Trafficking turns people into merchandise. Credit: Amnesty International

In contravention of international law, in Brazil trafficking in human beings remains invisible and unpunished, which encourages the practice of trafficking for sexual exploitation, forced labour, illegal adoption and the trade in human organs, according to experts.

Local laws punish drug trafficking more severely than human trafficking. The sale of drugs carries penalties of between five and 15 years, while trafficking of persons for sexual exploitation is punished with a maximum sentence of eight years, with work release allowed.

“Human trafficking is still an invisible crime. What we have here now is real impunity,” judge Rinaldo Aparecido Barros, a member of the National Council of Justice’s working group on human trafficking, told IPS.

An average of 1,000 persons a year are recruited in Brazil and sent abroad, the public prosecutor’s office said at a public hearing on “Tráfico de pessoas: prevenção, repressão, acolhimento às vítimas e parcerias” – Trafficking in persons: Prevention, repression, care of victims and (illegal) associations – that it held in this city on Friday, May 17.

The goal was to gather and share information about combating human trafficking and to organise joint action to prevent and crack down on the crime. The meeting focused on Brazil’s role as a source country of victims for other parts of the world.

Brazil is also a destination country for victims of human trafficking, and there is internal trafficking of Brazilians for exploitation within the country’s borders as well.

In the last three years, 3,000 Brazilians were transported abroad and subjected mainly to sexual exploitation and slave labour, participants at the meeting described.

“This is a significant number. A large group of people have been deprived of their dignity. The thousands of cases documented every year do not represent the total, because we do not know how many cases escaped our notice,” said federal deputy attorney-general Raquel Elias Ferreira Dodge.

The actual number of victims sent abroad by human trafficking rings is unknown, participants at the meeting agreed.

“We have to work more effectively so that these crimes are condemned without delay. The crime of trafficking in persons injures human dignity,” said Dodge, who is a member of the Higher Council of the federal public prosecutor’s office (MPF).

She said, “Slave labour negates the personhood of the individual and converts the victim into merchandise that can be smuggled and trafficked.”

But hindering the fight against human trafficking in Brazil is the fact that it is only a crime when it leads to sexual exploitation or slave labour, Erick Blatt, the representative of the federal police in Rio de Janeiro, told IPS.

“It is very hard to identify the crime; investigations can only be initiated on the basis of reports, without the certainty that illegality can be proved,” said Blatt, who is also the representative of Interpol, the international criminal police organisation, for the state of Rio de Janeiro.

Moreover, when it comes to international trafficking, “most people go voluntarily to the place where they are exploited: the majority do not know that their passports are going to be taken away,” he said.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) defines human trafficking as “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, for the purpose of exploitation.”

The forms of coercion cited are “abduction, fraud, deception, the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person.”

People smuggling, on the other hand, is limited to profiting from covertly transporting migrants, at their request, from one country to another where legal entry would normally be denied at the border. This is illegal, but no deception may be involved.

Article 231 of Brazil’s criminal code defines the crime of sexual exploitation, and article 149 describes subjection to slave-like conditions. Both crimes are punished relatively leniently, with lighter sentences than for other offences.

The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organised Crime, adopted in 2000 and ratified by Brazil in 2003, specifically identifies human trafficking crimes and proposes wide-ranging punishments, which Brazil has still not incorporated in its laws.

“We are going against the flow of international legislation. In Brazil, the issue has been inadequately treated. Human trafficking is a crime against humanity that robs people of their human dignity,” Judge Barros complained.

He said the best measures for fighting human trafficking were those that block the assets of the trafficking rings, in order to attack their economic flank.

Trafficking in persons is run by complex international crime syndicates that, in Brazil, recruit poor women who have no opportunities for a better life, lawyer Michelle Gueraldi of the Trama Project, an umbrella group for NGOs that combat human trafficking, told IPS.

These women emigrate voluntarily, often out of the desire to improve their lives, and end up being exploited in Spain, the United States, Portugal and Caribbean countries, among others, she said.

Blatt added that Brazil, in turn, is a destination country for women victims of human trafficking from Eastern Europe, especially Hungary and Poland.

“Trafficking in persons is a violation of human rights. The Trama Project is working on prevention and on victim protection. We also receive denunciations of cases, and we find that the majority of recruiters are persons known to and trusted by the victims,” Gueraldi said.

In February the Brazilian government established its Second Plan to Combat Trafficking in Persons, but the challenge is to put these policies into practice, she said.

Blatt admitted that tracing victims of human trafficking across borders is difficult for the local police and for Interpol.

“If communications between the police and the prosecutors are slow here in Brazil, imagine what communications are like between police forces internationally,” he said.

Human trafficking is extremely lucrative. In Europe alone it generates some 3.2 billion dollars a year, according to speakers at the meeting.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) says there are at least 2.5 million victims of human trafficking worldwide. A survey by UNODC found that 58 percent of respondents were victims of sexual exploitation and 36 percent of slave labour.

The ceasefire line in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS

Israel is being drawn into Syria’s quagmire as it threatens to act further on transfers of “game-changing” weapons to hostile protagonists involved in Syria’s civil war, be they Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, Jihadist Sunni rebels, or loyalist forces of President Bashar al Assad.

The country does so reluctantly while knowing full well the consequences of such actions. Within weeks, Israel has expanded its list of “tie-breaking”, “game-changing” and “deterrence-diminishing” weapons defined as a “red line” to its security.

Initially, a red line was drawn on any foe gaining control over Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal. These weapons, while being used increasingly in the war, are for the time being still secured by Assad’s forces.

But on Jan. 30, when Israeli warplanes destroyed a convoy carrying surface-to-air S-17 missiles supplied by Iran and bound for Hezbollah, it became clear that another type of red line was being crossed, from Israel’s standpoint.

Though it didn’t formally take responsibility for the airstrike, Israel declared it would not tolerate the transfer of advanced weapons to Hezbollah, with whom it fought an indecisive war in 2006.

Meanwhile, Iran hopes that greater Hezbollah firepower will deter Israel from striking Iran’s nuclear sites, should it decide to do so.

