Members of the indigenous guard of the native community of Puerto Nuevo, of the Amazonian Kakataibo people, located in the central-eastern jungle of Peru. Credit: Courtesy of Marcelo Odicio

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Jul 26 2024 (IPS)

The invasion of lands inhabited by Amazon indigenous communities is growing in Peru, due to drug trafficking mafias that are expanding coca crops to produce and export cocaine, while deforestation and insecurity for the native populations and their advocates are increasing

“Drug trafficking is not a myth or something new in this area, and we are the ones who defend our right to live in peace in our land,” said Kakataibo indigenous leader Marcelo Odicio, from the municipality of Aguaytía, capital of the province of Padre Abad, in the Amazonian department of Ucayali.“We are the ones who pay the consequences, we are visible to criminals, we are branded as informers, but I will continue to defend our rights. Along with the indigenous guard we will ensure that the autonomy of our territory is respected,” Marcelo Odicio.

Of the 33 million inhabitants of the South American country, around 800,000 belong to 51 Amazonian indigenous peoples. Overall, 96.4% of the indigenous population is Quechua and Aymara, six million of whom live in the Andean areas, while the Amazonian jungle peoples account for the remaining 3.6%.

The Peruvian government is constantly criticised for failing to meet the needs and demands of this population, who suffer multiple disadvantages in health, education, income generation and access to opportunities, as well as the growing impact of drug trafficking, illegal logging and mining.

A clear example of this is the situation of the Kakataibo people in two of their native communities, Puerto Nuevo and Sinchi Roca, in the border between the departments of Huánuco and Ucayali, in the central-eastern Peruvian jungle region.

For years they have been reporting and resisting the presence of invaders who cut down the forests for illegal purposes, while the government pays no heed and takes no action.

The most recent threat has led them to deploy their indigenous guard to defend themselves against new groups of outsiders who, through videos, have proclaimed their decision to occupy the territories over which the Kakataibo people have ancestral rights, which are backed by titles granted by the departmental authorities.

Six Kakataibo leaders who defended their lands and way of life were murdered in recent years. The latest was Mariano Isacama, whose body was found by the indigenous guard on Sunday 14 July after being missing for weeks.

In his interview with IPS, Odicio, president of the Native Federation of Kakataibo Communities (Fenacoka), lamented the authorities’ failure to find Isacama. The leader from the native community of Puerto Azul had been threatened by people linked to drug trafficking, suspects the federation.

Marcelo Odicio, president of the Native Federation of Kakataibo Communities, headquartered in the town of Aguaytía, in the department of Ucayal, in the Peruvian Amazon. Credit: Inforegión

During a press conference in Lima on 17 July, the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Jungle (Aidesep), that brings together 109 federations representing 2,439 native communities, deplored the government’s indifference in the situation of the disappeared and murdered leader, which brings to 35 the number of Amazonian indigenous people murdered between 2023 and 2024.

Aidesep declared the territory of the Amazonian indigenous peoples under emergency and called for self-defence and protection mechanisms against what they called “unpunished violence unleashed by drug trafficking, mining and illegal logging under the protection of authorities complicit in neglect, inaction and corruption.”

Lack of vision for the Amazon

The province of Aguaytía, where the municipality of Padre de Abad is located and where the Kakataibo live, among other indigenous peoples, will account for 4.3% of the area under coca leaf cultivation by 2023, around 4,019 hectares, according to the latest report by the government’s National Commission for Development and Life without Drugs (Devida).

It is the sixth largest production area of this crop in the country.

The report highlights that Peru reduced illicit coca crops by just over 2% between 2022 and 2023, from 95,008 to 92,784 hectares, thus halting the trend of permanent expansion over the last seven years.

These figures are called into question by Ricardo Soberón, an expert on drug policy, security and Amazonia.

Ricardo Soberón, a renowned Peruvian expert on drug policy, Amazonia and security. Credit: Walter Hupiú / IPS

“The latest World Drug Report indicates that we have gone from 22 to 23 million cocaine users, and that the golden triangle in Burma, the triple border of Argentina-Paraguay-Brazil and the Amazonian trapezoid are privileged areas for production and export,” Soberón told IPS.

The latter holds “Putumayo and Yaguas, areas that according to Devida have reduced the 2,000 hectares under cultivation. I don’t believe it,” he said.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), that commissioned the report, also lists Peru as the world’s second largest cocaine producer.

Soberón added another element that discredits the conclusions of the Devida report: the government’s behaviour.

“There is no air interdiction in the Amazonian trapezoid, the non-lethal interdiction agreement with the United States will be operational in 2025. On the other hand, there are complaints against the anti-drug police in Loreto, the department where Putumayo and Yaguas are located, for their links with Brazilian mafias,” he explained.

He believes there was an attempt to whitewash “a government that is completely isolated”, referring to the administration led since December 2022 by interim president Dina Boluarte, with minimal levels of approval and questioned over a series of democratic setbacks.

Soberón, director of Devida in 2011-2012 and 2021-2022, has constantly warned that the government, at different levels, has not incorporated the indigenous agenda in its policies against illegalities in their ancestral areas.

This, he said, despite the growing pressure on their peoples and lands from “the largest illegal extractive economies in the world: drug trafficking, logging and gold mining,” the main causes of deforestation, loss of biodiversity and territorial dispossession.

Soberón argued that, given the magnitude of cocaine trafficking in the world, major trafficking groups need coca crop reserves, and Peruvian territory is fit for it. He deplored the minimal strategic vision among political, economic, commercial and social players in the Amazon.

Based on previous research, he says that the Cauca-Nariño bridge in southern Colombia, Putumayo in Peru, and parts of Brazil, form the Amazonian trapezoid: a fluid transit area not only for cocaine, but also for arms, supplies and gold.

Hence the great flow of cocaine in the area, for trafficking and distribution to the United States and other markets, which makes the jungle-like indigenous territories of the Peruvian Amazon attractive for coca crops and cocaine laboratories.

Soberón stresses it is possible to reconcile anti-drug policy with the protection of the Amazon, for example by promoting the citizen social pacts that he himself developed as a pilot project during his term in office.

It is a matter, he said, of turning the social players, such as the indigenous peoples, into decision-makers. But this requires a clear political will, which is not seen in the current Devida administration.

Mariano Isacama (left), a Kakataibo indigenous leader who disappeared and was murdered after allegedly receiving threats from people linked to drug traffickers. Next to him, the president of the indigenous organisation Orau, Magno López. Credit: Courtesy of Marcelo Odicio

“We will not stand idly by”

Odicio, the president of Fenacoka, knows that the increased presence of invaders in their territories is aimed at planting pasture and coca leaf, an activity that destroys their forests. They have even installed maceration ponds near the communities.

When invaders arrive, they cut down the trees, burn them, raise cattle, take possession of the land and then demand the right to title, he explained. “After the anti-forestry law, they feel strong and say they have a right to the land, when it is not the case,” he said.

He refers to the reform of the Forestry and Wildlife Act No. 29763, in force since December 2023, which further weakens the security of indigenous peoples over their land rights and opens the door to legal and illegal extractive activities.

The leader, who has a wife and two young children, knows that the role of defender exposes him. “We are the ones who pay the consequences, we are visible to criminals, we are branded as informers, but I will continue to defend our rights. Along with the indigenous guard we will ensure that the autonomy of our territory is respected,” he stressed.

In the native community of Puerto Nuevo there are 200 Kakataibo families, with 500 more in Sinchi Roca. They live from the sustainable use of their forest resources, who are at risk from illegal activities. “We just want to live in peace, but we will defend ourselves because we cannot stand idly by if they do not respect our autonomy”, he said.

Asian Americans affected by anti-Asian sentiment and hate crimes have provided support to each other. Left to right from top: Dr Boyung Lee, Dr Russell Jeung, Cynthia Choi, and Dr Bryant Lin. Credit: Myleen Hollero

By SeiMi Chu
California, Apr 28 2022 (IPS)

Dr Boyung Lee, a widow and the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty at Iliff School of Theology, would use a short break in her working day to walk around her neighborhood. The fresh air helped her deal with her grief and work-related stress.

In May 2020, however, this small but significant daily ritual ended abruptly.

Lee was walking when she noticed a dirty white truck but did not think much of it. She carried on walking, then heard something. The noise continued, and when she looked back, she noticed the driver inside the truck was shouting at her.

Listening carefully, Lee realized that he was jeering at her – including using one of the common taunts directed at the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community: “Go back to your country.”

Slightly shaken by this hostile confrontation, Lee continued walking. However, the driver followed her. Thankfully, Lee acted swiftly and ran into the opening of her neighbor’s apartment building, so the driver could not follow her.

The incident made her feel unsafe. She was even nervous about grocery shopping. The verbal attack turned a Korean American independent feminist into a dependent person.

Dr Boyung Lee was targeted by a truck driver on this street on S Elati Street near W Bates Avenue in Englewood, Colorado.

Lee now covered herself with masks and hats to prevent others from noticing that she was an Asian.

She started to feel safe when her peers offered to go with her on her walks. However, outside of that, Lee was afraid. It took Lee over a year to feel comfortable going out to work by herself.

Angered because her experience had turned her into a dependent person, Lee thought about how she could educate the public about the beauty of Asian culture.

By teaming up with a few Asian colleagues, she brought in Asian American artists. She hosted lectures and workshops to educate the community about the intersection of Asian culture and art. Through this experience, Lee felt empowered and returned to being the independent feminist she once was.

Lee is not alone in her experiences of Asian hate abuse. Many in the AAPI community faced harassment, discrimination, and abuse.

When a Pacific Islander spoke Chamorro at a mall in Dallas, Texas, a passerby coughed on her and jeered: “You and your people are the reason why we have corona. Go sail a boat back to your island.”

A mother tried to enroll her daughter in a gymnastics class in Tustin, California. However, the owner refused because the mother’s name was ‘Asian’. These were two of the numerous incidents reported by Stop AAPI Hate, a support group that works to end racism.

Dr Boyung Lee ran into the opening of this apartment building when the truck driver followed her. Targeted because she is an Asian American, the incident resulted in a loss of independence until she became involved in hosting lectures and workshops about Asian culture and art. Credit: Supplied

From March 19, 2020, when the pandemic emerged, until December 31, 2021, there were over 10,000 incidents reported to Stop AAPI Hate, of which 4,632 happened in 2020 and 6,273 in 2021. Based on the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism’s data, there was a 339% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in 2021 compared with the previous year.

The increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans stems from the virus’s origin. COVID-19 was first identified in Wuhan province, China. Due to its origin, hostile rhetoric was used to connote the coronavirus, such as “Kung Flu”, “Chinese virus”, and the “Wuhan virus.” Racializing the virus led to an uptick in anti-Asian racism, prejudice, discrimination, and hate crimes. Common verbal harassment included: “Go back to China” and “Take your virus, you Chinks!”

The most recent report released by Stop AAPI Hate found that 63% of the hate incidents involved verbal harassment, 16.2% involved physical assault, 11.5% involved civil rights violations, and 8.6% involved online harassment. Most occurred in public spaces, such as public streets and public transits.

Asian Americans were blamed for “bringing the virus” to America.

Dr Russell Jeung, professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, worked with Cynthia Choi, Co-Executive Director of Chinese Affirmative Action, with other leaders, spearheaded the mission to fight anti-Asian racism. Jeung wanted to provide Asian American communities with resources, so this harassment would not happen again.

Along with Choi and Manjusha Kulkarni, Director of the AAPI Equity Alliance, Jeung founded Stop AAPI Hate to find solutions to the underlying causes of discrimination and hate. He formed a research team of San Francisco State University students to collect data to create the reports published on the Stop AAPI website. Jeung and his students discovered that hate crimes against Asian Americans occurred most frequently in California.

Jeung also noticed Asian Americans were taking a stance against racism.

Asian Americans used their social media platforms and utilized hashtags, such as #Racismisavirus, to ensure their posts would go viral. Another trend Jeung witnessed was that Asian Americans elected officials who would speak up against xenophobia.

As a result, Asian Americans turned out in their numbers to vote in 2020. As Jeung explained, Asian Americans voted for candidates who would support their beliefs and promised to fight against xenophobia.

Chinese Affirmative Action, a support community-based civil rights organization to protect the rights of Chinese and Asian Americans, and Stop AAPI Hate, collected first-hand accounts of people who self-reported what was happening and what was said to them.

The two organizations have been working on advancing racial equity by dealing with racial tensions between the Asian communities and other communities. These reports helped them understand the nature of the violent attacks. So far, over 3,700 cases have been reported to these organizations. They also work with the media to share the information.

“Certainly, in my lifetime, we have not witnessed this level of hate directed at our communities,” Choi lamented.

Dr Bryant Lin, a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine and Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Center for Asian Health Research and Education, led a project that researched people’s perception of the relationship between COVID-19 and discrimination. They surveyed nearly 2,000 people across the country.

Lin explained the results of his study. “Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, and other Asian Pacific Islanders showed up to 3.9 times increased odds of self-reported racial discrimination due to COVID-19 and experienced nearly up to 5.4 times increased odds of concern for physical assault due to COVID-19.”

Although Asians are very diverse and heterogeneous – there are six major subgroups in the United States – they are treated as a monolithic group. Lin revealed that East Asians tended to experience more discrimination than South and Southeast Asians. The highest rates of self-reported discrimination were from Chinese Americans.

“Our study also found that people were very concerned about physical attacks, and people were also considering buying firearms,” Lin said. He added they were likely to do a further study on how perceptions changed.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Tahira Hasan poses under the Fearless Collective public wall artwork, she and others in India and internationally are calling for tolerance and an end to hate speech in India. Credit: Mehru Jaffer/IPS

By Mehru Jaffer
Lucknow, Feb 24 2022 (IPS)

More and more women from different walks of life and corners of the world are raising their voices against the treatment of minorities in India today.

