“Reconstruction and reconciliation require finances and physical structure, but the families of the victims of the conflict first and foremost need their integrity protected. Physical and financial compensation mean little without justice,” wrote Suman Adhikari nearly 11 years ago, during a ceasefire in Nepal’s Maoist insurgency.

The conflict ended later that year, leaving 17,000 dead over a decade, including Adhikari’s father. A teacher and headmaster in Lamjung district, he and his fellow teachers in January 2002 refused Maoist demands to hand over 25 percent of their salaries. Days later, cadres seized him as he was teaching a Grade 10 class, bound his hands and legs, and dragged the man out of the school to a forest, where he was stabbed in the stomach and shot in the head. His body was left tied to a tree.“Many victims have been unable to get on with their lives. They are frustrated and suffer from psychological trauma." --Suman Adhikari

Soon after, Suman returned to the capital Kathmandu, where he began talking to other conflict victims about their own horrible experiences. They met with civil society organisations and political leaders, created an organisation and submitted their demands to political leaders then crafting the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA).

Today, as chairperson of the Conflict Victims Common Platform, Suman finds himself repeating many of the same requests.

One of the Common Platform’s main demands is that the government provide needs-based compensation to victims. The state has paid most of them Rs 500,000 (4,834 US dollars) as interim relief since the conflict ended but Adhikari says one-off payments can’t replace many of the breadwinners who families lost; without them, many are still struggling to find sufficient work or pay school fees.

“Many victims have been unable to get on with their lives. They are frustrated and suffer from psychological trauma,” he says.

Suman Adhikari, chairperson of Nepal’s Conflict Victims Common Platform, holding a photo of his father. Credit: Marty Logan/IPS

While society moves on, with, for example, the political leader who was prime minister three times during the insurgency taking over as PM again last week from former Maoist supremo Prachanda, victims are being forgotten, Suman says. “They still haven’t had the chance to speak of their pain properly, from the heart.”

A recent report found that victims have diverse demands for ‘truth’. Prepared by the Nepal office of the International Centre for Transitional Justice and local think-tank Martin Chautari from recent interviews with victims, it noted that many people needed closure and an end to their ambiguous losses. “Our people will come home today or tomorrow. We watch the roads,” said one woman in Bardiya, the district that had the most disappearances during the conflict.

Recognition is also a common wish, Aileen Thomson, head of ICTJ Nepal, told IPS. “They feel that the violation happened because of their membership in certain communities … a lot of times violations perpetrated by the State were because of perceived associations with the Maoists, which was really tied to identity and community and where you lived.”

The survivors want society to know that their kin were innocent victims, caught in the crossfire, adds the report.

Just as victims’ demands varied, civil society also had different ideas about what transitional justice should achieve, says Mandira Sharma, co-founder of Advocacy Forum, an NGO that filed numerous court cases for conflict-era crimes. But those theoretical discussions were shelved when it became apparent that political leaders from both sides were hoping to use the process to avoid prosecutions, adds Sharma, who is now doing a PhD in human rights and law.

“We went to see the prime minister at that time, Girija Prasad Koirala, and he was very open and honest. He said ‘Look, I had concerns raised by the military, I had concerns raised by the Maoists, and I have assured them that nothing will happen to them… We have to turn now to development, and we have to forget what happened’.”

Instead, Advocacy Forum and other groups continued to take cases to court. After victims received their interim relief, “You could have closed the chapter forcing victims to be quiet with that, but that would have been temporary: this deep sense of injustice would have remained,” Sharma says.

“In that past that’s what we did (using commissions formed after earlier political milestones like Nepal’s return to democracy in 1990). That hasn’t helped us to heal, that hasn’t helped us to improve the justice system, to correct the sense that certain people are always above the law. And there’s a very deep sense of inequality in our system because of this. We identified this as something we had to fix.”

Today though, transitional justice appears at a near standstill. The government created truth and disappearances commissions in 2014, but the legislation was severely criticised on several fronts. The Supreme Court later struck down a provision that grants amnesty for serious human rights violations.

Human Rights lawyer Raju Chapagain says that while the laws creating the bodies must be amended, the truth commission could be making efforts to advance transitional justice, which would also help to diminish a strong sense of scepticism about the body. “Nothing is preventing them inquiring into human rights violations. Commissions have powers equivalent to courts; they have adequate powers in terms of inquiries,” he says.

By taking action the commission could overcome its “credibility gap,” Chapagain adds, but it has failed to date, in part because it hasn’t engaged with victims.

The truth commission opened its office in Pokhara, west of Kathmandu, this week, one of seven regional centres, but Adhikari says the body still refuses to engage with victims. “The commissions are not good, the appointments are political, the commissioners are new to this: they should at least have a willingness to learn and to collaborate – but they don’t listen to us.”

Residents of La Hacienda, in the central department of La Paz in El Salvador, are holding pictures of the four American nuns murdered in 1980 by members of the National Guard, as they attend the commemorations held to mark 35 years of the crime, in December 2015, at the site where it was perpetrated. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Jul 23 2016 (IPS)

The ruling of the highest court to repeal the amnesty law places El Salvador in the dilemma of deciding whether the country should prosecute those who committed serious violations to human rights during the civil war.

It also evidences that, more than two decades after the end of the conflict in 1992, reconciliation is proving elusive in this Central American country with 6.3 million inhabitants.

At the heart of the matter is the pressing need to bring justice to the victims of war crimes while, on the other hand, it implies a huge as well as difficult task, since it will entail opening cases that are more than two decades old, involving evidence that has been tampered or lost, if at all available, and witnesses who have already died.“We do not want them to be jailed for a long period of time, we want perpetrators to tell us why they killed them, given that they knew they were civilians...And we want them to apologize, we want someone to be held accountable for these deaths”-- Engracia Echeverría.

Those who oppose opening such cases highlight the precarious condition of the judiciary, which has important inadequacies and is cluttered with a plethora of unsentenced cases.

“I believe Salvadorans as a whole, the population and the political forces are not in favour of this (initiating prosecution), they have turned the page”, pointed out left-wing analyst Salvador Samayoa, one of the signatory parties of the Peace Agreements that put an end to 12 years of civil war.

The 12 years of conflict left a toll of 70,000 casualties and more than 8,000 people missing.

Samayoa added that right now El Salvador has too many problems and should not waste its energy on problems pertaining to the past.

For human rights organizations, finding the truth, serving justice and providing redress prevail over the present circumstances and needs.

“Human rights violators can no longer hide behind the amnesty law, so they should be investigated once and for all”, said Miguel Montenegro, director of the El Salvador Commission of Human Rights, a non-governmental organization, told IPS.

The Supreme Court of Justice, in what is deemed to be a historical ruling, on 13 July ruled that the General Amnesty Act for the Consolidation of, passed in 1993, is unconstitutional, thus opening the door to prosecuting those accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during the conflict.

In its ruling, the Court considered that Articles 2 and 144 of said amnesty law are unconstitutional on the grounds that they violate the rights of the victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity to resort to justice and seek redress.

It further ruled that said crimes are not subject to the statute of limitations and can be tried regardless of the date on which they were perpetrated.

“We have been waiting for this for many years; without this ruling no justice could have been done”, told IPS activist Engracia Echeverría, from the Madeleine Lagadec Center for the Promotion of Defence of Human Rights.

This organization is named after the French nun who was raped and murdered by government troops in April 1989, when they attacked a hospital belonging to the guerrilla group Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).