On May 4 and May 5, Israel followed up by bombing shipments of Iran-made Fateh-110 missiles destined for Hezbollah.

Unlike rockets currently in Hezbollah’s arsenal, the more accurate surface-to-surface Fateh-110 missile is capable of reaching strategic targets south of the Tel Aviv metropolitan area in Israel.

In the last decade, Syria has chosen to ignore Israeli attacks on its territory, including one against its nuclear reactor (Deir ez-Zour, 2007) and another on Hezbollah’s chief of operations, Imad Mughniyeh (Damascus, 2008).

Yet in the wake of the latest airstrike – perhaps because the U.S. Pentagon confirmed Israel’s responsibility and thus, Syria couldn’t possibly keep mute – this time, Syria threatened to retaliate.

To add credibility to Damascus’ threat, Hezbollah also threatens to open a new front on the Syrian Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967.

Following the 1974 Separation of Forces Agreement signed by Israel and Syria, the Golan Heights have largely been quiet, aside from occasional and unintentional mortar fire in the past six months leaking from battles in Syria through the ceasefire line and resulting in Israel’s responding with artillery fire.

Israeli security analysts believe that Assad won’t dare risking engaging a far more formidable enemy than the rebels, even by proxy, while fighting for his own survival. But they won’t say it out loud.

Ten days after the last bombing, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, flew to Sochi for an urgent meeting with Vladimir Putin to try to persuade the Russian president to freeze his country’s commitment to supply anti-aircraft S-300 batteries to the Syrian army.

S-300 anti-aircraft missiles can threaten Israel’s airspace, as they’re capable of intercepting Israeli jets upon takeoff.

The provision of S-300 batteries is a long-standing issue between Israel and Russia, and it’s still unclear as to whether Russia will honour the arms deal with Syria.

Netanyahu’s office says the meetingwth Putin was at the Israeli prime minister’s request, perhaps because other sources indicate that Putin summoned the Israeli leader to warn him of the perils of further interference in Syria.

After all, no one wants Syria to implode – let alone explode and destabilise the entire region. And it’s no secret that Russia is determined to keep Assad in power.

Evidence of such determination are the recent leaks to U.S. newspapers of Russian warships patrolling the Mediterranean Sea near Tartus, Russia’s naval base in Syria, and of new shipments of Russian-made Yakhont anti-ship missiles to Syria.

These shipments serve as another “game-changer” that could target Israel’s offshore natural gas drilling rigs, at a time when Russia has agreed with the United States to host an international conference on Syria next month.

To complicate matters further, it’s now becoming patently obvious that Israel’s ever-evolving red lines, if taken to their logical conclusion, could lead to targeting not only shipments of advanced weapons systems and their recipient – Assad’s army – but also, albeit indirectly, the supplier itself: Russia.

Israel’s decision-makers are engaged in a balancing act between their preference for “Israel’s man in Damascus” (as a former Mossad Intelligence chief, Efraim Halevy, recently called Assad in Foreign Affairs) and Israel’s red lines.

Responding to Syria’s threats by words of an “official” in the New York Times, Israel threatened Assad with impending demise.

Correlatively, another “official” in the Times of London declared, “Better the devil we know than the demons we can only imagine if Syria falls into chaos.”

When asked which side he favoured in the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1989), then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir quipped, “We want them both to win.” Similarly, Syria’s civil war seems to serve Israel’s interests, as long as it’s a tie.

How Israel can enforce its red lines – by neutralising missiles shipments as they’re being delivered to, or assembled in, Syria? How would Moscow react? How would Damascus react? – is no longer so simple.

After all, if Israel and Russia both want Assad to stay in power, then why try to dissuade Russia from boosting the embattled Syrian leader’s loyal forces? The answer comes almost inadvertently from the “official” in the Times of London: Israel “underestimated Assad’s staying power”.

Meanwhile, the United States still grapples with how to react to the use of chemical weapons in Syria – a “game-changer” as far as President Barack Obama is concerned, yet not one that changes their Israeli ally’s hands-off approach to the civil war.

Caught in a miniature cold war between Russia and the United States, Israel risks sinking into the civil war’s quagmire and allowing Iran to evade further scrutiny on its nuclear programme while the international community is preoccupied with the situation on the ground in Syria.

Jorge Rafael Videla swears in as the head of the military junta on Mar. 24, 1976. Credit: Public Domain

Thirty-seven years after leading the coup d’etat that ushered in the most brutal dictatorship in the history of Argentina, former army commander Jorge Rafael Videla died in a common prison Friday.

Convicted in several cases for crimes against humanity, the former dictator was found in his cell without a pulse, according to the medical report from the Federal Penitentiary Service. He was 87 years old.

Videla was serving several sentences in the Complejo Penitenciario Federal Número 2 in the city of Marcos Paz in the eastern province of Buenos Aires, in a section of the prison where he was held with dozens of other human rights violators from the 1976-1983 dictatorship.

“I never killed anyone,” Videla stated. In every conviction against him he was found to be the “intellectual author” of crimes against humanity. He himself admitted as much in the book “The Dictator” by journalists María Seoane and Vicente Muleiro. “There was no lack of control. I was above everyone,” he told the writers.

Human rights groups, the families of victims and observers of the fight against impunity for the de facto regime’s crimes said Videla’s death in a common prison was a powerful symbol, but did not represent the end of a cycle and was merely one more landmark in the process.

The executive director of Amnesty International in Argentina, Mariela Belski, told IPS that Videla “will be remembered for the (dictatorship’s) most brutal and appalling excesses.”

“But the most important thing here is that justice was done, Videla was convicted, and he died in prison,” she said, stressing that Argentina “took a major stride forward in bringing these crimes to trial, and became a model for the region and for the global South.”

But Belski warned that the death of the dictator “does not bring the process to a close. This is an ongoing process, which Argentina is spearheading, but which must continue in the country and in the region.”

Videla’s death in prison “is a very important symbolic development,” Víctor Abramovich, executive secretary of the Institute of Public Policies on Human Rights of South America’s Mercosur (Southern Common Market) trade bloc, told IPS.

