOMqNZU The raid http://youtu.be/Y_dKo75oVpY

Rebels might have liberated the Taftanaz military airbase, but the regime took out its revenge on the town of Taftanaz turning it to rubble http://youtu.be/9VDxO24W3Jg Still, rebels are now in a position of several helicopter gunships http://youtu.be/6lR_uxy2X98

The town of Talbisseh, Homs, is hit with incendiary cluster bombs from a passing warplane. Local activists confuse these bombs with phosphorous bombs http://youtu.be/wFs9mlIb6Og

In the town of Saida, Daraa, rebels stormed the headquarters of the pro-Assad militias after weeks of clashes, many were killed on both sides, but rebels managed to captures 20 officers in hope to setting up another prisoners swap. But, according to local activists, pro-regime militias went on a rampage arresting civilians from buses and threatening to kill the lot if rebels failed to free their comrades. Eventually, both sides released their captives. The headquarters set on fire http://youtu.be/wZT3BnsA_aA Some of the rebels killed during the attack http://youtu.be/qU9EdCaYGVM

Thousands Gather to Protest New Anti-Adoption Law

January 14, 2013

By Alexandra Sandacz
Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe

MOSCOW, Russia – On Sunday, thousands of individuals gathered in Moscow to protest Russia’s new law banning Americans from adopting Russian children. A vast number of individuals showed their outrage with President Vladimir Putin and expressed their rage with his government’s ability to make orphans a counter attack on the United States in a political dispute.

Thousands gather to express anger over new anti-adoption law. (Photo Courtesy of RFE/RL)

The new anti-adoption law was rushed through parliament in response to a recent U.S. law that places sanctions on Russian officials suspected of involvement in human rights abuses.

Despite the winter conditions, police reported that an estimated 9,500 people participated in the march, including many with children and baby strollers. However, opposition organizers put the figure at 30,000 or more.

Protestors continuously shouted “shame on the scum,” and hoisted in the air posters of President Vladimir Putin and members of Russia’s parliament who voted for the retaliation law last month.

Individuals who oppose the new adoption ban believe it victimizes children to make a political point. Furthermore, the ban is evidence that Putin and his parliament have lost the moral right to maintain power in Russia.

Former Duma Deputy, Gennady Gudkov, also attended the march. She stated, “I disagree with this law, I think that the authorities now are in a state of hysteria, they are totally lost. They don’t understand what to do with the country, for the country, for the people.

Interestingly, the loudest voice to oppose the new anti-adoption law is a blind Russian high schooler. Natasha Pisarenko blogged sarcastically, “Mr. Putin was ‘saving children from American evil,’ and Russians rarely adopt disabled children because the country’s medical system is backward and can’t take care of them. They [the children] die because Russia doesn’t have modern medicine.”

Concluding, Natasha challenged Mr. Putin to adopt five or 10 children with serious congenital disorders.

The Kremlin, however, has used the adoption controversy to accuse the opposition as “unpatriotic and in the pay of the Americans.”

Likewise, Russian lawmakers justified the adoption ban by 19 deaths of Russian-born children who were adopted by American parents. The law is named after Dima Yakovlev, a boy who died after his adoptive American father left him locked in a sweltering car. Lawmakers believe U.S. Courts and police are too lenient with the deceased children’s American parents.

When Putin signed the law at the end of December, he also ordered improvements of conditions to be made for orphaned children, and the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, encouraged Russians to adopt.

For further information, please see:

The Washington Times – Blind teen sees inequality in Russia’s adoption ban – 14 January 2013

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty – Thousands March in Moscow Against Adoption Ban – 13 January 2013

Reuters – Russians protest against ban on adoptions by Americans – 13 January 2013

USA Today – Thousands march to protest Russia’s adoption ban – 13 January 2013

Iraqi Government Frees 335 Prisoners Held Under Anti-Terrorism Law

January 14, 2013

By Ali Al-Bassam
Impunity Watch Reporter, Middle East

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraq released 335 prisoners held under anti-terrorism laws as a goodwill gesture to Sunni Muslim demonstrators who have been protesting against Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki for the last three weeks.