The activist stressed that, even though it is true that a lot of information relevant to the cases has been lost, some data can still be obtained by the investigators in the District Attorney’s General Office in charge of criminal prosecution, in case some people wish to instigate an investigation.

The law has been strongly criticized by human rights organizations within and outside the country, since its enactment in March 1993.

Its critics have claimed that it promoted impunity by protecting Army and guerrilla members who committed human rights crimes during the conflict.

However, its advocates have been both retired and active Army members, as well as right-wing politicians and businessmen in the country, since it precisely prevented justice being served to these officers –who are seen as responsible for frustrating the victory of the FMLN.

“All the crimes committed were motivated by an attack by the guerrilla”, claimed retired general Humberto Corado, former Defence Minister between 1993 and 1995.

The now repealed act was passed only five days after the Truth Commission, mandated by the United Nations to investigate human rights abuses during the civil war, had published its report with 32 specific cases, 20 of which were perpetrated by the Army and 12 by insurgents.

Among those cases were the murders of archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero in March 1980; four American nuns in December of the same year, and hundreds of peasants who were shot in several massacres, like those which took place in El Mozote in December 1981 and in Sumpul in May 1980.

Also, six Jesuit priests and a woman and her daughter were murdered in November 1989, a case already being investigated by a Spanish court.

The Truth Commission has also pointed to some FMLN commanders, holding them accountable for the death of several mayors who were targeted for being considered part of the government’s counter-insurgent strategy.

Some of those insurgents are now government officials, as is the case with director of Civil Protection Jorge Meléndez.

Before taking office in 2009, the FMLN, now turned into a political party, strongly criticized the amnesty law and advocated in favour of its repeal, on the grounds that it promoted impunity.

But, after winning the presidential elections that year with Mauricio Funes, it changed its stance and no longer favoured the repeal of the law. Since 2014, the country has been governed by former FMLN commander Salvador Sánchez Cerén.

In fact, the governing party has deemed the repeal as “reckless”, with the President stating on July 15 that Court magistrates “were not considering the effects it could have on the already fragile coexistence” and urging to take the ruling “with responsibility and maturity while taking into account the best interests of the country”.

After the law was ruled unconstitutional, the media were saturated with opinions and analyses on the subject, most of them pointing out the risk of the country being destabilized and on the verge of chaos due to the countless number of lawsuits that could pile up in the courts dealing with war cases.

“To those people who fiercely claim that magistrates have turned the country into a hell we must respond that hell is what the victims and their families have gone –and continue to go- through”, reads the release written on July 15 by the officials of the José Simeón Cañas Central American University, where the murdered Jesuits lived and worked in 1989.

Furthermore, the release states that most of the victims demand to be listened to, in order to find out the truth and be able to put a face on those they need to forgive.

In fact, at the heart of the debate lies the idea of restorative justice as a mechanism to find out the truth and heal the victims’ wounds, without necessarily implying taking perpetrators to jail.

“We do not want them to be jailed for a long period of time, we want perpetrators to tell us why they killed them, given that they knew they were civilians”, stressed Echeverría.

“And we want them to apologize, we want someone to be held accountable for these deaths”, she added.

In the case of Montenegro, himself a victim of illegal arrest and tortures in 1986, he said that it is necessary to investigate those who committed war crimes in order to find out the truth but, even more importantly, as a way for the country to find the most suitable mechanisms to forgive and provide redress”.

However, general Corado said that restorative justice was “hypocritical, its only aim being to seek revenge”.

Africa's children still stand as the number one victims of suffering and destitution across the continent. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Aug 26 2015 (IPS)

“Poverty has become part of me,” says 13-year-old Aminata Kabangele from the Democratic Republic of Congo. “I have learned to live with the reality that nobody cares for me.”

Aminata, who fled her war-torn country after the rest of her family was killed by armed rebels and now lives as a as a refugee in Zimbabwe’s Tongogara refugee camp in Chipinge on the country’s eastern border, told IPS that she has had no option but to resign her fate to poverty.

Despite the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, African children still stand as the number one victims of suffering and destitution across the continent.“Poverty has become part of me. I have learned to live with the reality that nobody cares for me” – Aminata Kabangele, a 13-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo

“In every country you may turn to here in Africa, children are at the receiving end of poverty, with high numbers of them becoming orphans,” Melody Nhemachena, an independent social worker in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Based on a 2013 UNICEF report, the World Bank has estimated that up to 400 million children under the age of 17 worldwide live in extreme poverty, the majority of them in Africa and Asia.

According to human rights activists, the growing poverty facing many African families is also directly responsible for the fate of 200,000 African children that the United Nations estimates are sold into slavery every year.

“Many families in Africa are living in abject poverty, forcing them to trade their children for a meal to persons purporting to employ or take care of them (the children), but it is often not the case as the children end up in forced labour, earning almost nothing at the end of the day,” Amukusana Kalenga, a child rights activist based in Zambia, told IPS.

West Africa is one of the continent’s regions where modern-day slavery has not spared children.

According to Mike Sheil, who was sent by British charity and lobby group Anti-Slavery International to West Africa to photograph the lives of children trafficked as slaves and forced into marriage, for many families in Benin – one of the world’s poorest countries – “if someone offers to take their child away … it is almost a relief.”

Global March Against Child Labour, a worldwide network of trade unions, teachers’ and civil society organisations working to eliminate and prevent all forms of child labour, has reported that a 2010 study showed that “a staggering 1.8 million children aged 5 to 17 years worked in cocoa farms of Ivory Coast and Ghana at the cost of their physical, emotional, cognitive and moral well-being.”

“Trafficking in children is real. Gabon, for example, is considered an Eldorado and draws a lot of West African immigrants who traffic children,” Gabon’s Social Affairs Director-General Mélanie Mbadinga Matsanga told a conference on preventing child trafficking held in Congo’s southern city of Pointe Noire in 2012.

Gabon is primarily a destination and transit country for children and women who are subjected to forced labour and sex trafficking, according to the U.S. State Department’s 2011 human trafficking report.

In Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, a study of child poverty showed that over 70 percent of children are not registered at birth while more than 30 percent experience severe educational deprivation. According to UNICEF Nigeria, about 4.7 million children of primary school age are still not in school.

“These boys and girls, some as young as 13-years-old, serve in the ranks of terror groups like Boko Haram, often participating  in suicide operations, and act as spies,” Hillary Akingbade, a Nigerian independent conflict management expert, told IPS.

“Girls here are often forced into sexual slavery while many other African children are abducted or recruited by force, with others joining out of desperation, believing that armed groups offer their best chance for survival,” she added.

Akingbade’s remarks echo the reality of poverty which also faces children in the Central African Republic, where an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 boys and girls became members of armed groups following an outbreak of a bloody civil war in the central African nation in December 2012, according to Save the Children.

Violence plagued the Central African Republic when the country’s Muslim Seleka rebels seized control of the country’s capital Bangui in March 2013, prompting a backlash by the largely Christian militia.

A 2013 report by Save the Children stated that in the Central African Republic, children as young as eight were being recruited by the country’s warring parties, with some of the children forcibly conscripted while others were impelled by poverty.

Last year, the United Nations reported that the recruitment of children in South Sudan’s on-going civil war was “rampant”, estimating that there were 11,000 children serving in both rebel and government armies, some of who had volunteered but others forced by their parents to join armed groups with the hopes of changing their economic fortunes for the better.