“Ten years ago this was unthinkable. Today it is the result of a process of regional scope, a process that is moving forward at different speeds, under different laws, but is generating very interesting debates throughout Latin America,” said the representative of the bloc made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Abramovich, a former vice president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, said the fact that the former dictator died in a common jail “reaffirms the principle of equality before the law.”

“This process, which is moving ahead at varying rates, is occurring in Chile, Brazil, Peru, Colombia and Uruguay, as well as Guatemala, where (former dictator José Efraín) Ríos Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison (on May 10),” he said.

In Argentina, 422 human rights violators, mainly members of the military, have been tried since 1983. Of that total, 378 were convicted and 44 acquitted, according to the prosecution unit for the coordination and monitoring of cases involving human rights violations.

In the last two years, trials have picked up speed, thanks to measures such as the accumulation of cases committed in each torture centre. In 2012, 24 trials ended in 134 convictions and 17 acquittals.

As part of the fight against impunity, the organisation Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo has managed to identify more than 100 sons and daughters of political prisoners who had been kidnapped as children along with their parents or were born in captivity.

Some of those stolen children now hold public posts – as national legislators, city councillors or executive branch officials, like the secretary of human rights, Martín Fresneda.

In 1976, then army chief Videla led the junta made up of the commanders of the three military forces after the coup that overthrew the democratic government of Isabel Perón.

Under his leadership (1976-1981), thousands of people were kidnapped, tortured, killed and forcibly disappeared. Government records that are gradually being updated account for more than 11,000 victims of forced disappearance, while human rights organisations put the total number at 30,000.

When the regime collapsed in 1983, the former junta members were tried. In 1985, Videla was sentenced to life in prison for 66 murders, 306 kidnappings, 93 cases of torture and 26 cases of theft.

He spent five years in a military prison along with other officers, enjoying privileges that were denounced by the media and human rights groups. But in 1990 they were pardoned by then president Carlos Menem (1989-1999).

However, Videla was arrested again in 1998 in connection with the theft of children born to political prisoners – a crime he had never been convicted of and thus was never pardoned for.

But it was the declaration of the presidential pardon and the two late 1980s amnesty laws as unconstitutional that reactivated a number of human rights cases against him over the last decade. In 2010 he was handed a live sentence for crimes committed in the central province of Córdoba and in 2012 he was sentenced to 50 years for the theft of children.

He was also tried for crimes against humanity committed by the regime in the central province of Santa Fe and the northern province of Tucumán.

In the trials, Videla did not recognise the authority of the civilian courts to try him, and complained that he was a “political prisoner.”

He did so once again on Tuesday May 14, in another case related to Operation Condor, a coordinated plan among the military governments that ruled Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s, aimed at tracking down, capturing, exchanging and eliminating left-wing opponents.

On his last appearance in court he looked unwell, with difficulty walking and a trembling voice.

But he never repented in public. On the contrary, he said he gave the orders for the crimes committed by his subordinates.

In his last statements to the press, to the Spanish magazine Cambio 16 in March, he urged young officers to rise up against the government of Cristina Fernández “in defence of the institutions of the republic.”

Mandeep Tiwana, policy and advocacy manager of CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation. Credit: Mandeep Tiwana

Despite the tall talk at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid and Development Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, today NGOs, trade unions, faith based groups, social movements and community based organisations working to expose rights violations and corruption remain in a state of siege in many parts of the world.

Reports by U.N. officials and respected civil society organisations show that false prosecutions and murderous attacks on activists are rife and threatening to derail international development objectives even as we debate a new framework to replace the Millennium Development Goals, which expire in 2015.

In fact, moves are being championed by some governments to limit civil society participation at high-level meetings of the U.N. General Assembly through a process whereby states can issue politically motivated objections to the inclusion of particular NGOs in key discussions.

Unfortunately, legal restrictions on free speech, formation of civic organisations and the right to protest peacefully appear to be on the rise despite the rhetoric of engaging civil society in global decision making forums.

In many countries civil society groups are being prevented from accessing funding from international sources, as highlighted by the U.N.’s special expert on freedom of assembly and association in his latest report.

In Russia, non-profit advocacy groups receiving international funding are being subjected to intrusive inspections to ensure compliance with a controversial law that requires NGOs to register under the highly offensive nomenclature of “foreign agents”, or face sanctions.

A draft law currently pending in Bangladesh seeks to implement a cumbersome approval process for civil society organisations receiving foreign funding, in an attempt to discourage criticism of the government.

Egypt is mulling over a new law that would allow intelligence and security agencies to exert control over independent civil society groups.

Meanwhile, Ethiopia’s most prolific blogger is serving an 18-year sentence for writing about the implications of the Arab Spring for his country. A respected Laotian activist is missing after he criticised state-sponsored displacement of local communities.

In Saudi Arabia, founders of the Saudi Association for Civil and Political Rights have been handed 10 and 11-year sentences for “breaking allegiance to the King.” China continues to incarcerate dissident writers calling for democratic reform, including Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiobo.

The situation is alarming in fragile and conflict-affected states. As the civil war rages on in Syria, a number of peaceful civil society activists and journalists are being imprisoned and persecuted in violation of international human rights law.

The actions of Colombian right-wing paramilitary groups have become so murderous that the country is now the deadliest place in the world for trade unionists.

Women’s rights activists challenging patriarchy and religious fundamentalism in Pakistan are gunned down with frightening regularity, while activists from Sri Lanka and Bahrain voicing concerns at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva often face reprisals upon return to their home countries.

In Cameroon and Uganda activists seeking to advance gay rights are not only socially ostracised but also subjected to death threats on a regular basis to prevent them from carrying out their work.

Even in so-called mature democracies, expressing dissent remains an activity fraught with negative consequences. A section of the environmental group Forest Ethics Canada decided to give up its charitable status, including tax advantages, in order to protect itself from intrusive inspections after being blamed by the conservative government of “obstructing” the country’s economic development.

Julian Assange, founder of the activist website WikiLeaks, continues to be hounded for his exposé of U.S. diplomatic cables and, arguably, doing what most investigative journalists do.

