Moroccan security forces charge against a group of Sahrawi women in Laayoune, occupied Western Sahara. Credit: Courtesy of Equipe Media

By Karlos Zurutuza
LAAYOUNE, Occupied Western Sahara, Aug 23 2015 (IPS)

Ahmed Ettanji is looking for a flat in downtown Laayoune, a city 1,100 km south of Rabat. He only wants it for one day but it must have a rooftop terrace overlooking the square that will host the next pro-Sahrawi demonstration.

“Rooftop terraces are essential for us as they are the only places from which we can get a graphic testimony of the brutality we suffer from the Moroccan police,” Ettanji told IPS. This 26-year-old is one the leaders of the Equipe Media, a group of Sahrawi volunteers struggling to break the media blackout enforced by Rabat over the territory.

Ahmed Ettanji and a fellow Equipe Media activist edit video taken at a pro-independence demonstration in Laayoune, occupied Western Sahara. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

“There are no news agencies based here and foreign journalists are denied access, and even deported if caught inside,” stressed Ettanji.

Spanish journalist Luís de Vega is one of several foreign journalists who can confirm the activist´s claim – he was expelled in 2010 after spending eight years based in Rabat and declared persona non grata by the Moroccan authorities.

“The Western Sahara issue is among the most sensitive issues for journalists in Morocco. Those of us who dare to tackle it inevitably face the consequences,” de Vega told IPS over the phone, adding that he was “fully convinced” that his was an exemplary punishment because he was the foreign correspondent who had spent more time in Morocco.

“The Western Sahara issue is among the most sensitive issues for journalists in Morocco. Those of us who dare to tackle it inevitably face the consequences” – Spanish journalist Luís de Vega
This year will mark four decades since this territory the size of Britain was annexed by Morocco after Spain pulled out from its last colony of Western Sahara.

Since the ceasefire signed in 1991 between Morocco and the Polisario Front – the authority that the United Nations recognises as a legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people – Rabat has controlled almost the whole territory, including the entire Atlantic coast. The United Nations still labels Western Sahara as a “territory under an unfinished process of decolonisation”.

Mohamed Mayara, also a member of Equipe Media, is helping Ettanji to find the rooftop terrace. Like most his colleagues, he acknowledges having been arrested and tortured several times. The constant harassment, however, has not prevented him from working enthusiastically, although he admits that there are other limitations than those dealing with any underground activity:

“We set up the first group in 2009 but a majority of us are working on pure instinct. We have no training in media so we are learning journalism on the spot,” said Mayara, a Sahrawi born in the year of the invasion who writes reports and press releases in English and French. His father disappeared in the hands of the Moroccan army two months after he was born, and he says he has known nothing about him ever since.

Sustained crackdown

Today the majority of the Sahrawis live in the refugee camps in Tindouf, in Western Algeria. The members of Equipe Media say they have a “fluid communication” with the Polisario authorities based there. Other than sharing all the material they gather, they also work side by side with Hayat Khatari, the only reporter currently working openly for SADR TV. SADR stands for ‘Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic’.

Hayat Khatari, the only reporter currently working openly for SADR TV in Laayoune. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

Khatari, a 24-year-old journalist, recalls that she started working in 2010, after the Gdeim Izzik protest camp incidents in Laayoune. Originally a peaceful protest camp, Gdeim Izzik resulted in riots that spread to other Sahrawi cities when it was forcefully dismantled after 28 days on Nov. 8.

Western analysts such as Noam Chomsky have argued that the so-called “Arab Spring” did not start in Tunisia as is commonly argued, but rather in Laayoune.

“We have to work really hard and risk a lot to be able to counterbalance the propaganda spread by Rabat about everything happening here,” Khatari told IPS. The young activist added that she was last arrested in December 2014 for covering a pro-independence demonstration in June 2014. Unlike Mahmood al Lhaissan, her predecessor in SADR TV, Khatari was released after a few days in prison.

In a report released in March, Reporters Without Borders records al Lhaissan´s case. The activist was released provisionally on Feb. 25, eight months after his arrest in Laayoune, but he is still facing trial on charges of participating in an “armed gathering,” obstructing a public thoroughfare, attacking officials while they were on duty, and damaging public property.

In the same report, Reporters Without Borders also denounces the deportation in February of French journalists Jean-Louis Perez and Pierre Chautard, who were reporting for France 3 on the economic and social situation in Morocco.

Before seizing their video recordings and putting them on a flight to Paris, the authorities arrested them at the headquarters of Moroccan Association of Human Rights (AMDH), one of the country’s leading human rights NGOs, which the interior ministry has accused of “undermining the actions of the security forces”.

Likewise, other major organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have repeatedly denounced human rights abuses suffered by the Sahrawi people at the hands of Morocco over the last decades.

Despite several phone calls and e-mails, the Moroccan authorities did not respond to IPS’s requests for comments on these and other human rights violations allegedly committed in Western Sahara.

Back in downtown Laayoune, Equipe Media activists seemed to have found what they were looking for. The owner of the central apartment is a Sahrawi family. It could have not been otherwise.

“We would never ask a Moroccan such a thing,” said Ettanji from the rooftop terrace overlooking the spot where the upcoming protest would take place.

Edited by Phil Harris   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Irina was 21 when she first started using drugs. More than 30 years later, having lost her husband, her home and her business to drugs, she is still battling her addiction.

But, like almost all female drug addicts in this former Soviet state, she has faced a desperate struggle not only with her drug problem, but with accessing help in the face of institutionalised and systematic discrimination because of her gender.

“Georgia’s society is very male-dominated,” she told IPS. “And this is reflected in the attitudes to drugs. It’s as if it’s OK for men to use drugs but not women. For women, the stigma of drug use is massive. There are many women who do not join programmes helping them as they would rather not be seen there.”

Women make up 10 per cent of the estimated 40,000 drug users in Georgia, according to research by local NGOs working with drug users.“Georgia’s society is very male-dominated and this is reflected in the attitudes to drugs. It’s as if it’s OK for men to use drugs but not women. For women, the stigma of drug use is massive. There are many women who do not join programmes helping them as they would rather not be seen there” – Irina, now in her 50s, who has been taking drugs for 30 years

However, because of very strong gender stereotyping, women users have very low access to harm reduction services – only 4 percent of needle exchange programme clients are women and the figure is even less for methadone treatment.

Local activists say this startling discrepancy is down to the massive social stigma faced by women drug users.

Dasha Ocheret, Deputy Director for Advocacy at the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network (EHRN) told IPS: “In traditional societies, like Georgia’s, there is a much stronger negative attitude to women who use drugs than to men who use drugs. Women are supposed to be wives and mothers, not drug users.”

Many female addicts are scared to access needle exchanges or other harm reduction services because they fear their addiction will become known to their families or the police. Many have found themselves the victims of violence as their own families try to exert control over them once their drug use has been revealed. Others fear their drug use will be reported to the authorities by health workers.

Registered women drug users can have their children taken away while they routinely face violence – over 80 percent of women who use drugs in Georgia experience violence, according to the Georgian Harm Reduction Network– and extortion at the hands of police helping to enforce some of the world’s harshest drug laws. Possession of cannabis, for example, can result in an 11-year jail sentence.

Irina, who admits that she arranges anonymous attendance at an opioid substitution therapy (OST) programme so that as few people as possible can see her there, told IPS that she had herself been assaulted by a police officer and that police automatically viewed all female drug users as “criminals”.

But those who do want to access such services face further barriers because of their gender.

Free methadone substitution programmes in the country are extremely limited and because levels of financial autonomy among women in Georgia are low, other similar programmes are too expensive for many female addicts.

Discrimination is not uncommon among health service workers. Although some say that they have been treated by very sympathetic doctors, other female drug users have complained of abuse and denigration by medical staff and in some cases being denied health care because of their drug use.

Pregnant women are discouraged from accessing OST, despite it being shown to be safe in pregnancy and resulting in better health outcomes for both mother and child.

Eka Iakobishvili, EHRN’s Human Rights Programme Manager, told IPS: “Pregnant women don’t have access to certain services – they are strongly advised by doctors and health care workers to abort a baby rather than get methadone substitution treatment because they are told the treatment will harm the baby.”

While some may then undergo abortions, others will not, instead continuing dangerous drug use and the potential risk of contracting HIV/AIDS which could then be passed on to their child.

Meanwhile, those harm reduction services accessible by women are not gender-sensitive, according to campaigners, who say that female drug users need access to centres and programmes run and attended only by women.

Irina told IPS: “On some [harm reduction] programmes, the male drug users there will abuse the women drug users for taking drugs. This puts a lot of women off attending these programmes.”

She said that she had asked for a women-only service to be set up at the OST centre she attends but that it had been rejected on the grounds that only a few women were enrolled in it.

Together, these factors mean that many women are unable to access health services and continue dangerous drug-taking behaviour, sharing needles and injecting home-made drug cocktails made up of anything, including disinfectants and petrol mixed with over the counter medicines.

But there is hope that the situation may be about to change, at least to some degree, as local and international groups press to have the problem addressed.

At the end of July, CEDAW (UN Commission on Elimination of Discrimination against Women) released a set of recommendations for the Georgian government to ensure that women obtain proper access to harm reduction services after local NGOs submitted reports on the levels of discrimination they face.

These include, among others, specific calls for the government to carry out nationwide studies to establish the exact number of women who use drugs, including while pregnant, to help draw up a strategic plan to tackle the problem, and to provide gender-sensitive and evidence-based harm reduction services for women who use drugs.

The government has yet to react publicly to the recommendations but local campaigners have said they are speaking to government departments about them and are preparing to follow up with them on the recommendations.

Tea Kordzadze, Project Manager at the Georgian Harm Reduction Network in Tibilisi, told IPS: “We are hoping that at least some of the recommendations will be implemented.”

The Georgian government has been keen to show the country is ready to embrace Western values and bring its legislation and standards into line with European nations in recent years as it looks to create closer ties to the European Union. Rights activists say that this could come into play when the government considers the recommendations.

Iakobishvili said: “These are of course just recommendations and the government is not obliged at all to accept or implement any of them. But, having said that, Georgia does care what other countries and big international rights organisations like Amnesty International and so on say about the country.”

Irina told IPS that only outside pressure would bring any real change. “The European Union, the Council of Europe and other international bodies need to put pressure on the Georgian government to make sure that the recommendations don’t remain on paper only.”

But, she added, “in any case, the recommendations alone won’t be enough. The whole attitude in society to women drug users is very negative. It has to be changed.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

"Hands Up, Don't Shoot": A rally in support of Michael Brown. Credit: Shawn Semmler/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Aug 18 2014 (IPS)

The shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer in the southern United States earlier this month has led to widespread public outrage around issues of race, class and police brutality.

In particular, a flurry of policy discussions is focusing on the startling level of force and military-style weaponry used by local police in responding to public demonstrations following the death Aug. 9 of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.“We have a lot of military equipment and hardware looking for a place to end up, and that tends to be local law enforcement.” -- WOLA's Maureen Meyer

The situation has galvanised support from both liberal and conservative members of Congress for potential changes to a law that, since the 1990s, has provided local U.S. police forces with surplus military equipment. The initiative, overseen by the Department of Defence and known as the “1033 programme”, originally came about in order to support law-enforcement personnel in the fight against drug gangs.

“We need to de-militarise this situation,” Claire McCaskill, one of Missouri’s two senators, said last week. “[T]his kind of response by the police has become the problem instead of the solution.”

In a widely read article titled “We Must Demilitarize the Police”, conservative Senator Rand Paul likewise noted that “there should be a difference between a police response and a military response” in law enforcement.

During attempts to contain public protests in the aftermath of the shooting, police in Ferguson used high-powered weapons, teargas, body armour and even armoured vehicles of types commonly used by the U.S. military during wartime situations. Now, it appears the 1033 programme will likely come under heavy scrutiny in coming months.

“Congress established this programme out of real concern that local law enforcement agencies were literally outgunned by drug criminals. We intended this equipment to keep police officers and their communities safe from heavily armed drug gangs and terrorist incidents,” Carl Levin, chair of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, said Friday.

