Systematic crackdown on civilians!

2011-11-11T11:24:00.000-08:00

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Today there is one world wide headline and it is The Syrian Government's "systematic" crackdown on civilians amounts to crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said in a report issued Friday.

The systematic nature of abuses against civilians in Homs by Syrian government forces, including torture and unlawful killings, indicate that crimes against humanity have been committed

The watchdog group has already urged the Arab League to press President Bashar Al-Assad's government to allow human rights monitors into the country. Now, it is urging the Arab League, which has called an emergency meeting in Cairo on Saturday, to suspend Syria's membership and to ask the United Nations security Council to impose sanctions.

It also said Syria should be referred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. Human Rights Watch highlighted what it called "the systematic nature of abuses against civillians" by the Syrian regime, "including torture and unlawfully killings."

It based its 63-page report on more than 110 interviews with victims and witnesses from the besieged city and governorate of Homs, which has emerged as the center of the months-long uprising.

The death toll climbed again of Friday as the Local Coordinating Committee, a network of opposition groups, reported violent clashes across Syria. It said 13 people were killed, 10 in Homs. The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported 15 deaths, 10 in Homs.

The state-run SANA news agency said two members of the Syrian security forces were killed Friday in Homs. It blamed gunfire from "terrorist groups, as it has in the past.

Human Rights Watch said Syrian security forces have killed 104 people (not including Friday's deaths) in Homs since November 2, when Al-Assad agreed to abide by an Arab League proposal to halt all violence, release all detainees, withdraw all armed elements from populated detainees, withdraw all armed elements from populated areas and allow unfettered access to the nation by journalists and Arab League monitors.

But none of that has happened, according to the daily reports streaming out of Syria. CNN is unable to confirm the accounts, since the Syrian government hasn't limited access to the country by international reporters.

"Homs is a microcosm of the Syrian government's brutality." said Sarah Leah Whiston, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "The Arab League needs to tell President al-Assad that violating their agreement has consequences, and that it now supports Security Council action to end the carnage."

Human Rights Watch focused on security force violations from mid-April to the end of August 15 described to Human Rights Watch how civilians came under attack.

"We went out in a peaceful protest with the whole family about 10:30 or 11 p.m. It was calm, so everything seemed OK," she said.

"Then two cars showed up suddenly and opened fire, targeting people even as they were ducking and lying on the ground. They were white Kia Cerato cars with tinted windows, like those used by Air Force intelligence. The guns were machine guns. My husband leaned over our son to protect him, but the bullet entered our boy's stomach. The doctors were able to remove the bullet, but it left a lot of damage."

Human Rights Watch also spoke to 25 former detainees who said they had been tortured in custody. They described various methods, including heated metal rods, electric shocks and being forced into stress positions for hours or days at a time.

"They brought me into what felt like a big room with lots of people inside." said one detainee at a military intelligence base in Homs.

Slavery of women

2011-11-11T06:45:00.000-08:00

Life in slavery of Iraqi Women

Behind the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and her family lies a far larger story of what's happened to women in Iraq since they were 'liberated' by the Bush administration. - It is crazy that these women are sitting there on the floor of a prison cell with a goddamn man and gun standing over them. At the very maximum, these women may have somehow assisted their men to get these brutal soldiers, these beasts in human form, these rapists and sodomists, out of their blessed country. Is that a crime?? It is much more likely that these women on the floor have done nothing at all. They were picked up to be used by animals. - WPA

In the chaos of war and the confusion, lawlessness and poverty that followed, an untold number have become victims of sexual traffickers, some within Iraq and others sold over the borders.

But the problem of trafficking has gone almost unreported, kept in the shadows by a combination of corruption, religious and cultural taboo and lack of interest by the region's authorities in tackling it, researchers say.

A report released by the London-based non-governmental group Social Change for Education in the Middle East (SCEME) Wednesday hopes to change that.

Entitled Karamatuna, or Our Dignity, the study highlights the plight of girls as young as 10 or 12 who have been trafficked from post-war Iraq into countries including Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia for sexual exploitation.

Other victims trafficked within Iraq end up in nightclubs or brothels, often in Baghdad, the report says. Some of those brothels "have been established purely to meet the demand created by United States Service personnel," it adds.

