25/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
Paris – Do you like your job? How’s your health? Are you spending enough time each day with your children? When you need them, are your friends there for you? Can you trust your neighbours? And how satisfied are you, overall, with your life?.
Has the OECD asked them “How Is Life?” | Picture:UN
A new Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) publication, How’s Life?, looks at these questions and others, offering a comprehensive picture of what makes up people’s lives in 40 countries worldwide.
The report assesses 11 specific aspects of life – ranging from income, jobs and housing to health, education and the environment – as part of the OECD’s ongoing effort to devise new measures for assessing well-being that go beyond Gross Domestic Product.
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25/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
By Ernest Corea* – IDN-InDepth News
Washington DC – How quickly the tide of international opinion changes course. In took less than a week for the hurrahs directed at Libya’s success in ending the Gaddafi dictatorship to turn into criticism of how that success was achieved; specifically, of how the country’s late leader was felled
Picture: sovereignindependent.com
Even as “bullets of joy” were fired into the air, and other sounds and sights of triumph at the conquest of tyranny erupted over most of Libya, and were captured on phones and film for the rest of the world to witness, segments of the inter- national community were stridently demanding “clarity” on the details of Gaddafi’s last moments.
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Posted in Market Lords, Middle East, The Peoples, War Lords |
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24/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
By Alan Maass and Lance Selfa* –Socialist Worker
Libya’s former dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi was killed last week as rebels, backed by NATO military forces, conquered the final city holding out against them. The U.S.-backed Transitional National Council (TNC) declared on Sunday (Oct. 23) that Libya was now “liberated”–but the manner of Qaddafi’s downfall raises questions about that claim.
Image: James (Jim) Gordon | Wikimedia Commons
Most Libyans celebrated the death of the man who ruled their country with an iron fist for more than four decades. Hatred of the Qaddafi regime spurred a popular rebellion last February. This mass mobilization against tyranny was another chapter in the Arab Spring that has spread from Northern Africa across the Middle East.
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24/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
By Maung Zarni* – TRANSCEND
Burma is undergoing top-down changes, we are being told. Norway’s Deputy Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide, after his whirlwind trip to the country, told the Financial Times on Oct 11, “I almost left the country thinking they’re moving a little too fast. I never thought I would say that about Myanmar.”
Monks Protesting in Burma. Image: racoles | Wikimedia Commons
Last month, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) issued its latest report on Burma, “Myanmar: Major Reform Underway,” which brims with false hopes, unwarranted optimism, and projected possibilities for Burma—so much so that James C. Scott, Yale’s renowned Southeast Asianist, felt compelled to publicly criticize the ICG’s Burma spin in an interview with the Democratic Voice of Burma.
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24/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
Now that the Libyan National Transitional Council has announced the complete liberation of the country after the killing of dictator Muammar Gaddafi, many questions have been raised about the future of this North African Arab nation and the role of its numerous tribes.
Image: William Murphy | Wikimedia Commons
Open Democracy, a member of TRANSCEND, analysed this key issue in the following article, which was published few days before Gaddafi’s death, however still relevant to better understanding the future of Libya.
Open Democracy* –TRANSCEND — The Libyan war is often portrayed through a “tribal” lens that fails to explain how the country’s tribes coexist with a sense of nationhood.
The Libyan war has not been a tribal conflict. Yet throughout the seven months of fighting, much external commentary predicted and expected that the war would acquire a tribal dimension and viewed events through the lens of “tribes” and “tribalism”.
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23/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
By Celeste Hicks* – Think Africa Press
Tunis – For many Tunisians preparing to vote this Sunday (October 23), the death of Gadaffi could not have come at a more significant time. There are thousands of Libyans here – either those who’ve fled as refugees or those who’ve come to seek medical care for injuries sustained in the fighting.
Image from Think Africa Press
“Libyans are our brothers, we are together. Nothing can separate us – not Ben Ali, not Gadaffi!” shouts Nasser, a young Tunisian, waving a Libyan flag as he runs alongside the convoy of vehicles carrying Libyan ex-fighters, which is making slow and noisy progress down the wide boulevard Mohammed V in central Tunis.
Watching quietly from the sidelines is Ali, a Libyan from Misrata.“I’m happy, this is a great day” he says. “We’ve been following things here in Tunisia, and I really believe that after the death of Gadaffi we could even think about organising our own elections”.
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23/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
By Quil Lawrence* – RAWA News
Villagers from a violent part of southern Afghanistan say that Afghan troops, along with several American mentors, forced civilians to march ahead of soldiers on roads where the Taliban were believed to have planted bombs and land-mines.
Collage showing US, Afghan, French and Taliban forces. Image: Swarm | Wikimedia Commons
No one was hurt. But if the allegations are true, the act would appear to violate the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of civilians. The episode also raises questions about how civilians are caught between the two sides in the war.
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23/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
Cairo—Egypt’s deposed dictator Hosni Mubarak broke to mourn for the killing of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, and his health conditions have deteriorated, according to medical reports.
An Egyptian medical source reported on October 22 that Mubarak’s health deteriorated after he learnt about the killing of Gaddafi and watched pictures of his lynching.
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22/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
By Eric Walberg* – IDN-InDepth News
Toronto–The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, taking their inspiration from the Arab Spring, erupted after it became clear that the entire edifice pasted together by Carter-Reagan-Bush I-Clinton-Bush II-Obama is a fraud.
Image: David Shankbone | Wikimedia Commons
These politicians cover the entire spectrum of U.S. politics today, from liberal and neoliberal to neoconservative, and they are all equally helpless to change the trajectory of a system out of control.
The current crisis of capitalism is textbook Marx. Greedy capitalists, craven politicians, scheming bankers, dispossessed masses. It is also textbook Lenin.
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22/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
Geneva–Some of the nearly 200,000 Somalis who have sought refuge in Yemen from violence and famine in their own country are now considering going back home due to worsening security in the Arabian Peninsula nation, the United Nations refugee agency reported.
A Somali refugee in Yemen | Credit: UN
“Most new arrivals tell UNHCR (High Commissioner for Refugees) that they were unaware of the situation in Yemen and the conditions they would be facing,” spokesperson Andrej Mahecic said in Geneva on October 21.
Yemen has been torn by fighting between supporters and opponents of president Ali Abdullah Saleh for most of this year, while Somalia’s two decades of factional warfare have been exacerbated by one of the worst famines in memory, which has already killed tens of thousands of people, put 750,000 more at risk of death in the coming months if there is no adequate response, and affected four million others.
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 