“[W]e will review this programme to determine if equipment provided by the Defense Department is being used as intended.”

Drugs and terrorism

Despite this unusual bipartisan agreement over the dangers of a militarised police force, there appears to be no extension of this concern to rising U.S. support for militarised law enforcement in other countries.

While a 2011 law requires annual reporting on U.S. assistance to foreign police, that data is not yet available. However, during 2009, the most recent data available, Washington provided more than 3.5 billion dollars in foreign assistance for police activities, particularly in Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Mexico, Pakistan and the Palestinian Territories.

According to an official report from 2011, “the United States has increased its emphasis on training and equipping foreign police as a means of supporting a wide range of U.S. foreign-policy goals,” particularly in the context of the wars on drugs and terrorism.

In the anti-terror fight, African countries are perhaps the most significant recipients of new U.S. security aid. Yet a new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) highlights the dangers of this approach, focusing on the U.S.-supported Anti-Terrorism Police Unit (ATPU) in Kenya.

The report, released Monday, builds on previous allegations against the ATPU of arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Yet neither the Kenyan authorities nor the ATPU’s main donors – the United States and United Kingdom – have seriously investigated these longstanding allegations, HRW says.

Washington’s support for the ATPU has been significant, amounting to 19 million dollars in 2012 alone. Yet while U.S. law mandates a halting of aid pending investigation of credible reports of rights abuse, HRW says Washington “has not scaled down its assistance to the unit”.

“The goals of supporting the police in general are laudable and in line with concerns over rule of law,” Jehanne Henry, a senior researcher with HRW’s Africa division, told IPS.

“The problem here is it’s clear that, notwithstanding the goals of the assistance, it’s serving to undermine rule of law because the ATPU is taking matters into its own hands. So, our call is for donors to be smarter about providing this kind of assistance.”

Unseen since the 1980s

Meanwhile, Mexico and Latin American countries have been seeing an uptick in U.S. assistance for security forces as part of efforts to crack down on the drug trade.

“Currently the Central American governments are relying more and on their militaries to address the recent surge in violence,” Adriana Beltran, a senior associate for citizen security at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a watchdog group here.

“While the U.S. is saying it’s not providing any assistance to these forces, there is significant assistance being provided through the Department of Defence for counter-narcotics, which is channelled through the militaries of these countries.”

According to a new paper from Alexander Main, a senior associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a think tank here, U.S. security assistance to the region began strengthening again during the latter years of President George W. Bush’s time in office.

“Funding allocated to the region’s police and military forces climbed steadily upward to levels unseen since the U.S.-backed ‘dirty wars’ of the 1980s,” Main writes, noting that a “key model” for bilateral assistance has been Colombia. Since 1999, an eight-billion-dollar programme in that country has seen “the mass deployment of military troops and militarized police forces to both interdict illegal drugs and counter left-wing guerrilla groups”.

Yet last year, nearly 150 NGOs warned that U.S. policies of this type, which “promote militarization to address organized crime”, had been ineffective. Further, the groups said, such an approach had resulted in “a dramatic surge in violent crime, often reportedly perpetrated by security forces themselves.”

Mexico has been a particularly prominent recipient of U.S. security aid around the war on drugs.

“From the 1990s onward, the trend has been to encourage the Mexican government to involve the military in drug operations – and, over the past two years, also in public security,” Maureen Meyer, a senior associate on Mexico for WOLA, told IPS.

In the process, she says, civilian forces, too, have increasingly received military training, leading to concerns over human rights violations and excessive use of force, as well as a lack of knowledge over how to deal with local protests – concerns startlingly similar to those now coming out of Ferguson, Missouri.

“You can see how disturbing this trend is in the United States, and we are concerned about a similar trend towards militarised police forces in Latin American countries,” Meyer notes. “We have a lot of military equipment and hardware looking for a place to end up, and that tends to be local law enforcement.”

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

Some 15,000 people took part in the Marcha de la Gorra (March of Hats) on Nov. 20, 2013, in Córdoba, Argentina, protesting police discrimination against poor, dark- skinned young people. Credit: Courtesy of Colectivo de Jóvenes por Nuestros Derechos

By Fabiana Frayssinet
CÓRDOBA, Argentina, Mar 19 2014 (IPS)

Just being young, dark-skinned, poor, and wearing a hood or cap exposes you to arrest as a suspected offender in the Argentine province of Córdoba. Arbitrary police detentions are based on the misdemeanour of “loitering”, meant to prevent crime but in fact a violation of constitutional rights.

José María Luque, known as Bichi, has lost count of the number of times he has been detained by the police for these reasons in Córdoba, the capital of the province of the same name.

Luque is 28 years old and lives in a poor neighbourhood. He was first arrested when he was 13 and on his way home from school with a friend, dressed in school uniform. He was kept in custody for a week.

“They stopped us, asked for our documents and arrested us. Just like that. They made up a criminal charge against me: attempted robbery and possession of a firearm. They let me go when the charges were dismissed,” he told IPS.

Now Luque is a member of the Colectivo de Jóvenes por Nuestros Derechos (Young People’s Collective for Our Rights), which fights police abuse. He says he is lucky because his family paid for a lawyer, and he has no criminal record.

But that is not what happens to many young people arrested under Cordoba’s Código de Faltas (Code of Misdemeanours), which came into force in 1994 and was reformed in 2007.

A study conducted by the National University of Córdoba and the Spanish University of La Rioja found that 95 percent of people detained under the Code of Misdemeanours do not have access to a lawyer.

“If you have a misdemeanour on your police record, you cannot get a certificate of good conduct, which most companies require in order to hire an employee,” Luque said.

The code penalises behaviours that supposedly harm civil coexistence, such as disturbing the peace in a public place, not providing proof of identity, resistance to authority, drunkenness, begging or vagrancy.

The study indicates that nearly 70 percent of offenders are charged with “merodeo” (loitering), a controversial misdemeanour that allows police to pick up suspects who, in an Oxford Dictionary definition, “stand or wait around without apparent purpose” or “stand or wait around with the intention of committing an offence.”

Article 98 of the code establishes fines or up to five days imprisonment for those who hang around vehicles or urban or rural buildings “with a suspicious appearance or without a proper reason, causing disquiet among proprietors, residents, passersby or neighbours.”

“It’s a completely subjective and arbitrary rule. There is no explanation of what to do in order not to arouse suspicion and be arrested,” said Luque, who has worked since he was a teenager and is now a master pizza maker.

Bichi and other young people of similar social extraction tend to wear particular garments that identify them: coloured hats or caps, jogging pants and flashy trainers.

But the police interpret these cultural identifiers as a presumption of guilt.

“Many of those arrested wear hats. Hats are suspect,” said Luque, one of the organisers of La Marcha de la Gorra (March of Hats), which has taken place every November for the past seven years to demand the repeal of the Code of Misdemeanours. In 2013, 15,000 people took part.

“Whatever they say, the loitering rule is used so that the police can arrest darker-skinned people from the shanty towns who are wandering around wearing hats,” lawyer Claudio Orosz, the representative in Córdoba of the human rights organisation Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (Centre for Legal and Social Studies), told IPS.

In Orosz’s view, the code is a reflection of a “conservative and timorous” society that has inherited the “repression and genocide” of the 1976-1983 Argentine dictatorship.

This prosecution lawyer for crimes against humanity said that the culture is the reason why the poor are subjected to the “Kafkaesque labyrinth” of loitering rules.

According to the university study, people arrested for misdemeanours are mainly underprivileged young people aged 18 to 25. In 2011, 73,000 people were detained in the province, 43,000 of them in the city of Córdoba.

“It’s the usual thing: if you come from a poor area and you are poor, you dress in a certain way, you have certain features and a certain skin colour, then you are automatically considered a danger to society,” said Luque.

One of the most questionable aspects of the code is that powers that should be reserved for judges are handed over to police superintendents.

This is ironic because the Cordoban police “structure and support the major crime problems that cause most damage to society,” such as “human trafficking, drug trafficking, car theft and arms sales,” said Agustín Sposato, another member of the youth collective.

Aggravating circumstances, according to Orosz, are the unreliable systems for fingerprinting and carrying out police record searches in Cordoban police stations.

“Sometimes they take three days to find out if whether the detainee has a record and to release them, which is really illegitimate deprivation of freedom,” he said.

“It’s a system of social control, formalised by the police, that undermines the basic checks and balances of constitutional law,” he said.

In Orosz’s view, “the Code of Misdemeanours gives enormous power of selectivity and social control to the police, without the proper judicial control.”

Luque is well aware of the fact. “The times I was detained, I experienced that sense of illegitimate deprivation of freedom, of being kidnapped, of not knowing when I was going to get out, of not knowing how to let my loved ones know where I was. The impotence was very great, very dark, very ugly,” he said.

The governor of Córdoba, José Manuel De la Sota, on Feb.1 sent a bill to reform the Code of Misdemeanours to the provincial parliament, where it is being debated.

In the view of Sergio Busso, the leader of the parliamentary party for the ruling Unión Por Córdoba, the rule on loitering should be preserved because it is important in the fight against rising public insecurity in the province.

Busso told IPS that the code “is an instrument to regulate and punish illegal behaviours that harm the rights of individuals or of society as a whole, but that do not amount to crimes.”

But he admitted the code needs to be reformed, so that “arrests and fines may be applied only in special situations, and are replaced instead by alternative and secondary penalties, such as community service.”

He also said the enforcing authority should be changed. The new bill provides for specialist prosecutors or judges to decide misdemeanour cases, rather than police, “in order to separate those who judge from those who execute procedures,” and to ensure “an independent view.”

According to Orosz, this has already been tried, and it failed because the justice system collapsed under the avalanche of cases.

Busso said the reform bill requires loitering to be the subject of a complaint by an identified citizen. But Orosz said such a complainant would be “equally subjective.”

In Orosz’s view, the Code of Misdemeanours should be repealed and replaced by a code of coexistence establishing “the desired behaviours, and conflict resolution mechanisms that do not necessarily involve jail time,” like community mediation programmes.

Sposato, for his part, said the proposed reforms “are just window dressing, to ease the climate of social conflict” in the province.

“What is at stake is people’s lives, their rights, and the possibility of equality for all of us in the province,” he concluded.

Kayla Moore, in photo with her infant niece, suffered a mental health crisis and died in police custody. She is remembered in a community birthday celebration by her sister, Maria Moore. Credit: Doug Oakley/IPS

By Judith Scherr
BERKELEY, California, U.S., Nov 26 2013 (IPS)

Just before midnight on Feb. 12, Kayla Xavier Moore’s roommate dialed 911. Moore, 41, a paranoid schizophrenic, was off her prescription meds and highly agitated. The roommate thought he knew the drill – Moore would be taken to a psychiatric hospital, stabilised with medication and allowed to go home in 72 hours.

That’s not what happened. Finding Moore had an outstanding warrant, Berkeley police decided to take her to jail. When they tried to handcuff her, Moore, who was also African American and transgender, resisted – and died."All of a sudden there would be these invisible people in the apartment coming after her and she’d have to move again.” -- Elysee Paige-Moore

The coroner said Moore died from obesity, drugs and cardiovascular disease. Moore’s family blames the police.

Moore was not creating a disturbance and presented no threat, her sister Maria Moore told the community at a meeting on the incident.

“When you put your hands on someone who is a paranoid schizophrenic, who does not trust police, they are going to fight that,” she said. “If [police] had just stopped for a minute instead of trying to be enforcers, had listened and found out what the situation was about, Kayla would be alive.”

Police involvement in the death of people with mental health emergencies is not uncommon. In fact, an investigation by the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram one year ago estimated that at least half of the 375 to 500 people shot and killed by police in the United States annually suffer from mental health issues.

“Always a happy child”

Arthur Moore remembers the day he brought his first-born child home from the hospital and the joy Xavier brought the family. (This article refers to Xavier, the child, in the masculine and to Kayla, the adult, in the feminine.)

“Xavier was always a happy child. Whatever he focused on, he would focus on it with a lot of joy and a lot of intensity,” Arthur Moore said in an interview at the family home. “He was very bubbly and curious about everything.”