Meanwhile, back in the Tongogara refugee camp, Aminata has resigned herself. “I have descended into worse poverty since I came here in the company of other fleeing Congolese and, for many children like me here at the camp, poverty remains the order of the day.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

By David Kode
JOHANNESBURG, Apr 24 2015 (IPS)

Pierre Claver Mbonimpa is not permitted to get close to an airport, train station or port without authorisation from a judge.  He cannot travel outside of the capital of his native Burundi, Bujumbura. Whenever called upon, he must present himself before judicial authorities.

These are some of the onerous restrictions underlying the bail conditions of one of Burundi’s most prominent human rights activists since he was provisionally released on medical grounds in September last year, after spending more than four months in prison for his human rights work.

David Kode

Mbonimpa was arrested and detained on May 15, 2014, and charged with endangering state security and inciting public disobedience. The charges stemmed from views he expressed during an interview with an independent radio station, Radio Public Africaine, in which he stated that members of the Imbonerakure, the youth wing of the ruling CNDD-FDD party, were being armed and sent to the Democratic Republic of Congo for military training.

The arrest and detention of Pierre Claver is symptomatic of a pattern of repression and intimidation of human rights defenders, journalists, dissenters and members of the political opposition in Burundi as it heads towards its much anticipated elections in May and June 2015.

The forthcoming polls will be the third democratic elections organised since the end of the brutal civil war in 2005.  The antagonism of the CNDD-FDD government and its crackdown on civil society and members of opposition formations has increased, particularly as the incumbent, President Pierre Nkurunziza, silences critics and opponents in his bid to run for a third term even after the National Assembly rejected his proposals to extend his term in office.“The international community and Burundi’s donors cannot afford to stand by idly and witness a distortion of the decade-long relative peace that Burundi has enjoyed, which represents the most peaceful decade since independence from Belgium in 1962”

Tensions continue to mount ahead of the polls and even though the president has not publicly stated that he will contest the next elections, the actions of his government and the ruling party clearly suggest he will run for another term.  Members of his party argue that he has technically run the country for one term only as he was not “elected” by the people when he took to power in 2005.

Civil society organisations and religious leaders recently pointed out that Constitution and the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement – which brought an end to the civil war – clearly limit presidential terms to two years.

As the 2015 polls draw closer, state repression has increased, some political parties have been suspended and their members arrested and jailed. The Imbonerakure has embarked on campaigns to intimidate, physically assault and threaten members of the opposition with impunity. They have prevented some political gatherings from taking place under the pretext that they are guaranteeing security at the local level.

Civil society organisations and rival political movements have on several occasions been denied the right to hold public meetings and assemblies, while journalists and activists have been arrested and held under fictitious charges in an attempt to silence them and force them to resort to self-censorship.

Legislation has been used to stifle freedom of expression and restrict the activities of journalists and the independent media.  In June 2013, the government passed a new law which forces journalists to reveal their sources.

The law provides wide-ranging powers to the authorities and sets requirements for journalists to attain certain levels of education and professional expertise, limits issues journalists can cover and imposes fines on those who violate this law.  It prohibits the publication of news items on security issues, defence, public safety and the economy.

The law has been used to target media agencies and journalists, including prominent journalist Bob Rugurika, director of Radio Public Africaine.

The government does not see any major difference between opposition political parties and human rights activists and journalists and has often accused civil society and the media of being mouth pieces for the political opposition, describing them as “enemies of the state”.

In the lead-up to the last elections in 2010, most of the opposition parties decided to boycott the elections and the ruling party won almost unopposed. However, the post-elections period was characterised by political violence and conflict.

Ideally, the upcoming elections could present the perfect opportunity to “jump start” Burundi’s democracy.  For this to happen, the media and civil society need to operate without fear or intimidation from state and non-state actors.  On the contrary, state repression is bound to trigger a violent response from some of the opposition parties and ignite violence similar to that which happened in 2010.

The international community and Burundi’s donors cannot afford to stand by idly and witness a distortion of the decade-long relative peace that Burundi has enjoyed, which represents the most peaceful decade since independence from Belgium in 1962.

It is increasingly clear that the people of Burundi need the support of the international community at this critical juncture. The African Union (AU), with its public commitment to democracy and good governance, must act now by putting pressure on the government of Burundi to respect its democratic ideals to prevent more abuses and further restrictions on fundamental freedoms ahead of the elections.

The African Union should demand that the government stops extra-judicial killings and conducts independent investigations into members of the security forces and Imbonerakure who have committed human rights violations and hold them accountable.

Further, Burundi’s close development partners, particularly Belgium, France and the Netherlands, should condemn the attacks on civil liberties and urge the government to instil an enabling environment in which a free and fair political process can take place while journalists and civil society activists can perform their responsibilities without fear.  (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris    

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Scene in north Bougainville. Searching for the missing following a civil war has been identified as a priority for reconciliation and development in the region. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
SYDNEY, Australia, Dec 21 2014 (IPS)

Thirteen years after the peace agreement which ended a decade-long civil war in Bougainville, an autonomous island region of 300,000 people located east of the Papua New Guinean (PNG) mainland in the southwest Pacific Islands, trauma and grief continue to affect families and communities where the fate of the many missing remains unresolved.

The Autonomous Bougainville Government, identifying this as a barrier to progressing post-conflict reconciliation and development, introduced a policy in September to begin helping families answer questions and find closure.“Most perpetrators will not admit to being responsible [for the fate of the missing] unless assured there is reconciliation after remains have been recovered and identified." -- Nick Peniai

“This is very important for reconciliation,” Nick Peniai, head of the Autonomous Bougainville Government’s Department of Peace and Reconciliation, told IPS.

“Most perpetrators will not admit to being responsible [for the fate of the missing] unless assured there is reconciliation after remains have been recovered and identified” and “reconstruction will become meaningful to families after they have reunited with their loved ones.”

Patricia Tapakau, a community leader in the vicinity of the Panguna mine, agreed, saying that the new policy received her full support.

There is no accurate data about the human loss which occurred during hostilities between the PNG military and indigenous militia groups involved in a local uprising in 1989 that succeeded in shutting down the Panguna copper mine, formerly operated by the Australian company, Bougainville Copper Ltd.  But some estimates of the death toll run as high as 20,000.

The mine, a major revenue earner at the time for the PNG government, was at the centre of local grievances about loss of customary land, environmental devastation and increasing inequality. The conflict continued following a government blockade of the islands in 1990 until a permanent ceasefire in 1998.

Today many families on the islands continue to search for their missing loved ones, reports the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). The endless uncertainty about their fate is keeping the memory and suffering of the war alive in communities and inhibiting people’s confidence in a better future.

“We need reconciliation from one end of the island to the other….we need to restore the relationship with the bodies that have rotted in the jungle by bringing them back to their villages and giving them dignity by doing a proper burial,” a community leader from Guava village near the mine was quoted in a report by Jubilee Australia.

But, according to Peniai, it has only recently become feasible to publicly address this sensitive issue.

“It could not have been possible to get information on missing persons soon after the brokering of peace 13 years ago due to fear for the lives of those with the information, and the same on the part of those who were responsible for the killings in the event of being exposed.  The families of missing people were also not attempting to investigate for the same reason of fear,” he explained.

Conditions are more conducive to this occurring now, Peniai believes, with people willing to freely discuss the issue and some improvements to the law enforcement sector, which is supporting public confidence.

The United Nations Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance supports international human rights laws that place an obligation on warring parties, including governments, military forces and armed groups, to take all possible measures to search for and return missing persons, or their remains, to next of kin.