“Unity and the safety of citizens is the first and foremost condition of a country’s security,” Roop Rekha Varma, former vice-chancellor of Lucknow University (LU), told IPS.

With Ramesh Dixit, a former professor LU, Varma walked into a local police station to file a police report against hate speech against those who have threatened to kill Muslims in India.

In a recent case, provocative speeches allegedly calling for a genocide of Muslims were made at a December 2021 conclave held in the Himalayan town of Haridwar.

“If 100 of us become soldiers and are prepared to kill two million (Muslims), then we will win … protect India, and make it a Hindu nation,” said Pooja Shakun Pandey, a senior member of the right-wing Hindu Mahasabha political party in a video recording of the event.

Pandey, Wasim Rizvi alias Jitendra Narayan Tyagi, Yati Narsinghanand Saraswati, and Sagar Sindhu Maharaj are facing hate speech charges for their utterances.

The Fearless Collective public wall artwork. Credit: Mehru Jaffer/IPS

Varma is shocked at rising incidents of unprovoked targeting of Muslims, including Muslim women, in recent times.

Sunita Viswanath, founder and executive director of Hindus for Human Rights, a US-based civil society organization, is equally anxious.

“Muslim women in India are being barred from entering college for wearing the hijab. This is a country where the Prime Minister rode to power promising equal rights for women. Clearly, not everyone is equal. If this is not apartheid, please tell what is,” Viswanath says. She referred to the controversy that erupted in January when a government-run college in the Udupi district of Karnataka state barred girls from attending lectures for wearing headscarves. The matter is now under judicial review.

Along with 16 other civil society organizations in the US, Viswanath organized two Congressional briefings on India’s treatment of Muslims.

“We are US citizens of Indian origin, and we have the power to influence and to move US lawmakers and the Biden Administrations to speak out,” says Viswanath on social media. She feels that the world needs to understand that something is wrong in India, that India is on a perilous path.

“India’s tryst with hate is on overdrive. The only way we can fight systematic hate is to stand by India’s tried and tested secular fabric,” Saumya Bajaj told IPS on the phone. Bajaj is associated with Gurgaon Nagrik Ekta Manch (GNEM), a Delhi-based group for unity among citizens.

“Terrorizing Muslims and Christians on a daily basis seems to be the new norm. We, as citizens, can no longer afford to remain silent spectators to this macabre celebration of hate engulfing us?” reads a circular, inviting citizens to say no to hate mongers.

GNEM demands that the police investigate all violence cases against fellow citizens, including online abuse.

Nayantara Sahgal, 94, an award-winning Indian, says she does not recognize the new India.

“Today, that India is disappearing. My country is unrecognizable. It seems like a foreign country full of hatred and exclusion. There is a deep slide in democracy. It is utterly despairing. Yet we cannot be silent. A writer has to speak loud and clear,” the former vice president of PEN International said in a recent interview.

Booker Prize-winning author and essayist Arundhati Roy fears that Hindu nationalism could break India into little pieces like Yugoslavia and Russia. The hope is that ultimately the Indian people will resist what she calls the fascism of the ruling party.

Sahgal is pinning her hopes on the elections in five Indian states, including Uttar Pradesh (UP), until March 7.

In UP, interfaith marriages have been restricted in recent times. Muslim men married to Hindu women have been harassed by vigilante mobs and often arrested by the police. Many online attempts to humiliate and terrorize Muslim women continue.

Sahgal is the daughter of Vijay Laxmi Pandit, sister of Jawaharlal Nehru, first prime minister of independent India. She is also the widow of the late bureaucrat Edward Nirmal Mangat Rai, an Indian Christian. Today she is concerned about the safety of her Christian relatives and Muslim friends as incidents of majoritarian hate against minorities peak.

Sabika Naqvi, community and advocacy head at The Fearless Collective, says that vocal and assertive Muslim women have woken up in India to find their names on Auctioning apps – from Sulli Deals over the last two years to Bulli Bai. The call to rape and kill Muslim women is routine, and efforts to dehumanize Muslim women is on the rise, she says.

“They fear our ability to write, to speak, to journal, to dream, articulate, assert, organize, and fiercely fight the oppressors. They either sexualize us, try to act as our messiahs or plot to kill. But we are here to conquer the world. We are lawyers, poets, journalists, actors, activists, entrepreneurs, scholars and much more,” says Naqvi, adding that this is not just a ‘prank’ or mere ‘bullying’ but harassment that Muslim women face every day.

The Fearless Collective is a movement that helps citizens move from fear to love through the creation of participatory art in public space.

Naqvi feels that the time has come to speak up and ensure that solidarity voices are louder than those who support hatred.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Parents at Alheri leprosy colony outside Nigeria's Federal Capital Territory, Abuja have appealed for an end to discrimination, which they say impacts their children. Credit: Oluwatobi Enitan/IPS

By Oluwatobi Enitan
Abuja, Nigeria, Feb 3 2022 (IPS)

Seidu Ishaiku lives in the hope that his children will succeed. He and his family live with about 300 other residents in the Alheri leprosy colony outside Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory Abuja.

“They (our children) are obviously our future and hope,” Ishaiku says. “We don’t want our children to constitute a nuisance to society. We want them to succeed and become great people in future.”

He was speaking to IPS a few days before World Leprosy Day commemorated this year on January 30.

A homestead at Alheri leprosy colony outside Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.
Credit: Oluwatobi Enitan/IPS

The colony is in poor shape. The houses are dilapidated, there are few basic sanitation facilities, no sewage system, and the water tank at the clinic is empty. However, the borehole near their homes does guarantee a steady supply of water.

Most of the community are forced to stay in the facility long after they are cured – and survive on subsistence farming and petty trading while their children collect firewood and hawk to make ends meet for the family.

The clinic at Alheri leprosy colony outside Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory, Abuja
Credit: Oluwatobi Enitan/IPS

According to the residents, the facility has been open for 16 years, and even when cured of leprosy, the families continue to live there.

Terver Anyor, the head of Business Development for The Leprosy Mission Nigeria, said stigma, myths and misconceptions around the disease mean that people affected by the disease end up living in appalling conditions outside the mainstream society. The residents recognise The Leprosy Mission Nigeria as one of the NGOs that regularly assists them.

“Many people think that because one has a disability, maybe the fingers or the feet disease are off, then they suppose that that person has leprosy, even though that person is cured,” Anyor says. He explained The Leprosy Mission Nigeria, along with other organisations, would, over this period, be involved in awareness campaigns to sensitise people on the reality of the disease.

The awareness campaign included outreach on radio, media briefings and marches to public places in Abuja. The campaign, funded by the Sasakawa Health Foundation, will help disseminate facts about the disease.

“We aim to work towards the zero-transmission of leprosy … And we are also working towards achieving zero discrimination and zero disabilities due to leprosy,” Anyor says.

“Because of discrimination, people who are affected by leprosy don’t get jobs, and also don’t get to access social services like every other person.”

Two women sit under the trees at the Alheri leprosy colony outside Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. Credit: Oluwatobi Enitan/IPS

The children benefit from free education, but the headteacher of Alheri primary school, Aliyu Bashiru Kwali, says their parent’s conditions impact the children. He says many children go onto the streets to hawk as soon as school closes – some return at 10 pm, but others stay out the whole night. They return, he says, “with sleepy eyes”, and this means they cannot concentrate.

“The students having hawk on the streets to make ends meet for their parents is not helping matters, and we cannot stop them, because if they don’t hawk, they will not eat, their parents are incapacitated, so the huge responsibility falls on them at a young age,” Kwali says.

For many residents, their reality is complex and their anger palpable.

Ali Isah, the residents’ leader, says the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated their poor living conditions.

“We have got no intervention from Government, and we are confined here and dare not go out to beg, or else we would be maltreated by security operatives,” he says of the impact of Covid protocols. He said they once had to endure a charade where government officials brought three trailers of rice, dignitaries, and media, but when they left, the community only received three bags.

“As the head of the persons affected by leprosy, my family and I got less than a quarter of a bag of rice, which was barely enough to sustain us for three days. We struggled to survive during the lockdown with no hope in sight,” Isah says. “Our rights to freedom of religion and association have been denied us. We cannot pray in public because security operatives will deal with us. We have been ostracised.”

Lilibeth Evarestus knows first-hand about the plight of people affected by Hansen’s disease, as leprosy is also known. She is a lawyer who was once had the disease.

She now runs the Purple Hope Initiative – a non-profit for women and children affected by the disease in Lagos.

“As a person that has experienced Hansen’s disease, I faced a lot of discrimination and stigmatisation based on people’s wrong information about the disease,” she told IPS.

“I then decided to go into advocacy to create awareness and disseminate the right information about the disease. Thank goodness as a lawyer and human rights activist, I have been using my office to fight for our rights.”

Purple Hope is all about “restoring hope,” she says.

This echoes the sentiments of the WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination, Yohei Sasakawa, who says of his life’s work with people affected by leprosy: “I would like to create a society where everyone feels fully engaged, able to express their opinions, and appreciated. The coming era must be one of diversity, and for that, we need social inclusion. There is such ability and potential in the world, and to have everyone participate in society will create a truly wonderful future.”

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Trafficking survivor turned activist, and consultant Shamere McKenzie trains authorities and mentors survivors. The use of technology and awareness of how to spot and avoid traps used by human traffickers. Credit: Zadie Neufville/IPS

By Zadie Neufville
Kingston, Jan 31 2022 (IPS)

A single line at the end of the United States State Department 2021 Trafficking in Persons Report made headlines in Jamaica and had many perturbed. “Some police allegedly facilitated or participated in sex trafficking,” it read.

While the report cited no incidents, investigations, or police officers’ convictions for sex trafficking, Jamaicans on social media called for investigations. People cited the increasing levels of sexual abuse reported during the COVID-19 pandemic as justification.

US authorities have categorised Jamaica as “a source, transit, and destination country for adults and children trafficked for sexual exploitation and forced labour”.

Manager of the Trafficking in Persons (TiP) Secretariat Chenee Russell Robinson told journalists recently that more than 110 victims of sex trafficking were rescued in the last ten years. At an average of ten per year, she believes the number is far too high “because this number represents only the tip of the iceberg”.

Some matters are before the court, and investigations into other activities were ongoing, noting that while girls make up the majority of sex trafficking victims, there are a growing number of boys, too, she said.

Between 2015 and 2019, the number of teens reported missing on the island averaged approximately 1,400 a year, data from the Child Protection and Family Services Agency shows. With numbers increasing annually and the figures for those returning home or recovered declining, the spectre of a rising sex trafficking trade is becoming one of the biggest worries for local authorities.

Child protection activists believe that most missing children who do not return home are victims of sex trafficking. Here, it is not uncommon for families, including mothers, to traffic their girl children in exchange for monetary or material payment, police say. This form of child sex trafficking may be more widespread in some communities.

Experts say that children who are sent by their parents to live with their more affluent relatives in urban areas regularly become victims. And according to the State Department report: “Sex trafficking of Jamaican women and children, including boys, occurs on streets and in nightclubs, bars, massage parlours, hotels and private homes, and resort towns”.

So, while the report commends Jamaica for its strides and multi-agency approach to combatting human trafficking, it scolds the government for reduced spending, a fall-off in apprehension and training. It also criticised the absence of “long-term services to support victims’ reintegration, prevent re-exploitation, or sustain protection throughout lengthy court cases”.

The report noted that Jamaica “does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking but is making significant efforts to do so.” These efforts included a trafficking conviction with significant prison terms and restitution paid to the victim, a national referral mechanism that aims to standardise procedures for victim identification, referral to cross-government entities services and an annual report.

Significantly, authorities hold up several improvements The Trafficking in Persons (Prevention, Suppression and Punishment) Act, first enacted in 2007. Amendments speed up the prosecution of cases by introducing bench trials and increasing the penalties.

On July 9, 2013, the government amended the Act to increase incarceration periods to 20 years. The 2021 amendments removed the alternate and often controversial fine in place of imprisonment.

“Now a person convicted of trafficking can only be imprisoned or imprisoned and fined, so you cannot be fined only,” Russell explained.

Trafficking survivor turned activist, and consultant Shamere McKenzie told IPS in an interview that community awareness, involvement, and the use of technology to enhance the safety of possible victims could be the tools that tip Jamaica into Tier 1.

“There’s a lot we can do as a community to help our young people shape their morals and values and build their sense of awareness,” she said, noting that traffickers can recognise people with low self-esteem.

Since 2016 authorities have funded the development of two apps – Stay Alert and Travel Plan – to make it safer for especially young girls and women who use public transport. McKenzie believes communities and parents must learn to use technologies to keep their children safe.

“We should be teaching people how to protect themselves, how to memorise numbers, develop code words, develop safety methods and use text messages to protect themselves,” said McKenzie, who mentors survivors and educates others on how to spot and avoid the traps.

A former student-athlete, she was lured by someone she thought was a caring friend into 18-months of living hell. Sidelined by a serious hamstring injury, the young Jamaican’s athletics scholarship to a top United States university was suspended. She was forced to work for the extra money she needed for school fees and rent when she accepted a friend’s help.

The short-term offer of a rent-free basement apartment and ‘extra work’ at the trafficker’s nightclub turned into forced sex work after being beaten into submission by a man she believed to be her friend.

While this episode took place in the US, it is not uncommon for Jamaicans and foreigners to be lured young women into prostitution by offering them jobs or simply ’a better life’.

