North Korea; Still One of the World's Most Awful Places to Live (and Die)

North Korea: Still One of the World’s Most Awful Places to Live (and Die)

On September 27-28, 2013 I attended a conference in Toronto organized by the non-governmental group, The Council for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK Canada). This is a group of Korean-Canadians and others who have been trying to bring the plight of people living in North Korea—both ordinary North Koreans and political prisoners—to the attention of the wider Canadian public. So far they have managed to get several members of Parliament interested in this problem, and indeed, received a statement by Minister for Multiculturalism Jason Kenney during the conference proclaiming September 28 “North Korean Human Rights Day.”

North Korean prison in Pyongyang- Wiki Commons

For me, the most powerful part of this conference was listening (in translation) to the testimony of Ahn Myong-Chol, a former prison guard who escaped from North Korea and has been working with other defectors to expose the terrible conditions in the gulag there. He has written a book which is unfortunately not yet in English. He did not apply for the job of prison guard: he was assigned to it because his father was a member of the Korean Workers’ Party, so Ahn himself was “entitled” to a Party job.

When Ahn first arrived at the camp, he was encouraged to kill prisoners if he felt like it. He was ashamed to tell us that he took part in a custom of using prisoners as human punching bags when practicing martial arts; prisoners would be tied to a post and guards would kick and punch them.  Once he heard prisoners crying and screaming, and rushed over to find prison dogs attacking small children, three of whom died. Children are sent to prison camps in North Korea along with their parents, when their parents are accused of crimes: some children are even born there (see Blaine Harden’s 2012 book, Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, about Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person known to have been born in a prison camp and escaped).  Dogs are trained to recognize the distinctive smell of starving, maltreated prisoners, so that they can find anyone who tries to escape.

Ahn also witnessed several public executions, as one of his jobs was to drive the prisoners to the execution grounds. Prisoners were gagged so that they could not shout out any criticisms of the regime at the last moment. Family members were forced to witness the executions and were tortured or killed if they showed any emotion.

After eight years on the job Ahn was given his first vacation. When he arrived home, he discovered his family had disappeared. Asking around, he learned that his father had got drunk one night and blamed the North Korean leadership (probably Kim Jong-il, the second of the three Kims in the hereditary dynasty) for starving his people. The next day, knowing he would be arrested and imprisoned for criticizing Kim, he took his own life. But suicide in North Korea is a crime, so Ahn’s mother and two younger siblings were arrested and imprisoned: Ahn never saw them again.

The Tumen River at the Chinese-North Korean border- Wiki Commons

Some participants at the conference asked why someone--the UN, the West?—didn’t just invade North Korea and overturn the regime. There are all sort of geopolitical reasons why this won’t happen.  The route to changing North Korea’s horrible system is to put pressure on China. There are good reasons why China should no longer support North Korea: China’s prestige suffers when it supports such a brutal regime, and the North Koreans are a security threat to China, conducting nuclear tests close to the Chinese border. Also, so long as people continue to suffer from starvation and near-starvation in North Korea, they will flee to China. So it’s in China’s interests to stem that refugee flow by forcing North Korea to change the policies that permit it to starve its people to death.

Another way to change the North Korean political system is through information: it seems that the more North Koreans learn about the outside world, the better. A couple of years ago, through HRNK,  I listened to a defector who sent balloons from South to North Korea with DVDs in them: each balloon was also covered with writing explaining the real conditions of life in South Korea and the outside world. This defector had himself decided to leave North Korea when he read a pamphlet that had been dropped by activists; when I heard him, the North Koreans had already sent agents south to try to murder him.

Recently, activists have been able to put enough pressure on the United Nations and its member states that the UN Human Rights Council has now established a Commission of Inquiry into North Korea.  This is an important step in getting the UN as a whole to pay attention to the atrocities there. Departing from the usual practice of Commissions of Inquiry, this Commission is holding public hearings. Its report may pressure to UN to adopt further actions.  The best action would be to refer North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and some of his cronies to the International Criminal Court, where they could be tried for crimes against humanity including murder, slavery, and deprivation of food.  However, that would probably be blocked at the UN Security Council by China and Russia, although it appears China is getting increasing fed up with North Korea.

If you want to help North Koreans, I suggest (if you are Canadian) writing to your local Member of Parliament to show your support for measures to investigate North Korea’s appalling crimes and to indict its leaders for crimes against humanity. Also, whether you are Canadian or not, write to the Chinese Ambassador to your country, asking them to pressure North Korea to change and to stop supporting it with arms, money, or luxury goods for its leaders.  

And there’s one piece of good news in all this: international pressure does make a difference.  Ahn said that around 1992 he was told that he was no longer permitted to kill prisoners just because he felt like it. The reason was that Amnesty International had become interested in the prison camps, and the regime was afraid of an international inquiry. Ahn encouraged us all to keep up the pressure on this absolutely monstrous government.

For more on North Korea, see my blogs “Cannibalism in North Korea” March 20, 2013,  http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2013/03/cannibalism-in-north-korea.html and “North Korean Slave Labour, September 11, 2012, http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2012/09/north-korean-slave-labour-in-this.html as well as my article *2012. “State-Induced Famine and Penal Starvation in North Korea,” Genocide Studies and Prevention, vol.7, no. 2/3, pp. 147-65.

Venezuela Update: Food Situation Worse under Maduro than Chavez

Venezuela Update: Food Situation Worse under Maduro than Chávez

On March 11, 2013, shortly after his death on March 5, I posted a blog about how Hugo Chávez had managed to create food shortages in Venezuela during his 14-year rule there. You can read that original blog at http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2013/03/hugo-chavez-and-right-to-food-in.html. This is a short update on the food situation in Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro, who was Chávez’s designated successor and who was elected president in his own right on April 14, 2013.

