Blog of Parag

Know your WTO

Take the following quiz at BBC to find out how much do you really know about World Trade and WTO. My score was pathetic, not that I claim to know a lot about WTO, but, many answers surprised me totally.

BBC NEWS | Business | Quiz: What's the deal with trade?

Hudood law

This must be one of the supreme instruments for oppressing women.

Under Pakistan's hudood laws, thousands of women who report rapes are imprisoned and punished for reporting rape.

If rape victims cannot provide four male witnesses to the crime, they risk being whipped for adultery, since they acknowledge illicit sex and cannot prove rape.

A woman witness is not acceptable (it has to be FOUR male witnesses) because women are not really humans in the islamic world.

What? come again...

India announces Rs 650 mln aid for Palestinians

Such foolish waste of money...

Indian government should think about balancing the budget or maybe use this money to improve the electricity shortage situation, instead.

Koran desecration hoopla

White House bashes Newsweek report on Koran - Yahoo! News

Wonder why all the photos accompanying this story are from a demonstration in Mumbai. I read that demonstrations in Pakistan and Afghanistan were much bigger and turned into riots and dead people. Is it because it was just easy to take those photos in Mumbai rather than Karachi or Kabul?

Before believing this report about desecration and making all this fuss, did anyone stop to think if it was possible to flush such a big fat book down the toilet?

Wolfie to lead World Bank

A New Boss for the Bank (washingtonpost.com)

Paul Wolfowitz is nominated by President Bush to lead the World Bank. Last major economic prediction made by Mr. Wolfowitz: "Iraq reconstruction will be paid by Iraqi oil revenues." Yeah, right and pigs do really fly.

Big crash...

What if part of New York broke off and slammed into New Jersey? Something similar happened in Antartica over the last couple of months.

Check out the following link for details.
APOD: 2005 February 23 - Voyage of an Antarctic Iceberg

Help the Tsunami victims

Easiest way to make a donation to help the Tsunami victims. Go to the this link and please donate generously. There are millions who really need all the help they can get. Considering all the money eaten by the corrupt government middlemen, we really need to donate a lot to help the victims.

why???

Yahoo! News - Four Palestinians Killed in Violence After Arafat Dies

OK. So, finally, they figured out that Arafat is dead. That news brought on more violence. I don't understand why...

Three Palestinians were killed, at least two of them gunmen, in fighting that erupted when militants from an armed group in Arafat's Fatah (news - web sites) faction attacked a Jewish settlement in central Gaza after learning of the Palestinian leader's death.

Another Palestinian was killed in stonethrowing clashes in the West Bank, Palestinian medics said.

The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades said the attack against the heavily fortified Netzarim settlement signaled a new round of clashes against Israel to avenge the death of the 75-year-old Palestinian leader who came to symbolize his people's cause.

Dead or alive?

Palestinian Sources Say Arafat Dead, Others Deny

What the hell... Is it so hard to figure out if a person is dead or alive?

Darfur violence continues

Yahoo! News - New Violence Deepens Darfur Crisis

US, UN and rest of the International community just sit and watch continued violence in Sudan. In spite of a US-drafted UN security council that gives Sudanese government 30 days to disarm the 'Janjaweed' militia, attacks on Black Sudanese continue. Fresh violence on Tuesday included militia raids on the refugee camps as well as helicopter bombings by the government on Darfurians returning to their homes from refugee camps.

"In many rural areas and small towns in Darfur, government forces and the Janjaweed militias continue to routinely rape and assault women and girls when they leave the periphery of the camps and towns," the New York-based group (Human Rights Watch) said in a report.
...
Sudanese State Minister of Foreign Affairs Najeeb al-Kheir Abdel Wahab said the U.N. report of helicopter attacks was untrue, baseless and unsourced.
...
Despite recent pledges to cooperate to end the humanitarian crisis the U.N. has called the worst in the world, the U.N. said the Sudanese government had hampered access to hungry Darfuris by restricting relief flights and aid workers' movements.