As he grew older, Xavier was found hiding twice for extended periods, something the family would come to see as an early sign of his illness.

As an adult, Kayla Moore was haunted by voices and often chose street drugs over prescribed medicines. Known by friends and family as a poet, talented cook and hilarious impersonator, Moore lived in shelters, the streets, cheap hotels, the family home and finally in a subsidised apartment.

She’d settle in a new place, “then all of a sudden there would be these invisible people in the apartment coming after her and she’d have to move again,” said Elysee Paige-Moore, Kayla’s stepmother.

Police reports indicate that Kayla Moore initially cooperated with police on the night she died, stepping outside the apartment to speak with officers. But when they told Moore she was going to jail, she rushed inside, demanding to speak with the FBI for confirmation.

Police called for backup. Officers struggled with the 347-pound Moore until she lay on her stomach on a mattress on the floor, with several officers straddling her to place her in handcuffs and ankle restraints. When she stopped struggling, officers rolled Moore to her side. Police say she was breathing then, but soon stopped breathing and could not be revived.

Some Berkeley police have completed 40 hours of specialised Crisis Intervention Training, but no CIT officer was available when Moore was in crisis, and Berkeley’s Mobile Crisis Team of mental health clinicians clocked out at 11 p.m.

“If you’re going to be in a mental health episode in Berkeley, make sure you’re going into it during business hours,” Berkeley Mental Health Commissioner Paul Kealoha Blake quipped at a community meeting.

Shifting out of “cop mode”

Crisis Intervention Training is premised on the principle that people experiencing mental health distress need compassion and treatment, not jail.

“The tactics we are taught in the academy often are not the best tactics for dealing with someone in crisis,” Philadelphia Police Captain Fran Healy says in “An Integrated Approach to De-escalation and Minimizing Use of Force,” published by the Police Executive Research Forum.

“We reiterate to our officers that they need to shift out of ‘cop mode’ in these situations…[CIT] gives the officers an awareness of when they have to change their approach and shift more to ‘social worker mode,’” Healy writes.

Initiated in Memphis, Tennessee in 1988, Crisis Intervention Training teaches officers recognition of mental illnesses, de-escalation techniques, and the principle of “diverting people that have serious mental illnesses away from the criminal justice system and back into the community system of care,” said Officer Jeffrey Shannon, Berkeley’s CIT coordinator.

Just eight percent of Berkeley police are CIT trained, though Shannon hopes that will grow to 20 percent. Most of the 2,000 communities with CIT programmes train a fraction of the force; Portland, Oregon trains the entire department.

Partnership with the mental health community is the heart of CIT training, said Laura Usher, CIT programme manager with the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which co-founded the Memphis CIT.

“There’s usually a component of the training where individuals just tell their stories – what it’s like to have a mental illness, what it’s like to be in crisis and what it’s like to be in recovery,” Usher said. “Officers say it’s the first time they’ve ever seen someone with a mental illness who is not in crisis. They realise, ‘This is a person just like me.’”

Many communities have Mobile Crisis Teams of mental health professionals who respond to people experiencing mental health distress. The downtown Oakland, California MCT partners with police and is available weekdays for about nine hours each day.

Stephanie Lewis, who heads the team, explains that when police get a call saying, for example, that a loved one is agitated, pacing or yelling, the MCT will respond. First police make sure the situation is safe, then clinicians try to connect with the individual, calling the person by a name they prefer, modulating their tone of voice, and, especially, showing respect, Lewis said.

Collaboration with police has been built over 10 years, said George Karabakakis, head of Health Care & Rehabilitation Services, the nonprofit that employs the embedded mental health staff.

“It’s not something you just say – ‘We’re going to embed someone in the police department,’” Karabakakis told IPS. “There has to be a lot of preparatory work to build those connections.”

In Berkeley, a coalition led by the local NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights group, is responding to Kayla Moore’s death and related issues by pressing city officials for around-the-clock mobile crisis teams, restricting police response to mental health calls to dangerous situations, increasing mental health services and hiring more Black and Latino clinicians.

“We have to make some sense out of Kayla’s death,” said Maria Moore. “We have to make some change from this.”

A top policewoman in southern Afghanistan has died after being shot by unknown attackers, months after her predecessor was also slain in similar circumstances.

Sub-Inspector Negara, who like many Afghans goes by one name, was buying grass for her lambs outside her home on Sunday 15 when two gunmen drove up on a motorbike and shot her in the neck, said Omar Zawak, a spokesman for the governor of Helmand province.

Doctors tried to save her, but police spokesman Fareed Ahmad Obaidi said she died at 1am on Monday 16. Zawak also confirmed her death.

Kandahar government spokesperson, Javid Faisal told Al Jazeera that Negara had believed what she was doing was important for all women in Helmand province.

“She was the top when it comes to the female police force in Helmand. She has also worked during Dr Najibullah regime in Afghanistan,” Faisal said.

“She was considered the most effective female police commander in the province and she believed her duty was the most crucial and most important for women in Helmand Province.

“She didn’t have any threats from her family, friends, relatives or siblings but insurgents and extremists are against the women rights and women’s independence in the country.”

Negara worked in Helmand province’s criminal investigation department in Lashkar Gah city.

She had taken over the duties of Islam Bibi, a well-known police officer who was shot dead in July by unknown gunmen.

Bibi had told reporters her own relatives had threatened her for holding the job.

Officials have given different ages for Negara, including 35 and 38, and varying accounts of her work history.

Her son-in-law, Faizullah Khan, said that she was 41 and had two children, a son and a daughter, and that she had worked for the police in the early 1990s before the Taliban took over the country and banned women from working.

“She was like a mother to me, and I learned so many things from her,” Khan said.

Women under attack

Negara’s family has had several police officers, including her son, a brother, and Khan himself, and her relatives had not objected to her work, the son-in-law said.

However, she had been getting phone threats from people claiming to be with the Taliban, who have been waging an insurgency since being topped by US-led forces in 2001.

The Taliban have not claimed responsibility for the attack on Negara, and a spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment, but they are believed to be behind many of the recent assaults on Afghan women.

Earlier this month, a female parliamentarian held captive for about four weeks was freed by the Taliban in exchange for several detained fighters.

The Taliban said the freed prisoners were “four innocent women and two children.”

In August, an armed group ambushed the convoy of a female Afghan senator, seriously wounding her in the attack and killing her eight-year-old daughter and a bodyguard.

Published under agreement with Al Jazeera.

Human rights defenders and members of the opposition in Honduras see a new elite military unit created to engage in policing as a drastic setback for the demilitarisation efforts that began two decades ago.

The Military Police of Public Order will be launched in October, initially with 900 officers, to be built up to 5,000 by early 2014.

It was created to carry out law enforcement duties in shantytowns and other poor neighbourhoods where the civil police force has pulled out, overwhelmed by the greater organisation and firepower of common criminals and organised crime.

It will also have powers to call up military reservists and engage in domestic intelligence activities.

The new unit’s intelligence efforts will be in addition to the work carried out by the National Intelligence Directorate, created six months ago, the Anti-Drug Trafficking Directorate and the anti-drug prosecution service.

Ramón Custodio, the national human rights commissioner or ombudsman, said he was staunchly opposed to the new body on the grounds that it violated the constitution and virtually ensured the demise of the national civilian police, re-established 15 years ago when the military began to yield power to civilians.

To use reservists, a special law would be needed declaring a state of emergency or of war, “but this is not included in the law approved Aug. 21,” Custodio told IPS, calling the decision “an enormous setback.”

In contrast, congressman Celin Discua of the governing right-wing National Party said the foundation of the elite corps was a historic event that restored to “the military the power that had been taken from them … Now we will be safer.”
Discua said the decision was justified by the crisis in the national civilian police, which has been undergoing a reform and purge for the last two years, since its connections with crime and corruption came to light.

Twenty people a day are murdered in this impoverished Central American nation of eight million, which is considered one of the most violent countries in the world.

According to experts, the police purge is moving forward too slowly, and only an estimated 30 percent of the police force’s 12,000 officers can be trusted, Discua said.

Congressman German Leitzelar, of the social democratic Innovation and Unity Party (PINU), claimed the law in question is “unconstitutional and confuses the spheres of defence and security, which are two different things that in the long run may clash and result in human rights violations.”

As part of a strategy for strengthening ties with the armed forces, the government of right-wing President Porfirio Lobo issued a decree on Aug. 13 granting the military the right to carry out commercial forestry projects on land under military control.

The income from timber sales will go towards the military pensions institute (IPM – Instituto de Previsión Militar), which was in charge of managing business enterprises for the armed forces until two decades ago.

The IPM sold off its businesses when Honduras embarked on a demilitarisation process that stopped it from competing with the private sector for state funds.

But now the process seems to have gone into reverse. “The military are allowed into nearly every area of the country’s development, and they are creating the future conditions to return to the business sphere. Civilians may not like it, but they will not be able to get them out,” sociologist Eugenio Sosa told IPS.

Soaring levels of violence and the spread of organised crime have created a climate that favours the growing involvement and presence of the armed forces, in the midst of the campaign for the November elections.

The National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) Observatory on Violence reported that the number of homicides rose from 7,104 in 2011 to 7,172 in 2012, equivalent to 85.5 per 100,000 population – one of the highest murder rates in the world.

Although most of the killings were the result of gunshot wounds, a bill to regulate firearms possession has languished in Congress for three years.

For the last nine years, the most dangerous areas of the country have been the central province of Francisco Morazán, which includes Tegucigalpa, and the northern provinces of Atlántida and Cortés, although more ecently, organised crime has spread along the entire Caribbean coast.

Among the high-profile murders blamed on the police are those of two university students in 2011, one of whom was the son of Julieta Castellanos, president of UNAH and an expert on security and governance issues, who fostered strong social pressure for the reform of state security.

A month ago four of the eight police officers implicated in the murders were convicted, but the masterminds have not been identified.

The case led to the final lifting of the veil hiding police corruption, which includes kidnapping, connections with drug trafficking mafias and other serious crimes.

Political analyst Miguel Cálix told IPS that legal reforms were necessary before powers were granted to the armed forces to carry out logging and sales of timber. He also said the revenue obtained from these activities should go into the state coffers, rather than directly to the military.

What is being given in return for all this? Cálix asked. In Honduran society, “a militaristic viewpoint prevails in spite of the 2009 crisis,” he said.

On Jun. 28, 2009, then-president Manuel Zelaya was taken from his home at gunpoint and put on a plane to Costa Rica, still in his pyjamas. The coup was backed by Congress, which appointed Roberto Micheletti as acting head of state. Lobo was elected in December 2009.

Nevertheless, according to opinion polls, out of Honduras’ fragile institutions, public confidence in the military still puts it in third place, after the churches and the media.

In the face of the insecurity, people have been in favour of the soldiers being put on the streets, originally alongside the civilian police, but now with autonomy enjoyed by their own special unit.

Abdulhakim Belhasi (r), the spokesperson for the Libyan special police unit set up in 2012 under the crime squad to fight drug and alcohol trafficking, with two men from the sqaud. Credit: Maryline Dumas/IPS

By Maryline Dumas
TRIPOLI, Apr 4 2013 (IPS)

In Libya, a dose of LSD or the painkiller tramadol costs 78 cents, and a joint of cannabis is 7.80 dollars. Here, drugs are affordable to the poor for a simple reason. “Slashing prices is a way to create demand and open up a market,” a Western diplomat tells IPS in Tripoli, the capital.

“Prices will go up when enough people are hooked,” the diplomat, who works on defence and security, adds.

There is currently no data on the number of addicts in Libya, but the drug trade is thriving. Dr. Abdullah Fannar, the deputy director at a psychiatric hospital in Gargaresh, a wealthy suburb in east Tripoli, has noticed a change in the number of drug addicts they see there.

“The number of people suffering from addiction to illegal substances has increased. We used to have a special department for drug addiction 10 years ago, and are thinking of reopening it.”

Fannar says he receives patients from prison referred by the police, or people referred by their families, when they are suffering from withdrawal.