In the United Kingdom, the practice of police spies penetrating the environmental movement has prompted a sharp rebuke from the U.N., whose expert on freedom of assembly and association, Maina Kiai, expressed “deep concern” in January about police officers infiltrating non-violent groups who were not engaged in any criminal activities.

As evidence from CIVICUS’ State of Civil Society Report 2013 shows, promises made in Busan about creating an “enabling” environment for CSOs were ignored as soon as the proverbial ink had dried.

With discussions on the post 2015 development agenda well underway, influential civil society groups are urging the U.N.’s High Level Panel to explicitly recognise the centrality of an enabling environment for civil society in any new formulation of internationally agreed development goals.

While politicians are currently preoccupied with kick-starting or maintaining economic growth, there is a real danger that civil society’s right and ability to engage decision makers in various forums will be further limited.

If global development goals are to succeed, civil society needs to be able to operate free from fear of reprisals for advancing legitimate if uncomfortable concerns. After all, civil society groups contribute substantially to development strategies and help find innovative solutions to complex developmental challenges.

More importantly, they help ensure the representation of a wide range of voices, in particular those of the vulnerable and marginalised in development debates. Perhaps this is why they are being persecuted.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

The people of Cunduacán and Huimanguillo, which have a combined population of 300,000, will present a class action lawsuit against Pemex in June.

Oil rigs and pumps. Credit: Bigstock

“There have been several harmful effects; we have carried out tests on soils, sediments and water and we are about to receive the results,” Marisa Jacott, the head of Fronteras Comunes (Common Borders), an environmental NGO, told IPS.

Fronteras Comunes and the Asociación Ecológica Santo Tomás (Santo Tomás Ecological Association) are providing legal advice to the local population, mainly small farmers and fisherfolk, who have incurred great losses due to oil spills and gas explosions.

Mexico’s 2011 Class Action Law allows individuals and the federal consumer protection agency to sue state and private companies. However, the law does not provide for reparations.

The oil industry has been active in Tabasco since the early 1950s, and expanded there from the 1970s onwards with the construction of petrochemical plants, pipeline networks and storage facilities, sparking an economic boom.

But the boom did not result in benefits for the local communities. Instead, the oil industry displaced traditional activities like banana farming and cattle ranching.

The oil industry is active in 13 of Tabasco’s 17 municipalities, producing 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) – of a national total of 2.5 million bpd – according to the Mexican Petroleum Institute (IMP).

“There is environmental pollution and crop destruction, and there are soils that have lost their fertility. This means that harvests are not as abundant as they were before,” Lorena Sánchez, head of the Tabasco Human Rights Committee (CODEHUTAB), an NGO that has received complaints from local people about these problems, told IPS.

“It has affected people’s diets and caused respiratory health problems as well as blood and skin diseases,” she said.

Since 2011, CODEHUTAB has brought four lawsuits to the federal environmental protection agency, PROFEPA, that have resulted in fines for Pemex, but not in reparations for victims in local communities.

The most recent case, this year, was related to seven gas flares burning in the municipality of Paraíso, where CODEHUTAB took blood samples from 50 children between the ages of seven and 15. Ten percent of the samples had chromosome alterations, linked by the epidemiologists to oil industry activity.

PROFEPA estimates there are an average of 20 crude spills a year in Tabasco. Between 2008 and 2012, the environment ministry recorded 102 sites contaminated by environmental emergencies in the country caused by Pemex, including three in Tabasco.

In addition to Tabasco, the eastern and southeastern states of Veracruz, Tamaulipas, Hidalgo and Puebla and the highways connecting them to Mexico City are regarded as vulnerable to oil industry activity.

The oil industry in this region produces pollution with heavy metals, ozone, sulphur dioxide, nitric oxide, volatile aromatic compounds like benzene, hydrogen sulphide, salts, ammonia, cadmium and acids, all of which are harmful to the environment and human health, the NGOs complain.

Manuel Pinkus-Rendón and Alicia Contreras, academic researchers at the Autonomous University of Yucatán, concluded in a study published last year that “the social and environmental fabric of Tabasco reflects a regional development potential considerably below that which existed over 60 years ago, as a result of environmental degradation.”

For their study “Impacto socioambiental de la industria petrolera en Tabasco: el caso de Chontalpa” (Social and environmental impact of the oil industry in Tabasco: The case of Chontalpa), the authors interviewed 200 residents of four towns in the municipality of Cárdenas, 65 percent of whom expressed negative views about oil industry activity, especially because of the pollution and destruction it causes.

“It is a case that has not been addressed. We want the judges to have the fewest possible reasons to reject it,” said Jacott, of Fronteras Comunes.

In April, the local residents presented a complaint to the National Commission on Human Rights. In 2004 they had filed a legal complaint against Pemex in the attorney general’s office, but it went nowhere.

The environmental organisations and local residents have spent two years building their case. The next step will be legal action over damage suffered in the adjacent state of Veracruz, another major oil-producing region.

“We want them to take the required preventive measures. All Pemex does is supposedly carry out remediation of the damage, but it does not invest in maintaining the pipelines and guarding the area,” CODEHUTAB’s Sánchez complained.

The organisations are asking for an assessment of the state of ecosystems in Tabasco, and the dissemination of Pemex’s policies and guidelines for preventing leaks, addressing environmental contingencies and cleaning up polluted sites.

They are also calling for the gradual replacement of fossil fuels with alternative energy sources, as well as regular measurements of the main atmospheric pollutants in affected areas.

Ibrahim Makhlouf stands on the roof of his home in the West Bank, from where he can see the Israeli settlement outpost of Shalhevet Farm. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D'Amours/IPS

Ibrahim Makhlouf reaches for two wooden planks lying in the hallway and places them expertly in an L-shape along the seams of his front door.

“Open [the door],“ he beckons, knowing that doing so is nearly impossible. “Every night, we put this here,” he explains. “For the settlers.”

Makhlouf’s home sits on the outskirts of the West Bank village of Asira Al-Qibliya, only 500 metres from the illegal Israeli settlement outpost of Shalhevet Farm, an offshoot of the equally illegal settlement of Yitzhar.

