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Written by Jelena
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Monday, 14 December 2009 14:14 |
A Western Sahara activist on hunger strike in Spain's Canary Islands has been told to appear in court on public order charges, her supporters say. Aminatou Haidar has been refusing food at Lanzarote's airport since Sunday after being expelled by Morocco from the disputed territory. She is protesting at Spain's refusal to let her return to Western Sahara. Morocco controls most of the Western Sahara but Algerian-based separatists want a vote on independence. Ms Haidar was held by Moroccan authorities on Friday when she arrived in Western Sahara's main city, Laayoune - where she lives - on a flight from the Canary Islands. She was then sent back to the islands without her Moroccan passport.
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Written by Jelena
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Monday, 14 December 2009 14:07 |
Palestinians have marked Nov. 15 as their Independence Day since 1988, when the Palestine National Council unilaterally declared statehood in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. (AP Photo/Nasser Ishtayeh) "We have reached a decision ... to go to the UN Security Council to ask for recognition of an independent Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital and with June 1967 borders," chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat told AFP. He was referring to the West Bank, Gaza Strip and mostly Arab east Jerusalem that Israel captured during the 1967 Six-Day War. "We're going to seek support from EU countries and Russia and other countries" for the measure, he said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned the move could lead to unilateral action from the Jewish state. Israel warns Palestinians over seeking recognition.
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Written by Jelena
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Monday, 14 December 2009 13:56 |
TEHRAN, Iran — Iran's embattled opposition leaders accused the government of becoming more brutal than the shah's regime in Web statements Saturday, and authorities announced a new Internet crackdown aimed at choking off the reform movement's last real means of keeping its campaign alive. Two of Iran's top pro-reform figures said police used excessive force against anti-government protesters who took to the streets last week on the sidelines of state-sanctioned rallies to mark the 30th anniversary of the U.S. Embassy takeover. Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi, who lead the protest movement rejecting the legitimacy of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's June re-election, said authorities wielding batons even struck women on their heads. They called such treatment an ugly act that was not even seen during Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's response to the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled him.
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Written by Jelena
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Monday, 14 December 2009 13:20 |
TEHRAN -- Five months after a disputed presidential election spawned the largest anti-government demonstrations here in three decades, Iran's opposition movement appears rudderless and divided, with protesters increasingly at odds with their leaders' insistence on preserving the country's system of religious government. Many Tehran residents who oppose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are taking a harder line against Iran's leaders and want to remove them from power, several protesters said. Others in the opposition movement favor gradual change and caution against pressing extreme demands. Although there is no way to measure how widespread the sentiments on both sides are, Iranians involved in the movement say growing numbers of protesters are refusing to compromise with the ruling hierarchy, a system of Shiite religious and political rule ushered in by Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, which ended a 2,500-year-old monarchy.
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Written by Jelena
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Monday, 14 December 2009 12:56 |
A doctor who examined prisoners killed and injured during Iran's post-election violence has died in mysterious circumstances, prompting speculation that he may have been murdered to prevent him speaking out. After initial reports that Ramin Pourandarjani had killed himself, the Iranian authorities announced that the 26-year-old had died of a heart attack during his sleep at a health centre in Tehran's police headquarters where he was based while on military service. Pourandarjani was facing a possible five-year jail sentence and having his medical licence revoked after being blamed for failing to properly treat inmates at the notorious Kahrizak detention centre, which was closed amid allegations of abuse after the deaths of several prisoners.
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Written by Jelena
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Monday, 14 December 2009 12:30 |
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The U.S. State Department has told Cuba it deplores last week's ``assault'' on blogger Yoani Sánchez, one of the toughest of several expressions of support for the Havana writer.
Sánchez and fellow blogger Orlando Luis Pardo said they were beaten Friday by presumed state security agents to keep them away from a ``march against violence.'' Blogger Claudia Cadelo and another woman were detained in the incident, but without violence.
``The U.S. government strongly deplores the assault,'' said a State Department statement issued late Monday. ``We have expressed to the Cuban government our deep concern . . . and we are following up with inquiries to [the three bloggers] . . . regarding their personal well-being and access to medical care.''
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Written by Jelena
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Friday, 11 December 2009 12:49 |
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The history of Bertha Oliva de Nativi is the history of Honduras. If the storyline of the past one hundred years of this continent has been ‘so few with so much, and so many with so little’, then Bertha has been the fearless protagonist racing to rewrite the chapters that will hence come. In 1982 Berta’s husband, Professor Tomas Nativi disappeared. One of hundreds of Hondurans and tens of thousands of Central Americans to lose their lives to state sanctioned violence, Tomas and all of those who have disappeared remain the most terrifying and silencing bootprint of the military regimes of the 1980’s. The stories are all too common: "they came to our door in the middle of the night" or "he just never came home ever again." Their families must find ways to grieve, to cope, and to say goodbye to their loved ones without the benefit of closure or resolution. Some, however, began to demand answers.
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Written by Jelena
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Friday, 11 December 2009 11:50 |
Of the many lessons to be learned from the Honduran political crisis, perhaps the most important one for would-be deal brokers is that if you get involved, prepare to stay involved. The Organisation of American States, Costa Rican, Brazilian, Chilean and, most recently, US negotiators at even the highest levels have thrown up their hands in dismay at the intransigence on display. The agreement at the end of last month, which was praised by the Obama administration as a landmark in inter-American diplomacy, is now yet another in a line of broken ones. If the US wants its stamp on this quagmire to be any different from those of the other scorned negotiators, it will send its team back down to Honduras and do all it can to get the broken deal back on track.
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Written by Jelena
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Thursday, 10 December 2009 14:50 |
Not so long ago I was at a supper party about which I can give no other details than that the Cuban Ambassador and a well-known political industrialist were present. At some late, lubricated point between cheese and liqueurs, the captain of industry commended the man from Havana for his country’s imperviousness to such destabilising currents as democracy and individualism. Better stability, said the peer, winking, than chaos! I have heard the same thing, from similar sources, about China. It never, it seems to me, stops being said about the Middle East and Africa.
Should we, then, this week be celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall at all? When people under 35, who can barely imagine the Iron Curtain and the days when the Polish plumber was a defector, not an economic migrant, ask why 1989 was so good, do we actually have an answer?
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Written by Jelena
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Thursday, 10 December 2009 14:44 |
The international headlines all read something to this effect, "In Uruguay: Ex-Guerrilla Fighter Headed for Runoff Vote in November." Attention-grabbing as it is, that headline doesn't do justice to the complex story behind this ex-guerrilla fighter being on the verge of becoming Uruguay's next president. This story intertwines plot lines of economic hardship's goad towards anger, social inequity's call to action, violence's inevitable escalation, democracy's slide into dictatorship, impunity's lingerings and a society's tremendous capacity to persevere through it all, heal itself and ultimately advance. This story offers several timely lessons that the world could benefit from learning, as the present economic situation requires an understanding of the links between economic justice, the use of violence and the upholding of, as well as the straying away from, democratic principles.
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