According to Fannar, the drug epidemic has hit “the youth and rebel soldiers suffering from post traumatic stress disorder from the war.” Other vulnerable groups — those with little education and military veterans — are easily drawn to drugs and alcohol, both of which are illegal in Libya. In early March, several dozen people died as a result of poisoning from methanol contained in locally adulterated alcohol.

Drug and alcohol trafficking are not new to Libya. Under former President Muammar Gaddafi (1969-2011), a number of United Nations reports made reference to the illegal trade between Africa and Europe via Libya. But with limited border controls under the new Libyan government, the drug trade has grown.

“We know we have a problem of alcohol and drug smuggling, especially on our southern borders,” Colonel Adel Barasi, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence, admits to IPS. “We are working on a surveillance strategy, training and equipping the army. God willing, the Libyan army will be able to protect our borders.”

Céline Bardet, an expert on war crimes and transnational crime, tells IPS that drug routes are drawn up at a global level, targeting unstable countries where security is weak.

“This is how things stand in Libya. There is a great deal of trafficking, and it’s likely to get worse,” she says.

Bardet, a consultant with the European Commission, believes that drug processing laboratories may exist in Libya, even if none have been found yet. Still, she points out: “The police are starting to tackle the problem with the support of international aid.”

In an eastern district of Tripoli, a special police unit set up in 2012 under the crime squad is proud to demonstrate the results of its fight against drug and alcohol trafficking.

Abdulhakim Belhasi, the spokesperson for the unit, showed IPS the seizures – seven kilogrammes of heroin and cocaine, unknown amounts of cannabis, 1,400 tablets of tramadol, unknown quantities of whiskey and vodka, and 1,400 litres of adulterated alcohol. The seizures are stored in a hangar, to be destroyed.

In the last drug seizure, which was announced on Feb. 23 by the spokesperson of the Libyan Navy, Colonel Ayoub Gacem, 30 tonnes of drugs were seized and three people were detained on a boat intercepted by Libyan coast guards the day before. The type of drugs found was not specified.

“A war is being waged through the drug trade. They want to destroy the moral fabric of our youth. It can only be Gaddafists in neighbouring countries driving this trade. They are the only ones with this kind of money,” Belhasi tells IPS, appealing for international assistance.

A young drug user who wishes to remain anonymous laughs off this statement. “Having a drink and smoking a joint has never hurt anyone! The ‘beards’ (Islamists) are hounding us so that they can impose Sharia law.”

Khaled Kara, a member of an anti-drug organisation, and former mayor of Souq-al-Juma, a district in Tripoli, denies this. “I wear a beard, I look like an Islamist but I am a moderate,” he tells IPS.

Kara is worried. “The drug traffickers are very violent. They will do anything to protect their business. They are better armed than the special unit. They have rocket launchers, while the police only have handguns.”

The men of the special unit say they would like to be better armed, and add that they also face other kinds of pressures. “My 18-month-old son was kidnapped,” says an officer who goes by the single name of Kamal for security reasons. “He was only taken for a few hours, but when I found him, there was a message for me. ‘If you don’t resign, next time it will be your wife.’”

Asked by IPS if he is afraid, Kamal, who is admired by his comrades for his acts of bravery during the revolution, simply replies: “I am here, I am working.”

One of his colleagues adds: “We fought the revolution for our country, we are fighting the drug dealers for our country.”

But most members of the special unit go out in the field wearing balaclavas.

Grafitti in Cairo showing police brutality. Credit: Cam McGrath/IPS.

By Cam McGrath
CAIRO, Feb 6 2013 (IPS)

Graphic video footage of an Egyptian man being dragged naked across a street and beaten by riot police during a protest in Cairo has sparked outrage in Egypt and heightened calls for police reform, a key demand of the 2011 uprising that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak.

The video shows Hamada Saber, a 48-year-old painter, lying on the ground with his trousers around his ankles as police in riot gear strike him with batons and punch him in the face. After he stops moving, police officers drag him face down across the asphalt and attempt to bundle him into an armoured vehicle.

The incident has angered opposition and rights groups, which accuse President Mohamed Morsi of relying on the same brutal tactics as his predecessors to crush dissent.

“It’s shocking footage, but not surprising,” says activist Mohamed Fathy. “We have the same police force now as we did under Mubarak. There has been no serious effort to reform it.”

Saber was assaulted on Feb. 1 after clashes between police and anti-Morsi demonstrators near the presidential palace spilled over into the streets where he was shopping with his family. The violence followed a week of civil unrest across Egypt that left nearly 60 people dead and hundreds injured.

Many Egyptians accused the interior ministry of coercing Saber after he insisted in a televised interview from his bed in a police hospital that security forces had rescued him from protesters who had stripped and beaten him. His account contradicted the video evidence, as well as statements by eyewitnesses including members of his own family.

“That a citizen be dragged in a public space is a crime against humanity. That he be forced to amend his testimony before the Public Prosecution is tyranny,” rights lawyer Nasser Amin wrote on his Twitter account.

Saber later recanted his testimony, indicating that it was indeed the police who beat him. His son Ahmed told independent newspaper Al Shorouk that his father phoned him in tears and told him the police had “terrorised him” into giving a false account.

The public outcry over Saber’s ordeal was further heightened by news of the death of a 28-year old activist arrested by police on Jan. 27 during a protest in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Mohamed El-Guindy’s body showed marks of electrical shocks, strangulation, three broken ribs, a cracked skull and brain haemorrhage, according to a medical report.

Morsi’s government has promised to investigate reports of police torture and abuse. The president announced in a Facebook message that there will be “no return to rights abuses of citizens and their freedoms” of the Mubarak era.

But images of El-Guindy’s battered face and the video footage of police beating Saber have raised doubts, say rights groups.

“The Egyptian police continue to systematically deploy violence and torture, and at times even kill,” the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) said in a report published on the second anniversary of the uprising that toppled Mubarak.

“There has been no thorough change, or even cosmetic improvement, in the police apparatus, whether related to its administrative structure, decision-making, oversight of police work or the reform and removal of leaders and personnel responsible for torture and killing,” the report said.

EIPR has documented at least a dozen people killed by police and 11 tortured inside police stations in the seven months since Morsi assumed presidency. Security forces are rarely held accountable, the report said.

Only two police officers have been jailed for the deaths of more than 800 protesters killed during the 2011 revolution. Over a hundred officers have been acquitted.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group from which Morsi hails, has tried to distance the president from recent incidents of police abuse and torture. A group spokesman argued this week that Morsi needed more time to purge the police force of a culture that condoned the torture and humiliation of detainees, excessive use of force, and routine bribe-taking.

Yasser Hamza, a member of the Brotherhood’s legal committee, pointed the finger squarely at the interior minister. He said Egypt’s new constitution, hastily cobbled together and passed in a controversial referendum in December, absolves the president of accountability in cases of police abuse.

“Morsi bears no responsibility in cases of torture and killing of demonstrators according to the new constitution,” independent newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm quoted Hamza as saying.

He elaborated that the constitution stipulates that the cabinet is responsible for domestic matters, while the president only bears responsibility for foreign affairs.

Activists are not buying it. Some have accused Morsi of abandoning plans to reform the police because he needs a blunt instrument to secure his tenuous grip on power.

“The police are only good at one thing, beating and humiliating Egyptians,” says Mohamed Fathy, a member of the April 6 youth movement.

In a televised address last week, Morsi praised security forces for their crackdown on protests in the Suez Canal region that left dozens dead, including bystanders allegedly killed by police snipers. He described the protesters as thugs and Mubarak loyalists intent on toppling his democratically elected government.

He also announced a 30-day state of emergency in the Canal cities, granting security forces there arbitrary powers to detain or arrest civilians, in effect restoring the sweeping powers police enjoyed under Mubarak’s 29-year rule.

“Morsi gave the police a licence to use indiscriminate force against protesters,” says Fathy. “He shouldn’t be surprised that they did.” [END]

The doctrine of national security imposed by the United States on Latin America, which fostered the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, is making a comeback in Honduras where a new law is combining military defence of the country with police strategies for maintaining domestic order.

The law created the National Directorate of Investigation and Intelligence (DNII), a key agency in the security structure that does not appear to be accountable to any other body, and does not appear to be under democratic civilian control.

“This bill unites or fuses military defence and internal security, which is dangerous, because one of the aims after the Cold War was to separate these fields, due to the negative effects (their union had) on systematic violation of human rights” in the region, sociologist Mirna Flores, an expert on the issue, told IPS.

“We are back again with old national security concepts dating from the Cold War era in Central America, and the danger is that the former anti-communist rhetoric may be used against the ‘new threats’, such as allegedly criminal youth, dissidents against the regime, social protests or for the imposition of absolute powers,” she said.

The approval of the law on Jan. 14 took human rights organisations, civil society groups and academic bodies by surprise, because of the rushed nature of the legislation, the lack of consensus-building and the skipping of two of the three debates necessary for passing laws in parliament.

Sergio Castellanos, a legislator for the leftwing Democratic Unification Party, was the first to react when the bill was introduced. He asked for time for a fuller debate, but was overruled by the large rightwing majority comprising representatives of the governing National Party and one wing of the Liberal Party.

The law was passed amid a whirlwind of parliamentary activity, along with constitutional reforms and other laws that have engendered controversy in the country, such as mining regulations and suspension of all tax exemptions, pending review.

The Intelligence Law has some loopholes consisting of a lack of conceptual definitions, included in modern legislation in order not to allow room for discretionary interpretations or decisions.

Roberto Cajina, a civilian consultant on security, defence and democratic governance, told IPS that lack of definitions and limits in the text of the new law could give rise to “temptations” for abuse.

“It must be clearly understood what is meant by investigation, intelligence, strategic action, privacy protection, national security, special units, covert operations, special agents, special protection measures, secret funds and special risks, to cite just the most important definitions that are lacking in the law,” Cajina said.

Article 28 out of the 33 articles in the law says the DNII may recruit active members of the armed forces and the national police, Cajina said. This is “a very delicate matter and should be studied with care,” he said.

“As it stands, it is a dangerous precedent. One could warn of possible ‘piracy’ of the DNII toward the armed forces and police. What kinds of intelligence do each of them carry out?” he asked.

“If this is not clarified, problems and serious contradictions will arise, and the scenario will change radically. It is necessary to demarcate the boundaries of the fields of action of each of them,” Cajina emphasised.

Flores, the sociologist, and Cajina concur that another vacuum in the law is the lack of a chain of command subjecting the DNII to the control of any civilian institution or authority. It is not clear to what body it is affiliated.

The law compels private bodies to “cooperate by providing information required of them in order to support intelligence efforts”.

The experts said there should be a clearer description of the kind of information that private companies are required to give, because the current text leaves too much room for discretion. “The DNII director could, with very little justification, pick any organisation as a subject of interest which must provide the information (the DNII) demands,” they said.

“We are alarmed at this law that was tabled without ceremony, but also without debate, and furthermore, relying on old Cold War concepts,” activist Bertha Oliva, of the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH), told IPS.

Oliva said she was concerned by some aspects of the law, especially the power it gives the DNII to create “special investigation and intelligence units” and to cooperate with “other state intelligence bodies”.

“Does that mean there are more? Which ones? Why do we know nothing about them? I think there are many loopholes that could lead to abuses,” she said.

In the 1980s, members of the Honduran intelligence corps created the so-called Batallón de la Muerte (death squad), which was responsible for the forced disappearance of 187 people for political and ideological reasons, according to an official report.

This history raises fears that a similar body could be recreated, since the executive branch is giving the armed forces and police wide powers to run an intelligence corps which by law was supposed to come under the rule of the Commission on Public Security Reform, a civilian body working on structural reform of the police, prosecutors and the justice system.

But according to Matías Funes, chair of the Commission on Public Security Reform, its proposals do not have the ear of the legislative and executive branches. “It’s as if there were a parallel agenda,” and the institutional environment and democratisation of the country are not making progress, he said.

San Diego Veterans for Peace demonstrate weekly near General Atomics against domestic and military drones. Credit: Dave Patterson/IPS

By Judith Scherr
OAKLAND, California, Dec 7 2012 (IPS)

Better known as drones, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles piloted by military in the U.S. hunt and kill suspected enemy combatants abroad. Now the drones are coming home to beef up local law enforcement.