 I’ve based this update on English-language newspaper reports I’ve been tracking since January 2013. It looks like things are getting a lot worse, not better, under Maduro. I realize it’s possible to argue that I’ve just been reading biased, anti-socialist press, but that argument doesn’t wash.  Neither Chávez nor Maduro understood/understands how markets work: they think that nationalizations and price controls will reduce food prices, but they don’t understand the costs to production and distribution of food of using those mechanisms.  

Nicolas Maduro- Wikipedia Commons

Maduro has been continuing—and exacerbating—all the policies I described in my March 11 blog, such as imposing price controls on more and more food and other items. The twelve-month inflation rate skyrocketed to 35 per cent per year by June 2013, partly as a result of continued devaluation of the bolivar, the Venezuelan currency, but also as a result of food scarcities. Food line-ups are becoming longer and longer as more and more food items become scarce, and Venezuelans have to spend more and more time going from shop to shop looking for goods. Many people who’ve been interviewed by the press complain about severe shortages of basics such as milk that they need to feed their children.

By June 2013 the price of basic commodities had risen by 44.6 per cent in one year: by August the figure was a rise of 60.8 per cent in one year. Rice, coffee, and beef, previously produced inside the country, now arrive from other countries. Maduro spends much of his time making deals with other Latin American countries to import food from them, but this food often rots as ships can’t unload at congested, inefficiently-run ports.

But this provides new opportunities for web entrepreneurs. Someone developed a mobile app to provide information about what goods are available where, so consumers can reduce the time they spend going from store to store looking for food. Some other people developed a website to provide information about the real (black-market), as opposed to the official exchange rate of the bolivar to the US dollar: Maduro responded by ordering their arrest.

When not blaming the shortages on an imperialist, CIA-led conspiracy, Maduro explains them away by focusing on “over-consumption” by Venezuelans, who have more purchasing power than in the years before the latest oil boom. He also blames shortages on a deliberate campaign of sabotage by food producers and distributors, ordering government agents to raid private companies’ warehouses for allegedly “hoarded” food. The private producers respond that much of the hoarded food is simply what is needed for production of finished products: for example, sugar for soft drinks. The largest food company in Venezuela, Empresas Polar, can’t import enough inputs for processed food such as the pre-cooked flour for arepas, Venezuela’s staple food because it can’t get government permission to buy dollars to finance its imports. Meantime, smugglers sell price-controlled food over the border in Colombia, thus exacerbating the food shortage.

Ironically, just as these food shortages have been worsening, in June 2013Maduro accepted an award from the FAO for Venezuela’s success in reducing malnutrition. While this success was real, as I discussed in my March 11 blog, it was due in large part to Venezuela’s high oil revenues and to general and unsustainable mismanagement of the economy. Other Latin American countries have achieved similar success to Venezuela’s in reducing malnutrition without huge oil revenues and without undermining the market economy.

If mothers in Venezuela cannot find milk for their children, then malnutrition might rise again in the not-so-distant future. Indeed, by early August 2013 forecasters were predicting a long-term decline in food consumption by 7.5 per cent by 2017. Maduro’s insistent continuation of Chávez’s economic policies does not bode well for Venezuelans’ future food security.

A New Quebec Value: Discrimination against Religious Minorities

A new Quebec Value: Discrimination against Minority Religious Groups

Yesterday (September 10, 2013) the government of Quebec (Canada) released its controversial “Charter of Quebec Values.” The political party in power in Quebec is a minority nationalist one, the Parti Québecois. According to numerous news reports (I can’t find the actual Charter on the Internet yet) this Charter is a statement of “values” that will ostensibly entrench religious neutrality in Quebec by prohibiting either providers or seekers of government services from wearing conspicuous religious symbols, such as hijabs (headscarves for female Muslims), turbans (for male Sikhs), and kippas (skullcaps for male Jews). As a sop to neutrality, Christians will also be prohibited from wearing large, conspicuous crosses. Small (discrete) crosses for Christians, and Stars of David (for Jews) will be allowed.  So if you live in Quebec and wear such symbols, get out your measuring tape!

Premier of Quebec Pauline Marois

One could of course ask, what business does government have proclaiming the “values” of its entire population? In democracies, citizens are supposed to have the right to whatever values they please. Sometimes they may not be permitted to act on those values, if they are against the law.  For example, some people may hate Sikhs, Jews, or Muslims, but they can’t refuse to hire them. But wait a minute, they will be able to do so in Quebec! If you are in the government in Quebec, even if you don’t hate Sikhs, Jews, or Muslims; even if in fact you rather like them, or are one yourself, you won’t be permitted to hire them for any kind of government job if they wear turbans, kippas, or hijabs.

Even more ridiculous, Sikh women and Muslim men will be okay, as most Sikh women don’t wear turbans and Muslim men don’t wear hijab (though some wear a small religious skull-cap, much like some Jewish men). Religious Jewish women may be okay as well: some married Jewish women wear wigs or hats, but hats appear not to be banned by the new Charter. So far beards aren’t banned either. Some Muslim and Jewish men wear long beards (so do some Amish and Mennonite men, but I don’t know if any of them live in Quebec) so if they are banned in the public service the problem will be, do you wear a beard because you are religious, or because you just don’t like to shave? If the latter, can you get a certificate to that effect?

These new rules even apply to government services such as day care. God forbid (sorry, the new value is secularism, so God shouldn’t really enter into this, unless he is Catholic: see below) that a child should have a kind, loving, carer who wears a hijab. Everywhere else in Canada, if you are a parent and your child asks why her carer or teacher wears a head-scarf, you could just say, because she is a Muslim. The child could then say, “Oh,” and ask for a cookie.  But now in Quebec when your kind, loving, day-care worker disappears because she’s been fired for wearing a hijab, you will have to say to your child, “because our government thinks it is wrong for her to care for you.” 