Makhlouf told IPS that his house is attacked by Israeli settlers at least two times per week and has been vandalised over 100 times. The windows on Makhlouf’s two-story home all have bars on the outside to prevent them from shattering when settlers throw stones.

“When we see the settlers, we send the children to another house. What can we do?” Makhlouf, who lives with his wife and six children, said. “We’re afraid. There is no safety.”

Since the Shalhevet Farm outpost was established in 1999, Makhlouf said he has been barred from accessing some 16 dunams of his family’s land, which was traditionally used to plant figs, grapes, olives and other trees, and from using a freshwater spring.

“It is my father and grandfather’s land, but now settlers are planting, and I can’t even enter it. They want to confiscate the land and houses and control the whole area to extend their settlements,” Makhlouf said.

“The [Israeli] government encourages them, with money and protection from the soldiers,” he added. “The government and the settlers are one.”

Illegal settlements

In recent weeks, international actors, including the United States, have renewed efforts to get Israel to freeze settlement construction in the West Bank in order to restart long-stalled peace talks with the Palestinians. On Apr. 30, the Arab League said it would support potential land swaps along the 1967 Green Line in negotiations of final borders between Israel and a future Palestinian state.

But the growth of Israeli settlement outposts in the West Bank, like Shalhevet Farm, has been almost entirely omitted from the conversation. Such outposts are often precursors to full-fledged settlements, both of which are illegal under international law. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention also forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to the territory it occupies.

For Palestinians, both settlements and outposts have the same negative impact on their lives. But the Israeli government views only outposts, not settlements, as illegal, sometimes dismantling them for being built without the required permits and then relocating residents to nearby settlements.

Settlements are generally much larger than outposts and receive full services and infrastructure, although the Israeli government does also provide outposts, which generally begin as a few caravans on a hilltop, with basic services such as water and electricity. The Israeli army also protects outpost residents, as it does all other Israeli settlers.

Israeli settlement outposts were first built in the mid-1990s, during a freeze on settlement construction imposed by then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. A few years later, Israeli leader Ariel Sharon famously urged Israeli settlers to seize every hilltop. “Whatever you grab will be ours. What you don’t grab will not be ours,” he said.

In 2005, at the behest of the Israeli government, lawyer Talia Sasson reported that the outposts are illegal under Israeli law. To be considered legal, a settlement must be established by a government decision, be built on “state land”, possess a building plan, and have clear, territorial boundaries.

Outposts fail to meet these criteria, although earlier this week, the Israeli government announced plans to examine whether it could retroactively legalise four outposts.

Expansion for control

Today about 100 Israeli settlement outposts dot the West Bank. While most begin small, they develop quickly, and many have cement houses, paved roads, playgrounds and daycare centres.

In the case of Shalhevet Farm, Peace Now, an Israeli non-governmental organisation that works against Israeli settlements in the West Bank, found that the Israeli Ministry of Housing and Construction spent 1.1 million Israeli shekels (over 300,000 U.S. dollars) to connect the outpost to basic infrastructure. The national water company, Mekorot, provides it with water.

Many outposts also serve an important geopolitical aim.

According to Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, some outposts aim “to create Jewish continuity and connect isolated settlements with settlement blocs, in order to prevent future evacuation. Even though each of these outposts is home to only a few dozens of families, the outposts can completely control the land or the road around it.”

Violence against Palestinians and their property emanating from settlement outposts has also been well documented. After a Palestinian man killed an Israeli settler earlier this month near Nablus, Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq documented 13 settler attacks against Palestinians in one week in the area.

38-year-old Munir Jibreel Qaddous, a farmer from the West Bank village of Burin, told IPS about being viciously attacked by Israeli settlers in 2011, while the Israeli army and police looked on and did nothing.

White caravans of the settlement outpost of Bracha B, an extension of the Bracha settlement, overlook much of Burin’s farmland, and settlers regularly vandalise Palestinian property and attack their homes in the village, Qaddous explained.

Data collected by Yesh Din shows that between 2005-2012, over 91 percent of complaints filed by Palestinians against acts of Israeli settler violence were closed without an indictment. Of this, 84 percent were closed due to the Israeli police’s failure to properly investigate the crimes.

“All of them are the same,” said Qaddous, referring to Israeli settlers living in settlements and unauthorized outposts. He told IPS that he witnessed the Bracha B outpost’s construction and gradual expansion.

“In 1999, a watch-tower was put up, then trailers were erected. Then, there were 15 cement houses. Before the settlers came, they put [in] a road, electricity and water,” he said.

“This area is a very strategic area of the West Bank. After five or ten years, maybe you will see settlers on every hill.”

The Serbian Orthodox Church is highly influential in Serbia. Above, the Cathedral of Saint Sava in Belgrade. Credit: George Groutas/CC by 2.0

The influential Serbian Orthodox Church publicly crossed a line recently when two of its top clergymen took part in a Belgrade rally with messages amounting to direct threats against the lives of government officials.

The rally last Friday was organised by opponents of Serbia’s recent and historic agreement with Kosovo that essentially ceded authority over Kosovo’s Serb population to Pristina.

“We pray for the dead souls of government and parliament, and may all their sins be forgiven,” Archbishop Amfilohije told some 3,000 ultra nationalists who gathered at the central Republic Square.

Amfilohije’s words were followed by a warning from Bishop Atanasije to current Prime Minister Ivica Dacic. “The prime minister speaks about real politics only,” the bishop said. “That is how Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic [assassinated in 2003] used to speak, and we all know how he ended.”

The agreement with Pristina was signed last month under the auspices of the European Union (EU) and called for the normalisation of relations between Serbia and its former province.

It also caused deep disturbance among some 100,000 Serbs who live in Kosovo and refuse to recognise the authority of Pristina, despite their largely having autonomy.

A tense history

Populated by 1.7 million ethnic Albanians, Kosovo was part of Serbia in the former Yugoslavia, which fell apart in 1991, and was under direct rule of Belgrade, with a Serb minority holding power until 1999.

In the 1990s, armed rebellion against Belgrade led to bloody repression by the security forces of former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic that left more than 13,000 ethnic Albanians dead. The bloodshed was stopped by 11 weeks of NATO bombing in Serbia in 1999 and by the introduction of United Nations rule over the former Serbian province.

