Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Slavery In Our Times

An actress learns human trafficking doesn't just happen over there.' 'Cries for Help: Actress Emma Thompson at an exhibit illustrating the experiences of women sold into sex slavery (Mario Romuli / UN.GIFT)

An intelligent girl with ambitions, Elena had been enticed to London from Moldova with a promise of a good job and a bright future. Once in the U.K., however, her passport was taken from her and she was kept in solitary confinement to break her will. She was warned that her family in Moldova would suffer harm unless she did what she was told. And then she was put to work as a sex slave, servicing a procession of men in the most appalling circumstances. What made her story so personal for me was where she'd been imprisoned: the same massage parlor I'd once treated as a joke. It underlined an awful truth: that human trafficking is not just a problem for other communities or other people. It exists on our own doorsteps, and our lack of action shames us all.

It's hard to put an accurate figure on the full scale of this misery. But the International Labor Organization estimates that there are at least 2.5 million forced laborers who are victims of human trafficking at any one time. Their plight can be seen as the hidden side of globalization: a sickening business worth more than $30 billion a year. It is a crime that scars every region and almost every country. Some 120 nations are routinely plundered by traffickers for their human raw materials, and more than 130 countries are known as destinations for their victims. Like Elena, these victims may end up in the sex trade. Many others find themselves condemned as slave laborers, forced to work in domestic service, in hazardous factories or at grim sites like the cocoa plantations of West Africa. Thousands more, many just children, become unwilling conscripts in bitter wars. Nearly all suffer physical or sexual abuse, creating mental and physical scars they carry for the rest of their lives.
By Emma Thompson
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Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Mozlink’ for any or all of the articles/images placed here. The placing of an article does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
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ZIMBABWE: Engulfed by Sewage

Raw sewage flows outside homes in Kuwadzana 3 township in Harare, Zimbabwe,November 2007. Residents say they now have to lock their children inside their houses to avoid them catching diseases.
BULAWAYO, 14 March 2008 (IRIN) - To get to Sinikiwe MaKhumalo's doorstep in Zimbabwe's second largest city, Bulawayo, visitors have to step on a thin plank perched precariously over a trench that prevents sewage from flowing into her house. The 57-year-old grandmother has endured this arrangement to access her home in the city's Old Magwegwe working class suburb for the past five months after a sewer burst close to her residence. Service delivery has collapsed in Bulawayo, after local authorities recently announced that the municipality was insolvent and unable to cater to the needs of its almost two million residents. "The disgusting odour is awful and becomes more unbearable by the day," she lamented over the city municipality's failure to repair burst sewers in her locality. "I just hope a new team that cares about residents' welfare will be elected to take over the running of the city at the end of the month".

Zimbabwe is scheduled to hold presidential, provincial and municipal polls on 29 March. MaKhumalo's neighbour, Ingrid Mayobodo, fearful that her two children would contract communicable water-borne diseases, sent them to live with her sister in another suburb. "I could not stand them playing 'hop-skip-and-jump' over pools of sewage effluent to get into the house from the street." She feared her children risked contracting diseases in such an unhealthy environment. "Mosquitoes are a menace at night. We keep doors and windows shut at all times, living like we are in prison to avoid mosquitoes getting indoors." Mayobodo suggested the council should at least spray the pools of sewage effluent with insecticide to control mosquito breeding or use disinfectants to suppress the nauseating stench. "We can no longer enjoy our meals in such conditions."

The city's unsanitary conditions has left residents fearful of a fresh outbreak of cholera. The last outbreak occurred at the height of a water crisis in 2007 when close to 300 people were hospitalised and 11 died as a result of drinking contaminated water. The region's consistently low rainfall in the last few years had led to dwindling water levels in the city's dams. Heavy seasonal rain in December 2007 and January 2008 has filled up most of the city's supply dams, allowing for water restrictions to be lifted and enabling residents to flush their toilets after use. However, the sewer pipes remain blocked, resulting in sewage overflowing into the streets from manholes: "Our major problem is a shortage of manpower to deal with more than 500 reported cases of sewer bursts," Phathisa Nyathi, the city municipality's spokesman, told IRIN.

