70-year-old Chiute Tamang, his wife, daughter and son-in-law lost their house when the earth shook on Apr 25, 2015 in Nepal. They now lives a one-room cabin made of a wooden skeleton encased in corrugated iron. Credit: Robert Stefanicki/IPS

By Robert Stefanicki
KATHMANDU, Jul 12 2015 (IPS)

70-year-old Chiute Tamang was working in his field when the earth shook on Apr 25. He grabbed a tree. His wife and daughter were inside the house at the time, but managed to run out. In the blink of an eye, the building turned into a heap of stones. They were the lucky ones.

“Earthquakes don’t kill, buildings do” – this otherwise common knowledge – had just reached Nepal. Almost all the victims were buried in the rubble of their houses made by untrained masons of stones barely stuck together with mud. It is a very popular method, because it is the cheapest – stones and mud are free, bricks and cement cost.

In Ramche, Chiute’s village scattered over the terraced hills of district Dhading, 38 km northwest of Kathmandu, 168 houses out of a total 181 are no longer inhabitable.”Only time will tell if, in the process of planning reconstruction, the government of Nepal will use an opportunity to find out why the Tamangs are so vulnerable to natural disasters and what can be done to protect them from future calamities”

According to the latest government report, the disaster damaged 607,212 buildings in 16 districts. Of them, 63 percent in areas dominated by Tamangs – the largest and the most destitute group among the Tibeto-Burman speaking peoples of the Himalayan region – although they constitute less than six percent (1.35 million) of Nepal’s population.

”Earthquakes don’t kill, inequity does” – out of 8,844 people who died in the earthquake, 3,012 were Tamangs. Over 50 percent of the victims belonged to the marginalised communities. More than half the victims were women.

Ramche is a Tamang village. Some of the people own small plots of land on which they grow corn and potatoes of walnut size, but crops can feed the farmers’ family only for two to three months. For the rest of the year they live on contracted labour.

The residents of Ramche admit they are very poor. Why? Because, their answer goes, their fathers were poor, as well as the fathers of their fathers. They accept this as a judgment of fate and do not feel discriminated against, only showing how inequity is grown into the tissue of the society, the result of concerted exploitation for centuries.

This brawny hill tribe has always provided a labour reserve pool for the rulers of Kathmandu. In the past, Tamangs were prevented from joining the administration and the military. Even today they may man the barricades but have little role in the upper hierarchy of the armed forces or police, and are unrepresented in the country´s national affairs.

Being Buddhists did not immunise Tamangs from the caste system evolved by ruling Hindus. Those who wield power belong to Brahmin, Newars and Chhetri people and these “well-born” elites look down on the Tamangs.

In the blink of an eye, houses turned into heaps of stones when the Apr. 25, 2015 earthquake hit Nepal. Credit: Robert Stefanicki/IPS

Economic deprivation has increased the influx of indigent peasants to the job markets of Kathmandu, where they make up half of the porters and the majority of three-wheeler tempo (”taxi”) drivers. Prison surveys have shown that a disproportionate number of Tamangs are behind bars for criminal offences.

They have never counted on any government’s help, and this time is no different. After the earthquake, the residents of Ramche helped each other, cooked meals together and joined hands to raise themselves up from the rubble. With a little help from NGOs, the situation was brought under control.

One week after the disaster, the residents of Ramche were given blankets, tarpaulins and mosquito nets funded by the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection department (ECHO).

Today, the whole village is queuing at the barracks where ADRA, the Nepalese NGO, is handing out big plastic water jars with the blue logo of the European Union and “sanitary kits”: a few tubes of toothpaste, toothbrushes, water purification tablets, sanitary napkins and birth control pills. A young female activist tirelessly explains to one villager after another how to use these items.

Chiute Tamang’s family spent the first three days after they lost their house in a flimsy hut cobbled together with a few pieces of wood. Then made a tent of tarpaulin, where they moved together with goats, their most valuable asset. Livestock, the old man explains, must not be left outside at night because it could fall prey to tigers or leopards.

After one week, Chiute borrowed some money, bought materials and with the help of his neighbours put a house together for himself, his wife, their youngest daughter and her husband.

It has a simple design – a one-room cabin made of a wooden skeleton encased in corrugated iron, the floor covered with oilcloth, and equipped with simple beds, cupboards and a gas cooker.

”Even if this collapses,” says Chiute ironically, “at the worst, the corrugated sheet would pin us down, not stones.”

Construction took two weeks, because the wood had to be brought from a distance. When the house was already standing, the government finally sent some relief – any Nepalese family who lost a house is entitled to a 15,000 rupee (150 dollars) loan. Chiute could pay off half the loan.

Another Ramche resident, 29-year-old Deepak Bhutel, received 180,000 rupees but he had been less fortunate – his wife and 18-month-old daughter lost their lives under the rubble of their stone house.

The amount would be enough to buy a sturdy house, certain to survive any future earthquake but Deepak, together with his older and now only daughter, says he is also going to end up in a corrugated iron-clad cabin. Having lived from hand to mouth all his life, he says he does not want to spend all his wealth on the house.

Only time will tell if, in the process of planning reconstruction, the government of Nepal will use an opportunity to find out why the Tamangs are so vulnerable to natural disasters and what can be done to protect them from future calamities.

Past mistakes should not be repeated, warned Jagdish Chandra Pokhrel, former Vice Chair of National Planning Commission, quoted by ‘Nepali Times’.

Pokhrel recalled the example of the Tamangs displaced when the reservoir in Makwanpur was built in the early 1980s. Around 500 families whose lands were acquired by the authorities did not want cash compensation but resettlement elsewhere.

“But the government gave them money anyway, and very few bought land with that,” said Pokhrel. “Soon, the money was gone and they were destitute.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

A by-stander pauses beside a large poster featuring Tibetan martyrs. Credit: Robert Stefanicki/IPS

By Robert Stefanicki
DHARAMSALA, India, May 20 2014 (IPS)

Nestled in the Kangra Valley in the shadow of the Dhauladhar Mountains in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamsala is beautiful to behold. But the scenic landscape belies a dark reality: the cult of martyrs that has developed in this town, home to the Tibetan government-in-exile since 1959.

While some nations declare as martyrs those who lost their lives in freedom struggles or wars for independence at the hands of enemy soldiers, Tibetans recognize as martyrs those who take their own lives through the desperate act of self-immolation.

“People take their lives out of desperation and helplessness. Instead of disappearing into [Chinese] prisons, they choose to die in the fire." -- Kirti Rinpoche, exiled abbot of the Kirti Gompa monastery
Since 2009, almost 130 people have set themselves aflame in protest over China’s heavy-handed tactics in the Tibetan plateau. For decades Tibetan people have been demanding an end to Chinese rule and the return of the Dalai Lama, their spiritual leader, who fled Tibet’s former capital Lhasa over 50 years ago.

The “suicidal tide” swept Tibet in the aftermath of protests that erupted in Lhasa in the lead-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, and then spilled all over the Land of Snow.

Today, the faces of those men and women are omnipresent throughout the Indian city that hosts the bulk of some 100,000 Tibetan exiles.

The flames that claimed so many lives have become an important element of patriotic murals, sculptures and paintings visible all over Dharamsala. Even more spectacular are the large posters that display photographs of all those who committed suicide, each accompanied by a brief caption containing nothing more than the person’s name, place of origin and date of death.

Shadowy silhouettes stand in for those whose photographs could not be found. Some images capture martyrs in their final moments, consumed by fire. Other pictures show only charred corpses, unrecognisable without the identifying information.

Bravery, or wasted life?

The jury is still out on whether martyrdom is helping or hurting the Tibetan cause, with the diaspora far from reaching a unanimous assessment on self-immolations.

Take Tenzin and Ngawang, inseparable friends who were born in Lhasa in the 1980s and generally see eye to eye on just about every topic under the sun. But when it comes to the subject of patriotic suicides, the two stand on opposite sides of the debate.