After building its first democratic institutions, Kosovo declared independence in 2008 and has so far been recognised as a state by 96 nations.

But Kosovo is also the cradle of the Serb medieval state, embedded in the hearts and minds of millions of Serbs as the home of their rulers and Orthodox Christianity. Some of the oldest and most important monasteries and churches are in Kosovo, despite the fact that ethnic Albanians have become a majority there.

“Nothing can justify the scandalous behaviour of two bishops at the rally,” religion analyst and author Mirko Djordjevic told IPS. “Speeches by two SPC [Serbian Orthodox Church] primates are unprecedented and will certainly bear influence on future relations between the government and the church.”

“It’s high time the SPC stopped meddling into affairs of state,” commented leading Belgrade daily Blic. “The reputation of this institution has now been burnt to the ground, and its hate speech should be sanctioned.”

Public outcry and anger were most visible on media sites, where hundreds of visitors, even those who identified themselves as believers, posted protests against the clergy’s vitriolic speeches.

The role of the church

The SPC became influential in Serbia when the former Yugoslavia collapsed and Milosevic loosened his communist anti-religion grip for the sake of gaining allies in his wars of the 1990s. The church joined him, following the official policy of Serbia that said it was only “defending Serbs living outside [the] mother country”, meaning in Croatia and Bosnia. Milosevic’s wars led to the deaths of more than 200,000 non-Serbs and deeply tarnished Serbia’s reputation.

Religious curriculum was introduced in Serbian schools in 2001, as the regime that replaced Milosevic’s wanted good relations with the SPC.

“The church used the void left by [the] collapse of previous values and lack of new ones in the war chaos of the nineties,” Zivica Tucic, an independent analyst and expert on religious matters, told IPS. During political and economic transitions and crises, “people have nowhere to turn to but the church,” he explained.

According to the 2011 census, 94 percent of 7.3 million Serbs were Orthodox, but analysts say that most people consider religion and nationality to be equal. As Milan Vukomanovic, a sociologist from the Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy, said, “The church has taken its place in the past two decades and one can hardly expect it to leave the space it obtained.”

“The phenomenon arose after direct ethnic mobilisation in former Yugoslavia in the wars of the nineties,” he added. Those wars were fought along ethno-religion lines – among Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Bosniaks.

“Despite the fact that the war has ended many years ago, we still don’t see any engagement of the SPC in reconciliation, aid to the poor, et cetera,” Vukomanovic said.

The SPC clerics were widely engaged in wars in Croatia and Bosnia. Some of them went to battle or blessed troops that committed war crimes in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, where about 8,000 Bosniaks were massacred in 1995.

Although the SPC is not immune to other kinds of scandals, Djordjevic pointed out that the “top clergy never goes to court”, and court practise in Serbia is to allow statute of limitations for cases involving clergy.

The SPC also has a court of its own, the so-called “canon court”, which debates certain cases and suppresses scandal by retiring or mildly disgracing controversial priests. Cases involving paedophilia or embezzlement of church funds rarely end before regular courts.

Despite video evidence of a bishop with young men, for example, or moving stories of suicide attempts by victims of Pahomije, a Serbian bishop, little was done to reach justice. Similarly, a purser at the Patriarchate of Belgrade who stole more than 1.5 million dollars also never went to court.

The public now awaits the traditional SPC assembly, due to be held from May 21 to June 3. The assembly resembles a church parliament that debates the most current developments in all dioceses.

A highly placed source at SPC who insisted on anonymity told IPS that the scandals would not be on the agenda, and when asked whether the accountability of Bishops Atanasije and Amfilohije for their rally speeches will be discussed, he responded, “That is out of question.”

Diane Wilson protesting outside the White House. Credit: Ted Majdosz

Dressed in an orange jumpsuit, Wilson has been protesting outside the White House gates for over two weeks now. Her demand: Shut down Guantanamo Bay prison.

U.S. President Barack Obama has come under heavy criticism for his failure to close down the facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Obama has blamed the Congress for not supporting the closure. But experts and activists suggest that Obama can at least start the process by transferring detainees who have been cleared of all charges.

The detention facility at the Guantanamo Bay opened in 2002. According to reports, 100 out of 166 prisoners are on hunger strike. Some of the prisoners are being force-fed. Human rights groups have strongly condemned this technique of force-feeding prisoners, labeling it a form of torture.

This is not the first time Guantanamo Bay prison has witnessed hunger strikes. The first one dates back to 2005 where close to 200 detainees were on hunger strike.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What do you want to achieve through this hunger strike? As you know, many prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay prison have been cleared of all charges, but some are still awaiting trial.

A: The facility should be closed down – this is what I want. I am fasting in solidarity with those prisoners at Guantanamo, simply because they want justice. It is pretty much well known that President Obama can shut down Guantanamo right now. He can do it. He should have done it yesterday.

Q: What would you do if your body just gives up, given that you are a 65-year-old woman surviving on water, a pinch of salt and a potassium tablet for 17 days now?

A: Whenever such thoughts cross my mind, I think about those men in Guantanamo.

I get to lay down on a soft bed at night. I get to talk with people and I don’t have to sit in a cold, freezing room. I am not humiliated and tortured and I think if they can do it, I can do it.

Moreover, this is not my first time fasting for many days at a stretch. I had fasted for 30 days. The longest I had fasted was for 45 days when I was protesting to stop Valero from processing tar sands in Houston, Texas. I was little bit younger then, but age definitely takes its toll. This is early in the game though.

Basically, I am an optimistic person and I really believe that people can make a difference. In a way I have surrendered to the fast. I will take it as far as I can. I don’t mind collapsing. All I got to do is think of those men in Guantanamo. I know we can shut down the facility, and if required I am ready to go that far.

Q: Why did you choose the White House as the venue for your protest?

A: I am protesting directly in front of the White House. It is a strategic zone. A few days ago I locked myself to the White House gates. I wear an orange jumpsuit and makeshift chains round my legs and neck. I also wear a black hood over my face. This is my way of representing those men in Guantanamo in front of the Obama administration.