In Bougainville, the new policy will address the humanitarian needs of affected communities, but exclude bringing perpetrators to justice and claims for compensation.  Implementation will include seeking information about victims’ whereabouts, identifying burial sites, exhumation and forensic identification of remains before their return to relatives for burial.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) will be on hand to assist the Bougainville Government and its partners with advice and expert support as the policy is rolled out.

Families of those who have disappeared “may have psycho-social needs which require medical attention, even years later, this is an important need in Bougainville,” Gauthier Lefèvre, Head of Mission for the ICRC in Papua New Guinea, told IPS.

“Many may also have difficulties making ends meet economically or be in a vulnerable position within society due to absence of their usual support networks.”

The humanitarian organisation supports similar efforts to reconcile families in other post-conflict zones, such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Iran and Iraq.  It emphasises these measures are vital to helping people overcome anger and mistrust. If unaddressed, this burden can be passed on to a younger generation who are at risk of inheriting a sense of humiliation and injustice.

The Leitana Nehan Women’s Development Agency, a local non-governmental organisation, claims that unaddressed trauma has been a direct factor in high levels of alcohol and domestic abuse and violence against women, including rape, on the islands since the end of the ‘Bougainville crisis.’

During the three months of April, July and August 2010 alone, local police received reports of 84 sexual offences, 261 cases of domestic violence and 16 of child abuse.

Returning the remains of loved ones “is unfinished business on the road to healing, forgiveness, rehabilitation and reconstruction of whole communities” in the autonomous region, claims the OHCHR.

It “will bring closure and even psychological healing to families of missing persons and in some cases resolve legal issues linked to landownership and inheritance,” Lefèvre said.  He added that such efforts “certainly have an impact on human and social development in post-conflict zones.”

Peniai believes there will be benefits for human development “in the sense of establishing national unity, as a truly reconciled society is likely to be more stable.”

The peace process in Bougainville since 2001 has been assisted by the United Nations and international aid donors, but the autonomous region still faces immense development challenges. Life expectancy is 59 years and the under-five mortality rate is 74 per 1,000 live births, compared to the global average of 46, reports the National Research Institute.

In Central Bougainville, where the conflict originated, 56 percent of people do not have access to safe drinking water and 95 percent lack access to sanitation, according to World Vision.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Banner in the village of Fidae (near Byblos) which reads: "The municipality of Al Fidae announces that there is a curfew for all foreigners inside the village every day from 8 pm to 5.30 am". Credit: Oriol Andrés Gallart/IPS

By Oriol Andrés Gallart
BEIRUT, Nov 21 2014 (IPS)

Staring at the floor, Hassan, a 21-year-old Syrian refugee from Idlib in northwestern Syria, holds a set of identification papers in his hands. He picks out a small pink piece of paper with a few words on it stating that he must obtain a work contract, otherwise his residency visa will not be renewed.

Hassan (not his real name) has been given two months to find an employer willing to cough up for a work permit, something extremely unlikely to happen. After that, his presence in Lebanon will be deemed illegal.

Hassan, who fled Syria almost three years ago to avoid military service, tells IPS that all that awaits him if he returns are jail, the army or death, so he has decided that living in Lebanon illegally after his visa expires is his best bet.Hassan, who fled Syria almost three years ago to avoid military service … [says that] all that awaits him if he returns are jail, the army or death, so he has decided that living in Lebanon illegally after his visa expires is his best bet.

Sitting next to Hassan is 24-year-old Ahmed (not his real name) from Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, who lost his residency one month ago. Since then he has been forced to watch his movements. “I live with permanent fear of being caught by the police and deported,” he says.

Since the start of Syria’s civil war in March 2011, over 1.2 million Syrians have sought refuge in Lebanon, where they now account for almost one-third of the Lebanese population.

Particularly since May, the Lebanese government has increasingly introduced measures to limit the influx of Syrian refugees into the country. Speaking after a cabinet meeting on Oct. 23, Information Minister Ramzi Jreij announced that the government had reached a decision “to stop welcoming displaced persons, barring exceptional cases, and to ask the U.N. refugee agency [UNHCR] to stop registering the displaced.”

Dalia Aranki, Information, Counselling and Legal Assistance Advisor at the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), told IPS that Lebanon “is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention” and, as a result, “is not obliged to meet all obligations resulting from the Convention.”

“Being registered with UNHCR in Lebanon can provide some legal protection and is important for access to services,” she wrote together with Olivia Kalis in a recent article published by Forced Migration Review. “But it does not grant refugees the right to seek asylum, have legal stay or refugee status. This leaves refugees in a challenging situation.”

Current legal restrictions affect the admission of newcomers, renewal of residency visas and the regularisation of visa applications for those who have entered the country through unofficial border crossings.

One aid worker who is providing assistance to Syrian refugees in Mount Lebanon told IPS that the majority of the Syrian beneficiaries they are working with no longer have a legal residency visa.

Aranki notes that fear of being arrested often forces those without legal residency papers to limit their movements and also their ability to access various services, to obtain a lease contract or find employment is severely limited. It could also impede birth registration for refugees -with the consequent risk of statelessness, or force family separations on the border.

Before May this year, Syrians could usually enter Lebanon as “tourists” and obtain a residency visa for six months (renewable every six months for up to three years), although this process cost 200 dollars a year, which already was financially prohibitive for many refugee families.

However, NRC has noted that under new regulations Syrians are only permitted to enter Lebanon in exceptional or humanitarian cases such as for medical reasons, or if the applicant has an onward flight booked out of the country, an appointment at an embassy, a valid work permit, or is deemed a “wealthy” tourist. Since summer 2013, restrictions for Palestinian refugees from Syria have become even more severe.

Under its new policy, the Lebanese government also intends to participate in the registration of new refugees together with the UNHCR. Khalil Gebara, an advisor to Minister of Interior Nohad Machnouk, says that the government has taken these measures for two reasons.

“First, because the government decided that it needs to have a joint sovereign decision over the issue of how to treat the Syrian crisis. (…) Previously, it was UNHCR to decide who was deemed a refugee and who was not, the Lebanese government was not involved in this process.”

Secondly “because government believes that there are a lot of Syrians registered who are abusing the system. A lot of them are economic migrants living in Lebanon and they are registered with the United Nations. The government wants to specify who really deserves to be a refugee and who does not”.

Ron Redmond, a UNHCR spokesperson, said that the U.N. agency has “for a long time” encouraged the Lebanese government to assume a role in the registration of new refugees and affirms that registration is going on.

“There is concern about the protection of refugees but there is also understanding on UNHCR’s part,” said Redmond. “Lebanon has legitimate security, demographic and social concerns.”

Meanwhile, accompanying the increasing fear of deportation from Lebanon, Syrian refugees have also been forced to deal with routine forms of discrimination.

Over 45 municipalities across Lebanon have imposed curfews restricting the movement of Syrians during night-time hours, measures which, according to Human Rights Watch’s Middle East Director Nadim Houry, contravene “international human rights law and appear to be illegal under Lebanese law.”

Attacks targeting unarmed Syrians – particularly since clashes between the Lebanese army and gunmen affiliated with Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State in Arsal in August – have  also occurred.

Given such realities, life in Lebanon for Hassan, Ahmed and many other Syrian refugees, is becoming a new exile, stuck between a rock and a hard place.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Mandeep S.Tiwana
JOHANNESBURG, Sep 2 2014 (IPS)

The killings of hundreds of civilians, including scores of children, in Gaza – whose only fault was to have been born on the wrong side of the wall – was a major point of contention at the United Nations Human Rights Council at the end of July.