In 2016, a court sentenced Rohan Ebanks to 40 years and imprisoned and fined his common-law wife Voneisha Reeves after trafficking a 14-year-old Haitian girl. The judge convicted Ebanks for rape, trafficking, and facilitating trafficking in person while his co-accused had pleaded guilty to facilitating trafficking.

The fisherman had met the girl’s father on one of his many trips to Haiti and had convinced him to send her to Jamaica for a better life. Three years after the ordeal began, police rescued the teen from Ebanks and Reeve’s home, where she had been looking after the couple’s children.

As the pandemic progresses, Robinson and other members of the Traffic in Persons (TiP) task force warn parents that traffickers have gone online, making it more difficult to track them. They’ve also warned teens and their parents that families are also trafficking their relatives.

The 110 rescued by the TiP task force are among the .04 per cent of the estimated human trafficking survivors worldwide identified. The number is an indicator that most go undetected.

Experts conclude that assessing the scope of human trafficking is difficult because many cases go undetected. However, estimates are between 20 million and 40 million people n modern slavery today earn the perpetrators roughly 150 billion US dollars annually. Some 99 billion US dollars comes from commercial sexual exploitation.

“We must begin to teach our youth to use the technology we have to protect themselves,” McKenzie said.

This article is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.
The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN )  is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7, which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.
The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalization of indifference, such as exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking”.

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Friends Ajay and Durgesh are returned to their families with the help of ActionAid India and the All India Bonded Labour Liberation Front. The boys were tricked into bonded labour by a trusted fellow villager. Credit: ActionAid

By Mehru Jaffer
Lucknow, India, Jan 28 2022 (IPS)

Friends Ajay and Durgesh were lured from the same village in the remote and poverty-stricken countryside of eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP) in January 2021.

Friends Ajay and Durgesh were lured from the same village in the remote and poverty-stricken countryside of eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP) in January 2021.

The boys, aged 16, were whisked away from their homes, transported, and sold as bonded labour to a garment factory in Rajkot in the western state of Gujarat. Rajkot is some 2000 km from Ajay and Durgesh’s village in UP.

Along with two other boys from the same village, Sanjay (15) and Pavan (14), Ajay and Durgesh were befriended by a man, only identified as Gulab, and promised an eight-hour a day job, with a salary of Rs 7500 (about US 100 dollars) per month at a garment factory. The boys accepted the offer immediately because Gulab was from the same village and had known them since childhood.

“At the factory, the boys were thrown in with dozens of other children who were never paid. They were woken at 7 am and forced to work till 11 pm. The factory owner threatened to kill them if they stepped out of the factory,” Dalsinghar told IPS speaking from Lucknow. “The children were abused and kicked when the supervisor felt that they were not working fast enough. None of the children was given enough to eat.”

Dalsinghar, who goes by his surname, is a trade union leader and head of the UP office of the All India Bonded Labour Liberation Front. With ActionAid India, Dalsinghar helped to rescue the four boys in August 2021. The boys are now finishing their studies in their village.

These boys are lucky to have escaped the clutches of traffickers. Ajay found a mobile phone one day and quickly called his family. He told them the exact location of the factory in faraway Gujarat.

The family got in touch with Raju, a volunteer with ActionAid India, who lived near their village. With the help of Dalsinghar, Raju and the district administrations of Kushinagar in UP and Rajkot in Gujarat, the boys were rescued, and their eight-month ordeal at the hands of the garment factory owner ended.

There are numerous incidents of victims being deceived by people they know.

Families celebrate the return of four boys trafficked into bonded labour in a factory far from home. Credit: ActionAid, India

Take Gulab as an example. Gulab came from the same village as the four teenagers he trapped and sold to a garment factory owner.

In the hope of avoiding deprivation and starvation in difficult economic times, the teenagers took up Gulab’s offer. They trusted him and fell for his lies because it did not occur to them that he would betray them.

ActionAid quotes other instances when a loved one has tricked victims. When that happens, the victim often does not fight back.

Sita was sold to traffickers by her alcoholic father in a West Bengal village as a bride. She was taken from place to place until she found shelter in an ashram in a city in UP. The police were informed, and she returned to her village in West Bengal.

Frequently missing children and adults cases include abduction and trafficking. Most of the time, missing people are not reported to the police, and if reported, the reports are not registered.

Children from the poorest of low-income families are most vulnerable. They are the main target of traffickers as poor and illiterate families are most likely not to approach authorities for help. There are instances of children and adults leaving home searching for glamour and fortune in big cities like Mumbai. Once there, touts find them and force them to beg or work as sex slaves without remuneration or concern for their health.

ActionAid India continues to work in villages providing support to survivors of trafficking and violence with medical, psycho-social and legal support.

The COVID-19 pandemic has meant that times are extremely challenging for communities. Schools closures and work opportunities in most villages have shrunk, which means that social activists like Dalsinghar need to be more vigilant today than ever before.

Nobel Peace Prize winners Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai have rescued thousands of children from the worst form of child labour and trafficking.

Satyarthi has led a Bharat Yatra, a nationwide march in India to demand legislation against child rape, child sexual abuse and trafficking.

The Kailash Satyarthi Children Foundation conducted a study in 2020 that concluded there was a high likelihood of an increase in human trafficking in the post-lockdown period for labour.

About 89 per cent of NGOs surveyed said that trafficking of both adults and children for labour would be one of the biggest threats in the post-lockdown period as household incomes of the most vulnerable deplete.

There is concern that the desperate and vulnerable populations of unorganised workers, who are in no position to negotiate wages or their rights, will be a massive pool for cheap labour. Many of these labourers could be children, forced out of school and forced to earn a living.

The fear is that thousands of children will likely be trafficked across the country to work in manufacturing units where they will be paid meagre to no wages and will most likely face extreme physical, mental and sexual violence.

Thousands of children like Ajay, Durgesh, Sanjay and Pavan are easy targets for an organised crime network of human trafficking. It is feared that many more children will be enslaved during the pandemic by those looking for cheap labour when many economic activities have come to a standstill.

“It is tragic when people betray the trust of children,” concludes Dalsinghar.

This article is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.
The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) http://gsngoal8.com/ is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7, which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.
The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalization of indifference, such as exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking”.

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

South Asian countries are grappling with the erosion of democratic norms, growing authoritarianism, the crackdown on freedom of press, speech and dissent, a report by Human Rights Watch says. Credit: 2017 Paula Bronstein for Human Rights Watch

By Sania Farooqui
New Delhi, Jan 21 2022 (IPS)

As countries across South Asia continue to battle the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, causing serious public health and economic crisis, this region, which is home to almost 2 billion people, is also grappling with the erosion of democratic norms, growing authoritarianism, the crackdown on freedom of press, speech and dissent.

Despite the committed efforts of human rights defenders across South Asia, achieving human rights objectives remains a challenging task. Almost all countries in the region – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – face a common trend of human rights violations and a culture of impunity.

Afghanistan 

In Afghanistan, the Taliban rule has had a devastating impact on the lives of Afghan women, girls, journalists and human rights defenders. “The crisis for women and girls in Afghanistan is escalating with no end in sight. Taliban policies have rapidly turned many women and girls into virtual prisoners in their homes, depriving the country of one of its most precious resources, the skills and talents of the female half of the populations,” said Heather Barr, associate women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch in this report.

This report states, “the Taliban’s return to power has made members of some ethnic and religious minorities feel more vulnerable to threats even from those not affiliated with the Taliban. Taliban authorities have also used intimidation to extract money, food, and services. Fighting has mostly ended in the country, but people expressed fear of violence and arbitrary arrests by the Taliban and lack of the rule of law and reported increased crime in some areas.”

A group of three dozen Human Rights Council appointed experts in this report said, “waves of measures such as barring women from returning to their jobs, requiring a male relative to accompany them in public spaces, prohibiting women from using public transport on their own, as well as imposing a strict dress code on women and girls. Taken together, these policies constitute a collective punishment of women and girls, grounded in gender-based bias and harmful practices.”

The UN high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, has urged the UN security council to hold all perpetrators of human rights violations accountable, “I ask the security council to ensure that the perpetrators of these violations are accountable, I ask all states to use their influence with the Taliban to encourage respect for fundamental human rights. Denial of the fundamental rights of women and girls is massively damaging to the economy and the country as a whole,” Bachelet said.

The Taliban victory propelled Afghanistan “from humanitarian crisis to catastrophe”, with millions of Afghans facing severe food insecurity due to lost income, cash shortages, and rising food costs. Afghan refugees constitute one of the world’s largest refugees population, with more than 2.2 million refugees. “Afghanistan’s displacement crisis is one of the largest and most protracted in UNHCR’s seven-decade history,” says UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi.

Bangladesh

While Bangladesh, despite making economic progress and getting upgraded by the United Nations from the category of least developed country to developing country last November, the country continues to be in the news for enforced disappearances, abductions, torture and extrajudicial killings by its security forces with impunity.

In this letter written by 12 organizations to Under-Secretary-General Jean-Pierre Lacroix, urging the United Nations Department of Peace Operations to ban Bangladesh’s notoriously abusive paramilitary Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) from UN deployment.

As many as 600 people, including opposition leaders, activists, journalists, business people, and others, have been subjected to enforced disappearance since 2009. In this report, Dhaka–based rights organization Odhikar said that “some of the disappeared persons resurfaced in government’s custody after being arrested under the draconian Digital Security Act 2018.”

“Human rights defenders, journalists, and others critical of the government continue to be targeted with surveillance, politically motivated charges and arbitrary detention,” says this report. Earlier in November 2021, the United States slapped sanctions on elite Bangladeshi paramilitary force, Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), stating it threatens US national security interests by undermining the rule of law and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the economic prosperity of the people of Bangladesh. Bangladesh is the only South Asian country other than Afghanistan to receive US sanctions since 1998.

India

In 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in India was downgraded from a free democracy to a “partially free democracy” by global political rights and liberties US-based nonprofit Freedom House. Following this, a Sweden based V-Dem institute said, India had become an “electoral autocracy”. The country has slid from No. 35 in 2006 to No. 53 today on The Economist’s list.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) recommended India be designated as a “country of particular concern, or CPC, for engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing and egregious religious freedom violations, as defined by the International Religious Freedom Act in its report.

In its World Report 2022, Human Rights Watch said, “Indian authorities intensified their crackdown on activists, journalists, and other critics of the government using politically motivated prosecutions in 2021. “Attacks against religious minorities were carried out with impunity under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Hindu nationalist government.”

Indian authorities have continued to press charges against students, activities, journalists, including counter-terrorism and sedition laws. To undermine rights to privacy and freedom of expression, reports of Pegasus spyware, developed and sold by Israeli company NSO group, were used to target Indian human rights defenders, journalists, and opposition politicians.

The ongoing harassment of journalists, including particularly those reporting from and in Kashmir, including the recent crackdown on Kashmir’s independent press club being shut down, arbitrary detention of journalists, alleged custodial killings, and a broader pattern of systematic infringement of fundamental rights used against the local population,” the report said.

According to this report, calls for genocide have become more common than ever, “where Hindu extremists organized 12 events over 24 months in four states, calling for genocide of Muslims, attacks on Christian minority and insurrection against the government. In this interview, the founding president of Genocide Watch, has warned: “Genocide could very well happen in India.”  

Nepal

In Nepal, lack of effective government leadership, inadequate and unequal access to health care, and a ‘pervasive culture of impunity’ continue to undermine the country’s fundamental human rights. “A lack of effective government leadership in Nepal means that little is done to uphold citizens’ rights, leaving millions to fend for themselves without adequate services such as for health or education, said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director, Human Rights Watch.

“Systemic impunity for human rights abuses extends to ongoing violations, undermining the principles of accountability and the rule of law in post-conflict Nepal. The report states that the authorities routinely fail to investigate or prosecute killings or torture allegedly carried by security forces,” the report states.

In October 2020, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) published 20 years of data, naming 286 people, mostly police officials, military personnel, and former Maoist insurgents, “as suspects in serious crimes, including torture, enforced disappearance and extrajudicial killings”.

Along with this, the situation of women’s and girls’ human rights continues to be alarming in the country. According to this report, Nepal has the highest rate of child marriages in Asia, with 33 percent of girls marrying before 18 years and 8 percent by 15. Reports also indicate there has been an increase in cases of rape in 2021, with widespread impunity for sexual violence.

Patriarchal Citizenship Law in Nepal which does not treat men and women equally, has been criticized for undermining Nepali women’s identities and agency, subordinating them to the position of second-class citizens – also impacting children.

Pakistan

The Pakistan government, on the other hand, “harassed and at times persecuted human rights defenders, lawyers, and journalists for criticizing government officials and policies,” said this report by Human Rights Watch. Significant human rights issues include freedom of expression, attacks on civil society groups, freedom of religion and belief, forced disappearances by governments and their agents, unlawful or arbitrary killings, extrajudicial killings, torture, arbitrary detentions, terrorism, counter-terrorism and law enforcement abuses.

“Pakistan failed to enact a law criminalizing torture despite Pakistan’s obligation to do so under the Convention against Torture,” the report said.  The country’s regressive blasphemy law provides a pretext for violence against religious minorities, leaving them vulnerable to arbitrary arrests and prosecution.

According to this report by Human Rights Without Frontiers, 1,865 people have been charged with blasphemy laws, with a significant spike in 2020, when 200 cases were registered.

This piece highlights the plight of thousands of Pakistan’s Baloch who security forces have abducted. International human rights law strictly prohibits enforced disappearances, in Pakistan, Prime Minister Imran Khan vowed that a draft law to criminalize enforced disappearances would be “fast-tracked”. A bill about enforced disappearances, which the National Assembly passed, mysteriously went missing after it was sent to the Senate.