I’m all for separation of church and state, having been a victim of religious discrimination myself in Quebec a long time ago. When my parents brought me to Quebec from Europe as a young child, I was bilingual: we had been living in Belgium and I had learned to speak English in my home and French elsewhere. My father, a multilingual European, wanted to register me and my sister in French schools, but they wouldn’t accept us because we were not Catholic. My father would have had to pay fees for us, which he couldn’t afford, so we went to English schools.

This didn’t only happen to me. A friend from France had to attend English schools because he wasn’t Catholic: his mother was Jewish. A friend whose parents were from Italy and who learned French on the street was kicked out of French schools because he wasn’t Québecois (a person of French and Catholic ancestry) but the son of immigrants, and had to go to English Catholic schools instead.  (The education system in Quebec until fairly recently was confessional: there were French Catholic Schools, English Catholic schools, and Protestant schools; the latter attended by Protestant Protestants, Jewish Protestants, Muslim Protestants, etc). This went on until Bill 101, mandating that all immigrants must attend French schools, was passed in 1977, finally ending state-sanctioned religious discrimination in Quebec.

But the new Charter doesn’t advance separation of church and state: it discriminates against minority religious groups. The government of Quebec is claiming there’s a social problem where there is none. It seems to think wearing a religious symbol is the same as proselytization, trying to convert someone to your religion. It isn’t. Maybe what’s really going on in Quebec, as some commentators think, is that the Parti Quebécois is trying to play to the basest instincts of some sectors of the population, in order to get votes in the next election.

Meantime, probably so that the same people, of French and Catholic background, will vote for the Parti Québecois in the next election, the government has proclaimed that the Crucifix (a symbol of Roman Catholicism) hanging in the National Assembly, the provincial legislature, will remain. So, according to the September 11 Toronto Globe and Mail, will thousands of crucifixes that already exist in public buildings. Apparently this is part of Quebec “culture,” implying that the Muslims, Sikhs, and Jews who live in Quebec are not part of that culture. Perhaps they are just add-ons, superfluous groups who annoy “real” Québecois by insisting on reminding them that it’s okay to live in Quebec even if you aren’t French/Catholic (or at least, it used to be okay).

One thing’s for sure: there’s going to be a migration of professionals—especially doctors—from Quebec.  Doctors are a mobile group and there are a lot of places in Canada and the US where they can practice while wearing turbans, hijabs, or kippas. This is a shame for the people of Quebec, where there is already a severe shortage of doctors.  The five-year grace period that the Quebec government proposes for people to adapt to this new “secular” (but actually Catholic) Charter of Values will give all these people time to arrange for their migration.  

September 11, 2013: 40th Anniversary of the Chilean Coup

September 11: 40^th Anniversary of the Chilean Coup

Today is September 11^th, the day most North Americans will think of as the 12^th anniversary of the Al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers in New York City (and on the Pentagon). But it is also the 40^th anniversary of the right-wing coup d’état in Chile.

Salvador Allende- Wikipedia Commons

In 1970 Salvador Allende, a socialist, was elected President of Chile, a country with a long-standing democratic tradition. One of his policies was nationalization of mineral and other industries, including property owned by foreign investors. This didn’t sit well with members of Chile’s political right, or with the Americans—or Canadians, for that matter. On September 11, 1973 he was overthrown by a military coup lead by General Augusto Pinochet.  An extended period of severe repression followed. At least 2,200 people were murdered and 30,000 more were tortured (for a fictional representation of this event, see the 1982 movie, Missing, directed by Costa-Gravas).

The coup in Chile and the subsequent (1976) coup in Argentina contributed to the delineation of a new crime, “disappearances.” The army and police would “disappear” people, taking them away from their home in the middle of the night, torturing them to death, dumping their bodies from helicopters into the ocean. Families would not know what had happened to their loved ones; even now, 40 years later, some families are still trying to find out. Pinochet remained in power until 1990.



Chilean National Stadium as a prison camp- Wikipedia Commons



The Chilean coup had one positive result for international law. In 1998 Augusto Pinochet, no longer President, visited Britain. A Spanish judge, Baltasar Garžon, tried to have him arrested under the principal of universal jurisdiction for crimes against humanity, including torture. Although Pinochet hadn’t personally engaged in such crimes, he had certainly been responsible for them. Britain had signed the 1984 United Nations Convention against Torture; its signature went into effect in 1988. So the British Law Lords ruled that Pinochet could be tried for crimes that he had committed between 1988 and 1990. He was never tried though, as the British released him on grounds of ill health, from which he miraculously recovered when he returned to Chile. (For more on this, see Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice, The New Press, 1999, chapter 10).



Pinochet- Wikipedia Commons



I am not saying Allende was an angel, nor do I know enough about how he nationalized property to judge whether he conformed to the international law that owners are entitled to fair compensation when their property is confiscated. But he was elected democratically.

We might think about the Chilean example when we consider Egypt now. Allende wasn’t like Mohamed Morsi, the recently ousted President of Egypt. Morsi, who represented the Muslim Brotherhood, was showing signs of undermining basic democratic principles. There was a real danger that the new “democracy” following the 2011 uprising against the almost 30-year reign of the dictator Hosni Mubarak was going to be of the “one man, one vote, once” variety. But as in Chile, the new military rulers in Egypt have been using force—murder and torture—against their opponents. They have outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood and are busy rounding up its leaders.  I don’t know what to do about political parties that come to power democratically yet don’t respect democratic principles. I do know that murder and torture are illegal under any circumstances.

Ai Weiwei: Chinese Artist and Human Rights Activist

Ai Weiwei: Chinese Artist and Human Rights Activist

This past week (August 28, 2013) I attended an exhibit of works of the Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto. I urge anyone reading this who lives in the Toronto area to go and see it.

Ai Weiwei is not only an artist, he is also a human rights activist who has taken considerable risks in order to protest rights-abusive actions of the Chinese government. One of his exhibits, in fact, is an enlarged photograph of a brain hemorrhage he sustained after being hit by a policeman; fortunately, he was on his way to Munich when this happened and was hospitalized and treated there. He is currently not allowed to leave China.

