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Petition Condemning Violence
Against Women in the Gujarat Massacres in India
To: Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General and Mary Robinson, UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights
We, the
undersigned, hereby strongly condemn the systematic and brutal acts
of “ethnic cleansing” perpetrated by Hindu fundamentalist groups
and state functionaries on Muslim women and their families during
the recent communal riots in the Indian state of Gujarat, and demand
immediate justice and response. The pre-meditated violence, which
began in late February 2002, still continues. Approximately 2000
people, primarily Muslims, have been brutally murdered to date, and
a hundred thousand more have been beaten, burnt, skewered, maimed,
orphaned, looted, and rendered homeless. More than 2000 women
between the ages of 15 and 25 have been gang-raped—and this does
not include those who were killed after being raped. This violence
constitutes the grossest kind of violations of human rights and is a
crime against humanity. This is also a colossal failure of the
Indian state in its duty to protect its citizens and to protect the
idea of equality of all citizens.
Muslim women were particularly targeted in the cruelest ways
possible—stories about shooting women at point-blank range, rapes,
burning, beating, impaling, knifing pregnant women’s abdomens and
killing their fetuses abound. Are we listening yet? History has
repeated itself. The contemporary Indian state, quite like its
predecessors during Partition in 1947, during the anti-Sikh riots in
1984, and during the riots following the demolition of the Babri
Masjid in 1992, has yet again failed in its moral, ethical,
political and legal duties towards women and men belonging to
minority communities. Thousands of Muslim women continue to suffer
under appalling conditions in “relief” camps. They do not have
access to “safe” spaces that they can call “home.”
“Relief” is nowhere in sight. Many women’s husbands, fathers,
brothers and sons are either dead or missing or in custody or
hospitalized. Those in camps are suffering from emotional,
psychological and physical pain; the threat of disease and epidemics
looms large. These women’s rights have been violated in every
manner conceivable—as women, as members of a minority community,
as citizens, and as human beings. They demand immediate justice,
security, rehabilitation assistance, reparations and a decent life.
Are we listening yet?
We demand:
1. That the Indian government immediately provide overdue assistance
in relief camps, compensate the survivors of the massacres for the
loss of livelihood, life, and property, and rehabilitate those who
have become “refugees” in their own “homeland”; special
priority must be given to women whose male relatives were killed,
jailed or are missing; special attention must be paid to women’s
health, legal, and security needs in the camps.
2. That the Indian government take legislative and executive
measures to ensure the future safety of the Muslim community and
take immediate steps aimed at the re-enfranchisement of the Muslim
community; furthermore, the government must take proactive measures
to make all public spaces safe for Muslim women and free all Muslims
who have been jailed for no reason other than their religious
identity.
3. That immediate elections should not be held in the state of
Gujarat; holding elections at this extremely sensitive and fragile
time is bound to discourage the participation of the Muslim
community that has been violated, disenfranchised, and rendered
homeless.
4. That the Indian government commit to re-building impartial police
force and civil services, and conduct regular trainings on gender,
religious, and ethnic sensitivity for government officials at all
levels.
5. That special tribunals be set up (with representation from human
rights, and progressive feminist and grassroots groups) for holding
trials and adjudicating on violence against women.
6. That the state government in Gujarat be immediately dismissed and
the chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, under whose reign and
tutelage these massacres happened, be immediately tried as a
criminal for aiding and abetting this highly organized,
pre-meditated, pogrom against Muslim minorities and for human rights
abuses.
7. That all government functionaries who participated in the
massacres in any way—killed, aided, or ignored the killings of
innocent people—be brought to immediate justice.
8. That the government should facilitate, and not hinder, the work
of independent fact finding missions into these communal riots,
ensure that these findings are widely disseminated, and act on the
recommendations of these missions.
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/gujwomen/ to add your signature to the
actual petition.
Created by Progressive
South Asian Exchange Net and written by Anu
Sharma.