I am a constant reminder of the conditions under which the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay live. To propel any change, you have to be in their faces, and I am in their face.

Q: How do people react when they see you protesting outside the White House?

A: Sometimes people know that you are going to be there protesting. Sometimes people out of the blue come up and stand there. Sometimes people are just passing by and they agree with us. I would say almost 90 percent of the people that we speak to are in total agreement with our cause.

There are a lot of children who are brought to see the White House and they are always very curious. We got a huge poster of Obama with a statement that says Guantanamo is inefficient, expensive and in no way keeps America safe. In fact it is a recruiting tool because of the way the prisoners are being treated.

There are a lot of international guests and they are always curious and many people come and speak to us. We have had senators coming up and telling us that we were doing a good job. Actually some came up to us and shook our hands. They said that we should keep it up. In fact, it is a matter of keeping up. That is what it is.

Q: Who is your inspiration?

A: I take a lot of my inspiration from Gandhi. He is my man.

Q: What do you see yourself as – a political activist or an environmental activist or a fisherwoman?

A: When people ask me, I say I am a fisherwoman. I am a fourth generation shrimper. I did not do anything until I reached 40 and I am a really late bloomer.

I think there are a lot of problems with the recent movements – you got the environmental, you got the indigenous, you got the human rights and they tend to remain in separate camps. But there is a connection between all of them.

I guess because I am a fisherwoman and I lived my life on the bay and there is no sense of boundaries so my activism has flowed.

Q: What has been the reaction from your family?

A: I generally don’t tell them what I am doing and I let them find out. My family members are by and large Republicans and they love George Bush. They don’t like this kind of out there and in your face like action from me. So it is not fun.

Q: Diane, you are the author of book called “An Unreasonable Woman”. Do you think you are being unreasonable in your demands?

A: No, I am not unreasonable. I am asking for these men’s lives.

Protesters demand that the Mexican government search for their missing relatives. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

When people are forcibly disappeared in Mexico, it does not necessarily mean that the victims are immediately killed. In this country of entrenched violence, forced disappearance is also a method used to feed the markets for sexual exploitation and slave labour.

Mexico has regressed “to the barbarism of Roman gladiators,” lawyer Juan López, a legal adviser to Fuerzas Unidas por Nuestros Desparecidos en México (FUNDEM), a support group for families searching for their loved ones, initially in the northern state of Coahuila and now nationwide, told IPS.

In today’s Mexico, where organised crime is rampant and public security has been militarised, forced disappearances do not follow the pattern seen in past decades in this country and others in Latin America, marked by dictatorships, “dirty wars” against opponents and armed conflicts.

These days “just about anyone” is vulnerable, López said. An unknown proportion of the victims fall prey to “illegal businesses that produce lucrative profits from an unpaid slave labour force,” he said.

This includes the forced recruitment of teenagers and young adults as hired killers, workers in the production of drugs or to serve other needs of the cartels, or for organ trafficking.

“There have been confirmed reports of buses stopped by armed groups who take away all the young men,” López said.

The victims’ profile has changed, according to studies. At first the disappeared were men between the ages of 30 and 45; then the age range fell to 20-25 and again to 17-19. Now younger teenagers are also kidnapped, while the proportion of women has increased to the point where they make up half of all new disappearances, he said.

Human trafficking for labour and sexual purposes is currently flourishing in Mexico, and it is the third most lucrative illegal business in the world after drug and arms trafficking. The central Mexican state of Tlaxcala is the epicentre of networks that kidnap women in more than 20 districts, and also in border areas, and exploit them in cities in this country and the United States.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) says that 80 percent of the people trafficked in Mexico are women and girls. Mexico is the second country, after Thailand, for the number of trafficked women smuggled into the United States.

The victims, who are “picked up” in streets, towns and communities, are absorbed into “a human market,” and it is possible that many of them “are still alive,” López said.

During the six-year term of former president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), 26,121 people were forcibly disappeared, according to the database published by the government of incumbent President Enrique Peña Nieto in late February.

However, the list does not include several well-known cases, their families confirmed, nor the information, however much or little, that was often gathered by the relatives themselves.

The stories are horrifying: young men forced to fight each other to death, or to dismember a woman alive, as acts of initiation and hardening of recruits. Groups of men forced to undertake training that only the fittest survive. Women tricked, enslaved and forced into submission by threats against their children.

Brenda Rangel, a 35-year-old member of FUNDEM, is looking for her brother Héctor, who was 28 years old when municipal police detained him in November 2009, along with two other men in Monclova, Coahuila.

“But they didn’t hand them over to any authorities,” Rangel told IPS. She found out what had happened to them because her brother managed to call her on his cell phone. “The police handed him over to an illegal organisation.” The next day she went to Monclova, and she has moved heaven and earth to find him. “My brother is alive,” she stated.

Rangel was one of the most eloquent speakers at the march organised by mothers of the disappeared from all over the country on Friday May 10 in the centre of the capital to demand that the government mobilise its resources to find them.

“There is no money available to look for ordinary people who have disappeared,” she declared in her powerful, broken voice.

Dressed in white, the mothers marched several blocks to the monument of the Angel of Independence, shouting slogans like “¡Hija, escucha, tu madre está en tu busca!” (Daughter, listen! Your mother is looking for you!).

Forty-three-year-old Lourdes Valdivia has heard nothing from her husband, 47-year-old José Diego Cordero, or their 22-year-old son Juan Diego, since December 2010 when they went hunting with eight friends and relatives. Municipal police detained them at a checkpoint near Joaquín Amaro, a municipality in the central state of Zacatecas.

On the pretext of checking their hunting permits, they locked them up in the police station, Valdivia said, wiping away her tears. Thanks to an underage boy who was released and an adult who was able to escape, Valdivia learned that “they took them out at night and handed them over to a group, presumably Los Zetas,” a notoriously violent criminal syndicate.

Other people are kidnapped for ransom, or because they have witnessed a crime, or they disappear because they were unwittingly caught in crossfire.