The continued attack on journalists and activists for violations of the Electronic Crimes Act, the use of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), an anti-corruption agency to target critics, attacks and well-coordinated campaigns and attacks on women journalists on social media, and reported intimidation of nongovernmental organizations, including harassment and surveillance are all crackdowns which are only getting worse.

Sri Lanka

In Sri Lanka, the government continued to ‘suppress minority communities and harassed activists, and undermined democratic institutions.’ According to Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2022, “President Gotabaya Rajapaksha seems determined to reverse past rights improvements and protect those implicated in serious abuses. While promising reforms and justice to deflate international criticism, his administration has stepped up suppression of minority communities,” Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said.

The report highlights the harassment of security forces towards human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers and the families of victims of past abuses and suppression of peaceful protests. As covid-19 cases surged in the country, military-controlled response to the pandemic “led to serious right violations”.

A major concern from the minority Muslim and Christian communities in Sri Lanka was the government’s order not to allow the bodies of Covid victims to be buried. According to this report, “several bodies were forcibly cremated, despite experts saying that bodies could be buried with proper safety measures.” This order, which rights activists said was intended to target minorities and did not respect religions, after much criticism was reversed.

A leading British religious freedom advocacy group, CSW, in its report titled, “A Nation Divided: The state of freedom of religious or belief in Sri Lanka,” said the Muslim community experiences “severe” religious freedom violations. A key factor in the violations is the perception by Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalists that Muslims are a threat to both Buddhism and the Sinhalese. The report also noted attempts to “reduce the visibility of Islam through the destruction of mosques and restrictive stances on religious clothing.

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

A woman hides her face with the poster protesting forced conversions during the Aurat March (Women's March) in 2021. Experts say ‘forced conversions’, usually of underage girls, involve abduction, rape, human trafficking and other serious offences. Activists and experts have called improved legislation. Credit: Aurat March Karachi

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Jan 19 2022 (IPS)

Two years after Michelle, 15, was kidnapped, sold, forced to convert to Islam and married to a stranger, relatives still ostracise her.

“My aunts and uncles have left us, and my two older brothers, till a few months ago, were not even talking to me,” said Michelle, talking to IPS over the phone from Faisalabad, in the Punjab province of Pakistan. They believe she has brought dishonour to them.

Her captors and even the cleric who officiated the marriage are free despite committing multiple offences, including abduction, trafficking and rape.

“There are several laws that can be invoked for tackling offences, such as kidnapping and abductions,” lamented Peter Jacob, executive director of the Center for Social Justice (CSJ), a research and advocacy organisation. “But the prosecution has failed to do so.”

Most of the young, female victims belong to the Christian (in Punjab) and Hindu (in Sindh) minorities and followed the same pattern.

Experts and activists demand legislation to prevent ‘forced conversions’ that are often associated with human trafficking, abduction and rape. The white poster on the left says: ‘Forced conversion unacceptable’. The blue poster says: ‘Underage marriage is a crime’. Credit: NCJP.

“This year, at least 62 such cases have been reported,” he told IPS over the phone from the eastern city of Lahore, in the Punjab province.

In the predominantly Muslim nation of 220 million people, the Christians and Hindus in Pakistan are estimated to be 1.27% and 2.14%, respectively, according to the 2017 census.

Dr Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, a member of the national assembly from the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, also the patron-in-chief of the Pakistan Hindu Council, told IPS “hundreds of cases” remain unreported.

Rukhsana Khokhar, senior project manager at the Karachi-based non-profit, Legal Aid Society, agreed with Vankwani.

“The victim’s family is hesitant to approach the police because of their harsh attitude,” she said.

“The affected family is diffident to report the crime because of the repercussions from the powerful and influential another side.”

Moreover, Khokhar said, the road to justice was tedious and complicated, but it was also expensive and often beyond their means.

In a majority of the cases, the adolescent girls from Hindu communities are uneducated, belong to poor families and are “surrounded by misogyny and patriarchy,” she said.

However, the reason for the conversion of educated Hindu girls belonging to well-off families was different. They want to seek escape from being forced into marrying uneducated Hindu men from their community. The only way out is for them is to convert to Islam.

Khokhar, who has been studying this issue for over a decade, believed that sensitisation was one way of overcoming the issue since societal prejudices remained the most significant barrier. This should include the clerics who officiate the nikah (the ceremony where the couple is legally wed under Islamic law), the investigating officers working on such cases and the district administration.

According to Vankwani, many parliamentarians concede the issue persists, but it is not as rampant as to be of concern.

“I say, even if it’s just one person who is forcibly converted, it becomes our responsibility to stop this practise through legislation,” he says.

Over the years, there have been several attempts to regulate conversions through legislative means without success.

In 2019, the Sindh assembly, for the second time, rejected a bill criminalising forced religious conversions. The first attempt was in 2016.

Safina Javed, Vice President Pakistan Minority Rights Commission, Sindh chapter, holding a poster. Credit: Safina Javed

In 2020, the Standing Committee on Religious Affairs and Interfaith Harmony had rejected the Protection of Rights of Minorities Bill, 2020, which recommended an age limit of 18 years for conversion.

The parliamentary committee shot down a draft of yet another anti-forced conversion bill opposed earlier in the year by the ministry of religious affairs even before it could be tabled in the national assembly.

The excuse made by the minister for religious affairs, Noorul Haq Qadri, was the “unfavourable” environment.

According to political and integrity risk analyst Huma Yusuf, the current “social, religious and political environment” was too oppressive in a Talibanized Pakistan for the law to find favour from any quarter.

“A key problem is that the term ‘forced conversion’ glosses over what’s really at stake. Reportedly, some 1,000 girls from religious minorities, primarily Hindus, are forced to convert each year,” Yusuf says.

“These conversions can involve abduction, rape, violence, human trafficking and extortion. They also enrich clerics who receive payments for solemnising such marriages, corrupt police officials who take bribes instead of investigating, and magistrates who look the other way. By rejecting the bill, our lawmakers are condoning these other activities. How does this serve Islam?”

The reasons for rejecting the most recent bill by the ministry and the parliamentary committee were the minimum age (set to be 18 years) kept for converting to another religion, a 90-day contemplation period before conversion and testifying before a judge.

The bill stated that the “age will be ascertained based on the child’s birth certificate, school enrolment certificate, or the official database. In the absence of all, the person’s age may be determined through a medical examination”.

“There are about 20 laws that place some or the other restrictions on a person below 18 years of age,” pointed out Jacob, including getting a driver’s license, voting or seeking employment.

“These are reasonable restrictions and enhance the scope of freedoms and protect the rights in those specific areas.”

He also found the 90-day contemplation period logical for a “matter that is individually and socially important and should not be dealt with casually or hastily”.

Further, says Jacob, testifying before a judge eliminates the possibility of covering the crime of kidnapping by marriage and will ensure that conversion is not under any duress, deceit, threat or fraudulent misrepresentation.

Terming the bill a “dam” that was drafted to “restrain the spread of Islam,” Pir Abdul Khaliq, 66, who heads the century-old madressa Ahya Darul Uloom, in Dharki, in Sindh province’s Ghotki district, was happy it was “rejected”.

This madressa (a “hotbed” for alleged conversions), next to the shrine of Khanqah-i-Aalia Qadria Bharchundi Sharif, has a chain of nearly 200 seminaries spread across Sindh (140), Punjab (30) and almost two dozen in Balochistan.

Since he took over the reins of the seminary from his father 50 years ago, he says, he has converted scores of men and women of their “free will”. Talking to IPS over the phone from Dharki, he conceded he was among those who had threatened the ministry that his followers would “come on the streets and hold protests” if the bill was passed.

Having converted entire families, “from 80-year-olds to some as young as eight”, he says no one ever objected to that, so why the need for a law.

“If an underage child converts alongside the parents or guardians, there is no objection,” responded Khokhar. The objection raised was of the conversion of single adolescents like Michelle.

“Why are they never elderly women, why do they have to flee to another city to convert and why are the parents not allowed to meet them?” she asked.

“There is no age to conversion,” responded Khaliq, but insisted he “respected the age of marriage”, which is 18 in Sindh.

However, many underage Hindu girls from Sindh are taken to Punjab, where the legal age of marriage is 16, says Khokhar. She believes it would help halt forced conversion if the age restriction of 18 years for conversion and marriage was “enforced uniformly” throughout the country.

In 2019, two Hindu sisters, Raveena and Reena, made headlines by going to the court seeking protection from their family, saying they had wilfully accepted Islam. The family insisted they were abducted.

The sisters were converted before their marriage in Sindh (where the age for marriage is 18) but married in Punjab (where the age for marriage is 16).

However, the court allowed the sisters to go to their husbands but sent a five-member fact-finding team to ascertain this was not a forced conversion.

The report recommended religious conversion be carried out through a “proper process and be formalised or registered in a court of law”.

At times, says Khaliq, girls eloped and converted to Islam because they had fallen in love with Muslim men and “not for the love of religion”.

In that case, says the cleric, the woman is given “a day or two to think over her decision”. But if she still insists on conversion, he performs the ceremony. “Marriage between a Muslim and Hindu is not permissible in Islam,” he says, and so she converts.

He also pointed out that there are times the woman realises she has made a wrong judgement, but after having fled her parent’s home, the chances of her being accepted by her family are very slim on her return.

“She has little recourse but to follow the original plan of converting to Islam”.

However, he reiterated, his seminary would not perform the nikah if the girl was underage.

“We will convert her only, and then she can go back to her parents till she attains the age of marriage. If her family won’t accept her new religion, and which happens in most cases, we provide her shelter, till she attains the legal age of marriage,” says Khaliq.

Responding to Khokhar’s query of moving to another city to convert, Khaliq explains: “Once the girl elopes with the man and the parents go to the police, many forces come into play, including the feudal lord of the area and the police. Fearful of their life, their first thought is to find a safe place.”

If it were passed, the bill would have effectively addressed this issue by restricting the person applying for a conversion certificate to get it issued from the judge of the area where the non-Muslim resided, says Jacob.

He, however, refuses to let the rejection dampen his spirit. “We have no other option but to fight taking the legal route to ensure a fixed process for conversion is followed,” says Jacob.

Along with Dr Vankwani, he is working with the Council of Islamic Ideology (tasked with giving legal advice on Islamic issues to the government and the parliament) to develop a draft bill that would be acceptable to all faiths.

This article is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.

The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7, which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.
The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalization of indifference, such as exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking”.

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Gul Khan*, 53, alongside his children and grandchildren, adds a handful of plastic to the stove in their home in Kabul. Gul Khan* has five sons and two daughters, and two grandchildren. They fled their home in Nangarhar province three years ago. All the children are now in school and Gul Khan and his 26-year-old son work as day laborers. Life is a struggle and winter is the hardest time. “In summer we only have to worry about food,” said Gul Khan. “But in winter we have to worry about finding fuel to burn, fixing the heating system, falling down on the ice when collecting water.” *Names changed for protection reasons. Credit: UNHCR

By Naureen Hossain
GENEVA, Jan 11 2022 (IPS)

UN agencies have asked for a record USD 4.4 billion in aid for Afghanistan to avert a full-blown humanitarian crisis that could see hunger, distress, and death and a mass exodus of people from the country.

The agencies OCHA, UNHCR, and their non-governmental organization partners launched their 2022 Humanitarian Response Plans to provide relief for Afghanistan and the region on Tuesday, January 11, 2022.

Speaking at a press conference in Geneva to launch the relief plans, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths stated that this is the “largest-ever appeal for a single country for humanitarian aid”.

Mullah Ahmed* and his children unload firewood that he bought after receiving a cash payment from UNHCR to help his family meet their winter needs. One thousand vulnerable families in the Afghan capital have received cash assistance. Mullah Ahmed, his wife, and their nine children fled their home in Jalalabad four months ago and now live in a house in Kabul that was abandoned by its owner who fled the country during the Taliban takeover. “The cash assistance is very important because my work stops in winter as there is no construction,” he said. “So we need it to buy food and also warm clothes for the children.” *Name changed for protection reasons. Credit: UNHCR

“Events in Afghanistan over the past year have unfolded with dizzying speed and with profound consequences for the Afghan people,” said Griffiths. The world is perplexed and looking for the right way to react. Meanwhile, a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe looms.”

These humanitarian and refugee response plans aim to provide vital humanitarian relief to 23 million people in Afghanistan. They will also be provided to 5.7 million Afghans displaced in local communities in five neighboring countries: Iran, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

Funding will be required from donors. The Afghanistan Humanitarian Response Plan has requested USD 4.4 billion. If funded, this is expected to support aid organizations to ramp up the delivery and output of health services, education, protection services, food and agriculture support, and access to clean water and sanitation.

The Afghanistan Situation Regional Refugee Response Plan alone will require USD 623 million in funding for 40 organizations that provide protection, health and nutrition, shelter and non-food items, livelihoods and resilience, and logistics and telecoms, among other necessary services.

Griffiths was describing the ongoing humanitarian crisis overwhelming Afghanistan. In 2021, it faced increased disruptions to services and struggled to meet its population’s needs.

Its economy has suffered dramatically due to the freezing of assets in central bank reserves, the disruptions in markets, not to mention the sudden pause in international development assistance, upon which many basic social services are dependent. Severe climate-induced problems such as the harsh winter season and one of the worst recorded droughts in the country’s history have only exacerbated poverty among its citizens. Twenty-three million people are at risk of acute hunger.

This also accounts for those Afghans who have been internally displaced – 700,000. OCHA’s relief aid plan accounts for these displaced citizens.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi remarked that the international community must take the steps needed to “prevent a catastrophe in Afghanistan, which could not only compound suffering but would drive further displacement both within the country and throughout the region.”