The young man’s opinion echoes that of any Tibetan who is strongly opposed to China’s constant policing of the community, the replacing of Tibetan with Chinese as the language of instruction for all students above primary-school age, and laws that forbid Tibetans from freely practicing their religion, including a ban on displaying photographs of the Dalai Lama.

Tenzin, however, shakes his head, saying gravely, “Most of those who take their lives are in their twenties or thirties. This is a loss for our nation and we cannot afford such a waste.”

Tibetans have learned, the hard way, that aggressive or violent resistance will not lead to freedom but only to bloodshed and a further restriction of liberties. This maxim was tested most recently during the 2008 protests, when Tibetans in Lhasa set fire to some shops run by Chinese immigrants, provoking a wave of repression from the Chinese authorities.

Some argue that self-immolations fall somewhere in-between the two, representing the need for a rebellion while embodying the principles of non-violence.

“This is a sacred act, not born of hatred,” a monk named Kanyag Tsering told IPS. “In their last messages, those people do not call for the overthrow of the communist government [of China], but for the return of the Dalai Lama.

“They ask their fellow countrymen to give up gambling, avoid discord, work together for the well-being of Tibet. They do not harm anyone. While taking their lives, they could easily take the lives of some Chinese too, but they do not,” he added.

Paradoxically, most Tibetans are deeply religious, practicing a form of Buddhism that prohibits suicide. But supporters of self-immolations, lay and religious people alike, claim that Buddhism does not forbid the sacrifice of one’s life for a higher purpose.

In fact, one of the first references to self-immolation, which simply means ‘sacrifice’, can be found in the ancient Buddhist texts known as the ‘Jataka tales’, which recount an incident involving a past incarnation of the Buddha giving up his body to feed a hungry tigress.

According to the exiled abbot of the Kirti Gompa – a Buddhist monastery in China’s Sichuan province whose initiation of the self-immolations earned it the title of the “most militant” monastery in the country – the morality behind self-immolations comes down to a matter of intentions.

“People decide to self-immolate for the good of the six million Tibetans in Tibet…This means their intentions are good, that they are acting in accordance with the teachings of Buddha,” Kirti Rinpoche told IPS.

He added that there is not a single family in Tibet who, since the first uprising of 1959 and subsequent exile of the 14th Dalai Lama, has not had at least one member killed or tortured in prison.

“People take their lives out of desperation and helplessness. Instead of disappearing into prisons, they choose to die in the fire,” the monk said.

Mixed Messages

Despite the backing of influential spiritual leaders, more and more Tibetans are coming to realise that the flames are futile.

Five years of self-immolations have prompted little by way of international pressure on Beijing, which has responded by stepping up arrests and repression of anyone even suspected of being involved with the suicides – families, friends, monasteries and, sometimes, whole villages have been denied civil rights and forced to pay heavy fines.

So far the strongest call to halt the fiery protests has come from inside Tibet itself. In November 2012, the lamas (spiritual leaders) of Rebgong – a county in China’s Qinghai province – wrote: “Knowing the value of human life, we beseech you, kneeling on the ground and folding hands on our chests: stop the desperate self-immolations.”

The lamas advised Tibetans to use their “priceless human bodies” to “make great deeds for the benefit of all beings”, rather than giving in to “despair, agony and suffering.”

From the diaspora, the lone call echoing similar sentiments came from the Karmapa lama, the widely revered head of the Karma Kagyu order, an important sect of Tibetan Buddhism.

The government-in-exile remains ambiguous. Prime Minister Lobsang Sangay insists that while he “highly discourages” the drastic action, it is the “sacred duty” of the exiled community to support it.

Meanwhile, the only man capable of stopping the burnings – the one whose name hangs on the lips of all those writhing in the flames – avoids the subject.

Pressed by journalists, the Dalai Lama has called the acts “understandable” but says he does not encourage them. Some say his words can be interpreted as silent encouragement.

“The Chinese government accuses His Holiness of inciting self-immolations,” Thubten Samphel, a former government spokesperson and head of the newly founded Tibet Policy Institute, told IPS.

He himself has no doubt that the sacrifices would end if the spiritual leader wanted it so, but recognises that if the Dalai Lama called for a complete halt of all burnings and the people obeyed, it would only confirm China’s accusations that the previous acts could not have happened without his say-so.

Hasina, one of the 2,438 Rana Plaza workers that came out alive, by the remains of the factory. Credit: Robert Stefanicki/IPS.

By Robert Stefanicki
DHAKA, Oct 30 2013 (IPS)

Six months after the worst man-made disaster in Bangladesh’s history, safety conditions in garment factories have a chance to improve. But not the lives of survivors or the victims’ next of kin.

On Apr. 24, the collapse of Rana Plaza factory building took 1,133 lives of mostly female workers. The disaster was too big to ignore. The unprecedented scale of the tragedy shocked people the world over, many of them dressed in clothes made in Bangladesh on request of giants such as Tesco, Carrefour, Benetton or Walmart.

Today, the site in the Dhaka suburb is enclosed by a barbed wire and metal fence covered with banners. ‘How long do we have to wait for compensation for the death of our parents ?’ asks one.“Foreign clients should not avoid responsibility, even if the workers’ imagination is too narrow to blame them."

What was left of Rana Plaza can be seen from the top floor of a neighbouring building. Debris has been cleared, but the bodies of two cars stick out of a vast pool of mud water.

“They were parked in an underground garage,” Hassan, one of the volunteer rescuers told IPS. His team, he said, took some 400 people out of the rubble.

A survivor, Hasina, pulled her scarf up showing a deformed right arm with extensive scars.

“That day I came to work at 8:30. I heard from my colleagues about the cracks in the wall. We did not want to enter the building, but the supervisor forced us,” she told IPS. “Then the power was gone and soon after it happened.”

A piece of the ceiling pinned Hasina down. She was rescued the same evening. Today the young woman can barely move her hand, and is unable to work.

Hasina received compensation of 36,000 taka (450 dollars). The Bangladesh Garment Manufactures & Exporters Association (BGMEA), a powerful guild, promised to pay survivors a salary, so Hasina still gets 10,000 taka a month.

She is undergoing rehabilitation. Treatment is free, but she complains that commuting by rickshaw costs 20 taka each time – an amount that adds up.

The Rana Plaza tragedy resulted in an outpouring of commitments from governments, local and global institutions, groups and individuals.

According to some reports, each family of the deceased and seriously injured received up to a million taka – but IPS did not meet anybody who got anything close to that amount.

The compensation was paid mostly by the government of Bangladesh. Irish retailer Primark (one of the brands whose clothes were produced at Rana Plaza) paid a short-term allowance of 16,000 taka (200 dollars) to each victim, in what unwittingly made Primark the most recognisable brand in Bangladesh.

Long-term compensation is still under negotiation. The bad omen was that in a September meeting on this issue organised in Geneva with the support of the United Nations International Labour Organisation (ILO), only nine of the 29 companies that ordered production at Rana Plaza were present.

With 3.6 million people working in the garment industry, Bangladesh is the world’s second-largest clothing exporter after China. About 60 percent of exports go to Europe and 23 percent to the United States. The minimum wage for a garment worker is 38 dollars a month, though after a massive street demonstration recently, an increase is imminent.

Yet the survivors are far from blaming the West for what happened at Rana Plaza. Usually they do not know which brand made an order for clothes they were sewing.

Abdulrahman, who lost his wife Sharifa in the collapse (he got a total of 136,000 taka, or 1,700 dollars, in compensation plus a rickshaw from local NGO Karmojibi Nari), does not even blame the owner of the building, since “he did not order the factory owners to place the power generators on the upper floor instead of on the ground floor.” It was the generators’ vibrations that caused the collapse.

Abdulrahman blames only the factory owners, who along with the building’s owner Sohel Rana, are under arrest, awaiting trial.

What penalty is appropriate for Sharifa’s death? “I don’t want the manufacturer to be hanged. A life sentence would be enough. And he should apologise,” the mourning widower said.

“Foreign clients should not avoid responsibility, even if the workers’ imagination is too narrow to blame them,” said Dr. Khondaker Moazzem of the Centre for Policy Dialogue in Dhaka.