Sudan has said international pressure over Darfur aims to undermine the country's Islamist government

No ticket scalping at Athens Olympics

According to several reports, more than half of
Olympics tickets are still unsold. Wonder why? Is it so hard to find 5.4 million people from the whole world wanting to watch olympics. Are people really worried about terrorist attacks? Or are they just not interested? Given all the security arrangements, Olympics venue is probably one of the safest places on Earth to be.

I am going to search for an alternate to NBC coverage to watch Olympics. During the Sydney games, they made it so dramatic and soppy with all those stupid human interest stories taking up more time than the actual sporting events. I had heard the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) had better coverage. Thankfully, this time I am in an area where I can get CBC. Hope they really provide better coverage.

Blame it on women...

Vatican Says Modern Feminism Dangerous for Family

This is the oldest trick in the book. Rather than accepting the much needed change in the social structure, the men-dominated Catholic church is back to blaming those dirty, weak, wretched women for the ills of the society. It started with the 'Original sin' and is still going on. They are getting blamed for gay marriages. Isn't it surprising as in at least half of the gay marriages, women are not involved at all.

The pope makes an absurd argument that equality of a man and a woman in marriage weakens it, devalues it and then makes the society accept gay marriages. The bottomline to men is keep your woman supressed under your thumb as a slave; treat her as your property. If you start giving her lattitude, it will destroy our society.

What a disgusting message...

Prisons and religion

Another nugget of information from Time:

Percentage of France's population that is Muslim: 6%
Percentage of France's prison population that is Muslim: 50%

I think the last is true in US from my very limited knowledge about prisons gained by watching HBO's 'OZ'. Also, didn't Mike Tyson come out of prison as a muslim?

Update: Crisis in Sudan

The neglect of the world community continues. The UN is trying to decide if the situation in Sudan is a genocide or ethnic cleansing before deciding on a plan to send help. The US senate wasted 3 days discussing a constitutional amendment to ban Gay marriage, but nobody did anything to move the government machinery to help the Sudanese.

There is one organisation, "Doctors without borders", among many others that has setup medical and food help in Sudan since late last year. This group has a well known track reocrd of providing help in areas affected with war, famine and other disasters. They received the Nobel prize for peace a few years ago. If anyone wants to help the Sudanese, I'd suggest to make a donation to this group. Your donation will be used wisely and make an impact where it is really needed.

Darfur Genocide

News has been slowly trickling in over the last month or so about the horrendous ongoing genocide in Sudan. The UN, US and rest of the world has been busy fighting the unneccesary war in Iraq or fighting over the war in Iraq. They have completely ignored the situation in Sudan which will claim more than 300,000 lives this year even by the most conservative estimates.

Arab-dominated government backed group called 'Janjaweed' has been going on killing, raping, looting rampages for months now, through the towns where members of the Zaghawa, Masalit and Fur tribes live. Their aim is to drive out these African tribes and capture more land for Arabs. Interestingly, both parties in this conflict are muslims. So much for the religion of peace that doesn't discriminate among its believers.

After a visit by Colin Powell and Kofi Annan in recent weeks, more attention is being focused on getting a multinational peacekeeping force to provide protection and humanitarian help to the African tribes. These plans are still on paper. Hopefully, they will turn into reality soon.

Click on the link below to read two articles that appeared in New York Times and Washington Post describing the plight of West Sudanese.

Thanks for the links, Mayuresh.

Sudan's Ravines of Death

July 15, 2004
By JOHN PRENDERGAST

IN NORTHERN DARFUR, Sudan

While Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary General
Kofi Annan of the United Nations, and several members of
Congress were in government-controlled areas of Darfur a
few weeks ago, I crossed into Darfur's rebel-held
territory. This is the part of Sudan that the regime
doesn't want anyone to see, for good reason.

I expected to see a depopulated wasteland rife with
deteriorating evidence of the ethnic cleansing campaign
pursued by the government of Sudan. The regime, in response
to a rebellion begun by primarily non-Arab groups in early
2003, armed the Janjaweed militia, giving them impunity to
attack.