“It is key not to forget that there is a regional dimension to this crisis,” he said. “Not only Afghan refugees but the people who have been involved in hosting.”

Girls scavenge for fallen olives in an orchard on the edge of Jalalabad. The city is the capital of Nangarhar Province, which hosts internally displaced people from 17 of the country’s 34 provinces – up to 52 percent of the country’s total displaced population — and 72 percent of the country’s returnees live there. Nearly 700,000 people have been forced from their homes in Afghanistan since the beginning of 2021, joining 2.9 million Afghans already internally displaced across the country at the end of 2020. On 15 August, the Taliban took control of the country. The withdrawal of foreign aid has crippled the economy and led to a humanitarian crisis, with some 22.8 million people in the country facing food insecurity.

Neighboring countries currently host 5.7 million registered refugees from earlier waves of forced displacement. Iran and Pakistan account for 2.2 million Afghan refugees. While they have implemented inclusive policies in education and healthcare, the COVID-19 pandemic has compounded the countries’ own needs, which presented challenges to these governments to continue their policy of inclusion.

The UNHCR Plan will directly support 40 partner organizations working in the region to provide emergency relief, health and social services, education, and protection to refugees and host communities. It is also estimated to work closely to improve the livelihood and resilience of the Afghans, particularly to those who are more susceptible to exploitation or abuse when crossing borders.

One of the target goals addressed in the press conference was to ensure the country’s stability by supporting efforts to rebuild the economic and social structures.

“The key here is to stabilize the situation inside Afghanistan, which includes the people who are displaced,” Grandi said.

Griffiths also remarked it was crucial to invest in services and structures so that the country is eventually “secure for those [Afghans] who have been displaced to return to their homes”.

The UN leaders expressed hope that the relief plans would accomplish their target goals with the requested funding.

“With continuing adaptation, continuing adjustment, the plans can improve, and access to services can improve,” said Griffiths.

The Taliban’s takeover in August 2021 contributed to the decline in the economy and the freeze in international development assistance. It has threatened to undermine services, further undermining the development gains made in the last two decades. Education has been used as the prime example, with the concern over girls being allowed to return to schools or return to mixed classes with boys.

There is concern about the Taliban’s involvement with the relief plans. However, Griffiths stated that the partner organizations in Afghanistan, almost all NGOs, would “receive the money directly”, including programs that would directly pay frontline workers in the health and education sector.

Grandi remarked that their UN colleagues in the field were in talks every day with the Taliban, who have been open to discussing the scope of these programs, stating: “Humanitarian assistance… has created a space for dialogue.

“It’s that space we need to preserve… that then can be developed and make room for stabilization.”

Open dialogue between the international community and the Taliban would be needed to provide immediate relief to Afghanistan and the region, eventually paving the way for stabilizing the region and alleviating its dependence on donors. In this spirit and the palpable urgency to protect the people of Afghanistan, UNCHR and OCHA are launching their plans for 2022.

When asked at the conference what would happen to Afghans if they did not receive the required funds, Grandi said that if the country’s humanitarian system collapsed, it would likely result in a mass exodus of peoples into the neighboring states and beyond. “We will need that solidarity in those neighboring countries because they will be the first ones hit.”

Griffiths added apart from seeing “hunger, distress, death, despair, at the family level… we would be robbing the people of Afghanistan of the hope that their home is secure and that they can spend the rest of their lives here.”

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Desperate for work Kamikazi put her faith in ‘agents’ to find her a job. Instead, she found herself working without pay as a domestic worker in Kuwait. Photo: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI, Rwanda, Jan 5 2022 (IPS)

When Kamikazi * from Gisagara, a district in Southern Rwanda, was forced to quit her job due to COVID-19 last year, she desperately sought other employment.

A former co-worker in the food processing firm where Kamikazi once worked introduced her to “agents”. They assured her she would find decent employment in the Middle East, but little did she know her co-worker had delivered her into the arms of human traffickers.

The following day, with her passport in hand, the 22-year-old approached the agent, who told her to pay about 300 US dollars as a facilitation fee.

“One day, I received a call from the agent who told me that I had to travel to Kenya where I would secure my visa to Kuwait,” Kamikazi told IPS.

At the border between Tanzania and Kenya, the young woman met other members of the human trafficking syndicate who helped her to cross into Kenya unnoticed before travelling by road to the Kenyan capital of Nairobi.

In Nairobi, she and the ‘agents’ hid residential house with several other young women of different African nationalities. Driven by fear and desperation, she continued with the ruse until the group finally boarded a plane to Kuwait.

“I was told that domestic workers from our region (East Africa) were more highly valued in Kuwait than those from other countries,” she says.

Kamikazi recalls her arrival. The traffickers took their passports and held her and some other young women prisoner in an apartment.

“We believed them because my hope was that the new opportunity would help change my life for the better,” she told IPS.

However, her hopes for a better future were soon dashed.

She was “hired’ by a family – but found herself locked up and unpaid. And if it suited them, her employers would swap the domestic workers between themselves.

“I didn’t have any valid travel document, and I was treated like an animal being traded by one family to another,” she said. To make matters worse, she realised that her ex-colleague, whom she considered a close friend, was responsible for her situation.

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), in most countries in the Middle East, domestic workers are excluded from labour law, which means they have no social, health or legal protection.

Domestic workers suffer from particularly arduous conditions, and their situation is all the more vulnerable because most countries have no laws governing their employment, the report said. Because they are excluded from labour law provisions, written employment contracts are not required.

Victims of human traffickers often become sexually exploited, forced into labour, slavery and can become victims of organ removal and sale.

Rwanda Investigation Bureau (RIB) has warned that thousands of people fall prey to traffickers who portray themselves as recruitment agents. Vulnerable young women seeking greener pastures fall prey to these traffickers.

Latest estimates by UN Women indicate that while it’s challenging to get exact numbers of victims, the vast majority of detected trafficking victims are women and girls, and three out of four are trafficked for sexual exploitation.

Recent cases of maids being mistreated and assaulted by their employers in the Middle East have shone a light on domestic workers’ hidden and unregulated conditions.

In many cases, these women work illegally, which means they have little protection if their employers abuse them.

With tears in her eyes, Kamikazi remembers her first hours with her new employee.

“After confiscating my passport, I was told to stay at home (…) I was like in a cage,” Kamikazi said.

A typical working day started as early as 4 am and ended at midnight or later. There were no days off, and there was no going out unless to accompany the family somewhere.

“I had to take care of the house pets in addition to cooking, cleaning, washing clothes (…) I wanted to escape because I was abused by my employer but had no idea where to turn,” she said.

Whereas Rwanda Investigation Bureau (RIB) findings indicate that the majority of the victims are intercepted at the point of exit – either at the airport or the different border points of the country – evidence shows there are cases where young women are trafficked to neighbouring countries as a transit for commercial sexual exploitation in the Gulf countries.

An investigation by law enforcement institutions in Rwanda found at least 47 local-based syndicate members were trafficking women from Rwanda to work abroad. As a result, 49 individuals, including company owners, were arrested and prosecuted in courts of law in 2018, according to judicial reports.

The trend shows an upward trajectory, with 131 trafficking victims identified in 2020, compared with 96 victims in 2019.

Like Kamikazi, most human trafficking victims are enticed from villages and towns with false promises of gainful employment abroad.

Studies have proven that when families are economically unstable, the vulnerability of children increases. Traffickers prey on such families by making false promises of a new job, augmented income, better living conditions and financial support abroad.

Even though Rwanda has a strict anti-trafficking law that penalises sex and labour trafficking with up to 15 years of imprisonment, the RIB Secretary-General, Jeannot Ruhunga, is convinced that trafficking, especially women and children, continues to be a serious challenge faced by the international community.

Speaking during the workshop ‘Law enforcement officers & Criminal Justice practitioners’ workshop under the theme: Combating Trafficking in Human Beings with a Multi-stakeholders’ approach for Central and East Africa, the senior Rwandan police investigator noted that organised trafficking in persons is transboundary. It’s a global problem but seriously affects Central and East Africa.

“The most important is about how countries work together to address challenges encountered during the investigation and prosecution of this transboundary offence and to strengthen cooperation and mutual assistance,” Ruhunga said.

According to data from the Rwanda Directorate General of Immigration and Emigration, the majority of suspected human trafficking victims identified in Rwanda were from Burundi (62.7%), followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (15%) and Rwanda (13.6%).

Case data by the National Public Prosecution Authority reveal between 2016 and 2018, most perpetrators were male (63%), with females still comprising a substantial percentage of traffickers (37%).

The 2019 study conducted by Rwandan NGO Never Again Rwanda stresses that the effective management of national borders constitutes a critical component of inhibiting human trafficking because it functions to deter criminals and identify victims.

The research found that the primary transit countries for trafficking in East Africa are Uganda, Kenya, and, to a lesser extent, Tanzania. Uganda ranks first, followed by Kenya and Tanzania as destinations for trafficking.

Dr Joseph Ryarasa Nkurunziza, Executive Director of Never Again Rwanda, told IPS that awareness and education are key to beating human trafficking in Rwanda.

“Awareness is important considering that the pandemic has worsened the situation for many vulnerable groups which are now more prone to human trafficking,” Nkurunziza said.

For Kamikazi, her ordeal has come to an end. After being forced to work night and day and kept prisoner in her employer’s home, she was rescued after asking assistance from a businesswoman in Kuwait.

Her rescuer contacted the Rwandan Embassy in Dubai.

“It seemed like my employer didn’t want to give back my passport, but the Kuwait Police told them to give it to me.”

*Kamikazi’s name has been changed to protect her identity.

This is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.

The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN )  is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms.
The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalization of indifference, such as exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking”.

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Many in the crowd taking videos of the extrajudicial killing in Sialkot.

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Dec 7 2021 (IPS)

Mukhtiar’s heart sank when he saw the grisly incident of lynching of a man in the industrial city of Sialkot, in Punjab province.

The videos, taken on cell phones and put online, showed 49-year-old Priyantha Kumara Diyawadanage, a Sri Lankan national and manager of a garment factory, showing him being punched, kicked, hit with stones and iron rods, and killed. Not content, they then dragged his dead body out of the factory and set it on fire.

It was the same city which 11 years ago, had witnessed mob lynching two brothers, 22-year-old Hafiz Muhammad Mughees Sajjad and Mohammad Muneeb Sajjad, 16, in 2010, with support of the local police, on charges of theft. Later their bodies were hung upside down in the city square.

“There must have been no less than 2,000, men, mostly young, charged and in a frenzy, chanting ‘Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah’ (Here I am at your service, O Messenger of Allah), a slogan used by a far-right Islamic extremist political party, Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP),” said Sakhawat Mughal, a reporter working for Hum News, a private television channel, recalling what he saw.

“Many men had batons in hand. The police looked on and waited for backup,” he said, adding: “Had the handful of the law enforcers reacted, many more lives would have been lost.”

People from all walks of life have been shocked and condemned the incident.

“The Sialkot incident is a horrible example of the growth of extremism and violent mob lawlessness,” said the National Commission for Human Rights chairperson, Rabiya Javeri Agha. “The government should ensure speedy and equitable justice, and perpetrators must face the full force of law.”

According to rights activist Usama Khilji, director of Bolo Bhi, a civil society organisation geared towards advocacy, policy, and research in civic responsibility and digital rights, the TLP has managed to infiltrate the middle class disenchanted with mainstream political parties. The party stirred up ordinary people’s sentiments using tools of “religious passion and hatred towards any perceived act of anti-Islam” to drum support for itself and respond with violence when called upon to cause mischief.

What was even more disturbing was that not only did the people join in throngs to watch the horrendous incident, but they also filmed it and even took selfies showing Diyawadanage body burning in the background.

“Today, sections of the middle-class youth feel proud of lynching on a genocidal level, believing killing alleged blasphemers is an act of valour,” lamented Khilji.

Sitting 130 kilometres away in Lahore, the capital city of the Punjab province, and belonging to the Christian community, the breaking news from Punjab, for Mukhtiar, who goes by one name, was even more disturbing.

Along with the footage of the mob and burning of Diyawadanage body, the various television channels also showed archival photos of his late daughter Shama, and her husband, Shahzad. They were lynched by a mob in 2014 and pushed into a burning brick kiln where the husband worked, in Kot Radha Krishan’s village of Chak 59, near the city of Kasur, also in Punjab. They were punished for allegedly burning pages of the Holy Quran.

“Her three kids who are living with me were disturbed and cried a lot on seeing their parents’ faces plastered on the screen, as the older two remember the incident quite clearly,” said the grandfather, talking to IPS over the phone.

“The incident that happened yesterday (Friday, December 3) was a criminal act, as was my daughter’s and son-in-law’s lynching,” he said, adding: “Do you think any civilised person would want to carry out a sacrilegious act against any faith?”

“Nothing that happened on the part of Diyawadanage constitutes the offence of blasphemy as is the case in nearly all cases prosecuted under these laws,” pointed out Peter Jacob, executive director of Centre for Social Justice. Initial investigations by police suggest the manager had removed posters of a religious moot, as the factory would be whitewashed.

Peter Jacob, executive director of Centre for Social Justice addressing a crowd of protestors in Lahore. He and other rights activists have condemned the killing.

Mukhtiar further pointed out the consequences of committing blasphemy against Islam in Pakistan were “far too grave” for anyone to dare.

Statistics also point that one does not have to belong to a religious minority to be accused of blasphemy and face vigilante violence. The majority of the accused are Muslims.

At least 1,890 persons have been accused of committing blasphemy, under various clauses of the blasphemy law, from 1987 to 2021, said Jacob, who has been collecting data for the last 30 years, adding: “The year 2020 saw the highest number of accused.”