The high death toll caused by indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas by the Israeli military has resulted in what may very likely be war crimes. The United Nations has said that 70 percent of those killed in Gaza were civilians.

Mandeep Tiwana

Yet Western democracies, normally proactive on human rights issues at the Council, chose to withhold their vote when a resolution urging immediate cessation of Israeli military assaults throughout the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem, and an end to attacks against all civilians, including Israeli civilians, was brought forward.

Notably, the resolution sought to create an independent international commission of inquiry to investigate all violations of international human rights and humanitarian law in the context of military operations conducted since June 13, 2014.

When asked to vote on the above, Austria, France, Ireland, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom chose to abstain. The United States, whose foreign policy mission is to “shape and sustain a peaceful, prosperous, just and democratic world and foster conditions for stability and progress for the benefit of the American people and people everywhere,” was ironically the only country in the 47 member U.N. Human Rights Council to have voted against the resolution.“Institutions of global governance should be able to offer a source of protection and support for people who are being repressed, marginalised or excluded at the national level. Yet, too often, they are captured by state interests which override genuine human rights concerns.”

Essentially, each country standing for election to the Human Rights Council is required to “uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights.” By any yardstick, looking at the wanton death and destruction that has rained down on the people of Gaza, destroying the homes and livelihoods of tens of thousands as well as vital public infrastructure, is a blatant abdication of responsibility.

In 2006, when the Human Rights Council was created, then U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan poignantly remarked that the true test of its ability would be the use that member states make of it. Eight years down the line, sadly the Council remains a house divided on the great human rights matters of the day.

Earlier this year in March, when the Human Rights Council passed a resolution aimed at addressing impunity for the widespread violations of international law committed during and after the Sri Lankan civil war, many of the countries strongly in favour of accountability for crimes committed in the Gaza conflict – such as Algeria, China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Viet Nam – voted against the Sri Lanka resolution. Conversely, Western democracies that abstained on the Gaza vote robustly supported action to tackle impunity in Sri Lanka.

This double standard represents perhaps the greatest challenge to the world’s premier human rights body.

Notably, the Human Rights Council was established in response to well-founded criticism of rampant politicisation of human rights issues by its predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights.  At the Human Rights Council too, geopolitical interests of the more powerful states are driving selective blocking and support for human rights causes by elected member states, weakening respect for international standards. 

Notably, the formation of blocs presents a grave threat to the Council’s work. Its members have unfortunately slotted themselves into various informal groups such as the Western European and Others Group (WEOG),  African Group, Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) countries, and even a motley ‘Like-Minded Group’ that shares little in political culture and world view except that it largely opposes whatever the Western group comes up with.

These unfortunate political dynamics have weakened the ability of the Council to be a beacon for the advancement of human rights discourse. Tellingly, the issue of discrimination against and violations of the personal freedoms of sexual minorities including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) individuals remains another hotly contested area.

A regressively worded June 2014 resolution on the ‘protection of the family’ – which excludes LGBT individuals from the ambit of the family – witnessed en-masse voting in favour by the African, OIC and ‘Like-Minded Group’.

Worryingly, far too many countries are caught up in the herd mentality of en-masse voting coupled with advancement of strategic interests at the Human Rights Council. Too often, principle is being abandoned at the altar of politics. Every time this happens, the legitimacy of the global governance institution suffers, further exacerbating conflict.

A report by the global civil society alliance, CIVICUS, points out that in an ever more complex governance environment, where large problems are acknowledged to cross national borders, international level decision-making is starting to matter more.

Institutions of global governance should be able to offer a source of protection and support for people who are being repressed, marginalised or excluded at the national level. Yet, too often, they are captured by state interests which override genuine human rights concerns.

Civil society and the media have their work cut out to expose the hypocrisy and inconsistency that mars action on gross human rights violations in international forums like the Human Rights Council. States need to be held accountable and practice what they preach – on principle, and not only when it suits them. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

South Sudanese President Salva Kiir has declared a state of emergency in two states, according to the government’s official Twitter account.

The decree issued on Wednesday covers Unity and Jonglei, where government troops and rebel forces loyal to former vice president Riek Machar have been engaged in fighting.

The declaration came as the rival factions were set to open talks in Ethiopia on Thursday, aimed at bringing an end to the nearly three-week-old conflict, despite reports of an imminent military showdown in Jonglei.

Sources said government and rebel negotiators arrived in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on Wednesday.

Ethiopian government spokesman Getachew Reda said the talks would focus on “monitoring mechanisms for the ceasefire”.

Following the fall of Bor, Jonglei’s state capital, into the hands of the rebels on Tuesday, the government and rebels loyal to Machar agreed to meet for talks.

The South Sudan government, however, refused to call it a ceasefire, saying negotiators must first agree on “mechanisms” for talks to move forward.

Fierce battle imminent

For his part, Kiir named eight negotiators to represent his government in the proposed talks in Ethiopia, Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Adow reported from the South Sudanese capital Juba on Wednesday.

Despite the preparations for the talks, thousands of government troops were making their way to Bor in an effort to wrest back control of the Jonglei state capital, setting up another possible fierce battle with rebels.

Our correspondent quoted government sources as saying that “it is just a matter of time” before they retake Bor, which was captured by rebels on Tuesday.

Fighting is also going on in other fronts like Mayom and Malakal, he said.

Violence first erupted in South Sudan on Dec. 15, when Kiir accused Machar of attempting a coup.

Machar has denied this, in turn accusing Kiir of conducting a violent purge of his opponents.

The fighting has since spread across the country, with the rebels seizing several areas in the oil-rich north.

Thousands of people are feared dead, U.N. officials said, while close to 200,000 civilians have been forced to flee their homes – many seeking refuge with badly overstretched U.N. peacekeepers.

Jacob Kurtzer, a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross, told Al Jazeera that refugees need immediate help.

The U.N. has said it will do everything it can to prevent further “terrible acts of violence” in South Sudan.

“We have seen terrible acts of violence in the past two weeks, there has been killings and brutality, grave human rights violations and atrocities committed,” Hilde Johnson, U.N. special representative to South Sudan, told Al Jazeera.

The conflict has been marked by an apparent surge in ethnic violence pitting members of Kiir’s Dinka tribe against Machar’s Nuer community.

Continuing ‘atrocities’

The U.N. Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) said “atrocities are continuing to occur” across the country despite efforts to negotiate a ceasefire.

“UNMISS is gravely concerned about mounting evidence of gross violations of international human rights law that have occurred in South Sudan during the past 15 days,” it said in a statement, reporting “extra-judicial killings of civilians and captured soldiers” and the “discovery of large numbers of bodies” in Juba, Bor and Malakal, the main town in oil-producing Upper Nile state.

UNMISS has said it is “actively collecting information” on the atrocities to be used for future official investigations.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has already given warning that senior South Sudanese figures “will be held personally accountable” for any crimes against humanity.

Johnson, the U.N. special representative, has said there is evidence that South Sudanese citizens are being targeted “on ethnic grounds”.

“This can lead to a perpetual cycle of violence that can destroy the fabric of the new nation,” she said.

“We need to do everything possible to prevent such a cycle of violence between communities of South Sudan.”

However South Sudan political analyst Matthew LeRiche told Al Jazeera the fighting is “very much a political struggle” rather than an ethnic conflict.