Council workmen at work on a burst sewer in Old Magwegwe told IRIN that maintenance of the aging sewerage system was a daunting task, but it was aggravated by residents flushing down solid objects, causing sewer pipe blockages. "At times we retrieve stones, broken glass, spoons, rags or mops and other hard objects when clearing blockages in the system," council worker Jotham Ncube said. Ncube said most of the families could no longer afford standard toilet paper and have had to resort to newspapers or torn pieces of cardboard boxes for their ablutions. "It is no longer unusual to find entire sheets of a newspaper, used sanitary pads, children's shirts or shorts among items blocking the system", he said. Zimbabwe is grappling with a more than 100,000 percent annual inflation rate - the highest in the world - and unemployment levels of about 80 percent. Blockages were also occurring from the accumulation of sand in sewer pipes. "People use river sand to clean their soot-covered pots because they cook over wood fires when electricity is cut off during load shedding [a euphemism for electricity outages] instead of commercial scouring powders that are soluble," Ncube said. The dirty water was then flushed down the toilet.

Magwegwe Residents Association chairman Bazara Banyana rejected the argument that apportioned blame on residents and said people had always used the same methods of ablutions and cleaning of their utensils. He said residents cannot be expected to condone the absence of services when the residents pay rates and taxes to the council in the expectation of the provision of those services.

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No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Mozlink’ for any or all of the articles/images placed here. The placing of an article does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
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In Tibetan Areas, Parallel Worlds Now Collide

GABU VILLAGE, China: Mar. 20th. (NY Times) — For Caidan, a 40-year-old farmer whose life in this traditionally Tibetan area revolves around its Buddhist temple, the aluminum smelter that belches gray smoke in the distance is not a symbol of material progress, but rather a daily reminder of Chinese disregard. “Look at the walls of our temple, they have all gone grimy with the smoke that pollutes our air,” said Caidan, who, like many Tibetans, goes by a single name. Asked if Tibetans in this part of Qinghai Province in China’s rugged west had benefited from jobs at the factory, a man sitting nearby shook his head and launched into a litany about preferential treatment that he said was systematically given to members of the country’s Han Chinese majority. “Tibetans get the low-income and the hard-labor jobs, and although there are some Han who make the same as us, most of those who were brought in by the boss make twice as much money,” the man said. “They’re all paid as technicians, even though some of them really don’t know anything.” Caidan said there was only one solution to the problem: allowing the return from exile of Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. “We are unhappy that the state suppresses us, and as long as the Dalai isn’t allowed to return, we will remain unhappy,” he said. “Tibet is the Dalai’s home.”

After decades of heavily financed Chinese efforts to strengthen its control over Tibet and to tame the country’s far west through gigantic infrastructure projects and resettlement of Han Chinese from the east, the outbreak of protests and riots and a fierce crackdown by Chinese security forces in and around Tibet have laid bare a harsh reality of policy failure. In Tibet and in neighboring provinces, like Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan, where Tibetans and other ethnic minorities live in large numbers, Tibetans and Han live in closer proximity than ever before, but they occupy separate worlds. Relations between the two groups are typically marked by stark disdain or distrust, by stereotyping and prejudice and, among Tibetans, by deep feelings of subjugation, repression and fear. To be sure, there is no legalized ethnic discrimination, but privilege and power are overwhelmingly the preserve of the Han, while Tibetans live largely confined to segregated urban ghettos and poor villages in their own ancestral lands.

Chinese news programs on the events in Lhasa have reinforced an impression of separate universes that scarcely intersect — one Han and one Tibetan. The programs were clearly intended as propaganda to place the blame for riots on Tibetans and rally Han Chinese in support of a government-led suppression. Over and over, television broadcasts have repeated the same footage of rampaging Tibetans smashing shop windows and of injured, hospitalized Han, while making no mention of the widely reported deaths among Tibetans during the police crackdown that followed, nor of the underlying grievances that sparked them. Since the last widespread unrest in Tibet two decades ago, Beijing has sought to undermine separatists in what it calls the Tibetan Autonomous Region. It has invested billions of dollars, encouraged an influx of Han Chinese, and inserted itself deeply into the mechanics of Tibetan Buddhism to eliminate the influence of the Dalai Lama, who fled China for India in 1959 after a failed uprising. But real assimilation, if it were ever the goal, remains elusive. In the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, Han shopkeepers, hostel owners and others who are picking up the pieces of their lives after riots that destroyed many Chinese-owned business there spoke with scarcely concealed condescension, and often with outright hostility, of Tibetans whom they described as lazy and ungrateful for the economic development they have brought.