According to the researcher, who co-authored the report ‘100 Days of Rana Plaza Tragedy’, the compensation paid to the victims so far is too small. “According to some independent calculations the injured workers should get an average of more than two million taka.”

Families of the missing are in the worst situation. So far, 332 workers have not been identified or found, and their relatives are in a limbo, with no right to any compensation.

For the garments industry, Rana Plaza seems to have been a wake-up call. Six months on, new deals to improve safety of the workers are in place.

One is called ‘The accord on fire and factory safety in Bangladesh’. It was signed (under pressure from customers and public opinion) by more than 100 retailers and brands, mostly from Europe. Before the end of this year they plan to start “independent” inspections at about 1,600 factories used by them.

In another measure, employees will be trained to exercise their rights, including the right to refuse entry into a building considered unsafe.

‘The alliance for Bangladesh worker safety’ has been set up, and 23 brands, mostly from the U.S., have joined. This factory safety deal is seen as less rigorous than the other accord because its signatories are not legally bound by their commitments, and it is not linked to unions or workers’ rights groups.

Not least, the government in Dhaka and the ILO, with the backing of the British and Dutch governments, have launched a 25-million-dollar plan to provide technical expertise for building and fire safety assessments in the country’s garment trade over the next three-and-a-half years.

Amid doubts on the supply of professional and incorruptible inspectors for the job, individual brands have already inspected more than 500 factories themselves.

Since the Rana Plaza disaster, the authorities in Bangladesh are more sensitive to any breach of safety rules and are keen to close unsafe factories as never before. The manufacturers themselves prefer to do that rather than to risk a new tragedy. The BGMEA has so far inspected 620 plants and ordered the closure of 20.

Everybody in Bangladesh agrees that such a tragedy must never be repeated. But the way ahead is far. Three weeks ago, a fire ripped through the Aswad garments factory in a Dhaka suburb. Ten workers died.

The now landless family of Abdusattar Jaman (holding umbrella). Credit: Robert Stefanicki/IPS.

By Robert Stefanicki
KHULNA, Bangladesh, Oct 25 2013 (IPS)

It has been four years since Cyclone Aila struck Bangladesh, triggering floods and widespread destruction. But the villagers of Koira subdistrict, among the worst affected of the 11 districts hit by the cyclone, are yet to recover from its impact.

The Jaman family was among the 41,043 families in Koira affected by Aila. Like most of their neighbours, they remained homeless for eight months, surviving on supplies from humanitarian organisations.

Some 23,820 houses were totally damaged in Koira. When the waters receded, the government gave them 20,000 taka (260 dollars) each to build a new house.“We experience all natural disasters except perhaps a volcanic eruption: cyclones, floods, droughts, even earthquakes."

The Jamans used the money to build three cottages of clay, wood and corrugated sheets. But the family has no illusions; they know the next cyclone, which will hit them sooner or later from the Bay of Bengal 20 km away, will blow their new dwellings away again. Only the brick houses of the rich will survive.

But that is not their immediate concern. More worrying is the lack of a stable income. The Jamans are among the 40 percent of Bangladesh’s 155 million people who live below the poverty line. Before, it was a hand-to-mouth existence, but they never went hungry. Koira being an agricultural region, people could make a living off the land; the landless were employed by the farmers. In times of crisis, the poor could count on help from their more affluent neighbours.

Aila changed all that. Not only were 502 acres of crops destroyed in Koira, according to the damage summary by the local UNO office, but the cyclone left the fields waterlogged for three years. Now, since the water has receded, the soil has become salinated, allowing nothing to grow.

The newly pauperised rich therefore are no longer willing to share with their neighbours. Nor do they employ them in their barren fields any more.

“Before Aila, I had a garden here in my yard, so thick that the sunlight could not penetrate,” Shafiqul Islam tells IPS. The garden wilted because of the cyclone and the salinity.

Islam is the local representative of the ruling Awami League and “rich” by local standards, because he owns a brick house. But there is nothing remarkable about his three huts, covered with rusty metal and cane.

According to Islam, around 40,000 of Koira’s 193,000 people migrated after Aila, of whom a quarter are now back.

Among those who left are the three brothers of his neighbour, Robiul Islam, who stayed behind in the village with his mother and five-year-old son.

Robiul Islam drives a rented rickshaw, earning 80 taka a day (one dollar). His ambition? To earn 200 taka (2.5 dollars) a day. That is how much a five kilo bag of rice costs, which the family consumes in two days.

Besides, 200 taka is what Robiul’s brothers, all rickshaw pullers too, earn in the city. After the cyclone, they moved to Khulna, a three-hour drive away.

IPS visited a few refugees from Koira there. They live in the suburbs, in huts like the ones they have left behind, each accommodating four people. The rent is 200 taka per month.

Most men drive rickshaws and earn enough to be able to send money back home. One of them, Abdullah, tells IPS he sends 1,500-2,000 taka every month to his parents in Koira.

Hafeeza, on the other hand, is the poor among the poor. She cooks for the rickshaw pullers, earning 200 taka like them – but in a month. She says it is enough for her and her seven-year-old son. “At least, I do not have to pay for accommodation or food,” she tells IPS.

Back in Koira, the villagers say they do not know about climate change, never mind that Bangladesh ranks first in the world in terms of vulnerability to the impacts of climate change, according to German Watch’s Global Climate Risk Index.

“We experience all natural disasters except perhaps a volcanic eruption: cyclones, floods, droughts, even earthquakes,” says M.D. Shamsudoha, head of the Centre for Participatory Research and Development, a Dhaka-based NGO.

“After each natural disaster, 50,000-60,000 people migrate to cities, but the perpetual migration is not included in the statistics,” Shamsudoha tells IPS.

Experts expect about 250 million climate refugees globally by 2050. Of these, 20-30 million will be from Bangladesh.

Politicians and environmental experts associated with the government claim they are well-prepared to fight the effects of climate change. The country, they stress, was the first among the least developed countries to adopt a national strategy on climate change in 2009.

But local NGOs are sceptical. The government, they say, is good at formulating policies, but not at implementing them.

According to Shamsudoha, the state funds mostly large-scale projects, like the construction of coastal embankments and shelters or reforestation, while priority should be given to local development and adaptation. There are enough such programmes in risk areas, they say, but they do not address the scale of the problem.

Among the inventions tested by some NGOs and U.N. agencies are ‘disaster-resistant villages’, ‘floating solar-powered schools’ and “multi-tasked flood shelters’.

Bangladeshi scientists have also developed a variety of rice resistant to moderate salinity. But according to forecasts, cereal production in Bangladesh will fall by 32 percent by 2050. And the population of the country will grow by 130 million people.

Many farmers, instead of waiting for the saltwater to leave their fields, have taken to lucrative shrimp farming. The poor, however, lack the necessary capital for investment. Besides, shrimp farming spells another disaster for them: saltwater from the shrimp ponds seeps into the adjacent fields.

Shrimp also does not contribute to food security in the primarily rice-and-dal (lentil pulp) country. Yet, more and more farmers are selling their paddy fields to shrimp or mango cultivators – and leaving for the cities. They do not have any other option.

A memorial set up by the Communist Party of Bangladesh at the Rana Plaza factory in Dhaka where 1,133 workers died in April. Credit: Robert Stefanicki/IPS

By Robert Stefanicki
DHAKA, Oct 2 2013 (IPS)

On the industrial outskirts of Dhaka, which is dotted with big and small clothes factories, thousands of workers took to the streets demanding a minimum wage rise.

Last week, protestors blocked roads, set factories on fire and clashed with police, who responded with rubber bullets and tear gas. Some 200 apparel plants – which make clothing for some of the world’s top retailers such as H&M and Carrefour – had to remain closed for a week.

The last time the government raised the minimum wage for the garments sector was in 2010. Now the workers are demanding an increase from 3,000 taka (38 dollars) to 8,114 taka (100 dollars). That is more or less the price that a pair of brand name jeans made in Bangladesh sell for after it reaches the shopping mall shelf in Warsaw or Berlin.“Western consumers are partly responsible for the low level of wages in Bangladesh.” -- Reaz bin Mahmood, vice-president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association

The employers agreed a 20 percent hike, increasing salaries to 3,600 taka or about 46 dollars. But most commentators considered the increase a mockery and this offer led to riots.