Appeal: Women in Palestine Under
Fire
SOS call ( Save our Souls )
The right to life of Palestinian women continues to
be threatened since the launch of the most recent brutal Israeli
invasion of the Palestinian Territories on Friday March 29, 2002.
The Israeli Military Occupation Forces have been physically
preventing pregnant women from reaching hospitals and clinics. Women
are dying at check points, new born babies are dying at check
points, and the unborn are dying in their mother’s wombs. Under
present conditions of occupation, siege and the horror of continuous
shelling and bombardment, women are forced to deliver at home
without medical support or specialist care.
The women of Palestine call upon the people of the world, in
particular the human and women’s rights organizations, to take
action against of this unchallenged attack against Palestinian women
and their babies.
HELP SAVE US AND OUR
BABIES
For Further information please contact Dr. Salwa
Najjab at Juzoor “ Foundation For Health and Social Development
Telephone ++ 970-2-2344677 – 2344678
Fax : ++970-2-2344676
Email: Juzoor@yahoo.com
- Juzoor “ Foundation for Social and Health
Development”
- Women Center for Legal Aid and Counseling
- Women Studies’ Center
- The Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of
Global Dialogue and Democracy
( Miftah)
-
Women’s Affairs Technical Committee
-
Birziet Women Society
Fact
Sheet
Since the beginning of the Intifada on the 29th
September 2000, Palestinian women, along with the whole Palestinian
population have been facing extensive and continuous violations of
basic rights. Prominent
but unrecognized among these rights are women health rights.
Women are at risk; their Reproductive Health Rights are violated subjecting them and their newborn infants to
morbidity and mortality
Since the beginning of the Intifada there has been
sporadic reports of violations of women’s reproductive rights such
as the case (Jihan Ism’il Al Qanan) a pregnant 25 year old woman
who was wounded by shrapnel during the shelling of khan Younis
refugee camp in February 2001.
She underwent surgery to save her life but her unborn baby
died.
In the most recent months, women’s reproductive
rights have been blatantly violated in front of the closed eyes of
the whole world. The
Israeli army is denying women safe passage to hospitals and health
centres, forbidding ambulances to transport them and shooting at
them if in desperation they use alternative routes and means to
reach health services.
Such are some of the cases reported in March 2002:
-
A 21-year-old pregnant woman and her unborn baby
died at an Israeli checkpoint near Qalqilia.
The Israeli army forbids the vehicle that was transporting
her to pass through to the nearby hospital.
-
A pregnant woman aborts her baby after being shot at
by the Israeli army.
-
A pregnant woman delivers a still born baby at an
Israeli army checkpoint
-
A pregnant woman is shot by Israeli army at a Nablus
checkpoint
-
A newborn baby, from Gaza, in need of an incubator
dies in an ambulance after the Israeli army delays his transport at
Nessarim settlement junction for almost an hour.
Palestinian women have been obliged to find any
human resource, which would be willing to deliver their babies even
outside appropriate settings. Some of the cases reported include the
following:
-
A pregnant woman, in her thirties, from Bethlehem
started to bleed. The ambulance was unable to reach her home under
the severe shelling. She collapsed twice at home until finally her
husband risked his life and hers by transporting her personally to
hospital at 6am in the morning.
She aborted her fetus and is now recovering.
-
A young woman from a village near Ramallah pregnant
with her first baby, reached to a nearby health clinic there were
signs of fetal distress. She
delivered a stillborn baby boy.
-
A young woman from another village near Ramallah was
suffering abdominal pains for two days by the time an ambulance
managed to reach her she arrived at the hospital in a state of shock
and underwent urgent surgery for a ruptured ectopic pregnancy.
Jordan
woman 'wins right to divorce'
May
13, 2002 BBC
A
Jordanian woman has reportedly won the right to divorce her husband,
in the first such court ruling under a new law. The unidentified
woman has been married for three years to a man she claims to
"hate", according to Jordanian newspaper Al-Arab Al-Yawm.