But people across the U.S. are pushing back, contending that domestic drones could invade personal privacy or chill free speech by monitoring political activities.

“They want to use it for intelligence gathering – that’s spying,” Linda Lye of the Northern California American Civil Liberties Union told media at a hastily called press conference Dec. 4 outside the Alameda County administration building in downtown Oakland.

That morning, the Alameda County sheriff’s request for the Alameda County Board of Supervisors’ acceptance of Homeland Security grant funds for a drone was almost buried in a 66-item meeting agenda.

But when the Northern California ACLU – a member of Alameda County Against Drones – learned of the sheriff’s request, they called the press conference to expose a process they said ignored the community. The sheriff subsequently removed his request from the agenda.

And so, rather than a cursory board review, the supervisors’ Public Protection Committee will hold a comprehensive discussion on the drone question in January.

“Public policy should not be made by stealth attack,” Lye said, calling for debate on “the important questions of whether a drone is even appropriate in our community and if so, what safeguards should be in place before we buy a drone.”

Speakers at the press conference pointed to special circumstances in Oakland that call for protection against law enforcement abuse.

“When we see in the (sheriff’s Jul. 20 application to Homeland Security) that the drones could be used for large crowd control, naturally everybody thinks of Occupy Oakland,” said Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, referring to alleged police abuse of Occupy activists.

The Alameda County Sheriff’s Department is just one of many law enforcement agencies across the country lining up for free money for drones from Homeland Security. They often point to popular uses for the technology, such as searching for missing children or escaped convicts.

But those concerned with privacy issues note that the technology allows drones to peer through walls and ceilings, monitor cell phone calls and texts, read license plates, recognise faces and record a person’s every move.

Some domestic drones, like the ShadowHawk acquired by Monterey, Texas, are able to carry “less lethal” weapons, such as tear gas and rubber bullets.

As the Afghanistan war winds down, the defence industry is intensifying its push for domestic drones, which Susan Aluise, writing in investorplace.com, calls the “next market opportunity”.

“Just when you think the (drone) market cannot go any higher, it does,” says Forecast International’s unmanned vehicles analyst Larry Dickerson, quoted on the Defense Professionals website. “No matter how many systems are built, operators want more.”

Dickerson estimates the industry’s value over the next decade at 70.9 billion dollars, with the civilian market worth 600 million to one billion dollars.

The industry is fueled by a 60-person congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus whose members have pocketed some eight million dollars in drone-related campaign contributions over the past four years, according to a Hearst Newspaper and Center for Responsive Politics investigation.

Citizens concerned with drone misuse are lobbying local officials. Buffalo, New York and Portland, Oregon activists want their city governments to ban drones entirely from airspace above the city.

Syracuse, New York petitioners are calling for an ordinance that “declares Syracuse and its airspace to be a SURVEILLANCE DRONE FREE ZONE wherein such drones are banned from airspace over the City of Syracuse until Federal legislation is adopted that adequately protects the population as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”

San Diego Veterans for Peace and their allies take their protest each Thursday to a busy corner near General Atomics, the manufacturer of Predator and Reaper drones.

“The technology’s not going to go away; we want oversight,” said VFP activist Dave Patterson, whose sign reads, “G.A. drones surveil America. Is that OK?”

Like Alameda County, Buffalo, Syracuse, Portland and San Diego don’t have drones.

Seattle does – but they’re not deployed, except for training missions. Like activists in Alameda County, Seattle residents were unaware when Seattle police initially pursued a Homeland Security grant for the drones.

They also were unaware of their delivery in 2010. The Seattle City Council and community learned of the drones in April of this year, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation uncovered the 82,500-dollar acquisition through a freedom of information request.

Police insist they did not keep the drones a secret, but concede they could have kept the public better informed.

Alerted to the acquisition, the ACLU of Washington sounded the alarm, saying in an April press release that, while drones could have valid domestic uses, they also “provide an unprecedented ability for the government to engage in surveillance of the activities of law-abiding people.”

Seattle Councilmember Bruce Harrell, chair of the Public Safety, Civil Rights and Technology Committee, said at a meeting in May that he was concerned that “the federal government is coming in making funds available through Homeland Security…and basically getting into the city’s business.”

In a recent phone interview with IPS, Seattle City Council President Sally Clark said if she had discretion over the grant funds, she’d opt to spend the money on city priorities, such as paying for an additional police officer.

Seattle’s Public Safety Committee will take up drone regulation in January. Harrell told IPS he’d like the law to restrict use of the drone to monitoring specific individuals named in a warrant, rather than allowing general surveillance. He said he’d like the law to require an officer with the rank of sergeant or above to authorise drone missions, and he wants public logs kept for each drone deployment.

He said the drones won’t fly until regulations are in place. Moreover, he said the council “put a requirement in our budget for next year, 2013, that there be no more purchases of drones.”

Farewell to soldiers killed in a Taliban attack. Such attacks have killed many policemen, and demoralised others. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Dec 7 2012 (IPS)

The Taliban’s ruthless campaign against security forces has demoralised the forces, who are unable to put up a strong resistance to Islamic militants.

“Taliban militants have established a world record of savagery. They have slaughtered soldiers and common people with knives and displayed their heads in public places to send a message across the forces that they must not chase them at the behest of government,” says a police inspector in Qissakhwani bazaar in the old city area of Peshawar in northern Pakistan.

Militants have carried out 1,962 acts of terrorism since 2008 in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province adjacent to the Afghan border. These have killed 6,200 persons and injured more than 9,000 others, according to a report by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government in the north of Pakistan.

These included 146 suicide attacks that have killed 826 policemen, 222 Frontier Constabulary personnel and 300 army soldiers, the local government said.

“The police are less equipped than militants, who have rocket launchers, bombs and hand-grenades,” police inspector Jawad Ali tells IPS. He says that the militants’ ferocity against security forces have demoralised the forces to the extent that most police stations and checkpoints are locked up during nights.

Some personnel seek medical leave to stay away from duty, prompting the government to issue a notification banning vacation except in unavoidable circumstances. “Genuinely ill personnel get required leave whereas those enjoying good health should stay alert to threats,” Jawad Ali says.

“We have received about 450 applications from policemen seeking leave on health grounds,” says Dr Wasan Khan at the Police Services Hospital. “Only 15 had illnesses for which they were advised rest. Others had arrived only to get a doctor’s prescription that they were ill and couldn’t perform duty.”

About 1,400 security men from the Frontier Constabulary (a 50,000 strong paramilitary force) were sacked two years ago when they refused to take part in an anti-Taliban operation on the outskirts of Peshawar, the capital city of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The government has launched a campaign to scale up morale among the security forces. “Dying while fighting the enemy is martyrdom and they shouldn’t surrender in any circumstances to the militants. They did in many instances,” police inspector Jawad Ali says. “This would only further embolden the attackers.”

He says 17 soldiers who were beheaded in Kunar province of Afghanistan in June this year after being kidnapped from checkpoints in Dir, one of the 25 districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, had first surrendered. After this they were blindfolded, had their hands tied behind their backs, and were taken away to Afghanistan’s Kunar province.

Militants had beheaded seven soldiers in the same area only a week earlier.

In other recent attacks, militants attacked the Mattani checkpost near Peshawar Oct. 12 and killed six policemen including superintendent of police Khursheed Khan. The militants slaughtered Khan and took his head away. The head was found hanging in a local market the next day.

On Nov. 12 seven policemen including superintendent of police Hilal Khan were killed in a suicide attack in Qissakhwani bazaar.

“All these attacks are meant to terrify the police and security forces so they stay away from defending the people. Beheading them is a strategy to spread fear in the forces,” police officer Abdullah Shah tells IPS.

Terrorists have also damaged or destroyed 300 Internet cafes and CD shops, 325 schools and 100 electricity grid stations.

The past five years have seen more than 600 attacks on police stations and police vans, according to the local government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The bomb disposal squad has defused 644 bombs and explosive devices in this period.

The government has allocated 23.35 billion rupees (240 million dollars) for the police in the total 300 billion rupee (3.1 billion dollars) Khyber Pakhtunkhwa budget to equip the police with new weapons and facilities.

“We have now 90,000 policemen in the province compared to only 35,000 when we took power in 2008,” Khyber Pakhtunkhwa information Mian Iftikhar Hussain says. “We are also giving plots of land and cash amount of five million rupees to the families of policemen who die at the hand of militants.”

The United States has provided vehicles, communications and other equipment worth 17 million dollars to help the police deal with the Taliban, Hussain says.

Police officers in Honduras are protesting regulatory measures and aptitude tests implemented as part of reforms aimed at purging the police force of corruption and growing links to organised crime.

The rebellious police officers say they do not oppose the clean-up of the force, and insist that they are loyal. But they are complaining about the four new exams: drug tests; lie detector tests; studies to verify their personal and family assets; and psychometric tests to determine their aptitude as police officers and their ability to control their emotions.

The protests broke out after a number of officers failed the tests, which began seven months ago. The authorities are considering dismissing them from the force.

Other officers are to be relieved of their posts because of seniority or other labour-related reasons.

The situation has led to a bitter dispute within the police force, especially against the new police chief, Juan Carlos “El Tigre” (The Tiger) Bonilla, whom many of the purged officers do not recognise as their superior because he is less senior than they are. They also accuse him of being linked with human rights abuses in the past.

Eduardo Villanueva, head of the office of investigation and evaluation of the police (DIECP), told IPS that the tests “are one of several instruments to purge the institution. At present we are investigating the family assets of 150 officers, and no doubt this is causing resentment,” he said.

By law, DIECP is responsible for enforcing controls and testing in the police force and taking action based on the results. It is an autonomous body that does not depend on the security ministry, and its work has drawn on Mexican, Colombian, Chilean and U.S. experts.

Villanueva said the agency he heads is “getting to the bottom of the barrel in the police force, and the reactions against the process merely indicate that we are on the right track.”

One of the leaders of the police rebellion is Aldo Oliva, former head of the National Penitentiary, who publicly challenged the authority of President Porfirio Lobo, calling on him to “be more careful” in reviewing the purging process.

In late October, Oliva and another 150 officers went to court to challenge the constitutionality of the tests, claiming they violated human rights.

When Lobo refused to meet with him, Oliva hinted that in the coming months there would be “a revelation of irregularities of such magnitude that he will have to listen.” But he did not provide details.

Lobo confirmed the tests would continue, as would the purge. “If (the police) feel hard done by, they can go to the courts, but the clean-up process we have started is irreversible,” he said.

Along with Oliva, two other former police chiefs, José Luis Muñoz who was suspended from his post in October 2011, and José Ramírez del Cid, suspended in May 2012, have also expressed discontent.

Muñoz and Ramírez del Cid have been identified as part of a group of officers who are trying to destabilise the administration of Bonilla, a hard-line police officer who enjoys the full confidence of the government of the right-wing Lobo, in spite of doubts expressed about him by human rights defenders and the families of victims of violence.

“At least Bonilla gets things done; he seems to be diligent and willing to clean up the police force, although we still give him a margin of doubt,” Julieta Castellanos, the president of the National Autonomous University of Honduras, whose son was murdered by police officers a year ago and who is now one of the leaders of the movement to reform the police force, told IPS.

“We are living in a time of a police counter-reform. This will not be an easy process, because organised crime mafias have been operating within the force, and they are feeling the effects,” political analyst Víctor Meza, coordinator of the Public Security Reform Commission (CRSP), which includes the attorney general’s office and the judicial branch, told IPS.

In late October Meza presented a package of six bills to the legislature, including a new comprehensive law on the police. All of this, analysts say, is causing jitters among corrupt police structures.

Edmundo Orellana, a former attorney-general, told IPS, “difficult times are coming; they are fighting among themselves, and seeking external allies to put the brakes on the reform.”

The Honduran police force has faced an unprecedented crisis in the past year, with revelations of its links to organised crime, extortion rackets, kidnapping and assault gangs compelling President Lobo to sack a number of police chiefs.

Most countries in the world have an emergency telephone number for the police. But in Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul, an emergency telephone line has been launched for victims of police violence.