In Bangladesh the minimum wage is fixed for each sector separately. The differences are substantial: transport workers or shop attendants get twice as much as the average wage for three million Bangladeshi garment makers.

The latter are at the bottom not just nationally, but globally. According to a study by the Japan External Trade Organisation released in December, only in Myanmar do garment workers earn less.

In neighbouring India their wages (in dollars) are twice as high as in Bangladesh, in China five times as high.

The minimum wage is theoretical, everyone takes overtime. IPS interviewed some women working as sewing machine operators who positioned their monthly earnings at 8,000 to 9,000 taka (about 102 to 115 dollars). Usually their workday stretches over 11 to 12 hours.

But raising the bottom threshold is important, because this means an increase for everyone.

According to trade union leader Masood Rana, the wage demands are partly a result of a growing awareness among the workers. After the hype over the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building in April that took the lives of 1,133 workers, workers began to realise how much Western consumers pay for clothes made by their hands.

But why were the demonstrations so violent? “This is because the protests are spontaneous, there is no leader,” Rana told IPS.

Reaz bin Mahmood, vice-president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) – and a factory owner himself – presents a different theory: protests are the work of political provocateurs. He did not explain whom he meant.

“This problem cannot be settled on the streets,” Mahmood told IPS. “There is a government panel working on new minimum wage level, expected to announce the results in November. But I’m afraid that this may not happen if the protests continue.”

Various payment models have been proposed. “We have carried out an economic analysis of the garment worker’s cost of living, with the assumption that his or her pay should cover the consumption of their family,” Dr. Khondaker Moazzem, additional research director at the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CDP) in Dhaka, told IPS. “And we came out with three options.”

The first is the poverty line that makes the pay 6,444 taka (80 dollars). CDP rejected this variant as unacceptable.

The second option was based on the “aspirational level”, which provides that the worker eats well and enjoys life, in which case the monthly wage should be 17,800 taka (220 dollars). This too was rejected, because the minimum wage cannot exceed the average salary in the country.

The third option, based on the current expenditure level, was worked out at 8,200 taka – which is exactly what the workers are demanding.

“After we sent this recommendation to the government, I received numerous calls from manufacturers,” smiled Moazzem. “They said they were ready to give me some factories and let me try to make a profit with such exorbitant salaries.”

“Costs of production increase every year by 13 percent,” said Mahmood of BGMEA. “Bangladesh has to import cotton, India has its own. The currencies of India, Indonesia and Turkey are losing their value, the Bangladeshi taka remains strong, so we lose competitiveness.

“The government does not support us: there are frequent power outages, and travel from Dhaka to Chittagong port should take six hours instead of 26.”

To this list Moazzem of CDP adds the high cost of loans, difficulties with buying land for investment, and political instability.

But the apparel plants may not lose competitiveness as easily as the entrepreneurs lament. The prices of clothes are down and production costs are up, but this is compensated by increased efficiency.

“I recognise that my workers should get paid more, but for that the retailers must pay me more,” Mahmood said, explaining that the price is decisive in gaining contracts. “Western consumers are partly responsible for the low level of wages in Bangladesh.”

According to Moazzem, retailers make the most from clothes made in Bangladesh: 55 to 65 percent. About 25 percent is the cost of material. The rest, about 15 percent, is divided evenly between workers and employers.

It is not certain that the workers will get what they want. Shipping minister Shahjahan Khan has openly supported their demands, but the government is believed to be on the side of manufacturers. Nobody wants to harm the goose that lays the golden eggs – garment production provides Bangladesh with 80 percent of its export earnings, 22 billion dollars annually.

What is more, 30 percent of MPs in Bangladesh are businessmen, mostly from the apparel industry. They sponsor both major parties.

After talks with the leaders of more than 40 trade unions, Bangladeshi garment factory owners have promised to raise wages as soon as a government panel sets a figure, without bargaining.

Most commentators predict that the new minimum wage to be announced soon will be set on a “compromise” level.

Poland has been identified as having hosted a secret CIA prison. Cuba is host to the notorious Guantanamo Bay. Pictured here are protestors during the 10-year anniversary of Guantanamo Bay detention center, in January 2012. Credit: Amnesty International/Christoph Koettl/CC By 2.0

By Robert Stefanicki
WARSAW, Jul 21 2013 (IPS)

The only sign of life at Szymany’s “international airport” are mosquitoes eager to suck blood out of a rare visitor. The gate is locked with a rusted chain and a padlock.

Evidence suggest that some of the last passengers at this site were CIA officers and their prisoners. That was in 2003. Soon after, the airport about 180 km north of Warsaw inside the picturesque Mazury forests went out of service.

Bounded by the Freedom of Information Act, Polish Airspace authorities have revealed that at least 11 CIA aircrafts landed at Szymany, and some of their passengers stayed on in Poland. The European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation (Eurocontrol) was not informed about those flights.

From Szymany the prisoners were driven to a nearby intelligence academy in Stare Kiejkuty, where the CIA had a separated facility. In 2006, a few months after Poland was first identified as having hosted a secret CIA prison, Polish ombudsman Janusz Kochanowski visited the CIA villa – only to see that its chambers have been freshly renovated.

According to a U.S. intelligence source quoted by The New York Times, the prison in Poland was the most important of the CIA’s black sites, where terror suspects were subjected to interrogation techniques that would not be legal in the United States. The source claimed that Poland was picked mostly because “Polish intelligence officials were eager to cooperate.”

Two other European countries with known but unconfirmed black sites are Romania and Lithuania; the rest were in Asia and North Africa.

Human rights groups believe about eight terror suspects were held in Poland, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Two other men currently detained at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility have been granted “injured person” status in the ongoing investigation.

The first is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi national alleged to have organised the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. He has claimed that he was often stripped naked, hooded, or shackled during seven months at Stare Kiejkuty, and subjected to mock execution with a gun and threats of sexual assault against his family members.

The second, a stateless Palestinian known as Abu Zubaydah, said he was subjected to extreme physical pain, psychological pressure and waterboarding – mock drowning.

Any Polish leaders who would have agreed to the U.S. programme would have been violating the constitution by giving a foreign power control over part of Polish territory, and allowing crimes to take place there.

Former prime minister Leszek Miller, now chairman of the opposition Democratic Left Alliance has been the prime target of criticism. There are demands he should face a special tribunal charged with trying state figures.

In March 2008, the Polish authorities opened a criminal investigation. “This indicates that Poland is a country with a rule of law,” Senator Jozef Pinior told IPS. “But the protraction is a reason for concern. The investigation has been moved to the third consecutive prosecutor’s office, in what looks like playing for time.”

Pinior, one of the leaders of the Solidarity opposition movement during the 1980s, and more recently a member of the European Parliament, has for long been lobbying for a full investigation into what the CIA was doing in Poland. Twice he was called in as witness in the investigation. He claims to have seen a document on a CIA prison with PM Miller’s signature."Poland is no banana republic, our security services do not do such things behind the back of the government.” -- Polish Senator Jozef Pinior

“The Polish government, especially Leszek Miller, must have had knowledge that such sites existed on Polish territory without any legal basis,” Pinior said. “They must have known about the torture too. Poland is no banana republic, our security services do not do such things behind the back of the government.”

It is still not clear how much knowledge the Polish leaders had about the black site in Stare Kiejkuty. Some have vehemently denied the prison’s existence, but some admit it between the lines, though denying responsibility.

“Of course, everything took place with my knowledge,” said former president Aleksander Kwasniewski in an interview with leading daily Gazeta Wyborcza.

“The President and the Prime Minister agreed to secret service co-operation with the Americans, because that is what was required by national interest…the decision to co-operate with the CIA carried a risk that Americans would use unacceptable methods. But if a CIA agent brutally treated a prisoner in a Marriott hotel in Warsaw, would you charge the directors of that hotel for the actions of that agent?”