Like
most Islamic countries, Jordan's legal system only used to allow men
to file for divorce, but a new law which came into effect earlier
this year gave women the same right. The woman filed for divorce
shortly after the law was passed, according to the report. In line
with the new legislation, she first had to forfeit any right to
financial compensation. This included a dowry she had received from
her husband at the time of their marriage, the newspaper said.
Improving
women's status-
The
court tried to reconcile the couple but finally bowed to the woman's
request in line with the new legislation. The amended law states
that a judge can order a divorce if the woman says "she can no
longer live with her husband".
The
changes were based on a proposal by a royal human rights commission
set up in 2000. The commission was set up by King Abdullah, who
pledged to improve the status of Jordanian women when he came to
power in 1999.
Correspondents
say that since the new law came into force, at least 50 women have
filed for divorce.
[Also
listen to the BBC report by Magdi Abdelhadi, “Critics say many
women will not have the means to buy their freedom."]
An
Open Letter to the Editors of Ms. Magazine [segments]
April
20, 2002
The
feminist majority's self-serving appropriation of 11 pages of a
magazine they now own, in order to claim a foremost role in
"freeing" Afghan women (A Coalition of Hope, Spring 2002),
confirms fears that Ms. magazine is now the mere mouthpiece of
hegemonic, US-centric, ego driven, corporate feminism. One test of
the editorial freedom of Ms. is whether its owners will allow it to
spare the column inches for a letter that disagrees with their
owner's ego-centric and self-serving view of history.
While
the Feminist Majority does deserve credit for their early
recognition (relative to others in the US) of the dangers to Afghan
women under the Taliban and for their actions to educate US women
and to intervene in US politics and policy, this article would
suggest that they, other Western women, and a handful of expatriate
Afghan women have single-handedly freed the women of Afghanistan
from an oppression that started and ended with the Taliban.
What
is missing from this telling of the "Feminist Majority
Story" is any credit to the independent Afghan women who stayed
in Afghanistan and Pakistan throughout the 23 year (and counting)
crisis in Afghanistan and provided relief, education, resistance,
and hope to the women and men of their country. Among these are such
groups as HAWCA and RAWA, the latter of which is the only
independent, feminist, Afghan women's political and humanitarian
organization.
Over
the past 25 years of its existence, a longer history than the
Feminist Majority can claim, RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of
the Women of Afghanistan, has provided humanitarian assistance and
political consciousness to Afghan women and men and has been the
voice of the people, documenting abuses that would have gone
unreported and are the basis of much of the knowledge that Western
groups such as Feminist Majority have about the atrocities in
Afghanistan. While many in the US are now familiar with RAWA, it is
perplexing that the Feminist Majority should have somehow not
thought to include RAWA in their telling of history. It was the
Feminist Majority who first invited RAWA to the US in March 2000 for
the Feminist Expo, and Eleanor Smeal spoke at a RAWA protest rally
across from the White House in DC in April of the same year. There
are many other points at which their failure to name RAWA is
particularly striking, because RAWA was actively involved in many of
the important activities within Afghanistan and Pakistan and in the
international activities that the Feminist Majority chose to
highlight in their article.
There
are several hypothesis for the failure of the Feminist Majority to
even name their sister feminists RAWA as important in the struggle
for Afghan women's rights. Could it be that the Feminist Majority is
somehow unaware of the work that RAWA has done for 25 years? Could
they have forgotten RAWA's attendance at their own convention, or
their President's attendance at a RAWA rally? Did they somehow
overlooked the fact that RAWA was at the Brussels women's
conference, which Feminist Majority helped support? Did they fail to
notice that a RAWA member was one of the several women who toured
the US as a representative of the Brussels summit, an event lauded
in their article? Could they be somehow unimpressed with the
educational and humanitarian mission that an independent,
international, feminist organization has carried out under the most
oppressive and dangerous conditions? Or worse, can they not stand to
share the credit with this independent organization, which, while
appreciative of the support of their non-Afghan sisters (and their
Afghan and non-Afghan brothers), has never acted in the name of any
other organization nor allowed outsiders to steer their course?