Ai Weiwei in 2009

The exhibit opens with a large set of photographs Ai Weiwei took of devastated lands expropriated by the government to permit construction of new buildings. Since all land in China belongs officially to the government, people whose homes or small businesses are destroyed don’t have the right to protest. This violates both the right to housing and the right to property.

Another set of photographs is of the famous “Bird’s Nest” Stadium, built for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, which Ai had helped to design. He refused to be involved further in Olympic propaganda, however, once he realized that people were being arbitrarily displaced in order to provide room for the Olympics. Many of the displaced were “illegal” (unauthorized) internal migrants to Beijing from other parts of China. All Chinese must take part in the household registration system, a form of internal passports. Migrants to Beijing who don’t have official permission to live there lack many fundamental rights; for example, many of their children can’t attend school.

Ai Weiwei was also horrified by the death toll from the 2008 earthquake in the region of Chengdu.  An estimated 90,000 people died, including thousands of school children who perished in the shoddily-constructed, government-built schools. Against the wishes of the authorities, Ai assembled a team of researchers who eventually accumulated names, ages, and other information about 5,186 school children. One of the most moving pieces in the exhibit was a wall installation of all the names and other information about the children. Although I do not read Chinese, I was still moved by the columns of birth dates of those who died. Also, Ai had used Twitter to teach people all over the world willing to read out the names of the dead, so as I read the birthdates, I heard a recording of voices—often those of children—reading the names. 

Free Ai Weiwei atop the Kunsthauses Bregenz Exhibition Centre

Ai weiwei thinks naming the dead is important: a quote from him about the installation read “A name is the first and final marker of individual rights, one fixed part of the ever-changing human world. A name is the most basic characteristic of our human rights; no matter how poor or how rich, all living people have a name, and it is endowed with good wishes, the expectant blessings of kindness and virtue.” If we name the dead, we bring them back to life and remove them from the unfathomable multitudes, the millions who die.  Ai’s installation reminded me of an exhibit on Cambodia I saw in the University of Connecticut Museum in 2001, with pictures of some of the 20,000 people—many children—tortured and then murdered in the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh during the reign of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979.  These people remained nameless, but their faces reminded us of their individuality.

Since the United Nations’ Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993, the official line of the human rights establishment has been that all human rights—civil, political, economic, social, and cultural—are interdependent and indivisible. Certainly this is something I’ve been arguing for a long time. It seems that there is more than one path to “development,” considered merely as economic growth. One path was the messy model whereby Western Europe and North America became wealthier and freer, eventually—after much struggle by--protecting most human rights for most citizens most of the time. The other path is the East Asian model, where economic growth eased the lives of many people while the governments—as in South Korea until the late 1980s—remained dictatorial. China is definitely much wealthier than it was before it turned to state-organized capitalism in 1978, and many Chinese people live much easier lives than did their parents under communism. But as Ai Weiwei shows, without property rights the state can take away your home.  Without freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly, the state can construct shoddy schools in which your children may die, and you can’t do anything about it.  Without artists like Ai Weiwei—as the Chinese government knows full well—it is difficult to represent their own suffering to the Chinese people. Ai Weiwei’s is an extremely powerful voice for freedom in China.

There was one discordant note in this exhibit. The souvenir shop attached to it was selling small books of reproductions of Chinese government propaganda posters.  I’m not sure what to think of that: I know that propaganda posters can be considered art that is interesting in its own right, but it seemed as if the Art Gallery of Ontario hadn’t got Ai Weiwei’s message at all.   

Water Rights of West Bank Palestinians

Water Rights of West Bank Palestinians

On May 17, 2013 I posted a blog on Palestinian property rights: http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2013/05/property-rights-of-west-bank.html. I was interested in this question because of my research on malnutrition in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), comprised of the West Bank and Gaza. This is part of a larger research project on malnutrition which also includes North Korea, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela. I’ve also posted a blog explaining my position on criticizing Israel: http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2013/06/on-criticizing-israel.html I believe that Israel is a state that has the right to exist in peace, but that it must also obey international law. From what I’ve learned, Israel is not obeying international human rights and humanitarian laws that require that Palestinians enjoy their right to clean water. Some of what I’ve written in this post is based on a 2009 report by Amnesty International, “Troubled Waters-Palestinians Denied Fair Access to Water: Israeli-Occupied Palestinian Territories https://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/MDE15/027/2009/en/e9892ce4-7fba-469b-96b9-c1e1084c620c/mde150272009en.pdf.  I’ve also used other sources that I can provide to interested readers.

The United Nations has proposed a human right to water, referring especially to the right to “an adequate standard of living” mentioned in Article 11, 1 of the 1976 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the right to the “highest attainable standard of physical…health” mentioned in Article 12. Israel ratified this Covenant  in 1991.The right to water is most clearly elaborated in the 2002 General Comment 15 of the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, “The human right to water is indispensable for leading a life in human dignity. It is a prerequisite for the realization of other human rights.” International humanitarian law also states that an occupying power must ensure that the occupied population has sufficient water. Israel is also obliged under international law to ensure equitable distribution of groundwater between itself (as occupier) and the inhabitants of the area it occupies.

Access to clean water is a major problem for Palestinians in the West Bank. While Israelis in 2009 consumed about 300 liters of water per day,  Palestinians consumed about 70 (Amnesty International 2009, 3). According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, the percentage of people with access to improved water sources in the OPT as a whole declined from 97 in 1991 to 85 in 2010.

Israel has expropriated much of the water in the West Bank for its own use. The main source of water in the West Bank is the Mountain Aquifer, but Palestinians in 2009 had access to only 20 per cent of the water it produces, while Israel used the rest. The right to water also includes protection from arbitrary interference in the water supply, yet Israelis authorities frequently cut off water from Palestinians. Individual Israeli soldiers often destroy private water cisterns and other traditional means by which Palestinians collect and conserve water. The Israeli military requires that Palestinians obtain permits to build new cisterns, yet often does not grant them.