For now Poland is the only country with investigation into the secret jails still open (Lithuania closed its case inconclusively). The officials blame delays on lack of cooperation on the U.S. government.

According to a public opinion poll by SW Research released in June, 82 percent Polish respondents said that the issue of CIA secret prisons should be clarified, and 78 percent that those responsible for human rights abuses and breach of constitution should be held liable.

“In the U.S. there is a stamp of approval that even though torture did happen, they are unwilling to go after the criminals. So Poland has tremendous responsibility to pursue the investigation and hold people accountable. It could be an inspiring example for the rest of the world,” Ramzi Kassem, attorney for some Guantanamo prisoners told IPS.

Otherwise, Kassem said, Poland will prove to be “a puppet regime willing to do the dirty work for the U.S. in much the same way that Jordan, Egypt and other dictatorships were doing at the time, imprisoning people and torturing them because the U.S. asked them to.”

Although no major political party in Poland wants the truth about Polish cooperation with the CIA to come out, Senator Pinior is “cautiously optimistic”.

“Any attempt to cover up would result in colossal shame,” he said. “I believe Polish democracy and institutions are too strong to be manipulated.”

By Robert Stefanicki
WARSAW, May 21 2013 (IPS)

For more than 100 days, detainees at American detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been on hunger strike, drawing international attention back to the prison that U.S. President Barack Obama vowed during his first presidential campaign to close down.

Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer who defends prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Photo courtesy of Ramzi Kassem.

Ramzi Kassem, associate professor of law at the City University of New York, is one of the lawyers who voluntarily defend prisoners of the “war on terror” being held at Guantanamo Bay. He currently represents seven detainees of various nationalities at Guantanamo and one at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan.

The facility was established in January 2002 by the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush to hold alleged enemies in the so-called global war on terror.

As pressure from the strike grew, Obama said on Apr. 30 that he would try again to close Guantanamo, despite persistent congressional opposition. “I think it is critical for us to understand that Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe,” the president said. “It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing.”

In an interview with IPS correspondent Robert Stefanicki, Kassem described the brutal manner in which detainees are force-fed, the legal situation of the prisoners, and how the experience has been unique for him.

Q: What is the current scope of the hunger strike?

A: I was at Guantanamo on Feb. 6 this year, and on that day my client told me that the hunger strike had begun. Now even the U.S. government admits that more than 100 prisoners out of 166 are protesting.

But based on information from my clients, in reality, all of them are on strike, with the exception of those who are sick, old and “high value” detainees kept in complete isolation. The discrepancy comes from the fact that the U.S. government has a narrow definition of a hunger strike, just like it has a narrow definition of torture.

Q: Why are they protesting?

A: My client Moaz al-Alawi told me he is refusing food and drink to protest his indefinite imprisonment without charge and without fair process. This is the only way for prisoners to exercise their autonomy and dignity.

Those people were taken from their families over a decade ago. Very few have been tried or charged. Over half of Guantanamo’s current population has been approved for release by various U.S. security agencies: the CIA, FBI, and the Department of Defence."The U.S. government has a narrow definition of a hunger strike, just like it has a narrow definition of torture."
-- Ramzi Kassem

Yet they are still in prison. One of my clients, Shaker Aamer, was cleared for release by the Bush and Obama administrations, and the UK government has been demanding his freedom for years, but he is still there, now on hunger strike.

Q: Do the prisoners have concrete demands?

A: The prisoners want Barack Obama to deliver on his promise to close the prison and send them home. Until the government takes some concrete steps in that direction, I think the hunger strike will continue. It may stop when some people are released, beginning with those cleared for release long ago.

Q: What are U.S. authorities doing to stop the protest?

A: Several prisoners are being force-fed. Force-feeding someone against his or her will is a violation of medical ethics and international law. Other prisoners in Guantanamo refuse food from their captors but accept feeding; they protest by making the U.S. military feed them by tube.

Although it is legal to feed those men, it is still illegal to do it in such a brutal way – sending five guards to take the prisoner violently, beat him up, restrain him in a chair, and tie down his arms, legs and head, so he cannot move. Then they put the tube through his nose down to the stomach. No anesthetic or lubricant.

Q: Do your clients claim innocence?

A: The fundamental concept in any legal system is that one is innocent until proven guilty. In this case you have people who have not even been charged.

At its peak, Guantanamo had 800 inmates. Now it has 166. The majority was released unilaterally by the U.S. government, not by court order.

I’ve seen several cases where the evidence did not support the accusation. When those cases were moved forward to trial level, federal judges ruled in favour of the prisoners in over 75 percent of the cases.

I am not saying that there aren’t any criminals at Guantanamo. If they are suspected criminals, they should be charged in a court of law that recognises the basic principles of fair process: presumption of innocence, no secret evidence, reliable evidence not extracted under torture.

Some families of my clients told me, “If my son or my husband did anything wrong, charge him. If he is convicted by a fair court, we would not have any objections. If you are not going to charge him, then release him.”

Q: Why is the U.S. government reluctant to bring Guantanamo detainees to court?

A: The U.S. government is reluctant because if you have torture, the case does not fly in court. All the prisoners of Guantanamo have been tortured one way or another.

Q: Are the concerns that released prisoners could return to terrorist activities justified?

A: When we say “return”, we assume that they were there. There is no proof of that. Also, there is no empirical evidence for the concern that they may engage in something wrong after release.

Even if you believe in U.S. government numbers – and I don’t – 77 percent of prisoners from Guantanamo have gone back to normal peaceful life.

Q: How is working at Guantanamo unique for a lawyer?

A: First, we have to fight for access to our clients. Then we stumble over numerous other restrictions: requirements of being a U.S. citizen, security clearance by the FBI, traveling to Cuba to meet the client.

In a normal criminal case, when given a report that the government wants to use against my client, first I would review this report with him. In Guantanamo such a report is classified, not to be shared with the client, so I have to develop the defence on my own—a big handicap.

Q: Were you surprised by recent revelations that authorities in Guantanamo listen to the conversations between prisoners and their lawyers?

A: For us it was confirmation, not a revelation. In 2005, when I first met with my clients in Guantanamo, I did not believe them when they said conversations were being recorded. But now I know my clients have always been right.

The prosecution at the military commission admitted that smoke detectors are in fact cameras and microphones. The government may not use these recordings in court against my clients, but the intelligence services are using them for whatever purposes they want.

Q: Do the lawyers at Guantanamo feel helpless?

A: We try to change the situation as much as we can. Our role is not necessarily to win in court. We have to amplify the voices of our clients to ensure they are heard by the media, NGOs and the public.

News from Guantanamo pressured the U.S. government to release prisoners. I hope this time pressure from the hunger strike will bring real change: closing Guantanamo, a place that has no right to exist.

Excerpt:

A Syrian child in a makeshift school at the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan. Credit: Robert Stefanicki/IPS.

By Robert Stefanicki
ZA’ATARI REFUGEE CAMP, Jordan, Nov 19 2012 (IPS)

No other camp for Syrians match the size of Za’atari. Equal rows of tents marked with the UNHCR logo spread to the horizon, dotted with lanterns and water tanks. Only a handful of people remain in sight, mostly on their way to or from the bathrooms.

Peace and quiet in a camp of 26,000 war refugees is surprising, even more in light of recent media reports of protests against unbearable living conditions.

Some more movement can be found on the main street, lined with food and clothes stalls. Water tankers and bulldozers pass by the walkers. “This is our entertainment. Walking back and forth. Or lying in the shade,” one of the passers-by says.

Za’atari was opened in late July to shelter the massive influx of Syrian refugees fleeing the violence in their country. The camp is in the north of Jordan, 15 km south of the Syrian border. It is set up on barren desert land where the common sandstorms cover everything in dust. Initially there was no shade, no medical assistance and very little water.

At the end of September complaints erupted into unrest. According to reports, angry refugees demolished a field hospital and one of the offices, provoking Jordanian security forces to disperse them with tear gas.

Since then about 5,000 refugees left the camp for Syria.