The İmdat Polis (Help, Police!) initiative comes in response to a spate of highly publicised incidents of police violence in the city.

“We always knew about abuse in the prisons and police precincts, but now there is an increase of [police] attacks against people in the streets,” said criminal lawyer Taylan Tanay, one of the hotline’s creators.

The phone line, established by the Progressive Lawyers Association, which Tanay heads, is open 24 hours a day to anyone who has a complaint about his or her treatment by Istanbul police. In an emergency, a lawyer from a network of 150 legal volunteers is dispatched immediately to the scene.

The hotline was conceived as a response to a high-profile case of police violence in June, when police in the conservative neighbourhood of Fatih brutally beat a man with batons and belts over a traffic dispute. Using a cell-phone camera, a passerby recorded the beating. The images, accompanied by the screams of the victim’s wife, made headline news and prompted the creation of the emergency line.

Tanay is currently representing the victim, Ahmet Koca, in his case against the police for brutality. He is also helping to fight counter-claims from the police that Koca resisted arrest and used undue force. Such counter-charges nearly always follow a complaint of police brutality, he alleged, with the courts “nearly always” siding with the police.

But, with the hotline, victims can now fight back.

“With more and more people recording such violence with phone cameras and witnesses prepared to speak along with media reports, we can successfully bring cases (against the police),” Tanay asserted.

Observers attribute the perceived increase in police violence to everything from the government’s desire to court nationalist voters by allegedly giving the police a freer hand, to the declining impact of European criticism on halting rights abuses.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, however, has dismissed the claims of growing police violence as “black propaganda”.

His government points to EU-inspired reforms such as introducing cameras into police stations, having zero-tolerance for torture and prosecuting police who mistreat citizens.

Nonetheless, the perception of police impunity persists. Earlier this year, police officer Sedat Selim Ay was appointed deputy-chief of Istanbul’s anti-terrorism department despite a past conviction for torture (a verdict which he appealed) and involvement in two European Court of Human Rights rulings against Turkey for cases related to rape and torture. Yet while some government ministers deplored Ay’s appointment, he was not removed.

Tanay argues that such practices explain why many people in the past have preferred to keep quiet about police abuse.

Not anymore. In its first week of operation this August, the police-violence hotline received 80 calls for help, four of which were deemed emergencies.
Fifty-year-old taxi driver Serkis Yogurtcu was among the first assisted.

“The police were called to my house because of a domestic dispute with my wife. I was standing outside the house and the police immediately handcuffed me from behind and then beat me,” Yogurtcu alleged. “I was then taken to a side street near the police station where they again beat me, kicking, punching and using batons against me.”

Yogurtcu’s wife called the hotline. In response, a volunteer lawyer headed to the police station – a legal presence that, according to Tanay, “always” prompts police to be “polite and cooperative” and ensures that medical tests and forensic reports “are compiled correctly”.

Yogurtcu has now filed a case against the police, as well as fighting counter-charges against him. If he loses, he could face jail time.

But the hotline’s lawyers can easily fall victim to police violence as well. In August, hotline lawyer Sule Erdem was summoned to a textile-factory-worker protest and ended up with a broken arm and fingers from police batons.

“I arrived and identified myself to the police; many knew me already as I had met them in the police stations,” Erdem recounted. “But within minutes of arriving, they attacked the workers, using gas and batons. They beat me to the ground and kept hitting me, breaking my arm and two fingers.”

The experience has not deterred Erdem, who says he has since “opened several cases against the police” for unjustified use of force.

But not all calls are for help. Volunteers claim that 20 percent of the calls they received in the hotline’s first week were threatening calls from people claiming to be from the police.

Undeterred, the hotline is continuing its battle, making headlines earlier this month when it published a list of the top ten worst Istanbul police stations for violence. The number-one, Taksim, is in the heart of Istanbul, in a multi-ethnic district heavily frequented by tourists and known for its nightlife.

But, sometimes, it’s the police themselves who are calling for help. The hotline rings and a policeman asks a volunteer whether the lawyers can help in legal problems with their superiors. “Of course,” Tanay answered.

*Editor’s note: Dorian Jones is a freelance reporter based in Istanbul.

This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Panahi Gholamhousein (22), an Afghan refugee who spends his days in a room that is barely five square metres with his wife Zarmina (18) and their 19-month-old daughter Zahra, has hardly left his place in downtown Athens since he was beaten up and robbed nearly a month ago.

Extremist sympathisers in the Greek police force breed impunity. Credit: George Laoutaris/CC-BY-ND-2.0

The four attackers “unleashed their dogs on me”, he told IPS. The incident shook him badly, confining him to an apartment shared with many other irregular migrants living in squalid conditions.

The young family – who lost legal status some months ago after withdrawing their asylum application to Greek authorities in exchange for a return ticket to Afghanistan – embody the predicament faced by many migrants caught in a rising wave of xenophobia.

The last three years have seen racist attacks dominating the streets of Athens, spreading fast throughout the country.

Some experts blame the situation on the social stress caused by an extended period of economic austerity – unemployment rates are fast approaching 30 percent and approximately 25 percent of the Greek population now lives below the poverty line.

Last Saturday at 2 a.m. a group of three unidentified assailants used an incendiary explosive device in an attempt to burn Pakistani immigrants alive in their home while they slept.

Navit Navaz was awakened by an explosion from a flaming bottle of gasoline that landed on the edge of the bed. Navaz was subsequently brought to Thriasio Hospital and admitted to the intensive care unit with severe burns on his back and hands.

Two months ago Human Rights Watch released a report describing how gangs of Greeks carry out attacks against migrants with almost total impunity. Authorities are reportedly ignoring complaints, or discouraging victims from filing them at all.

On Jul. 23, the rape and attempted murder of a 15-year-old girl in the island of Paros by a Pakistani migrant worker, Ahmed Vakas, fueled a wave of attacks against foreigners during which Iraq Aladin, an Iraqi immigrant, was beaten and stabbed to death by five hooded youngsters on Aug. 12.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), along with 20 organisations that comprise the Racist Violence Recording Network, blamed the deterioration of social relations on the “the inability or reluctance of the law enforcement authorities to carry out arrests”.

Extremists on the rise

Many of the attacks are allegedly linked to the neo-fascist party Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) that entered parliament last June with 6.9 percent of the vote and is now climbing even higher in the polls.

So far the organisation has not accepted responsibility for instigating the attacks but continues to endorse racist initiatives. Thus far, only two violent attacks have been linked directly to the party, one against four fishermen at Perama and one in central Athens that involved a Golden Dawn candidate.

According to migrant communities more than 400 attacks took place last year alone, but very few people have been arrested and none of the perpetrators has faced justice.

Opposition MPs and activists claim that Golden Dawn supporters inside the security apparatus breed a culture of impunity.

The problematic relationship between the organisation and elements within the Greek police force provoked close attention two weeks ago when Golden Dawn supporters, along with two of the party’s official deputies, Giorgos Germenis and Panayiotis Iliopoulos, checked legal documents and attacked immigrants’ stalls at a church fair in Rafina, a small town northeast of Athens.

As legitimate members of parliament these deputies have immunity and cannot be arrested by the police.

Furthermore, the local police director failed to report the incident to her central command for two hours and claimed that the deployed forces were not “strong enough to intervene” despite her own description of the incident as verbal abuse.

Victims of the attack have denounced police for turning a blind eye to their vulnerability and the police director of Rafina has been suspended from service.

However, a pattern of impunity for such officials suggests that she might soon resume her post, with the possibility of a promotion.

Golden Dawn has promoted the events in a bid to present itself as a force that guarantees the interest and protection of Greek citizens.

Nikolaos Dendias, minister of public order and citizen protection and commander of all Greek security forces, has stripped Golden Dawn deputies of their police protection following these incidents and allegations.

In a symbolic move the organisation responded by suing the minister and since then it has continued to challenge of state authority – despite allegations from activists that members of the police force and extremists are working hand in glove.

Effective control over the security apparatus by the political leadership is an issue of acute concern according to Anastassia Tsoukala, a criminologist at Paris University XI and former advisor to the ex-minister of citizen protection.

In a recent article that appeared on the local ‘TVXS’ online news site, Tsoukala argued that there is ample proof of mutually beneficial relationships between low ranking policemen and extremists.

“According to information in our hands from the last national elections, a very big percentage of the police personnel share the same ideology as the perpetrators of racist attacks,” Tsoukala wrote.

The percentage of Golden Dawn voters that work for the security apparatus was estimated to be between 17.2 and 23.04 percent in 11 electoral sectors during both national elections last summer.

This relationship is a “danger to the pubic order” according to Tsoukala.

Antonis Liakopoulos, vice president of the Association of Attika Police Officers, responded to these challenges with the assertion that the abuse of authority is a common phenomenon among police forces around the world, “but one should not generalise over these cases”.

The real problem, according to Liakopoulos, is the large numbers of Greek officers who have suffered major wage cuts, and security structures that operate on budgets that are inadequate to support their basic needs.

“This is what makes the police ineffective and unable to offer safety,” he told IPS.

“In a society going through such an acute crisis, wherever police and state institutions fail to exercise effective control, other groups see an opportunity to promote their own agenda,” he added.

Still, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay, in a speech to the Geneva-based Human Rights Council last week, highlighted Greek police ineffectiveness in addressing and preventing “violent xenophobic attacks against migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in recent months”.

Dendias’ repeated promises to establish a special force to address racist violence are still pending. Prosecutor Ioannis Tentes has instructed police stations around the country to stop and, if necessary, apprehend members of the parliament if they become involved in unlawful actions.

(END)

More than 200 of Sudan’s journalists are now unemployed after the government forced the closure of a number of newspapers in the country amid increasing press censorship. Credit: Zeinab Mohammed Salih/IPS

By Zeinab Mohammed Salih
KHARTOUM, Sep 15 2012 (IPS)

In Sudan’s newspaper district in Khartoum East, dozens of people sit beneath the trees sipping tea or reading newspapers. Most are journalists who once worked for the 10 newspapers that were either forced closed by the country’s security services or because of economic constraints that resulted after the government raised printing taxes in an attempt to prevent the media from reporting on anti-government demonstrations. 

Mohamed Ahmed, a former journalist for the Ajrass Elhuriya newspaper, which was closed in July 2011, is one of them.

“I have been sitting under the trees for a year and a half because the government closed my newspaper and other newspapers, that consider me to be opposed to the government, are afraid to hire me.”

The Sudanese Network of Journalists, a union for reporters, estimates that about 200 journalists are currently unemployed by the closures, which, it says, is the highest unemployment rate the profession has seen. The crackdown against the press began more than a year ago, soon after Sudan and South Sudan separated in July 2011.

More than 10 journalists were reportedly arrested and tortured by the police before and during nationwide anti-government demonstrations in June after the implementation of a government austerity plan that scrapped fuel and commodity subsidies.

In addition, security services have been accused of preventing 15 reporters from publishing stories on the demonstrations.

On Sep. 9, the general court in Khartoum north upheld the closure of a local newspaper, the Rai Elshab, and fined it for breaching the “duties of the press” and for “starting sectarian strife” after it published a story about rebel forces fighting the government in the country’s volatile western region of Dafur.

The war between the rebel forces in Dafur and the Sudanese government has raged since 2003 when the Sudan Liberation Army and Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) began attacking government, accusing it of oppressing black Africans in favour of Arabs. Since 2010, the warring factions have been in peace talks. However, fighting has continued in the region, with the most recent incident occurring on Sep. 6, which resulted in the death of 10 government soldiers.

The country’s National Intelligence Security Services (NISS) had closed the Rai Elshab newspaper in January, and owners had gone to court in an attempt to have the publication reopened. However, the judge ruled that the paper would not be allowed to publish again without NISS approval.

Ashraf Abdul-Aziz, the head of the political department at Rai Elshab, told IPS: “The NISS complained against us in a court and closed our newspaper because we published a story about JEM, which has been fighting against the government in Darfur. That the NISS has the right to allow us to publish or not is a very strange situation.”