In an effort to appease Sunni protesters, the government released 335 Iraqi prisoners who were not formally charged but were held under anti-terrorism law. (Photo Courtesy of BBC News)

Deputy Prime Minister Hussein Shahristani announced their release during a ceremony that was held at a Baghdad prison last Monday. The ceremony itself was attended by dozens of freed prisoners, both male and female, who then shook hands with Shahristani after his speech. It was at the ceremony where Shahristani apologized “on behalf of the Iraqi state” to those prisoners who suffered a prolonged detention. “I, and the committee, will follow up all the cases to accelerate the release of the prisoners who are freed or completed the sentence,” said Shahristani, who heads the committee formed to look into the Sunni protesters’ demands.

Officials declined to provide statistics over how many prisoners had finished their jail terms and how many had been detained without being formally charged. An AFP journalist who was present for the mass release said that a number of old men and women were among the prisoners freed. “This is a good step,” said Mehdi Saleh, a prisoner who was held without charges since 2009. “We were really desperate to be released,” he said.

For three weeks, Sunni demonstrators had assembled in Iraq’s Anbar province and other predominately Sunni regions to protest alleged discrimination. Sunni leaders claim that the anti-terrorsim law was used to unfairly target and arrest Sunnis. Aside from the demand to release prisoners held under the anti-terrorism law, protesters had made other demands, some of which are considered extreme. They range from calls for Maliki to resign, to ending the campaign to track down former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party.

Thousands of protesters are still in Anbar, and do not feel that their demands were adequately met. “This is not enough. We didn’t ask for a gesture or a gift for the people. We want to give people their rights,” said Jaber Al-Jaberi, a lawmaker who represents the Sunni-backed Iraqiya block. The protests began on December 23, when officials arrested 9 members of Sunni Finance Minister Rafa Al-Essawi’s security team on terrorism charges. Tensions have been high for both the demonstrators and government officials since the start of the protests, and Maliki has even threatened to direct security forces to forcibly intervene.

Since Hussein’s fall in 2003, many Iraqi Sunnis felt that they have been discriminated since the Shi’ite majority took power. Since then, Iraq’s government, comprised of Shi’ite, Sunni, and ethnic Kurds, have struggled to cooperate together in rebuilding Iraq.

For further information please see:

Al Arabiya — Iraq Frees Hundreds of Detainees to Appease Protesters — 14 January 2013

Al Jazeera — Iraq Releases Hundreds of Prisoners — 14 January 2013

BBC News — Hundreds of Prisoners Released in Iraq — 14 January 2013

Kurdish Globe — Iraq Says it Freed Hundreds of Inmates — 14 January 2013

Reuters — Iraq Frees Prisoners in Gesture to Ease Sunni Protests — 14 January 2013

Failures of Governance Spawned the Rape Crisis

January 14, 2013

by Ramesh Thakur
The Japan Times
Saturday, January 12, 2013

CANBERRA — The shock waves from the pack-rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in New Delhi continue to reverberate in India and around the world. The pathology of rape is not rooted in local culture. A nation does not rise in collective revulsion at normal but rather at unacceptable behavior.

The explanation for the rape epidemic lies in accumulating failures of governance. Successive governments have responded to crises with patchwork solutions, postponing structural reforms to tomorrow. That tomorrow has arrived with a vengeance and the government is at a loss on what to do.

There are four reasons for the extraordinary outpouring of anger: This attack was particularly horrific and savage. It was perpetrated on the streets of the nation’s capital in a bus that drove through several police checkpoints. The victim was representative of the new aspirational India. And she proved remarkably fearless in fighting her attackers, and tenacious in clinging to life and hope that evoked admiration for her courage.

The problem of rape, especially against the poor, outcast and tribal women, is not recent and there have been enough high-profile cases that a government with a social conscience would have acted decisively by now. Public policy failings have produced the world’s biggest pool of poor, sick, starving and illiterate people. Institutional failures of governance mean their suffering is aggravated.