IPS asked around whether the exodus continues. True, some people are leaving. Because of the conditions? “No. To fight against the regime,” said a 28-year-old from Dara, who said his name was Ahmed. “Others leave only for a while to see what happened to their homes. Whatever the conditions are in the camp, they are still better than those in Syria.”

Ahmed rolls up his trouser-leg and shows marks from burning cigarettes. And a torn certificate that he had spent six months in prison.

“I came to the camp in August, crossing the border at night, after the fighting died down,” he said. Jordanian soldiers took him to the assembly point for refugees, from where he was transported to Za’atari.

The situation in the camp is changing for the better. All the humanitarian agencies – among them UNHCR (United Nations Refugee Agency), UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund), Save the Children, World Food Programme (WFP), Islamic Relief and the Jordanian Hashemite Charity Organisation – are working to improve conditions.

Different methods of feeding refugees are being tested. Because the Syrians kept complaining that food was not to their taste, distribution of hot meals has been abandoned. Now, every family gets a basket of staple products: canned beans, tuna, hummus, rice, oil, salt, sugar.

Outside the food distribution centre IPS spoke with 40-year-old Baha (nickname) waiting for a car to take him back to his tent. He pointed to two cardboard boxes filled with food: “Look, is this enough for two weeks for me, my wife and two children?”

His colleague, 36-year-old Mohammed, lifted a can of tuna with apparent disgust and said that fish is bad. “They give us the cheapest stuff.”

WFP which is responsible for feeding the refugees, says that the quality of food in Za’atari meets standards, and that the minimum of 2,100 kcal per person per day is exceeded by 300 kcal.

After giving up on hot meals, communal kitchens have been raised. Now refugees can cook for themselves but not everybody is happy.

“Beans and rice every day,” grumbled one of the women cooking in the kitchen. “Bread is not enough: we get three pita a day, but I used to eat four only for breakfast.”

The woman named Um Hassan has a more serious problem: “My husband is a diabetic. He cannot eat what is given here. I reported it, but to no avail.”

More changes are on way. “Instead of rations, the refugees will receive coupons to stores that will soon be opened in the camp,” Jonathan Campbell of WFP said. “They will be able to buy whatever they want.”

The hardest struggle is against the dust. The land for construction of the camp was razed, which breached its structure. Despite gravel and asphalt being laid, even a slight gust of wind rises up whirls.

In all 57 percent of Za’atari residents are children. Nearly 3,000 students are registered at school at the camp. Lessons are held in two shifts, with girls attending in the morning and boys in the afternoon. Also, UNICEF operates 20 Child Friendly Spaces – brightly painted tents where kids can play, socialise and try to overcome war trauma.

The approaching winter is a serious challenge. Winters in Jordan are surprisingly cold, especially in the northern areas, where temperatures drop below zero at night. Between November and March rain, strong winds and storms are common, as well as occasional snowfall.

“We have no blankets. Only a few are lucky to live in caravans. We are going to freeze,” said a resident at the camp. But the resident of a caravan is not happy either: “It is hot and stuffy, I sleep outside.”

“Transfer to the camp is a shock,” says Heinke Veit, regional information officer for the European Commission Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO). “Everything is different from home. Libyan refugees in Tunisia were shocked at the lack of air conditioning, widely provided by Gaddafi. Their Tunisian hosts were also shocked – at such exorbitant demands.”

By mid-December 600 more caravans are expected, enough for 2,500 refugees. This means most of the Za’atari residents will spend this winter in tents. Humanitarian agencies are preparing warm clothes, thermal blankets, heated and insulated communal spaces and hot water supply.

More than a million people have been displaced by violence within Syria. In the worst case scenario the refugee population at Za’atari is going to swell threefold by the end of March – unless the war ends, a hope that keeps spirits up.

Belarusians will vote for a new, but still regime-controlled parliament on Sep. 23. At least those who do not respond to calls for boycotting the poll.

The opposition is far from united in their positions on the election: some are campaigning, some boycotting, others plan to pull out right before voting day. But all are agreed that the election process is being rigged.

The seats, dissidents believe, will again be distributed according to the will of president Alexander Lukashenko who has ruled the nation of 10 million since 1994, earning the title “Europe’s last dictator”. The parliament in Belarus, as in most autocracies, has in any case very little say.

The election campaign started Aug. 22. The registration process ended the same day. Every fourth contender has been denied the right to run.

The election commissions registered most opposition candidates, but banned the most popular – on the ground of alleged irregularities in their financial disclosure, or claims that some of the signatures on their supporters’ lists were forged.

“Registration has been denied to those who would run till the end with a fair chance to win,” analyst Valery Karbalevich tells IPS.

Among the excluded are Aleksander Milinkevich, leader of For Freedom movement, a former Lukashenko rival in the presidential race, Anatol Liaukovich, former leader of the Belarusian Social-Democratic Party and Mikhail Pashkevich from ‘Tell the Truth!’.

Some popular dissidents are still in jail, like Mikola Statkievich who was sentenced for six years for “driving riots” on Dec. 19 2010 – the day of the rigged presidential election. An estimated 20,000 protesters assembled in the main square of capital Minsk on that day, leading to a massive crackdown against opponents of the regime.

Some opposition members cannot run because of their suspended sentences. Others fled abroad, such as Ales Mikhalevich, another presidential candidate, who was arrested and charged for organising riots.

Mikhalevich was released after two months in jail and said he and other political prisoners had been tortured. He escaped the country soon after, and has been granted political asylum in the Czech Republic.

This has not deterred him from trying to run for parliament. Members of the civic initiative ‘Freedom for Mikalai Statkevich and other political prisoners’ put forward candidatures of Statkievich and Mikhalevich. But the concerned election commission derided the move as “PR action aimed at gaining them prominence,” and said “there is no legal ground” to nominate them.

IPS asked Ales Mikhalevich whether he believes the opposition will manage to enter parliament at all. “Probably not,” he said. “The mechanism of vote rigging is well oiled. To quote Joseph Stalin: ‘It’s not the people who vote that count; it’s the people who count the votes’.”

Among 68,945 members of the election commissions charged with vote counting less than 0.1 percent are from the opposition, fewer than in the last parliamentary election in 2008. The 279 registered candidates then included 70 critics of the regime – none of who gained a seat.

But Mikhalevich says boycotting would be a mistake. “The Opposition should run to show that our candidates are of better quality than those of the regime.” The Lukashenko administration has put forward mostly elderly officials and security apparatus members.

Independent opinion polls give the president 25-35 percent of support, mostly among villagers and pensioners. But that does not mean that the rest are ready to support opposition, let alone fight the regime.

Interest in the election is close to zero. “None of my friends plan to go to the ballot,” Alexei, a 26-year-old doctoral student from Minsk told IPS. “Not because we are boycotting; we just don’t care about politics. This election is not going to bring any change.”

Divisions in the opposition movement are playing further into the hands of the regime.

“By persecuting some opponents while offering preferential treatment to others, Lukashenko is skillfully playing his critics,” said Mikhalevich.

Although confident of victory, Lukashenko still seems to be nervous, mostly over the prospect of widespread boycott.

In a speech Sep. 1 he criticised those who shun electoral confrontation. “Had it been the actual opposition, they would have struggled to the very end for power, for the nation’s interests,” he said. “But this is the fifth column, they act for the benefit of certain powers, some of which are located outside our country.”

Another sign of the regime’s nervousness are recent arrests of administrators of political social media groups – especially those calling for boycott.

On Aug. 30 law enforcement officers in Minsk and Vitsebsk detained four moderators of two pro-opposition groups. One of them had said bluntly, “We’ve had enough of Lukashenko” – on the Russian social network VKontakte.ru.

Investigators physically abused the moderators in a bid to obtain the password of the group they administer. “I was taken to the living room and tortured for an hour for the password. They hit me in the head, chest and stomach,” Pavel Yeutsikhiyeu reported.

Among them, Yeutsikhiyeu and Andrey Tkachou got five and seven days in jail, respectively, on charges of petty hooliganism. Others were released after a few hours.

The human rights group Viasna reported on Aug. 31 that access to the pro-opposition news websites Charter97 and BelPartizan had been blocked. Much of the content was removed.