The
other major omission from the Feminist Majority's version of history
is any discussion of the uncountable atrocities committed against
women from 1992-1996 under the rule of the same factions and
individuals who now make up the so called Northern Alliance. Many of
these atrocities were worse than those committed by the Taliban…
hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, and women and girls
were systematically targeted by forced marriages, abductions and
rapes, the threat and actuality of which realistically, if not
legislatively (as under the Taliban), removed women and girls from
schools and job and restricted them to their homes. Their crimes
against women and all of Afghan humanity are well documented by
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and RAWA, and are the
basis of demands by the Basque government, RAWA, Mary Robinson,
Amnesty International and others that rather than being supported,
armed, and returned to power by the US and our allies, these men
should be held criminally responsible for their human rights
violations in a court of law. The current escalations in
inter-factional fighting, lawlessness and regional, ethnic and
gender violence portends a resumption of the 1992-1996 period that
destroyed so many women's lives.
There
are an equal number of hypotheses for the Feminist Majority's
failure to mention the atrocities of the Northern Alliance. Could it
be they are ignorant of a time period before Afghan women were
somehow newsworthy? Are they unwilling to report on this period of
time in which they, like the rest of the world, were complicit in
ignoring the pleas of our Afghan sisters for aid? Are they merely
mirroring the US government and Western press, who find it easier to
present the Taliban as evil and the forces that the US supported
against them as good. Or have they joined with our government in the
concerted effort to ignore these crimes and once again forfeit the
lives and rights of women for our current national self-interest.
Perhaps the Feminist Majority, in their push for US political and
economic power, are being careful not to anger the political powers
in the US who still deny and make apologies for the human rights
abuses done… trained, armed and supported by the US during the
cold war years in Afghanistan…
While
it would appear that these two omissions, that of RAWA and that of
the darkest period in Afghan history are unrelated, one of the most
parsimonious explanations to both of these omission is that they are
connected. Throughout their involvement in Afghan issues, the
Feminist Majority has made alliances with women who have ties to the
Northern Alliance, ties that are an amazing compromise of value and
integrity that comes at the cost of countless Afghan women's
lives…
As
our own government is also filled with Northern Alliance apologists,
Feminist Majority has much to gain from aligning itself with those
who would sacrifice the lives of Afghan women for political
expediency. Within this equation of compromise, apology, and
politically expedient, hegemonic feminism, RAWA has no place…
…the
Feminist Majority is certainly welcome to their own US-centric
version of history and to disagree with RAWA, although the grounds
on which the Feminist Majority would base such objections is not
clear. But what is troubling is that in carving out their version of
reality they not only fail to give any credit to RAWA and others but
they also claim to represent some sort of feminist majority. Their
version of feminism, however, which blatantly ignores 25 years of
work by their RAWA sisters in Afghanistan and ignores atrocities
committed against women by groups the Feminist Majority has aligned
themselves with, seems a blow to feminism and a blow to the building
of a truly representative, principled, and effective feminist
majority…
For
the Feminist Majority to use the first issue of Ms. since its
purchase of the magazine as a vehicle to write this indigenous,
feminist group out of Afghan women's history is not so much a slap
in the face of RAWA as it is an indictment of the compromises and
convolutions the Feminist Majority seems willing to make for their
own self serving purposes. It is also a sorry indication of the
future of hegemonic feminism in the US, not to mention the future of
Ms. Magazine…
Elizabeth
Miller
Global
Women’s Rights Treaty Gets Second Wind [segments]
Peggy
Simpson
May
14, 2002
WASHINGTON
(WOMENSENEWS)--For the first time since 1994, the U.S. Senate plans
hearings on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women, the U.N. global women's treaty which
has been ratified by 168 countries since 1979.