He noted that Kiir and Machar belonged to the same government and the same party, until they split due to political differences.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

In the apparently idyllic Solomon Islands, trauma continues for many families whose loved ones went missing in the civil war. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS.

By Catherine Wilson
AUKI, Malaita Province, Solomon Islands, Nov 13 2013 (IPS)

Anguish over the whereabouts of loved ones who went missing during a five-year civil conflict that ended a decade ago continues for countless families in the Solomon Islands. Searching for the remains of those who disappeared is vital to enduring peace in this culturally diverse south-west Pacific island nation of 550,000.

“I can’t sleep, I want to know the truth because he [a man in the village] is talking to people when he is drunk and telling them that he killed them all. We don’t know. When I look into the eyes of my brother’s child, I feel very, very angry. I want the truth.”

This plea for help came from a family in a small village in Malaita Province where seven people disappeared during the war known as The Tensions (1998-2003). To this day no one knows what happened to them. But one man in the community, on occasions when he is inebriated, boasts of being the perpetrator.“I can’t sleep, I want to know the truth because he is talking to people when he is drunk and telling them that he killed them all."

In 1998 the Guadalcanal Revolutionary Army, later the Isatabu Freedom Movement (IFM) on Guadalcanal Island began to evict migrant settlers from neighbouring Malaita Province who were perceived to be dominating access to land, resources and employment. Combat ensued as the Malaita Eagle Force (MEF) was formed to defend Malaitan interests.

The reason for these seven disappearances is confirmed. However, hearings of the Solomon Islands Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) established in 2009 indicate that a significant number of abductions during hostilities occurred within the same community or indigenous group as rumour led to suspicion of individuals being collaborators or spies for rival militia groups or the enemy.

Deputy director of the Malaita Peace and Reconciliation Office, Francis Kairi, believes that many more untold stories will be revealed during the course of its outreach programmes.

Ambiguous loss, in which the whereabouts of someone is unknown and relatives experience relentless psychological stress, can significantly impede healing within post-conflict societies.

The view of many is that “unless we know where our missing relatives are, unless we know where they are buried, I don’t think we can accept reconciliation,” Reuben Lilo, director of peace and reconciliation in the Ministry of National Unity, Peace and Reconciliation, told IPS in the capital, Honiara.

Father Sam Ata, TRC Chairman, told IPS that the endless uncertainty and trauma of these families must be addressed, otherwise projects aimed at development could become the targets of retaliation.

This year four villages in Central Malaita, home to some of the 20,000 people forcibly displaced to the province in the late 1990s as they fled evictions on Guadalcanal were destroyed by arson, with an estimated 500 people made homeless. According to Leslie Filiomea, the Anglican Church of Melanesia’s justice, reconciliation and peace co-ordinator in Malaita, ongoing untreated trauma was a major factor in the rapid escalation of small disputes in the communities into wider retribution.

Five years of armed hostilities had a severe impact on people’s lives.  An estimated maximum of 50,000 people were displaced on both sides. Guadalcanal communities fled to other areas of the island to escape bloodshed, and long established settlers from Malaita made an exodus to become refugees in their former home province.

Many of those kidnapped from their villages, places of work or from the side of the road were subjected to torture and executions. In two years of hearings from 2010-2011 the TRC received 1,413 statements of torture and 300 accounts of kidnapping and illegal detention by militia groups and security forces.

But, with no official assessment yet undertaken of the missing, the list of fatalities in the TRC’s final report is believed to be an underestimate.

“We identified 200 based on our mapping of the grave sites,” Father Ata explained. “But some of these are mass graves and there are other grave sites that we could not identify or the locals have not revealed to us.

“People don’t come forward because they fear the continuing presence of former combatants who still have weapons…to give information about missing people would jeopardise their security.”

But there is wide agreement that returning the remains of loved ones to families, one of the key recommendations of the women’s TRC submission, is imperative to addressing ambiguous loss.

“The spirit does not rest until you are buried properly,” Kairi said. “The physical beings living, too, will not rest, as well as the dead. So closure has to be achieved for the spirit of the dead and the family.”

In August 2011, the TRC began exhumations on Guadalcanal Island based on requests from families. The remains of four male victims, two from Guadalcanal and two from Malaita, were retrieved and returned to their next of kin during a national memorial service held in Honiara later that year.

Closure for these families was the culmination of long, complex and sensitive negotiations with communities, village chiefs and witnesses, and assistance by forensic experts from Argentina.

Ata is adamant that continuing the exhumation programme, despite the significant challenge of funding, and ensuring it is done in a locally appropriate way, is vital to achieving true healing in the Solomon Islands.

“We have done a lot symbolic reconciliations where the whole community comes together, but the actual process of healing is far from that,” he said, emphasising the importance of addressing individual human suffering.

The Ministry of National Unity, supported by the UN Trust Fund for Human Security, has begun creating avenues for people to share the burden of their loss. This year 200 trauma counsellors began working in communities in Malaita and Guadalcanal Provinces, including Honiara.

One outcome, Kairi believes, is that the true scale of human loss will slowly become clearer and with it the opportunity to focus on people with unresolved trauma-related needs. Only when these have been addressed can wider peace be built for both victims and perpetrators.

Thousands of suspected marxist youth were 'disappeared' in the late 1980s and never seen again. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
NEW YORK, Feb 19 2013 (IPS)

It was almost four o’clock in the morning on Feb. 18, 1990, when Dr. Manorani Saravanamuththu pulled into the driveway of No. 42 Castle Street, an old Portuguese-style home located in a suburb of Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo.

“They’ve taken Richard,” she said, when her niece and her husband opened the door. “The Black Cats have taken him.”

The young couple needed no further explanation. Both were intimately aware of the plain-clothes death squads that drove around in black jeeps, arresting, abducting, abusing and assassinating at will.

Their quarry – members or suspected sympathisers of the left-wing People’s Liberation Front (the Janatha Vimukti Peramuna or JVP) – were usually poor university students, whose bodies would either be found the next day, burning in rubber tires atop piles of other corpses, or would never be seen again.If you have no answer except to meet indiscriminate killings with equally brutal reprisals…you will build up a monster no one will be able to control.

And although this period in the country’s history was even then referred to as the ‘bheeshana kalaya’, or the reign of terror, no one expected that one of its victims would be Richard de Zoysa: the progeny of two powerful Colombo families, star of the English-language stage, a well-known newscaster and bureau chief of the Rome-based Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency, whose dispatches on Sri Lanka throughout the 1980s earned him a reputation at home and abroad as an exceptionally prolific writer.

The days following de Zoysa’s abduction were – for his family, his comrades and, especially, for the government of then-President Ranasinge Premadasa of the ruling United National Party (UNP), which was engaged in what has been described as a war to “root out” the JVP – marked by utter uncertainty.

Day and night, phones rang: desperate calls to police stations and influential lawyers, urgent offers of asylum and amnesty from abroad, incessant requests for government statements from international media, all essentially asking the same question: where is he?

On the third day after de Zoysa had been bundled into a jeep by six armed men (one of whom his mother would identify as a high-ranking police officer in the president’s detail), wearing nothing but a sarong around his waist, a fisherman bobbing about on the Indian Ocean just off the coast of Moratuwa, a seaside suburb south of Colombo, hauled a floating corpse into his narrow boat and rowed it ashore.

And although bullet wounds and three days in salt water had eaten away at the handsome 30-year-old, his mother, called in by a magistrate defying government orders to “dispose” of bodies without due process, recognised him.