When the core problem is lack of implementation, new legislation is not the solution. India suffers from too many laws that are confusing, provide perverse incentives for police and judicial corruption, and foster and embed a disrespect for the principle of the rule of law. India needs fewer laws that are easier to understand, simpler to interpret, habitually obeyed and routinely enforced when challenged.

Many are demanding mandatory death sentences. India lacks the courage of conviction either to abolish the death penalty on principle, or implement it firmly in practice. Afzal Guru from Kashmir, convicted of the terrorist attack on parliament in 2001, with legal avenues exhausted in the Supreme Court eight years ago, is yet to be hanged because the Congress government fears an electoral backlash from Muslim voters.

A person was convicted and sentenced to death in 2002 for the rape-murder of a five-year old girl in 2001. In May last year, India’s woman president commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment.

A new feudal system is being created as the political process is captured by a narrow and self-perpetuating ruling class that is increasingly inbred, criminal and out of touch with the changing nation.

Patrick French’s analysis shows that of the 545 federal members of Parliament (MPs), 156 had hereditary connections. Of women MPs, 70 percent were in family seats. Every MP under 30, and 65 percent of the 66 MPs in their 30s, had a family connection. Of Congress Party MPs in their 30s, 86 percent inherited a family seat.

The president’s son, of the notorious “dented and painted” crowd of women protesters quote, is an inheritor MP. With the inheritor MPs being 10 years younger on average than others, this group will have a decade’s advantage in Indian political life. If the trend continues, almost all MPs will be hereditary.

Around one fourth of MPs face criminal charges. They can only be debarred on conviction. Because court cases can be indefinitely delayed, in practice being implicated in serious crimes is no bar to being an MP for life.

Courts are clogged. In Maharashtra — the worst on this count — only 240,000 of the 3.1 million cases of people in prison or awaiting trial were settled last year.

At current caseload settlement rates, India’s 15,000 judges (another 3,000 posts are unfilled) will require over 300 years just to clear the backlog of 30 million pending cases. Against India’s recommended norm of 50 judges per million population, it has just 10.

Public officials operate with colonial structures and mind-sets, lording it over subjects instead of serving citizens. India’s bureaucrats are rated the most inefficient in Asia. The police are corrupt, distrusted and feared by those who need the most protection against powerful predators.

Ruchika Girhotra, a 14-year old girl, was sexually molested by a senior police officer in 1990. He rose to be the state’s top cop while she and her family were harassed and victimized for pursuing the case. She killed herself in 1993.

Only in 2009 did justice finally catch up with the police officer, and even then with a risible six-month sentence that saw him smirking as he left court on bail pending an appeal. What is especially dispiriting about this is just how many individuals and institutions that could and should have protected her just went with the flow.

India is a laboratory for demonstrating the law of perverse consequences. Legislative quotas for women will be another means of feathering the family nest by packing parliaments with the “bibi, beti and bahu” brigade (wives, daughters and daughters-in-law). What’s required is exactly the opposite: opening the doors of political office to the talented young people of the new dynamic India who aspire to public office for serving a higher social purpose.

Creating special courts for speedy trials of rape cases with toughened conditions for defendants will impose even further delays in the administration of criminal justice in general. Powerful Congress Party politicians who incited the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi in 1984 that killed up to 3,000 are yet to face their day in court. Until they do, Sikhs will not reach emotional closure on those traumatic events.

Some victims will get swifter justice under fast-tracked procedures in special courts. Some people will threaten to or file false cases as a convenient tool of extortion against political opponents, social rivals, wealthy neighbors, rejected suitors, property disputants, etc. And the police and judges will have yet another weapon to extract bribes from all sides. Instant justice is usually the hallmark of kangaroo courts. India must build an efficient criminal justice system for everyone concerned, not subvert due process to appease the mob.

The glib call to name a tough new law after the victim will import American custom that is alien and offensive to the British legal tradition. It would be better to set up a memorial sculpture to the unknown rape victim along the route of that bus of infinite sadness.