“As usual, the regime is preparing for the elections with an all-out crackdown,” Reporters Without Borders declared. “The judicial harassment of journalists and Internet users critical of the government has just one aim – to keep them under pressure and make them feel permanently threatened.”

The authorities are meanwhile engaged in building pro-government websites, some defaming opposition members. None has gained much popularity.

Many people believe Lukashenko will stay in power for the next two decades, then hand the government to his son Kola, now eight years old.

Mikhalevich predicts “a revolt inside the state apparatus which might open the doors of change.

“To me a Ceasusescu scenario seems probable,” he said, referring to Romanian head of state Nicolae Ceausescu who was overthrown and executed following a televised two-hour court session in 1989.

“I believe Belarusians have already grown to democracy,” he said. “They just don’t want to fight for it.”

“I had to fight to be treated like a human, not animal,” dissident Nikolai Avtukhovich wrote from prison. Last month Avtukhovich, Belarusian political activist and entrepreneur, convicted to five years in the penal colony for illegal storage of five cartridges for a hunting rifle, cut his veins.

The reason for such a dramatic move may seem trivial: he was put into one cell with homosexuals.

But the subculture of Belarusian prisons is brutal: gays and rapists are at the very bottom of the hierarchy. They are obliged to announce their status to the fellowship when they arrive in a new place so that other inmates will not lose their status coming in contact with them.

Prisoners are told they must not shake their hand, eat with them, nor stay in one room. Otherwise you could become “dirty” too; then the “clean” fellows may harass or beat you.

So Avtukhovich went for self-mutilation to get moved out of those cells. Soon after recovering from cutting his veins, Avtukhovich was on Jan. 17 found guilty of “malicious abuse of the colony regime” and ordered to be transferred to a high-security indoor jail, where conditions of confinement are much more severe.

In the penal colony convicts live in the barracks, able to spend free time outdoors. In closed jail they are cramped in the cells, and entitled only to a one-hour walk round a tiny yard. They have a right only to short visits and a food parcel not more than once a year.

Andrei Sannikov, the most serious rival to president Alexander Lukashenka in the 2010 election, serving five and a half years, faced similar issues. When an “untouchable” prisoner was allocated to his solitary cell, Sannikov immediately called hunger strike and stood close to the door. The new inmate was taken away within minutes.

“We have not witnessed that before: prison administration using the informal order to humiliate jailed dissidents,” journalist and former prisoner of conscience Andrzej Poczobut told IPS.

It is neither the prison administration nor the judiciary who call the shots. According to Poczobut “all decisions regarding political prisoners are taken at the high level, usually by KGB.” KGB is an acronym for the Committee for State Security.

“The regime is open in its intention: to break the dissidents, make them beg for mercy,” Poczobut said. Last summer this journalist from Grodno got a suspended sentence of three years for insulting Lukashenka. He was released after three months detention.

“Initially the investigators tried to intimidate me, but overall I was not treated badly,” Poczobut said. “They knew I was a journalist, ready to report any mistreatment abroad. And unlike most of the other inmates, I was conscious of my rights, having printed prison regulations with me.”

Prisoners seen as troublemakers are more prone to harassment and punitive measures. From day one in jail Avtukhovich helped other prisoners write complaints, then went on hunger strike to protest the refusal of medical assistance.

A week before Avtukhovich, Nikolai Statkevich, another former candidate for presidency in Belarus, was also sentenced to more rigorous imprisonment. He is serving six years for organising “anti-state riots” (means the demonstrations against election rigging).

Statkevich was declared by officials to be a “malicious violator” of the order who has refused to follow the path of correction. “He is seeking no early release on parole, but is going to wait till the end of his sentence and lead a criminal lifestyle in the future.”

According to his wife, the politician was accused of failing to carry a prisoner’s number tag on his clothes, and for failing to list handkerchiefs among his personal belongings.

Most of the 800 people arrested a year ago following after-election protests have been set free. President Lukashenka left eight of his enemies behind bars, the most high profile and as the regime sees it, unrepentant.

“This is the personal vengeance of Lukaskenka,” Ales Kirkievich, one of the leaders of the anti-regime Youth Front told IPS. Asked about his own treatment in jail, Kirkievich said it was “not as bad as in the 1930s, but certainly far from EU standards.”

Arrested in January 2011, and sentenced to four years of penal colony, Kirkievich was released in September after applying for a presidential pardon.

That is exactly what Lukashenka wants. “They hope to come out of jail as heroes. No way,” the President said recently, responding to questions about political prisoners.

Last September Uadzimir Kobiets, staff member of Sannikov’s presidential campaign, gave public testimony about his stay in a KGB prison on the Charter97.org website.

“Masked KGB officers armed with batons and paralysers abused us, made us run on steep stairs while handcuffed, do squats, forced us to undress, then to stand naked with feet wide apart for a long time. I felt pain, but must not move – otherwise the oppressors kicked and beat me.”

The worst was mental torture. Interrogators told Kobiets that the fate of his wife and children depended on his behaviour. “I thought I was in a hopeless situation. This lawlessness was suffocating, there was no one I could address,” he wrote.

Kobiets signed a collaboration agreement and got out of jail.

His testimony confirms Kiril Semianchuk’s story. In March this opposition activist from Grodno applied for political asylum in Poland, saying he suffered from beating and sleep deprivation in KGB custody.

“During the interrogation, KGB officers beat me with shoes filled with gravel, one of them strangling me. I was punched in the face, and my head would hit the wall,” Semianchuk told Belsat TV.

After a whole night of such interrogation, the politician agreed to appear on public television and express views critical of the opposition. He also signed an agreement to cooperate with the KGB. “They showed me a small plastic bag with white powder and threatened to plant it on me, so that I could be sentenced to 10 years,” he added.

The government in Minsk denies allegations of torture and ignores repeated calls from the EU and the U.S. to release all political prisoners.

By Robert Stefanicki and - -
BENGHAZI, Libya, Nov 7 2011 (IPS)

As the first foreign official to visit Libya after the liberation announcement made by National Transitional Council, Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski tried to kill two birds with one stone.

First, to enable Polish energy and construction companies’ comeback to post-Gaddafi Libya. This “unique opportunity” at the “best possible moment” excited members of his entourage.

The other part of what may appear a new Warsaw Pact being offered to the Arab nations was more idealistic. Poland wants to share its knowhow on transfer to democracy.

“We want you to learn from our successes as well as our mistakes,” Sikorski declared after the meeting with NTC head Mustafa Abdel Jalil. The offer was backed with signs of goodwill. From his previous visit to Libya in June, Sikorski brought back to Warsaw three families of African refugees. This time he offered the services of Polish doctors and nurses to Libyans wounded in war, both in Poland and in Libya. The Polish medical mission in Misrata has now begun its work.

The old Solidarity trademark seems still helpful. “We remember your brave Solidarity movement and we want to learn from Poland how to depart safely from dictatorship,” Abdalla M. Fellah, head of the Libyan Business Council, told IPS.

Fellah echoed his countryman Mohamed S. Salem Abunnaja, a former political prisoner, who together with other observers form Tunisia and Egypt visited Poland at the beginning of October to watch the parliamentary election. “We want to study the Polish experience and apply similar legal mechanisms in our countries,” said Abunnaja at a press conference in Warsaw.

He cited examples. “Election Commission integrity. Also the vetting law (obliging the candidates for key state posts to be scrutinised for collaboration with communist security services) is worth copying, in order to prevent former thugs and informers come to power again,” Abunnaja said. Libya, he said, is at a crucial historical moment, like Poland in 1989.

Since mid-year, when Poland took over EU presidency, Polish initiatives aimed at North Africa have gathered speed. Many Polish VIPs now take the flights to Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli. And the representatives of the Arab revolutionaries are being invited to Warsaw.

At one conference in Poland an Egyptian veteran of the anti-Mubarak opposition wearing a Solidarity badge hugged Jerzy Buzek, head of the European Parliament. “I learned from you how to print leaflets,” he said.