Of the 75% Muslims accused this year, 70% belonged to the Shia sect, he said, and 20% belonged to the Ahmadi community, 5% were Sunni, 3.5% were Christians and 1% Hindus. Religions of 0.5% could not be ascertained, Jacob told IPS over the phone from Lahore.

From 1992 till December 4, 2021, there have been 81 extrajudicial killings on suspicion of blasphemy and apostasy, 45 were Muslims, 23 Christians, nine Ahmadis, two Hindus and two persons whose religious identity could not be ascertained, Jacob noted.

In 2017, Mashal Khan, a Muslim student studying at Abdul Wali Khan University, in Mardan, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, was killed by his peers for allegedly posting blasphemous content online. The accusation was later proved to be fabricated.

Even in Shama and Shahzad’s murder, rights activists later found the attack was instigated by the brick kiln owner who had an altercation with Shahzad over a money dispute.

The Prime Minister terming the incident a “horrific vigilante attack” promised that all those responsible would be punished with “full severity of the law”. News reports say police have arrested over a hundred, including 19 who played a “central role” in the brutal killing.

For Mukhtiar, these promises ring hollow.

“There will be a lot of promises for a few weeks, and then when the public’s attention is diverted, the perpetrators will be released, you wait and see,” he said.

“Of the five men charged with murder and sentenced to death, two have been released,” he said. After seven years, he was tired of doing the court rounds or seeking justice. “I’m old and a heart patient, and I have the responsibility of these three kids too!”

Khilji also remained sceptical whether justice will be “dispensed to the mob” given Pakistan’s “dismal track record” in such cases.

“Entire police stations have been burnt down for perceived inaction towards blasphemy-accused people by the TLP,” he said, giving the example of the state caving into this group that exudes “massive street power”.

And this “capitulation” to those demanding, inciting, encouraging, and perpetuating violence, pointed out Saroop Ijaz, senior counsel with Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, has reinforced the “legitimacy of violence” in the public consciousness.

A December 5 editorial in Dawn said: “… on the last day of his life, Mr Diyawadanage came face-to-face with the consequences of the Pakistani state’s decades-long policy of appeasing religious extremists.”

“The Sialkot incidence is yet another reminder that violence and impunity are now embedded in society on the issue of blasphemy,” Ijaz told IPS, emphasising the urgent need for holding a “national conversation on violence” and, in particular, on how religion is often used to incite violence.

But, he was not sure if the government was “ready and willing to provide an enabling environment for such a conversation” to be had.

A new analysis of global drug policies looks at how countries’ drug policies and implementation align with the UN principles of human rights, health and development. Credit: Michael Longmire/Unsplash

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, Nov 9 2021 (IPS)

A “radically innovative” new analysis of global drug policies has laid bare the full impact repressive drug laws and their implementation have on millions of people worldwide, civil society groups behind its creation have said.

The inaugural Global Drug Policy Index (GDPI) www.globaldrugpolicyindex.net, developed by the Harm Reduction Consortium (HRC) – a collaboration of civil society groups – ranks countries on their drug policies against a series of indicators related to health, development, and human rights.

Groups in the HRC say it is the first tool of its kind to document, measure, and compare countries’ drug policies, and their implementation, across the world.

And the results of the first index have underlined how even the best-ranked countries are falling dramatically short in aligning policies and their implementation with UN principles of human rights, health, and development.

Ann Fordham, Director at the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), which was involved in creating the index, told IPS: “The message is that no country is doing well. They all have huge room for improvement.”

HRC organisations say that for decades, tracking how well – or badly – governments are doing in drug policy has been difficult.

Until now, many governments have measured the ‘success’ of drug policies not against health, development, and human rights outcomes, but instead by prioritising indicators such as the numbers of people imprisoned for drug offences, the volume of drugs seized, or the number of hectares of drug crops eradicated.

The net result, drug law reform groups argue, is a severe lack of accountability when it comes to the repressive approaches to drugs favoured by many governments and which blight the lives of millions of people, invariably among the most vulnerable and marginalised populations.

But they believe the GDPI will change that.

It uses 75 indicators running across five broad dimensions of drug policy: criminal justice, extreme responses, health and harm reduction, access to internationally controlled medicines, and development.

Thirty countries – the HRC plans to expand the project to include more states in future – are given a score in each of these five areas and ranked according to an overall score out of 100.

The scores are decided on not just extant data but, crucially, expert local perspectives on policy implementation.

This, the team behind the index’s methodology says, helped create a more accurate picture of how people were being affected by a given state’s drug policies, and objectively quantifying the effects of their implementation.

Professor David Bewley-Taylor, of Swansea University told IPS: “Our work was a deliberate effort to include affected communities at the heart of the index. It allows lazy assumptions about countries’ drug policies to be challenged and adds nuance to the debate about drug policy.”

His colleague, Dr Matthew Wall, added: “Even with the best data records there can be gaps. Because we were working with civil society, we could get extra data, get an on the ground evaluation of policy implementation.

“Without civil society perspectives, there would have been something missing, especially in measuring equity of implementation in some areas, for instance, access to harm reduction treatment.”

Some of the findings in the index highlighted the dire impact of policy implementation on communities.

It showed that a militarised and law enforcement approach to drug control remains prevalent globally, with lethal force by military or police reported in half of the countries surveyed. Drug law enforcement is also predominantly targeted at non-violent offences, especially people who use drugs.

Meanwhile, to some extent, in all countries, there is a disproportionate impact of drug control on marginalised people based on gender, ethnicity, and socio-economic status.

The index also pointed out sometimes large gaps between policy and its implementation, and how some countries are doing well in some areas but poorly in others.

For instance, in ensuring access to controlled medicines, countries like India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Senegal score high on policy but get 0/100 for actual availability for those in need.

It also found that inequality is deeply seated in global drug policies, with the five top-ranking countries scoring three times as much as the lowest-ranking five countries. According to the report, this is partly due to the colonial legacy of the ‘war on drugs’ approach.

While Norway topped the index, even it did not perform well in all areas and gained an overall score of 74/100. The median score across all 30 countries in the index was just 48/100.

Campaigners believe that by framing the ‘success’ of countries’ drug policies in terms of indicators of human rights, health, and development, and especially because it involves data gathered from on the ground experience of implementation, the index can be a powerful tool in trying to persuade governments to change their approach to drugs.

“The Global Drug Policy Index is nothing short of a radical innovation,” said Helen Clark, Chair of the Global Commission on Drug Policy and former Prime Minister of New Zealand.

“Good, accurate data is power, and it can help us end the `war on drugs´ sooner rather than later.”

Writing in the report’s foreword, she added: “For decision-makers wishing to understand the consequences of drug control, as well as for those who seek to hold governments accountable, the index sheds light on critical aspects of drug policies that have been historically neglected, such as the intersection of drug policy and development, or the differentiated impacts of drug law enforcement on ethnic groups, Indigenous peoples, women and the poorest members of society.”

The index’s accompanying report illustrates the effects of drug policies on communities, including real-life stories of people who use drugs, often documenting the stigma, violence, and persecution drug users face because of repressive drug policies and their implementation.

It also has a series of recommendations for governments, including calls for an end to violence, arbitrary detention, extreme sentencing and disproportionate penalties, and the promotion of access to health, medicines, and harm reduction services and a long-term development approach for marginalised communities worldwide.

However, it is unclear to what extent the GDPI would sway policymakers in countries where repressive drugs policies have been the norm for decades and where regimes have repeatedly resisted calls for reform.

Groups campaigning for drug law reform in Belarus, for instance, which has some of the most repressive drug legislation globally and notoriously harsh implementation of it, told IPS the index is unlikely to change the regime’s legislation, nor its hard-line approach to drug use.

Piotr Markielau of Legalize Belarus told IPS: “This index is a great idea, but it has very little chance of influencing drug policy in Belarus or any other non-democratic country.”

But Fordham said even if the index was ignored by policymakers in some states, it does not diminish its worth.

“We appreciate that there are some countries which will remain impervious to our efforts, but we hope that the index will at least ignite conversation about the metrics used to measure drug policies.

“We have to keep banging the drum and shining a light on repressive drug policies and the harm they are doing.”

She added: “Governments don’t like accountability on this, so we expect some pushback on the index. But one thing I am proud of with the index is the incredibly robust methodology that has been used. It is a very considered piece of work, and it will put us on solid ground when we talk to governments.”

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait, is welcomed by teachers and students at a girls’ primary school in Kabul, Afghanistan. Sherif led the first all-women UN mission to Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover to meet with the new de facto education authorities in October 2021. She has called on the de facto authorities to resume adolescent girls’ access to secondary education. Credit: Omid Fazel/ECW

By Alison Kentish
New York, Nov 5 2021 (IPS)

After leading a landmark, first-ever all-women mission to Afghanistan last week, Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait, the United Nations global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises, says that schools must reopen for all children and that girls, in particular, must be able to return to secondary school classrooms.

Sherif visited a girls’ school in Kabul and spoke to students, female teachers, and administrators as part of her Afghan mission. She also met with the de facto education authorities at the Ministry of Education to advocate the right of all children to quality education. The ECW mission comes less than a month after ECW launched a US$4 million First Emergency Response grant to provide ‘quality, flexible learning and psychosocial support for children and adolescents caught in the escalating crisis.

“We need to act fast. When you are in the midst of a humanitarian emergency like Afghanistan, where there is no money in circulation, starvation is a very real fact and poverty is extreme,” Sherif told IPS. “Schools need to continue to reopen and education must be sustained. Not only at primary school levels but through secondary schools – and girls have to go back to secondary schools.”

Sherif, a human rights lawyer, worked in Afghanistan in the early 1990s. She was part of a mission to the country after the first Taliban takeover in 1999 and has visited the country periodically over the last 20 years. She spoke to IPS about her observations from this ground-breaking mission to Kabul a few days ago – the first of its kind since the Taliban take-over in August.

Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait, meets with de facto education authorities in Afghanistan.
Credit: Omid Fazel/ECW

“There are more women on the streets of Kabul today. I even saw women demonstrating for health care. I visited a girls’ primary school whose teachers and administration were all women,” Sherif said.

“The school’s headmaster is a woman, the school’s doctor is a woman, administrators and teachers are women. There are educated, strong women who are working, but they do not get salaries, because there are no salaries for basic services as a result of the funding freeze to Afghanistan.”

The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Union are just a few of the international bodies that have cut off Afghanistan’s access to financing. According to the World Bank, the country relies on grant funding for more than 75 percent of public spending, with expenditure of US$411 billion and government revenue of US$2.5 billion.

With that grant funding frozen, the country is on the brink of economic collapse.

Sherif is appealing for direct funding through UN agencies like ECW and UNICEF, which has the proven mechanisms in place to ensure that funds are used to support teachers and students.

“Teachers are not being paid. UNICEF has a very strong process on the ground. If money were to be given today or tomorrow to pay all teacher salaries, UNICEF has capacities in place to deliver on that funding, even if this would typically have been done through the World Bank or other development actors, but now we are in humanitarian crisis so you cannot use regular development aid approaches,” Sherif told IPS.

“The same goes for all UN agencies like the World Food Programme and UNHCR, the UN Refugees agency. Funding can be channeled through them directly to implement aid programmes. Nothing needs to, nor will go through, the de facto authorities.”

The ECW Director is cautiously optimistic following her meeting with the de facto education authorities, to whom she appealed for a return to secondary school for girls.

UNICEF Deputy Representative Alice Akunha and Chief of Education Jeannette Vogelaar greet the Education Cannot Wait all-women delegation to Afghanistan, led by Director Yasmine Sherif and her colleagues, Michelle May and Anouk Desgroseilliers.
Credit: Omid Fazel/ECW

“Primary schools have opened for girls’ education and for girls’ secondary education, the de facto authorities told us that they are developing a plan. I stressed that the girls have no time to lose and that the benefits of educating girls are crucial to the future of the country,” she said.

The ECW Director has commended international and national civil society organizations that now work with religious scholars as they negotiate the resumption of secondary school education at the grassroots level. “By bringing an Islamic scholar with them, these NGOs have actually managed to build trust. So secondary schools have opened in some provinces, a few in the north and a few in the south. It is important to stand firm on human rights and girls’ rights, but you must also have the ability to build trust as well,” she said.

ECW is already prepared to swiftly scale up its support and adapt its programming in Afghanistan. New challenges and more children in need of help demand pivoting and quick response. Sherif says ECW was created for crises like these.

“As the UN’s global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises, we are agile, quick, and flexible. We use decades of lessons learned across the UN system to respond to crises. Traditional development aid modalities that are not crisis-sensitive are not going to work; not in this situation,” she said.

Sherif says that an estimated $1 billion is urgently required for United Nations agencies and international and local NGOs to meet the pressing education needs across the country.

“It’s about how can we save the Afghan population from a humanitarian catastrophe. How can we ensure that every Afghan girl and boy in the country can go to primary and secondary school? It’s about how we can ensure that teachers receive their salaries, so they are able to continue to teach. It is about providing teaching and learning materials and safe learning environments. It is about ensuring that the rights of adolescent girls to access education are fulfilled. That is why it was important for us to do an all-women mission to Afghanistan and to make clear where we stand on girls’ education.”

Sherif is hoping that the visit can give the world an open window view into life in Afghanistan and provide concrete recommendations for international aid to be immediately scaled up and invested to support quality education for both girls and boys.

“Afghanistan cannot wait. The girls of Afghanistan cannot wait. Education cannot wait.”