I did indeed see numbing evidence of such a campaign in
this Muslim region of Sudan, which is populated by Arabs
and non-Arabs. Burned villages confirmed harrowing stories
we had heard from Darfurians who were lucky enough to make
it to refugee camps in Chad. About 1.5 million people have
been left homeless, and as many as 300,000 may be dead by
year's end. In village after village that I visited, the
painstakingly accumulated wealth of the non-Arab population
of Darfur - their livestock, their homes, their grainstocks
- had been destroyed in a matter of minutes.

I was not prepared for the far more sinister scene I
encountered in a ravine deep in the Darfur desert. Bodies
of young men were lined up in ditches, eerily preserved by
the 130-degree desert heat. The story the rebels told us
seemed plausible: the dead were civilians who had been
marched up a hill and executed by the Arab-led government
before its troops abandoned the area the previous month.
The rebels assert that there were many other such scenes.

The government's deadly portfolio in Darfur already
includes the wanton burning and bombing of villages, the
raping of women and girls, and the denial of humanitarian
aid, all of which have so far claimed tens of thousands of
lives. But judging from the scene in the ravine, executions
may also be part of the assault.

My colleague Samantha Power, the author of "A Problem from
Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," and I traveled
together through the refugee camps and the rebel-held
villages. Refugees in Chad claimed their loved ones had
been stuffed into wells by the Janjaweed to poison the
water supply. We went looking for these wells and found
them covered in sand, in what might be construed as an
effort by the Sudanese regime to cover its tracks.

While Western dignitaries visited the camps teeming with
refugees from Darfur and elsewhere, I encountered large
numbers of displaced civilians inside the rebel-held areas
of Darfur, where no camps exist and not a drop of
international assistance has been delivered. There are
potentially hundreds of thousands of survivors who have
fallen through the cracks. Some of them say they are afraid
to travel to government-controlled camps and unable to make
it to the border. They are running out of food.

It is urgent that the United Nations, donors and
nongovernmental organizations demand access to these
desolate areas, to deliver aid to the people left behind.

And it is not enough to collect testimonies only from
refugees in the government camps, as the State Department
is beginning to do. Investigators must cross into the
rebel-held zones of Darfur to exhume evidence and conduct
inquiries there as well.

Obviously, in such a dire situation security is paramount,
both for the delivery of humanitarian aid and for the
creation of conditions to allow Darfurians to return to
their homes. For all the visibility of Darfur lately, the
United Nations and others have accepted a Sudanese plan
under which the wolf will guard the henhouse. The
international community has called on the government to
disarm the same militias it helped create and arm, and to
use the government police to patrol the same camps the
regime has been terrorizing. A mere 300 African Union
troops spread over an area the size of France are meant to
ensure the government's change of heart.

This formula guarantees that six months from now the
Janjaweed will still be in a position to kill, rape and
pillage, leaving unchallenged the ethnic cleansing campaign
that has changed the map of Darfur.

In one interview after another, Sudanese refugees and those
displaced but still within Sudan's borders told us that
they would never trust the government to disarm the
Janjaweed, that only an international force could protect
them. Sufficient numbers of elite Rwandan and Nigerian
forces, now conceived of as the bulk of the African Union
contingent, could lead such an effort if they were properly
financed, equipped and otherwise supported by Europe and
the United States.

There has been a great deal of tough talk since the visits
of Mr. Powell, Mr. Annan and others, but the United Nations
Security Council so far has failed to act decisively. It is
time to move directly against regime officials who are
responsible for the killing. Accountability for crimes
against humanity is imperative, as is the deployment of
sufficient force to ensure disarmament and arrangements to
deliver emergency aid. The sands of the Sahara should not
be allowed to swallow the evidence of what will probably go
down as one of the greatest crimes in our lifetimes.

John Prendergast, who worked on African affairs for the
Clinton administration from 1996 to 2001, is an adviser to
the International Crisis Group, an independent
conflict-prevention group.