The news sparked a massive public outcry among Colombo’s elite: louder, even, than the collective fury over the roughly 40,000 deaths that had preceded de Zoysa’s in that black decade.

Just days after the funeral, the media received a directive from the government: no more mention of Richard de Zoysa — not in print, not in pictures, not on the radio. If murder would not suffice to silence him, then censorship would have to be the next best thing.

A life in writing

Though speculation about the reasons behind de Zoysa’s murder ran a wide gamut – from his artistic involvement in theatre to his sexual involvement with members of the JVP — IPS has maintained that de Zoysa’s greatest contribution was in the field of journalism, awarding him, posthumously, its annual International Achievement Award “for his news accounts of the killings of students by death squads (in Sri Lanka).”

In fact, de Zoysa was corresponding for IPS during possibly one of the most complex moments in Sri Lankan history – a time of total war on more than one front.

According to de Zoysa’s report entitled “Pride Stalks Beneath a Full Moon”, published on the IPS wire on May 22, 1989, “Pride stalks Sri Lanka today, in a variety of guises. There is the racial pride of the Sinhalese, who make up 70 percent of the island’s 17 million people (mostly Buddhist), as well as the pride of the 1.4 million-strong Tamil minority.

“There is also the pride of two fierce militant groups, one Sinhalese and one Tamil; the pride of two armies, one Sri Lankan and one Indian; and the political pride of their governments in Colombo and New Delhi.”

He was referring first and foremost to the thousands of youth in the south and centre of the country who had joined a Marxist insurgency that preached “nationalist revolution for Sri Lanka’s largely-Buddhist Sinhalese peasantry”.

The second group of militants, located in the north and east of the tiny island, were the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a separatist organisation comprised of rebels drawn from the country’s minority Tamil population, demanding independence and a “homeland” for the Tamil people.

Thus the Sri Lankan army, as de Zoysa would report in great detail, was fighting two wars: dispatching soldiers into the “economically-underprivileged southern belt” to crush the JVP and terrorise any possible recruits, while simultaneously ordering troops to the northern jungles to do battle with the seasoned guerillas of the LTTE.

Meanwhile, the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), pressed into service by former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, was tasked with dragging the Tigers to the Indian-backed negotiating table to agree on a devolution plan outlined in the 1987 Indo-Lankan accords.

According to de Zoysa’s monthly features, the peace deal itself split the island still further: with the JVP and the shadowy organisation suspected of being its armed wing (known as the Patriotic People’s Movement or DJV) “implacably opposed to Tamil separatism or anything remotely approaching it”; while the LTTE held out for full separation against a tide of Tamil political parties pushing closer to an official agreement with the government for regional autonomy.

On Dec. 21, 1988, de Zoysa sketched a vivid picture of the delicate “triangle of power” that then governed the island, predicting, “(If) Premadasa, a shrewd self-taught professional politician, wants his presidency to get off the ground, he will have to deal swiftly with two men who, like him, have simple origins – Tamil Tiger guerilla leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and JVP supremo Rohana Wijeweera.

“The actions of this trio,” de Zoysa noted, “will determine Sri Lanka’s immediate future – as well as the fate, in life or death terms, of the country’s 16.4 million people.”

His writings elegantly pieced together the bits of this war-torn story, bringing in a range of voices from government insiders to children in JVP-strongholds who, as a result of curfews and a climate of terror, stayed home from school and played at violent revolution instead.

In this way, he exemplified the IPS ethos of raising the “voice of the voiceless” at a time when testimony in all its forms – whether written, whispered or even insinuated – was deemed worthy of death at the hands of any number of armed parties.

He picked his way across the corpse-strewn island, stopping at coastal towns like Tangalle, 110 miles south of Colombo, to speak with fishermen like Ranjith, put out of work by a thinning flow of tourists; and mothers like Siriyawathi who had traveled hours from her remote village to file a complaint that her brother — “an electrician, not a militant”, she assured De Zoysa – had been blindfolded and led away by the police, not seen or heard of since.

He spent many hours in this town, at the headquarters of the Human Rights and Legal Aid Organisation where Mahinda Rajapakse – then a little known lawyer and secretary of the rights group, now president of the country, wielding an unprecedented degree of power – met with one bereaved woman after another, all begging for news of their ‘disappeared’ sons, husbands, nephews.

“This kind of work is called humanitarian but ultimately makes one inhuman,” de Zoysa quoted Rajapakse as saying back in 1988. “From the time I open my door there are these women weeping and wailing. Eventually one gets desensitised and just concentrates on offering practical advice.”

In uncovering little-known stories, and prying snippets of information from those worst affected but least visible in times of conflict, de Zoysa put his finger on the grisly point the government hoped most would go unremarked: that the late 1980s marked a turning point in military strategy, away from the Tamil “other” in the north and onto the Sinhalese “brother” in the south.

With unwavering accuracy, de Zoysa uncovered how the draconian anti-terror laws – implemented through arbitrary arrests, detention, torture and murder — that had once been used to crush the Tamil rebellion, quickly became the favoured means of stamping out the JVP, a sleight of hand that did not go unnoticed among the Sinhalese peasantry.

His journalism has been described as activism, but a reading of his collected writings for IPS reveals that these stories had no agenda: rather, they are the work of one who wades into murky and murderous waters to fish out the flotsam of stories found floating there.

And while he fitted together the jigsaw of the present, he also – perhaps unwittingly – prophesied the future: his last dispatch for IPS, entitled “Sri Lanka: Nearing a Human Rights Apocalypse”, contained none of the stoic analysis that had hitherto characterised his reports.

Rather, the story flew hastily across a series of killings, with passing reference to “bodies smoldering on public roadways” and the death squads that came knocking “with a licence to kill”, adding that, in the past month, over 1,000 youth had fallen victim to such assassinations.

He ended by echoing the words of former Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who told Parliament shortly before his death, “(If) you have no answer except to meet indiscriminate killings with equally brutal reprisals…you will build up a monster no one will be able to control.”

Excerpt:

Colombia has suffered an internal armed conflict for so many decades that it almost amounts to a “forgotten crisis” for external donors. But the president of neighbouring Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, is well aware of the conflict, and understands that it destabilises Latin America, where centre-left governments proliferate.

“He is a man who is determined (to find) a political solution, and to bring peace to this country. He did not lose the sense that Colombia deserves a better fate,” a source familiar with the ongoing negotiations between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC guerrillas, told IPS on condition of anonymity.

Chavez “has understood that this internal conflict causes tremendous damage to the country, but that it is also a destabilising factor in the region,” he said.

Amid the secrecy, the government and people familiar with the negotiations agree that the Venezuelan president has played a cardinal role in the current peace efforts.

The outbreak of civil war in this country dates to 1946, and in its current phase persists between the state security forces and the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), both guerrilla groups that emerged in 1964.

Apparently, Santos told Chavez about his intention to explore a peace agreement with the guerrillas in a meeting in August 2010, during the early days of Santos’ administration.

The negotiations with FARC are no longer secret, but IPS has learned that separate talks with ELN are also moving forward.

Inquiries by IPS found that, with great courage, Chavez encouraged FARC leaders to accept Santos’ gestures. The Venezuelan leader’s initiative was also endorsed by Cuban President Raul Castro.

The proposal probably came as a surprise to FARC, whose leaders finally said “Yes” to the negotiations.

