REPORT 1 OF 2. PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 17, 2007

Chad. For the first time, a group of victims manages to bring an African ex-dictator to trial

(Translated from Spanish) 

Isabel Coello, Special correspondent to N’Djamena

Clément Abaifuta prays everyday that Chadian ex-dictator Hissène Habré lives. “I tell myself that it would be a great injustice if God allowed Habré to die before being tried.” Clément Abaifuta remembers perfectly the date of his detention and that of his release: “On July 12, 1985, they arrested me. My crime was having obtained a scholarship to study abroad. I was released on March 3, 1989.” And he remembers every detail of his captivity. “50 of us lived in 16 square meters at a temperature of 50 degrees, and we did our business there inside. I was in charge of burying my prison mates who died in custody; I buried thousands in mass graves, between seven and ten each day.” Today, Clément Abaifuta leads the Chadian Association of Victims of Political Repression, an organization that brings together 2,000 victims of the dictatorship of Hissène Habré and has achieved something unheard of in Africa: managing to get a trial against the Chadian ex-president to be prepared.

Habré ruled Chad by force between 1982 and 1990, when he was overthrown by the current president Iddris Déby. The dictator fled to Senegal, where has lived in exile ever since. A Truth Commission created after his escape accused Habré of 40,000 political killings and of systematically practicing torture.

In all likelihood, Habré counted on enjoying the same placid existence in Senegal that many African tyrants have lived after their escape abroad: Ugandan Idi Amin wanted for nothing during his exile in Saudi Arabia, where he died in 2003, and Ethiopian Mengistu Haile Mariam still lives comfortably in Zimbabwe.

The fact of the matter is that, unknowingly, Judge Garzón, calling for the extradition of Chilean Augusto Pinochet from the United Kingdom in 1998, ruined the plans of the Chadian dictator.

“When Judge Garzón requested Pinochet’s extradition, human rights organizations considered it an admonishment to many of the world’s tyrants that they could see what could one day happen to them. In reality, the Pinochet case actually meant a real wake-up call for victims associations, which realized that they could use international law to prosecute people who seemed to be beyond the reach of Justice,” explains Reed Brody, of the Human Rights Watch organization (HRW).

“Our lawsuit was inspired by the Pinochet case,” Jacqueline Moudeina, the attorney of the Chadian victims, admits with pride. With support from the HRW and the International Federation for Human Rights, 17 victims filed suit in January of 2000 in a Senegal court. They based themselves on the Convention against Torture, ratified by the country, which binds the signatories to prosecute any torturer in their territory.

So began the long struggle to bring to trial one of the Africa’s lesser known tyrants, but whose regime killed at least 1,208 people in jail and abused another 12,000, as shown by the 2,000 recently discovered files of the Documentation and Security Directorate, the secret police created by Habré.

Senegalese Justice got out of the way, and in March of 2001, the Court of Appeals confirmed that the courts of that country did not have jurisdiction over the crimes of which Habré was accused because the Convention against Torture had not been incorporated in domestic legislation.

The victims did not give up. “We went to Belgium and, using the universal jurisdiction law, which was in effect in the country at that time, we filed the lawsuit there.” There were already 20 plaintiffs, and three of them Belgian nationals of Chadian origin.

Belgian judge Francois Fransen investigated the matter for five years, travelled to Chad, visited mass graves and interviewed victims of all kinds. In 2005, he accused Habré of crimes against humanity and other abuses of human rights and asked Senegal to extradite him to Belgium to be tried.

Senegal arrested him, but its Justice ruled again that it wasn’t “competent” to rule on the request for extradition, and this time it passed the ball to the African Union (AU), asking it to decide which jurisdiction should try the case.

After appointing a committee of experts to analyze the mater, the General Assembly of the AU ordered Senegal to try Habré in its territory, after making the appropriate amendments to its national laws.

“That decision was already a milestone: that an assembly on which notorious tyrants like the president of Zimbabwe or the president of Sudan are seated would order Habré to be tried, knowing very well that one day it could be their turn,” remarks Brody.

Since then, Senegal has been preparing for the trial. It has changed its law, eliminated the jury, introduced the crimes against humanity and the possibility of appealing, in order to ensure that Habré has a fair trial. A mission from the European Union must soon travel to the country to study what the trial will cost and what financial aid it can give.

The Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, has shown in a letter “the full support of the Spanish Government for Habré’s trial,” a process that he deems “of great importance for the strengthening of the Rechtsstaat, the fight against impunity and the defense of human rights in Africa.”

If Habré comes to be seated on the bench, it will be the first time that the national courts of a developing country prosecute mass abuses against human rights. And unlike the case of other African dictators, like the Liberian ex-president Charles Taylor, who is being tried by the International Court of Sierra Leone, the victims themselves will have been the ones who have brought him to answer for his actions.

“The regime considered the victims to be subhuman. In order for them to regain their dignity, justice must be served,” says attorney Jacqueline Moudeina. She knows very well that there are many people who do not want to see Habré tried: in 2001, she suffered an attack that severely injured one of her legs. “Many people who were in positions of responsibility with Habré continue to be in power today,” Moudeina indicates.

But since she became an attorney, she wanted to lead this case and does not plan on abandoning ship. “Impunity makes the State disappear. Trying Habré would be showing that you can’t violate and kill as though it were nothing,” she insists.

Before the trial begins, Senegal will have to do its own investigation, whereby the process may easily be delayed another year.

“The problem is that time goes by and many victims are dying. If we wait much longer, I wonder how many victims will remain alive when the trial begins,” laments Abaifuta.

For many like him, the wounds of torture are far from having healed. “I saw Habré again in Senegal during his extradition sessions. I cried like a boy,” he recalls. “Only on the day I see him on the stand will I be completely healed.”

IN FIRST PERSON

Ginette Ndjarbaye

43 years old. Detained when she was two months pregnant, she was tortured and gave birth in prison

I was engaged in 1985. It was my fiancé who convinced me to study professional training, and I came to the capital to do secretarial work.

On January 16, they detained me. I was at home resting when they came looking for me. I was two months pregnant. I did not have any link with politics. They told me that they were taking me to the Documentation and Security Directorate to ask me a few questions, that it was not “anything serious.” When I arrived, I went in a room where there was a man. His shirt was covered in bloodstains. I asked him what I was being charged with. He told me that he was accusing me of having met with members of the opposition in Cameroon. I had only been to Cameroon once in my life, and it had only been to the market.

They brought me to a room full of instruments of torture. They tortured me for eight nights. Especially with electric shock. I still have the marks, like this one on my chest. They also raped me. I think it was three times, but I am not sure, because I lost consciousness, but when I awoke, I had semen on my underwear.

Then they transferred me to the prison. My daughter Annie was born there in September of ’86. I gave birth on the floor, helped by a woman. They released me on February 10, 1987. When he found out about my release, my fiancé came to see me. He told me that he had looked for me everywhere and thought that I had died. He had married another woman. I married another man, with whom I had another two children.

To this day, no one has ever told me why they detained me. 20 years have gone by, but I have not forgotten. It is unforgettable. It is not normal to arrest people at will; there is no justice in this country. Our fight is to get Habré to answer for his actions. What he did is inhumane. In the neighborhood, I still pass by the one who came to detain me; he looks the other way. Not the torturer, however; he died years ago. We want justice. Without justice, there is no forgiveness. I cannot forgive until they explain to me why they detained me. My hope is to see him tried.

Younous Mahadjir

55 years old. Accused of belong to a rebel group, he spent four months in prison, where he lost 30 kilos.

They arrested me on August 17, 1990. I was 30 years old, married with three children. I was a radiology technician. Two policemen came looking for me at the hospital.

I was a unionist, from the center of the country, where there was a rebellion against authority. They accused me of collusion with the rebellion and of preparing a conspiracy. I went to prison. They tortured me there. At night, they tied me up to ask me who my accomplices were. They put the wheel of a car on my stomach and make me drink water until I lost consciousness, while I was peeing myself all over the room. When you woke up, they would begin again. It continued like this until you confessed to being a member of the rebellion. I never did so, because I wasn’t. They tortured me this way twice.

Life in the cell was very hard; there were many people and it was very hot. I had no contact with my family. And we were dying of hunger. My dreams in jail were images in which I saw myself eating. Upon leaving, on December 1, 1990, when Habré fled, I weight 45 kilos; I had lost 30. I always thought that I should resist. I was convinced that the horror would end one day. The physical suffering goes away, but the mental damage…I will never forgive it.

The process for trying Habré is getting very long, and we are losing hope. We believe that the current Chadian system does not want him to be tried. It is hard to see the people responsible back then still in positions of command today. Habré’s accomplices remain in Chad. They are useful for the system. Meanwhile, no one is concerned for the victims. Last year one of the prisoners died who they ordered to make holes where they threw the people that they killed. He died of a mild liver ailment that is curable, but he did not have the means. In this process, I believe that, with our determination, we will win. For the health of Chad, for it to be greater as a country, it must be achieved. I am convinced that it will happen. But it must be done while Habré lives. The more time that goes by, the more likely it will be to say that he is ill or mentally incapable.

Kongarde Hawa

40 years old. Lost his father and brother. They were of the Hadjarai ethnicity, among the most persecuted by the regime

The military came at night. Several vehicles parked at the door of the house. It must have been in 1985; I do not remember it well. A civilian man came in the house. He said that he wanted to see Mamat, my little brother. He did not give us any explanation as to why they were looking for him. My brother was a student; he was twenty-something years old. That day he had gone to the hospital to see some people who were ill, and he was on his return from the hospital when they came for him. They took him away. I never saw him again.

During that time, when they came looking for my brother, my father was already arrested. He was military and died in prison. We know this because when Hissène was overthrown and fled the country, all those who were in jail and did not return home were considered dead, and my father did not return. He had been detained during the Hadjarai massacres; there were collective detainments. During the time of Habré, there were many deaths of that ethnicity, and many members of the association of victims of repression are Hadjarai.

I do not have the slightest hope of finding the bodies of my father and my brother. Later, the Documentation and Security Directorate (DSD, secret police of the dictatorship) published a few lists of people who had died, and my brother was on one of these, but they never told us where his body was. For us, it is difficult not to have been able to find them and give them a proper burial. We think of them every day. When I am eating, when I am walking, I think of them.

If they try Habré, it will provide us with a certain amount of relief. I want him to suffer like he has made our loved ones suffer. I would like to look him in the eyes and torture him. I would like them to crucify him the same way they crucified Jesus Christ. I am very pleased with the trial that is being prepared in Senegal. It is what I want. For him to be tried.

Chad is different today. My children move about the city and nobody bothers them. I do not think that something similar to what happened during the time of Habré could happen again today.

Abakar Ousman

37 years old. Recruited to the force by armed group opposed to Habré, he was a prisoner of war

I was arrested in 1983 as a prisoner of war, since I was a combatant of the FAP, one of the armed groups that had fought against Habré since 1979 in the north of the country. They had recruited us by force. I did not want to fight, because I am a believer and I know that killing is not right, but they forced us. There were more than 1,000 of us prisoners of war, and more than 150 were executed. They came one day and took away two or three that we never saw again.

The conditions of imprisonment were very harsh. We were beaten, interrogated and tortured, but the worst of it all was the hunger. Fifty-two prisoners died of hunger before us all. We ate the leaves of the trees. The International Committee of the Red Cross came to inspect the prison. After that visit, the situation improved. It is thanks to them and to God that I am alive today.

I was released by an agreement that Habré signed with the FAP in 1989. Many joined his army; I returned home and survived with something of a business. When I left, I was in very poor condition. I had lost my sight, and they had applied torture to my testicles. I do not even know how long the interrogations last. When you are suffering, you do not count the time. If they were happy with your answers, they left you alone; if not, they continued.

Today I live with normalcy, but I have friends that suffer and are in poor mental condition. Even so, I think about what happened every day. I want the trial to come. I do not mind making a statement as a witness. I am not afraid. Afraid of what? If God saved us from that, there is nothing to fear. I want to stand before Habré and hear what he says. I want to hear his reasons why he did what he did. That would relieve us. I would like them to sentence him to death like they did to Saddam Hussein, but if that does not happen, I will be satisfied with the fact that they tried him. We will continue with this process until the end. Justice is peace. Where there is justice, there is peace. Unfortunately, today in Chad there is impunity, even though it is in a more hidden form.

REPORT 2 OF 2. PUBLISHED JULY 27, 2008

Two years after the African Union ordered the country to prosecute Hissène Habré, almost no progress has been made

ISABEL COELLO, special correspondent - DAKAR

“I spent six months in a cell jam-packed with more than a hundred people. We lived among our own excrement, which was piled up in a corner. The heat was unbearable. Two or three people died each day.” Senegalese Abdourahmane Gueye never thought he would see the man who caused his suffering seated on a court bench.

 Abdourahmane Gueye, Senegalese victim of Chadian ex-dictator Hissène Habré, trusts that he will ultimately be tried.

62 years old, married with six children, this merchant is one of the two Senegalese victims who, 20 years ago, was detained without charges by the regime then in power in Chad. In command was a man named Hissène Habré. When he was deposed in 1990, Habré fled to Senegal, where he has lived placidly ever since.

“I was detained when I crossed from the Central African Republic to Chad. I was going to sell jewels to French soldiers who were stationed in Chad. They detained my friend and companion Demba along with me. I never saw him alive again,” Gueye recounts.

Gueye was lucky, and mediation from former Senegalese president Abdou Diouf led to his release. Thousands of Chadians, however, suffered torture and inhumane treatment in the prisons of Habré. Abandoned documents from the former Security Directorate and discovered by the Human Rights Watch organization (HRW) confirm the death of 1,208 people in prison. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission estimated the number of political killings at 40,000.

Today Gueye has the chance to dream of seeing his torturer appear before a court, a privilege that the majority of victims of abuses inflicted by African dictators have not had. Gueye forms part of the group of victims who have filed suit against Hissène Habré and, after a six-year struggle, got the African Union to demand that Senegal prosecute him in 2006. That was two years ago, however, and Dakar is not moving to prepare the trial at the speed that the victims would like.

“We are not at all satisfied. There is a lot of political grandstanding and few specific actions. Meanwhile, there are victims of Habré who die every day without seeing justice served,” Demba Ciré Bathily, the victims’ attorney, tells Público.

“We do not understand how it takes three years to carry out a minimal legal reform,” he says in reference to the Constitutional amendment, finally approved last Wednesday, to allow Senegalese courts to prosecute crimes against humanity committed in the past.

“We are wondering if Senegal has the political will to try him or if it is toying with the international community. Our impression is that they are stalling for time. In fact, in Habré’s camp, they do not believe there will ever be a trial,” Bathily complains.

“Senegal has perfected the art of delaying this case,” states Alioune Tine, of the African Assembly for the Defense of Human Rights. “This case is a test for African justice. Africa cannot complain that international justice is being baited with African leaders while it allows Habré’s case to languish in Senegal.”

If Habré is ever tried, it would be the first time that a lawsuit filed by African victims sees a dictator seated on the bench. Attorney Bathily insists on the importance of this process: “Africa has never fought against impunity. It is the only continent where dictators have escaped punishment and enjoyed a luxurious retirement, with the sole exception of the ex-president of Liberia, Charles Taylor [currently on trial before the International Criminal Court for Sierra Leone],” the attorney explains. “Therefore, this case would send a strong message to the world that Africa wants to put an end to impunity,” Bathily remarks.

“For two years, the process has moved very slowly,” agrees Reed Brody, of the HRW. “The Government inflated the budget for the trial: it asked for 66 million euros, when we estimate that it may cost 28 million,” Brody explains. A team from the European Union that visited Senegal last January to evaluate the financial needs stemming from the trial for the purpose of disbursing economic aid, asked Senegal to redo the budget.

“We remain cautious,” says Stéphanie Masure, in charge of the matter in the Delegation of the European Commission in Dakar. “In one way or another, we will support the efforts to try Habré, but we need to know what it is that we can or cannot support. Right now, the conditions for us to be able to request financial aid are not met,” she explains.

With the approval of the constitutional amendment last Wednesday, any obstacle to trying Habré has been eliminated. Now, at least, preliminary proceedings on the case may begin. However, at least another year may pass before this is completed and gives way to the hearing. There are other troublesome factors. The current Senegalese minister of Justice, Madické Niang, is Habré’s former attorney.

“The documents are there. The evidence is there,” Brody notes. “Delaying justice,” he concludes, “is to deny justice.”

The factory that killed 15,000 in 1984 is still poisoning new victims. As survivors march to Delhi, RAGHU KARNAD tells the chilling story of Bhopal's ongoing disaster

THERE IS a face of our democracy that you only see when you follow a 60-year-old woman marching 800 kilometres on swollen knees. That is the distance fromBhopal to Delhi, and she hopes that if she walks for a month, instead of taking the overnight train, she will remind Delhi about something in Bhopal. Not that the gas that leaked from the Union Carbide factory on December 2, 1984, killed 15,000 people. That is world history; that is not why she is marching. Some people remember that the five lakh Bhopalis who survived that night had their bodies ruined. This explains her swollen knees, her painful lungs, the sudden dizziness that occasionally drops her onto the roadside.

Fewer people heard that after being denied a hearing in court, after being denied a humane compensation, the gas peedith are spending their lives being denied medical care they were supposed to receive, being denied jobs they were trained to do, being denied justice. But there is another reason she is marching. Almost nobody ever heard that the factory which leaked poison into the air in 1984 [see box: The Story of that Night] has been leaking it, constantly, into the soil and water ever since.

For 23 years, the chemicals that went into Carbide's pesticide process have been ignored, left to leach into the groundwater. That groundwater feeds tubewells and handpumps from which 25,000 people in neighbouring areas drink. Most of these people were nowhere near the gas leak on December 2. They belong to a new category of victims, the paani peedith, and every year their numbers and their toxicity symptoms increase. Their existence is being denied altoget her. Everyone knows the Union Carbide gas leak killed more than 15,000 people. Almost nobody has heard that the killing never stopped. That is why the woman is marching.

AS YOU READ this, 50 padyatris between the ages of 11 and 82 will be entering New Delhi. For a month, they have been hitting the highway at 5 am, marching until the sun burns the neck like a rash, breaking for a nap, then marching again until Delhi is 25 km nearer. They've been sleeping in school houses, wedding halls, open fields. Most are in ill-health from exposure to toxic gas or water: what keeps them going is sweet tea in the morning, painkillers at night and a fierce desire to hold their Prime Minister to account. This is not the first time they have made the padyatra: it is a Bhopal survivors' tradition. In 2006, a group marched to Delhi and presented their demands to Manmohan Singh.

In essence, the demands were: provide support to the survivors. Clean up the toxic waste at the plant. Give water to the communities whose water it has poisoned. Take legal action against Dow Chemicals, which bought over Union Carbide in 2001. They say the Prime Minister nodded as they read out the first three, and when they reached the fourth, he placed his hands over his ears. He would not endorse any bans or any arrangements for the special prosecution of Dow. Many of the padyatris from 2006 are marching again this year, to remind him of those promises.

There has been a little progress on the first three demands – not much, but enough to put the survivors' movement on its strongest footing in years. But as it turned out, that fourth demand is a wedge under the door. Ever since 2001, Dow Chemicals has maintained that while it acquired Carbide's assets, it did not inherit its liabilities. The survivors are det ermined to see Dow held to account. The Cen tre is determined to see it let off. For two years, the tangled question of Dow's liability has ensnarled progress on every other front.

NATHIBAI, HER HUSBAND and their three-year-old son Sonu left their village in 1990 and moved to Atal Ayub Nagar. This mohalla presses up against the wall of a dilapidated factory, and terrible stories about what had happened there were repeated to Nathibai often. Many of her neighbours were gas peedith – survivors of that night – their lives were pitiful, wasted waiting in lines at the hospitals. The factory still looked desolate, perhaps haunted, but the compound was full of ponds and birdsong.

IT WAS two years before Sonu began having problems. He never learnt to talk, and although he continued to grow, he became uncontrolled and erratic. His mind was regressing; he droo led and was incontinent. Today he is 21, but mentally still an infant. Nathibai is around 50, but looks two decades older. She can never leave Sonu alone. Some times he becomes violent, striking and scratching her. Doctors never explained what was wrong. Something was poisoning the community.

Children who had been healthy for years developed neurological conditions, even regres sed into mental disability. New borns had low birthweight, grew too slowly, suffered from cerebral palsy and deformities. Healthy children began to behave in frighteningly abnormal ways, with disorders like Pica: com pulsively eating mud, faeces, bone, even glass. People who had never been near the gas found their families beginning to sicken, and sometimes die. In two wards – 18 communities– there was a slow escalation of the rate of anaemia, skin disease and cancer. Girls in their late teens had not started menstruating and women in their mid-thirties had stopped. Entire communities sagged under fatigue, nausea and bodily pain. 'Now people here just stay ill constantly,' Nathibai says, 'There is no respite.'

WILDFLOWERS GROW INSIDE the Union Carbide compound; palash trees are in full bloom and look like dynamite suspended

mid-explosion.Cowherds graze cattle on the thick brush until guards come by and threaten them. The rust monsters tower above this pastoral scene, skeletal arrangements of girders, inscrutable valves, disembowelled regulators and long, long intestines of rusted piping. Nostril-singeing chemicals cling to the machinery, especially the huge, corroded storage vats in the processing plant. In the summer, says the guard, the wind blows a stinging scent through their quarters. They develop headaches, and become dizzy on their rounds. He knows the word – dichlorobenzene – even though he was never warned about toxicity when first posted here. He hustles us on, 'It is not good to stay here long.' An hour wandering through the buildings leaves you swooning like a seven-year-old smoking a cigarette.

THREE YEARS ago, all the visible toxic material scattered around the premises was gathered together in one vast warehouse. The guard teases we won't find what we're looking for – it's all been locked up. But he leads us to the building and to a peep-hole in the wall. Hidden under tarpaulin sheets, sackfuls of chemicals are heaped like haystacks, one heap after another, as far as the eye can see in the dim interior light. In any case, the guard is wrong. There is a barren field in the north-east corner, from where you can throw a stone in three directions and hit someone's jhuggi. This is where, in the mid-90s, Carbide made a landfill for the industrial residue excavated from their solar evaporation ponds. It was buried and soil was bulldozed on top.

Today a depression has formed in the earth, where toxic tar is creeping back to the surface. It looks gratifyingly evil, like a small prehistoric tar pit, reliquified and shimmering in the March sun. It is not shallow – place a large rock in the puddle and it is slowly swallowed, until the tar closes over it like a mouth. How is it possible that Ground Zero of the worst industrial disaster in history was left so vividly and potently contaminated?

After 1984, the Carbide management had only one thing on its mind: to get out of India before its liability was fully calculated. This required them, on the one hand, to restrict proof of the extent of damage and, on the other, to unload assets as fast as possible. They did both ruthlessly. For example, Carbide refused to disclose proprietary research that would help doctors understand the physiological effects of gas exposure and treat victims. It disrupted independent research on drugs like sodium thiosulphate, which would have helped detoxify victims but would also have proved that the gas entered the bloodstream and caused multiple- organ damage.

The Indian Council of Medical Research began a study on the impact of the gas on the next generation – this was mysteriously cancelled when results began to point to extreme damage. Satinath Sarangi, 54, is one of the principal leaders of the Bhopal survivors' movement. He abandoned a doctorate in metallurgy at Benares Hindu University to arrive in Bhopal the day after the gas leak. He co-founded the clinic that ran the improvised sodium thiosulphate trials –
until it was raided by the police and every single datasheet confiscated. Today, by compulsion, he is a self-trained physician, lawyer and detective.

'Carbide had the best emergency response you could imagine for bringing down the appearance of damage,' Sarangi says. 'It was like there was a Department of Dirty Deeds dedicated to this, a system in readiness – and it involved scientists and researchers, which makes it seem even more evil.' Sarangi can spend hourslisting the ways the company co-opted the government to suppress evidence of damage. 'First it happened with the gas deaths, then with the gas injuries, now with the contamination.' Carbide was relieved of all civil liabilities after paying a $470 million settlement – leaving each bereaved family with Rs 63,000, and each injured person with Rs 25,000. Warren Anderson, Carbide's CEO, could not be extradited, so their criminal liabilities were immaterial.

WHAT THAT left was the actual factory site. A month after the gas leak, the gates were padlocked, the factory abandoned in suspended animation. The dial for tank E-610, which had released the lethal methyl isocyanate (MIC), stayed stuck on Overload. All the chemical ingredients of Sevin, the pesticide end-product, stayed exactly where they had been that night – in warehouses full of iron drums and sacks, inside the pipes and the tanks of the actual plant. Residual waste sat in solar evaporation ponds. For a decade, only time touched the factory: the sacks ruptured and the pipes corroded, loosing the chemicals onto the ground.

Pesticide is a form of poison, so it should come as no surprise that its ingredients, like MIC, were highly toxic: mercury, dichlorobenzene, hexachlorocyclohexanes, lead. On nights of heavy rain, the factory became a toxic marsh. The land had been given to Carbide on lease by the state government; in order to relinquish it,Carbide needed the Madhya Pradesh Pollution Control Board (MPPCB) to certify the land was not contaminated. In 1989, and then again in 1994, the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) of Nagpur was asked to measure soil and water contamination.

Carbide had been privately testing their own samples, and found high levels of naphthol and Sevin. But NEERI's reports summarily acquitted Carbide. It said the soil in the area was clayey and impermeable, and would keep contaminants from reaching the groundwater table for at least 23 years. It declared that 'the water meets the drinking water quality criteria.' This was such cavalier logic that even Carbide's consultant, Arthur D. Little (ADL), found it insupportable. In a private response to NEERI, they urged: 'The sentence 'The groundwater appears to be suitable for drinking purposes' is too strong,' and, 'The conclusions regarding travel time to the water may significantly underestimate the potential for contamination… clay is only present to a depth of 6.1 meters… The worst case scenario travel time would be 2 years.' But NEERI's final report included none of ADL's revisions.

The MPPCB, a body so corrupt it was fired en masse three years later and its chairman arrested, looked at the flimsy report and discharged Carbide's lease: the land became the problem of the Madhya Pradesh government. Since then, the NEERI report has been the touchstone for both Carbide and government officials. Both use it as proof that there is no groundwater contamination, or if there is, it is not on account of the factory waste. They steadfastly ignored the multiple studies that found contamination present and growing – that was to be expected from pesky activist groups like the Boston-based Citizens' Environmental Laboratory and Greenpeace. In 2002, the Delhibased Srishti environmental research group found heavy metals, the pesticide HCH-BHC and volatile organic compounds (such as dichlorobenzene) in samples of soil, groundwater, vegetables and breastmilk collected in the areas. But the NEERI report overrode all contrary indications. The issue of cleaning up was mothballed. The official response became: of course, people in these areas are sick. The poor always are.

THERE WAS little urgency for the first 20 years about planning the 'site remediation'. According to Digvijay Singh, the CM of Madhya Pradesh from 1993 to 2003, the main issue during that span was funding.'There were very few experts, and the foreign firms we contacted wanted to charge 30 million dollars.' Singh also believes that the contamination issue 'is being played up by activist groups for publicity and funds.' Scepticism persists among the state officerswhose support matters most.

Ajay Vishnoi, the BJP Minister of Gas Tragedy Relief and Rehabilitation, denies the contamination firmly. 'A total survey has just been conducted, but it has not been announced yet. What has been reported to us is that there is no contamination of the groundwater in any of the tubewells in those areas,' he said, adding, 'beyond tolerable limits.' Arif Aqeel, the former Minister of Gas Tragedy Relief, has an even slicker response to claims of water contamination. 'While I was the Minister, the locals were complaining. They asked me to come drink the water myself,' he says, chuckling, 'I asked, this water is bad? And I drank two glasses right in front of the entire media, in front of the public. If there had been something wrong with it, I'd also have had the problem – but nothing happened at all.' Sarangi was there to watch Aqeel drink the water. He swears in all seriousness that the Gas Minister excused himself straight away, went around back and vomited it.

OUT OF THE factory gates, and a few minutes later we are in Atal Ayub Nagar, across the wall from the tarpit. It is one of 18 communities ranged around the factory's northern perimeter, collectively home to 25,000 people. Ninety percent of residents, including Nathibai's family, draw water from its wells. It tasted like phenyl was mixed into it, and often it had an oily sheen.'But what other water was there?' Nathibai explains,'Eventually we stopped tasting it.'

It is eerie to be a visitor in a community of illness. The adults suffer diseases that are mostly internal and invisible. Some, from foot to knee and hand to elbow, have skin that burns and is cracked so deep it bleeds. But the horror is what has happened to the young: every alley has households with children with developmental problems – like five-year-old Amit, who cannot walk or talk and whose parents are still praying; older ones, like 32-year-old Munni Bai, who was a normal teenager before 'her mind was lost.' She can no longer feed herself.

ONLY IN the last few years have state officials been compelled to acknowledge that this is happening. At first, all that happened was that workers came through, painted the hand-pumps red, painted – 'Paani peene yogya nahi hai' – and left. In 2004, the recalcitrant MPPCB admitted it had found pesticide in water-samples from around the plant. IIT Kanpur found high concentrations of endosulphan in the breast milk of mothers. The same year, acting on a contamination report from its monitoring committee, the Supreme Court directed the state government to provide clean drinking water to the contaminated areas.

Fourteen crores were allocated to pipe water in from the Kolar reservoir; in none of these areas has that arrived, but some are serviced by tankers or water piped from the Rasla Kheri bypass. The day we visited Annu Nagar, the Rasla Kheri water was cloudy pink. Where the tankers go, each family receives less than four litres per day. On days when the pipes are empty or the tankers missing, residents return to their handpumps, and mothers urge their children not to drink. As we crossed from Atal Ayub Nagar to Annu Nagar, we passed a child pissing on the railway track, his urine almost orange.

EARLIER THIS YEAR, VS Sampath, secretary, Department of Chemicals & Petrochemicals as well as Chair of the Central Task Force on Bhopal, addressed a CII conference. In his speech, he said that India needs to attract Rs 80,000 crore of investment in the petrochemical sector. Sampath refused to be interviewed for this story. But one could guess that he does not consider this a good time to antagonise the world's second-largest chemical manufacturer. On the contrary, the government has been most patient with Dow's errors. For example, last year Dow disclosed that its Indian subsidiary, DE-Nocil, had slipped more than Rs 80 lakh under the table to Indian officials to get approval for three pesticide products – including one called Dursban. Local people were charged with bribery and criminal conspiracy, but no action was ever taken to revoke the product approval.

Dursban was banned in the United States in 2000, after it was found that exposure to it caused headaches, vomiting, and diarrhoea, and risked permanent neurological damage to children. It is still manufactured and sold here. Dow has already begun investing in major new projects, including an R&D facility in Shinde-Vasuli in Maharashtra, where it is already embroiled in controversy. Civil society groups claim it concealed information about 20 hazardous chemicals it would manufacture at the plant. Last month, the residents of Shinde- Vasuli dug up their own roads to keep out Dow's construction teams.

IT WAS A SMALL, upstart motion that finally gave the issue of site remediation a shot in the arm. In 2004, a PIL filed in the Jabalpur High Court requested that the Court direct the government to get on with the clean-up. The Court's proactive instructions in this case had two effects: they threw a new momentum behind the survivors' efforts to haul Dow back into the picture. They also revealed the Central government's determination to keep Dow out of it. Among the Court's first actions, it directed the formation of a Central government Task Force to implement the clean-up. To advise it, the Court constituted a Technical Sub-Committee, which included the eminent biologist PM Bhargava.

When the Sub-Committee drew up a list of recommendations, the topmost was that Dow be made responsible for taking the surface waste and contaminated soil out of country for disposal; and that it should pay for the long-term decontamination of the water, which might take upto 20 years. This was endorsed unanimously.'My strong view is that there is simply no alternative to Dow doing this,' Bhargava says. 'No one in this country has the expertise to evaluate the waste, and we have no capacity to incinerate waste of this kind and quantity. Besides, the principle is simple – the polluter pays.'

Mysteriously, when the minutes of the meeting were presented to the Task Force, the suggestion involving Dow had fallen from first to last in the order. The Task Force ignored it, preferring instead a proposal to incinerate some of the waste at an industrial incinerator in Ankleshwar, Gujarat, and to bury the remainder in a sealed tank in Pitampur, MP. Preparations for this went ahead full-steam until the end of last year, when the Gujarat Pollution Control Board took stock of its facility and suddenly refused to participate. 'It's very clear that the government isn't interested in Dow's responsibility,' Bhargava says, 'but the incineration in Gujarat could have been another disaster.'

The Gujarat PCB's rejection has not yet sunk in – in Bhopal and in Delhi, officers insist the plan is moving ahead. There has been no talk of an alternative. The Jabalpur High Court put in motion another chain of events, which again revealed that on questions of Dow's liability, the government had its hands over its ears. This time its soft spot for Dow was not just the Central Insecticides Board or the Task Force on Bhopal. It was the most powerful men on the Union Cabinet. When Alok Pratap's PIL was registered, Dow found, to their horror, that they had been named as one of the respondents. This was the first time since their acquisition of Union Carbide that Dow had been impleaded in a case relating to Bhopal.

To represent them, they secured the services of Abhishek Manu Singhvi, the Congress Party spokesperson. The High Court was restless to see action on the clean-up front – but who was going to pay? To general surprise, in an application in May 2005, the Union Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilisers (MoCF) coolly suggested that Dow pay the government an advance amount of Rs 100 crore. Work could then begin. They could pay the difference afterwards.

THIS WAS exactly the kind of payment against which, for years, Dow had barricaded itself with deadly seriousness. "' We all ask the same question: 'Why isn't this site cleaned up?' "says Dow's spokesperson Scot Wheeler. 'As owners of the site, it is the government of Madhya Pradesh that has the ability and, more importantly, the authority to clean up the site.' Ever since it bought out Carbide, Dow has emphasised that it never owned or operated the Bhopal plant. 'Union Carbide Corporation had stopped doing business in India long before Dow acquired UCC's shares in 2001,' says Wheeler. 'UCC remains a separate company, which manages its own liabilities.'

In the United States, however, barely a year after completing the acquisition, Dow settled an asbestos-related lawsuit that had been filed against Union Carbide in Texas. The MoCF proposition was a nightmare sprung to life – not because Dow, which made Rs 11,600 crore in profits last year, was daunted by a pay-out of Rs 100 crore, but because of the precedent such a payment would set. What might litigants expect them to pay for once their gates of liability were cracked open? For further clean-up costs, if the Rs 100 crore were to fall short?

Last year Yashveer Singh, the officer incharge of the MoCF Bhopal wing, guessed that final costs might reach Rs 500 crore. What if Dow were asked to pay compensation and medical expenses for the victims of the groundwater contamination? Where might it end? It was time for lateral thinking. The MoCF was dragging Dow into the harsh light of liability because it needed the money. If the money could somehow be arranged, the MoCF would relent and Dow would be back in the clear. Dow made its move around the time of the high-powered US-India CEO Forum in New York, in October 2006. The Forum, a bilateral government initiative to encourage trade and investment, is co-chaired by Ratan Tata, the benevolent giant of Indian business. Dow CEO Andrew Liveris was a member as well.

On July 9, months before the Forum began, Tata wrote to Finance Minister P. Chidambaram and Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia, about resolving the'legacy issues' of Bhopal. In his letter to the FM, he made a striking offer: 'We should be concerned about the lack of action on remediation of the old Union Carbide disaster site… I believe that responsible corporates in the private sector and in the public sector might be willing to contribute to this initiative in the national interest and Tatas would be willing to spearhead and contribute to such an exercise.'

At the Forum, Dow held a meeting to discuss its liability problem. Afterwards, Ratan Tata resumed the correspondence. In another

letter from him to MS Ahlu walia, copied to the PMO:'It is critical for [Dow] to have the MoCF withdraw their application for a financial deposit by Dow against the remediation cost, as that application implies that the GoI views Dow as liable in the Bhopal Gas Disaster case… My offer for the Tatas to lead and find funding… still stands. Perhaps it could break the deadlock?'

The Cabinet leapt at Tata's overture. Chidambaram gave his support. So did Cabinet Secretary BK Chaturvedi. MS Ahluwalia said: 'The Chairman of Dow indicated that they would be willing to contribute to such an effort voluntarily, but not under the cloud of legal liability.' Minister of Commerce & Industry Kamal Nath came right out with it: 'While I would not like to comment on whether Dow has a legal responsibility or not, as it is for the courts to decide, with a view to sending an appropriate signal to Dow Chemicals, which is exploring investing substantially in India, and to the American business community, I would urge that a group... look at this matter in a holistic manner.' The idea quickly fizzled out after the press and activist groups caught wind of it.

By January 2007, the Tatas were playing defence. They released a statement regretting the 'considerable misalignment and misunderstanding' of Tata's offer, which was 'no different from any public-spirited initiative to clean a polluted river or a site damaged by some abnormal phenomenon.' The Tatas' reputation for philanthropy did not incline the survivors to believe in Ratan Tata's public spiritedness. In their eyes, Tata's corporate responsibility only arrived in time to relieve Dow's corporate liability. A clearer picture never emerged about what motivated Ratan Tata to offer his shareholders' money to clean up the Carbide site – and to enable Dow to contribute voluntarily to a cost it might have to pay involuntarily if the court finds it liable. But it was made quite clear that key Cabinet Ministers are ready to work to keep Dow out of trouble in the 'holistic' interest, even to the extent of helping it evade judicial process.

If a national economy could accept a bribe, this is what it would look like. Then again, would it be so terrible if somebody else cleaned up the plant? At this point, many officials say, the survivors are their own worst enemies. Their desire to see Dow's atonement is limiting the scope for quicker alternative solutions. Ratan Tata's consortium might have begun the clean up already. Arif Aqeel has ideas about why the survivors pursue Dow, even though it prolongs their poisoning.'What I'm saying is clean it up! Let Dow do it, let the Indian government do it, let a foreign country come and do it,' he says. 'But once the chemicals are gone, certain leaders will be unemployed, they won't have anything to do without their zindabad-murdabad.' The government wrings its hands and says the same – why are they making this so difficult?

The answer to that depends on another question: who are these people? Two views contend. Either they are the typical poor: exploited and misled, as always, but this time by activist leaders who are careerists or ideologues. Or, they arepeople in whom tragedy and poverty, and also education and leadership, have realised a potential for participatory citizenship. Survivors talk about 'moral responsibility' less often than the media makes it seem. More often, they talk about deterrence – making sure Bhopal never happens again.

Their insistence on Dow's liability is not vindictive; it is to ensure that their own personal justice becomes a precedent for wider justice. Jabbar Khan, who is marching with his daughters, says: 'If Dow is let off now, it will go somewhere else in the country and Bhopal will be repeated. We don't just want to be paid off. We want justice to be done. Even if we have to wait another 20 years.' Many of the survivors, whether or not they articulate it this way, are insisting on corporate and industrial liability.

That is why they have allied with other groups – mercury survivors from Cuddalore, Endosulphan survivors from Kasargode – people even more obscure and powerless than them. Some of the marchers – like 82-year-old Shantha Bai, who marches with her sari hitched up above her sneakers, and with a pace so fierce they call her the Bhopal Express – may not survive to see vindication even if it comes. Their fight stopped being about personal recompense a long time ago. To a great extent it is about the lives of their children, and their children's children. There is also a whole country to be saved from contaminated lives.

As you read this, the padyatris will have entered Delhi, carrying 20 questions to put to their Prime Minister. They can anticipate what his answers will be. Reaching Delhi may not mean the end of their road. But neither will it mean the end of their tether. If your swollen knees have carried you 800 kilometres, they will not fail you when it is time to stand your ground.

Without economic rights, slums move billions

Carla Rocha and Dimmi Amora

(translated from Brazilian Portuguese)

At least one in each four Rio residents lives in a lawless, wild capitalism, outside the state. Such parallel market, which boils at the city's slums, has generated businesses which increased their price so much in recent years that, in an imaginary stock exchange, their shares would be disputed under the most deafening screams of a trading session. Far from the laws enforced in the asphalt, pulsates a rich, dynamic and, in some respects, chaotic market, which reaps more than R$ 3 billion per year. Fighting for a chunk of that little known fortune, are formal, informal and illegal activities, in a heterogeneous environment that extends from small grocery stores to banks, from drug trafficking “firms” to the militias [paramilitary groups formed generally by current or former policemen, who take traffickers out of slums and take over with their own violent methods]. The residents form a mass of potential consumers estimated at something between 1.3 million and two million people, with annual income reaching somewhere between R$ 5 billion and R$ 10 billion. In spite of statistical differences, those figures make dollar signs clink in the eyes of any entrepreneur. Whether in retail or in bulk, official or parallel, the holding company Favela, Inc. makes a few rich, explores thousands and swindles the State.

O GLOBO followed the money trail to try to measure such emerging economy, despite the few data available, and publishes, a series of reports that will reveal who profits from these businesses. The mass of salaries was obtained updating Census data which showed a family income of R$ 634.50 in those areas, according to the Pereira Passos Institute, at the city hall. The turnover in trade was calculated from estimates by entrepreneurs from many industries and by public officials, in addition to a census conducted in 2000 in 44 slums included in the Favela-Bairro program [an urbanization program for favelas, enterprised by the Rio city hall], which showed an average of 91 businesses per shantytown, with average annual revenues around R$ 15 thousand. These are R$ 3 billion, which do not include the billionaire and still unknown profits obtained from trafficking.

This X-ray shows that, contrary to the government, which has not yet been effectively present there, the market has appropriated the dynamics of slums and made them a powerful machine to generate wealth. Such phenomenon has left behind some old concepts and a romantic image of shantytowns. The social inequality and lack of popular housing projects are no longer sufficient to explain them. Today, slums concentrate one fourth to one third of the population of the capital and, contrary to self-fulfilling assumptions, they are no longer the stronghold of the miserable.

Pereira Passos Institute estimates that 5% to 8% of the slum residents are the so-called middle class, with incomes between R$ 1,064 and R$ 4,051. The calculation was based on 2000 national census, the latest major survey with data on slums. In 2000, only one third of Rio's poor population lived in slums. The rest was in the formal part of the city. With the growth of income among the lower classes in the past three years, economists believe the participation of people of middle and upper classes is now much bigger in slums – and lower the number of poor and miserable.

Without freedom to express politically and under constant threat, as O GLOBO revealed in 2007 in the series "The Brazilians who still live under the dictatorship," residents of these areas also do not have full freedom to enjoy the growth in the local economy and their income. It is common that criminals catch hold of businesses, charge tolls and fees. On the other hand, with the informality, most businessmen and residents avoid spending on some items they’d have to pay in the formal city: taxes and fees for water and electricity.

-- These are very entrepreneurial areas, but the trafficking and militias act as predatory economic agents. These criminal groups appropriate the profits of virtually every business in slums – says sociologist Paulo Magalhaes, who represents Caixa Econômica Federal [a national state-owned bank] and monitoring the construction works in the Program to Accelerate Growth (PAC, in the Brazilian acronym). -- It is a kind of wild capitalism that enhances all the bad that happened in the Brazilian economy in recent years.

The desire to own a house won’t account for all the occupation of shacks in slums. In 2000, 12.2% of the buildings in these areas were rented. And the trend for those figures is to increase. Studies show that, on average, almost 30% of real estate transactions in the slums are rentals, a percentage that is increasing. This informal market created real estate "sharks", former residents who now live in the luxury condominiums. In the shantytown, they left roughly built buildings and still continue to pour hundreds of two-room apartments to be rented.

Slums are very different among themselves. Even though a few still are, as they all were in the past, small cities where workers only go to sleep, Rocinha [the biggest favela in Brazil] has already three bank agencies – among them, one of Bradesco and one of Itau, the largest private banks in the country – restaurants, gyms, tuck shops, big stores, cybercafes, bars, grocery stores, minimarkets and supermarkets. In Rio das Pedras (Jacarepaguá), a factoring company exchanges future claims for cash, like any other in the financial market. But it has a competitive advantage: the payment is guaranteed by the strong arm of the militia, where defaulting means to be under a death threat. In the Complexo do Alemão, stores from big chains are just a few meters away from drug dealing hotspots.

The removal of slums is no longer part of public policy. Since the Favela-Bairro program, the government has prioritized infrastructure work to integrate shantytowns to formal neighborhoods. These works, however, have not yet managed to integrate shantytowns to the city in the political, social and economic aspects. A sign of this is the fact that the state has been replaced by the action of populist politicians, who also profit from Favela, Inc. The vote market is also profitable and promotes, in some cases, the association between politicians and organized crime. Sociologist Marcelo Burgos, a professor at PUC-RJ, has no doubt that the economic strengthening of the residents of these areas will also generate social change:

-- The old system, which has always been successful in the slums, which have "owners", is in agony. I have no doubt that there will be a radicalization of democracy in such areas with the economic development.

A professor at the Institute of Economics of UFRJ, Ronaldo Fiano remembers that the modern economy is characterized by anonymous relationships between dealers, granted by clear laws, which does not happen in the slums. According to him, negotiations in those areas always need the support of the "owners" – which means higher costs and affect the business.

André Urani, director of the Institute for the Study of Labor and Society (IETS), wrote a study based on 2006 data from the National Survey of Sample Households (PNAD), from the national statistics bureau – partially covering the slums in the Metropolitan Region of Rio – and found out that the quality of life improved more in the formal areas of the city than in the informal ones. For him, informality and crime may be behind the result.

The slower pace in improving the quality of life is also noticed in practice by those who live in slums. A member of the Rio Forum, an entity which aims to reduce informality in the city and stimulate development, Cezar Vasquez, a director of the Sebrae-RJ [a reference center for small entrepreneurs], noted in interviews that traders and slum leaders considered informality as an obstacle to their activities:

- Historically, it was as if our society, which went through a process of shrinking in the last three decades, had told those people: "go about however you want." Now, we need to develop an appropriate model to bring formality to those areas. But nothing can be done without solving, first, the problem of violence.

The militia in Campo Grande neighborhood drained economically everything it could from the area’s slums. Investigations showed that the militia controlled the sale of kitchen gas and the distribution of pirate cable TV signal, as well as influenced in public transportation, sometimes acting as entrepreneurs, sometimes as public officials – charging fees or deciding who may or may not operate a service. The ownership made it possible for them to elect a councilman and a state legislator. In the same fashion as in the actions to combat the mafia, the police understood that it could only beat them through breaking their businesses, which began to be done. The first action, last June, was a sting in a huge illegal warehouse of kitchen gas in Campo Grande, which delivered gas cylinders to slums across the city and had reaped R$ 970 thousand in only ten days.

Understanding what happens in the rich and diverse market of slums, which is continually growing despite the poor infrastructure and absence of state, may be the way to integrate them in fact to the city – politically, socially and economically. After all, everyone remembers the famous quote said by marketer James Carville, in 1992, while pointing out the engine that actually moves the world and could make then presidential candidate Bill Clinton win the election:

-- It's the economy, stupid!  

At least 12% of the houses in slums are not owned by their residents

Carla Rocha and Selma Schmidt

(translated from Brazilian Portuguese)

Every day, Antônio, 70, works for 12 hours watching more than 40 buildings. He is not a guard. For 30 years, Antonio (fictitious name) builds and keeps houses for rent – with great profits – at the Maré complex. Building "condominiums" where the owners at the same time explore and have to ensure the integrity of property and tenants is one of the peculiarities of the dangerous activity of construction in poor communities of Rio. Profits are fat, especially in the South of the city, in slums like Rocinha, where the verticalization industry provides for the emergence of new-rich. Yesterday, O GLOBO initiated the series of stories about who profits from the business in so-called Favela, Inc.

This informal market in slums moves at least R$ 107 million a year in rents. The estimate comes from economist Ib Teixeira, based on the 2000 Census, which revealed the existence of 35,500 leased houses (12% of total) in slums.

Ib estimates that the real estate assets of 307,500 buildings in Rio slums is worth R$ 7.3 billion. A gigantic sum, which doesn’t include the favelized housing projects and irregular lots. Just to illustrate, the figures represent more than 6% of Rio’s GDP and 67% of Rio's city hall budget for this year.

This reality is very different to the faded idea that all the problems of slums have a social origin. The market for buying and selling in these communities is enough to overcome the prices of real estate in the “asphalt” (slum slang for the legal city), often curiously devalued by conflicts in slums.

-- At Tijuca, a house with 30 square meters in the Morro do Turano can be sold for R$ 60 thousand, while in the asphalt a larger apartment can cost little more than half of that – says Ib

Whoever adventures himself constructing in slums knows the risk. Mr. Antonio can’t remember how many times has been called into drug dealing places to answer questions, and he says there were times in which he had to scare bandits off the ceiling of his tenants’ houses:

-- When the traffickers invade the houses, I have to defend my tenants, sometimes physically.

The lack of rules and verbal contracts affect the residents, who stay without legal protection, at the mercy of the will of the owner, be it traffickers or militiamen. In slums, contracts can be canceled without any reason, as it was possible under a law enforced by the military dictatorship between 1964 and 1979 – the “empty complaint”.

-- What happens in the slums is worse than the old “empty complaint”. It is the law of the jungle. Those who can rule will rule, and those who have reason will obey – says Arnon Velmovitsky, chairman at the Real Estate Law commission at the Rio de Janeiro Bar Association. He remembers the empty complaint was reinstated in 1991, but subject to a 36-month contract.

Even without being a great builder, Maurício (fictitious name), 33, decided to leave the Barreira of Vasco, where he maintains business and a rented house, afraid of trafficking:

-- No one can do anything, become an entrepreneur or earn money in a slum without the approval of trafficking.

Manoel Grova is a successful trader: he has two furniture stores at the Maré and one in Rio das Pedras, as well as two in the asphalt, in Taquara and Madureira. He spends R$ 3 thousand a month to rent his branch at Roquete Pinto, at the Maré – a store with 3,000 square meters. That’s more expensive than what he pays for his branches in the asphalt.

-- It’s worse in Rio das Pedras, where I pay R$ 2,100 for 150 square feet – he tells.

Despite Manoel’s complaint about costs, his financial situation improved greatly since she started to invest in trade in slums, 12 years ago. Four years ago, he moved from the slum to a house in Taquara.

In slums, residents' associations act as notaries, to give the appearance of legality to real estate transactions, charging fees that can reach 10% or a fixed value when the deal is closed. That’s more expensive than the 2% charged by city hall in the tax for transfer of ownership.

Flavio Minervino, president of the Center for Support of Residents of Santa Teresa Slum, shows that Morro dos Prazeres charges 5%. Residents of Vila Esperança, in Gardenia, say the association keeps R$ 100 from the seller and R$ 100 from the buyer.

In Rio das Pedras, the real estate business spread to Orkut [a Facebook-like social network website, owned by Google and very popular among Brazilians]. In one ad, Allan Farias, 21, tries to attract not a simple candidate to buy his house, but investors who are interested in making money from rent. Claiming that a property bought for R$ 30,000 can be rented out for R$ 400, he says the buyer will have a salary for the rest of his life, in a violence-free area near Barra.

-- We sell 80% of the apartments to investors – says Allan, over the phone, without knowing he was talking to a reporter.

During the conversation, Allan reminds the potential client that he will not pay taxes for the construction or water fees:

-- All the communities reached by Favela-Bairro are exempted from paying for water – he says, adding that, in contrast, the tenant has obligations. -- If you do not pay in ten days, you have to leave. If you do not leave, we’ll go there and take you out.

In Rio das Pedras, a stand displays models of buildings under construction. One of them, which is already under construction, will have 10 floors, including a penthouse.

According to residents, militiamen are behind the real estate business in Rio das Pedras. On the road to Jacarepaguá, at the Curva do Pinheiro, apartments are being sold in three buildings under construction, on invaded land. Two of the four owners – colonel Geudo Gomes de Moraes and lawyer Rolim de Abreu – went to court claiming reintegration of possession. The other owners allegedly were police inspector Felix dos Santos Tostes, murdered in 2006, and Washington Luiz de Souza, who is missing. Despite the dispute, there is a sign at the site with a phone to contact the brokers of the property. Ricardo Ramos da Silva, a settler who’s 75 years old, owner of a stretch of land alongside that lot, also went to justice, having seen his restaurant demolished. Now, he only has a workshop left:

-- I walk with God and I have no fear - he says.

Group that operates at the Gardênia Azul is investigated for exploiting child prostitution

Sergio Ramalho

(translated from Brazilian Portuguese)

At 13 years, Maria (fictitious name) is very thin and has the body of a child, still showing no signs of adolescence. The lack of physical attributes led her to the “queue of the infants”. The phrase is common in meetings organized by members of the militia that operates in the Gardênia Azul favela, in Jacarepaguá. In a house on Canal do Anil Avenue, the militia selects children and teenagers, between 9 and 14 years old, which will be negotiated in wild nights of drinks and drugs. After taking over slums with a “shock of order” marketing, attracting residents with the promise of putting an end to the drugs trafficking, the militia is being investigated by state prosecutors for the practice of one of the most cruel of all crimes: the exploitation of child prostitution.

Since Sunday, the series Favela, Inc. has shown who profits with business in poor communities of Rio. The militia now discovered that sexual exploitation of children and teenagers may be another niche. Previously, cases of child prostitution happened in dens of trafficking, being common in “funk” dances.

The investigation of the state prosecutors is based on a document of the Center for Support to Promoting Children and Youth. In it, there are reports by relatives and by victims lured into orgies. The first complaints were pressed in August last year. Last week, prosecutors were beginning to identify the militia, so they can be criminally punished. The accused may be charged with operating child prostitution – which leads to sentences of four to ten years in jail – and rape, which is classified as a heinous crime, because there is presumption of violence, as the victims, at the time, were less than 14 years old. With this, the maximum penalty can reach 15 years of incarceration.

About the practice of such crimes in slums, attorney Helio Bicudo says the exploitation of child prostitution, historically, tends to be more intense in poor areas:

-- The poorer the place, there are more cases of exploitation of child prostitution. Although that is not classified as a heinous crime, Brazilian judges usually opt for the maximum possible punishment when determining the sentence. It is a tradition in the courts - explains the lawyer.

For anthropologist Alba Zaluar, the proposed shock of order offered by the militia to conquer the slums is a trick to lure the local population. She points out that these paramilitary groups are involved in a series of crimes, from economic fraud to murder:

-- Militiamen present themselves as enforcers of order and morality, but we know that they commit all types of crimes, they attack, they humiliate, they kill. And the worst part is this: the militiamen belong or have belonged to the very institutions of the state that should enforce the law. From a social point of view, exploiting of child prostitution and rape is a crime that can’t be forgiven. It’s so unforgivable that, when those who are convicted for these types of crime reach the prisons, they are punished by other inmates.

The luring of the girls was revealed by a testimony, in August 2007, by the mother of Ana (also a fictitious name), age 12. According to the woman, her daughter ran away from home one night to be part of the "queue of infants". The girls selected by militiamen were paid one real to participate of the orgies.

Ana's mother said she had discovered the existence of orgies on the night her daughter and a friend of hers, Maria, came home dirty. Maria had hemorrhage, because she had had sex repeatedly. The girl told her she had received R$ 1 after making sex with 23 men – without condoms. At the time, Ana's mother said that she would press charges with the police, but the girls said they would deny everything. According to testimonies at the juvenile justice and at the Center of Support to Prosecutors of Children and Youth Issues, the girls showed a certain pride in having been chosen by militiamen.

The paramilitaries would give preference to girls aged under 14. The older, according to reports, began to work as prostitutes for a woman identified only as Beatriz. In such cases, they were carried in the trunk of the car to motels in the region, being paid R$ 20 per appointment. To avoid drawing the attention of receptionists, Beatriz and the client pretended to be dating so they could enter the premises. In the garage, the girl was removed from the trunk. In their testimonies, some girls said the "work" with Beatriz was better because they earned much more than at the "queue of the infants".

The seriousness of the complaint made by Ana’s mother resulted in the admission of two girls into a shelter, where they are receiving medical and psychological care. Three administrative cases are under way in a court specialized in child issues at Cascadura. The cases are being investigated under secrecy, such as is established by the Statute of the Child and Adolescent (ECA), and the mothers can lose the guard of the girls.

No operation was made so far to curb child sexual exploitation in Gardênia Azul. The testimonies were not even taken to the police station or the police branch which investigates crimes committed against young people. Contacted by O GLOBO, prosecutors Marcia Velasco and Christiane Monnerat confirmed that there is an ongoing investigation, but said they could not comment on the case because it involves children.

Despite the anger they feel, the mothers of sexually exploited children rarely press charges against the criminals. In one of the cases mentioned at the juvenile justice office, the mother told her daughter escaped at night to take part in the "queue". For many of the girls, being one of the militiamen’s chosen ones is a sign of power and status. In one occasion, a mother assaulted one of the exploiters, whose sons are members of the militia in the region. Police was called – but, despite the evidence against the man, they told the woman she would be arrested for assault. Afraid, the girl's mother withdrew from pressing charges.

The mothers are not alone in facing difficulties in combating this crime. The investigation by the prosecutors shows that professionals like social workers, psychologists and members of the juvenile justice offices classify sexual exploitation of girls at Gardênia Azul as an epidemic. Little they can do to inhibit the action of exploiters. The justification is emphasized in a document attached to the research. "Would like to help in investigations, so that the gang can be arrested, but also fears for its own safety and for the continuation of its work in the community, since it must have the endorsement of the bosses of the area, which is known to be ruled by a militia," says the report about a professional.

Trafficking and militias were born, grew up and remain in the slums of Rio based on the same fact: the absence of the rule of law in these areas. The monopoly of force and the planning of social and economic practices in those territories, which are essentially roles of the state, were taken over by criminal gangs.

-- The state gave up its sovereignty in the slums. The only kind of public policy at these sites has always been the contention of trafficking by force, to isolate it. Investments in health or education are rare – examines geographer Fernando Lannes, coordinator of the Observatório das Favelas (Observatory of Slums).

The absence of the rule of law is a major reason for the fact that, today, at least 66% of the Rio slums are dominated by armed groups, according to a research made by the Department of Public Safety in 326 communities. The oldest gang of traffickers occupies 26% of the slums, such as the Complexo do Alemão. The other two factions together have 20% of them in their hands, the same share the militias have.

In three years, the militias were able to expand enough to approach the same amount of slums controlled by the oldest faction, which exists for three decades.  

“I would have liked a happy life”

(Translated from Spanish)

Text and photos: Fátima Monterrosa, Special Correspondent

Acteal, Chiapas.- At the age of 10, Ernestina Pérez Luna became mother of two little girls. Her dolls, toys, friends, and school were all left behind. At her young age, she learned to cook beans, toss tortillas, wash clothes, gather firewood and plant vegetables and corn.

After 22 December 1997, she devoted herself to caring for her two little sisters, who were orphaned just like her: Zenaida, 4 years old, and Rosella, 2.

Ernestina’s studies were cut short in her fourth year of elementary school, where she only learned to draw a few doodles.

A radical change in her life, which made her sick with sadness in her heart.

“That pain marked me, and so far I have not been able to relieve it,” confesses this Tzotzil native who still lives in the Acteal Alto community.

Men carrying powerful weapons—R-15s, AK-47s, sawed-off .22-caliber rifles—who wore navy blue uniforms and covered their faces with red handkerchiefs, killed five members of her family: her father, Miguel Pérez Jiménez, and her mother, Marcela Luna Ruiz, as well as her brother Alejandro and her sisters Juana and Silva, respectively 15, 8 and 6 years old.

Of the Pérez Luna family, only Ernestina, Zenaida, who was left blind by a bullet shard to her head, and Roselia, who was grazed by a bullet in her mouth, survived. 

Ten years have passed since Ernestina took charge of them. Thus, she was forced to give up what remained of her childhood, of her adolescence.

“I suffered greatly. It was very difficult, because I didn’t know how to take care of the baby while by grandparents were taking care of my other sister in the hospital. I had to make an effort. My heart was sick. I had been orphaned.”

Now, at the age of 20, she is an expert in the kitchen and in fieldwork. Though ready for marriage, she is not interested in getting married; she has other concerns.

For Ernestina, there are no weekends or holidays. Every day is the same: she gets up at 4:00 in the morning, stokes the fire, tosses tortillas, heats the beans and prepares coffee in her house of wooden planks, blackened by the firewood that burns on the ground, where they cook on a grill and on very rare occasion eat chicken or beef.  She does not even know the taste of milk.

She tends to her sisters and then goes to work in the field, accompanied by her grandfather, Antonio Luna Santiz.

For Ernestina—fair skin, big brown eyes, long, straight hair that goes down to her calves because it has never been cut—the illnesses that have weakened her grandparents are a concern, since she has no money to buy medicines, much less to provide for Zenaida and Roselia. 

“We don’t know how we’re going to live in the coming years. We have no money or mom or dad. I don't know what I’m going to do with my sisters in order to feed them.”

“And you don’t plan on getting married?”

“I don’t plan on abandoning my sisters. I’m going to keep taking care of them. I’m not interested in getting married.”

“Do you think fate has been unfair with you?”

“I feel that life has treated me poorly. I would have liked a happy life with my parents, getting to be like other kids who walk and play with their parents. If my father were living, I wouldn’t work like a man in the field, and he would be in charge of us.”

Ernestina has a very vague memory of them. Of her father, she has only a small photograph that has started to fade, while of her mother she does not even have that.

“What goes through your head each day? What do you think about?”

“I worry about my grandparents, who are sick and don’t receive medical care. If they die, I’m going to be orphaned all over again.”

“Would you like to keep studying?”

“No, because I have to go to the cornfield and take care of my sisters.”

During the coffee seasons, Ernestina and her grandfather harvest up to 120 kilos, for which they are paid between 10 and 15 pesos per kilogram.

Ernestine’s heart grows even sadder when she hears what they will receive for their harvest. Barely 1,800 pesos to survive for an entire year.

* * 

Many Mexicans perhaps do not remember it. Still others have wanted to bury that part of our history. But the memory of Acteal will be difficult to silence. It remains there, still awaiting justice to be served for the murder of 45 Tzotzil natives shot down one December day ten years ago: 21 women, four of them pregnant, 15 children and nine men.

It happened on a cold and rainy morning on the 22^nd of December, 1997, nights before the celebration of the advent of the Son of God.

An armed, priista-affiliated group invaded that community of the Chenalhó municipality, in the heights of Chiapas, and attacked men, women and children while they were praying for peace in a chapel.

Dozens of native families held wakes for their dead on Christmas Eve and buried them on Christmas Day.

A decade has gone by since that vigil which abounded with children. Along with them, the future of those who escaped the killing was also buried.

They are the children of Acteal, today adolescents and youths who survive abandoned to their luck in poverty and marginalization.

The furrows of land that were bathed in native blood continue to call out for justice. The wound remains open, latent.

The victims who did not die, warn: “If Acteal remains in impunity, sooner or later another massacre may take place."

The growth of the paramilitary groups that intended to curb the presence of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in indigenous communities, culminated in the homicide of 45 natives. Acteal was the population chosen by the Máscara Roja group to perpetrate its attack.

The men, who carried high-caliber weapons for the Army’s exclusive use, arrived at the community in three freight trucks. They descended stealthily, surrounded them and opened fire.

Everyone, regardless of age or sex, was grazed by bullets from AK-47s. And as if that were not enough, some received the coup de grâce, and still others were mutilated at the point of a machete.

The dead: 33 women, ranging in age from 65 to 11 months, four of them pregnant; four children between the ages of four and 15, and eight men between 25 and 68 years of age. Furthermore, a score of injured men and women.

“How did we survive? I was stranded after the gunfire and until everything was over. I saw how those who fired were lifting the skits of the women, dead or alive. They were laughing. Those who were alive, were crying,” recounted Erasto Ruiz Pérez three days after the paramilitary raid.

The 18-year-old youth had received a gunshot in the stomach and was convalescing in the San Cristóbal de las Casas Hospital. He had lost his mother and two-year-old brother.

The attack had been announced in advance in the media. And no authority stopped it. Weeks after the tragedy, armed civilians linked with the PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party) had expelled natives from their communities who sympathized with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and formed part of the Las Abejas Civil Society.

They robbed them of their few belongings, burned their homes and took over the lands. “The priistas wanted to force me to burn my companions’ house, and I didn’t want to. So, I left my home in Quextic, went to Acteal and prayed,” explained Erasto, who fled his community for fear of being killed.

Like him, some 6,000 indigenous peoples took refuge in Acteal, X’oyep and Polhó, where they set up camp with branches, banana leaves and plastic remnants. They were barely sheltered from the rain and the cold.

The destination held hundreds of displaced natives, who had fled from the paramilitary groups.

Many were stranded in a muddy hollow in an attempt to save their lives. Today their bodies remain in the same place, but in wooden coffins.

Before the Acteal massacre, the acts of violence that had taken place in various communities of Chenalhó had left a balance of 62 dead, 42 injured and more than 6,000 injured, as documented by the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Center for Human Rights.

* * *

The almond-shaped eyes of Zenaida Pérez Luna lost their glimmer, and her face lost its joy.

The shard from a bullet that was lodged in her head robbed her of her sight when she was four years old.

She is tiny, fragile and pale, condemned to live as an orphan, just like her two sisters who survived the bullets of an AK-47.

She cannot distinguish colors, only shades. She cannot see the stars, those diamonds that line the Acteal night and which make crickets and cicadas harmonize symphonies during the frozen twilight of winter.

Ten years in the darkness have turned her into a tormented, quiet girl. Zenaida is already 14 and has began adolescence, but still does not know, does not feel it; in her confusions, she continues to be a child.

She has great difficulty in the sixth grade at Vicente Guerrero Elementary School, where she struggles to distinguish a few scrawls on the chalkboard. She does not have three-dimensional vision. The teachers have been passing her because she has the hope of finishing school.

Her grandmother Catarina Ruiz Pérez became her guide: she takes her to school and returns her home, because Zenaida trips over things while walking.

No matter how much she strives to take part in household chores, she cannot embroider or make tortillas.

In 2008 she will turn 15, and fantasizes about three wishes: recovering her sight, that her grandmother heals from the illnesses she has acquired over the years, and that someone gives her a skirt.

For now, a worn and discolored skirt is her everyday outfit. Her slender body and ashen skin, tanned by the sun and mud, shiver with the cold that falls over these mountains.

There is no furniture or beds in her home. Only a few small circular benches that are used when they make tortillas.

At dinner time, along with her grandparents, sisters and cousins, Zenaida sits around a bonfire that burns on the ground. They share bean soup and a few tortillas. Six kilos of corn are enough for 12 people everyday.

At night, they use a few planks on the floor as a bed. They huddle their bodies to shelter themselves from the wind that slips in through the cracks of the wooden house.

They do not have drinking water or sewage.

They receive no minimal benefits from government programs: neither Progresa or Oportunidades, neither Seguro Popular or Procampo, neither Alianza para el Campo or support for the elderly or grants. Nothing of that kind.

Zenaida’s grandmother laments that the girls have ended up in destitution and do not receive the aid that authorities have promised. “They are suffering greatly… Who is going to take care of them, since I am already old and can no longer work? I am getting weaker and weaker, and I don't have money, and we hardly have enough to eat. We need someone to support us. Coffee leaves us with little, and the corn and bean crops are what we eat.”

Zenaida is hopeful that her eyes will recover sight, but she has no hope of escaping the poverty in which she lives.

* * *

After the mass burial, the Attorney General of the Republic implemented an ostentatious mechanism for detaining those responsible for the killings in the communities of Los Chorros, Puebla, La Esperanza and Quextic, considered to be bases of the priista paramilitaries.

Dozens of natives were detained, among them the mayor of Chenalhó, Jacinto Arias Cruz, accused of having distributed weapons to civilians linked to the PRI and the Cardenist Front, which were lead by Manuel Anzaldo Meneses and Juana García Palomares. Then-state governor, Julio Cesar Ruiz Ferro, tried to shirk from his liability, but against pressure from civil society and international organizations, he resigned from office 16 days after the massacre in Acteal.

The government of Ernesto Zedillo, for the purpose of confronting the scandal that has crossed borders, created the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Addressing Crimes Committed in Chenalhó on March 12, 1988.

This office began nine trials and issued arrest warrants against 135 suspects, 84 of which went to jail, among which were a mayor, a soldier and 12 state policemen. All were accused of homicide, injuries and bearing arms without a license.

Various arrest warrants remained pending and, for better or for worse, ceased to exist on April 17, 2000.

Jorge Madrazo, then-Attorney General of the Republic, affirmed that the massacre had three causes: historical confrontations, the illegal creation of the Autonomous Municipal Council of Polhó, and the non-existence of a state of law.

Twenty-seven natives received sentences of 35 years in prison; recently another 49 received sentences of 26 years. On the other hand, the public servants detained received a sentence only three and seven years in prison, and today they are free.

Five years ago, the Second District Court released six of the accused for lacking legal elements to hold them responsible. It ruled that the evidence contributed by the Attorney General’s Office lacked legality.

Two natives sentenced to 25 years in prison were released for reasons of humanity (for age and health). One of them just died.

No high-ranking official was punished, despite a recommendation from the National Human Rights Commission that indicated that several were responsible by omission. Among them was the then-Secretary of State of Chiapas, Homero Tovilla Cristiani.

Gonzalo Ituarte, at that time member of the National Intermediation Commission (CONAI), revealed that, hours before the armed group finished the massacre, the Secretary of State was notified of the violent events that were taking place in Acteal. The official answered that nothing was happening there.

* * *

Seven bullets destroyed the life of Catarina Méndez Paciencia without killing her: they left her handicapped, unfit for marriage and unable to conceive children.

The bursts from the AK-47s also caught her mother, Manuela Paciencia Moreno, her sister Margarita, her sister-in-law Marcela Capote and her five-year-old nephew Vicente Méndez Capote.

Catarina is 30 today and has lost all hope of forming a family, like she used to dream of a decade ago.

Today, Catarina can barely walk. One of the projectiles that hit her pierced her hip, another pierced an ankle, another four pierced her right arm, and one more opened her left hand.

She was bedridden for more than five years. After multiple surgeries and rehabilitation sessions financed by civic organizations, she learned to take her first steps once again.

Her legs rapidly tire; as she cannot walk long distances, she does not go to the cornfield or the coffee plantations.

The plate and three screws she has in her ankle bother her; she feels as though they are burning her skin.

She tried to hide the scars that mark her body and soul with a large, navy blue skirt and a red blouse that she embroidered. But her face shows her despair, which cannot be hidden.

When she was 16-years-old, she rejected a marriage proposal; she did not want to get married before her two older sisters, Ana and Margarita. She begged her father, Antonio Méndez Hernández, not to force her to get married to the man who had set his eyes on her, because he had a bad reputation: he had abandoned a woman and liked to drink hard liquor.

Antonio handed over his firstborn. So it was that Ana gave birth to eight children with that man. The youngest of her children was born four months ago.

Luck did not smile on Margarita, either: the bullets of the paramilitaries cut her life short on December 22, 1997.

And that day Catarina became a woman who would find it difficult to find a husband.

Since then, she has been passed from hospital to hospital. Her situation keeps her from doing household chores, loading firewood and going to the field, as Tzotzil women customarily do. At the age of 30, it is impossible for her to compete with the young singles of her community.

Catarina asked the Virgin of Guadalupe to close all her wounds. The tragedy still hurts her as if it had taken place yesterday.

“What were you doing that day?”

“When the paramilitaries arrived, we were praying in church. We had been fasting for three days. They came firing, so I ran with my sister-in-law to a ravine. My mom and my sister left for somewhere else and, after a while, came out of hiding. They were maybe four meters away from where we were hidden, and I saw when they killed them… There was a boy with us named Ricardo; he was a year and a half old. He cried with fear. His cry gave us away to the armed men, who fired at us. That was when they injured me.”

The bullets knocked down the Tzotzil native. She crawled among the red clay and the thickets until she came across an injured woman and lay down beside her. Then she covered her face with her face with the bloodied clothing of her companion, who had just passed away.

“I pretended to be dead. I was very frightened. I tried not to move. My heart beat very strongly. The woman was bleeding a lot, and her blood was getting in my face. I was afraid that the men would see that I was alive and would finish me off.”

Three hours after the armed group had perpetrated the attack, Catarina was losing strength and prepared to die. One of the Red Cross ambulances that arrived at that moment transferred her to the San Cristóbal de las Casas Regional Hospital.

“What has your life been like all these years?”

“I have a lot of pain and fear. I’m afraid that the killers will return. Now nothing is the same. I remember when I went to cut coffee; now I can’t go anywhere, just to hospitals. My life isn’t normal. I can’t work like before.”

Catarina’s deep black eyes begin to tear up. She tries to dry her tears with her hands.

She wants to forget. But she smiles when I ask her if she wants to get married. Her thick lips allow a glimpse of a row of platinum teeth while she fixes her braided hair with green and purple ribbons.

Catarina lives in Quextic, three kilometers away from Acteal, amongst ravines, muddy hollows and streams. She shares a small wooden shack with her father, her sister Ana, Ana’s husband and her eight children.

The therapies she undergoes at the National Rehabilitation Institute have allowed her to walk again. She receives free medical assistance, but must pay for her medicines. On many occasions, she has stopped taking them because she does not have enough money to buy them.

The Ministry of Health pays for her transportation, food and lodging when she comes for rehabilitation in the Federal District. They examine her and write the prescription, but they do not provide her with the medications. Every time she is in the Federal District, she goes to the Basilica to entrust herself to the Virgin of Guadalupe and ask that she heal her wounds.

 * * *

The attack carried on for several hours. The natives who managed to flee hid themselves in a deep trench, without imagining that there they would be gunned down at point-blank range by the armed men.

“The priistas came dressed as soldiers. “They killed everyone who had hidden in the caves,” told Catarina Vázquez Gómez shortly after having escaped the massacre.

The Red Cross reported that the deceased suffered from gunshot wounds, dismemberment of legs, arms and other parts of the body due to machete strikes.

International organizations and civil society make an extreme effort with the Acteal community to assist the survivors.

Ten years after the tragedy, they have ended up alone. The aid slowly disappeared, just like the 35,000 pesos that the state government handed over to the family members of victims. That was the price that it allotted to the life of each Chiapaneco native killed: 35,000 pesos.

Ten years after the tragedy, ex-President Ernesto Zedillo stated from abroad his “sadness” for the 45 dead natives and defended the investigation carried out by the Attorney General’s Office during his term.

“I remember this event with great sadness, and I also remember that the Attorney General of the Republic carried out some serious investigations… But my conclusion is that it is something that should still sadden us and that all of us must continue to lament,” stated Zedillo in Madrid, Spain.

* * *

The majority of the victims were members of Las Abejas, an organization created by catechists of the diocese of San Cristóbal de las Cases in the municipality of Chenalhó in 1992.

Las Abejas define themselves as pacifists, defend human rights in communities and seek peace with justice and dignity. They have played an important role in recent years, upon extending their activities to the municipalities of Tenejapa, Chalchihuitán and Simojovel.

In February 2005, Las Abejas and the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Center for Human Rights brought a complaint before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights against the Mexican government for the Acteal killings. “Many years have gone by, and we have not found justice in this country; thus, this petition,” they indicated.

With support of donations, they built the Indigenous Ceremonial Center and the Open Ecumenical Chapel. A galley of iron and sheets that they mounted over the 45 graves.

They created the Mayavinic Coffee Producers Union, which exports its production abroad.

They founded a community radio station. From 4:00 in the morning until 8:00 at night, nine native presenters broadcast programs in Tzotzil and Tzeltal to promote the defense of collective and individual human rights. Radio Abejas Chapul Pom has other programs and broadcast traditional music of indigenous peoples, ranchera songs, cumbias and duranguenses. They send out messages of peace and tell Tzotzil stories. For its peaceful fight and defense of rights, it was awarded by the Republic of France.

* * *

José Alfredo Jiménez forms part of the Indigenous Communicator Network, which is in charge of giving community and popular communication workshops in rural areas. He made a documentary about the indigenous radio that secretly operations in the ravines, which was selected at three national and international film festivals. Currently, he is preparing a video with testimonies of the survivors of the Acteal killings.

José Alfredo personally experienced the violence of the paramilitaries, who attacked his community, Yibeljo, burning houses and beating the inhabitants. He took refuge with his family in the X’oyep camp for the displaced. They lived in exile for three years.

Saint Death protects little Efraín Gómez Luna. The same one who took away his mother and whom he forgave ten years ago.

He was two years old when he was saved from dying at the hands of the Máscara Roja group in Acteal.

Efraín survived because his mother, Irma Luna Pérez, who was five months pregnant, protected him with her body. She received the rain of projectiles. But a bullet reached the boy and destroyed his jaw.

The doctors gave him a plate and did little else to reconstruct that part of his face. A scar 15 centimeters long crosses from his chin down to his throat.

On his neck, near the injury, hangs a plastic medal with the image of Saint Death that he bought at a fair. And on his left hand he wears a wooden bracelet with the same image.

He is 12 years old, but he looks like a child of 8, on account of his stature. He is short and thin. And he no longer lives in Acteal.

Along with his father, his stepmother and his three new siblings, Efraín took a bus and arrived at Tuxtla Gutiérrez in search of better life opportunities. Eight hours of work in the field cutting coffee and cleaning corn only leaves them with 20 pesos a day. His father, Victorio Gómez Pérez, does not have enough to support his family.

In the capital of Chiapas, Efraín and his father sell chilies, sweets, peanuts and cigarettes wherever they can: park, cafeterias, and snack centers of the San José Terán district.

Efraín became a “little kangaroo,” as indigenous children who sell sweets in Tuxtla Gutiérrez are called.

When his father works as a construction worker, the small Tzotzil carries 15-kilogram wooden box that displays a great variety of candies. On other occasions, he shines shoes at five pesos per pair.

“I leave at 10:00 in the morning to sell sweets. I come back to eat around 4:00 in the afternoon. I leave again and get back to the room around 11:00 or 12:00 at night,” he tells.

The fact of the matter is that Efraín likes to earn money to contribute to supporting his family. “When it goes well for me, I get around a hundred pesos selling sweets, and then shining and polishing shoes, I earn around fifty pesos,” he says with enthusiasm.

Despite the fact that he cannot read or write, he gets by with ease in the city. He learned to speak Spanish very quickly.

“What do you like to do?”

“Work. Well, I also like to watch soccer and westerns on TV. As we can’t buy a television, sometimes I go to the man’s house who rents us the room, and he lets me watch TV with them.”

“What team do you root for?”

“I like the Pumas. I hope they win the championship.”

Efraín likes to sell in the cafeterias, because that way he can watch the games that are broadcast pay-per-view.

His family rents a small terrace room for 500 pesos a month on 2^nd Avenida Norte Oriente, number 299, in the Terán district.

In that same room, the owner keeps old and useless things that Efraín’s sisters play with. Another room is inhabited by eight youths, all relatives of victims of Acteal who also left the community to sell sweets and gum.

“It’s going well for us here, selling candy. It’s not much, but it’s enough to support the family in Acteal. It makes us want to leave for the other side,” remarks Juan Guzmán Gutiérrez, Efraín’s uncle, speaking of immigrating to the United States, “but they charge a lot, and we’re also afraid that the coyotes will abandon us in the desert.”

Efraín’s cheerful expression changes when he is asked about his recovery. He complains that he has not received rehabilitation in one year.

“I no longer go to the doctor. There is no one to help me. I want to go to Mexico City so they can see me, but nobody helps us. This piece of iron that they put in my mouth hurts me when I eat.”

The metal plate is already small for him, due to the fact that his bones are growing.

His memories of Acteal are few: “My mom is buried there. My house was locked up there, and it makes me sad, because they stole my bicycle.”

Nothing seems to have changed in the 3,650 days that have passed since the killings in this community in the heights of Chiapas.

Here, the future simply does not exist. Poverty is everywhere. And the government’s promises to tend to the most urgent needs of the indigenous people have never become reality. The carts full of resources that would arrive ten years ago, who knows where they went?

In accordance with the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples, the municipality of Chenalhó registers a very high index of marginalization. The statistic will remain there. Just like the nearly 30 collapses on the highway that connects San Juan Chamula with Chenalhó that cleanly cuts off passage. For years the highway has shown faults, and nobody bothered to repair it.

Last year, the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples announced the reconstruction of the 59.9-kilometer road. Today, the Tzotzil natives are still waiting on the repair of the only asphalt road that they have in the municipality.

The orphans and survivors of the massacre also keep hoping that government support will arrive.

During Pablo Salazar’s administration, the state government signed an agreement with the Las Abejas Civic Organization by which the authorities committed to support the victims of the massacre through education, medical assistance, housing and food.

Nothing has been accomplished.

And the wounds remain open.

SALLY CHIWAMA, Zambia correspondent - Women News Network - WNN

A sex-safety school poster for students in Lusaka, Zambia. Image: Joshua Treviño

Lusaka, Zambia - In Feb 2006, only three months before the Zambian government ratified the African Union’s Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa, a young girl student was calculatingly raped by her greatest authority figure, her own school teacher.

The minor and her guardian sued the teacher, along with the school and the Zambian Ministry of Education one year later, achieving a first ever court victory in Zambia on June 30, 2008.

During the case presiding Judge, Philip Musonda, made his assessment in the High Court of Lusaka. “The government is responsible for all school going children in the care of its agents — such as teachers, school authorities and any other person in it’s employment during the time the schools are in session,” he said. The case brought a K45m award (approx $13,000+ USD and $45million Zambian Kwacha) to the plaintiff, a girl who was only 13 at the time of the crime.

According to a CARI – Children at Risk in Ireland Foundation - 2006 report, Submission to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Child Protection, “Perpetrator psychological rehabilitation is an extremely important prevention strategy; for example, a sexual aggressor who begins abusing during adolescence and is not rehabilitated is estimated to commit an average of 380 sexual offences during his lifetime.”

13 yr old Kalenga Mutale (not her real name) was like all children and pupils who idolize their teachers. When she was about to begin work on her ninth grade final exams, she innocently asked her instructor if she could see her past test papers. “Conveniently,” Kalenga’s teacher, Edward Hakasenke, forgot the papers, even after being asked more than three times. When it suited him, he told the girl to “come and get them from his home” after class.

In innocence, Kalenga followed instructions and went to her teacher’s home. There she found him listening to music. After being asked to “take a seat,” Kalenga, was told she needed to go and get her test papers from another room. Unfortunately, she followed instructions again to gather her papers from the other room. Even though she admitted in court that she was uncomfortable and scared in her teacher’s home.

When Kalenga went to go into the other room she froze in her feet. When she opened the curtain (in place of a door) she found she was looking into a bedroom. That’s when she turned to go back but “Teacher” was standing in her way blocking her from passing as he began to tell Kalenga she was pretty and that he wanted to marry her.

The US Deptartment of Health and Human Services outlines the definition of sexual assault stating, “Sexual assault can be verbal, visual, or anything that forces a person to join in unwanted sexual contact or attention.”

Many girl-children, teens and young women do not know that sexual assault does include activity such as nonphysical verbal abuse as well.

A 2000 report on rape in neighboring South Africa by the Medical Research Council pointed to the seriousness of teacher-student rape and exploitation outlining, “Girls reported routine sexual harassment by teachers, as well as psychological coercion to engage in “dating relationships.” In some cases, girls acquiesced to sexual demands from teachers because of fears that they would be physically punished if they refused. In other cases, teachers abused their positions of authority by promising better grades or money in exchange for sex. In the worst cases, teachers operated within a climate of seeming entitlement to sexual favors from students. A medical research study found that among those South African rape victims who specified their relationship to the perpetrator, 37.7 percent said a schoolteacher or principal had raped them.”

Terrified, Kalenga asked her teacher what he was doing. Instead of an answer she was pushed on the bed. Before she knew it she went blank and tried to scream, but her assailant put his hands firmly over her mouth.

Like so many survivors of sexual assault, Kalenga was told, in the face of this crime, that she was not to tell anyone - or else. If she did she would be chased from school and her “Teacher” would lose his job.

When she went home Kalenga told no one. Not even her Auntie who is her legal guardian. Alone with no one to turn to, she soon realized she was hurting and itching and beginning to show signs of disease. Alone and silent, she decided to go to a clinic, got examined and was diagnosed and given medicine.

Once there she still remained silent and told no one, but in a bout of courage and fear she went to tell “Teacher” of her condition and health treatment.

In response, he scolded her saying, “How come I am not getting sick myself?”.

The situation on its own was not getting any better.

The silent young girl did not know what to do or where to go. Finally, in an act of desperation she decided to tell the Deputy Headmaster of her school what had happened. To her surprise the Headmaster already knew the whole story.

He knew what had been going on because he had been a roommate, sharing a house with Kalenga’s “Teacher.”

It was then it was decided. Enough was enough. There must be an end to this.

As the trauma started sinking in, Kalenga’s performance in school started dwindling. This is a common occurrence for children who have been abused by authority figures at school.

Once a very good student at school, Kalenga started getting low marks. The children at school in Kalenga’s class, who began hearing about her struggle, started talking about Kalenga behind her back. Her friends bullied her. Some would even write notes to her telling her she was a “bad” girl. Others said she was lying. Others blamed her for spreading school rumors, saying that she was falsely accusing her teacher.

“It was really traumatizing for me,” said Kalenga in a recent interview for Women News Network. “My friends were bullying me and telling me that I was just making up this whole thing. That I just wanted to put the teacher in trouble. Many days I would go home crying,” said added.

CAMFED, an international NGO which started in 1993, is dedicated to eradicating poverty in Africa through the education of girls and the empowerment of young women. Using a platform of “Education for all,” CAMFED has recently released the “Child Protection Policy” (updated April 2008) recognizing that, “girls are especially vulnerable to abuse and that they require special protection.”

All of Zambia’s children deserve safety in educational environments.
Photo image: US Embassy, Zambia / Lubuto Library Project Opening

“Empowering girls is the foundation for enabling them to be less vulnerable to abuse of any kind. A key element of our programme policy is that girls develop the confidence to reduce their exposure to abusive situations,” states CAMFED in its policy talking points.

The responsibility for education leaders in Zambia to insure the safety of its students has finally been brought to the public in Kalenga’s case. Many times girls abused by an authority figure from their school, or by school mates, stop attending school all together after they have experienced their abuse. The hardest part is that assistance for their suffering goes unattended as they often remain silent.

After facing her struggle alone, Kalenga tried to tell her Auntie what had happened but she couldn’t. It was then her headmaster put her to task and told her that if she didn’t tell immediately he would tell her aunt himself.

Scared, without knowing what would happen next, Kalenga went to a pay phone. She dialed her home number. Her aunt answered. When she tried to speak tears made Kalenga’s throat swell. The words just would not come.

On hearing this, Kalenga’s headmaster at school quickly picked up the phone and spoke to Kalenga’s “Auntie” himself urging her to listen to what her niece had to tell her as soon as she came home.

When Kalenga arrived home her “Auntie” was waiting pensively for her.

After hearing Kalenga’s story she said later, “I couldn’t believe it, I didn’t know what to do. The first thing that came to my mind was to confront the teacher at school.”

As part of a Nov 2006 YWCA Zambia campaign, “16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence,” a report outlined an alarming statistic. An average of eight cases of girl-rape per week was revealed coming into the YWCA centre in Lusaka for help.

Teacher-student abuse has now been found to be a hidden and significant contributor to this statistic.

A 2002 Human Rights Watch investigation in Zambia found that Zambian teachers all too frequently have placed certain girl-students in positions resulting in exploitation. This exploitation is dependent on non-disclosure by the perpetrators as well as the survivors of abuse.

“Sexual abuse and exploitation in school environments was all too frequent. Some of the perpetrators were teachers who prey on vulnerable girls, exchanging answers to tests or higher grades for sex. Most abuses by teachers are not reported, and few teachers are penalized. A more typical outcome is that the teacher is cautioned and possibly transferred.

In some cases, parents negotiate for the teacher to marry the girl. Advocates for girls’ education have tried to get stiffer penalties against teachers who abuse students, and to ensure that those found responsible are dismissed. However, the onus is on the girl’s parents, not the school, to report the case to the police so criminal charges can be made.

School administrators sometimes interfere with the process by transferring the teachers elsewhere, which makes it extremely difficult for the case to proceed,” said Human Rights Watch in their 2002 report, “Suffering in Silence: The Links between Human Rights Abuses and HIV Transmission to Girls in Zambia.”

The next morning, Aunt and niece decided to go school to make a formal report to the Headmaster. A meeting was called. The Headmaster, another senior teacher and Kalenga’s teacher, Edward Hakasenke, were present at the meeting with Kalenga and her aunt.

The Headmaster told Kalenga’s Aunt that he could not blame the girl for anything that happened as she was a minor. He reminded Kalenga’s teacher of a previous relationship he also had with another of his students. When the Edward Hakasenke was asked if he felt Kalenga was a “girlfriend,” he answered in the affirmative. The headmaster then asked him if he knew how old the girl was when the incident allegedly occurred and if he committed the rape. The teacher admitted that he thought the girl was 14 years old, but would not answer the last question.

Verifying in court “Teacher” did testify that, yes, he knew Kalenga. He said that she was his pupil. But he denied any sexual assault.

He testified that Kalenga had started spreading rumors that she was his girlfriend. Adding that on Valentines Day, the young girl followed him with a bunch of flowers along with some chocolate and a card. But, he tried to avoid her as he realized that the whole thing would get him in trouble. He said that the young girl requested to talk to him on several occasions but he had declined.

He also said that the girl wanted to have a relationship with him but he declined. However, on cross examination in court, Kalenga’s teacher admitted that Kalenga did not proposition him. He admitted that he called the girl his “girlfriend” because he thought there was a relationship.

On June 30, 2008 the High Court of Zambia released a verdict of guilty to Kalenga’s teacher, Edward Hakasenke.

In concluding remarks Judge Philip Musonda outlined the reasons he chose “guilty” in the court decision:

“A teacher has moral superiority over his pupils. A girl saying that she loved a teacher does not mean that she consented to sex, when she is below 16 years of age. This teacher manipulated the girl by deliberately forgetting her past examination papers in order to create an opportunity to sexually abuse her at his home. There can be no consent by a child under 16 years of age.

To characterize a (child’s) valentine card as consenting, is legally, morally and psychologically flawed. Such a person (who interprets a young girl this way) undermines section 138 of the (Zambian) penal code. It is contrary to the ethics of a teacher to sleep with school girls. It is psychologically wrong. A child under 16 is not cognitively developed enough to consent to sex.

When children are left at school a teacher becomes a parent. The standard of care, managed by a headmaster of a school, is one of a careful father toward his own children.

The chances of millions of girls being infected with a (HIV/AIDS) ‘death sentence’ by unscrupulous teachers and/or headmasters cannot go unabated. Diseases (in Zambia) such as HIV/AIDS, have no cure.”

Zambia belongs to the world

As legislative solutions are coming into focus in Zambia, factors to reduce the incidence of teacher/student abuse are moving forward.

A 2000 World Health Organization – Geneva report, “World Report on Violence and Health (Chap 6 - Sexual Violence)” states, “Action in schools is vital for reducing sexual and other forms of violence. In many countries a sexual relation between a teacher and a pupil is not a serious disciplinary offence and policies on sexual harassment in schools either do not exist or are not implemented. In recent years, though, some countries have introduced laws prohibiting sexual relations between teachers and pupils. Such measures are important in helping eradicate sexual harassment in schools. At the same time, a wider range of actions is also needed, including changes to teacher training and recruitment and reforms of curricula, so as to transform gender relations in schools.”

With a verdict of guilty, the High Court of Zambia awarded Kalenga and her guardian aunt $13,000+ USD (equal to $45,000,000 in Zambia) for damages.

“I want to ensure that such a situation does not happen to any child, because the emotional scars do not heal,” said Kalenga’s “Auntie” who fought closely by Kalenga’s side in court.

Thankfully, Kalenga was also told after testing by the clinic she did not have HIV/AIDS.

“I feel like a hero for coming out in the open because most girls tend to keep quiet when such things happen to them,” said Kalenga. “I want to urge young girls not to trust any strangers and to report any cases of sexual abuse against them,” she added.

“We Zambians, especially activists, must translate this landmark judgment, with clear illustrations, cartoons and posters, into simple English and the seven official local languages (of Zambia) so that every person who can read or see learns from it,” said Zambian gender activist Sara Longwe, in a recent call to protect girls reproductive and sexual rights.

“Now I am my own ambassador,” said Kalenga, “because now I am a role model. Some girls even come to me for advice. Like the girl from school who came and told me that her uncle had defiled her and asked me what she should do. I advised her to tell a family member or see her pastor at church right away.”

“This judgment (also) protects the girl-child from the sexual abuse that customarily follows enforced child marriages,” added Ugandan attorney, Laura Nyirikindi, soon after learning the outcome of the case. “Women’s NGOs now have a precedent which they can use to lobby for legal and policy reform,” she explained. “Errant staff suspensions (inside the schools) is not enough. More in-depth measures have to be taken, especially preventative ones.”

“I also tell my friends not to trust any strangers. That they should speak out when something of that sort happens,” added Kalenga.

“We value education and as such will not take kindly to any girl being stripped of her right to education and a secured bright future,” said YWCA Director, Ktembu Kaumba. “The teaching profession is a noble one and all bad eggs must be removed from the education sector and exposed. The message we are sending is a zero tolerance one.”

“We have to fight this scourge together because a potential defiler can be anywhere, at school or at home,” added Kalenga with a big smile on her face.

A large question still remains as the Zambian public realizes what this landmark case really means. Will stronger legislation be supported throughout Zambia’s governing committees to help limit teacher-student abuse in the future? Will this case cause parents and guardians of abused children to begin to sue the Ministry of Education itself at increased levels?

The biggest question yet to be answered is: Will Zambia’s Ministry of Education pay for all upcoming defilement cases or will they put measures in place to curb this “vice” inside the education sector before it hits the courts?

Even with a landmark case like this winning in court, Zambia may have much more to go before teacher-student rape cases show a sharp decline.

MONDAY, 28 July 2008

Al Rabih Ould Edum

(Translated from Arabic) 

She is the youngest divorcee on record at human rights organizations in Mauritania…Smart, and well-spoken, she knows how to express what had happened to her…

When we arrived at her parents' humble home, she was sitting with her peers… a group of girls, not a group of women… Upon first meeting her, it was hard to believe that this is the same girl who got married in Saudi Arabia, the girl who carries in her small purse a triple divorce certificate… It was hard to understand that behind her dreamy eyes, innocent face and slender form lay the tragedy of a child that had joined the divorcee club even before she had practiced fasting in the month of Ramadan, not once, not even for a try.

We hesitated for a while at the door of the house she sat in… Um El Kheyr would not let us enter immediately… She had wanted to cover her head, since we were, after all, "foreigners", as the child described.

Her journey had been long, and her experience deep… Her story was overwhelming… In just one year, this child's innocent soul, life-embracing and curious, had lost all innocence… Her papers had been forged… She had been coerced and tortured into marriage… She had been kidnapped, snatched away from her father who had been forced by adversity to grant his daughter’s custody over to his sister…as he searched for a sustaining livelihood… The girl had been through enough alienation, oppression and violation, that she had become dreamy-eyed, as though searching for an unknown haven to rest in.

She did not cry when detailing the hurtful story… More unnerving was that the wounds inflicted had robbed her from her childhood and left no place for reserve… The child recounted the rape in minute detail in the presence of her father, who was sorrow-riddled as he stroked his dignified white beard…saying that what had happened was a heinous crime committed against his daughter…confirming that he stood by her right.

"Um El Kheyr" is ten years old… Her father, Sayed Muhammad Ould EL Tijani, 42, is a travelling salesman… He says about the experience: "Last year, the mother of my daughter passed away… It was then that I decided to take her to the eastern states, to my sister in Nouakchott, the capital, so that she would supervise her education and upbringing…

But my sister Maymuna, he adds, had a different point of view. She took the girl to Saudi Arabia without my knowing it… to where her son and daughter lived. She took the child along with her daughter whom a Saudi had married and asked for her… So, there, in Saudi Arabia, was my little child, living with my sister's son, and my sister's daughter and her husband. The man would often take his new wife to a hotel, spending there most of the time, and my little child, who was not a day older than ten, would be left alone with her 25-year-old cousin… One day, the young man found himself alone with my sleeping daughter… He raped her, and there was no one to keep him from committing this evil act…"

Um El Kheyr interjects saying: "My cousin "Abd El Lateef" raped me in Saudi Arabia when we were all alone in the house… We would never usually be in the same room, but my married cousin [his sister] was not around… Afterwards, I tried to call my father, but I couldn't."

According to her father, he had received a call in Nouakchott from the father of the young man who had raped the child, telling him that he wanted them married… Um El Kheyr's father recalls: "I wasn't aware then about the rape…and I had actually agreed to the marriage, but I didn't believe that he meant then and there, I had thought that he wanted them promised to each other… I told him that the procuration should be in the hands of an honest person. He promised to contact two of my cousins in whom I trusted, for me to vest them the authority of overseeing my daughter's marriage at the time they see that she has become eligible to do so… When he was hours late to call me back, I contacted him that very same evening… I asked him what had happened concerning our conversation, and he said that what we had talked about was done and over with, that the marriage was contracted… I yelled at him, asking him who had given him permission to marry my daughter to his son, and where were the people whom we had agreed would be granted the authority over my daughter… He hung up on me, and since then he would not take my calls, and would arrange to be in Nouakchott only when I am in the central states."

As for the child, she comments the rape and marriage that had happened successively, saying: "After my cousin raped me, he told me that he had done that because he would marry me… So, I told him, and I told everyone, that I will not get married, that I did not want to get married, that I did not want to get married to that person in particular… But my opinion did not matter at all."

According to data from the "Mauritanian Housewives' League", the groom returned to the country with his young bride, who still played with children and loved candy… and had a hard time dealing with all that had happened… Her father was not contacted to tell him the news, and she did not know that he was in the capital where she had arrived, but thought that he was roaming the central states, trading as usual… In a matter of days, he found out, and his sons-in-law visited him, accompanied by the child… This visit only lasted ten minutes, during which the father asked his daughter why she had not called to say that she was coming… She told him that she did not know that he was in the capital, and that she did not have a phone to call him… So, he gave her one that he owned, and told her to call him often… He said that he had done it because he did not want to get into a fight with a young man of twenty-five, that he blamed his brother-in-law for what had befallen his daughter… and that with him alone, would he discuss the matter.

The child's husband would not talk to us, since, according to him, he saw no need to… But the divorce certificate he sent one day after a call made by her father, reveal part of his perspective on the subject… The certificate stated: "In the name of Allah, the all Merciful the all Compassionate and His prophet, peace be upon him. This is a letter of divorce…

I, Mr. "Abd El Lateef son of…" hereby bear witness in front of Allah, His prophet, and those who believe in Him, that I have divorced Um EL Kheyr, daughter of Sayed Muhammad, a triple divorce, due to the bad company of her parents, and the hypocrisy of their treatment, as Allah is witness to my words… Signed by the husband… Date: 14 March 2008."

The girl's father told Sahara Media that the scars due to torture were evident of his daughter's back, as she was, allegedly, whipped by the husband and his brother.

"My husband tortured me with a whip, after my uncle came to advise him against mistreating me and my father, and told him that keeping me from contacting my father was unacceptable… He and his brother threatened my uncle with a knife… They tortured me and humiliated my father."

The Child Hamza: My Brother Hung me on the Ceiling…

And Branded my Body with Searing Metal…

(Translated from Arabic)

Thursday, 31 JULY 2008

Al Rabih Ould Edum - Nouakchott

He is ten years old… A child like all other children in the world… He has the right to play, to have fun, go to school, and to learn… He has the right to learn new languages and go to parks… But as fate would have it, another life awaited him… a life that was anything but what it should have been.

This child who had dropped out of school some time ago… is caught between those people living around him and those who have a negative influence on the quality of his life.

His name is "Hamza Ould Kaynu", he was born in 1998. His mother, Aysha daughter of EL Mukhtar, 35, is a travelling ice-cream saleswoman… and his father, Kaynu Ould Amaran, 60, a porter… Hamza's family lives in the capital Nouakchott.

His elderly father lives on the sidelines… He does not understand modern times at all… He does not even hold an ID… His poor mother dreams of a brilliant future for her son, but all she can offer is what little money she makes and that barely covers the daily expenses of feeding her family. Life had been harsh, and she had been compelled to sell the cold drinks "Bisam"… His older half brothers are in no way role models for him; one had died serving time in jail, and the other has just been released… His two sisters are married, toiling through life with their prince charming.

Life had not been kind to three other brothers; it had dealt them poverty, crises, sickness and inadequate living conditions… They had passed away, and death seemed more merciful than carrying on in this losing struggle for decent living.

He has had a rough life, this shy young fellow… It would stir your emotions to see him walking barefoot in the streets of the capital.

His father had two children before marrying his mother… According to the mother, he had not raised them properly… So, they had grown up on the street, and acquired a violent and delinquent way of life…

His new wife gave birth to two girls, who in turn got married and moved out from the family home… She also gave him two sons, Muhammad, 11… and Hamza, 10.

Hamza's two brothers were jailed for committing crimes… One had died serving time last year (2007)… The other survived and was released, only to be interned again after two months… promising to change his life for the better… and swearing that he repented.

After a while, "Daoud" asked his step-mother to leave the two children in his custody, so he would teach them a trade that would do them good in this life and in the hereafter… He took them with him to where he lived, and got them started in car repair… The mother did not object to her sons going into this line of business, even though she had wanted them to go to school, she was illiterate and had wanted her sons to get and education.

Hamza was opposed to working in a garage… and told his brother firmly that he will not go into this business… That earned him punishment, in the eyes of his elder brother, and this punishment almost cost him his life… His brother had tortured him until he was on the brink of death.

His mother presented the case to the Prosecutor General at the Palace of Justice in the capital Nouakchott… She filed a complaint to the police… She contacted the media to draw people's attention to her struggle.

Today, Hamza's mother is with her sister… She cannot afford the 1500 ouguiya (USD 7) needed to get her son examined, and find out if his bones are broken or fractured… She cannot even afford the taxi fare… to travel… Her last few ouguiyas were spent on medicine for the child… She is now caught in a vicious circle… But she has faith in Allah; He does not forget those who worship Him.

Her husband stood by his son, she confirms… He told her that he was her son too even if she had not given birth to him… that filing a complaint against him was unacceptable… To this she answered that evil should not be harbored against others, the truth should be declared in public, and those with just claim should defend their right… He got angry with her… They have not reconciled yet.

"A month ago, my brother "Daoud Ould Kaynu" took me away from my mother to a garage owner in "Ksar" named "Obeid" to teach me to become a mechanic, but I would often skip going to work, so he started hitting me because of that… But I told him that I did not want to become a mechanic and that I will return to the "mahzara" (Quranic School)... So, he finally accepted to do as I asked.

The very same day he took me to the "Mina" market to buy some food items and carry them to the house of his "nephew", but I did not wait for him… I went to my mother's house is "Casablanca". When he returned to his house, he took me by the hand and led me to a remote place next to pole 6 in the "Mendez" neighborhood (a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Nouakchott). He made me go inside a dark house and he closed to door. He went in after me carrying some rope. He then gagged me, took some charcoal and started a fire. He placed a nail in it and waited for it to become red hot, and started searing me, all over my body."

The child, who seemed shaken by the memories of physical and psychological torture, added:

"No one heard me screaming, because he had gagged me. As I was about to lose consciousness, he took some rope and he tied it around my hands and feet, and hung me on a beam in the ceiling of the house. He took a whip and beat me repeatedly. He left me a whole day in that place. Then in the evening, he untied me and ordered me to go to the "Souk Al Maghreb" to fix my brother's bicycle. I took the opportunity to go to my mother's house. I told her the story and showed her the scars of torture on my body… She cried and cried because of what had happened to me… Around the time of Evening Prayer, he came to my mother and told her that he was taking me away with him… She refused… He tried to snatch me away from her, but after some neighbors appeared he left our house. My mother reported the incident to the police… I am terrified; I expect to be tortured again by my brother…"

In the past 10 years, the AUC has abducted more than 1,000 people – several of whom have disappeared.

(Translated from Spanish) 

RAÚL ALEJANDRO RIAÑO RUBIANO, a cadastral engineering student at the District University who worked with his family's cargo transport company, was kidnapped by the AUC (Colombian United Self-Defense Groups) on 25 August 2005 at the corner of 30^th Street and Primero de Mayo Avenue in Bogotá. At that time, the paramilitaries had already declared a cessation of hostilities.

Rubiano was 25 when he was abducted. His family received news from him one month later when an uncle got a phone call. The hoarse voice on the other end told him:  "Raul says hello and to please do everything you can to put together 5 billion pesos to give to them. For now, we are asking for a 50 million peso advance to send you proof of life and to keep him alive."

Raul's sister, Sandra Riaño, tells the story. His family always feared the guerrillas because the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) came calling in 2000 to extort them. "They never did it again and we were at ease," she says. "Imagine our surprise when we learned that the kidnappers were from the paramilitaries!" They notified the Gaula (Unified Action Groups to Rescue Kidnap Victims) to ask for support and a few days after the phone call, they got an ID and some documents as proof of life. "The police told us that the calls came from Villavicencio," Sandra said as she gazed at her brother's most recent photo. "In Villavicencio they found the black pickup truck that he was driving the day they took him – which led them to think that this could have been the work of the Centauros (paramilitary) bloc, which did not demobilize. But we didn't rule out another bloc. The problem is that they haven't called back."

Since then, the Riaño family knows nothing about Raúl. Still, despite the captors' silence, Sandra is not losing faith. The same cannot be said of his mother, Carmenza Rubiano, who could not endure her son's kidnapping and died on 18 February 2007. "My mom began to deteriorate, her defenses were all down and that sped up her pulmonary hypertension," Sandra says. "Before dying she told us that she felt Raul was dead, that she would not see him again and that there was no use fighting anymore."

Sandra had posters and T-shirts made with her brother's picture and name for a 6 March demonstration against the paramilitaries and in tribute to their victims. "I hope that my case will at least resonate in the hearts of the kidnappers," she said. "Even though we're not prepared for the worst – to receive a body – we need a signal that he's alive...or dead."

On 27 July 2001, men from the AUC operating under the command of "Gato" summoned several residents of Cabuyaro (Meta Department) to a meeting at a farm on the La Embajada trail. The residents were to arrive on the 28^th at 8:00 a.m. Wiliam Hernando Murad Sánchez – a 51 year-old municipal employee with two sons – was among those summoned. His wife Leonor remembers that he was very pensive that night:  "William told me:  'He who owes nothing fears nothing; it'll be worse if I don't go because they'll come for me." That is why he got up early, took his daughter's bicycle and headed for the appointment at the farm that the paramilitaries had seized months ago and which they used as a base. He was the only resident of Cabuyaro who decided to go to the meeting.

His relatives say that they asked around and were told that nobody heard screams or gunshots and that there was no torture on the farm. Since then, his mother and sister joined the search. They met with AUC bosses from the region, including Gato. He told them:  "We didn't summon anyone around here; don't ask about him."

But the two women continued asking from farm to farm and then went to the police, who refused to go to the site. William's sister, Aydée, recalls that "the only lead we have is the testimony of Emilio – the owner of the farm. He told us that William left there alive; that they kept him at night and gave him food, and then Gato took him to the school and also held him there." William's mother, Teresa, interrupts to add a detail to the story:  "Don Emilio said that Gato kept my son's watch."

The two women believe that William was kidnapped. For that reason, they hope that the depositions of paramilitary bosses who have laid down their arms will provide some clues. "We know who he went to, but it's going to be seven years and they still haven't returned him," Aydée says. "As an attorney, I have gone through all the possible legal channels but nobody tells me anything," she says. Even more serious, Teresa got a phone call at her home in Bogotá:  "They told me not to go back there and to stop asking so many questions, then they hung up." The search has been suspended since then.

Meantime, rumors were circulating in Cabuyaro that William was "departed" and that he had been thrown into a lagoon full of piranhas. Still, Aydée pays that no mind and continues waiting for the conclusions of the Prosecutor General's report. "As long as there is no body, he is not dead," she says. The sister adds:  "I'm going to fight this battle; especially because I have dreams about him and he tells me:  'You idiot! Why aren't you doing anything for me? Why aren't you looking for me?'"

On 11 May 2002, two men and one woman from the AUC took Pedro Octavio Franco Bernal – a 36 year-old father of two sons – off a bus belonging to the Macarena bus line that was traveling from Bogotá to Vistahermosa, where he worked as a technician for the Agriculture Secretariat. His mother, Marina, says:  "They took him and they still have not called." "I say he's kidnapped because I see no other motive; but I got a message that they held him for some time, killed him, and threw his body in the Lagoon of the Dead – there in San Juan de Arama. The people at País Libre insist that he could have disappeared because there hasn't been a single phone call in six years."

There are many more stories like those involving Raúl, William, and Octavio; but relatives do not disclose their names out of fear. The wife of a businessman told Cambio magazine:  "We paid the ransom and they already told us he's dead." "They haven't given us the body," she added. Another victim said:  "Some people from the Central Bolivar bloc kidnapped one of our uncles. They asked for the farm and two apartments that we were renting out. Who could stand up to them?"

Kidnapping is, in general, associated with guerrillas; but according to the National Fund for Personal Freedom (Fondelibertad), which compiles kidnapping statistics from intelligence agencies, the AUC abducted 1,163 people between 1996 and 2996.

The AUC, then, are not only guilty of murder, massacres, forced disappearances, atrocities, displacements, and seizure of land; they are also guilty of kidnapping for extortion, for political reasons, or to extract favors from relatives of their victims. Even for purposes of forced recruitment of children – 99 in the past 10 years, according to authorities – and for sexual exploitation.  

One of the most publicized political kidnapping cases was that of Victor Ochoa Daza, a political leader from Cesar Department.  In February of 2007, he testified before the Colombian Supreme Court that he was abducted by Jorge 40 in January 2002 as part of a strategy to change the regional electoral map. According to Ochoa, Senator Alvaro Araujo – currently under arrest for suspected ties to the paramilitaries – instigated the plot. "My 80 days in captivity were part of that deal with the Devil that made Alvarito Araujo into the foremost electoral force in Cesar," Ochoa said. He was kidnapped on 13 January 2002 as he was inspecting his farms. The Prosecutor General subsequently dropped the kidnapping charges against Senator Araujo.

Ochoa recalls that it was 8:30 a.m. when a member of an armed group stepped out in front of him and told him:  "I have to take you; orders from the 40^th Command." Danilo, the first man responsible for his captivity, warned him to prepare for a long stay. "This is a political matter and you probably already know that the 40^th Command does not back down from anything," he told him. At that moment, Ochoa recalled that on 3 January, Jorge 40 had forced the leadership of the Valledupar City Council to resign and that his men had spread the story that the list of Congressional hopefuls would require his blessing.

This story touched off a scandal that led to the resignation of then Foreign Minister Maria Consuelo Araujo, sister of the senator, today under house arrest, and daughter of Alvaro Araujo Noguera – a fugitive from justice in connection with the same case.

Salvatore Mancuso admitted to other kidnappings in a deposition:  those of Leonor Palmera -- sister of Simon Trinidad – taken hostage between 1996 and 1997, Hilda Rodriguez – sister of Nicolas Rodriguez Bautista (AKA "Gabino"), head of the Army of National Liberation (ELN), and who was abducted with her husband Libardo Acevedo in 1997 and subsequently killed together with him, and of Senators Zulema Jattin and Juan Manuel Lopez Cabrales, kidnapped in 2000.

Colombians also remember the kidnappings of Senator Piedad Cordoba on 21 May 1999 in Medellín under orders of Carlos Castaño. The senator was freed in Necoclí on 4 June 1999. Similarly, former Senator Jorge Eduardo Gnecco was taken hostage in Magdalena Department by the Northern bloc on 27 June 2004 and released three days later because the case jeopardized the AUC demobilization process.

The only public kidnapping for extortion was that of Venezuelan Richard Boulton, son of aviation executive Henry Boulton. The younger Boulton was abducted on 15 July 2000 and freed in 2002 following the payment of a USD 4 million ransom.

Until now, few have been able to tell their tale, because as Mancuso coldly told a prosecutor from the Peace and Justice Commission in Medellín in January 2007, "we didn't keep hostages. Most of those held were taken out." He justified the killings with the argument that the victims were guerrillas or aided the guerrillas. The truth will never be known.

And where are the rest – which, according to Fondelibertad total 254? Fondelibertad Director Harlan Andres Henao says:  "It is not known if they died or if they are somewhere (alive)." That answer does not please the relatives who will not rest until they know the fate of their loved ones. If they are alive, they want them returned. If they are dead, they want to be told where the bodies are to bury them and mourn.

Henao is confident that the Justice and Peace Law will help ascertain the truth about those who have been kidnapped and/or disappeared, and that testimony will provide some clues. And that has been the case:  until now, demobilized bosses have confessed to 39 kidnappings. It is still necessary to check whether the names coincide with those on Pais Libre's and Fondelibertad's list of 254.

Most of the abductions took place in areas marked by heavy paramilitary presence. Authorities say that the numbers may be underreported, because for every case that is publicized, it is estimated that two never are. Gaula managed to rescue 187 of the 1,163 hostages. Thirteen captives escaped, and 129 families received a body – in some cases after paying a ransom.

According to the País Libre Foundation, "there was negligence during the demobilizations when it came time to ask about those hostages." Mancuso himself acknowledged in an interview with transitional justice expert Natalia Springer that he never checked on the situation of the more than 550 individuals – according to him – who are registered as "kidnapped by the self-defense groups."

Nevertheless, little is mentioned in Colombia about those abducted by the AUC. Most families keep silent out of fear that they will be identified as having links to the guerrillas or that they will suffer retaliation from members of that armed organization. The sister of a hostage missing for nine years and who waits to at least be told where the body is, tells Cambio:  "In this country, they stigmatize people like us who have somebody abducted by the paramilitaries." "We know who took him and why, but at this point we do not know why they haven't returned him," she adds.

She blames the Northern bloc of the self-defense groups, which is under the command of Rodrigo Tovar (AKA "Jorge 40") and warns:  "Regrettably, we have had to feel the silent commentary that if they took him it was because he owed them something; there is a certain complicity with the paramilitaries on the part of society."

Olga Lucía Gómez asserts:  "There cannot be top-tier and second-tier victims. Kidnapping is despicable, regardless of who perpetrates it. Our concern is for all the hostages – of the guerrillas and of the paramilitaries – so that the situation of those families who don't know what to expect can be resolved."

The Office of the Prosecutor General has registered 306 reported victims of kidnapping by the AUC; 113 of whom are being held for ransom. According to investigators, it will be difficult to find any of them alive because demobilized paramilitary chiefs have, in testimony, confessed to having killed those who were "retained." For example, Freddy Rendon (AKA "El Alemán"), former head of the Élmer Cárdenas bloc, admitted that Jorge Yabur Espitia and his brother Rodolfo were abducted and killed in Dabeiba (Antioquia Department) on 29 April 2005.

Juan Francisco Prada Márquez (AKA "Juancho Prada") former AUC boss in southern Cesar Department, revealed that his men kidnapped and murdered former Administrative Department of Security (DAS) agent Henry Ancízar Vanegas on 16 December 1994. One of Prada's men disposed of the body.

Arley Hernando Benítez, a demobilized member of the Cacique Nutibara bloc, recounted that the order was to kill those who had been kidnapped. He added that Hernán Eusebio Tovar and Joana Janeth Mosquera were kidnapped in San Félix and El Bosque near Medellín and that the order was that the two be executed.

I see people now as strange. If this is heaven, which kind of heaven am I in? Because I ran away from heaven. I ran away from my life.

Let me ask you, in your country, the person when he died in the street, nobody cared about him? In your country, the people die because they carry a hundred dollars? In your country, a person is killed because you have a good car? Or because you are a manager? A doctor? Or because you are happy? Happy in your life? In my country, you don’t know who your friend is; you don’t know who your enemy is. You walk in the street and you don’t know what time you will die and for what reason? Every morning we start our day, we go to work and we say goodbye to our family and we leave the house and they are sure, the family is sure that you may not come back. And so they say «be careful». Everyday they remind you to be careful. The problem is you don’t know - be careful from what? Your friend is dead. One call and your friend is dead. Is this possible in your country? Your friend is dead, your cousin is kidnapped, and they say you or your neighbor is a spy. Your friend is dead. For me this day is finished. Do you know the first time I heard my friend, a friend is dead? How many times alone, I stayed alone? I try to forget, the people around me say this is normal, people here die everyday. But there is a first time, a first friend and for me this is the first person I know he is dead. It takes me three days, after three days, I come back to the life again. I come back to the life because my area has been attacked. The area where I work and live has been attacked. I want to see, to see what happened, I go to work to see what happened to the people I know. To the people I knew. No day is the same from the other.

They took Ahmed today. I watched, he cried, I stood and watched. I stood against my car and I watched. People come and go and I don’t know what to do. Maybe they think I know him, this is dangerous, but for me he is a normal person. I don’t know why they took him. I’m just looking. I want to hear something, some reason. I keep looking at his store - they come out, men with guns - he’s a man and they carry him like a baby. They throw him like a plastic bag into their car.

He cries to anyone who will listen, but no one listens. His eyes are locked onto me. I don’t know how much time passes. Time is not important. They took Ahmed today. The day finished, the next day, they find him, they find the body of Ahmed in the morgue. Ahmed was 25 years old, not married. He worked in the market to make good money, to marry; he had a dream to have a house, a family. For three days, the market is quiet; nobody has a mind to work because we don’t know who is next. That’s what happened one time.

Freedom, we cannot change any letter from this word. Now I sleep with­out fear, now I sleep like a normal person. I’m not scared, no one will come and break my door to steal from me or kill me with my family for no reason. The police won’t come to catch me or my neighbor to gather us together, to question you or to take you. So I can sleep. I close the door and I take off my clothes, and I sleep naked. I smile because I feel light. It’s a nice feeling, I didn’t feel it before.

I stand in front of a red brick immigration building in Stockholm, Swe­den. I’m wearing all of the clothes that I brought to heaven, I shaved. What do I tell them? Who am I? What will happen to me when I go inside this building? Who will I be? Or what, to them?

I know my truth, but how many times have they heard the truth from thousands before me and not believed them. What truth are they looking for? All I know to be true is that my life was no life but I am not alone in this.

I follow a woman from immigration to a storage closet of mattresses, blankets, pillows, some clothes (second hand), shoes, she hands me a blanket and pillow and a blue plastic bag. I still have this blue plastic bag. Somewhere under a bed you’ll find this bag, it’s the first sign, first mark that we are refugees, that we are strangers. I don’t know why no one throws it away, they keep it, it’s a memory, a first memory of living outside of your country. Something changed, my life changed when I accepted this blue plastic bag.

We Iraqis, we are foreigners in our own country and now we are foreign­ers in exile.

In my room in the refugee camp there is Hussein who is a Kurd from Baghdad, who refuses to say he’s Kurdish, he says, «I’m Arab». To the Swedish, he’s an Arab. Hussein cannot speak Kurdish well and his ac­cent in Arabic is not good either. If he speaks with Arabs, they think he’s Kurdish and if he speaks with the Kurdish, they think he’s an Arab. He lost who he was somewhere along the road to Sweden, maybe we all have.

In Iraq you can’t save yourself, you can’t save your son, so you send them away. You cannot save your child. In my own family, my cousin’s 12 year-old daughter slept alongside her parents, on the roof one unbear­ably hot summer night to escape the heat of Baghdad. There was no elec­tricity, no air downstairs so the family slept on the roof. In the summer, you sleep on the roof or in the garden. This is what we do. On this night, a bullet came from the sky and found a place to settle deep inside her skull. The little girl made a sound, they say like a cat and the family woke. They woke to check on her and this sound. Blood stained her face. She made no more sounds. Her family carried her down the stairs to the car and drove to the nearest hospital. At first, they thought the blood was coming from her nose, they didn’t know at first that there is a bullet in her head. At the hospital, her head was shaved and they find a hole in her head. She died within two hours. Before one day, she told her mother, «If I die, give the people Pepsi and bananas». During the three days of mourning, our tradition in Iraq, we make lunch and dinner for the people. During these three days, food was prepared and her mother served Pepsi and bananas. Why she died, we don’t know. A bullet came from the sky.

Do you know loss? Loss that takes everything, every sense is assaulted, everyone is a victim, do we ask to be victims? No, we ask for our lives. It’s no simple matter to leave your country, to leave your life, your family and friends. We are Iraqis, we are proud of being Iraqi, we don’t leave our families, we don’t give our families to stay alone without us. Now, if we stay, our families are more in danger, more in danger if we stay than if we run away. This is how we keep them safe.

In your country, are the police kidnappers and kidnapper’s police? In your country, when you see a man in a police uniform, driving a police car and there’s a checkpoint, a police checkpoint and you stop, you stop for the police does it ever occur to you that you’ll be kidnapped? That the police aren’t the police, aren’t who you believe they are? That the police in your country, are the kidnap- pers, aren’t who you think they are, will never be who you think they are, never to you, never again? You’ll never trust a uniform, never trust your neighbor, never trust your country, that it will keep you safe, know that it can’t keep you safe. Where do you go from there, knowing this? Living this? Where do you begin again, can you begin again, can you trust again or will it be in the back of your mind? For how long? When will we have back our country? Our lives? Our families?

At some point, we all run, you too would run. Maybe you would run before the troubles, or after they’ve broken, your body or you learn to live in fear and you wait. You wait inside your home behind locked doors and drawn curtains and dim candlelight, you wait in the heat, a murderous heat. You listen to each sound outside your door, each whisper can throw you in panic. We spend a lot of time learning our sounds, we memorize sounds. The sound that the front door makes or a car door, how one drags their feet or searches for their keys. We know the sounds of our own footsteps, how each one approaches the home. The women of the house know these footsteps. Your never late to come home. If your late they watch the door for some sign they recognize pulled from the endless days they wait by the door. Then they cry, they cry because they know you won’t be coming home. Our women they know these things. Hold these images. But now do you understand, now do you begin to see, there is no safe side, no one is who they say they are. Once we were normal. Remember, once we were normal. I too was normal, I’m not sure anymore.

I’m from Baghdad, I was. I believe in the Holy Koran, which says, If you don’t feel or you don’t find your life in this ground go to search for your life on another ground. When your country doesn’t want you anymore, why should you want her? In my country, I saw death too many times to face her again. I faced my own death as I lay bound hand and foot in the truck of a car. I was scared, I tell you, I’m still scared. So, I ran.

April 28, 2007. I was kidnapped today. Eat. Sleep. Wait. This is my life, my new life. I watch others watch TV. I watch others watch me. The television sits in the middle of the apartment. It’s always on. We stopped talking with one another, the television speaks between us. It speaks for us. We watch the news of Iraq as if we are in a theatre, an audience sitting quietly with no attachment to what they see before them. Life in a camp, a refugee camp is boring. There is money, but not enough to do more than feed you. We receive money every month. In another country, the money would go farther. In another country, one could go farther. But here in Sweden, I live in a country, which for Europeans is expensive but what about for a refugee? I cannot take a bus to the next town less than 30 kilo- metres away, it is too expensive to travel. I cannot buy bread in the local supermarket, it’s too expensive. So, we bake our bread and we smoke cigarettes from an Arabic shop nearby where a pack is less than half the money than in a Swedish store. I am not complaining, I have no right to complain. I only wonder, what life will I find here in a country that is too expensive for Europeans and impossibly expensive for me and others like me. You see, the last four months, I have not moved from within a one kilometre circle and I have walked this same circle daily, to change the air I breathe. But the Swedish do not speak to us, they have seen enough of us pass through their small town. The others have been here longer than I. The others eyes are out of focus, they stopped going to Swedish classes long ago, they never go outside except once a month to a local disco where they stand on the edge of the dance floor and look at the blonde haired Swedish girls who they know will never speak with them. You learn this quick here that if you have black hair, the locals do not talk with you, it is that simple. Everything’s simple really, black and white. We are black, they are white, our hair is black, theirs is white.

Imagine I’ve come from a prison and now I’ve found that I didn’t escape the prison, I’ve only moved into another room in the prison without my knowing it at first. Each day, my mind narrows, each day I watch the others around me and see their blank faces, they lost their expression months ago; they have been here to long. Here too long without family, without something familiar to hold to, it’s become too expensive to call home to Iraq, we lose a lot of money on the telephone. We lose a lot on the telephone. Boredom deadens you; it has deadened those around me.

I am sure one day it will deaden me. Everything is strange to me here, everything. Every street, the language, the people how they look and act, how they react to me. I see people now as strange.

Where do I begin? Every time I face the West, I find myself facing my own self ... upon my first encounter with Western literature as a teenager, I created a heroine who lived in a cor­ner of my soul, a heroine who was a collage of all the heroines I had met upon the pages of books, with unique characteristics from all the female protagonists from the Western novels I read. I don’t know when I made her, nor where, nor why, but she contained all the coincidental mistakes, games and fears of an adolescent who dreamt of a far-away, unattainable world. I don’t know why my mind has not glazed over the details, and on winter nights in Berlin a month ago, the thought would cross my shivering mind that I was going to meet her, perhaps in a dark bar, or a nearby restaurant, or even at a café, and in the dim lights I would feel the fantasy transformed into a cold, cruel, loneliness, and feel that a childish entertainment that had popped up in my imagination while I read had transfor­med my life into something of a sorry mess, exiling my great hopes into nothingness, not because I will never find that woman, but because I haven’t found the place where I wanted her to be.

This woman is more responsible for my upbringing than the environment I grew up in. She is the one who’s always watching me and critiquing my behavior, and I see her at all times standing in front of me picking out my clothes, helping to brush my hair and making me into someone different. This difference, perhaps this difference alone, has led me to feel this oppressive misery, and to escape from many of the questions that confront me about my own identity.

This is not because my behavior, life or thoughts developed in an environment totally different from the one I found myself in, and belong to the long-lasting hours of reading and dreams rather than the reali­ty that I existed in, but it’s that I found myself after a while participating in creating a history that exi­sted despite my wishes, having to belong to a society where I was already a stranger and an exile. I had dreamt of a place that would change and become one of the most civilized and developed of the world’s metropolises, stable and unchanging, and I find myself here in this place that is constantly agitated, and I must carry a weapon, be a soldier and fight, I must be a part of a society that I was always escaping from into books, hours of reading and dreaming of a woman who was simultaneously there and not there.

Baghdad collapsed a long time ago, ceasing to be a global center, but its wounded narcissism caused this country to create perceptions of itself that far transcended reality. This desolate place, which used to be a center of a world that stretched all the way to the Great Wall of China, has succeeded in attracting the world’s attention once again. The fact that it has found itself in a position that doesn’t match with its historical role has created an adolescent who breaks plates just to gain others’ sym­pathy, and made him stray on the streets committing destructive acts. This is perhaps one way to see this unceasing movement, this constantly moving soul that rushes through Iraqis at a dizzying speed: it is a kind of feeling of being in the wrong place, a feeling of the collapse of an old empire and the sorrow resulting from great poverty and destruction. I was looking out from the river onto this city that is rotting in its darkness and gardens and buildings fading from dirt and rust and filth, thinking to myself again and again how unfair it was for me to be in this place, and to live in this corner of the world, in this patch that breathes destruction and is being destroyed by its sadness and feelings of marginalization, insisting on remaining buried under the ashes. I wondered about this fate that never changes, about this fate that makes me be like this in this place, feeling just a little angry and rather worried when I read, shuddering, about incredibly beautiful and wealthy capitals, or about Baghdad when it was the unmatched metropolis of the world beaming its rays of science and literature across the world, unstoppable.

A real mental confusion has occurred in Iraq as the result of the revolutions, hesitations, break-ups, and splits. It is the desperation of a murderer who no longer has any hope of receiving a logical trial, since politics is the only yardstick; an option of resentment, cruelty and hatred that has imposed degenerate values upon a society that no longer distinguishes between the ethics of politicians or gangs. It has imposed breakdowns and unending abuse as well as confrontations ruled by nothing except the deification of chaos, irrationality and perversity. It has imposed an incredible reverence for the forces of instinct and mysterious blood. Saddam Hussein was a my­sterious current toyed with by the spirit of revenge and violence and brilliant cunning, and his insanity could only be materialized through the picture of the eternal enemy, first the commu­nists, then the Iranians and after that, the Westerners. Iraq as an existing nation and entity was only defined through its enemies, which is how he changed it into a vessel that moved without caring where it was going, a blind force that rolled about aimlessly before collapsing into the abyss of certain destruction, a force of insane speed. The west was pushing it into battle after bat­tle, from invasion to invasion, in order to create the empire of malice and opportunistic masses who would go on to eat up the nation, the nation, the future and the past, leading to this massive distortion of reason, this madness, and unlimited violence and ceaseless, unstoppable, motion.

Life became, not recently, but a long time ago, rather Dostoyevskian in its harshness, reminding me of an event that has remained in my mind from a while back whenever I see the scenes of terror, damage and destruction in Baghdad: Saddam Hussein mentioned three times that he had read Dostoyevsky as a young man, claiming that he had read him while spending time in prison in the 1960s. I didn’t know then whether or not Saddam Hussein had loved Dostoyevsky’s characters and spaces. The only time I saw him was when I was awarded the badge of courage following the Basra battles against the Iranians. Fate alone allowed me to see him up there, his tanned face infused with a specific shade of yellow. I was not a hero, and was more interested in the enormous bookshelf behind him than in the person himself. The shelf was stacked with numerous magazines, and my eyes kept returning to an expensive red leather-bound volume until I made out with some difficulty the name Dostoyevsky on the spine. The name was a key, and after the ceremony, I went to the Semiramis Bar on Sa’adoun street with a friend of mine for a beer and a chat, and there I wondered whether Saddam Hussein was so passionate about Dostoyevsky’s characters that he wanted to create fates for the Iraqi people si­milar to those of the great Russian author, this brutality mixed with a special tinge of cruelty, and an attraction to everything violent and crazy which gave the Iraqis the same excessive emotional range as Dostoyevsky’s characters. An unbounded propensity for extreme hatred, and love that leads them to dumb submission. Upon following it, one finds a resemblance between the narrative of Saddam and his victims and Dostoyevsky’s plots, he leaves them to their own choices, submitting them to humiliation and insults in utter sadism and cruelty, sparing them only to be able to chase them down again later, or else exterminating them ruthlessly only to cry passionately over them afterwards. Even as Saddam stood at the gallows a few months back, I recalled the scene that Dostoyevsky had written of his fake execution.

I stood there, unable to explain this extremism of rancor, malice and hatred, sometimes unable to explain this terrible cruelty without finding it in the past, or in the Islamic heritage of state-formation. But this extremism is also present in the Western nation-state model, and modern Iraqi culture was very much influenced by Western culture... It is true that there was a tangible slide into an Islamic-influenced state with the rise in ethnocentrism, sectarianism and tribalism which stunted social-class formation and led to the creation of power legacies and a regime which used the military as a crutch and distributed rank and privilege to its entourage, but the Western model was always present for in­tellectuals, politicians, the educated elite, artisans and the Baghdad middle classes; thus you find that politicians attempted to emulate western models of forced integration, such as the Bismarck model, and intellectuals tried to imitate Western cultural models in all their phases. The Bismarck model’s failure to produce a nation was doubly painful for Iraqi intellectuals; on one side, there were constant accusations of betrayal of their nation and on the other there was a particularly strong attraction to Western culture dictated by the historical position of the West and its culture. You are aware that the first conception of an intellectual was developed in Baghdad during the Abbasid reign, a model that the West only developed in the modern period. However, Islam in its imperial context proved incapa­ble of melding the philosopher-intellectual, poet, author, historian and critic with the man of the cloth, as happened during the Christian era in the west. Thus, the intellectual was doubly confronted caught between the preacher on one end and the sultan on the other.

Allow me to tell you about Bab Touma, the neighborhood I currently live in, in Damascus: Bab Touma is the Christian area of old Damascus, characterized by the ancient architecture of its buil­dings, its smells and its way of life. It is my favorite place in this area, and this isn’t due to the fact that my home looks like an ancient Roman convent, or to the fact that the place is Christian in an Eastern way. No, it’s - maybe - because it’s crowded with Europeans… Europeans enchanted by the East, as you described them in your letter. You can see them wandering around with their backpacks, wearing simple clothes, walking the streets day and night. This is a neighborhood of narrow, winding streets that intertwine; there are no straight roads, all the roads fold in upon each other in strange ways. These Europeans walk around these narrow winding streets as if they’re looking for something that they can’t find. They roam these labyrinthine streets constantly, and when they get tired they sit in one of the small bars that dot the place, bars that have no equal, since they are a bizarre mix of rowdy Eastern bars and dark European ones. To me, the thing that makes this neighborhood magical are those peo­ple who rent out small rooms in houses with large inner courtyards and fountains: Christian Syrians, refugee Iraqi artists, and Europeans who have come here to search for parts of themselves that they still have not discovered.

We Iraqi artists here in Damascus seek out Westerners naturally, and this is crucial - Easterners love Westerners more than the West, whereas Westerners prefer the East to Easterners. I said this to a Fren­ch friend of mine, who had asked me frankly why Arabs flocked to Pigale, Paris’ red-light district. As I drummed my fingers upon the table, I told her that Westerners like the East as a place, as desert, water, architecture, and ruins, wanting to forcibly remove the people who inhabit it. Westerners come to these places - I’m not saying “our” places - and don’t even glance at the people there. They stare impassively at the places where people live and at the people themselves with blank faces that become animated as they look at stones and ruins. They look to the left at an old building, and turn their heads right to look at another one, and erase those who inhabit them from their vision; or, they take folkloric pictures of these people - but these pictures are cold, sterile and ancient. On the other hand, Easterners are fascinated by Westerners, and because they can’t get to them personally, they take the easy route and interact with the West through Western women, which is why they crowd Pigale!

I am sure that those who come from Europe to Bab Touma are not after our oil, or seeking to oc­cupy our land - the our here is important, since we are talking about us and them. I don’t believe that people in general believe that they really own things on earth. The our and theirs is important as long as Europeans speak of culture and say our culture, and speak of modernity and say our mo­dernity. Even if we only witnessed Western modernity at the end of the 19th century as the Ottoman Empire weakened, you should know that the struggle over moderni­ty was bitter; brilliant intellectuals paid heavy tolls for it. An enthusiastic elite fought for what they saw as dignity and life, and were dragged into a bloody fight with the religious establishment and the political authorities. Some went to the gallows for this, feeling that a true enlightenment was coming from the West. But they were shocked by the second-rate treat­ment they received at the hands of Westerners, and the humiliation they were forced to bear. Did you know that the bloodiest revolt against colo­nialism in Iraq was not over petrol, but over dignity - the 1920 revolt in Iraq against the English, the largest in the colonies, took place because a British officer had slapped an Iraqi man held in high esteem by his family. I have never felt that I own something on this earth. What makes me oppose the West is not the petrol that we don’t own, and not the land that we don’t own either, but disappointment. The Iraqi intellectual is like the intellectual in your countries, feeling that culture has a role to play. Western culture, from Gramsci to Sartre, is planted in the heart of every Iraqi intellectual, and intellectuals here use the same discourse as intellectuals there: semio­tics, sign, image, simulacrum. Western culture is a treasure trove of ideas that intellectuals here plumb ceaselessly. Our intellectuals have entered a new era with the West, don’t think that the majority of them are still looking for something in Western culture: they know full well that the anthologies of the past have collapsed, and are gone for good, and that the return to re­ligion, or the Islamic awakening as you in Western newspapers call it, was caused by the West itself, which has really brought us up against a wall.

The Islamic movements in Iraq were supported, and sometimes even crea­ted, by the West to fight communism, and this has led to us being massacred with their swords these days. We paid a really hefty price because the West doesn’t want any genuine intellectuals in Iraq, and did not respect those who hungered for the spirit of independence, freedom and justice, since these values and principles did not coincide with interests of large corpo­rations. We were being shoved towards the West, which - as we imagined - was the source of reason and enlightenment, and these great humani­stic values naturally stoked our enthusiasm. But the Western support for Islamist movements, reactionary regimes and foul dictatorships gave our consciousnesses multiple personality disorder. Was the continent of reason - which is what we called Europe at the time - truly reasonable? We shouted as loudly as we could: Faust! Faust!

We were famished for the Faustian values, wanting to free our societies of the Holy and we wanted to liberate our societies with Justice and Law. But, on the other end, we came up against the Western wall, which was supporting all those movements that glorified the blood instinct, which murdered us with Western weapons. Our societies are experiencing so­mething akin to the terrifying explosion of the forgotten vows of history, and those of us who had lived a sort of cultural hybridity in Baghdad, due to the intermingling cultures and meanings, now have all developed multiple identities. And, what a disappointment it was when we found the continent of reason treating us despotically with extreme bigotry, showing only one face to us: either Saddam Hussein and stories of him blotting out an entire nation or the news of Islamists, who have become the true representatives of Iraq’s people, with their immensely rich and diverse culture. We - this latest generation of Iraqi intellectuals - realized after it was too late that the West does not want real intellectuals from this country, but what it really wants are servants and shoeshine boys. The war here, is a war of values, and as you see religion is invading Iraq, but don’t believe that Iraqis believe in absolute Truth. This is more a search for objective parameters to balance their lives, since some of the magic of the world they used to inhabit has gone. Iraqi intellectuals were sturdier, due to their sturdy relationships with their culture, but their relationship to Western culture distanced the magic of their culture and their surroundings. And this is why you can see, despite his high culture, the Iraqi intellectual has begun to suffer from a spiritual void. He lives in two separate minds, his present mind deprived of modernity and his other mind that is issued from the modern world - and, I wonder, how can this void be filled? Gilles Keppel’s statement that all Islamists want to get re­venge for their gods does not apply to them at all, but I believe that some of them - at least, some of the intellectuals I know - do not want to stand midway. In the beginning, there was a strong trend towards modernity, or a certain idiosyncratic type of modernity, and when they hit the Western wall, some decided to return to religion in its most primal form, which is impossible, since the world has totally changed. I am certain that they will soon come around.

Under-age and trafficked out of Iraq, girls as young as 11 and 12 are sold as dancers in nightclubs and casinos, virgin brides and as prostitutes to the illegal sex markets in The Gulf, Yemen, Jordan and Syria. Organized criminal networks operating in the sex trade further jeopardize the precarious financial state of Iraqis at home and living abroad.

When the body of her sister was dumped at the door of her Baghdad home, the life of Aishiq, changed forever. It was 2003, she was 12.

Prior to the war in Iraq, she lived with her mother, sister, and brother. The family lived in a simple two-room traditional Arabic style home in the eastern part of Baghdad. Her father died two years prior from natural causes. The loss of the head of household dealt an emotional & financial blow to the family. The future now uncertain, their home falling into disrepair, the remaining members of this small Shiite family moved from their Baghdad home to a $200 a month rental apartment in the holy city of Kerbala. Aishiq’s brother first found work as a day laborer in Kerbala and the family relied on the charity of Shiite and Sunni neighbors for any essentials not covered by the boy’s income. «After the death of my father we were very poor and even with my brother’s money it was not enough. We spent a lot of time without good food. My sister suffered from bad headaches, my mother begged neighbors to feed us.» Financial struggles and stress complicated the mother’s health, dying one day of heart failure while praying in the Imam Hussein Ibn Ali’s mosque in Kerbala. The three siblings, without parents, managed to survive on the sole income of the son. With the aftermath of the war in Iraq, Aishiq’s brother found new work. It is one of the most dangerous civilian jobs in one of the world’s most dangerous countries: translating Arabic for the U.S. military in Iraq. Late one night, Aishiq found the body of her brother, shot in the chest, slumped against the door of their family home, murdered by Wahabeen (foreigners). «There was a noise at the door, I opened it and found my brother shot in his chest. His eyes were open, I closed them.»

Her sister would shortly suffer a similar fate. First beaten, raped, then murdered, the body dumped at the family door, this time by five local men. She was 15 years old. «They kidnapped her in front of our house. My sister told me she was going to study. She was at the front door and five guys came and took my sister - her voice starts to break. She knew the men who killed her sister - these guys take pills.» Scared for her life, Aishiq fled her family home to an uncle living in the same city. Yet, her uncle’s wife refused to take the girl into their home. Without family, a home to return to and her own life endangered Aishiq joined a multitude of Shi’a pilgrims congregating outside of the Imam Hussein Ibn Ali mosque in Kerbala. It was the first night of Ashura, the anniversary of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, a time of mourning and religious observation for Shi’a Muslims. Exhausted and with few options before her, she lay down on the pavement alongside the mosque and fell asleep. She wouldon’t remain asleep for long. A woman shook her awake, «Aren’t you the daughter of Umm Saddam? Aren’t you Aishiq?» The girl nodded, yes. Kissing both her cheeks, she told her «come home with me.» In the women’s home were two young Iraqi girls orphaned in the aftermath of the war. They told Aishiq that they were living in a Baghdad orphanage when this same woman and a man posed as prospective parents looking for children to adopt. Aishiq explains, «If someone goes there (to the orphanage) and says my wife doesn’t bring children they will give the child. They don’t know how the children will be used.» She is visibly saddened when remembering the two young girls, she describes as thin, one with green eyes, the other with hazel. They girls 11 and 12 years old at the time. The threesome would soon be trafficked out of Iraq. Aishiq sent to work as a dancer in a Dubai nightclub and the two girls would be married off to men in the United Arab Emirates. In the coming months Aishiq would be brought in and out of Dubai three times on trips to and from Syria where the woman’s family was living on the outskirts of Damascus in Sitt al Zeinab. On the return trips to Syria, she worked as a dancer in nightclubs and casinos as she did in Dubai. «There were a lot of girls - But she says she was the youngest - The others were older 16, 17, 18, 20…»

This work did not last long, however as these places are regularly checked by the Syrian police for girls working under the age of 18. The woman who first trafficked her out of Iraq and would today be the go between for prostituting Aishiq decided to sell her most valuable commodity: the girl’s virginity. Living in Damascus, an elderly Saudi man entered into a temporary contract marriage with the young girl. Contract marriages, also commonly called pleasure marriages are permitted in Shiite society but there are conditions: «The girl must be an adult, must have agreement of the mother and father, and cannot be a virgin must be a widow, it must be because of war or other things like that.» The woman sold her off to the Saudi. The man paid 200,000 Syrian pounds (4,000 USD), the going price for a virgin. «When I married I had no period, I was 12. I was a virgin.» The Saudi gave her gold bracelets and earrings, she says he took good care of her and she became fond of him. Yet, it wasn’t long after the woman had the money for Aishiq in hand that she calculated how to get the girl back under her own roof. One day while shopping in a local market in Damascus, two of the women’s sons kidnapped Aishiq. «They put their hands over my mouth and forced me into a car» she says.

After the kidnapping, a doctor was brought to repair the girl’s virginity by reattaching her hymen. «I was crying, it hurt too much - she says. Aishiq goes on to explain that - men want virgins.» Following her kidnapping, she was once again whisked away to Dubai alongside of the woman. The girl was put to work as a dancer once again in a casino. While working she met a young Emirati man, she says they fell in love. The woman again arranged for a contract marriage between the Emirati and the girl. Aishiq lived with this man for 3 or 4 months. Yet, it wasn’t long before the woman who contracted this second marriage again soon realized that if she lost the girl, she also lost income. The woman threatened the young man that if he didn’t return the girl she would call his family in the Emirates. The shame and dishonor would be too great to bear, he agreed to return Aishiq. The young girl was sent back to Syria and forced this time into prostitution In Syria, she lives with the woman who first trafficked her out of Iraq, the women’s two daughters both prostitutes, one of the woman’s sons and his wife. The woman, now Aishiq’s pimp, has two other sons who live in a separate apartment nearby; one of the boys is the girl’s minder and accompanies her when she is sent to a client. She says she sees the second son every three days when he comes to force sex upon her. «One time I refused and he struck me, blood came out of my nose and mouth.»

Aishiq’s body is a roadmap of torture. A knife cut across her chin paired with a deep slice in the base of her thumb. Punishment by her minder. Her arms and hands are riddled with scabbed punctures to her skin. Some old, some new.

«This family when they punish me brings nails and heats them, tie me and stick the nails on my hands and arms», she says. We ask, «When do they punish you?» «When I ask for money, the money I’ve earned, they become angry and punish me. They won’t give me money.» Aishiq sleeps in a small space between the bathroom and the kitchen on a thin mattress. «They provide me with a little food and a place to sleep. The woman sends my money to Iraq to build a house in Kerbala.» She then pulls down her t-shirt and bares her scarred chest, mutilated by cooking oil thrown at her after she asked to buy a cream to sooth her itching skin. «They were cooking fish and threw the oil on my chest.» In the past when her injuries were too severe to treat at the home, she was taken to the hospital. In the hospital she was threatened that, «if you say something, we will kill you.»

…EVEN A DOG WON'T BARK IN HIS DEFENSE…" – CZECH NEWSPAPERS SAY ABOUT A MIGRANT WORKER FROM TRANSCARPATHIA

Czech public came to the defense of a wrongly convicted Ukrainian, and after almost five years in prison his term was reduced for one third

(translated from Ukrainian) 

Yaroslav GALAS "FACTS" (Uzhgorod)

The story of Petro Terpay, a migrant worker from Maly Rakovets mountain village in Transcarpathia, is hardly typical. In Czech Republic the Ukrainian got sentenced to seven years in prison for a crime he never committed. Our compatriot was looking at serving the entire sentence, but to his defense suddenly came… the prison chaplain.

Now Petro is back home with his family, while his friends in Czech Republic are collecting money to buy a tractor that the Ukrainian had lost during his ordeal in foreign jails.

Why a tractor – that became clear at Maly Rakovets where Petro Terpay lives. As a journalist I had a chance to drive frequently around this entire region, but nowhere else have I seen such roads. In the center of the village the streets have a more or less decent asphalt surface, but at the outskirts the roads are paved with elongated stone blocks surviving from the times of Austrian-Hungarian Empire. It took us 45 minutes to drive three kilometers of this road in our off-road four-wheeler! No wonder that residents of Maly Rakovets use 'Niva' jeeps, tractors or horses as their regular means of transportation.

Petro's small hut sits at the very edge of the village. Its owner, 37, meets me in the front yard and invites inside. Rooms with well-built furniture are clean and cozy; icons are hanging on the walls. The very environment and the host's behavior make you doubt unwittingly that he is capable of the crime for which he spent almost five years in jail.

Petro's pre-trial bio is no different than life stories of most of his townsmen. In mid 1990s the young man was working on a collective farm; and after the farm fell apart, he lost his means of subsistence. He had to bring food to his wife and two sons, so the head of the family moved to Czech Republic in search of work. A "client" (in Transcarpathia this is the term for people who find illegal jobs for migrant workers), who came from the same village, found Petro a job of an excavator operator in a sand quarry in Lysa nad Labem town about 50 km from Prague, collecting one third of earnings as a reward for his services.

- I worked in this sand quarry from 2000 to 2002, - Petro Terpay says. – I was sending money home regularly, and when my visa expired, I would go back to Ukraine for a few months to get a new one. One of my periods of stay in Czech Republic was ending in June 2002, so I was about to go back home again. I was going to take an intercity bus, but the "client" recommended me to travel with his friend, another fellow villager, who was driving back home with his nephew. We agreed on the price, and on June 22 drove to the Polish border (back then transit through Poland did not require a visa). But at the border checkpoint our Ford Mondeo was directed away from the common line of cars, and in a few minutes eight cops approached the car, handcuffed and detained us. After three days in a cell the cops informed us that we are suspects in a hold-up of a post office.

The crime with which the Ukrainians were charged took place five days prior to their arrest, on June 17^th, in Smecno village near the town of Kladno. In the morning two armed robbers broke into the post office and stole 104,850 korunas (about four thousand dollars) and shot a cashier through her arm. The police had some leads to detain the Ukrainians. Six days before the crime a man about thirty came to the post office, carefully examined the room, bought three postal stamps, and left. Postal workers found his behavior suspicious; he spoke with strong Russian accent; so they noted his car license plate number and notified the police just in case.

After the hold-up the police first of all started looking for the car with that license plate. It happened to be the very Ford Mondeo where Petro was riding with his townsmen. After their arrest, the Ford driver explained that indeed he was passing through Smecno six days before the crime with a friend who did buy stamps at the post office, but he has nothing to do with the hold-up. As for Petro, all that time he was working in the sand quarry all day long, and he met his companions for the first time only on the day of their departure for home. But the police were not satisfied with their testimonies.

Since there were just two robbers, the driver's nephew was released soon, but two other detainees were charged with armed robbery. The main evidence of the Ukrainians' involvement in the crime came from the line-up arranged for three women postal workers and a chance witness who happened to stop by the post office and seen the robbers.

The identification went as follows. The chance witness did not recognize either Petro or his companion, and picked up a police officer from the line-up instead, identifying him as a robber. The first postal worker pointed at Petro who, she said, was standing by the window and shot her colleague with a pistol, and at the Ford driver who took money from the money box. The second woman identified one of the cops in the line-up as one of the criminals. The last witness pointed at a cop and also at Petro who, she claimed, took money from the box. After that the first woman said that she made a mistake, and in fact it was Petro who took the money, while the Ford driver shot her colleague. Despite two witnesses identifying no one, one woman picking up just one of the suspects, and another one contradicting herself, the cops considered this evidence conclusive.

- We were transferred to a detention facility in Prague, - Petro continues. – I was put in a cell with three foreigners: a Russian guy for whom that was not his first arrest; an employee from an embassy of an African country accused of raping a Czech girl (he was reading the Bible all the time and kept swearing that he raped no one, it was consensual), and a Polish guy who was soon transferred to a camp. The driver of ill-fated Ford was kept in the same facility but in a different wing. We saw each other again only at the trial. They started interrogations and other investigative procedures. I was amazed from the beginning with the cops' arrogance. They treated me dismissively as a third-rate person. There were plenty of Ukrainians in that detention facility, who were there for a reason. But is it fair to tar everyone with the same brush? I kept arguing that on the date of the hold-up I was 110 km from Smecno working on my excavator, and that many people can confirm that. They were simply writing down my statements… 

I tried to get help at our embassy, I sent a letter there. The reply was: "The Embassy personnel have no right to influence the investigation procedures. We advise you to have your lawyer summon to court the witnesses who can confirm your innocence".

Investigation went on for almost a year. First I was called for interrogation almost every week, and later I could be waiting my next interrogation for up to several months. We were taken out for a walk in the courtyard for just one hour daily, and spend the remaining 23 hours in our cell. I was reading the Bible most of the time.

The Ukrainians went on trial in April 2003. Nine witnesses for defense testified in Petro's favor: the father of the sand quarry owner; his daughter-in-law; five workers; and two more people who happened to be in the sand quarry. They all confirmed that on that date Petro spent the entire day at his workplace. One of the workers testified that at the moment when the robbery was taking place he was standing next to the excavator talking to the defendant; another one recalled that when he heard the news on the radio about the hold-up allegedly committed by former Soviet Union migrants on that date, he even teased Petro – what if he had a hand in that. The Czechs had no interest in defending the Ukrainian; on the contrary, they were risking to be fined for illegally hiring an alien. Nevertheless, they all unanimously confirmed his alibi.

"Terpay was my best worker, - Miroslav Coubal, father of the sand quarry owner, told a Czech newspaper. – It was his second season working for me; he was never absent from the sand quarry; I could rely on him completely. And on that day too he was working there since 7 am. I hired many Ukrainians, but all of them I had to fire after a while. And such workers as Terpay are very rare. I am certain that he never committed that crime, this I why I came to his defense…" However, the court ignored witnesses' testimonies and on the basis of controversial identification line-up sentenced each of the Ukrainians to seven years in prison. The Czech "Tyden" weekly would write later: "The court could not care less about witnesses' testimonies. They had a Ukrainian in their hands – an ideal criminal, in whose defense even a dog won't bark…"

The court of appeal left the sentence unchanged. Petro tried to get justice at the European Court of Human Rights, but the ECHR refused to take the case. It turned out that first he had to go to the Czech Republic Supreme Court, but by that time he missed the deadline for lodging an appeal...

After the sentence was enacted, Petro got transferred to Vinarice maximum security prison (near Prague). This deeply religious Ukrainian who prayed every day in the prison chapel behaved so differently from other inmates, that he attracted attention of the prison chaplain Pavel Kocnar. The chaplain got interested in Petro's case, carefully studied the charges, visited the sand quarry and met its workers. Realizing that Petro was convicted unfairly, he turned to the media. Unexpectedly Petro Terpay's case provoked tremendous response in Czech Republic. It was covered in national newspapers; discussed on the national radio; popular Nova TV channel has even produced a whole program about the Ukrainian with a kind of investigatory experiment arranged by journalists who, getting police permission, tried to drive at the maximum speed from the sand quarry to the crime site and back in 15 minutes (that was the longest that Perto could have been absent from work according to the witnesses). After that experiment, the journalists concluded: Petro would not be able to commit that crime even if he flew a helicopter. He had a hundred percent alibi.

Religious organizations, NGOs, even the Czech Helsinki Committee rose to the defense of the wrongfully convicted Ukrainian. A petition was sent to President Vaclav Klaus asking to pardon Petro Trepay. Helas, everything was in vain. This is what the "Tyden" weekly wrote: "Public organizations approached the Ministry of Justice; however, justice was not interested in a Ukrainian. Appeals were made personally to Petr Necas (Czech Minister of Justice – Author's note). He said that he is convinced of Terpay's innocence, but did nothing to help him. Ivan Langer (Czech Cabinet member – Author's note) and other top officials were approached too. They did nothing. Eventually, Terpay's predicament could be eased by Presidential pardon, but President Klaus denied it. Pardon a Ukrainian? That would be a very unpopular move…"

However, all the appeals in Petro's defense did produce a certain effect – he started being treated differently in the prison camp. The Ukrainian has been permitted to work – to grow vegetables on a land plot within the camp grounds, and then he was transferred to a facility for soon-to-be-released inmates. That was something of a hotel within the prison. Thirty inmates there had to themselves a common kitchen, a bathroom with automated washing machines, and even a living room with two TV sets. But most importantly, Pavel Kocnar arranged for the prisoner a long-awaited meeting with his family.

- When in June 2002 Petro did not return from Czech Republic to renew his visa, I went to see a mini-bus driver who often brought deliveries from Czhechia, - Petro's wife Oksana Terpay says. – He told me that my husband was supposed to come back two weeks ago, and he advised me to go to the "client". The "client" knew what happened, but he decided to conceal the truth. He told me that Petro moved to work somewhere near German border and cannot be reached. After a few days, worried and confused, I went to a nearby village to see a seeress. She told me: "Petro is alive but kept in confinement. Wait for a message from him". And in a few weeks a letter came from my husband. (Petro wrote to his family immediately after the arrest, but the letter was kept for security check by police for a long time. – Author's note.) Learning of what had happened to my husband I got sick and spent three months in hospital. And meanwhile rumors started in the village that my husband left us and found himself another family abroad…

- All these years my children and I lived in misery, - Oksana Terpay continues. – My disabled brother received a pension of 220 hryvnias, and that is what the four of us had to live on through winters. And in the summers children and I would pick up wild mushrooms and berries and sell them on the farmers' market. I finally saw my husband again only after three and a half years. Chaplain Pavel Kocnar sent us money to get me a passport, buy tickets, and in June 2005 he invited us to Czechia. Petro was sick then, he even got appendectomy. We were granted a three-hour visit. Children and I were taken into a room where they then brought my husband. And here he was, thin as never before, standing in the door and looking at his sons who had grown up so much, and he could not say a word. We were standing like that maybe for 15 minutes looking at each other silently. I had a lump in my throat, and tears were running from my eyes…

After this visit, Oksana and children spent another week in Prague. Pavel Kocnar placed his guests in a hotel, organized tours for them every day, gave them presents. Next year, in the summer of 2006, the chaplain arranged for Petro another meeting with his family. This is how a Ukrainian family that lost their only breadwinner for several years, found support from a complete stranger.

And eventually Pavel Kocnar's appeals brought some results. In February of this year, the District Court of Usti nad Labem city, after hearing Petro Terpay's case, decided to reduce his term in prison for one third and release him with immediate deportation and exclusion from the country for indefinite time.

- I spent my last six months in a minimum security camp near German border, - Petro says. – On the day of my release they gave me 500 korunas (about 25 dollars) and ordered me to leave Czech Republic within seven days. I called Pavel Kocnar from a bus station, and he came right away to pick me up, and had me as his house guest for several days. He helped me with the papers and put me on the Prague-Hust intercity bus that passes on the highway at two kilometers from my home village…

Now Petro enjoys living with his family, occasionally going for work to other Ukrainian regions. Alas, in his own village there is no work for him. Before his imprisonment, Petro had a tractor which he received after the collective farm had been dissolved, but during the years the vehicle that could help the family to earn some living had disappeared somewhere. Knowing that, Pavel Kocnar organized a collection in Prague at the St. Prokop Church to buy a tractor for the wrongfully convicted Ukrainian.

- Pavel and Mirek – a Czech who was my cellmate – came to visit me at the end of the summer, - Petro says. – Their trip was not uneventful; the visitors got their Ford fuel tank punched (!) on our country road. Despite that they loved Transcarpathia. We travelled around the entire region, visited several castles, had a vacation in the famous Valley of Daffodils…

Pavel Kocnar told me that my case is not closed yet, it must be heard by the Constitutional Court. If I am acquitted and the exclusion from the country cancelled, I will be able to go there again to work.

I had enough time during my years in prison to think about it. I hold no grudge against anyone. I have met people in Czechia who helped me. And I will remember that as long as I live… 

By Tatyana TEN, Karaganda

(translated from Russian)

Amantay Usentayev became gravely disabled, lost his memory and mobility after horrendous torture to which he was subjected by police officers at Satpayevo Department of Interior.

Zhezkagan City Court on behalf of Kazakhstan Republic has established the respondents in the case – Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Finance – and obliged them to pay the victim and his parents five million tenge [approximately $42,000] in material and moral damages. The respondents refuse to abide.

Kazakh Republic Ministry of Interior believes that the damages must be compensated from public purse, and therefore should be paid by Ministry of Finance. While Ministry of Finance insists that damages must be compensated by those who directly caused them, that is, by Satpayevo Department of Interior. Or by the Ministry of Interior itself…

Amantay's father, Karatay Usentayev, gave us his son's pictures. What he looked like before and after February 20^th, 2005. Without inhibition or doubts he asked us to publish them as irrefutable evidence of his son's past and present life. If current existence of this unfortunate family can be called a life.

We have already covered the flagrant crime committed by ex-officers of Satpayevo police station on February 20^th, 2005. This is what happened. Detective Mahmut Unchibayev and investigator Nurgali Belkidekov subjected a completely innocent security guard of Kazakhmys Corporation, Amantay Usentayev, to horrendous tortures, trying to beat out of him a confession to a crime he did not commit. They were tying the handcuffed young man to a chair and putting a gas helmet over his head, cutting off air supply. When he fainted, they were taking the gas helmet off, bringing him back, and then pulling the gas helmet on again.

These atrocities were performed not in some secret flat or an abandoned garage. The interrogation took place in the investigator's office, at the police station. And the gas helmet in question was kept by cops in their official safe box.

Unchibayev and Belkidekov were found guilty and convicted. But prior to justice being done, authorities refused trice to bring criminal charges "for reason of insufficient evidence to initiate criminal prosecution".

After 12 hours of interrogation in the investigator's office Amantay Usentayev lost consciousness for good. He was taken to the emergency care in coma. And then transferred into care of his parents. A helpless creature – no memory, no movement, and no consciousness. This evidence was considered insufficient.

– We arrived to Kazakhstan on September 1^st, 2004, - says Karatay Usentayev, Amantay's father, who can hardly hold back his angry tears. – We believed that here, in our home land, we are expected and welcome. And we were not grumbling when realized that no one needs us here that much, and that it is hard for oralmans [ethnic Kazakh repatriates] to make it and move up in their new home land. We placed all our hopes on Amantay, our eldest son. Our boy is persistent, honest, strong. He graduated from International Kazakh-Turkish University, got a law degree. He believed that sooner or later he would become an investigator. It's scary to remember that, but that was his dream. But all that collapsed on February 20^th, 2005. In fact, I lost my son, my life support, my faith in justice. And I see no meaning in my life any more.

After six months Amantay's wife gave up on him and left. Amantay's only care-givers are his elderly parents, both disabled. By himself Amantay can only breathe. Today he weighs less than 40 kilos. He cannot swallow; he cannot coordinate his movements; he recognizes no one and understands nothing. The family of three lives on three disability pensions, a total of about 40,000 tenge per month [approximately $300], and 20,000 of that sum is monthly paid to a nurse. They are renting an apartment in Zhezkagan, have neither family nor friends in this city. The city where they hoped to build a new and happy life, and where they are still strangers.

– At first we waited, - Karatay says. – We could not believe that we were just left alone with our tragedy. We were sure that someone will come, a government person, and apologize or at least explain. No one came. No one apologized, no one sympathized, no one helped. And no one was going to punish stranglers of my son.

After one year, on January 23, 2006, Karatay sent nine angry letters to governmental offices in one day: to the Prosecutor General, to the Minister of Interior, etc. …

"I am not bullying you or threatening you, - he wrote in that letter. – I am writing in desperation this very last complaint in my life. The last one because if I again receive no reply to this complaint, if again nothing will be done to bring to criminal justice the policemen who are guilty of my son's tragedy, I will come to Astana and I will burn myself right in front of the Prosecutor General's Office! My family and I were not having too bad a life abroad. And we returned to our Motherland not because we were starving, but because we were missing our Motherland. I ask you, I beg you! Do not send this complaint of mine back to our region. Send your officers here, so that they would first hand verify everything that I am saying in this letter…"

This time Karatay's complaint has not been sent back to the region. A team of investigators from Astana came to Zhezkagan and Satpayevo. Their work resulted in a trial over the policemen and in a verdict that has not made the father feel much safer.

Another year passed. Life had to go on. Karatay, upon advice from lawyers, filed a complaint against the felons seeking monetary compensation for material and moral damages. Material damages were calculated up to a penny. Lost salary of his son for all the months of investigation and trial. Costs of nurse, medication, treatment, and transportation. A total of 3 million and 743 thousand tenges. "The accuracy of this amount is verified and causes no doubt", - the court said in its decision. What is more, the court obligated the defendant to make monthly payments to the victim's family in the amount of the son's monthly salary.

As for moral damages to his family, Karatay assessed it at 50 million tenges.

– Everyone is outraged at seeing this sum, and say that I am out of my mind! – Karatay says. – No, ladies and gentlemen, I am in my right mind. And I will do all it takes to make the government pay the bill. This money won't save Amantay, it will not help me or his mother. Our life was over on February 20^th, 2005. I want to send my younger son and my daughter abroad. I am afraid for their lives and their futures. I want them to leave. For China, for America… Whatever, as long as it is far away from this cruel and unfair life.

The court awarded much lower moral damages: one million tenges to Amantay and 500,000 each to his mother and father. The court designated Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Finance as respondents in the lawsuit.

"A representative of the Ministry of Interior respondent disagreed with the claim at court. Without denying the fact of damage caused by the police officers, without disputing the amount, the respondent believes that damages should be compensated at the expense of public purse, that is, the Kazakhstan Republic Ministry of Finance."

"A representative of the Ministry of Finance respondent disagreed with the claim too. Without objecting to the compensation amount, the respondent nods to the party that has immediately caused harm and therefore should compensate the damages".

Despite respondents' objections, Zhezkagan City Court on March 21, 2008, found in favor of the plaintiff and ordered Ministry of Finance to pay the above amount. On April 4^th Ministry of Finance lodged an appeal.

We quote below the key argument from the Ministry of Finance's appeal:

"Allocating money from the Kazakhstan Republic Government funds reserved for satisfying liabilities awarded by courts is performed in cases stipulated in Article 923 of the Kazakhstan Republic Civil Code which provides that harm caused to a citizen by unlawful conviction, unlawful criminal charges, unlawful arrest and detention, home arrest, restriction on travel, … unlawful placement into a mental institution or other medical facility, shall be compensated by the government in full regardless of guilt of officers of inquiry agencies, preliminary investigation agencies, public prosecution or court, according to procedures stipulated by law.

Since none of the above listed actions were applied to A.K. Usentayev, Ministry of Finance maintains that the court had no grounds to recover the amount of harm from Ministry of Finance that administers the Kazakhstan Republic Government reserve funds under 010 state budget line for the unlawful actions of the Department of Interior that are not stipulated in Article 923 of the KR Civil Code".

What can you say… Indeed, the Civil Code does not provide for torture. Lawmakers who adopted the Civil Code were probably assuming that in our country no police officer would ever subject a Kazakhstan citizen to a sophisticated torment. Even our Criminal Code got supplemented with the Article 347-1 entitled "Torture" just recently, five years ago. And no one thought of simultaneously adding "torture" to the Civil Code.

Skillfully playing out this legal gap, the financiers ask to reexamine the claim in court and insist that its respondent should be "the Satpayevo City Department of Interior as the immediate harm-doer, who must therefore compensate awarded moral damages from its own funds".

The court declined the financiers' appeal. Its decision came into legal force on May 14^th. However, the bouncing game goes on. Ministry of Finance asks the court to postpone enforcement of its decision. Apparently the financers are looking for a new loophole, determined to protect the public purse and save it from devastation. Would they pay Usentayev today, tomorrow they may be overwhelmed with claims from all other victims of police abuse!

P.S. Karatay Usentayev asked us to pass a message to Minister of Interior Baurzhan Muhamedzhanov via our newspaper that he would like very much to have an appointment with him. "I have things to tell him." We hereby fulfill Karatay's request and join it.

By Tatyana TEN, Karaganda

In our previous issue we published an article entitled Life Turned into Hell.

We told the story of Amantay Usentayev who became gravely disabled after being subjected to torture by officers of Saptayevo City Department of Interior. The victim's father Karatay Usentayev asked the newspaper to publish his request addressed to Baurzhan Muhamedzhanov, Minister of Interior: he would like very much to have a personal appointment with the Minister. We have fulfilled his request and joined it.

After our publication on August 13^th, Karatay Usentayev received a call from the Interior Minister's office and was told that Baurzhan Muhamedzhanov has read the article and is ready to hear the father.

– They made an appointment with me for September 3^rd, - Karatay Usentayev says, - and said that the Minister will be waiting.

Karatay Usentayev wishes to thank our newspaper for our interest in his family. And we are hoping that our newspaper is read not only at the Ministry of Interior, but at the Kazakhstan Republic Ministry of Finance as well. And we are looking forward to the financial agency's response. We are reminding that the Ministry of Finance has not complied yet with the court order to compensate Usentayev's family material and moral damages.

Using data from the Global Integrity Index, we put a U.S. court's recent order to block access to anti-corruption site Wikileaks.org into context. In summary: The Wikileaks.org shutdown is unheard of in the West, and has only been seen in a handful of the most repressive regimes. Good thing it doesn't work very well.

Starting in 2007, Global Integrity added specific questions about Internet censorship to the Integrity Indicators, which are a set of 304 questions addressing the practice of anti-corruption in national governments. We have always held that a free and critical media is an essential component of good governance; adding an analysis of Internet censorship was an overdue refinement.

We asked our local research teams to investigate two questions:

1. Are Internet users prevented from reaching political material on the Internet?

2. Are content creators prevented from posting political material to the Internet?

The results of this work are generally encouraging. In examining a diverse group of 50 countries, a majority earn a full score on both counts. Freedom of speech is a widely held right. Moreover, Internet censorship is difficult and is often ineffective in suppressing political activity. Most governments, aside from targeted libel restrictions, don't bother regulating online political speech at all.

The Many Flavors of Internet Censorship

A few countries, however, are deeply committed to trying to make censorship work. On this list in 2007 are Algeria, China, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Russia and Thailand. Each has it's own flavor to the repression of online speech -- Internet censorship is still in an experimentation phase, and even the most aggressive approaches don't seem to work very well.

Algeria has no firewalls or filters, but outlaws hosting content critical of the government, and monitors chat rooms for political speech. [source]

China is home to 1.3 billion people and has a highly scalable technological approach based on extensive content filters known satirically as the Great Firewall of China. China also uses technology to discourage content creation, deploying cute animated police characters (pictured above) to remind Internet users they are being watched. [source]

Egypt has limited technical means to discourage content creation, so it relies on an old-fashioned technique -- harassment, beatings and arrests. Hala Al-Masry used to publish in a blog entitled "Cops Without Boundaries" until the government harassed her, "unknown people" beat her father, and she and her husband were arrested and signed a commitment to shut down the blog. Similar techniques have shut down websites of opposition parties. [source]

Kazakhstan has little Internet capacity. The government uses this to mask censorship -- rather than block sites, it slows them down, frustrating the users of political content into looking elsewhere. The KNB (formerly the KGB) has a special program called Bolat, which slows down, but does not stop, access to sites of terrorist organizations. Popular opinion holds that it is used to slow opposition party sites as well. [source]

Russia has a mixed bag of state persecution and neglect, allowing a rare opening for free expression in a country with highly restricted media. However, the sophistication of the attacks that do occur is frightening, with hackers singling out individual online targets. For instance, the website of Ekho Moskvy, a liberal Moscow radio station critical of the Kremlin, was brought down by a DDoS attack last year. [source]

Thailand's military junta moved aggressively to shut down message boards and the formerly-ruling party Thai Rak Thai website after taking over the country in 2006. But the junta's censorship cops work to keep the thinnest appearance of tolerance -- message boards were allowed to reopen under the condition that they did not "provoke any misunderstandings." Message received. [source]

So how does the United States fit into this picture?

The court order that muzzled Wikileaks.org (covered here) was prompted not by the government but by a bank registered in the Cayman Islands. The bank used American courts and a compliant domain registrar to scrub the wikileaks.org URL from the Internet. It is extremely unlikely that this decision will stand up in an appeals court, but the larger point is that there is no reason this case should even be fought. Wikileaks should not need a legal team to explain to the courts that the First Amendment requires freedom of speech.

The whole event seems to encapsulate the constant criticism of governance in the United States: that the government has been captured by corporate interests, and that the world-leading rule of law and technocratic mechanisms in place can be hijacked to serve as tools for narrow, wealthy interests.

Online Censorship: Sounds good, but it never works.

While there is much diversity in the style of Internet censorship among the world's worst offenders, one common thread unites them: Internet censorship doesn't work. Cut off one site, and a thousand more pop up. In China, censorship online is sparking criticism that off-line censorship has rarely seen.

So Wikileaks.org went offline, but Wikileaks mirror sites hosted overseas hold the same content, and the original site is still up and running from Sweden (http://88.80.13.160) without its easier-to-type URL. As it turns out, shutting down Wikileaks-the-website has focused our attention on Wikileaks-the-idea, which is spreading at the speed of light.

By Deepa A

Around 250,000 people were estimated to have been displaced by the Gujarat riots of 2002. Six years later, 4,500 families are still living in 81 relief colonies. They know they cannot return to the villages where they had homes, farms or shops. They are struggling to survive in areas often lacking even basic amenities. There is at least a framework for those displaced by development projects. There is no policy and no framework of entitlements for those displaced by sectarian or communal violence

The exteriors of the one-room tenements in Rahimabad Society in Devgarh Baria, in Gujarat’s Dahod district, are painted pink, a bright colour that belies the darkness inside the houses. Around 75 families live in these tiny structures, without even basic facilities like sanitation, access roads and water supply. Livelihoods are hard to come by here. There are no good schools or hospitals nearby. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why the 475-odd inhabitants of the society, who have been living here for the past six years, don’t call it their home. Perhaps it’s also because their roots lie elsewhere, in a village where they had farms or shops, where their children went to school, and where their lives followed trajectories they had chosen for themselves.

Such luxuries are noticeably absent in the unpaved paths in and around Rahimabad Society, which houses survivors of the horrific communal violence that Gujarat witnessed in 2002. According to Gujarat government estimates, which activists allege are on the conservative side, over 1,000 people -– most of them belonging to the Muslim community -- were killed during the riots. A report published by the Concerned Citizens Tribunal in 2002 estimated that the violence also resulted in the displacement of around 250,000 people. Over 4,500 families are still living in what are called ‘relief colonies’, much like Rahimabad Society, unable to return to their homes, from which they were hounded out for no reason except that they were Muslims.

Even a casual discussion with the residents of Rahimabad Society is enough to understand why going back to their homes is not an option they can consider. They hail from Randhikpur village, which, today, is known as the place where a pregnant Bilkis Bano was gangraped and 14 members of her family killed by a mob, in 2002. 

Almost everyone in Rahimabad Society has lost a loved one in the violence. Siraj Nana Patel, who tries to make a living in Devgarh Baria by working as a casual labourer, says his son, his brother and his nephew were killed in the riots. He remembers the gruesome event as if it had happened yesterday. “A mob came in the morning and attacked our house. They hit me with a sword. I was bleeding and I fainted and they thought I was dead,” Patel says, taking off his shirt to show the scars on his chest. His surviving relatives took him to hospital, from where they went to a relief camp in Godhra, and ultimately to Rahimabad. He lives here with his disabled daughter and wife, and speaks of a daily struggle to eke out a living. Most days he just sits at home as work is hard to find.

Like his neighbours in Rahimabad, Patel cannot imagine going back to his home, where people he knew and who lived in the same village were part of the mob that attacked him. He says he went to the police several times but in a story that’s repeated across relief colonies, the cops did not even bother to register a complaint. As their attackers roam free, the victims remain confined to ghettos where they live in an atmosphere laced with insecurity and fear.

Rahimabad Society is just one of the estimated 81 relief colonies in Gujarat that house people who have been internally displaced by the 2002 riots. There have been countless reports on their plight but despite the current United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government at the Centre announcing new compensation packages for the survivors, words have not translated into action at the ground level.

The displaced continue to live a life centred on mere survival. Most don’t have documents certifying possession of their houses, which were built by Muslim trusts, occasionally with the support of non-government organisations. There has been no help from the Gujarat government, which stands accused of complicity in the violence of 2002. None of the colonies have been provided with even basic amenities. Ration cards and voter ID cards were issued as recently as last year, that too because of the tireless work of a few non-government organisations and at the insistence of the Election Commission.

Assembly elections were held in Gujarat in December 2007, and the Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Chief Minister Narendra Modi, was elected to power for the third consecutive time. The very same government had, for over five years, denied that people had been displaced by the riots. Acknowledgement came only in August 2007, when, responding to an explanation demanded by the National Commission for Minorities regarding steps taken to rehabilitate the displaced, the government stated that people were still living in relief colonies. Such was the level of despair that the victims had been plunged into, that activists counted the government’s statement as a minor victory.  

Across Gujarat, life in the relief colonies follows a similar depressing pattern. In Godhra, in the Panchmahals district, Aman Park houses those who managed to escape from neighbouring villages and towns after being attacked by mobs during the riots. Some of the men in this colony were forced to take up jobs in dolomite factories and have ended up with silicosis. They speak of once owning farms or small businesses in their hometowns. Today they have been reduced to penury and have to wait hours at government offices begging for electricity and water connections that they still do not have.

In Ahmedabad, as elsewhere across Gujarat, the relief colonies lie on the outskirts of the city, in areas without roads and schools and hospitals. To earn a livelihood, people have to travel long distances; the commuting cost itself eats into their meagre earnings. In the rains, the water reaches their doorsteps. At Faisal Park in Vatva, an industrial area on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, residents complain that the water contains chemicals from nearby factories. There’s no drainage facility to speak of here, as in any relief colony in Gujarat.

A survey conducted in October 2006, supported by Oxfam and implemented by Aman Biradari, Lawyers Collective and Yusuf Meheralli Centre, confirms that there are hardly any public conveniences in the relief colonies. In 65% of the colonies, residents get drinking water from private sources. In colonies such as Rahimabad Society and a nameless one in Rajgadh, Panchmahals district, the handpump is located almost two kilometres away from the houses. It’s the women who usually trek the distance to get water for their homes. The survey notes that only two colonies have government schools; four colonies have Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) anganwadis; just three have ration shops.

The economic condition of the displaced is dire, says a committee appointed by the Supreme Court in a case pertaining to central government-sponsored food security schemes. In its report presented to the apex court in June 2007, the panel states that despite the visible poverty, only 725 of the 4,545 internally displaced families had been recognised as living below the poverty line (BPL). As a report of the National Commission for Minorities, dated October 2006, says, the residents are unable to support themselves as they used to before the riots. “Before the violence, many of these people were small self-employed traders, artisans or industrialists. The violence put an end to their means of livelihood since their old clients were unwilling to use their services,” says the report. It adds that though residents are living in abject poverty, many have been issued above the poverty line (APL) cards instead of BPL cards. 

In December 2006, a delegation of Members of Parliament from the Left parties and Congress submitted a report to the Centre on conditions in the relief colonies. The report highlights an important point: every attempt is being made by those who intimidate the Muslim community to take possession of their (the Muslims’) property. In Naroda Patia, Ahmedabad, the site of one of the worst massacres of the riots, only 15 of the 80 families living there have returned, says the report. “Leaders of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad have taken possession of their land and built multi-storeyed buildings,” it adds. 

The availability of substantial documented evidence about the internally displaced in Gujarat, however, has not prompted the government into action, notes an Amnesty International report released in 2007 on riot victims. The question of compensation remains a grey area in Gujarat. The state government returned Rs 19 crore sent by the Centre for riot victims, claiming that it had completed all its rehabilitation work. Yet in almost all the relief colonies, residents complain of receiving inadequate or no compensation. In September 2007, the Centre announced an additional package of Rs 70.66 crore for the riot victims. However, as activists noted during a similar pronouncement of additional compensation by the Centre in March 2007, such packages ignore the rights of the displaced and neglect aspects related to their rehabilitation. 

Taking note of the appalling conditions in relief colonies, the National Commission for Minorities, in its report, recommends that the state and central governments prepare a special economic package for those displaced, with a focus on livelihood issues. The report also highlights how India does not have a national policy in place for those forced to move because of violence. “Populations displaced due to sectarian, ethnic, or communal violence should not be left to suffer for years together due to the lack of a policy and the absence of a justifiable framework of entitlements. When displacement takes place under conditions of fear and under constant direct threat of violation of Article 21 of the Constitution, the trauma and conditions under which survivors face the future is considerably worsened. Further, when the threat of violence is perceived to be continuing, the protection of people’s constitutional rights can only be sought through a national policy which clearly lays out a non-negotiable framework of entitlements,” the report says. The commission suggests that such a policy should include provisions for immediate compensation and rehabilitation; facilitate the displaced’s right to return home, if the environment is conducive; and establish timeframes for implementing rehabilitation plans as well as include grievance redressal and monitoring mechanisms. The 2007 Amnesty International report, quoting the Commission for Minorities, notes that such a specific policy for dealing with those internally displaced by the riots is important because the criminal justice system in Gujarat “appears not to be working and discrimination and exclusion persist”.

Gagan Sethi, an Ahmedabad-based activist who has been fighting for the rights of those internally displaced by the communal violence of 2002, points out that states have a framework for those displaced by development projects, but not so in the case of those displaced by ethnic violence. Internationally, nations are expected to follow the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement presented to the United Nations in 1998. Though it’s not a legally binding document like a treaty, the 30 Guiding Principles do have international acceptance and identify the rights of the displaced. They recognise internally displaced persons as those “who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalised violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internally recognised State border”. Among other things, the principles state that the authorities must provide protection and humanitarian assistance to the displaced, and, regardless of the circumstances, provide essential food and potable water, basic shelter and housing, appropriate clothing, essential medical services and sanitation.  

Sethi, who’s also the managing trustee of Jan Vikas and the Centre for Social Justice, Ahmedabad, notes how these principles have been ignored in Gujarat. The displaced have been living in tenements for six years without holding any documents to the one-room shacks they live in. Some of them have paid money, amounting to Rs 45,000, as in Baroda’s Noorani Mohalla, for the houses. Yet, they do not have papers for them.

Almost all the relief colonies were built on land owned by Muslims, when the state government arbitrarily shut down relief camps that housed riot victims and they had nowhere else to go. Some of these plots were classified as agricultural land, but construction was taken up here because of the difficult circumstances. Though none are encroachments, the state government still has to approve usage of the land for residential purposes. “The paperwork is pending and it’s used as a ploy to classify the colonies as illegitimate,” says Sethi. The same tag is used to deny basic facilities such as water, sanitation and electricity to these colonies, though, as internationally accepted principles note, the relief colonies should have been constructed by the state government in the first place. Not only did the state not construct even a single house, but, over the past six years, it has done nothing to create basic infrastructure in the relief colonies.

With the return of Narendra Modi as Gujarat chief minister for the third time, in the recent state elections, even the most optimistic of activists working with riot victims in Gujarat appear concerned. Sethi says that the exclusion of Muslims continues in Gujarat, with there being a “greater design to reduce the presence of Muslims to a few villages in each taluka and free the rest of the villages from Muslims”. Hanif Lakdawala, director of the non-government organisation Sanchetna, which works in the areas of health and education, adds that subtle discrimination and social ostracism against Muslims continue in Gujarati society, pushing Muslims into ghettos. He warns that this will only reinforce the alienation the community already feels.

Ghanshyam Shah, a social scientist who has studied riots and socio-political trends in Gujarat extensively, feels that Muslims seem to have reconciled to the fact that there’s nothing that they can expect from the government. Even if the Gujarat government were to offer protection to those displaced, people might not return home because of fear and insecurity, he says. For Muslims to feel safe, he explains, “it requires a different kind of conviction,” a strong political will that’s absent both in the current government and its opposition party, the Congress. Shah says that Muslims have therefore developed their own coping mechanisms, and today construct their own schools and hospitals instead of relying on the government.

Shakeel Ahmed, administrator of the State Islamic Relief Committee’s legal help and guidance cell, concurs that the situation is unlikely to change. “It’s therefore important for the Muslim community to re-organise itself and work together,” he points out. Ahmed is also secretary of the Forum for Democracy and Communal Amity (Gujarat). “We need to work together to improve education levels. Also, there is a percentage of the Gujarati population that’s non-communal and we should build bridges with them.”

Achyut Yagnik, founder-secretary of the NGO Setu: Centre for Social Knowledge and Action, and co-author of the book The Shaping of Modern Gujarat points out that if one were to go by the United Nations’ principles on displacement, the central government would have to be held equally responsible for the plight of Gujarat’s internally displaced. “The UN is not going to ask the Gujarat government, it’s going to ask the Government of India about the people,” says Yagnik.

The Manmohan Singh-led UPA government stirred into action only in 2007, when Gujarat was set to go to the polls. Yagnik cities just one example: the residents of Juhapura in Ahmedabad, considered to be one of the largest Muslim ghettos in India with a population of 250,000 people, have been demanding a bank for the past three years without any response from either the Centre or the state government.

Little wonder then that when the Centre announces a compensation package, people see it as a case of too little, too late. For people displaced by the riots, living in houses they cannot call their own, an announcement is just that: a statement someone makes with an eye on the votes, only to be forgotten a few days later.

Najah Alosaimi | Arab News  

FINAL CHECK: A student applying for scholarship checks her documents. (AN photo)               

RIYADH: Manal Al-Quais, a 23-year-old Saudi, won a scholarship from the King Abdullah Scholarship Program to study nursing in Canada. There’s only one problem: She can’t find a close male relative to go with her for the entire duration of the study; they have their own families and responsibilities to attend to.

Recently, two key governmental departments have initiated a debate on how women in Manal’s situation can take advantage of Saudi Arabia’s national scholarship program.

The Higher Education Ministry will not lift the requirement that these students bring a guardian (a close male relative or husband) in order to study abroad, while the governmental Human Rights Commission (HRC) disagrees on the importance of the “mahram” accompanying the students.

“This would help hundreds of women who don’t have male guardians available or ready to go with them to pursue higher education outside,” said HRC spokesman Zuhair Al-Harithy.

In a recommendation sent to the Council of Ministers, the HRC argues that the permission of a guardian should suffice, just as it is done for allowing women to travel unaccompanied.

But for the time being, Higher Education Ministry will stick to the existing policy. Saudi women who go abroad to study at their own expense are exempt from this requirement.

“Any woman student whose guardian leaves the country where she studies will immediately lose financial support,” said Abdullah Al-Moussa, general supervisor of scholarships at the Ministry of Higher Education.

Some guardians prefer to accompany their relatives for a couple of months and return to work and family. And some Saudi women, like Maram, who in her late teens dreams of going to college abroad to study events management, simply do not have any close male relatives.

“The rule expects that every house has a man,” Maram told Arab News, adding that the rules don’t allow her mother to accompany her.

The way the government ensures that Saudi women receiving these scholarships follow the requirements is simple: They don’t give the allowance money to the woman, but rather directly to the guardian whose passport is submitted along with the prospective student during the application process.

“The complaints (on the policy of requiring “mahrams” to accompany these young women) also come from parents,” said Al-Harithy. “They object to the rules that prevent their daughters from studying abroad when they have given their full approval for them to do so.”

Contrary to a popular misconception, women in Saudi Arabia are allowed to travel abroad alone (or without their male relatives) if their guardians give permission. The permission slips are affixed to the passports to show to the authorities.

Al-Harithy pointed out that the HRC efforts in this regard are not only because of individual complaints, but also because of the impact of this rule on society and the economy.

With approximately 30 percent of these scholarships going to women, according to official figures, there are many families with college-bound daughters who can’t afford to send a male relative with them, or the male relatives have their own lives and responsibilities that prevent them from being able to take this time off.

According to media reports, the problem has even led some women to seek out marriages of convenience with men willing to become “temporary husbands” and therefore guardians of these women during their stay abroad.

Sociologist Wafa’a Taibah, a professor at King Saud University and HRC member, expressed concern about these short-term marriages. “Such marriages are based on selfish interests,” she said. “They raise the rate of divorce and adversely affect any children born out of these marriages.”

The guardians themselves are affected. Should they decide to accompany their women relatives, they can end up spending years outside the work force and return to Saudi Arabia jobless.

Abdullah, 31, who did not want to provide his family name, is an example. He works in a legal office, but will soon resign to go to Brisbane, Australia, to act as his sister’s guardian while she earns her Ph.D.

“I will have to resign from my work because the management refused to give me three years’ leave,” he said.

Furthermore, in many cases these men will not be able to legally work in the countries where they reside temporarily. Guardians abroad receive monthly allowances from the ministry for staying with their student relatives.

In some countries, such as the United States and Britain, the guardians receive monthly stipends of SR4,000.

Wajeha Al-Huwaider, a Saudi women’s rights activist, said this policy should change and that there is no legitimate religious basis for prohibiting women from living alone in general.

“If we look around us we will find a number of Saudi women living alone with their kids after divorce, or after their husbands pass away,” she said. “Tribal customs and traditions must not interfere in education because it will slow women empowerment.”

An interview by Glenda Girón; Photos by Edu Ponces

(translated from Spanish)

The only thing that shines today at the jeweler’s house is the memory of the daily $5.15 he used to earn by picking watermelons, tomatoes, cucumbers and onions in Texas, United States. When Francisco Linares was deported, in 2007, all he could do was return to his goldsmith trade, working other people’s gold. And so it was until, after suffering a second burglary, he was left with nothing but his tools: a darkened table and a pile of twisted junk. From that moment on, he was no longer able to pay the $17 monthly fee for the house in the outskirts of Santa Ana. The $4 a day that Delmy de Linares earned with her job as a housekeeper was barely enough to pay for the food of their three children and the couple, and the deallocation orders that were slid under the door had started to put pressure on them. At 44, the United States was as necessary to Francisco as a life-jacket to a shipwrecked person. He convinced Delmy to join him in a trip with no guide and no guarantees, in which the only advantage was that he had made it once in the past. Working with watermelons in the North, he must have thought, is more dignifying than working gold in El Salvador.

They said goodbye to their children and to their house on Tuesday, March 26, of the present year. Two days later, they entered Mexico. They were on a bus, travelling down a road in Chiapas, when some agents of the Preventive Federal Police appeared. They made the bus stop and what happened then was that she hesitated, she got nervous, and she wasn’t able to answer the agents’ questions with the necessary promptness. They made her get off the bus. Francisco saw her face of concern and, after thinking about it for a few seconds, he decided to confess about his origin. They were both forced to get off the bus, same as others who did not carry their documents with them and, once stripped of their flags, coats of arms, governments and nationalities, were put all together in one big bag: Central Americans.

It wasn’t that bad this time. They were sent back to Guatemala thanks to the fact that, foreseeing the possibility of being arrested, Francisco had recommended Delmy to say she was from that country. He claimed the same. And, as the Mexican authorities did not bother to confirm the veracity of the statements, they were left in a border point that the Mexicans call Talismán and the Guatemalans call El Carmen. Before that, they had to spend the night in the police station, where he stayed with the men and she stayed with the women. They suffered from hunger and never stopped worrying about each other, but in the end it wasn’t so bad.

It was not a significant setback, and it did not undermine the Linares’ intentions. The same day the Mexican agents left them at the border point, Delmy and Francisco took a bus and made a half an hour trip to the following border point, which is called Tecún Uman and, as opposed to the previous one, is open 24 hours a day. That way, they went on the route that Francisco knew well.

On Saturday, March 1st, they were on a bus again. It was early. At 6 in the morning, they had crossed the Suchiate river, the one that links and, at the same time, separates the two countries, and since the sun was just starting to rise, he thought there would be no one there willing to surprise them. She didn’t speak this time. It was him who, with a fake Mexican accent, asked the driver to let them get off before arriving at the customs control. “Are you going to avoid it?”- Francisco says the driver asked him. An affirmative answer was not enough to quench curiosity. “You don’t have documents?”, the driver asked again; to which Francisco remembers having answered with an irritated: “And why do you think I’m asking you to leave me here?” The driver stopped and the couple got off.

Until that trip, Delmy had never been to the capital city of her own country, San Salvador, which is located only 65 kilometres from her place of residence. But when the sun finally rised on that Saturday, she and her husband had left El Salvador behind, had traveled across Guatemala and were walking through a place known as La Arrocera, in Huixtla (Chiapas). They got off the bus about 500 metres away from the customs control and walked about four blocks in order to avoid it. This is where the darkest part of their story began. Here begins the episode that the Linares couple decided to call “the incident”.

Francisco says that they hurried, and almost ran, in order to escape from them. It didn’t work. In a split second, one of the three uniformed officers jumped in front of them and asked them where they came from, where they were going, whether they were upset, whether they carried any money, whether the ‘old woman’ had any money. They were three. They had shotguns.

In Linares’ house there are several chairs, a couple of beds, a partition wall, and behind the partition wall, a paltry kitchen. Francisco agreed to tell this story on April 22, when the memories were still like open sores. He spoke because he wanted to demand justice. He had spent less than 48 hours in El Salvador. And he kept going back to his part of the incident with gestures and anger.

The agent asked Francisco whether he was upset. “No, I’m happy; I’m happy because I see you. That makes me feel there are no thieves here, nothing bad can happen to me. And at the same time, I’m worried, because you can hand me over to the Immigration Police”, he remembers having answered.

At the beginning, there were three agents, two with “navarone” hats and one with a regular cap. One of them, who had the face covered, passed his gun from one hand to the other. And the one who was talking to Francisco ordered other three men to get closer with a sign. These were wearing dark green shirts and trousers; army green. The last ones stayed with Delmy. The other three, the first men, took Francisco away. They said they would let Delmy go in about 10 minutes and that she would join him then.

With a diplomatic courtesy, Gustavo Gutiérrez, officer in charge of migration affairs in the state of Chiapas, admits that the respect of the immigrants’ rights and the purging of the police forces are “a challenge”, a big one. This way, turning actions into words, what the Linares called “the incident” works for Gutiérrez to size up his challenge. “This is not a case that we could consider as extraordinary; unfortunately, it shows the size of the challenge we are facing”, said the officer.

Francisco ran away from the uniformed men of the Preventive Federal Police. He escaped and hid in a gully. Like in a movie, he says he heard his chasers walking above his hideout, and he heard them say “That guy has gone”. And he stayed there, awake, stucking his head out to see if Delmy appeared. He waited for one day and a half, and she didn’t appear.

Francisco assures he searched for her. He says he wandered around the place where they had been intercepted, and he didn’t find any trace of who had been his wife for more then 25 years. He decided to go on, but the weight of sorrow became too heavy for him to continue toward his dream of working in the picking of watermelons, tomatoes, cucumbers and onions in Texas, United States.

He hung off the south train –which travels through the states of Chiapas and Oaxaca– and managed to get off safe and sound. Without a cent in his pocket (the six uniformed officers had kept it all), he decided to accept the shelter and food offered by the house “Hogar de la misericordia”, administered by a Mexican priest called Alejandro Solalinde, in the Ixtepec municipality. The nights became tears in there. He spent time alone, because he didn’t like it when his travel mates, who were also broken and exhausted, tried to cheer him up.

His relationship with lights and cameras began in that house. Solalinde gathered his guests and encouraged them to tell their experiences, as in a group therapy. Francisco requested permission to speak, but only to tell the priest that he wanted to talk to him in private. Solalinde is not an unknown person for the media. In the last months, he has been cited by Prensa Libre, Reforma, El Universal, Vanguardia, Noticias de Oaxaca, El Periódico de México and Gatopardo. In all the interviews he talks about violations to the immigrants’ rights, and he has always referred to the immigrants themselves as a source for his complaints. The priest, however, took two days to receive Francisco in private; and Francisco still complains about that.

The chat with Solalinde not only worked as a relief. It also planted the seed of complaint in Francisco’s heart. And the Salvadoran man, who had no news about his wife since the encounter with the uniformed officers, who didn’t have a cent in his pocket and felt totally confused, let that seed grow.

Opening the denunciation process meant going back in his trip to the North. And going back, especially when each step forward has hurt so much, is not easy. Francisco had to come back from Ixtepec, in the state of Oaxaca, to the state of Chiapas. “I agreed to do it only because I had no news about her, and that was a total injustice”, he remembers.

Francisco is a dark-skinned man –as dark as the police officers who took money and wife from him, he says–, with strong convictions, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), father of three children and married to a woman of his same age, 44, who he met when they were small kids and used to play in the España colony, in Santa Ana, also known as La Sucursal del Cielo (a Branch of Heaven).

On March 14, 14 days after the incident, Francisco took part in a press conference. The “Santaneco” goldsmith was sat in front of who knows how many journalists. Because Francisco’s stay in Mexico coincided with that of Jorge Bustamante, Minister-Reporter of migration affairs for the United Nations. After answering to the journalists’ questions, they met in private.

Since December 2006, Bustamante has visited the Republic of Korea, Indonesia, the United States, Guatemala and Mexico as a UN special rapporteur on immigrants’ rights. Bustamante has a PhD. in Sociology and Political Sciences, and has participated in the writing of books like “Decadencia y auge de las identidades”, “Economía fronteriza y libre comercio” and “Frontera y migraciones”. Francisco, for his part, went to school until first grade, was deported from the United States, was eventually part of the Cuerpo de Agentes Metropolitanos de Santa Ana, and owes $1,100 to a friend. With those credentials, they sitted one in front of each other.

“Now go ahead, disguise a couple of your officers with a backpack and make them walk by a customs control with me, and let’s see what happens to them, let’s see if they get robbed or not. You know what happens, but you profit from that. You know that our only crime is to cross through Mexico, and you know we come to make a contribution to your country, because Salvadoran people bring dollars and leave dollars”, Francisco remembers having told the reporter.

Bustamante issued a report of his visit to Mexico. “The special reporter expresses his profound shock before the increasing abuses against immigrant people, especially against those of Central American origin”, are the lines of the document that can be applied to what the Linares went through.

After the meeting with Bustamante in Tapachula, still in the state of Chiapas, Francisco made a formal complaint. At that time, his thirst for justice was huge. That was when missing Delmy appeared.

Delmy arrived at her home on Monday, March 10. She was alone, wearing clothes that someone (who knows who) had given her. The trip from La Arrocera, in Huixtla, to her modest house in Santa Ana took her five days. She had spent the other four days in the jungle.

Delmy starts with her account from the moment the men left her lying on the floor. She went back, undoing the steps she had done with her husband. She walked as far as she could, and then she started asking for money.

She, who had never been outside Santa Ana, had to find a way to survive alone. There was no sorrow to be ashamed of or known people to rely on. “I paid the buses with what the people gave me. Some of the buses charged me and some didn’t”, she says in a low voice.

Unlike her husband, she doesn’t speak much, and she barely smiles. She dries her tears before they start rolling down her cheeks.

The ones who separated her from her husband (the uniformed ones, the ones in green, the ones who had shotguns) held her for four days. They raped her for four days.

She remembers having been fed, but she doesn’t remember what. She remembres having been beaten, but she doesn’t know how much. She knows she was sexually abused, but she knows she wouldn’t be able to reconstruct a face, a scene or a name. She knows about the scar, but not about how they wounded her. “The problem is that when I get cut, I faint instantly”, she explains as if she was talking about a manufacturing defect.

In her hand, Delmy has a golden ring that her husband Francisco forged for her, and she still keeps it because she never took it out of her house in Santa Ana. The place she returned to on March 10: “The first thing I did after getting home was asking whether he had already spoken”.

What Mexican authorities said about Delmy’s whereabouts was that she had been “assured” in a Preventive Federal Police operation and that she had already been released, according to the information gathered by the local media. Solalinde was not satisfied with that explanation. “How can there be a migrations operation without Migration Agents? Or do Migration agents use balaclava? And also, they threatened them with powerful weapons, they insulted them, they threatened them, they robbed them and they kidnapped the lady”, were the words of the religious man before the journalists.

Once the Linares’ experience attracted the cameras and the pens, the Chiapas authorities committed themselves to research and to respond for what had happened. The case was put in the hands of Gustavo Gutiérrez, officer in charge of migration affairs.

Movilidad Humana is the name of the NGO that documented the Linares case and caused it to reach the ears of Bustamante, the United Nations’ reporter. Solalinde works in Movilidad Humana, and it was him who, on March 18, received the news from the state authorities: Delmy was in her home. They knew it eight days after she managed to come back to her country.

Solalinde is a usual source for journalists. An article that cites his name says that he interceded to avoid the beating of 22 Central Americans one morning; another article reports that the authorities didn’t do anything to investigate the whereabouts of 12 kidnapped Guatemalan people; another note claims that 700 undocumented immigrants arrived at his house hanging off the train. All was in big numbers, with countless testimonies of human rights violations. To find, amidst that sea of tragedies, someone willing to demand justice through the institutional channel is not something that occurs everyday. That is why it was important.

Francisco not only was exhorted to dare to make a complaint before the corresponding entities. He also received offers to accompany the whole process until the end. Gustavo Gutiérrez assured Francisco, on behalf of the state of Chiapas, that he, Delmy and their three children would be helped with a home, work and studies if they returned to Mexico to live legally. If they accepted the benefits, of course, they also had to agree to go on with the process, which required a statement ratification on his part and a first statement on hers.

Francisco returned to his home in the outskirts of Santa Ana on April 20. He had spoken to Delmy the day before. It was their first conversation since the incident. They reached an agreement beforehand. He would call her as soon as he arrived at El Salvador so that she moved with their children to a place near the spot where the bus would drop him. They wanted to meet as soon as possible. But the plans were nothing but that, plans. Because Francisco ran out of money and couldn’t call his family. They met at their home.

Francisco returned to El Salvador through the legal way, not through deportation. The Salvadoran consulate in Tapachula helped him to get a temporary passport. He received the document on April 18.

El Salvador’s consul in Tapachula is Nelson Cuéllar. According to him, this office’s obligations towards Francisco were clearly delimited and they consisted in helping him with the obtaining of the documents, like the granting of the permission from the Migration office to stay in Mexico without problems, the processing of a certificate of origin and the approval of a temporary passport.

Since the incident, he spent a month and a half in Mexico. During that time, he became the main concern and the center of attention for the State of Chiapas. Gustavo Gutiérrez was the person in charge of the case from the beginning.

Francisco is a man with strong convictions. So strong that they cause him trouble. “I have always been fond of eating herbs and vegetables. That’s why we got together with some ‘brothers’ there and we cooked soups for ourselves, so that the people from the shelter didn’t have to feed us and could give the food to those who really needed it”; that is how Francisco summarizes the “issue” for which he was transferred from the shelter. It was an action in which Gustavo Gutiérrez took part.

That was because Gustavo Gutiérrez, unlike the Salvadoran consul, does not put limits on what they did for Francisco. “We took care of him”, he says; and the list of things this phrase implies is long. “We would pay attention to where he spent the night, what he ate, that he received his psychological support; we took him to his consulate, we did all we could for the consulate to help him, and then we prepared a strategy so that the consulate would work together with the Immigration Office”, the Chiapaneco officer said on the phone.

The man responsible for migration affairs in the state of Chiapas needed time. Francisco’s time. As the officer himself reckons, it isn’t hard to find stories worth reporting in Mexico. The hard part is that the interested party give up or delay his trip to the North, in order to be able to make the complaint and to confirm it later. “The Central Americans don’t stay long enough”, he says with resignation.

Mexico is a country that asks for things but doesn’t give anything in return. That is, at least, what it reads in Bustamante’s statements: “We do to the Central American immigrants worse things than they do to Mexicans in the United States”. He said that on March 12, one day before meeting Francisco for the first time.

When Gustavo Gutiérrez talks about what is left to be done, he starts by highlighting the importance of making the government institutions’ staff more sensitive before the immigrants’ complaints, and goes on by emphasizing the importance of convincing immigrants to take their complaints and put them through.

“I think they did it for convenience. They would help me out in return for me making that complaint”; such is the conclusion reached by Francisco while sitting in a chair in his home.

Francisco returned to his home on April 20, and he did it thanks to the Chiapaneco government, that gave him $95 with which to pay the cost of his family members’ documents, such as birth certificates, photos, unique identity documents, and passports. When he entered El Salvador, however, he didn’t have enough money to make a phone-call. Because, although Gustavo Gutiérrez insists that the state of Chiapas paid for his transport, Francisco assures that he had to pay for his bus ticket with those $95. “And with that money, I also paid for my food and for what they charged me for some stamps at the border”, he insists.

Since his return, Francisco has only been able to get sporadic jobs. In spite of the repeated rapes, Delmy has not seen doctors or psychologists, and she spends the time performing domestic jobs in others’ homes to raise money for the food.

Francisco’s thirst for justice has been decreasing. And Delmy, who never felt a strong desire to make a formal complaint, leaves her sorrow behind and focuses on being quiet and working. “I don’t want to accuse anyone unjustly, I didn’t see their faces”, she explains.

On May 20, the Linares couple traveled to San Salvador. She was wearing a suit and he was wearing a buttoned shirt and a belt. They got off the inter-departmental bus at the stop that is in front of the Basílica de Guadalupe, in Antiguo Cuscatlán. They were picked up by the staff of the Instituto de Derechos Humanos de la Universidad Centroamericana, IDHUCA (Institute of Human Rights of the Central American University).

A whole month had passed since Francisco’s return to El Salvador, and during that time he had to deal with the same problems that had forced him to leave: paying for the house and maintenance. The Linares live in a house that was given to them by an institution that helps low-income families to get a decent home. Families, however, commit themselves to pay an installment in order to keep their adjudication-right. The Linares almost lost that right. In order to keep it, they committed to pay the delinquency fee; with that, the initial monthly payment increased from $17 to $50.

To that, they should add the amount the borrowed before the trip; the $1,100 they owe to a friend, with which the couple expected to get to the United States. But most of it was kept by the men who intercepted them.

With all those concerns, but still with the interest of justice in mind, Francisco arrived at the IDHUCA asking for advice to continue with the process of the complaint from here. But his spirit crashed down two days later. He was, as he himself puts it, frozen.

Although Gilma Pérez, coordinator of the IDHUCA’s immigration program, had said the complaint represented an “unprecedented” and “exemplary” case, Francisco had already started to give up that idea. The crimes for which he made the formal complaint in Mexico were false imprisonment, abuse of authority, forced disappearance and theft. The only non-effective charge as for today, due to Delmy’s presence, is the forced disappearance one.

According to IDHUCA’s opinion, Francisco should not return to Mexico. Pérez thinks it’s not convenient for him to be exposed to retaliation. From Mexico, Gustavo Gutiérrez not only considers it necessary for Francisco to come back, but they will also receive his whole family, willing to offer Delmy a job and to include their children in the educational system. At least that’s what they’ve offered him. And according to the Mexican officer, Francisco must only comply with the documents part, since the cost of the tickets would be at the expense of the Chiapas’ Government.

But Francisco no longer feels the same thirst for justice. The wounds have healed. Now, as if poverty had consumed his willpower, he says he regrets having accepted to make the complaint. “I should have gone (to the North)”, he says, expressing his frustration.

So, the only thing that shines today at the jeweler’s house is the memory of the daily $5.15 he used to earn by picking watermelons, tomatoes, cucumbers and onions in Texas, United States. After he came back from Mexico, two months ago, Francisco didn’t take up his trade as a goldsmith. The darkened table and the pile of twisted junk with which he worked before the second burglary are still not in use. They still haven’t found the way to pay the $50 of the installment, already in default, of the house in the outskirts of Santa Ana. The deallocation orders will soon be slid again under the door. The $4 Delmy gathers with her domestic job is barely enough for the food. At 44 years of age, the United States is as necessary to Francisco as a life-jacket to a shipwrecked person. He has convinced Delmy to let him try to do it again. He will do it alone this time, and with $20 in the bag. A trip whose only advantage is that he thinks he knows the way. Working with watermelons in the North, he is certain, is more dignifying than working gold in El Salvador.