“Our government has wasted our money in helping those white-eyed wolves,” said Wang Zhongyong, a Han manager of handicraft shops, said in an interview in Lhasa. Mr. Wang’s shops sell Tibetan-themed trinkets to tourists, one of which was smashed and burned in the riots. “Just think of how much we’ve invested in relief funds for monks and for unemployed Tibetans,” he said. “Is this what we deserve?”. Among Han in Lhasa, comments like these stood out for their mildness. “The relationship between Han and Tibetan is irreconcilable,” said Yuan Qinghai, a Lhasa taxi driver, in an interview. “We don’t have a good impression of them, as they are lazy and they hate us, for, as they say, taking away what belongs to them. In their mind showering once or twice in their life is sacred, but to Han it is filthy and unacceptable. “We believe in working hard and making money to support one’s family, but they might think we’re greedy and have no faith.” Even among long-term residents in Lhasa, Han Chinese said they had no Tibetan friends and confessed that they tended to avoid interaction with Tibetans as much as possible. “There’s been this hatred for a long time,” said Tang Xuejun, a Han resident of Lhasa for the last 10 years. “Sometimes you would even wonder how we had avoided open confrontation for so many years. This is a hatred that cannot be solved by arresting a few people.” Tibetans, meanwhile, complain that they have been relegated to second-class citizenship, that their culture is being destroyed through forced assimilation, that their religious freedoms have been trampled upon.

A Tibetan university student in her early 20s who declined to give her name explained relations this way. “I really don’t want to talk about politics, saying whether or not Tibet is part of China. The reality is that we are controlled by Chinese, by the Han people. We don’t have any say, so in my family we don’t even talk about it.” Although the young woman said that her family was relatively well off and that she was receiving a good education, the future was bleak here even for someone like her because the system favors the Han. “I’m not even sure I can get a job after graduation,” she said. “For rich Tibetans and for officials, they send their children out to Chengdu or Beijing.” A sense of the fear many Tibetans live with could be heard in the comments of a religious leader in Aba Prefecture in Sichuan Province, the site of a protest by monks and others earlier this week in sympathy with the Lhasa demonstrations, and the scene of a subsequent fierce crackdown. “I only know that the Communist Party is good, that they are good to us,” said the religious leader, Ewangdanzhen, when asked about official explanations that have blamed the Dalai Lama for the protests. “I only believe in the Communist Party. Splitting is bad. We want unity and harmony. We don’t have any contacts with him and we don’t need to contact him.”

Far from giving up on their way of life, though, or renouncing their attachment to the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader the Chinese government has long vilified as a separatist, or “splittist,” most Tibetans interviewed while dodging heavy police checks during a 450-mile road trip through Tibetan areas in Gansu and Qinghai provinces professed near-universal devotion to the Dalai Lama, and vowed to continue resisting government attempts to control their faith. “All Tibetans are the same: 100 percent of us adore the Dalai Lama,” said Suonanrenqing, a 40-year-old resident of a Tibetan village in Jianzha County in Qinghai Province. Asked about China’s decision to commandeer an ancient Tibetan religious rite and select the Panchen Lama, the second-highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, in 1995, and the implications for how Beijing would manage things after the Dalai Lama, who is 72, dies, Suonanrenqing’s response suggested indefinite tensions between Chinese and Tibetans. “We’re not sure if it’s true that the Panchen was appointed by the government, but if it is true, we cannot support him,” he said. “We wouldn’t support a Dalai Lama appointed by the government either. These people should be chosen by monasteries.”

