Human Rights: July 2004 Archives

Report by the internationally respected Human Rights Watch

On the morning of February 27, 2002, the gruesome attack on the Sabarmati Express in Godhra, Gujarat, left fifty-eight dead. The train cars set alight were carrying Hindu kar sevaks (religious volunteers) returning from Ayodhya. By evening, retaliatory attacks against Muslims had begun, including in Rajkot, Vadodara, and Bharuch.50 That same day the Vishwa Hindu Parishad called for a statewide bandh (shut-down) for February 28, a call that according to press reports, its cadre interpreted as a call to action.51 The state's endorsement of the bandh, announced through a press note issued at 8 p.m. on February 27, was taken by the VHP/Bajrang Dal as an endorsement of its stand.52

State support of the bandh also sent a message to the police. A reporter for the Hindu observed that, "In such a situation, the police would always be hesitant to act lest it hurt the interests of the political bosses. And the saffronised police also found a common cause with the criminals to `punish' the minorities."53 The same reporter wrote that, "insiders in the Bharatiya Janata Party admit that the police were under instructions from the Narendra Modi administration not to act firmly."54

The "Good War" story of World War II is a Big Lie, used today by the likes of George W. Bush and John F. Kerry to create a mind set in which America's rulers are the good guys who, despite all of their faults and foibles, are saving the world from the really really bad guys.

FDR told Americans that the war was about fighting fascism and tyranny. But FDR lied about his real war objectives, just as Hitler lied to the Germans and Japanese militarists lied to the Japanese people to get them to fight the bloodiest war in history.

by Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar

Some people, ideas and events have created havoc in human society during the last two hundred years. This has led to suppression, repression and oppression in social life. Let us discuss some of the different psychic aspects of suppression, repression and oppression, the three psychic calamities that the human beings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have had to undergo.

From the blog Baghdad Burning - direct from Baghdad

posted by river @ 9:15 PM
Excuses, Excuses... I have had neither the time, nor the inclination, to blog lately. The weather is, quite literally, hellish. The heat begins very early in the morning with a blazing sun that seems unfairly close to our part of the earth. You'd think, after the sun has set, that the weather would be drastically cooler. This is not the case in Baghdad. After the sun has set, the hot sidewalks and streets emanate waves of heat for several hours, as if sighing in relief.

Famine images mean it's already too late for thousands in Sudan's Darfur region

By Tom Masland

How bad does a crisis have to get? Relief groups have tried for months to avert a disaster in the western Sudanese region of Darfur, but hardly anyone has listened. Most aid donors don't do much until they're shocked into it by graphic images of hollow-eyed infants—and by then, the victims whose pictures they're seeing may be permanently damaged, if not dead.

“Today's human rights violations are the causes of tomorrow's conflicts.”

Mary Robinson: United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (Retired)

London

The United States prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was an anomaly that must end, Prime Minister Tony Blair said yesterday.

Mr Blair said he had asked US President George Bush to free the remaining four Britons. But Washington insisted that the British Government must guarantee they would not pose an international threat.

"The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects
from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the
reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal
principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty,
and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and
assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote;
they depend on the outcome of no elections."

Justice Robert H. Jackson
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice

"We pledge to the Iraqi people and the world to continue resisting oppression and occupation to our last drop of blood.

"Resistance is a legitimate right and not a crime to be punished."

Moqtada Sadr