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Kawthar, 13, takes notes while attending Grade 3 at a UNICEF-supported self-learning centre in Al-Hasakeh, northeast Syria. She says she always wanted to be like other children and grab her bag and go to school like other children. With Education Cannot Wait assisted schooling, this dream has become a reality. Credit: UNICEF/ Syria 2020/ Delil Souleiman

By Alison Kentish
DOMINICA, Oct 21 2021 (IPS)

In war-torn Syria, the support of Education Cannot Wait (ECW) – the United Nations global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises – is bringing positive, life-changing educational opportunities tailored to children like 11-year-old Ali.

Ali, who lives in Raqqa with his two siblings and parents, has to work to help support his family. He and his brother did not attend school. Ali heard about registration for ECW-supported educational activities near the industrial area in which he works. They are part of courses being offered in three centres in the city – alongside psychosocial support for children who have experienced war for most of their lives.

Ali initially registered his siblings in the ECW-supported programme but held out himself for fear of losing his job. The centre proposed a flexible learning schedule – one that would allow the brothers to work and attend classes. Programme officials had to convince his family and employers at the industrial centre that school is essential for children’s development. Now he is part of a class of 16 children from the area who attend classes from 7:30 am to 10:00 am. After class, they go to work.

Ali’s story is one of the many stories of vulnerable children and adolescents embroiled in Syria’s protracted conflict that ECW’s investments are helping bring back to school in partnership with education partners on the ground. ECW’s multi-year response in Syria was initiated in 2017 through an initial investment which was further expanded into a Multi-Year Resilience Programme which will continue until 2023 with a cumulative budget of US$45 million.

Yasmine Sherif, the Director of Education Cannot Wait, says too many children and adolescents in Syria have only seen the brutal reality of war, forced displacement, and the hardship of living in areas affected by armed conflict in their short lives.  Credit: Education Cannot Wait (ECW)

“Too many children and adolescents in Syria have only seen the brutal reality of war, forced displacement, and the hardship of living in areas affected by armed conflict in their short lives. For them, education is a beacon of hope. It is an opportunity to thrive and become positive changemakers to rebuild their communities and ensure a more peaceful and prosperous future for all,” said Yasmine Sherif, the Director of Education Cannot Wait. “Working together with our partners on the ground, ECW is dedicated to fulfilling the right to a quality education for the most vulnerable girls and boys in Syria.”

“Save the Children has key actor status in the education sector in Syria and has been involved since the inception of ECW’s multi-year response, providing sector-specific technical expertise and guiding in the development of a programme framework that is responsive to the extensive education needs of children in Syria,” Sara Dabash, Awards Officer for the ECW programme in Syria, told IPS.

Children and adolescents already suffering from the impacts of a decade-long war are also bearing the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly due to school closures and movement restrictions.

“The disruption of access to quality education for children has dramatically impacted learning and child well-being. In addition, lack of access to safe learning environments and continued isolation exposes children to higher risks of child labour, early marriage, and other negative coping mechanisms. The limited social interactions also compromise access to psychosocial support and other protection services,” Dabash said.

Emad, 9, who lives with a disability, shows his writing to his teacher to check if he is doing right in the class of Arabic subject in the ECW supported temporary learning space in Idleb, northwest Syria. Credit: UNICEF/ Syria 2020

According to Dabash, blended learning options have been introduced, using devices such as mobile phones for remote learning. This option has its downsides as many children have limited to no access to phones or internet connections.

Figures provided by Save the Children put almost 7 million people in need of humanitarian education assistance. Children make up 97 percent of that number. Dabash says, however, that in the “determined locations of implementation within the ECW Programme in northeast Syria, Save the Children, with the support of its partners, has identified around 15,000 children as the most vulnerable and in need of education assistance.”

Since 2017, ECW is also partnering with UNICEF to provide quality education services for the most vulnerable children in the country.

“With funding from ECW, UNICEF provides children across Syria with opportunities to continue their learning through a holistic package of activities tailored to the needs of the children. To support learning, the package of activities generally includes providing learning supplies and psychosocial support through recreational activities. Where classrooms do not exist or continue to be unsafe or overcrowded, we establish new classrooms and rehabilitate existing ones,” Karen Bryner, Education Specialist and ECW Programme Manager in Syria, told IPS.

Bryner says the partnership provides training, teaching supplies and stipend payments to teachers.

The goal is to get as many girls and boys as possible enrolled and attending school regularly. According to UNICEF, ‘children have experienced psychological distress due to violence and instability. Many have missed years of education, with over 2.4 million currently out of school.’

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged that goal with intermittent school closures. However, Bryner says when face-to-face instruction was not an option, the ECW-supported students transitioned to electronic and paper-based distance education.

“Various modalities were used over the last year, including WhatsApp groups by teachers to deliver daily instruction where connectivity allowed; blended learning with face-to-face instruction two days a week and home-based learning (worksheets and assignments) for the other days, conducting lessons in smaller groups closer to children’s homes, and home delivery of biweekly learning packs and retrieval of students’ work by teachers,” she told IPS.

Kawthar, 13, hangs out with her cousin Juhaina outside her house in Ghwairan neighbourhood, Al-Hasakeh. Since 2019, she has benefitted from the self-learning programme, helping her catch up on the education she had missed due to displacement, her disability, and the financial challenges her family had. Credit: UNICEF/ Syria 2020/ Delil Souleiman

The story of 13-year-old Kawthar is a testament to the positive impact of ECW’s support for the most marginalised children Displaced five times and suffering from growth-related issues due to stunting, she could not walk to school, and her family could not afford transportation. Two years ago, Kawthar, originally from Al-Hasakeh City, enrolled in the ECW-supported self-learning programme implemented by UNICEF– a course that gives out-of-school children the tools to catch up to their peers. She also receives transportation to classes.

“I always wanted to be like all other children; to grab my bag and head to school; to read, write and learn,” says Kawthar. “I wish for all children to be able to go to school. And I certainly hope that nobody gets displaced anymore and that we all remain safe.”

According to UNICEF, with ECW funding, since November 2020, the self-learning programme has been able to reach 2,600 out-of-school children in Al-Hasakeh. Despite this progress, challenges remain to fulfil the right to inclusive, quality education for every child in Syria.

UNICEF states that there has been a 20 percent increase in the number of children in need of humanitarian assistance, and agencies will need scaled-up support as they continue to bring hope to Syria’s children.

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Ras Bongo Wisely Tafari (far right) holds on to the CARICOM’s symbol of the reparatory justice movement, the reparations baton, in Castries, Saint Lucia. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS

By Alison Kentish
DOMINICA, Oct 18 2021 (IPS)

The Rastafarian organizations in the Caribbean are determined that the issue of slavery reparations will emerge from the eclipse of COVID-19.

As the world deals with the impacts of efforts to contain the virus’ spread and regional governments tackle vaccine hesitancy and a wave of misinformation, issues not directly related to COVID-19 have had to be temporarily shelved.

However, members of the Caribbean Rastafari Organization are determined to keep the movement for slavery reparations in the minds of citizens and on the agenda of policymakers.

“From the time of emancipation in 1834, our ancestors have been clamoring for reparations. Some leaders have taken heed to the calling, some have ignored it, but the Rastafari nation from its inception has been appealing for reparations, and up to today, we are on that platform,” chairperson of the Caribbean Rastafari Organization, Burnet Sealy told IPS.

Sealy is known as Ras Bongo Wisely Tafari – part of a move by members of the Rastafarian faith to change the colonial names given at birth and advance the internal healing aspect of the reparations process.

He is a member of the Reparations Committee of Saint Lucia, one of 15 national reparations organizations in the member states of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) bloc.

In 2013, the group of nations established the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC), a body charged with making the ‘moral, ethical and legal’ argument for reparatory justice for organizations of the Caribbean Community.

The CRC is headed by Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies.

“It is the greatest crime ever committed against humanity – a crime whose harm and suffering continue to haunt humanity in this 21st century. A crime that has anchored the 21st century within a legacy of untold human suffering, and there is no carpet in the world that is big enough to brush this under,” Sir Hilary told a Slave Trade Remembrance Day online discussion earlier this year.

The movement for reparations in the Caribbean has risen and waned in the last decade. Changes in administration on some islands, with ensuing shifts in policy directions and budgetary priorities, meant that funding for national committees has also been wavered.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its consequent limitations on movement and in-person gatherings have added another obstacle to the movement.

However, Ras Bongo Wisely Tafari says that despite the challenges, the Rastafarian movement remains committed to healing from the effects of slavery.

“Reparations Cannot Die,” he told IPS.

“We have been educating the masses on what reparations are all about. People think that reparation is just about money, but we are letting them know that this is not true. Reparations really mean repairing the damage that was done as a result of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery, continuing to colonial rule. The damage was done mentally, physically, spiritually, financially, culturally.”

CARICOM, which is home to about 16 million people, has its reparations battle fought as part of a 10-Point Plan. Signed in 2013, the plan calls for:

• A full, formal apology for slavery by the governments of Europe;
• A repatriation program to resettle descendants of the over 10 million Africans who were forcefully transported to the Caribbean;
• An Indigenous Peoples Development Program to begin healing for genocide on the native Caribbean populations;
• The establishment of cultural institutions like museums and research centers;
• A program to remedy the public health crisis includes the African descended population in the Caribbean, which has the highest incidence of hypertension and type 2 diabetes globally. Regional health experts and historians say this is directly related to the ‘nutritional experience, physical and emotional brutality and overall stress profiles associated with slavery, genocide, and apartheid;
• Programs to eradicate the high levels of illiteracy that stem from slavery;
• The establishment of an African Knowledge Program;
• Psychological rehabilitation programs;
• Technology transfer;
• Debt cancellation.

“The argument has been won that reparatory justice is inevitable. The issue is how best to achieve it. Who should have the authority to conceptualize and structure it and how to ensure that while it has a reparatory function, it is also at the same time creating a greater sense of justice and humanity in the world,” says Beckles.

The road to reparatory justice has been tough to conceptualize in the Caribbean, and in the face of issues like climate change, biodiversity loss, and a global pandemic, slavery reparations often plummet on the list of priorities for governments.

For champions of the cause, however, the commitment is unwavering.

“It is our responsibility to maintain that focus of our ancestors and see to it that we have reparations,” Ras Bongo Wisely Tafari told IPS.

“This is not a quick fix. It is a long journey, but we refuse to give up. We will never give up the fight. Reparations are a must.”

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Sheeba Aslam Fehmi at an event organized by Dhanak, celebrating couples who married under the Special Marriage Act.

By Mariya Salim
NEW DELHI, India, Sep 27 2021 (IPS)

When Ali (name changed) proposed to his best friend, little did he know that her parents would take six years to agree to their alliance because he was born into a Muslim family, and they were Hindus.

“Everything they had heard all their life pointed to Muslims being violent, conservative, forceful etc. The idea of me being Muslim and marrying their Hindu daughter was too much to fathom despite them thinking of me highly,” he said in an interview with IPS.

This story is one of the few where the end was ‘happy’, and the family did not bow to societal pressure. However, if one looks at recent propaganda and the increase of Islamophobia in India, one concept which has added fuel to this fire is the fictitious propaganda of ‘Love Jihad’.

Love Jihad is a term propagated by religious fundamentalist groups, alleging a conspiracy by Muslim men to convert non-Muslim girls in the guise of love.

The propagation of this concept is perhaps one reason why Ali had to struggle to convince his wife’s parents that his religion had nothing to do with his love for their daughter.

While it may be easy to counter such a narrative, socially, with more awareness, what has made this term popular and the hate associated with it resulting, in some cases, in violence is the support it has garnered from right-wing political parties and their success at turning such marriages into a criminal offence.

“Social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, host hundreds of pages and handles which post unverified incidents as ‘real news’ of Hindu women being deceived by Muslim men into marrying them and ending up either dead or as captives forced to convert and live in the homes of their supposedly violent Muslim husbands,” says Ashwini KP, an academic and rights activist based in Bangalore.

Challenging the provisions of one such draconian state law passed in the state of Gujarat as Gujarat Freedom of Religion (Amendment) Act, 2021, Advocate Isa Hakim, one of the petitioners’ lawyers, argued: “Amendments (in the Act), read with the discourse around Love Jihad, it is clear that the impugned Act is enacted with nothing but a communal objective and is thereby opposed to the constitutional morality, basic features and fundamental rights guaranteed under Articles 14, 19, 21, 25, and 26 of the Constitution.”

The Gujarat High Court, through an order on August 19, 2021, put a stay on the operation of several sections of the Act, including a provision that termed interfaith marriages as a means for forceful conversion. The order, the court stated, was being passed “to protect the parties solemnising inter-faith marriage from being unnecessarily harassed”. The state government soon after decided to challenge this order in the Supreme Court of India.

Addressing a rally last year in Uttar Pradesh, the chief minister Yogi Adityanath openly proclaimed: “Govt will work to curb ‘Love-Jihad’, we’ll make a law. I warn all those who conceal their identities and play with the respect of our sisters if you do not mend your ways, your ‘Ram naam satya’ journey (a phase associated with people being taken to be cremated) will begin”. Therefore, it is not surprising that in a state whose chief minister makes such open threats, right-wing groups have used love Jihad to stoke communal tensions and rioting. A total of five states in India, where the BJP is in power, have laws based on the conspiracy theory of Love Jihad, without actually using the phrase.

“It is also to undermine the agency of 21st-century Hindu women. We are a society that is afraid of its own daughters, and to keep a check on them prohibiting them from making their own choices, they (current regime) have brought out very Islamophobic and communal legislation under the garb of a safety and security issue for ‘their’ women,” says Sheeba Aslam Fehmi, research scholar and journalist in an exclusive interview with IPS.

Fehmi, also the president of Dhanak, works to protect the couples’ right to choose marriage or relationship partners. The organisation supports couples in inter-faith and inter-caste marriages.

She told IPS they also try to assist interfaith couples with safe houses to ensure they do not become targets of right-wing attacks.