A visit by former Solidarity lead Lech Walesa to Tunis in May was more than a photo opportunity for local politicians to shake hands with the famous Nobel Peace Prize laureate. People had many questions for Walesa, and he had some useful suggestions.

Like one that instead of mass arrests of former security officers, it is more reasonable to include those without blood on their hands in the new order. Or, that presidential election should precede a parliamentary ballot, because an elected head of state is more likely to bring stability and unity when there is a fragmented parliament.

Walesa, who used to be an electrician at Gdansk Shipyard, initiated a peaceful transition from communism in 1980 with the establishment of the Solidarity union. Nine years and a martial law later, Solidarity brought freedom: a round table, followed by the first semi-free elections in the Eastern bloc on Jun. 4, 1989. And then all other pieces of the Soviet domino began to crumble. Five months later the Berlin Wall fell.

Senate chairman Bogdan Borusewicz, who was one of the top leaders of Solidarity, visited Cairo in July. “Entering Tahrir Square was like deja vu to me,” Borusewicz told IPS. “The same discussions, the same tension as in Poland 30 years ago.”

“At the time our movement had to face critiques not just in Moscow, but in the West too. Some asked, ‘What do those Poles want? They know nothing about democracy’,” Borusewicz recalled. “Now we can hear the same sort of arguments: all this Arab Spring puts the world stability in danger! But they are wrong. Human nature is common regardless of geography.

“Each wave of the mass freedom movements – in Latin America in the 70s, Eastern Europe in the 1980s, and now in the Middle East – comes from the same source: a strong desire for liberty.”

But could a three decades-old experience from a chilly Baltic state be applicable on African shores in the 21st century? Inspirations from far can work. In the 1990s Poland itself adopted reform of the pension system based on the Chile model.

“In some aspects the Tunisians have more in common with the Poles than with the French: take our conservative attitude towards homosexuality, abortion or euthanasia,” Adam Balcer, programme director at the DemosEUROPA think-tank told IPS. “Differences between Polish regions are alike differences between the well developed coast and the under-developed interior of Tunisia.”

Aleksander Smolar, head of Batory Foundation, an NGO focused on building open society and improving the quality of democracy in Poland, added that for the centralised Arab states, Polish local government reform implemented in 1998 could come in useful.

“True, Tunisians are traditionally close to Southern Europe, they know very little about Poland,” said Smolar, who accompanied Lech Walesa to Tunis. “But on the other hand our relations are stripped of mutual complexes because Poland was never a colonial empire.”

Seen from Benghazi’s dusty and graffiti-covered post-revolutionary reality it appeared that Poland is courting the extremely busy, distracted and undecided Libyan bachelor. “There is a general interest, but on the ground they find it hard to make any decisions, not sure who of them should do it,” one Polish diplomat said.

Some have questioned the sincerity of the government’s sudden interest in Arab countries. “Polish foreign policy recently abounds with spectacular gestures aimed at establishing relations with the (North African) nations,” says the Zagranica Group, a platform for NGOs involved in international development cooperation.

“In our opinion it serves more to promote Poland than to building a substantial dialogue. We expect from the government to initiate an open and transparent process of evaluation of the development needs of the new democracies, engage the representatives of the region, as well as Polish civil society.”

Poland has strong competition. “For our presence in North Africa to bring results a change in foreign policy is needed: more development assistance, more scholarships,” Balcer said. “At present there are 300 students from the Middle East studying at Polish universities. Ukraine has 25 times more.”

Excerpt:

After 50 years of near absence, grey seals are coming back to Polish coast of Baltic Sea. Not everyone is happy about it.

A WWF picture of the reappearance of the grey seals. Credit:

Twelve seals lying on the beach of Mewia Lacha reserve were spotted and photographed by WWF volunteers at the end of October. The picture was called “sensational” because of the impressive size of the group.

It seems that occurrences like this will become less and less unusual. In the last 20 years the population of the seals, the Halichoerus grypus, has grown in the Baltics from 4,500 to 20,000.

“The seals play a role of an ambassador of life in the Baltic,” Prof Krzysztof Skora, head of the Hel Marine Station of the Institute of Oceanography at the University of Gdansk told IPS. “Though the seals are much leaner now, their overall health improved, we detect less heavy metals or toxic substances in their bodies. This means the sea is not as contaminated as in the past.”

The current population is still far below the estimated 100,000 at the turn of 19th century. Humans, loathing a “nuisance” that tore their frail fishing nets, began then to wipe them out. Fishers caught the seals in traps and cages; after presenting a trophy jaw to the Sea Fishing Bureau, they got a financial reward.

The seals’ wheel of fortune rolled over at the end of the 1980s. The Baltic states that once wanted to reduce their number now turned to protection, having come to the conclusion that without the seals the already degraded ecosystem of the sea was even more fragile, and that coexistence of man and animal is perfectly possible.

Sweden pioneered efforts to reintroduce grey seals. In Poland a breeding and rehabilitation centre was established in 2000. Since then new seals are being released every year – this summer eight of them: three newborns and five rehabilitated.

“Each of them gets a microchip, but to read it you would need to come close,” said Marcin Gawdzik of the Hel Marine Station. “Some animals get GPS transmitters, but they work only afew months, because of the limit of the battery, or until the seals moult.”

In effect, the monitoring system is based on foot patrols and air (paraglider) photography. What disturbs the scientists is the unusually high number of dead seals – dozens of them this year – being found on the beaches. Part of the explanation may be their grown population, but other factors like viruses, water contamination or human activity must be taken into consideration.

“Some of them had scars,” said Gawdzik. “But the causes of the deaths would be known only after the autopsy of each animal is done.”

Not everyone is pleased over the seals’ comeback. Some fishermen complain that they steal their catch.

“Seals are a disaster,” says Zbigniew Pyra, head of the Sea Fishermen Cooperative at Stegna, a community on the shore of Gdansk Bay. “We are unable earn our bread and butter.”

“For two months I have not caught a single salmon,” Pyra told IPS. “Near each of our nets four or five seals are cruising all the time. We try to throw stones at them, but they don’t care. Then we find only fish heads and spines in the nets.”

Fishermen wish to get damages from the government, like farmers who are being compensated for the devastation done by wild animals – but for now this is not on the agenda.

Prof. Skora believes the fishermen exaggerate in their complaints. “We try to collect such data, but we receive them very rarely from the fishermen. If they want compensation, they should prove their loss.”

Local communities must not be afraid of seals’ protection programmes, Skora said. On the contrary he believes these should help them move from fishery to tourism. “Some locals believe it is enough to build the infrastructure – but no tourist would come just because the hotel is there. They come for the seals and other natural values.”

Last year Hel Marine Station together with WWF began an education campaign aimed at informing people how to behave when they meet the seal. Before the programme started, only 40 percent of the Poles questioned in an opinion poll knew that seals live in the Baltics. One in three erroneously believed that one should pour water on the seal at the beach.

“What the seals need most is quiet,” Gawdzik said. “They come ashore to rest and may stay there for weeks, especially in breeding and moulting seasons.”

The campaign, titled ‘Home back to the seals’ provoked a surprising attack from some sea biologists who called it “the worst example of primitive marketing” and crying wolf.

In a commentary for the Gazeta Wyborcza daily, professors Jan Marcin Weslawski, Lech Stempniewicz and Tomasz Linkowski Ph.D. said that grey seal is not an endangered species. In their opinion the natural habitat of the seal are the rocks and islands of Scandinavia, not plain Polish beaches, unsuitable for them especially now, with more people and less ice than a century ago.

Prof Skora disagrees. “Baltic seals are protected as an endangered species both by Polish and international law. In Scandinavia generally they are more safe, because of special dedicated reserves and sanctuaries. All we should do now in Poland is to avoid abusing seals’ confidence and coming into direct contact.”

*This story is part of a series of features on biodiversity by Inter Press Service (IPS), CGIAR/Biodiversity International, International Federation of Environmental Journalists (IFEJ), and the United Nations Environment Programme/Convention on Biological Diversity (UNEP/CBD) – all members of the Alliance of Communicators for Sustainable Development.