Although Suonanrenqing spoke candidly, worrying only at the end of a lengthy conversation if his comments could bring him trouble, many conversations with Tibetans began with nervous denials that they knew anything at all of the events of Lhasa. Their wariness was warranted by a severe security crackdown in clear evidence wherever Tibetans live in large numbers. After dodging one police roadblock, a reporter making his way late at night toward a town in Gansu Province where Tibetans had protested in sympathy with the Lhasa demonstrators the day before was set upon by plainclothes police officers at a highway tollbooth and forced into a nearby building for questioning before being turned away. The following day, when visiting Taersi, an important Tibetan monastery in Qinghai Province, the reporter was closely tailed by plainclothes police officers who were seen videotaping his conversations with local monks. “I have no idea what’s happening in Lhasa,” said one 32-year-old monk, who agreed to sit and chat in a small restaurant with a foreign visitor but apparently felt the topic was too dangerous to touch upon. “We don’t have anything to do with that.”

Despite the vigilant police, the nearby Lijiaxia Valley, a starkly beautiful area dominated by the Yellow River with craggy, desiccated mountains and windswept farmland, Tibetan villages were easy to spot by the colorful prayer flags that flew from roofs and hilltops. Here, many initially claimed to know nothing of the events in Lhasa. But some quickly dropped this cautious pose. One poor villager, who rolled homemade cigarettes using old newspaper, was aware that Chinese news broadcasts were showing footage of Tibetans rioting in Lhasa. “Have there been any pictures of Tibetans getting killed?” he asked. When told no, he nodded his head and said, “Of course not.”
By Howard W. Lynch
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Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Mozlink’ for any or all of the articles/images placed here. The placing of an article does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
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Sunday, March 16, 2008

China seals off TibetanCapital

Chinese authorities have sealed Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, cutting off the city from visitors with a large military and armed police presence ahead of a “surrender deadline” of Monday at midnight.
China: March 16th. (Financial Times) -
The government has also tightened control over information coming out of the Himalayan region, blocking many Internet sites, including Youtube, which could be used to upload video content of the protests over the last week. The protests began on March 10, when Buddhist monks staged protests against Chinese rule over Tibet, which China administers as a “special autonomous region”. Last week marked the 49th anniversary of the flight by the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, to exile in Dharamsala, India. Chinese media have reported 10 “innocent civilian” deaths and injuries among police and troops sent in to restore order. Exiled Tibetan officials in Dharamsala have said that at least 80 people were killed, according to Reuters.

Beijing faces difficult decisions in coming days over the level of violence it authorises to suppress demonstrations and regain control of Lhasa, and some monasteries elsewhere in Tibet and China where there is unrest. The resolution of the issue is taking place against the backdrop of the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics, and the huge international attention that event is generating. Wen Jiabao, China’s Premier, will hold his annual press conference on Tuesday, at the close of the National People’s Congress, which is telecast live. Residents of Lhasa contacted on Sunday said sporadic gunshots could be heard through the day as Chinese police attempted to keep people off streets and rooftops. The spectre of inter-ethnic violence also loomed, after Hui Muslim Chinese reportedly attacked Tibetan homes to avenge pro-independence protests that escalated on Friday, when demonstrators ransacked businesses owned by Han Chinese, China’s dominant ethnic group, Huis and other settlers.

Chinese state media dropped a country-wide reporting ban on the unrest at the weekend, as it became untenable after widespread leaks of eyewitness accounts, pictures and video footage of the growing violence in Lhasa. Official media footage showed Tibetans overturning police cars, looting businesses and assaulting ethnic Chinese on the streets of the regional capital. However, state media showed no images of the suppression of the protests, and stuck to the official line that the unrest had been orchestrated by a “separatist Dalai Lama clique”. Even more ominously for Beijing, protests have flared further afield in cities in neighbouring Qinghai and Sichuan provinces, where there are large monasteries and sizeable Tibetan populations. Reuters reported that a police station in Aba county, Sichuan, was burned down, quoting a police officer at the scene. This year’s violence in Tibet marks the most serious clashes since the late eighties, when independence protests were forcibly quelled. China’s current president, Hu Jintao, was then party secretary of the country’s most restive region.
By Richard McGregor and Jamil Anderlini in Beijing, and Tom Mitchell in Hong Kong
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Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Mozlink’ for any or all of the articles/images placed here. The placing of an article does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
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