Systems engineer Juan Ricardo Rodríguez met up with his fiancée in September 2011 in a hotel in Zacatecas, where he was working, to finetune their wedding plans. As they were leaving, they saw an armed commando taking three men away. The couple tried to get away, but they were also seized.

Federal police, who spoke to the armed men, watched the entire event, Rodríguez’s mother, Virginia Barajas, who reconstructed the scene with the help of witnesses, told IPS.

There are reports of hundreds of people shut up in warehouses, safe houses belonging to crime syndicates, or isolated ranches in rural areas.

Other sources say it is likely that the disappeared persons are dead, as indicated by the mass graves that have been found. But some families have received remains that do not correspond to their loved ones.

The families of the disappeared always live in hope, said legal expert Santiago Corcuera, a member between 2004 and 2010 of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.

But Corcuera described a number of different patterns of disappearances.

When the perpetrators are members of the public security forces, the victim will most likely be killed, he said. But there is “collusion, for instance, with sexual exploitation of women and girls,” or with other kinds of labour exploitation “in support of drug trafficking” and to swell the ranks of hired killers, he added.

In his view, the “law on victims” adopted by the Peña Nieto administration is “a beacon,” because it establishes reparations mechanisms. But protocols to search for disappeared victims are lacking; these should be coordinated between different Mexican states and with other countries in the region, he said.

FUNDEM’s López went even further: “The state does not carry out searches or investigations. And it opposes investigations by the families.”

According to Human Rights Watch, in many cases, official investigators have told families that the investigation’s progress depended entirely on the efforts of the families themselves.

Syrian refugee children learn to survive at a camp in north Lebanon. Credit: Zak Brophy/IPS.

Humanitarian assistance groups in Washington are warning that the health care system has become a deliberate target in the increasingly brutal civil war in Syria, presenting major challenges to addressing the humanitarian and refugee crises spurred by the conflict.

In a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday, UK Prime Minister David Cameron stressed the centrality of the unfolding health crisis, emphasising the need in Syria to “care for trauma injuries, help torture victims to recover, [and get] Syrian families clean drinking water”.

Health aid is meeting significant obstacles, though, as the public health system in Syria reportedly has been largely dismantled after being targeted by Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which has wiped out a third of the hospitals in the country.

“The systematisation of the attacks [in Syria]…certainly served its purpose,” Stephen Cornish, executive director at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Canada, said recently at a panel discussion in Washington. “It created a flight of many medical personnel and destroyed large numbers of hospitals and interrupted public healthcare in a significant way.”

According to the Violations Documentation Centre, a Syrian human rights organisation based in Damascus, 469 health workers are currently imprisoned in Syria. Tom Bollyky, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington think tank, estimates that around 15,000 doctors have been driven out of the country.

Bollyky noted that these attacks are one conflict’s manifestation of a disturbing global trend in which medical facilities and personnel become more frequent combat targets in conflict zones. In a March report, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic accused the Assad regime and opposition groups of strategically targeting medical facilities and personnel.

“Attacking medical personnel is a way of terrorising a population and depriving them of the humanitarian support they need,” Bollyky told IPS.

He pointed to similar instances in the Middle East and Asia, particularly coordinated attacks by the Taliban on polio immunisation volunteers in Afghanistan and Pakistan. On Monday, the Taliban announced it was halting its years-long effort to sabotage the campaign to eradicate polio among children in these two countries.

Such attacks are specifically outlawed in the Geneva Conventions, which entitle hospitals and medical staff to protection from hostile fire.

“Medical personnel are absolutely protected under international law,” Bollyky noted. “There is no circumstance where it is okay to attack medical personnel or facilities, and it is certainly happening on both sides.”

Silent casualties

The targeting of the Syrian health care system has not only left those wounded by combat without urgently needed care but has also exacerbated a public health crisis brought on by the poor living conditions of refugee camps outside of Syria.

Refugees from the conflict currently number more than one million, and the United Nations is warning that figure could swell to 1.5 million by the end of this year. That number is dwarfed by the more than 4.2 million Syrians who are displaced within Syria.

In addition to the systematic targeting, Syrian medical facilities are reportedly being “cannibalised” to serve military ends.

Zahir Sahloul, a doctor with the Syrian American Medical Society, told an audience on Friday about the looting of the two main hospitals in Aleppo – an eye hospital and a children’s hospital – that now serve as bases of operations for military battalions.

“Besides the destruction of the public health system, there is no sewer system,” Sahloul said “[There is a] lack of hygiene because of lack of electricity and sometimes water…and lack of diesel fuel. And because of that, you have a resurgence of some of the epidemics that weren’t there before.”

Chronic illnesses that were relatively easily treatable before the outbreak of the conflict – diabetes, or high blood pressure, for example – are now deadlier than ever, leading to what MSF’s Cornish called “silent casualties”.

These patients can’t be referred outside of the country because they aren’t considered emergency cases. But they also can’t be treated inside Syria because the necessary facilities and healthcare providers simply don’t exist anymore.

“Folks who have cancer and had their chemotherapy interrupted, all they can have is palliative medicine,” Cornish said. “And slowly, day by day, they die.”

Health workers are increasingly ill-equipped to deal with these growing problems, expert say, as their capacities are being undercut by suspicions over loyalty.

“In Syria, if you are a physician who is…’treating people from the other side’, you put your life at risk,” Sahloul said.

As humanitarian groups try to find solutions to the challenges to health and humanitarian assistance, observers appear united in their calls to the international community to ramp up pressure on both sides to stop hospital and medical staff attacks and to have more respect for international humanitarian standards.

Geneva Call, a non-governmental organisation in Geneva that focuses on engaging non-state actors in international humanitarian law, released several short video spots promoting respect for international humanitarian standards. One of the videos’ titles was “Respect and Protect Medical Personnel and Objects”.

Tom Bollyky suggested that treating these violations with more seriousness in the International Criminal Court– and recognising the international community’s responsibilities in combating them – would be a step in the right direction.

“You have seen a surge in these attacks, but you have not seen a surge in the indictments being brought against the people behind them,” he said. “The international legal system is not known for being expeditious, but it would be a form of real condemnation.”