The Sudanese Network of Journalists told IPS that in the coming weeks the organisation would lay a complaint against the Sudanese government with the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. According to one of the organisation’s leaders, Khalid Ahmed, the complaint will be made once all national and regional mechanisms to put pressure on the government for a free and fair media had been completed.

In July reporters protested against the censorship at Sudan’s Human Rights Commission to no avail.

Khalid Ahmed said that the network’s last memorandum to the Human Rights Commission in Sudan had been submitted on Jul. 4 and called for the cessation of censorship and the release of journalists in police custody.

“They didn’t reply to our memorandum as we’d expected, but we will continue on our mission to complain to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva to set the media here free,” he said.

Faisal Mahmed Salih, the former chief editor of the now-closed Eladwaa newspaper, and the head of Teebba Press Center, told IPS that the censorship had negatively affected the media’s role in disseminating information.

“Due to censorship, readers don’t buy newspapers because all of them are the same. People only buy one newspaper or two now.”

Political analyst Hafiz Mohamed told IPS that the crackdown against the press would have a negative effect upon democracy and any possible political reform.

“Freedom of expression is a basic part of the democratic process, included with other freedoms such as freedom of assembly and association. If the government forbids journalists and the media from doing their jobs, there will be no democracy in Sudan,” he said.

He added that the government’s current censorship “shows that the government is afraid of the freedoms of the press.”

However, Rabei Abdallatee, consultant to the Information and Communication Minster, told IPS that censorship had been imposed on the media because there were “public and special circumstances in the country.”

He said that the censorship would only end if the circumstances changed. “Our country has special circumstances, because we are in a war with rebel groups and the media has to be careful,” Abdallatee said.

He said that the newspapers closed by the NISS, which are yet to be charged, “published negative articles, and threatened our national security” and were being investigated.

Osman Shinger, the chief editor of Eljareeda newspaper, told IPS that his publication had been to court 15 times during the last two months because of an arrest warrant against him. Shinger was charged after the publication of an opinion article criticising the governor of Sudan’s Al Jazirah state.

“I think that all the Sudanese problems are relevant to freedom of expression and access to information,” Shinger said.

“We tried to talk to the Centre of Media and Information, but it is seen as an NGO that favours the government. They didn’t reply to our phone calls and they didn’t allow to us to enter their building.”

Meanwhile, some journalists who were arrested and subsequently released now face ostracism from other publications practising self-censorship.

Mohamed Alasbst, the former managing editor of the Al-Ahram daily newspaper, spent two months in prison because he aided the now-deported Egyptian journalist, Shymaa Adil, who was covering Sudan’s nationwide protests for the Egyptian Elwatin newspaper. She spent two weeks in prison. He told IPS that because of his stint in prison, newspapers will not hire him for fear of being targeted by the government.

Alasbst added that his own newspaper fired him after he was released from prison.

“They expelled me from my job and the other newspapers also don’t want me to work with them, because I was in prison and they are afraid for the government. They fear if they hired someone like me who is considered to oppose the government, the government might fight them or close them down.”

The difficult situation has resulted in some choosing to quit the profession altogether.

Mohamed Ahmed told IPS that he has decided to leave Sudan to find work in one of the Gulf states.

“I was just a professional in my career and the government didn’t accept the professionalism, they want all the journalists to be in with the government or not to be journalists at all.”

Striking miners who were relased from police custody on Sep. 3 vowed to continue fighting for a minimum monthly wage of 1,495 dollars. Credit: Nat Nxumalo/IPS

By Siyabulela Debedu
JOHANNESBURG, Sep 7 2012 (IPS)

The South African Police Service members who were involved in a bloodbath with striking workers at the Marikana mine in North West Province could face murder charges, sources close to the investigation told IPS.

The possible charges follows the death of 34 mineworkers after police opened fire on them using automatic rifles and pistols on Aug. 16.

According to procedure, the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) was brought into investigate the police conduct. However, sources close to the investigation have revealed to IPS that because an autopsy report found that many of the victims were shot in the back while fleeing from the police, the police involved are expected to be charged with murder.

“We have gathered evidence showing that the miners were killed by police. We are going to complete the investigation and they will be charged,” the source told IPS.

“The report indicates that the majority of the miners were running away and they were shot at the back. At least two of the victims were shot and killed by one bullet. It was only a few, who had direct contact with the police, who have been shot from the front,” the source added.

About 3,000 miners, armed with pangas and spears, had been protesting and demanding a minimum wage of 1,495 dollars monthly outside the Lonmin-owned platinum mine when police attempted to break up the demonstration. The incident was the culmination of several days of violent strikes, which saw the death of 10 people, including two police officers.

It is unclear why the police fired, but police officials claimed that the strikers had rushed at them and they responded in self defense. It resulted in the country’s first ever massacre since the advent of democracy 18 years ago.

At the time, 270 mineworkers were arrested for public violence, illegal possession of dangerous weapons, illegal possession of firearms, murder and attempted murder.

But on Sep. 3 the state withdrew the charges against them and they will only appear in court in February 2013.

However, Shawn Hattingh, a researcher and education officer at the International Labour Research and Information Group, told IPS that even if the police are charged with murder, those in power who were responsible for giving the police permission to use live ammunition would most likely not be brought to justice.

“The whole thing was incredibly badly handled or incredibly ineffective, but I don’t think the state will answer for this. I don’t think there is an interest in the state to prosecute high up in the state. We’ve seen it before with politicians being charged and given light sentences or having had them dropped.”

He added that the priority in mining is to protect the mined resources from the mineworkers “and it was clear that violence would be used to protect it.”

“The police was there to protect the mine, our constitution is based on the protection of private property, so in general the state is going to react in the same way,” he said of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry set up by President Jacob Zuma to investigating the killings.

“There are people who aren’t going to answer for this. The Lonmin management won’t be charged with this. The guy who did the shooting will be charged, but he was following orders. There were orders to break the strike that day, the police commissioner made that clear,” Hattingh said.

He said what needed to be clarified was who gave the order to fire on the miners.

The Congress of South African Trade Unions’ spokesperson Patrick Craven told IPS that there were many unanswered questions that the Judicial Commission of Inquiry needed to address.

“Certainly the role of the police absolutely has to be central to this – we already know from the television footage that they played a role in this and this can’t be dodged. Again it seems from the coverage that these weren’t individual police officers loosing their heads and firing,” he said.

However, the IPID spokesman Moses Dlamini would not confirm the possible charges or the contents of the autopsy reports.

“Once the investigation is completed, the dockets will be forwarded to the Directorate of Public Prosecution (DPP) for a decision on whether anyone should be prosecuted or not.

“If the decision of the DPP is to prosecute, the suspects will then be charged and be put on trial. Our investigation has not been completed and we have not even discussed the case with the DPP,” Dlamini said.

Meanwhile, Hattingh said that the massacre at the mine had been inevitable as there was a history of violent conflict between miners and owners in South Africa.

“The scale (of violence) at Lonmin is vastly bigger that what has happened in the past, but it is not that first time that workers have been killed … The whole history of mining is confrontational and harsh,” he said.

“If you look at what the security on the mines is like, it’s very strict. Communities are kept off their own land with barbwire, workers every day have to go through though security check, there are armed guards all over. You are watched over a lot of the time – it is a militarised environment,” he said.

He said that in South Africa the system of capital accumulation had been about oppressing all workers, especially black workers, and nothing much had changed.

“The ruling classes have changed in the mining industry but the stuff on the ground hasn’t changed … the lowest paid workers – the rock drillers who earn R4,000 (482 dollars) and work deep underground in the most dangerous of jobs – are still black,” he said.

Meanwhile, the miners have vowed to continue to fight for a minimum wage of 1,495 dollars from Lonmin mine owners.

Lungisile Lutsheto was among the miners arrested. He told IPS of his alleged abuse by police while in custody.

“It was bad in the cells. The police special units came to our cells and started to assault us for no reason. Initially, they searched us saying they were looking for cellphones in our possession. When they could not find any, the beating continued repeatedly,” Lutsheto said.

Already 150 statements have been made and cases opened against the police by miners who claimed to have been assaulted while in custody.

*Additional reporting by Nalisha Adams

Mohamed Ceesay, a 20-year-old farmer from the Central River Region in the Gambia, is a high school dropout. But thanks to an initiative to discourage local youths from emigrating to Europe, he earns almost half the salary of a government minister from his rice harvest.

The Gambian government has provided farmers in 10 of the country’s most-vulnerable districts with inputs such as power tillers, tractors, rice threshers, seeders, sine hoes and bags of fertilisers. Credit: DW / Manuel Özcerkes/ CC by 2.0

“In July I harvested 20 hectares of rice fields on my own farm, and our association harvested 100 hectares across the Central River Region. We earn more than what our ministers are earning today,” he told IPS.

He earns 35,000 Gambian dalasi or 1,170 dollars every three months or so – half of what government ministers in this West African nation earn. Their monthly salaries are around 667 dollars, which amounts to almost 2,000 dollars over three months.

Ceesay is one of 50 young farmers from “Operation No Back Way to Europe”, an association founded in 2008 that aims to discourage youths from illegally emigrating.

Indeed, some of the young farmers in the organisation have attempted to enter Europe unlawfully, but they were deported back to the Gambia. Edrissa Sane, 23, is one of them.

“Before, I used to ask my family to help me go abroad in search of greener pastures. I have tried several times by voyaging by sea on a small boat to Spain. I did not succeed because we were arrested and deported back to the Gambia,” Sane said.

But since he joined “Operation No Back Way to Europe” he has no desire to make the dangerous and unlawful journey to Europe again.

“I earn more than 30,000 Gambia dalasi (about 1,000 dollars) in just a few months. That is enough for me, rather than voyaging across the sea to lose my life,” the rice farmer told IPS.

Edrissa said that he regretted not venturing into farming sooner as he now earned a good living.

The chairman of “Operation No Back Way to Europe”, Bubacarr Jabbi, told IPS that the association was working with the Immigration Department and the Gambia Police Force to reduce illegal emigration.

Over the years, more than 200 Gambian youths have died while crossing the seas to Europe. At one point, more than 600 youths a year were attempting to emigrate unlawfully. However, according to statistics from the Gambia Immigration Department, only 60 attempted the journey in 2010/2011.

“We believe in action and therefore urged other relevant stakeholders to come to the aid of the youth in order to inform them about the implications of illegal emigration,” Jabbi said.

One of their initiatives to keep young people in the Gambia has been youth farming. “Operation No Back Way to Europe” has young farmers across the country, in the Lower, Central and Upper River Regions.

On about 2,000 hectares of loaned government land, the 50 young farmers grow the New Rice for Africa (NERICA) variety known for its ability to grow in dry lands. An additional 1,000 hectares of government land has been loaned to other farmers across the country.

And as the 2012 harvest approaches this September, the organisation has promised that its farmers will have a bumper crop. It estimates that they will produce 4,500 tonnes of NERICA.

Currently, the country has only 100 registered rice farmers who produce between 10,000 and 15,000 tonnes of rice a year.

The Gambia, Africa’s smallest country in the Sahel zone, was in the midst of a food crisis last year when the government announced a national emergency in March after declaring the 2011 crop season a failure. At the time, about half the country’s 1.4 million people were affected by food insecurity.

According to a United Nations Development Programme report, the country experienced an almost 70 percent reduction in food production, with 19 of the country’s 39 rural districts being the most affected because of low rainfall. According to the report, rice production in the country fell by 74 percent.

The U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization office in Banjul said that vulnerability to food insecurity would continue to rise in the country, especially among farmers who faced an early and protracted lean season because of decreased income and household food stocks.

In addition, the prices of basic food commodities have skyrocketed over the last year. Many here cannot afford to buy a 50-kilogramme bag of rice that now costs almost 33 dollars when it previously cost 20.

About 70 percent of the population in the Gambia rely on farming for their livelihoods. Agriculture, however, only contributes 32 percent of GDP. Although almost half the country’s 10,000 square kilometres is arable, only about one-fifth of the land, some 2,000 square kilometres, has been cultivated.

However, the government says that agriculture remains the prime sector with which to reduce poverty, generate investment and improve food security. And this is the reason why it wishes to see further investment in the sector.