The source close to the talks said that the decision was approved by all of the guerrilla leaders, though some had recorded their written reservations over secondary issues, such as whether the timing was right or if the guerrillas were contributing to the popularity of Santos, which was indeed what happened.

Chavez not only approached the parties, but has acted decisively as the facilitator.

The first contact between the Santos government and FARC took place in the Colombian territory of Catatumbo, on the border with Venezuela, according to Mauricio Jaramillo, the nom de guerre of Jaime Alberto Parra, one of the guerrilla leaders involved in the exploratory talks.

Jaramillo is the current commander of the Bloque Oriental (Eastern Bloc), which operates in the giant bi-national valley of the Orinoco River and especially along the border between Colombia and Venezuela.

This meeting took place before the talks formally started, Jaramillo said in a letter on Jan. 9. “The process was about to fail because of the difficulty of finding an agreed location for the negotiations,” he added.

Santos also boldly began the rapprochement, without the army’s knowledge, as revealed in an article on Dec. 29 in the Bogota newspaper ‘El Espectador’, written by the president’s brother, journalist Enrique Santos.

But Santos rejected FARC’s proposal that the negotiations continue in Colombia.

Venezuela also was ruled out as a venue to avoid accusations against Chavez’s government, according to IPS’ annonymous source. The Colombian military regularly warns that there are limits to Venezuela’s tolerance for FARC presence on its soil.

Finally, Havana was chosen to host the exploratory talks: “We decided on Cuba for safety reasons and, above all, because it guaranteed confidentiality,” wrote Enrique Santos.

This exploratory phase ended in August of 2012, leading to the formal negotiation stage, which opened last October in Oslo and since November has been taking place in Cuba.

The process has involved much political arm-wrestling – just answering the question of how Jaramillo was going to be transported to Venezuela and then to Havana took almost a year, demonstrating the level of mistrust between the parties.

The government wanted to arrange an overland journey, crossing three-quarters of Colombia’s territory to reach the border city of Cucuta in the northeast. According to Jaramillo, the government claimed that “the airlift transport was impossible because it violated the drug controls agreed with the USA.”

Thus, Chavez also facilitated the transportation logistics for Jaramillo and other insurgents to Havana, which was a matter of “vital importance”, the source added without giving details, although these difficulties are “well known” by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Finally, Jaramillo was taken to Venezuela by helicopter and from there travelled to Cuba. The same operation was repeated for the other guerrilla fighters.

The talks have had ups and downs, including a severe slump after the death of “Alfonso Cano”, the then commander of FARC and considered an expert negotiator, in a military operation in November 2011.

According to Jaramillo, “Upon formal request of the Colombian government, the bedridden Chavez was kind enough to intervene at some difficult times, contributing to smoothening some rough edges with his enormous prestige.”

Negotiations have moved behind closed doors in the middle of the war, since the government does not accept a truce. FARC, on the other hand, unilaterally decreed an offensive ceasefire for two months, starting last November and expiring on the 20th of this month.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the National University of Colombia on Wednesday handed government negotiators in Bogota, and FARC representatives in Havana, the civilian proposals to resolve what has triggered the war: inequality in land ownership, which in the Gini index ranks 0.87.

These propositions are contained in 11 volumes, compiling 546 proposals from 522 farmers and business organisations that participated in an agrarian forum held in Bogota last December.

(END)

A woman walks past a bullet-ridden, graffiti-covered wall inside the Jaffna railway station, which was destroyed by the war. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
VAVUNIYA, Sri Lanka, Oct 18 2012 (IPS)

Mamaduwa, a remote village in Sri Lanka’s northern Vavuniya district where scorching winds blow across parched earth, is trying to forget the past.

Comprised of 130 families, Mamaduwa lies on the southern border of Sri Lanka’s former war zone, popularly known as the Vanni. The village is almost entirely Sinhalese, the island’s majority ethnicity.

When ethnic tensions gave way to full-blown civil war in 1983, this small village found itself caught in the crossfire of a separatist conflict between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – who were demanding an independent state for the minority Tamil community – and the Sinhala-Buddhist government of Sri Lanka.

In 1985, a woman and her child were killed by suspected LTTE gunfire close to the Mamaduwa reservoir, igniting a mass exodus that emptied the village in a matter of years.

Since the guns fell silent in May 2009, villagers have been trickling back in, but three years into peacetime they are yet to see an improvement in their lives.

“We are happy to be back in our own village, but there is nothing else to be happy about,” 25-year-old Sagara Sampath, who spent two decades as an internally displaced person (IDP), told IPS.

Sampath, at least, has a job with the civil defence force, which guarantees him a monthly salary. But other villagers are not as lucky, particularly because the mega development projects popping up throughout the former war zone have skipped over Mamaduwa.

Most of the villagers here make a living by farming, though a harsh drought across the country has brought cultivation to a near complete halt.

Still, even when harvests are plentiful – as they were six months ago according to Sampath – farmers find themselves struggling to survive.

“This land is fertile, nothing has been planted here in the last 20 years, so even without any fertiliser, a good harvest is a guarantee,” Sampath said.

But a bumper harvest doesn’t necessarily mean bumper profits. The faulty road system, which excludes Mamaduwa from easy access to local markets, allowed transporters and wholesale buyers from Vavuniya town, 30 kilometres away, to drive down the prices of farm produce.

“If the roads were (better), we would have been able to save some money,” Sampath said.

Former war zone struggling

The problem extends beyond a dearth of transportation facilities, electricity, schools and health centres in the interior areas of the island’s former war zone.

Jobs, too, are scarce. The Central Bank recently stated that the North was one of the country’s fastest-growing regions between 2011 and 2012 – achieving double-digit growth rates as high as 27 percent after the war.

But early this year a joint survey by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Food Programme and the Ministry of Health found that over 37 percent of the population in the Northern Province listed daily labour as their main source of income.

Economists point out that the main reason behind the province’s high growth rates is the introduction of major infrastructure projects like roads and electrification.

That trend, according to economist Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, principal researcher at the Point Pedro Development Institute based in northern Jaffna, is not helping job creation.

Sarvananthan told IPS most development projects are reliant on technology or heavy machinery rather than labour, which is abundant in the north.

“In a post-war geographic area where the educational and skill levels of the local population – especially of the youth – are low, it would have been prudent to deploy labour-intensive construction methods,” he said.

To make matters worse, large companies and investment firms have been reluctant to physically set up facilities in the former war zone. The only major exception appears to be MAS Holdings, a large international apparel supplier that is setting up three factories in the Vanni.

Anush Wijesinha, an economist with the Institute of Policy Studies, also blames the employment deficit on the lack of incentives given out to local small and medium-scale enterprises, which could boost growth across the region.

Public officials in the region told IPS that the government has recognised the slow pace of social empowerment, and has taken adequate steps to improve the situation.

Roopavathi Ketheeswaran, the top public official in the Kilinochchi District, told IPS that vocational training facilities for youth were being set up in the region, with an eye on providing manpower for long-term reconstruction efforts.

“Special steps have been taken to engage the youth in the development process. Vocational training is provided to many youth,” she said.

Robert Peiris, the additional secretary at the North East Reawakening Programme, which operates under the ministry of economic development, agrees that one of the ways to break the employment jinx is to work with the available labour force.

“For that, we need time to develop workers’ skills,” he pointed out, adding that the ministry is indeed paying close attention to the skills required for the construction sector.

“If we can impart these skills, the trainees can find jobs even outside the region,” Peiris said.

(END)