Archive for October 11th, 2011

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11/10/2011

The Story of Child Yami and the Atomic Bomb

Human Wrongs Watch

By Neena Bhandari – IDN-InDepthNews*

SYDNEY – It was 7am on a fateful day in 1953, 10-year-old Yami Lester and a group of Aboriginal children were playing with a toy truck, when they heard a loud bang intercepted with several small bangs as the ground beneath their small feet shook.

Image: ICAN

“We saw a shiny black cloud coming from the south, moving above and through the trees, which spread across 70 miles. We shut our eyes as they began to burn. In the days that followed, about 50 Yankunytjatjara people in Walatina began to complain of skin rashes, sore eyes, vomiting, diarrhoea and coughing…”

“… There was no treatment on the cattle station. The closest health clinic was hundreds of miles away and we had no transport,” says Yami Lester, who was living160 km from Emu Junction in South Australia, the site of the first nuclear test on mainland Australia.”

Lester managed to open his eyes after three weeks, but couldn’t see anything with his right eye. The left eye, he reckons had about 70 per cent sight. By February 1957, he was totally blind and now he is confined to a wheelchair following a stroke last year.

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Posted in Asia, Others-USA-Europe-etc., The Peoples, War Lords | 7 Comments »

11/10/2011

Sharp Increase in Afghan Opium Production and Consumption

Human Wrongs Watch

The cultivation in Afghanistan of opium poppies – the crop used to make heroin and other drugs – has increased by seven per cent this year because of continued insecurity and higher prices, a United Nations-backed survey reveals.

Heroin seized and destroyed in Afghanistan. Credit: UN

Cultivation reached 131,000 hectares, compared to 123,000 hectares in the previous two years, and the amount of opium produced rose from 3,600 tons last year to 5,800 tons according to the 2011 Afghan Opium Survey released on Oct. 11 by the Ministry of Counter Narcotics and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Opium production forms a significant part of the Afghan economy – production alone makes up nine per cent of the country’s gross domestic product, it says. This does not include manufacturing and trafficking profits, which fuel corruption and funding of insurgent groups.

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11/10/2011

U.S.-led “Enduring Freedom”: Systematic Torture and Abuse in Afghan Prisons

Human Wrongs Watch

Ten year after the launch of the still ongoing U.S.-led military “Operation Enduring Freedom”, a new United Nations report has now confirmed “compelling evidence” of the “systematic” torture and mistreatment of detainees in Afghan detention facilities, including of children.

Afghan National Police. Credit: UN

The report, which was released by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) on Oct. 10, is the result of extensive interviews from October 2010 to August 2011 of 379 pre-trial detainees and convicted prisoners at 47 facilities of the National Directorate of Security (NDS) and Afghan National Police (ANP) in 22 provinces.

The mission found “compelling” evidence that 125 detainees, or 46 per cent, of the 273 detainees interviewed who had been in NDS detention experienced interrogation techniques at the hands of NDS officials that constituted torture, and that torture is practiced “systematically” in a number of NDS detention facilities throughout Afghanistan,” states the report.

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