Category: Violence
Here comes a documentary from 2008 focusing on gender based violence, taking conflicts happening in Africa as an example - not only against women, men are also victims.
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The situation in Syria is dire and saddening. From the outside there is not much insight into the situation itself still. And the insight we are getting is slowly turning into calls for war, either by spreading the horror stories from the killers themselves or by the Syrian National Council, who seems to be calling for armed resistance as well, which could only help multiply killers instead of stopping the murder.
Should that wish be fulfilled? Certainly not, past experience has shown that
a) the number of casualties will increase a lot when weapons are brought into the country and an open civil war is furthered.
Further b) the participation of civil society would diminuish and the success chance of the uprising, which is linked to the participation of the population would go down while at the same time offering the brutal Syrian government even more 'excuses' for military intervention against its own people.
Additionally c) it would strengthen Assad's narrative that the uprising is directed by foreign countries and therefore resistance would be a legitimate way of dealing with the 'terrorists'. View full article »
I wonder how come the world seem just to be watching what's going on in Syria, where there has been some say over 5,000 deaths?
I wanted to share this intersting article that made me think a lot... it's just the absence of OIL the difference with Lybia?
The Truth Behind the Coming "Regime Change" in Syria by Shamus Cooke
You can find the full article here:
www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28853
The war on terror since the tragic attack on civilians in the US ten years ago is far from finished, instead, it is reproducing itself. In the US, about 3000 people died in those attacks. In the following 'war on terror', the human rights were basically stripped to the bone, economies suffered (except for the military industrial complex) but most of all, civilians were killed. I will shortly give some indications for three countries, hit as so-called direct consequence of the US war on terror - though other countries used their own 'war on terror' to terrorize civilians in their countries.
However, here some rough informations about some of the civilian casualties of the war on terror:
Iraq
At least 355.000 (but more likely about 650.000) people were killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2006 according to the Lancet study http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casualties Other studies find between 60.000 and 1.000.000 casualties. View full article »
A very interesting short summary about the current situations of Palestine / Israel from the global avaaz-network - made as a call for supporting a petition to the UN security council for recognizing Palestine state:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/middle_east_peace_now/
Amnesty International published a report on the suffering of civil society in Northern Pakistan - being hit by Taleban, Pakistani army and deadly U.S. drone strikes - as Huffington Post describes it in this article.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism - an NPO founded 2010 to strengthen independent journalism - brought this topic up again by publishing its research on the number of casualties - which translates into human beings murdered by people ordering and operating the drone strikes.
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Amnesty International has published its new report on the human rights situation world-wide.
You can find an introduction here:
http://amnesty.org/en/annual-report/2011/introduction
The details about single countries can be accessed via the following link:
http://amnesty.org/en/annual-report/2011/country-data
More on the key issues of this year as Freedom of Expression, International Justice, Corporate Accountability and Middle East and North Africa can be found on this page
http://amnesty.org/en/annual-report/2011/key-issues
I also included the amnesty-international news on this page on the right side bar together with the headlines from democracy now. That way it is quite easy to stay up to date with news about human rights and political issues!
Vittorio Arrigoni has been found murdered today in Gaza. He had been kidnapped yesterday and his body was found this morning.
I will let Matteo from our No-more-war-team explain the significance of Vittorio:
He was a volounteer and althought he wrote articles from gaza and also a book RESTIAMO UMANI (we remain human) which collected all his articles written during the Israely attack on gaza of December 2009 and January 2009 he never made a cent off it. All the revenues went to the organizzation FREE GAZA... the laptop from which he wrote has a gift and he was many things but among all a FULL TIME VOLUNTEER OF ISM resisting the siege of Gaza. He lived in Gaza since 2008 and through his articles and blog we gathered information that was not avaible anywhere else. We will miss the man, but among all we will miss this voice of freedom that broke the wall of silence of the mass media. In that sense too he is unreplaceable. A journalist of a media or a main stream newspaper will be replaced by another collegue, but Vittorio was a unicum. He was there on his own. Somebody once told the story of UTOPIA. See the horizon (the skyline)... You take one step toward it, and it moves one step away, stays at the same distance... you take two step and it move two steps... and so on... it's unreachable...so what is the use of the horizon? someone may wonder? well it's there so we have a reason to keep walking... well utopia is like that... Today I would like to add that in the dark days when we have the temptation to fall to the easy hate of Others, we will have a memory to stay true to our creed WE REMAIN HUMANS! saluto di pace MatteoThere is a video recording of an interview with him from 2009: SCI Italy published the following statement the following (translated by Matteo):
FOR VICTORY, FOR THOSE WHO RESIST Vittorio Arrigoni was killed, a pacifist, a non-violent. He was killed by those who want to destroy the possibility of building a new world together. Vittorio in recent years had exceeded every wall, that of the misinformation, that of indifference, the wall of those who want to separate people by fomenting hatred and violence. Vittorio, as well as Juliano Meir Khamis killed just 10 days ago, believed that fighting for a just peace in places like Palestine, meant to tell, to do, but above all "be there". Who killed him want to destroy that hope. But no, we will continue to stand against war, violence, indifference, misinformation. We will continue to be there, in Palestine as anywhere in the world where there is injustice. We'll do it for Vittorio, who called himself "a citizen of Utopia". We remain humans SCI ITALYLuca Galassi from the peacereporters-webpage also wrote about him: http://en.peacereporter.net/articolo/28014/Vittorio%2C+the+good+hero
The Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a stunning animation of the worlds nuclear explosions beginning in 1945 till 1998 showing all the madness.
I found some pictures for you from one his exhibitions here.
View full article » 
Do no harm - that idea is broadly derived from medical contexts, where it first was phrased like this in the 16th century and was used to make medics aware of the possible dangers any treatment could contain and compare those dangers to the dangers and benefits of instead not intervening (A bit more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First,_do_no_harm).
For volunteers and professionals in any kind of helping situation, this was and still is a hard learned lesson.
Just 'helping' by giving food to starving people can create a backslash on local food economy and thus create future dependencies for foreign food supplies. It can also lead to people getting used to the taste of non-local food and changing their taste-preferences, again hurting local sustainable food economy.
For this very reason and to prevent problems like these, the European Commission created a Code of Conduct for food aid donors and organisations. View full article » 