Popular Indian jewellery brand Tanishq withdrew this advert with a depiction of an inter-faith marriage. It said while the campaign was to celebrate diversity it had prompted reactions “contrary to its objective”.

It is perturbing that couples who want to marry under the ‘Special Marriage Act’ (an Act passed by the Indian Parliament allowing interfaith marriages without conversion) have a section, which is now being challenged, where a 30-day notice is publicly displayed, inviting objections, before the marriage is registered.

Shital (name changed), shared with IPS how she received threatening calls from some right-wing groups once she and her Muslim partner decided to register under the Act.

“My Aadhar card (national ID) details were made public on a Facebook group. My parents, who approved of our alliance, received calls where they were threatened with ‘dire consequences’ if they did not stop our marriage,” Shital said. She called the marriage off because of these security concerns.

Asif Iqbal, the co-founder of Dhanak, said in an exclusive interview to IPS that they started the organisation because there was no support system for interfaith couples trying to marry using the Special Marriage Act. The objective was to organise people against religious fanaticism.

“I was made to sit for six hours in a police station in Delhi. The investigating officer was trying to enquire about a possible conspiracy as I was the last person an interfaith couple spoke to before they eloped. The boy was Muslim, and the girl Hindu,” said Iqbal.

The fear of vigilante groups, in the online and in actual physical spaces, is so prevalent that even brands advertising using the idea of inter-faith marriages, particularly where the boy is Muslim, are targeted as promoters of Love Jihad. A recent example was a popular jewellery brand depicting a Hindu woman and a Muslim man getting married. The advert was trolled on social media, that the company removed the advertisement from all forums.

For couples looking to challenge the draconian laws, the only recourse is the courts. However, the worrying feature is that Love Jihad targets Muslims and criminalises its men in a society with frequent incidences of Islamophobia.

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Flashback: March of Justice, Minsk, Belarus, in September 2020. Credit: Andrew Keymaster / Unsplash

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, Sep 6 2021 (IPS)

There will soon be no one left to defend human rights or help minorities in Belarus as the country’s third sector moves closer to “complete liquidation”, international rights groups have warned.

Belarus’s authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, has stepped up his regime’s crackdown on any potential opposition in recent weeks, ordering the closure of scores of NGOs, claiming they are being run by foreign entities fomenting the destabilisation of the country.

As of mid-August, more than 60 civil society groups had been shuttered, including not just human rights organisations but some promoting women’s rights, helping the disabled, and working with people who have HIV/AIDS.

This comes amid a wider crackdown on independent media and pro-democracy activists which began a year ago after mass protests following Lukashenko’s re-election in a widely disputed election.

Heather McGill, a researcher for Amnesty International, told IPS: “We are close to the liquidation of the third sector. There is hardly anyone left in Belarus to provide help to people that need it. There won’t be any groups left in Belarus to protect anyone, or defend their rights.”

Belarussian civil society has come under increasing pressure over the last year as authorities in the country have moved to repress any possible opposition to the regime.

Not only have many organisations faced sudden police raids and checks, some staff have been arrested or harassed, while demands to fulfil what groups say are impossible administrative obligations have been used to force their closure.

Some groups have moved out of the country and are continuing their work from abroad. However, this limits what services and help they can provide.

“Some groups provide legal services, lawyers, for instance, for people. Those simply won’t be there now,” said McGill.

Groups providing key social services, including help for the elderly or the sick will also be affected.

“Many non-profit organizations did work with the issues that the state did not do and, having lost the services of NGOs, ordinary people, including those from vulnerable groups, will suffer,” Svetlana Zinkevich of the Office for European Expertise and Communications NGO, told the Devex media platform.

Her organisation, which works to build third sector capacity, has been told it must close.
Lukashenko has been in power since 1994 and during his rule, Belarus has been repeatedly criticised for human rights abuses and suppression of opposition. He has often been dubbed ‘Europe’s last dictator’.

But the scale of the attacks on the third sector, and wider repression in society of anyone seen to be linked to pro-democracy or anti-regime movements, has shocked seasoned observers of the country. 

Rachel Denber, Deputy Director of the Europe and Central Asia Division at Human Rights Watch (HRW), told IPS: “Belarusian civil society had, despite years of authoritarian autocracy, managed to flourish, expand, and grow quite strong. The scale and scope of the raids, arrests, and moves to close civic organizations in recent months in Belarus is unprecedented in this region.”

There has been an equally shocking crackdown on independent media with most independent news outlets having been forced to close and the few independent journalists still working talking of living in daily fear of arrest.

According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the country is now the most dangerous place in Europe for journalists, and the Belarussian Association of Journalists (BAJ) says that over the last year almost 500 journalists have been arrested, 29 have been imprisoned, and there have been almost 70 documented incidents of violence against reporters.

Meanwhile, the BAJ, the only independent representative organisation of journalists and media workers in Belarus and one of the country’s most prominent champions of freedom of expression, has been dissolved on the order of the Supreme Court for allegedly not dealing with alleged administrative violations after a Justice Ministry inspection earlier in the year.

One worker in what remains of Belarus’s independent media told IPS: “We have never encountered so many violations of the rights of journalists, especially physical attacks, arrests, and detentions.

“An unprecedented number of journalists are under criminal prosecution, being deemed political prisoners. It is obvious that the authorities are trying to silence the press, constantly increasing the level of pressure, thereby grossly violating the right of their citizens to information, and no one knows when this will end.”

Apart from NGOs and their staff, the dire situation has also forced many ordinary people to leave the country.

Natalia*, a former emergency services worker who was involved in organizing protests last year, told IPS she had fled Belarus after fearing she and her family were about to be arrested.

She said that she was arrested many times, abducted off the street by police, told her three children would be taken from her and put into care unless she stopped organising protests, tortured in police cells, had her leg broken by riot police at a protest before suddenly fleeing with the rest of her family one night after discovering her home had been broken into by security forces.

“I had kept a small bag of clothes packed in case I was detained and held ahead of a trial. It was all I had when I crossed the border. I later found out a warrant for my arrest had been issued,” she said.

Meanwhile, Alexiy*, a former student in Minsk, told IPS how he had left the country earlier this year by trekking through forests across the border into Russia and then travelling on to Western Europe.

He said that what has been happening in Belarus over the last year was “shocking and sad” and that life had become “terrible” in many places, especially the capital Minsk. “There is fear everywhere,” he said.

It is unclear how long the current repression in the country is likely to last. Much of the international community has condemned what they say are the appalling human rights abuses being committed in Belarus, and some countries have imposed tough sanctions on Lukashenko’s regime.

But whether these are having their intended effect is hard to gauge.

Groups like Amnesty International suspect the NGO closures are related to sanctions imposed by Western nations.

It is also thought that the regime is orchestrating flows of thousands of undocumented immigrants towards its borders with EU states in the Baltic region, to potentially provoke an international refugee crisis which it can use as leverage to get the EU to reverse sanctions.

Analysts also believe that the regime’s fate – and that of pro-democracy movements, independent media, and the wider third sector – depends more on financial injections from Russia than external pressure from Western governments.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has approved USD 1.5 billion in loans for Belarus over the last year while Lukashenko is also courting closer economic ties with his traditional ally.

McGill said: “The country can go on without the third sector, and it can go on as it is as long as there is no economic collapse, which is not going to happen while Russia is giving its financial support.”

But others see some hope in the fact that even as it faces liquidation, people working in Belarus’s civil rights groups are refusing to abandon their work entirely.

“The situation is grim. [But] it’s heartening that so many civic groups are still finding ways to carry out this work. It speaks to their commitment and sheer determination,” said Denber.

*Names have been changed for reasons of safety.

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Sania Ahmed found her photograph uploaded on ‘Suli Deal’ auctioning app. Credit: Handout

By Sania Farooqui
NEW DELHI, Jul 16 2021 (IPS)

Ongoing online sexual harassment of Muslim women through ‘Sulli Deals’, an auctioning app hosted by GitHub, has been reported to the authorities – but not before it called untold trauma to the targeted women.

Cyber Cell registered the case in Delhi, India, despite GitHub having shut the open-source app Sulli Deals down. Sulli is a derogatory term that often used by abusive right-wing trolls for Muslim women in India.

Previously similar profiles and handles were found on Twitter and YouTube. These platforms were used to harass Muslim women using a similar ‘Sulli Deals’ modus operandi to auction pictures of the women.

Sania Ahmed, a media professional, realised her pictures were being auctioned and morphed online through ‘Sulli Deals’ on Twitter almost a year ago. Sania says she complained to Twitter about these handles, even tried to reach out to the police, but her complaints were ignored.

“When I first found it online, a handle on Twitter was bidding Pakistani Muslim women. When I called it out, that handle blocked me, but that incident was followed by horrible trolling, very graphic abuse, and posts. I knew about this ecosystem of trolls, and I had been complaining to Twitter, but it had not taken any action,” Ahmed told IPS in an exclusive interview.

“It was recently when a right-wing handle tagged me on Twitter that I realised that they had gone ahead and created an entire app, and they were bidding on Muslim women through it.

“I have received rape threats, acid attack threats and death threats. This was different because it wasn’t just about me anymore; there were so many other women involved. The fact that these men had downloaded all our pictures, imagine the kind of effort they were putting in,” Ahmed said.

Farah Mizra (name changed due to safety concerns), is another woman who found her pictures on the ‘Sulli Deal’ app, said in an interview with IPS. She was “in an absolute state of shock” for days when her friend told her the pictures were being used as ‘Sulli Deal of the Day’.

“I also found my friends’ pictures on that app, and my first reaction was to immediately report it to GitHub. There were twitter handles sharing screenshots from this app and tagging us, and I just spent that night incessantly reporting all those handles that were auctioning us.”

Online harassment creates anxiety about general safety.

“Online sexual harassment doesn’t take much time to reach women offline. They have my pictures. They have my name. They can easily get more information and details about me. I feel safe, neither online nor offline.

“These attacks are not random. The women are carefully chosen. We are all Muslim women. We have a voice and have been vocal towards many policies of the BJP government,” Mizra said.

According to this report by Plan International, “Free to be Online”, 58 percent of young women face online harassment and abuse on different social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp and TikTok.

Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen, CEO of Plan International, in this piece, said: “In high and low-income countries alike, the report found that girls are routinely subjected to explicit messages, pornographic photos, cyberstalking and other distressing forms of harassment and abuse. Attacks are most common on Facebook, where 39 percent have suffered harassment, followed by Instagram (23 percent), WhatsApp (14 percent) and Twitter (9 percent).”

Geeta Seshu, a journalist specialising in freedom of expression, working conditions of journalists, gender and civil liberties, in an interview with IPS, said women face a range of online harassment which range from abuse to stalking to doxing and hosting platforms need to take responsibility.

“The ‘Sulli Deal’ auction is the latest manifestation of the extreme misogyny and fear of who speaks out. It is revolting and Islamophobic, and an attempt to intimidate and insult the dignity of women,” Seshu says.

“Organised groups use the internet to incite hatred and abuse. The delay in spotting and taking down objectionable content is inexcusable. If this app was hosted on GitHub, it needs to state clearly what its hosting guidelines are. I feel that the tech companies are aware of the problematic content. They do allow its circulation while they pretend ignorance or helplessness. For them, the more the clicks and eyeballs, the more the possibility of monetisation.”

Following these attacks on Muslim women, a group of more than 800 women’s rights organisations and concerned individuals issued a statement condemning the harassment and abuse.

“This is a conspiracy to target women by creating a database of those Muslim women journalists, professionals and students who were actively raising a voice on social media against right-wing Hindutva majoritarianism. The intention is to silence their political participation.

“This attempt to de-humanise and sexualise Muslim women is a systemic act of intimidation and harm. This is not the first time this has happened,” the statement says.

The National Commission of Women (NCW) took suo motu cognisance of the case and has written to the Delhi commissioner of police seeking a detailed action-taken report on the matter.

Hana Mohsin Khan, a commercial pilot, says she was targeted because of her religion.

Commercial pilot Hana Mohsin Khan was also targeted for taking issue with the ‘Suli Deal’ app. Credit: Handout

“I’m a Muslim woman. Even though I am not political, I am active on Twitter. All I did was support and Tweet against those ‘Sulli Deal’ Twitter handles earlier, and I guess they decided to go after me as well,” Khan said.

“I am not scared, this is not going to stop me from doing what I am doing, but the fact is they took my photo from Twitter, my username, and this app was running for almost over 20 days without our knowledge and that just makes me angry.”

Khan was among the women who went ahead and filed an FIR with the police, she tweeted, sharing a copy of her FIR and said, “I am resolute and firm in getting these cowards to pay for what they have done. These repeated offences will not be taken sitting down. Do you worse, I will do mine. I am a non-political account targeted because of my religion and gender.”

In a statement, Human Rights Watch flagged its concern towards the Indian government’s policies and actions towards its minorities.

“Since Modi’s BJP came to power in 2014, it has taken various legislative and other actions that have legitimised discrimination against religious minorities and enabled violent Hindu nationalism. The BJP government’s actions have stoked communal hatred, created deep fissures in society, and led to much fear and mistrust of authorities among minority communities.

“Prejudices embedded in the government of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have infiltrated independent institutions, such as the police and the courts, empowering nationalist groups to threaten, harass, and attack religious minorities with impunity,” the statement says.

The internet has always held out the promise of democratic communication, says Seshu. For Muslim women and women who are marginalised and face discrimination in society, the internet can be empowering.

“The internet is regulated and censored by the state and by private internet companies. Organised groups use the internet to incite hatred and abuse. When no action is taken against these vigilante groups by either the state or by private companies, they jeopardise and end up destroying all democratic space.”

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau