Her appeal comes in the wake of the killing of Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh, who was fatally shot on Wednesday while covering an Israeli raid in Jenin, West Bank.
The veteran Palestinian-American journalist was buried in East Jerusalem on Friday and huge crowds turned out for her funeral.
‘Shocking’ use of force
The High Commissioner issued a statement saying she was following “with deep distress” the events in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
“Footage of Israeli police attacking mourners at the funeral procession of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in East Jerusalem on Friday 13 May was shocking. Reports indicate that at least 33 people were injured,” she said.
Ms. Bachelet said the Israeli use of force, which was being filmed and broadcast live, appeared to be unnecessary and must be promptly and transparently investigated.
“There must be accountability for the terrible killing not just of Shireen Abu Akleh but for all the killings and serious injuries in the occupied Palestinian territory,” she said.
Call for investigations
The UN rights chief reported that 48 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces so far this year.
The latest death occurred on Saturday when a young man called Walid al-Sharif, succumbed to injuries sustained during clashes last month at the Al Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem.
“As I have called for many times before, there must be appropriate investigations into the actions of Israeli security forces,” said Ms. Bachelet.
“Anyone found responsible should be held to account with penal and disciplinary sanctions commensurate to the gravity of the violation. This culture of impunity must end now.”
Security Council condemnation
The killing of Ms. Abu Akleh has sent shockwaves across the globe, and UN officials have been among those calling for an investigation.
The journalist was shot even though she wore a vest that identified her as a member of the press corps. Her producer also was wounded.
The UN Security Council issued a statement on Friday strongly condemning her killing, reiterating that journalists should be protected as civilians.
The Council also called for an immediate, thorough, transparent, and fair and impartial investigation into her killing, and stressed the need to ensure accountability.
During one of the hearings in Buenos Aires, the court trying a 1924 indigenous massacre in the Chaco heard the testimony of historian Nicolás Iñigo Carrera, from the University of Buenos Aires, who has been studying indigenous history in Argentina for decades. The expert witness described in detail the conditions in the Napalpí indigenous “reducción” or camp where the massacre took place. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS
by Daniel Gutman (buenos aires)
Inter Press Service
BUENOS AIRES, May 13 (IPS) – It’s a strange trial, with no defendants. The purpose is not to hand down a conviction, but to bring visibility to an atrocious event that occurred almost a hundred years ago in northern Argentina and was concealed by the State for decades with singular success: the massacre by security forces of hundreds of indigenous people who were protesting labor mistreatment and discrimination.
“We are seeking to heal the wounds and vindicate the memory of the (indigenous) peoples,” explained federal judge Zunilda Niremperger, as she opened the first hearing in Buenos Aires on May 10 in the trial for the truth of the so-called Napalpí Massacre, in which an undetermined number of indigenous people were shot to death on the morning of Jul. 19, 1924.
The trial began on Apr. 19 in the northern province of Chaco, one of the country’s poorest, near the border with Paraguay. But it was moved momentarily to the capital, home to approximately one third of the 45 million inhabitants of this South American country, to give it greater visibility.
In a highly symbolic decision, the venue chosen in Buenos Aires was the Space for Memory and Human Rights, created in the former Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA), where the most notorious clandestine torture and extermination center operated during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, which kidnapped and murdered as many as 30,000 people for political reasons.
The hearings in Buenos Aires ended Thursday May 12, and the court will reconvene in Resistencia, the capital of Chaco, on May 19, when the prosecutor’s office and the plaintiffs are to present their arguments before the sentence is handed down at an unspecified date.
“This trial is aimed at bringing out the truth that we need, and that I come to support, in the place where they brought my daughter when they kidnapped her. This shows that genocides are repeated in history,” Vera Vigevani de Jarach, seated in the front row of the courtroom, her head covered by the white scarf that identifies the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo human rights group, told IPS.
Vera, 94, is Jewish and emigrated with her family to Argentina when she was 11 years old from Italy, due to the racial persecution unleashed by fascist leader Benito Mussolini in 1939. In 1976 her only daughter, Franca Jarach, then 18 years old, was forcibly disappeared.
“Truth trials” are not a novelty in Argentina. The term was used to refer to investigations of the crimes committed by the dictatorship, carried out after 1999, when amnesty laws passed after the conviction of the military regime’s top leaders blocked the prosecution of the rest of the perpetrators.
A petition filed by a member of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (made up of mothers of victims of forced disappearance) before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) led later to an agreement with the Argentine State, which recognized the woman’s right to have the judiciary investigate the fate of her disappeared daughter, even though the amnesty laws made it impossible to punish those responsible.
Eventually, the amnesty laws were repealed, the trials resumed, and defendants were convicted and sent to prison.
Indigenous communities and human rights organizations held an Apr. 19, 2022 demonstration in Resistencia, capital of the Argentine province of Chaco, at the beginning of the trial for the truth about the Napalpí massacre. CREDIT: Chaco Secretariat of Human Rights and Gender
Historic reparations
“My grandmother was a survivor of the massacre and I grew up listening to the stories of labor exploitation in Napalpí and about what happened that day. For us this trial is a historic reparation,” Miguel Iya Gómez, a bilingual multicultural teacher who today presides over the Chaco Aboriginal Institute, a provincial agency whose mission is to improve the living conditions of native communities, told IPS.
The trial is built on the basis of official documents and journalistic coverage of the time and the videotaped testimonies of survivors of the massacre and their descendants, and of researchers of indigenous history in the Chaco.
The Argentine province of Chaco forms part of the ecoregion from which it takes its name: a vast, hot, dry, sparsely forested plain that was largely unsettled during the Spanish Conquest. Only at the end of the 19th century did the modern Argentine State launch military campaigns to subdue the indigenous people in the Chaco and impose its authority there.
Once the Chaco was conquered, many indigenous families were forced to settle in camps called “reducciones”, where they had to carry out agricultural work.
“The ‘reducciones’ operated in the Chaco between 1911 and 1956 and were concentration camps for indigenous people, who were disciplined through work,” said sociologist Marcelo Musante, a member of the Network of Researchers on Genocide and Indigenous Policies in Argentina, which brings together academics from different disciplines, at the hearing.
“When indigenous people entered the ‘reducción’, they were given clothes and farming tools, and this generated a debt that put them under great pressure. And they were not allowed to make purchases outside the stores of the ‘reducción’,” he explained.
David García, a member of the Napalpí Foundation, created in 2006 to gather information about and bring visibility to the 1924 massacre, took part in the trial in Buenos Aires. His organization was one of the driving forces behind the historic trial in Argentina. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS
Invaded by cotton
Historian Nicolás Iñigo Carrera said it was common for indigenous people in the Chaco to go to work temporarily in sugar mills in the neighboring provinces of Salta and Jujuy, but the scenario changed in the 1920s, when the Argentine government introduced cotton in the Chaco, to tap into the textile industry’s growing global demand.
“Then the criollo (white) settlers, who often had no laborers, demanded the guaranteed availability of indigenous labor to harvest the cotton crop, and in 1924 the government prohibited indigenous people, who refused to work on the cotton plantations, from leaving the Chaco, declaring any who left subversives,” Carrera said.
Anthropologist Lena Dávila Da Rosa said the Jul. 19, 1924 protest involved between 800 and 1000 indigenous people from Napalpí, and some 130 police officers who opened fired on them, with the support of an airplane that dropped candy so the children would go out to look for it and thus reveal the location of the protesters they were tracking down.
“It’s impossible to know exactly how many indigenous people were killed, but there were several hundred victims,” Alejandro Jasinski, a researcher with the Truth and Justice Program of the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, told IPS.
“The official report mentioned four people killed in confrontations among themselves, and there was a judicial investigation that was quickly closed. All that was left were the buried memories of the communities,” he added.
The memories were revived and made public in recent years thanks in large part to the efforts of Juan Chico, an indigenous writer and researcher from the Chaco who died of COVID-19 in 2021.
“Juan started collecting oral accounts almost 20 years ago,” David García, a translator and interpreter of the language of the Qom, one of the main indigenous nations of the Chaco, told IPS. “I worked alongside him to bring the indigenous genocide to light, and in 2006 we founded an NGO that today is the Napalpí Foundation. It was a long struggle to reach this trial.”
Vera Vigevani de Jarach, a member of the human rights group Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, attended the hearing in Buenos Aires for the Napalpí indigenous massacre, held in the most notorious clandestine detention and torture center used by the 1976-1983 military dictatorship in Argentina. CREDIT: National Secretariat of Human Rights
Indigenous people in the Chaco today
Of the population of Chaco province, 3.9 percent, or 41,304 people, identified as indigenous in the last national census conducted in Argentina in 2010, which is higher than the national average of 2.4 percent.
Census data reflects the harsh living conditions of indigenous people in the Chaco and the disadvantages they face in relation to the rest of the population. More than 80 percent live in deficient housing while more than 25 percent live in critically overcrowded conditions, with more than three people per room. In addition, more than half of the households cook with firewood or charcoal.
Today, the site of the Napalpí massacre is called Colonia Aborigen Chaco and is a 20,000-hectare plot of land owned by the indigenous community where, according to official data, some 1,300 indigenous people live, from the Qom and Moqoit communities, the most numerous native groups in the Chaco along with the Wichi.
In 2019, mass graves were found there by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, a prestigious organization that emerged in 1984 to identify remains of victims of the military dictatorship and that has worked all over the world.
“What we hope is that the sentence will bring out the truth about an event that needs to be understood so that racism and xenophobia do not take hold in Argentina,” Duilio Ramírez, a lawyer with the Chaco government’s Human Rights Secretariat, which is acting as plaintiff, told IPS. “People need to know about all the blood that has flowed because of contempt for indigenous people.”
“We hope that with the ruling, the Argentine State will take responsibility for what happened and that this will translate into public policies of reparations for the indigenous communities,” he said.
BERLIN, May 13 (IPS) – While the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine is shaking up the European security order, other parts of the world are being particularly affected by the war’s ‘side effects’.
The struggle against the economic consequences of the pandemic and the effects of the climate crisis were already posing major challenges for many developing countries. The war in Ukraine is now making the situation even more difficult to manage, and adding new crisis dynamics as well.
As a result of the Russian invasion, for example, the prices of bread, petrol, and fertiliser are rapidly increasing in the countries of the Global South. At the same time, many exporting countries have restricted food exports, so that in many places, food shortages are looming. In view of these developments, the risk of famine is growing, as is the risk of protests that lead to unrest.
In addition, there is concern that donor countries could become less willing and less resourced to support the Global South, due to new commitments related to the war in Ukraine. Yet these are now needed more urgently than ever. We, Europeans, must counter these fears. Support for Ukraine and a strong commitment to the Global South must not be mutually exclusive.
International solidarity and the adherence to a global commitment
Two examples from Africa show why our commitment to the Global South remains important.
First, the Horn of Africa is experiencing its worst drought in 40 years. Up to 20 million people are acutely threatened by hunger. At the same time, due to the war in Europe, the prices for food and fertiliser are spiking.
Until now, over one third of east Africa’s grain imports have come from Russia or Ukraine; but since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, deliveries have plummeted. The region’s national budgets are massively indebted after two years of pandemic and economic restrictions, and cannot absorb the price increases.
Meanwhile, the UN World Food Programme (WFP), which sources more than half of its grain from Ukraine and Russia, lacks the resources to combat impending famines. The appeals to the international community are becoming more and more desperate.
Martin SchulzSecondly, in West Africa it is becoming increasingly difficult to protect the civilian population. The climate crisis has already led to increased risks of conflict in the Sahel region, among other places, because pastureland and water sources are shrinking.
The lack of economic prospects, non-existent public services and a lack of security are giving people greater incentives to join violent groups. The region’s military forces often fight against such groups, without regard for the civilian population. Increasingly, Russian weapons and military advisors are also being used.
Locally coordinated support for human security, which is also promoted by German and European development cooperation, and international peacekeeping missions, such as the one in Mali, can make an important contribution to protecting the local civilian population.
The continuation of the MINUSMA mission and Germany’s participation in it have been a subject of debate, especially since the withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer. The war in Ukraine now raises the question more strongly as to whether a commitment is still viable when the current threat is so close to home.
However, Germany’s withdrawal from the Sahel region would deprive the civilian population of necessary protection and make it more difficult to provide humanitarian aid. That would be a fatal signal to the local population. It would also hardly constitute convincing evidence of Europe’s willingness to assume more global responsibility in the future.
These two examples illustrate that we should intensify rather than scale back cooperation with the Global South now. Our international solidarity requires that we adhere to our global commitment to comprehensive human security both within and outside Europe.
As the Global North, we have benefited from colonialism and globalisation for centuries while we live at the expense of the countries of the Global South, who are not only suffering the most from the climate crisis, but have also contributed to it the least. It is part of our global responsibility to continue to support these countries right now – especially when they are being acutely affected by the effects of war in Europe.
Being a reliable European partner
Europe’s commitment to this is more broadly based than that of other partners of the Global South. Russia, China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates work almost exclusively with governments – regardless of whether or not they are democratic.
Europe, on the other hand, also cooperates with legislative bodies, the judiciary and civil society. Whether combatting hunger, protecting the civilian population, enforcing human and employee rights in global supply chains, or strengthening democratic scope, civil actors in the Global South count on European support.
This is not to be expected from Russia and China. In most countries in the Global South, a majority of the population wish to realise opportunities that only democracies guarantee. Continuing the common commitment to social and political rights worldwide – without being naive in terms of foreign policy – must therefore be part of the Zeitenwende.
Continuing a strong global engagement is also essential for Europe in geostrategic terms. No other region of the world benefits from the rules-based multilateral order as much as the EU, which has built its prosperity and supply chains on its reliability.
Therefore, the hitherto underestimated deglobalisation that currently poses a threat along exclusive zones of influence constitutes a particular risk, given the special integration of European prosperity into a global division of labour. This is all the more reason for Europe to commit itself to preserving this rules-based order beyond its borders.
To do this, we need partners. However, in order to find them, we will need to make more intensive efforts than in the past. The circle of the EU, the G7, NATO, and the OECD is too small.
We need to make concrete and fair offers to the Global South that will make the EU a more attractive partner than it has been thus far. This is not out of altruism, but a rational approach in mutual interest.
After all, if we want to secure majorities for a rules-based multilateral order in your own interest, we have to be the partner of first choice for the developing countries and for common political projects.
The need for critical assessment
The abstentions of some developing and emerging countries in the vote on the Ukraine resolution in the UN General Assembly in early March is therefore a warning signal. Among the more than 140 countries that voted for the resolution were primarily those in the Global South where Europe is particularly engaged and which tend to be democracies.
However, we should also look to the reasons that led certain countries to abstain, and derive constructive policy approaches from this. For many countries in the Global South, an increasingly multipolar world is also one in which they can reduce dependencies on Europe and the US and diversify partnerships.
For such countries, Russia is increasingly one of these partners – for example as the largest arms exporter to Africa, but also in the area of grain export. A clear positioning vis-à-vis Russia is therefore more difficult in the case of some countries.
Europe should respond to this in a constructive way. Future cooperation should not be based on categories of ‘reward’ or ‘punishment’ for voting behaviour. Instead, the opportunities to jointly shape global challenges should be emphasised.
Countries such as India and South Africa abstained from the vote in the General Assembly, among other reasons, because they assume that we have double standards, for example in the case of fighting the pandemic.
However, these two countries are not the only ones that remain decisive partners for rules-based multilateralism. Therefore, we need to be making more competitive offers to the Global South. For this we need a new framework of cooperation and a better understanding of the other parties’ interests.
Our cooperation must be more strategically positioned than in the past. This will require greater coherence between the various political areas in Europe. Approaches in foreign, development, climate and economic policy must mesh with each other.
Despite the increased demand for defence funding, the extensive humanitarian and development policy commitment must be maintained. In the end, every euro spent on crisis prevention saves many times the expenditure than dealing with the consequences of the crisis would entail. Every euro spent on protecting democracy creates a foundation for political stability.
A critical assessment of one’s own actions is always a prerequisite for a change in policy. In the past we have too often confused short-term security with long-term stability. For example, Europe’s cooperation with African autocrats to control migration to Europe and, supposedly, strengthen regional security was a mistake.
This cost us trust among those who – with growing success – protest against these autocrats and may soon assume government responsibilities. Establishing commercial interests that protect the interests of individual European industries but limit the creation of added value in the Global South makes it easier for other actors to make more attractive offers – for example in the establishment of economic infrastructure.
In a world in which many developing countries are being courted by various potential partners, a fairer EU trade policy takes on geopolitical importance. Through it, we can win the partners we need.
Europe’s advantage remains its capacity for multi-dimensional cooperation with the Global South. There it experiences a high degree of recognition – our partners from politics, civil society and trade unions from São Paulo to Bamako to Dhaka agree on this point.
An increasingly multipolar world needs more international commitment rather than less. This also amounts to one way in which our political approach to the new era must be measured.
Martin Schulz has been Chairman of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung since 14 December 2020. He is a former member of the German Bundestag and the European Parliament, of which he was President from 2012 to 2017. He was party leader of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) from 2017 to 2018.
Source: International Politics and Society (IPS), published by the Global and European Policy Unit of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Hiroshimastrasse 28, D-10785 Berlin.
States that have not yet abolished the death penalty may only impose it for “the most serious crimes,” the group of eleven experts said in a joint statement, adding that under international law, “only crimes of extreme gravity involving intentional killing” should be considered “most serious”.
“Drug offences clearly do not meet this threshold”, they argued.
Rights violation
The experts condemned Singapore’s execution of Malaysian nationals Abdul Kahar bin Othman and Nagaenthran Dharmalingam for drug-related offences in March and April, respectively.
Mr. Dharmalingam was executed despite claims that he had an intellectual disability, a deteriorating mental health condition and was a victim of human trafficking.
“Executions of persons with intellectual disabilities and for drug-related offences are a violation of the right to life and the right to be free from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and amount to unlawful killings,” the experts underscored.
A life in the balance
They also urged the Government to halt any plan to execute another Malaysian man convicted for a similar offence and to immediately establish “an official moratorium on all executions with a view to fully abolishing the death penalty”.
Datchinamurthy Kataiah was arrested for trafficking 44.96 grams of diamorphine from Malaysia to Singapore, and sentenced to death in May 2015.
Although his execution was scheduled for 29 April 2022, a stay was granted until 20 May.
They called on the Singaporean authorities to instead commute his death sentence to prison terms, in accordance with international human rights law and standards.
Additionally, the UN experts raised concerns over the discriminatory treatment of individuals belonging to minorities, as in the case of Mr. Kataiah, and reports about reprisals against their legal representatives.
Abolish death row
The statement reiterated that the mandatory use of the death penalty constitutes “an arbitrary deprivation of life”, since it is imposed without any possibility of taking into account the defendant’s personal circumstances or that of the particular offence.
“As a first step, the Government of Singapore should review, without delay, the scope of the death penalty, particularly with regard to drug-related offences, in order to ensure that its imposition and implementation are strictly limited to cases involving intentional killing,” they concluded.
Independent status
Special Rapporteurs and independent experts are appointed by the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council to examine and report back on a specific human rights theme or a country situation. The positions are honorary and the experts are not paid for their work.
Click here for the names of the experts who signed the statement.
Children and adolescents in a Yanomami community in Parima, on the southern border with Brazil, the area where four indigenous people were shot dead and others injured when they confronted military troops last March. CREDIT: Wataniba
by Humberto Marquez (caracas)
Inter Press Service
CARACAS, May 12 (IPS) – The voracious search for gold in southern Venezuela, practiced by thousands of illegal miners under the protection of various armed groups, represents the greatest threat today to the lives of indigenous peoples, their habitat and their cultures, according to their organizations and human rights defenders.
In this part of the Amazon jungle, “mining, violence, habitat destruction, death from disease and forced migration make up a context that indigenous people are calling a silent genocide,” researcher Aimé Tillet, who has worked in the area for many years, told IPS.
At the other end of the country, along the northwest border with Colombia, indigenous people are fighting for the delimitation of their territories, which has led to clashes and deaths in their attempts to recover ancestral lands, while they are often reduced to destitution.
There are common features of life in border regions that are home to indigenous peoples, such as neglect by the government, which fails to fulfill its duties in health, education, security, provision of food, fuel and transportation, supplies, communications and consultations with native peoples regarding the use of their land and resources.
The government foments mining activity and in 2016 decreed the “Orinoco Mining Arc” on the right bank of the Orinoco river – an area of 111,844 square kilometers, larger than Bulgaria, Cuba or Portugal.
In parallel, it established an armed forces company, Camimpeg, to spearhead the mining of gold, diamonds, coltan and other conventional and rare minerals, in which the country is rich.
Opacity is a stain on the management of military companies by the authorities, according to non-governmental organizations such as Citizen Control for Security and Defense.
The local press has reported on the involvement of military and police units in the region in incidents related to mining activity that have sparked protests by indigenous people and human rights activists, ranging from deaths of native people in altercations to massacres in which “unknown groups” have killed dozens of people.
Artisanal and illegal mining, in hundreds of deforested areas and along rivers contaminated with mercury used to extract gold from ore, are often controlled by criminal gangs that call themselves “syndicates” and that traffic in gold and supplies, as well as in people who work in the mines, who are often subjected to forced labor.
According to human rights groups, for some years now another danger has been Colombian guerrillas, particularly the National Liberation Army (ELN), which is involved in mining and other illegal activities in the southern state of Amazonas, as well as dissidents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which laid down its arms under a 2016 peace deal.
In the Sierra de Perijá mountains, home to three native peoples and part of the northern border between Colombia and Venezuela, the ELN has made inroads into indigenous communities, setting up camps, collecting “vacunas” – taxes or protection payment – from cattle ranchers, overseeing cattle smuggling and recruiting young people as guerrilla fighters.
A map showing the areas that are home to the main indigenous peoples of Venezuela, according to the governmental Simón Bolívar Geographic Institute. The most numerous groups are in the extreme northwest, south and east of the country. CREDIT: IGVSB
Shots in the jungle
On Mar. 20, four Yanomami Indians were shot and killed in the Sierra de Parima mountains that mark the border with Brazil in the extreme south, by Venezuelan Air Force troops after an altercation over the internet signal and a router shared by the military and members of a native community.
The Yanomami, who have lived in the jungles of southern Venezuela and northern Brazil for thousands of years – considered a living testimony to the Neolithic era who only came into contact with the rest of the world a few decades ago – have found mobile telephones a useful means of communication in their widely dispersed communities.
What happened in Parima “cannot be taken as an isolated reaction, but must be seen as the result of an accumulation of tensions and abuses, of a lack of a differentiated treatment based on the right to positive discrimination,” declared Wataniba, an organization supporting the indigenous peoples of Venezuela’s Amazon region, at the time.
“All these tensions that are experienced daily on the borders are a consequence of extractivism, coupled with abuses of power by the military, transculturation and the lack of concrete actions by the State to meet the basic needs of indigenous peoples,” the organization added.
Hundreds of informal and illegal gold mines deforest land, damage the soil, pollute the water with mercury and exploit indigenous and other workers under forms of modern slavery in Venezuela’s Amazon rainforest. CREDIT: RAISG
Undeterrable garimpeiros
In 1989, a decree law by then President Carlos Andrés Pérez (1922-2010, who governed the country from 1974-1979 and 1989-1993) banned for 50 years all mining activity in the state of Amazonas in the extreme south of the country, an area of 178,000 square kilometers of jungle with fragile soils, home to 200,000 inhabitants, more than half of them members of 20 indigenous peoples.
For decades, however, thousands of garimpeiros – the Brazilian name for informal gold prospectors, who originally came from Brazil – have made incursions into Amazonas, and in recent years on a larger scale, using airstrips and a large number of motor pumps, and imposing relations, sometimes involving trade but above all exploitation, with indigenous communities and individuals.
On Jul. 28, 2021, the Kuyujani and Kuduno indigenous organizations, as well as the Tuduma Saka court of justice of the Sanemá ethnic group (Yanomami branch) and their Ye’kuana (Carib) neighbors, denounced the presence of garimpeiros in four communities, in documents delivered to the governmental Ombudsman’s Office.
More than 400 armed garimpeiros, according to the complaint, were working with 30 machines extracting precious minerals in the Upper Orinoco area, forcing men and boys to work in mining, and enslaving and forcing women into prostitution.
The report added that the destruction of the forests has also affected the vegetable gardens of local indigenous communities, which have become dependent on food supplies from the garimpeiros.
Tillet said the incursion of guerrillas and illegal miners in the south also creates hotbeds of inter-ethnic conflict, because some indigenous people and communities desperate to find a means of survival accept the miners, while others (such as the Uwottija or Piaroas of the middle Orinoco) strongly oppose such incursions.
A view of the damage caused by uncontrolled mining in an area of southern Venezuela. CREDIT: SOS Orinoco/RAISG
Modern-day slavery
In the “currutelas” or mining villages, young men and boys work extracting gold-rich sands, while women are employed to cook, sweep, wash and clean the camps, and are exploited sexually.
This situation, seen in the hundreds of mining camps in Amazonas and the southeastern state of Bolívar, which covers some 238,000 square kilometers, is aggravated in the case of indigenous peoples, lawyer Eduardo Trujillo, director of the Andrés Bello Catholic University’s Human Rights Center, which is conducting several studies in the area, told IPS.
“Under the control of armed groups, dynamics of violence are generated, with confrontations and deaths, and conditions of modern-day slavery, where omission translates into acquiescence on the part of the Venezuelan State,” Trujillo added.
In particular, indigenous women recruited to work in the camps “are caught up in a dynamic of violence: their work is not voluntary, sometimes they are not paid, and they are subjected to risks to their health and lives,” he said.
Mining in Venezuela contributes to the figures of the International Labor Organization (ILO), according to which more than 40 million people around the world are victims of modern-day slavery, 152 million are victims of child labor and 25 million are forced laborers.
Autana hill, seen from the banks of the Cuao River, a tributary of the middle Orinoco. The Uwottija people consider it sacred and reject the presence in the area of guerrilla groups from Colombia, associated with illegal mining. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS
Adios habitat, culture and life
According to the 2011 census, at least 720,000 of Venezuela’s 28 million inhabitants are indigenous, belonging to some 40 native peoples, and close to half a million live in rural indigenous areas, mainly in border regions.
Although the largest indigenous group (60 percent) is the Wayúu, an Arawak-speaking people who live on the Colombian-Venezuelan Guajira peninsula in the north, most of the native peoples are in the south of the country. Some groups have thousands of members but others only a few hundred, and their languages and ancestral knowledge are at risk of dying out.
The environmental organization Provita reports that 380,000 hectares have been deforested south of the Orinoco in the last 20 years, while the area dedicated to mining increased from 18,500 to 55,000 hectares between 2000 and 2020.
Riverbanks and headwaters have been especially affected, many in areas theoretically protected as national parks. Tillet stressed that, in addition to the environmental damage they suffer, these are areas of limited resources for subsistence, for which indigenous communities and miners are now competing.
“Because they depend on mining for an income, indigenous people are forced to abandon their traditional activities of planting, fishing and hunting, their diet deteriorates, malnutrition and diseases such as malaria increase, and they are forced to say goodbye to their land, to move and migrate,” said Tillet.
The researcher said that health services, which are the responsibility of the State, have practically disappeared, and even more so during the COVID-19 pandemic, while education has collapsed as teachers move away and migrate, with the result that “children who should be in school now work in exploitative conditions in the mines.”
In the document they presented to the Ombudsman’s Office, the Yanomami and Ye’kuana organizations said they were victims of selective killings, contamination of water with mercury, contagion from diseases and, in short, “a silent cultural genocide.”
Children from a Uwottija (Piaroa) community in the middle Orinoco region, where organizations of this native people reject the presence of guerrilla groups from neighboring Colombia, associated with illegal mining. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS
Territory, an elusive right
The current constitution, adopted in 1999, recognized the right of indigenous peoples to conserve their cultures and possess their ancestral territories, and provided for the expeditious demarcation of these areas – which has only happened for a small part of their territories.
In the case of the state of Amazonas, which is almost entirely the habitat of indigenous people, the demarcation process has been ignored, preventing indigenous peoples from laying claim to their rights, demanding the required consultation processes and consent for the exploitation of their territory, and eventually obtaining benefits from their land.
Tillet said that “demarcation is still a pending issue, for which there is no political will, but the avalanche of mining has relativized its importance, because if protected areas such as national parks or natural monuments are violated by mining, you can imagine that the same thing is true for indigenous territories.”
Examples are the 30,000-square-kilometer Canaima National Park in the southeast, rich in tepuis – steep, flat-topped mountains – and large waterfalls, and the 3,200-square-kilometer Yapacana, in the middle of Amazonas state, where mining is practiced while the authorities turn a blind eye.
On the other hand, in the northwest, the struggle for land of the Yukpa people in the center of the Sierra de Perijá continues, with episodes of violence. Like their neighbors, the Barí of Chibcha origin, and the Wayúu, they are a bi-national people, although with more members of the community on the Venezuelan side than in Colombia.
The crux of the conflict is that throughout the 20th century the indigenous people were pushed into the most inhospitable lands in the mountains, while the plains, on the western shore of Lake Maracaibo, were occupied by cattle ranchers.
Some communities have accepted plots of land – the least fertile areas – granted by the government. But a resistant group of Yukpa, led by chief Sabino Romero until he was murdered in 2013, lays claim to land occupied by cattle ranches, while combating incursions by smugglers and guerrillas in the mountains.
Sabino Romero, a Yukpa chief from the Sierra de Perijá mountains bordering Colombia, was killed in 2013 in the context of his people’s struggle to recover lands occupied by cattle ranchers throughout the 20th century. CREDIT: Homo et Natura Society
“Other members of Sabino’s family and followers of his have been killed over the years and have endured attacks by hired killers and employees of cattle ranchers, and even by the National Guard (militarized police) or the ELN,” Lusbi Portillo, leader of the environmental Homo et Natura Society, told IPS.
Ana María Fernández, a Yukpa activist in the area, said that “we are not only fighting against large landowners, police forces and the National Guard, and the State, which does not allow the demarcation of our lands. We are also attacked by Colombian guerrillas and hired killers contracted by ranchers.”
On the other hand, some Yukpa indigenous people sometimes seize cattle as a way to collect on the damages inflicted on them. Others, less combative, “charge a right of way on what used to be their lands, to earn some money to eat and survive,” said Portillo.
The activist said that one alternative is for the State to fulfill its commitments to compensate cattle ranchers whose farms must be returned to the indigenous people, and to make good on its duty to provide transportation routes for the communities’ agricultural production and health care in the face of the increase in diseases.
Ana María Fernández is an activist from a Yukpa community that is demanding the demarcation of their ancestral territories in the western Sierra de Perijá, where the best lands were occupied by cattle ranches throughout the 20th century. CREDIT: OEPV
Time to migrate
The crisis of the second decade of this century in Venezuela has forced thousands of indigenous people to migrate, as part of the diaspora of six million Venezuelans who have left the country since 2014, overwhelmingly heading to neighboring Latin American and Caribbean countries, the United States and Spain.
The largest group is the Warao, a people living in the northeastern Orinoco delta, whose southern zone is affected by mining and logging activities, and who have gone mostly to Brazil, but also to Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago.
The Warao “number less than 50,000, and the migration of at least 6,000, more than 10 percent of them, is a decrease in numbers that speaks volumes about the human rights situation of this population. In northern Brazil there are some 5,000, and Brazil already considers them to be a distinct, nomadic indigenous people in its territory,” Tillet commented.
Pablo Tapo, a member of the Baré people and coordinator of the Amazon Indigenous Human Rights Movement, compiled a report according to which more than 4,500 indigenous people from nine ethnic groups in his region crossed the border into Colombia in three years.
In both cities and rural areas, “communities are left on their own because there is no attention or services, in outpatient hospitals there are no doctors, medicines or supplies, and there is no food security,” said Tapo.
In the southwestern plains state of Apure, the armed confrontation that months ago involved Colombian guerrillas and Venezuelan military forced the flight to Colombia of indigenous groups living on the Venezuelan side of the Meta River.
In the extreme southeast, next to Brazil, the Pemón people have suffered from the drop in tourism due to the insecurity associated with mining and the pandemic, which has created an incentive to migrate. And in the northwest, for peoples such as the Wayúu, continuously crossing the border is an ageold practice that has never changed.
At the center of the indigenous people’s plight is mining, particularly the insatiable craving for gold, of which, according to a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), this country can produce some 75 tons per year, although actual extraction, both legal and clandestine, is possibly half that.
ROME, May 12 (IPS) – The writer is Director, Global Health Justice Program, Society for International Development (SID), and Co-chair Geneva Global Health Hub (G2H2). In what has been defined a historic consensus decision aimed at protecting the world from future infectious diseases crises, on 1st December 2021, the special session of the World Health Assembly agreed to kickstart a global process to draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General, the decision marked “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to strengthen the global health architecture to protect and promote the well-being of all people”.
The process officially started with the constitution of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB), whose task is weaving the texture of the negotiation, based on a treaty working draft, by 1st August 2022. The INB is mandated to submit the outcome of its work for consideration by the 77th World Health Assembly in 2024.
The WHO does not have a consolidated experience in exercising its binding normative power, having used it only twice in seventy-four years. Well before the pandemic, the health agenda negotiated at the WHO had propelled experts and civil society organizations to call for hard rules to replace voluntary regimes, insufficient to address escalating challenges and expanding determinants, which now include trade rules, environment, digitalization.
On the other hand, as illustrated in the Geneva Global Health Hub (G2H2) report on the genesis of the pandemic treaty, there are piercing geopolitical issues that require scrupulous mapping of reality and a questioning attitude, now that the international community is projecting itself towards a pandemic future.
Does the world need a new pandemic treaty?
After months of debates in the WHO Working Group on Pandemic Preparedness and Response (WGPR), there remains a lack of deep contextual evidence on the problems that the new instrument could and should help solve.
There is not even an official definition of what a pandemic is in legal terms. COVID-19 has not been the only pandemic raging the world – global cancer figures are staggering and doomed to grow due to the effects of COVID and climate change.
Other existing pandemics (like antimicrobial resistance) are not exclusively triggered by zoonotic events – most of which are caused by wildlife trading, alongside nature loss, industrialized livestock production and habitat destruction. Shouldn’t binding measures to prevent and respond to such crises address the widespread destruction of ecosystems, instead?
This unfortunate conjuncture should be understood, yet to date, there is no comprehensive analysis of the reasons why governments did not comply with the existing WHO binding legal framework designed to face health emergencies: the International Health Regulations (IHR), last reviewed in 2005 (after SARS).
IHR obligations should have guided countries to engage in sharing information and cooperating for contrasting SARS-CoV-2 unknown and aggressive contagion. What went wrong? It may be that IHR are prominently skewed towards prevention and detection of pathogens, and limited on response steps to prevent transmissions.
But couldn’t they be seriously revised and updated, as in the past, to include the new contents deriving from COVID-19’s unprecedented lessons instead of a push for a new treaty?
The WHO Emergency Committee and alarm system must be reformed, along with the strengthening of the legal obligations and compliance of cooperation rules: this is the terrain where most IHR violations have occurred.
One Health approaches surely need integrating in the negotiated review, to build a better prevention and response capacity on the harsh lessons of COVID-19. A clear uncompromising priority assigned to sustainably financing universal public health systems and their workforce, as the reliable safeguard for societies when outbreak emerge, must supplant persisting policies skewed to health privatization and financialization, too uncritically promoted by the WHO. Existing IHR provisions need updating and strengthening to this end.
Ultimately, the critical tension between global health security requirements and the management of existing science must be resolved in the interest of public health rather than private profits – COVID-19 makes it very clear that it’s not an easy game.
Meanwhile, things are being made more complicated. Now that the pandemic treaty negotiations are being led by the INB, in parallel to the IHR review led by the US, new layers of diplomatic intricacies are surfacing in terms of content and process overlaps, ushering dwindling expectations.
The lack of a shared vision is matched by the accelerated pace of the INB negotiation, for which governments are not ready – uneasiness emerged in recent European consultations on the treaty elements that were to be provided by 29th April.
Both the WHO and the INB claim to be looking at the precedents of the WHO’s only other treaty as guidepost, the breakthrough Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), while civil society organizations have been instrumental in paving the way to the FCTC and challenging the playbook of the tobacco industry, they now sit at the very margins of the diplomatic process, advocating in the paucity of spaces and restrictions of time allowed in the first round of public hearings.
Twenty years later, the fact that macroeconomic forces have been allowed to shape a new political platform for global governance through multistakeholderism, it does not necessarily favor the best scenario for pandemic treaty-making.
The WHO is weakened and under-resourced, while the corporate sectors that have profited from the pandemic in terms of market dominance – pharma companies, big tech, etc. – seemingly support this new negotiation, deemed to institutionalize the super public and private partnerships assembled in 2020 by major philanthropic actors for COVID-19 response.
Governments for their part are still grappling with the pandemic and its turbulent socio-economic effects. Meanwhile, exactly like one century ago, the pandemic tsunami gets tangled with a war of international proportions doomed to transform the world and the international community.
The tang of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is starting to poison Geneva’s health circles. This is not a good foreboding.
Women have been highly impacted by the Ukraine war, and have headed humanitarian efforts in their communities, but are still absent from leadership positions. UN Women and Care called for their meaningful inclusion in planning and decision-making processes. Credit: Ed Holt/IPS
by Naureen Hossain (new york)
Inter Press Service
New York, May 11 (IPS) – A joint UN Women and CARE report on the gender disparities in the wake of the Ukrainian crisis calls for donors and humanitarian partners to take greater care to promote the voices of women and marginalized communities in the humanitarian effort.
The Rapid Gender Analysis by UN Women and CARE, released on May 4, 2022, revealed the challenges and hardships women and minority groups face in Ukraine. UN Women and CARE officers conducted interviews with over 170 participants to determine how the war impacted their needs and concerns.
The war has affected multiple areas of life, from education and healthcare access to their livelihoods. In the last two months, women have emerged to take on more authority in households and the community, including community and civil society organizations.
Women have been at the forefront of humanitarian efforts, the report reveals. However, they have not been included in leadership or the decision-making process.
The risk is that current humanitarian efforts do not fully address the more complex needs of the affected civilians, such as the disabled, people who have already been displaced before the current crisis, and ethnic minorities, such as the Roma.
Among the report’s key findings, women, men, boys, and girls have different needs that must be considered in the humanitarian response.
However, the current frameworks of humanitarian aid need to improve to address their complex needs better.
Women, minorities, and other underrepresented groups face greater pressure with the compounded and intersectional impact of the crisis that can leave them more vulnerable in conflict or the loss of income.
Even though they are at the forefront of humanitarian efforts in their communities, they are not included in the decision-making process of how humanitarian aid is disseminated to even the most vulnerable groups.
Sima Bahous, Executive Director of UN Women, said: “It’s critical that the humanitarian response in Ukraine takes into account and addresses the different needs of women and girls, men and boys, including those that are furthest left behind…Women have been playing vital roles in their communities’ humanitarian response. They must also be meaningfully involved in the planning and decision-making processes to make sure that their specific needs are met, especially those related to health, safety, and access to livelihoods.”
A UN Women Media Compact event discussed the findings of the report and media experiences with reporting on the war in Ukraine through the lens of gender. Presenting the report at the event on Tuesday were Felicia Dahlquist, Programme Analyst from UN Women’s Ukraine office, and Siobhan Foran, CARE Gender in Emergencies Coordinator.
The speakers agreed that there was a need for gender-responsive and socially inclusive humanitarian efforts. This response could address the needs across different sectors, from providing shelter and non-food items (NFI) and education to lessening the care burden on mothers at home.
Dahlquist and Foran acknowledged that multiple areas need to be addressed all at once in a crisis. This runs the risk of other factors such as gender and diversity competing for attention.
Another recommendation was to increase communications to ensure accountability to the affected populations. This would mean implementing feedback and complaints mechanisms to ensure effective procedures and diverse communications channels to disseminate information on humanitarian aid to various groups.
A key topic of discussion was the role that media could play in reporting the stories of women, men, and minority groups on the humanitarian front.
The speakers said that the media has the ability, and thus a responsibility to address the ongoing issues that women and minorities deal with, to present the nuance and complexity of their experiences within the context of their intersectional experiences.
The media have the potential to reflect the voices of these communities to the general public but also get the attention of donors and humanitarian agencies to increase their efforts to support women-led organizations.
Even as donors and humanitarian agencies are expected to be pragmatic in their program planning and implementation approach, Dahlquist said it is essential to remember the humanity of the people who need this aid.
The media could play a key role in showcasing that human element, especially among those groups that receive less coverage in the news, such as ethnic minorities and the LGBQTIA+ community.
Mozn Hassan, Founder, Doria Feminist Fund for Women
by Sania Farooqui (new delhi, india)
Inter Press Service
NEW DELHI, India, May 11 (IPS) – When it comes to gender equality and development, the Middle East, North Africa (MENA) and the Arab States region continues to be in a paradoxical situation. While within the region, several laws, policies and programming focused on gender equality are growing, women’s representation in government jobs, corporate roles, and national programming seem to be dismissed. Healthcare, education have seen improvement, most countries have become tech inclusive as well, but access to hospitals and educational institutions –at times due to social programming or gender-related policies continues to prevent women from accessing them and using them.
Gender-based human rights assault and violence dominates and devastates the lives of women across the region. Whether it is arbitrary arrests by governments, abductions, assassinations, so called “honour” killings, online trolling, abuse, being denied right to safe abortion, lack of engagement and inclusivity of women in politics, peace and security in the country, women continue to face entrenched discrimination.
Mozn Hassan, Founder, Doria Feminist Fund for WomenMozn Hassan, one of Egypt’s most outspoken voices on human rights, founder and Executive Director of Nazra for Feminist Studies has been working on building an Egyptian feminist movement for years, by supporting women human rights defenders.
In this interview given to IPS News, Hassan said, feminist movements continue to battle culture of impunity in Egypt. “We are losing everyday, but the feminist movement in Egypt is not a failed movement.” At that time, Mozn and her non-government organizations assets were frozen, a travel ban was imposed in 2016, followed by regular incidents of judicial harassment.
None of the harrassment and cases against her stopped Mozn from pursuing “a bigger dream of creating a feminist fund for the region” called Doria Feminist Fund. “Being a local feminist activist in Egypt within a changeable time, running Doria Feminist Fund allowed me to set local feminist agendas and narratives. I figured out that this work needs not only funding, but also resources and accessibility, which is rare in the MENA region and for feminists in MENA. Doria was a dream for me on multiple levels, I named it after Doria Shafik to recognize her resilience,” Hassan said.
In a series of conversations on The Sania Farooqui Show which recently partnered with Doria Feminist Fund and IPS News to bring out powerful voices of women in the MENA region, the CO-CEO of the organization, Zeina Abdul Khalek said, “Doria Feminist Fund seeks to create a feminist ecosystem where the new generation of feminist movement in the MENA region has access to more and better funding and resources which enables the development and sustainability of its activism to advance the rights, wellbeing and security of all women & LGBTQ+ individuals and groups.”
Right to Abortion in MENA
Cultural sensitivity and taboos surrounding sexuality are particularly pronounced in the MENA region, it has taken women activists and even medical professionals years to break the culture of silence that surrounds sexual and reproductive health, as silence often prevents people from seeking information and care and prevents governments from putting the health issues on their development agenda.
Nearly 80% of women in the Middle East and North Africa live in countries where abortion laws are restricted. Among those, 55% live in countries where abortion is prohibited except to save the mother’s life and 24% live in countries where abortion is permitted only to preserve the woman’s physical or mental health.
Turkey and Tunisia allow elective abortions, and like many catholic/christian countries, abortion appears to be a highly controversial topic for the Muslim-majority countries as well as for the Islamic jurisprudence.
Dr. Selma Hajri, Rights & Access of Women to Safe Abortion, MENA RegionDr. Selma Hajri, medical professional, MD specializing in endocrinology and reproductive health at Right and Access of Women to Safe Abortion (RAWSA) in the MENA region, in an interview given to IPS News said, “ It is always a shame to talk about sex in the MENA region. Women cannot have a loud voice, talk about their body, their sexual rights, their right to premarital sex and contraception. It’s challenging as a medical health care professional to help women, as so many are just afraid to come forward and seek basic healthcare, which is their right.
According to RAWSA Network that has been working on changing mentalities, behaviours and legislations related to sexual and reproductive rights, as well as advocating for legal abortion in most MENA countries. This report states, “Women resort to clandestine abortions that have a rate higher than in the rest of the world and are responsible for around 9700 deaths each year. Only 47% of women in the MENA region have access to a contraceptive method, while this percentage is 57% worldwide.”
“MENA region is a very conservative region where religion and culture are very restrictive concerning women’s access to reproductive health. They are very conservative and restrict sexual relationships of women who are not married, even for married women it is not easy to talk about it openly.
“We realized the situation of women in this region is very difficult, not because of access to healthcare, but the problem is access to reproductive healthcare and her right to control her body,” says Hajri.
More than 40 million women between the ages of 13 and 44 live in states with restrictive abortion rights, costing those economies $105 billion, according to Women’s Policy Research. The impact of COVID-19 pandemic only made the situation worse. According to RAWSA, unsafe abortions have increased by about 10%, as access to contraception and safe abortion – which most often takes place abroad, have been restricted since the beginning of the pandemic.
United Nations Office of Human Rights High COmmissionar (OHCHR) states that “women’s sexual and reproductive health is related to multiple human rights, including the right to life, the right to be free from torture, the right to health, the right to privacy, the right to education, and the prohibition of discrimination. The committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR) and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimnation against Women (CEDAW) have both clearly indicated that women’s right to health includes their sexual and reporductive health. This means that states have obligations to respect, protect and fulfil rights related to women’s sexual and reproductive health”.
While one watches states, governments, societies across the MENA region fail women by not supporting them, it is a few women like Mozn Hassan and Dr Hajri who dare to do so.
Sania Farooqui is a New Delhi based journalist, filmmaker and host of The Sania Farooqui Show where she regularly speaks to women who have made significant contributions to bring about socio economic changes globally. She writes and reports regularly for IPS news wire.
More than 44 people died, and over a dozen were injured, after riots broke out on Monday at the prison, located in the northern city of Santo Domingo, OHCHR Spokesperson Liz Throssell said, citing the authorities.
The riots were reportedly provoked by the transfer of a prisoner known as ‘Anchundia’, linked to the R7 gang, from La Roca prison in the south-west to the facility in Santo Domingo.
‘Worrying incidents’
This marked the latest violence to erupt in prisons in the South American country. Fifteen people were injured in clashes between prisoners from different gangs in El Inca prison in the capital, Quito, on 25 April.
Three days earlier, disturbances at the Esmeralda No. 2 prison, located on the northern coast, left 12 inmates wounded.
“These worrying incidents once again highlight the urgent need for a comprehensive reform of the criminal justice system, including the penitentiary system to tackle what has been a protracted crisis in the country,” Ms. Throssell told journalists in Geneva.
Call for investigation
From December 2020 to May 2022, at least 390 people have been killed in Ecuador’s prisons, including some 20 inmates at a prison in the south of the country on 3 April, she added.
“We emphasize that the responsibility of the State for the security of all people in its custody creates a presumption of State responsibility for these deaths and call for a full investigation of these incidents.”
Ms. Throssell recalled that in February, Ecuador’s President, Guillermo Lasso, had launched a public policy of social rehabilitation of prisoners.
The plan had been developed with significant technical support from OHCHR, and in consultation with a large cross-section of Ecuadorian society, including the families of prisoners as well as prisoners themselves.
“We encourage the State to take vigorous steps and provide adequate resources to implement this policy,” she said.
Roadmap for security
OHCHR also called on the Government to carefully examine recommendations in its 2019 report on human rights in the administration of justice, that are aimed at reducing violence, deaths and serious injury in detention
The authorities were also urged to consider a roadmap proposed by OHCHR and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to guarantee security in prisons and ensure better prison management, including by combating corruption, among other measures.
“The UN Human Rights Office will continue collaborating with other UN agencies as we remain committed to support Ecuador in facing this urgent challenge, based on human rights and in line with international norms and standards,” said Ms. Throssell.
Caught in a web of deceit, a human trafficking survivor from Ghana tells her story. Credit: Tim Tebow/Unsplash
by Jamila Akweley Okertchiri (accra)
Inter Press Service
Accra, May 10 (IPS) – “It feels like yesterday when I was deceived by one man who claimed to be a travelling agent. He promised me a work opportunity and a good salary,” says 25-year-old Cissy, as she prefers to be called. “As a young lady coming from an average family who really needed help, I fell for his lies.”
Cissy says although she was a bit sceptical about the offer and afraid of her destination country, the so-called travel agent convinced her that she had nothing to worry about.
“He said I had a host mom who would receive me at the airport. In fact, she was the one sponsoring my trip, and I am supposed to work for her, and he claimed the work was legitimate,” Cissy adds.
However, the story changed when she arrived at the airport of her destination country.
“A man came to pick me up and collected my passport. I was taken to a house where I saw other young African women kept in the room, some having price tags. It was at that time I realised what I had gotten myself into,” she narrates.
She and the other women were later smuggled illegally into Iraq to work as domestic workers.
“I saw how my own African sisters were physically and mentally abused. Some were sexually harassed and subjected to forced labour on an empty stomach,” Cissy says.
She wanted to return to Ghana but was unable to until several months later.
After countless failed escape attempts, which left her fighting for her life, she finally had a breakthrough and was able to return home with the help of a good Samaritan and the authorities.
Since she returned last November, Cissy has devoted her time to irregular migration advocacy activities.
“I am happy to be alive today to tell you my story but not all the young ladies who travel out get the chance I got to return home to their families,” she says.
Assistant Superintendent of Police William Ayaregah says human trafficking is multifaceted and covers several situations from debt bondage, exploitation, and organised crimes.
Issues of human trafficking continue to be a human right violation and cancer in Ghanaian society because it is a country of origin, transit, and destination for victims of human trafficking, Ayaregah, who is the Deputy Director of the Anti-Human Trafficking Unit in the Criminal Investigation Department.
Likewise, the Gulf of Guinea is characterised by cross-border and irregular migration, human trafficking, and child exploitation.
ASP Ayaregah says recently, the unit, with a Non-Governmental Organisation, End Modern Slavery (EMS), and the Social Welfare Department, rescued four children, two boys and two girls, from a trafficker and reunited them with their families.
He reveals that the two boys, aged 10 and 13, were trafficked by a family friend identified as Rose, a trader from Berekum-Senase in the Bono East Region of Ghana. She said the children would attend school while staying with her in Accra.
Instead of sending the children to school, as she promised, she sent the boys onto the streets to hawk.
Ayaregah says the suspect, upon her arrest and investigation, claimed that she has been sending Ghc30 (about 4 US dollars) to the boys’ parents in Berekum every month.
In another case, two girls, aged 13 and 17, were brought from Akim-Aboabo in the Birim Central Municipality and Adeiso to engage in ‘gari’, a dried cassava business at Amanase in the Ayensuano District in the Eastern part of the country.
The Director of Operations of End Modern Slavery, Afasi Komla, explains that “many victims of human trafficking have had traumatic post-rescue experiences during interviews and legal proceedings.
“In their attempts to get help, they have experienced ignorance, misunderstanding, victimisation, and punishment from offences their traffickers had them commit,” he says.
He adds that through the foundation, they have been able to help in identifying and saving hundreds of victims and supporting their rehabilitation.
Deputy Minister For Gender, Children and Social Protection, Hajia Lariba Abudu, says the country has responded to the issues of human trafficking in diverse ways. It passed the Human Trafficking Act, 2005 Act 694 to prevent, reduce and punish human trafficking offences and for the rehabilitation and reintegration of trafficked persons and related matters.
“The Ministry, together with our partners, we embark on community advocacy and engagements to educate the public on the dangers of human trafficking,” she says.
Abudu further indicates that together with the law enforcement officers, Social Workers and NGOs, the country in 2021 rescued 842 victims of human trafficking, gave comprehensive trauma-informed care, and reintegrated 812 of them.
“On the 1st of February 2019, the adults’ shelter was opened, and 178 adult female victims of trafficking have been cared for, and we are still receiving and caring for victims at the shelter now,” she says. “The Children’s Shelter was also fully operationalised in August 2020 and has cared for 98 child victims.”
She adds that the department received and investigated 108 cases, 42 being sex trafficking, 60 labour trafficking and six related cases that started as human trafficking offences.
“Thirty–four cases were sent to court for prosecution. Out of those, 22 cases were prosecuted involving 37 defendants, and we have gained 17 convictions for the country,” she adds.
Abudu says that even though a lot has been achieved, it is still not enough and calls for stronger partnerships to reduce human trafficking incidences, strengthen government institutions, and increase public knowledge.
This article is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.
The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7, which “takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms”.
The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalization of indifference, such as exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking”.
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