States are also obliged by international law to “prevent third parties from interfering in any way with the enjoyment of the right to water,” yet Israel permits Jewish settlers in the West Bank to draw on water supplies traditionally used by Palestinians, even permitting individual Jewish households to have swimming pools while nearby Palestinians endure severe water shortages.  Many Palestinians rely on water brought in by tankers, yet segregated roadways often make it difficult for the tankers to reach Palestinian villages. Palestinians also have to tolerate deliberate contamination of their water supply by Jewish settlers who, for example, throw garbage or even dirty baby diapers into Palestinians’ water containers. Lack of water for agriculture means Palestinian farmers must rely on purchased food. As one farmer told Amnesty International (p. 23 of the AI report), “We can’t keep more goats because we can’t afford the water, and we can’t grow food for us and fodder for the animals, so we have to buy it and this is too expensive.”

As of 2008 Israel obtained almost 50 per cent of its drinking water and 40 per cent of its agricultural water from the West Bank. As early as 1990 the Israeli Agriculture Minister warned that Israel would lose nearly 60 per cent of its water if it relinquished control of the West Bank (Amnesty International 2009, 47). This strategic need for water may explain the desire to occupy the West Bank even more than does the desire for Jewish settlements. Peace between Israel and the Palestinians will require a detailed agreement on water resources, but Israel may not be willing to give up its access to West Bank water.

I used to be impressed when I heard people say that the Israelis have “made the desert bloom.”  Yet I now realize they’ve done so by using stolen water.

Canada: Malnourishment of Aboriginal Children

Canada: Malnourishment of Aboriginal Children

This week (July 15-19, 2013) the Canadian media has been awash with stories about  malnourishment of Aboriginal (“Indian”) children in nutrition experiments carried out from 1948 to 1952. The source of the media’s information is an article by historian Ian Mosby, “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942-1952” (Histoire Sociale/Social History, vol. 46, no. 91, May 2013, pp. 145-172; http://www.ianmosby.ca/about/ ). Mosby recounts experiments in Indian residential schools from 1948-52 that would violate today’s ethical standards. In an attempt to improve Indian children’s nutritional status, researchers gave experimental nutritional supplements to some children in some schools, but left other students and schools without such supplements, as “control” groups. They also denied some children dental care in order to observe the effects of malnourishment on the children’s teeth and gums.  

A Photograph of a Canadian Residential School, Wikimedia Commons

The larger story behind these experiments, as Mosby makes clear in his article, is severe malnutrition among Canada’s Aboriginal populations in the 1930s and 40s. According to Mosby, the children who were the subjects of these experiments were already malnourished in the residential schools where they were forced by the government to live, with little if any contact with their parents or other Aboriginal adults. The experimenters who left some “control” children malnourished while feeding others experimental nutritional supplements were trying to find ways to improve Aboriginal peoples’ diets without addressing long-term, structural problems. These structural problems included erosion of Aboriginal people’s traditional diets and inadequate funding both of schools and Aboriginal reserves by the relevant national government departments.

The economist and philosopher, Amartya Sen, has famously suggested that “there has never been a famine in a functioning multiparty democracy” (see his Development as Freedom, 1999, p. 178). The reasons for this, Sen argued, are that in democracies citizens have access to a free press, they are allowed to criticize their governments, and they can vote their governments out of office. But Aboriginal Canadians did not have these rights in Canada at the time that they were suffering from severe malnutrition. Indeed, if you were recognized as a “status Indian” and lived on a reserve, you couldn’t simultaneously be a citizen with the right to vote in federal elections until 1960. The government also restricted Aboriginal Canadians’ rights to freedom of association.

And of course, Aboriginal children had no rights at all. Those who lived in residential schools were effectively prisoners in “total institutions,” institutions where the inmates were totally controlled by those in authority. Total institutions of this kind—residential schools, prisons, orphanages, homes for the disabled—are notorious in Canada for abuse of the inmates; over the last 30 years Canadians have heard horrific story after horrific story about these places, often, like Indian residential schools, run by various Christian denominations. Aboriginal children were torn from their families, who in turn had no say over how their children were treated in residential schools, whose notorious purpose was to “take the Indian out of the child.” And the children knew that if they complained about their hunger, there would be “consequences,” as one survivor of the residential school system said on the radio. This survivor was so hungry that he used to go into the woods with his friends after school and hunt for small birds to eat. When I heard him say this, I thought of what I’ve been learning recently about state-induced famine in North Korea in the 1990s. There, if you foraged for food, you ran the risk of execution. At least things weren’t that bad in Canada, but Aboriginal children did go hungry for years on end, afraid to say anything to their “caretakers” for fear of brutal punishment.

Ironically, the reports of Ian Mosby’s article broke in Canadian newspapers just as Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is trying to find out the truth about white Canada’s relations with Aboriginal people, and in acknowledging that truth to come to some form of reconciliation between the two groups. Yet at the same time, the Commission is having trouble getting access to all the government’s records of how it has, historically, treated Aboriginal people. Now we know why.

Not surprisingly, Canada’s Aboriginal leaders are demanding an apology from the government for these nutritional experiments. But that is not enough. Every living survivor of this experiment deserves substantial financial reparation. And I think those survivors’ children and grandchildren deserve apologies and reparations too, as the long-term effects of malnourishment may well have reduced the survivors’ abilities to make a living and support their descendants.