Launching the report, Iman Abou-Atta, a clinical researcher who put her career on hold a year ago in order to produce the study, told a hearing at the House of Lords in London that she had felt compelled to investigate after realizing the extent of the silence around the issue.

"What I came across was closed doors, shame, the unwillingness of authorities of Syria and Jordan and the quietness of civil society on the issue," she writes in the foreword to the study.

Abou-Atta also encountered resistance when she raised the issue with the British and U.S. authorities whose forces' presence in Iraq has been a contributing factor to the problem, she says.

While sexual exploitation existed in Iraq, as anywhere, long before the war began in 2003, "the invasion and instability that followed led to an environment where young women and girls became much more vulnerable to trafficking," she told the hearing.

One Iraqi non-governmental organization, the Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq estimates that about 4,000 women one fifth of them aged under 18, disappeared in the first seven years after the war.

Although hard data is hard to come by, the group's research suggests many were trafficked by criminal gangs nationally or internationally, or sold into forced marriage by their own families.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were displaced or made refuges by the war. Prevented from working legally, some men have forced female relatives into prostitution to earn money for the family.

Others have taken advantage of other's hardship. One case cited by the study is that 17 year-old Amira, whose impoverished father accepted a man's offer to hire for $200 a month to care for this handicapped wife. As well as housework, she was forced have sex with the man's son and friends.

Professional trafficking gangs also target young women after they flee home to escape forced marriage, abuse or violence, the report says.

In a finding that may surprise some people, many of the traffickers within Iraq are women, the study says. While some of those have themselves been victims of sexual exploitation, Abou-Atta says, others are in it for the easy money.

Other traffickers are taxi drivers who lure girls with false offers of help and then take them to brothels, or young men recruited by gangs who trick vulnerable young girls into eloping and then sell them into sexual servitude.

Some young victims are tricked into thinking a marriage proposal is genuine, Abou-Atta said - and then after being sexually exploited are swiftly divorced and dumped in the streets, all honor gone in the eyes of conservative Arab society. They are then easy targets for further abuse.

Once in the hands of the traffickers, the victims face a grim future. One girl, identified as Shada, was left by her father at the Syrian border, the study says. She was trafficked to Damascus, where she was raped by five men and sold to a woman who forced her to work as prostitute in nightclubs.

Many women forced into the sex trade then feel trapped, unable to leave because of threats to their family and a lack of any future in a conservative, predominantly Muslim society that tends to see them as to blame for their "shame".

Abou-Atta, who spoke to some victims of sex trafficking in Lebanon, said women painted a dismal picture.

"In the beginning it's a nightmare" she said. "Then they realize there's no choice they cannot run away".

One woman recounted how when those who had trafficked her learned she planned to flee, they threatened to destroy the life of her daughter by making her shame public - so she opted to stay, Abou-Atta said.

Another cruel practice, particularly in Syria, is the "muta" marriage, in which a girl is married off for a price to a man on a Friday, only for him to divorce her on the Sunday.

"Research suggests that the rates at which these mut'a marriages are carried out intensifies in the summer when male tourists visit Syria from the Gulf, the study says.

"Although this particular kind of marriage is not explicitly called prostitution, it is in effect sexual exploitation, often forced, as a means of either securing livelihood, or generating profit."

In a move in the right direction, Syria strengthened its anti-trafficking laws last year, the study says, and toughened the penalties against men involved in trafficking. However, women who have been forced into prostitution continue to face sanctions too.

Houzan Mahmoud, of the Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq, which published its own report on prostitution in Iraq last year, told the hearing the Iraqi government had opposed her group's work and tried to block its access to the media.

She urged Western governments to do more to put pressure on their Arab counterparts to tackle sexual exploitation, and to ensure they do not send vulnerable asylam seekers back to a situation where they may be trafficked again.

Religious leaders should play a role by using their influence to change attitudes within society rather than demonizing women who are sexually exploited, she added.

Change won't be easy though. At the heart of the issue are the men who are happy to hand over money for sex- and the corrupt officials at borders and elsewhere who turn a blind eye to what's happening to vulnerable women.

"The problem is there's a demand for this, there's a market for this, "said Mahmoud. "This is about money-making and profits."

Crackdown against humanity?

Systematic crackdown on civilians!

Slavery of women