The
U.S. hearing, set for May 15 before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, does not guarantee that the United States will finally
ratify the treaty, but it's a big step forward. The treaty has been
in force for decades without United States participation; if the
Congress ratifies the treaty, the United States will have a seat at
the table when global women's rights issues are debated in the U.N.
The
treaty spells out a framework for governments to use in combating
discrimination against women and in protecting women's human rights.
Although it contains no enforcement mechanisms, it sets out
goals--and provides examples of how they can be met--to end
inequities in women's legal status, education, work, health care,
marriage and family relations, finance and politics. Treaty
signatories must report annually to the United Nations on continuing
gender inequality in their countries, progress they make and their
governments' strategies for eliminating discrimination against
women.
North
Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms, who will retire this year,
blocked the treaty from being debated while he was committee chair
from 1995 until Democrats regained control of the Senate in 2001. In
2000, California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer and all the other
women members of the Senate except Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey
Hutchison moved to hold hearings on the treaty. But Helms rebuffed
them. "Dream on," Helms told the treaty advocates, saying
he would continue to block the measure, which he said had been
"negotiated by radical feminists with the intent of enshrining
their radical antifamily agenda into international law…I will have
no part of it…”
Helms'
support came from anti-feminist and religious groups that claimed
the treaty would interfere with "family values" and with
pro-life activists' attempts to curtail abortion rights.
Today,
the committee is chaired by Delaware Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden,
who supports the women's rights treaty. All committee Democrats
favor the treaty and at least several Republicans are probable
supporters--but Biden won't call for a vote unless he is assured of
at least 13 votes, says Leila Milani, the Senate liaison for a
coalition of women's groups seeking the treaty's ratification.
A
favorable committee vote would send the treaty to the Senate floor,
where 67 votes are required to ratify the treaty. That would be the
end of the process--no House action or White House signoff would be
required for U.S. ratification to take effect. But Milani says
supporters are well short of that 67 total--and other supporters say
this year's Senate committee hearing may be a warm-up for full
Senate action next year.
Treaty
supporters, however, are encouraged that President George W. Bush,
through the State Department, has in essence given it his support,
even if that support is lukewarm…
Helms
could still try to sabotage the hearings or put a hold on Senate
ratification of it as a last hurrah, but such a move would not be
welcomed by the many Republicans in tight election races this
fall…
Although
most women's rights advocates have supported the treaty since 1979,
few made it a priority, which permitted Helms and other
conservatives to effectively block a vote. Another problem that kept
the treaty stalled was that, until recently, few people in the
general public had even heard of it…
Why
the action now? It's an election year. The women's vote will be
pivotal in deciding which party controls the next Congress.
Democrats back the treaty and are pushing for action on it. Moderate
Republicans want to avoid giving the Democrats an opportunity to
characterize all of them as retrograde on women's issues.
Other
Conservatives See Treaty as Hazardous-
Although
Helms' imminent departure from Congress may move the treaty toward
passage, supporters also must address other concerns of opponents.
One criticism made by Helms and others was that the convention would
prompt an avalanche of frivolous lawsuits demanding changes in U.S.
laws or practices. Advocates say the treaty would not trigger any
lawsuit not already authorized under U.S. law…
Right
now, the United States cannot have a role in the global women's
rights committee sessions which are held three times a year, to
assess the global status of women…
Women's
rights advocates say that, despite conservative worries and
accusations, the women's treaty will not change U.S. abortion laws,
prohibit same-sex schools, or affect child-rearing laws in any
way…
Back
to top
[1]
HDIP from Al ayyam Newspaper report February 14th 2001
[2]
http://www.amanjordan.org/arabic_news/wmview.php?ArtID=122
[3]
Documented by Juzoor “Foundation for health and social
development”
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