The American legal scholar David Marcus coined the term “faminogenesis” in 2003 to refer to state activities “creating or aiding in the creation of famine.” He described four degrees of faminogenic behavior. These four degrees are intentional famine, using famine as means of extermination; reckless famine, continuing policies despite evidence of famine; famine by indifference, turning a blind eye to mass hunger; and famine as a consequence of incompetence (see David Marcus, “Famine Crimes in International Law,” American Journal of International Law, vol. 97,no, 2, 2003, pp. 245-81). Canada didn’t create famine, but it did recklessly contribute to the malnourishment of Aboriginal children and adults, in its overall policy of underfunding reserves and schools and in the experimenters’ decision to leave some children malnourished in the interests of “scientific” rigor. The experimenters could easily have fed the children they were studying enough food, but they didn’t; they were indifferent to the children’s suffering.  If anyone who conducted these experiments in the 1940s and 50s is still alive today, he or she should be held accountable, as should the federal government. This is one week that I am truly ashamed to be a Canadian.

Iranian Prison Massacre: 25th Anniversary

Iranian Prison Massacre: 25^th Anniversary

 

 

This week, with his permission, I am re-posting a blog by Jafar Bekhish, originally posted at:

http://jbehkish.blogspot.ca/2013/06/mothers-of-khavaran-strong-voice-for.html .

Jafar is an Iranian who immigrated to Canada in 2002.  As you will see from his post, he spent 15 months in jail in the 1980s, and lost several siblings who were executed, three in the Evian prison massacre of 1988.  Jafar’s post is about the search for truth and justice by his family and the many other families who lost loved ones in prison executions.  These family members do not know why their loved ones were killed, or where exactly they are buried, but they continue to memorialize them every year. Jafar’s sad story shows us how important it is to their survivors to know exactly what happened to family members who are murdered by vicious political regimes.

 

 

Mothers of Khavaran; a Strong Voice for Truth and Justice in Iran

 

Kaveh Shahroz’s article in Ottawa Citizen on May 28, 2013, “How Canada Can Lead On Iran”

explains very well the pain that has been inflected by the Islamic Republic of Iran (the IRI) on the victims and victims’ families in last thirty five years, prevalence of “The culture of impunity” and a long overdue proper reaction/action by international community on systematic and widespread human rights violations by the IRI. However, I would like to look at the 80s atrocities and their consequences from a different aspect, which has not been elaborated in Kaveh’s article.

Kaveh wrote about his young uncle, Mehrdad, 20 at the time of arrest in 1980. Mehrdad was sentenced to ten years imprisonment in the early 80s. After seven years of hardship and torture inside prison, Mehrdad was hanged along with four thousands political prisoners, in the 1988 prison massacre, under the direct order of ayatollah Khomeini, the then supreme leader.

It is heart breaking when Kaveh wrote:

“We still don’t know exactly when he was executed or where his body is buried.

My family has never truly recovered from that loss.  My grandmother and mother have both passed away since then, both with the unfulfilled wish of seeing justice in Mehrdad’s case. “

This is a pain shared by many similar families in Iran.  

In transitional justice literature, it is claimed that although, dictatorial regimes suppress political and social activists, ironically, the suppressions lead to other types of resistance. Victims’ families and many others become active in order to save the life of their loved ones and ask for truth and justice. Is Iran an exception?

It has been 33 years since the mass executions of political activists in the early 80s, and 25 years since the 1988 prison massacre, yet victims’ families still do not know the truth and have not seen justice. It is important to ask, with about 20,000 thousands victims, and hundreds of thousands of political prisoners and exiles; why has a strong movement for truth and justice not been established in Iran? Is it only because Canada and other countries did not act properly? Then, why is it that such a strong movement for truth and justice in Latin America and other parts of the world is evident, despite the fact that in many cases, United State, Russia (Former Soviet Union) and China and their allies supported the dictators?

In the 80s, the IRI put enormous pressure on the victims’ families to stay silent in the face of the atrocities that were happening inside prisons all around Iran. Although a majority of victims’ families were forced to comply with this brutal policy, few hundreds of victims’ families, known as Mothers of Khavaran, became a voice for justice and truth inside Iran.  

Before 1988 prison massacre, these families, tried to save their loved ones or improve the prison condition. They knew that the prisoners did not have any right to defend themselves. So it was up to family to do that. I remember in the 80s, my mother along with other mothers, sisters and wives of political prisoners, gathered in front of governmental buildings to submit their requests for fair trial and improvement of prison conditions

In the 80s, each Friday, and despite all the harassment, they went to Khavaran cemetery, a piece of land where non-believer victims were buried in single or mass graves. The authorities named it “doomed land”, to show their disrespect.

In the 80s, family arrest was very common. In 1984, when I released from prison, after they kept me inside for 15 months, without any accusation, two of my siblings were killed and were buried in unknown grave in Khavaran and three others were in notorious Evin prison.  Families like mine acted as a connecting point between families of political prisoners and executed.

In summer of 1988, when the authorities canceled all prison visits and isolated prisoners, again this group of families went to the officials to find out what was happening inside of the prisons. They felt that something terrible was happening. It was autumn of 1988, after about four months of being in the dark, we received the horrible news. My brothers, Mohammad-Ali and Mahmoud, and my brother in law, Mehrdad Panahi, were among four thousands victims of the massacre.

In 1989, the first anniversary of the 1988 prison massacre, Mothers of Khavaran decided to hold a public commemoration in Khavaran cemetery. Each year on September first or the closest Friday to it, the only semi formal commemoration inside Iran has been held In Khavaran cemetery by Mothers of Khavaran, despite of all the harassment by the IRI. In the last thirty three years, many of them have been arrested or summoned by the authorities.

Mothers of Khavaran also hold commemorations in their residence. Many times the authorities have attacked the ceremonies and summoned the participants. They have collectively gone to officials, sent collective and personal letters, filed complaints, given interviews to media outside of Iran and written numerous articles about the atrocities and harassment that the families have faced.

My mother and my sister are among them. In the 80s and 90s, my mother was summoned several times to the ministry of intelligence to prevent her pursuit of justice and truth. My sister, Mansoureh Behkish, has also been arrested and summoned many times. I was part of this group of courageous families before I immigrated to Canada in 2002.

Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, in her book, “Golden Cage”, explains her experience when she went to Khavaran cemetery:

“I recognized the woman they called Mother, the spokes-woman of their grief… She was about seventy years old.

Mother slowly raised her arm and began to speak. The buzzing stopped,

“Today we’re here to remember. We know that blood can’t wash away blood. We are women, not guerrilla fighters. Wives and mothers and daughters and sisters who have already seen more than enough violence. Killing the murderers will not bring back the victims…”

“silence, infidel! They weren’t victims—they were traitors, and they deserved to die!”

We’d been surrounded by women and men of the goruh-e feshar. The forces that attacked and broke up public demonstrations were once again ready to act.

With the persistence of Mothers of Khavaran, Khavaran cemetery became a prominent symbol of systematic and widespread human rights violation in Iran and Mothers of Khavaran became a strong voice for truth and justice in Iran.

I agree with Kaveh Shahrooz that it is very important that the international community recognize the massacre of 1988 as a “crime against humanity”, it is long overdue.

But it is more important to emphasise that without active and effective dialogue with the younger generations, without an attempt to involve civil society in this discourse; it will not possible to pursue truth and justice.

Facing past atrocities and asking for truth and justice is a social process. Mothers of Khavaran are a nucleus for such social movement. But both opposition political parties that want to overthrow the IRI by any means and reformist faction of the IRI, who have direct and indirect responsibility for the 80s massacres are ignoring them.

 After 33 years of systematic suppression in Iran, and after 33 years resistance by some victims’ families, there is no recognition for Mothers of Khavaran and other groups of families, such as families of the victims of political killing in 1998. May be because, Mothers of Khavaran, distanced themselves from political parties. May be because the families did not discriminate against each other because of political affiliation of the victims? Or maybe because their goal was to neither forget, nor overthrow the government

They simply ask for their basic rights; why, where, when, by whom and under whose orders were the victims executed? Where are their bodies? Why aren’t the families allowed to hold commemorations in public and private spaces? Why do the authorities harass the families when they ask for their basic rights?

  .      

This year is the 25^th anniversary of the 1988 prison massacre. I urge and ask the human rights community in Canada to recognize and acknowledge the efforts that have been made by Mothers of Khavaran for truth and justice and to ask the IRI to stop their harassment.

Jafar Behkish

June 2^nd, 2013 

Note: This article was sent for publication to Ottawa Citizen Newspaper, on June 2^nd, as a complimentary article to Kavaeh Shahrooz article on 1988 prison massacre and Campagin88, published by the same newspaper. It has not been published. So I publish it in my weblog.

In defense of Marriage (Gay and Straight)

In Defense of Marriage (Gay and Straight)

Celebrations outisde the US Supreme Court after DOMA was ruled unconstitutional, Wikimedia Commons

Last week the US Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act by a vote of five to four. Shamefully, President Bill Clinton had signed this act in 1996. It outlawed federal benefits to same-sex partners of individuals who worked for the federal government, even if two same-sex individuals had been legally married in a US state. Marriage in the US is regulated by the states, and the federal government is supposed to recognize the marriages that the states authorize.

I live in Canada, where same-sex marriage has been universally recognized since 2006. Before that, most of Canada’s provincial and territorial jurisdictions had already legalized same-sex marriage, although the new government of Nunavut, whose tiny population is composed mainly of indigenous people, hadn’t got around to legalizing it yet. The anti- gay marriage lobby frequently argues that homosexual marriages will undermine male-female heterosexual marriages. Since gay marriage was legalized in Canada, there’s been no evidence that this is true. Straight people aren’t any less likely to get married because gay people can get married. If anything, gay marriage strengthens marriage as a social institution. It affirms the partnership of two people, whether gay or straight; it grants them all the legal rights and responsibilities of straight marriages; and it protects their children.

In 2005 I spent four months teaching in the human rights master’s program at the University of Goteborg in Sweden. While I was there, I was asked to spend a morning at Lund University’s Faculty of Law teaching in one of its short courses for international human rights activists. The group I taught was eleven Muslim activists from Indonesia, of whom one only (if I remember correctly) was a woman. This was a fairly liberal group of Muslims; only one man refused to shake my hand (I am a woman), and all the others stood up and offered their hands to me so that I would not be embarrassed.

The morning’s topic was human rights and cultural relativism, and I had been advised not to discuss gay rights, so of course I did. Immediately, the activists told me that they opposed gay marriage, so I said, “Let’s start at the beginning.” I wanted to see how far this group of activists would go in defending homosexuals’ rights. Should they be killed, I asked: No, was the unanimous response. Should they be imprisoned? Again, the unanimous response was no.  Should they be denied an education or a job because they are gay? Again, unanimously, no.  Should a landlord have to rent a room to a gay couple if it is in the same house he lives in?  Here, the activists defended the landlord’s right to refuse to rent the couple a room. And finally, should gay marriage be recognized?  The answer to this one was no, all around. So this group of Indonesian activists had more or less the same attitudes to homosexuals as existed in Canada around 1980, when homosexual acts were no longer illegal and discrimination against them was gradually being outlawed. 

Marriage Equality symbol, Wikimedia Commons

 I mention this discussion because of the recent upsurge of anti-homosexual lawmaking in some African and Eastern European countries. President Obama was in Senegal last week, and when he mentioned the rights of gays in his speech there the Senegalese President responded with a defense of anti-homosexual laws. It’s common in Africa now to argue that gay rights are just another Western imperialist plot (much as many Africans used to argue that women’s rights were a Western imperialist plot, until so many African women scholars, lawyers and activists started defending women’s rights that that argument became ridiculous). Also, anti-gay evangelical Christians are influencing the debate in Africa. At the same time, Russia has passed a law outlawing homosexual “propaganda.” This is a nationalist assertion of Russian “values” against the “corrupt” West, and a way for President Putin to gain cheap points against human rights defenders.