__________________________________________________________________

'We Want to Make a Light Baby'

By Emily Wax

GENEINA, Sudan, June 29 -- At first light on Sunday, three young women walked into a scrubby field just outside their refugee camp in West Darfur. They had gone out to collect straw for their family's donkeys. They recalled thinking that the Arab militiamen who were attacking African tribes at night would still be asleep. But six men grabbed them, yelling Arabic slurs such as "zurga" and "abid," meaning "black" and "slave." Then the men raped them, beat them and left them on the ground, they said.

"They grabbed my donkey and my straw and said, 'Black girl, you are too dark. You are like a dog. We want to make a light baby,' " said Sawela Suliman, 22, showing slashes from where a whip had struck her thighs as her father held up a police and health report with details of the attack. "They said, 'You get out of this area and leave the child when it's made.' "

Suliman's father, a tall, proud man dressed in a flowing white robe, cried as she described the rape. It was not an isolated incident, according to human rights officials and aid workers in this region of western Sudan, where 1.2 million Africans have been driven from their lands by government-backed Arab militias, tribal fighters known as Janjaweed.

Interviews with two dozen women at camps, schools and health centers in two provincial capitals in Darfur yielded consistent reports that the Janjaweed were carrying out waves of attacks targeting African women. The victims and others said the rapes seemed to be a systematic campaign to humiliate the women, their husbands and fathers, and to weaken tribal ethnic lines. In Sudan, as in many Arab cultures, a child's ethnicity is attached to the ethnicity of the father.

"The pattern is so clear because they are doing it in such a massive way and always saying the same thing," said an international aid worker who is involved in health care. She and other international aid officials spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they feared reprisals or delays of permits that might hamper their operations.

She showed a list of victims from Rokero, a town outside of Jebel Marra in central Darfur where 400 women said they were raped by the Janjaweed. "It's systematic," the aid worker said. "Everyone knows how the father carries the lineage in the culture. They want more Arab babies to take the land. The scary thing is that I don't think we realize the extent of how widespread this is yet."

Another international aid worker, a high-ranking official, said: "These rapes are built on tribal tensions and orchestrated to create a dynamic where the African tribal groups are destroyed. It's hard to believe that they tell them they want to make Arab babies, but it's true. It's systematic, and these cases are what made me believe that it is part of ethnic cleansing and that they are doing it in a massive way."

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell flew to the capital, Khartoum, on Tuesday to pressure the government to take steps to ease the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. U.S. officials said Powell may threaten to seek action by the United Nations if the Sudanese government blocks aid and continues supporting the Janjaweed. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is due to arrive on Khartoum this week.

The crisis in Darfur is a result of long-simmering ethnic tensions between nomadic cattle and camel herders, who view themselves as Arabs, and the more sedentary farmers, who see their ancestry as African. In February 2003, activists from three of Darfur's African tribes started a rebellion against the government, which is dominated by an Arab elite.

Riding on horseback and camel, the Janjaweed, many of them teenagers or young adults, burned villages, stole and destroyed grain supplies and animals and raped women, according to refugees and U.N. and human rights investigators. The government used helicopter gunships and aging Russian planes to bomb the area, the U.N. and human rights representatives said. The U.S. government has said it is investigating the killings of an estimated 30,000 people in Darfur and the displacement of the more than 1 million people from their tribal lands to determine whether the violence should be classified as genocide.

The New York-based organization Human Rights Watch said in a June 22 report that it investigated "the use of rape by both Janjaweed and Sudanese soldiers against women from the three African ethnic groups targeted in the 'ethnic cleansing' campaign in Darfur." It added, "The rapes are often accompanied by dehumanizing epithets, stressing the ethnic nature of the joint government-Janjaweed campaign. The rapists use the terms 'slaves' and 'black slaves' to refer to the women, who are mostly from the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups."

Despite a stigma among tribal groups in Sudan against talking about rape, Darfur elders have been allowing and even encouraging their daughters to speak out because of the frequency of the attacks. The women consented to be named in this article.