According to the agricultural director of Central River Region, Ousman Jammeh, the success of young farmers from “Operation No Back Way to Europe” is thanks to the support of the Gambia Emergency Agricultural Production Project or GEAPP.

The European Commission-funded project, run by the Gambian government, has provided farmers in 10 of the country’s most-vulnerable districts with inputs such as power tillers, tractors, rice threshers, seeders, sine hoes and bags of fertilisers – all for free.

Jammeh told IPS that since some farmers in the Gambia had been supplied with proper farming inputs, their production levels for the 2012 harvest should increase. The GEAPP distributed 3,000 tonnes of fertilisers to 600 villages, 300 power tillers, 367 seeders, 367 sine hoes and 367 threshing machines, and 525 tonnes of seed.

“GEAPP has the objective, due to soaring food prices, to enhance agricultural production in the country’s most vulnerable villages by providing access to inputs and machinery, and through the rehabilitation of 35 village seed stores and 23 seed multiplication centres,” he said.

Ceesay, who only started farming last year, is one of the farmers expecting an increase in his crop yield. He estimated that he would have more than 300 50-kilogramme bags of rice from his harvest. Last year he produced 200.

“This year, we had all the farming materials and inputs in place ahead of time and used them. (Not having inputs) was our major problem that contributed to our poor season last year,” Ceesay said.

Using grant funding from the Dept. of Homeland Security, UC Berkeley is preparing to buy an armoured vehicle, which it will share with the city. Credit: Gary Dorrington/IPS

By Judith Scherr
BERKELEY, California, Jun 22 2012 (IPS)

The city of Berkeley, California has long been regarded as a leader in the movements for peace, free speech and civil liberties. But this very city is now poised to follow the lead of hundreds of others around the United States where local police deploy armoured vehicles to fight crime and terrorism.

The University of California, Berkeley police department is using grant funds from the Department of Homeland Security to purchase a Lenco Ballistic Engineered Armoured Response Counter Attack Truck, better known as BearCat. The university will share the BearCat with police from Berkeley and the neighbouring city of Albany, where it will house the vehicle.

Purchasing the vehicle was raised at a Berkeley City Council meeting as part of a larger discussion on the city’s relationship to Homeland Security agencies that award grants and collect information on citizens.

Police Chief Michael Meehan defended the BearCat, telling the council he would have used it last year in a situation where a mentally ill man held off police officers with a gun for several hours. An armoured vehicle would have allowed negotiators to safely approach the suspect, Meehan said, although in this instance, police eventually took the man into custody without incident.

But Daniel Borgstrom, Occupy activist and former Marine, warned the council on Jun. 19 that the vehicle could be used to chill free speech.

“I’m asking, please stay out of this urban warfare stuff,” he said.

While Meehan called the armoured personnel carrier “a defensive resource” without weapons, Councilmember Max Anderson argued that the vehicle has gun ports and that weapons would be easy to supply.

“While we might count [the vehicle] as being protective of officers, they also carry an offensive component that could be misused under certain circumstances,” Anderson said.

No transparency

Citizens and councilmembers also criticised the secrecy with which the purchase was taking place.

Because the vehicle is being purchased by the university, and not a city governed by elected bodies, and because no matching funds were required – which the council would have had to approve – the Berkeley police department was not required to disclose the grant application.

Berkeley citizens found out about it only when the watchdog organisation, Berkeley Copwatch, discovered the project as a result of a Public Records Act request for general information on police equipment, according to Andrea Prichett of Copwatch.

The armoured vehicle has not been publicly discussed in Albany, and no such discussions are scheduled, according to Albany’s city clerk. Occupy Cal activists contacted for this story were unaware that the university was buying the armoured vehicle.

“I feel a certain level of – I have to use the word – betrayal,” attorney Sharon Adams told the council.

Adams works with a community coalition that has been meeting with police over concerns about local Homeland Security agencies, including the Urban Areas Security Initiative that is awarding the university about 200,000 dollars to purchase the BearCat.

“During all this time, police never told us they were going for this armoured tank,” she said.

Militarising cities – and police forces

Since 9/11 and with a surplus of combat equipment, armoured vehicles have become popular in larger higher-crime cities like Oakland, California, as well as tiny crime-free places like Keene, New Hampshire, where just two murders have been reported since 1999.

These armoured vehicles are part of “an alarming increase in militarisation” of the police, said Norm Stamper, former Seattle police chief and author of Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing.

Stamper explained in a phone interview that, in addition to 9/11, the war on drugs has fuelled the drive toward police militarisation, exacerbating conflict between those targeted – people of color, youth and the poor – and law enforcement.

Once targeted, these communities become the enemy. “We start adding the military nomenclature and the military equipment and military tactics and strategies, and we find SWAT units hitting the house of somebody suspected of having half a bag of marijuana,” he said.

Locally, police militarisation was evident at the Nov. 9, 2011 Occupy Cal demonstration at UC Berkeley, where combat-gear clad police injured peaceful protesters with baton strikes, and on Oct. 25, 2011 in Oakland, when similarly armed police nearly killed a young former Marine when they fired a tear-gas canister that hit him in the head.

“There’s this mistaken belief, that if we harden the image of the police officers, that will give the forces of law and order more legitimacy,” Stamper said. “What it does, I think, is precisely the opposite.”

When police carry weapons and use chemical agents on non-violent demonstrators, they “appear to be the repressive arm of an oppressive establishment”, Stamper explained. An armoured personnel carrier would serve to reinforce that impression.

A necessary piece of equipment?

However, Stamper allowed, an armoured vehicle can save lives, when used correctly. When Stamper was on the San Diego police force in the 1980s, a man shot and killed 21 people at a McDonald’s restaurant over the course of more than an hour. An armoured vehicle could have ended the event more quickly, he said.

“That was a situation that calls for exactly what I’ve been condemning in our approach to demonstrations,” he said. “You need police officers with ballistic gear, ballistic helmets…you need an armoured personnel carrier, in a situation like that. But you certainly don’t need it when people are peaceably assembling and expressing their first amendment rights.”

Police Chief Meehan acknowledged the growing militarisation of police, noting that in a highly armed society and country like the United States, which has 200 to 300 million gun,”there’s a limited way to protect our officers, especially when you’re talking about gunfire”.

“However much I would love to have something that doesn’t look military that still does the same job, it is what it is,” he argued. “The equipment that is available to us is what we avail ourselves of.”

The question of whether the armed vehicle is necessary remains: the last time Berkeley police officers were killed by gunfire was in the 1970s; no UC Berkeley or Albany officers have been killed by guns, according to the website Officer Down Memorial Page.

Councilmember Kriss Worthington placed the armoured vehicle on next week’s Berkeley council agenda for further discussion. “If this is a joint application that includes the city of Berkeley and the city of Albany, it seems to me that there should be a public vote of the Albany City Council and the Berkeley City Council,” he said.

“It seems to be against the spirit of Berkeley for us to be using it.”

A crowd of police at street demonstrations in Algiers on Feb. 19, 2011. Credit: Giuliana Sgrena/IPS

By Giuliana Sgrena
ALGIERS, Jun 20 2012 (IPS)

The on-going hunger strike of nine Algerian court clerks, coupled with the government’s indifference to their demands for an independent labour union, have stirred debate about Algeria’s role in the Arab Spring, which many see as an incomplete attempt to overturn a deeply flawed political and economic system.

Despite the fact that the health of the six women and three men, who have been fasting for over a month now, are deteriorating rapidly, neither the government nor the justice ministry has shown any indication that they will meet the workers’ demands.

“The health conditions are getting worse every day, three women are now in the Rouiba hospital; all of them have lost ten percent of their weight, and suffer from pain in their muscles and bones,” Nassira Ghozlane, chairwomen of the Autonomous National Trade Union of Public Administrations Workers (SNAPAP), told IPS.

“Also doctors are being pressured by authorities (the government) that want to minimise the impact of the hunger strike,” she added.

The justice workers started their protest last February, after the Minister of Justice failed to implement an agreement to improve working conditions. To make matters worse, the government still prevents workers from organising independent unions to advocate for their rights.

Nevertheless the clerks decided to create their own trade union affiliated to the independent SNAPAP.

These striking clerks are just one example of nation-wide discontent, that is daily manifest in strikes and protests around the country.

Thus many are curious as to why the wave of dissent, which began in earnest early last year, has failed to yield results in a country that offers fertile ground for resistance.

Following the now landmark act of self-immolation that sparked the Arab Spring in Tunisia, the practice spread through Algeria as well. Meanwhile opposition parties, unions, human rights organisations and bloggers united to form the National Coordination for Democracy and Change (NCDC) to organise rallies every Saturday.

“The slogan under which protesters rallied was ‘Systeme Dégage’ (System Go Away) not only ‘Bouteflika (referring to Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika) Dégage’, because people knew that even if the president were to leave, nothing will change as the whole system is corrupted,” Nadjet Rahmani, one of the protesters, told IPS.

But protesters suffered a brutal crackdown, with 30,000 policemen and riot police surrounding the location of a May 1 demonstration and arresting numerous people last year.

Though government repression was swift, some observers believe the failure of the Algerian Spring is due more to memories of terror that still haunt the masses.

“We already had our revolution back in 1988. Although it was called the ‘couscous revolt’ (in reference to critical food shortages at the time) it was also a revolution for social justice, against the one party system, for democracy,” Cherifa Kheddar, chairwoman of Djazairouna (Our Algeria), an association of families of terrorism victims, told IPS.

“It was organised by trade unionists and activists, who were all put in jail and tortured. So the streets were occupied by Islamists, as (was the case) with the Tunisian and Egyptian revolts,” she added.

Elections following the 1988 revolt resulted in the victory of the Islamic Salvation Front. The Algerian army, supported at the time by large swathes of the population including women’s groups who rightly feared the outcome of an Islamic party victory, interrupted the election and opened the floodgates to a period of bloodshed in the country that claimed 200,000 lives.

Both the army and the Armed Islamic Groups (GIA) were responsible for the massive human rights violations that marked this dark period of Algeria’s history, in which 40,000 people were disappeared.

The Islamists clung to power for a year but even after they were ousted in 1992 they continued to threaten and kill anyone considered to be a non-believer – soldiers, politicians, women, intellectuals, teachers, hairdressers.

The period of terror only ended when then-president Bouteflika declared a national reconciliation programme that failed to persecute human rights violators or bring perpetrators of grave crimes to justice.

Exhausted by the wave of bloodletting, a majority of Algerians supported the presidential proposal, which effectively destroyed any substantial opposition for years to come.

As a result, the same tensions that plagued the country a decade ago are still very much alive today, with Islamists and secular people living side by side in simmering hostility.

Added to these old wounds are the issues of corruption, low salaries, inadequate housing and unemployment, which is particularly high among the country’s youth.

“People are still afraid of what happened in the 90s and they do not want to risk going back to that period, so they do not want to go to the street to protest,” Karima Moali, a secondary school teacher, told IPS.

Meanwhile, the Algeria government is using covert methods of warding off dissent, particularly the kind aroused by economic dissatisfaction.

Consistently high oil revenues suggest that by the close 2012 the foreign revenues fund will amount to some 205.2 billion dollars.

Currently, Algeria is producing 1.2 million barrels of oil per day, but “our capacity is 1.4 million barrels, and (could) reach 1.5 million in a few months,” said Algerian Energy Minister, Youcef Yousfi, in a summit in Kuala Lumpur on Jun. 7.

Thus the government has been able to allocate enough money towards employment-generating schemes, better housing, and social services in an effort to ward off social unrest.

State-owned companies have created enough new opportunities to bring unemployment down to 9.8 percent from 11.3 percent in 2008, according to national statistics, though the youth unemployment rate stands stubbornly at 20 percent.

The government also allocated funds towards new public housing and increased state salaries across the board, just prior to the May 10 elections.

“Of course there is not a fair redistribution of the oil revenue, as we asked for in the demonstrations; rather, (national) wealth is being used to avoid a worse situation that could provoke a revolution or a revolt,” Djamal Hammoune, a human rights activist, told IPS.

(END)