These reactions against gay rights are a worrisome trend, and show us that there is nothing inevitable about progress toward their complete defense. Gays still face execution in some countries, imprisonment in more, and rampant discrimination in many places.  But the thoughtful exploration of gay rights that I had with my class of eleven Indonesian Muslim activists in 2005 gives me hope that more and more people are beginning to acknowledge them. It will take quite a while before every country gives gays and lesbians the right to marry each other and become what they are; ordinary people who want to establish families, raise their children, and have their relationships acknowledged by their relatives, society and the state.  Indeed, this may never happen, if we are not vigilant in protecting gay rights/

I think marriage is a useful social institution. It regularizes each party’s rights and responsibilities, and makes sure that children are protected in cases of divorce or death. Society’s commitment to the relationship—through the legal institution of marriage- also strengthens the partnership. Everyone has an interest in making sure the partnership survives. Children of the partnership feel more secure knowing that their parents have legal commitments to one another. This doesn’t mean that I favor the old-fashioned patriarchal marriage that existed in Canada, and everywhere else, until the 1970s or so. But I do think it’s a good idea to defend the institution, and to extend it to everyone.

On Criticizing Israel

On Criticizing Israel

In the past few weeks I’ve had conversations with three Jewish friends about the ethics of criticizing Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel is a pariah state; the world pays much more attention to its many wrongdoings than to the terrible events than occur in many other parts of the world. I believe that the inordinate amount of attention paid to Israel in the United Nations, especially in the Human Rights Council (so-called) is partly caused by anti-Semitism. Also, as one friend pointed out, Israel is a democracy, and there’s lots of criticism of its policies from the press, academics, and activists. So there’s lots of information for the Human Rights Council and other agencies to draw on.  

Many critics also think of Israel as the last Western colony. People who hold this view often think that all Jews in Israel are from the West. But many Israeli Jews, or their immediate ancestors, are or were from the Middle East. At one point, for example, there was a large Jewish community in Baghdad, which centuries ago was a centre of Jewish learning. Critics of Israel should be aware of the many Middle Eastern Jews who live there and should accept that as the cradle of the three Abrahamic faiths, the Middle East for centuries housed Muslims, Jews and Christians living together. The ethno-religious cleansing facing Christians in some Middle Eastern countries today is another aspect of the tragedy there.

Jewish activists claim that as many as 800,000 Jews were expelled from Middle Eastern countries after the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel before and after Israeli independence in 1948 (on this, see Ian Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, London, Oneworld Publications, 2006). Some activists think that reparations to Palestinians for their expulsion from Israel should be tied to reparations to Jews for their expulsion from other Middle Eastern countries. I disagree with this point of view: Israel is a sovereign state and it is responsible for what it does, regardless of what other states do. As a pragmatic matter, financial reparation to displaced Palestinians is a crucial aspect of the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Another criticism that bothers me is comparison of Israel to Nazism. A couple of years ago, some students at my university staging “Israel Apartheid Week” put up a poster of a man in striped pajamas lying behind a fence: the idea was to compare the situation of Palestinians to that of Jews in Nazi concentration camps. As one of the students said to me, “Oppression is oppression, right?” But she wasn’t right. If Israel were a Nazi state, there would be no Palestinian problem. The Palestinians under Israeli control would have been long-since murdered. Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli attack on the Gaza strip in 2008-9, would have killed one and a half million people, not (at the upper estimate) 1400. We should be able to criticize Israel without making such a nefarious comparison.

Israeli apartheid week is a week to suggest that Israel is imposing apartheid on Palestinians. Indeed, some aspects of Israeli control of the West Bank resemble apartheid, especially the existence of Jewish-only settlements and the existence of segregated roads (about which I wrote in my post of May 17, 2013) on which Jewish, but not Palestinian, residents of the West Bank can travel. There is also de facto and de jure discrimination against Palestinian citizens within Israel. I oppose all these measures, as I also oppose declaration of Israel as a Jewish state. I am against all full or partial theocracies, even though Israel does not prevent citizens from other religions from practicing their own faith.

But as one of my Jewish friends, originally from South Africa, said to me, apartheid there was a much more pervasive system. Blacks could not vote or form political parties. They were not allowed in “White” cities without passes. And families were often split up, with mothers and children legally confined to Bantustans while fathers worked in the cities or the mines. Everyone was racially classified: families were split up if the government deemed that members did not all belong to the same “race.” This is not a defense of the many discriminatory aspects of life for Palestinian citizens of Israel, but it does point out some of the differences.  Palestinians in Israel can vote, can form political parties, and they do have freedom of movement. The government does not deliberately separate their families or use “racial” criteria to judge who can live with whom.

Another criticism of Israel is the contention that Zionism is racism. I am sure there are some Zionists who are indeed racists against Arabs. But Zionism is principally a philosophy that argues for a Jewish homeland. Some Zionists think that means they should be allowed to take over the West Bank, which they call Judea and Samaria. I don’t think they should: again, Israel is a sovereign state, and it should follow international law, which says that its settlements in the West Bank are illegal; indeed, they are theft of Arab land and water.  But the key here is, indeed, land, not race. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is about land, although it’s also morphed partially into a religious conflict, in part because of the world-wide rise of Islamism. 

So these criticisms of Israel: that Israel is a Western colony; that Israelis are like Nazis; that Israel is an apartheid state; and that Zionism is racism, all have serious flaws. They are rhetorical exaggerations that don’t help to solve the very real problems of Israel’s increasing occupation of the West Bank and its control over Gaza. I don’t like Israel’s policies, but I think the best way to criticize it is to refer to international human rights, humanitarian law, and the laws of occupation. Israel is a state that has the right to exist without being attacked, but as a state, it has to follow the same laws as any other state. We shouldn’t demonize Israel.