In El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, about 200 miles east of Geneina, Aisha Arzak Mohammad Adam, 22, described a rape by militiamen. "They said, 'Dog, you have sex with me,' " she said. Adam, who was receiving medical treatment at the Abu Shouk camp, said through a female interpreter that she was raped 10 days ago and has been suffering from stomach cramps and bleeding. "They said, 'The government gave me permission to rape you. This is not your land anymore, abid, go.' "

Nearby, Ramadan Adam Ali, 18, a frail woman, was being examined at the health clinic. She was pregnant from a rape she said took place four months ago. She is a member of the Fur tribe and has African features.

"The man said, 'Give me your money, slave,' " she said, starting to cry. "Then I must tell you very frankly, he raped me. He had a gun to my head. He called me dirty abid. He said I was very ugly because my skin is so dark. What will I do now?"

In Tawilah, a village southeast of El Fasher, women and children are living in a musty school building. They said it was too dangerous to leave and plant food.

Fatima Aisha Mohammad, once a schoolteacher, stood in a dank classroom describing what happened to her three weeks ago, when she left the school to collect firewood.

"Very frankly, they selected us ladies and had what they wanted with us, like you would a wife," said Mohammad, 46, who has five children. "I am humiliated. Always they said, 'You are nothing. You are abid. You are too black.' It was disgusting."

During a recent visit, government minders warned people at the school to stop talking about the rapes or face beatings or death. Minders also were seen handing out bribes to keep women from speaking to foreign visitors. But those at the school spoke anyway. A group of people handed a journalist two letters in Arabic that listed 40 names of rape victims, and wanted the list to be sent to Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas and Rep. Frank R. Wolf of Virginia, Republicans who were touring the region and pressing the government to disarm the Janjaweed.

"I was sad. I am now very angry. Now they are trying to silence us. And they can't," Mohammad said. "What will people think of all of us out here? That we did this to ourselves? People will know the truth about what is happening in Darfur."

Later that day in Tawilah's town center, Kalutum Kharm, a midwife, gathered a crowd under a tree to talk about the rapes. Everyone was concerned about the children who would be born as a result.

"What will happen? We don't know how to deal with this," Kharm lamented. "We are Muslims. Islam says to love children no matter what. The real problem is we need security. We don't trust the government. We need this raping to stop."

Aid workers and refugees in Geneina said that despite an announcement last week by Sudan's president, Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Bashir, that the Janjaweed would be disarmed, security had not improved. Janjaweed dressed in military uniforms and clutching satellite phones roamed the markets and the fields, guns slung over their shoulders. Last week, the Janjaweed staged a jailbreak and freed 13 people, aid workers said. They also killed a watermelon salesman and his brother because they did not like their prices, family members of the men said.

A government official, speaking with a reporter, described the rapes as an inevitable part of war and dismissed accusations by human rights organizations that the attacks were ethnically based.

In Geneina, two women told their stories while sitting in front of their makeshift straw shelter. One of the women, a thin 19-year-old with dead eyes, moved forward.

"I am feeling so shy but I wanted to tell you, I was raped too that day," whispered Aisha Adam, the tears rushing out of her eyes as she covered her face with her head scarf. "They left me without my clothing by the dry riverbed. I had to walk back naked. They said, 'You slave. This is not your area. I will make an Arab baby who can have this land.' I am hurting now so much, because no one will marry me if they find out."

Sitting on mats outside the shelter, Sawela Suliman's father talked with village elders about what to do if his daughter became pregnant.

"If the color is like the mother, fine," he said as a crowd gathered to listen. "If it is like the father, then we will have problems. People will think the child is an Arab."

Then his daughter looked up.

"I will love the child," she said, as other women in the crowd agreed. "But I will always hate the father."

Then the rains came. They pounded onto the family's frail shelter, turning their roof into a soggy and dripping clump of straw. Suliman started to shiver as the weather shifted from steaming hot to a breezy rain. She will no longer leave the area of her hut to collect straw. She will stay here, hiding as if in prison, she said, and praying that she is not pregnant.