I may be sinking into fb/twitter lingo, but I just became a fan of Somaly Mam.

A member of the Phnong ethnic minority of Cambodia, Somaly grew up alone in the forests of the Mondulkiri province after the disappearence of her family, before being taken in by a man who posed as her grandfather, who then began to abuse her and in the end sell her to a local brothel. That’s how she ended up in sexual slavery at an age of sixteen, enduring torture, rape and unspeakable abuse. After years she managed to escape by marrying a Frenchman, and now leads the Somaly Mam Foundation which works against the industry of sexual labour and human trafficking. The foundation leads a rescue and rehabilitation program that has so far effectively gotten more than 5.000 girls and women out of prostitution and helped them get an education.

So now I have a pending friend request for her on Facebook .. she also twitters:

her dead comes up with bubble from mouth and noise seems she committed suicides or spoiled by food
3 days ago

The Road of Lost Innocence is the number 1 selling in Demark
1 day ago

cooked foods for the survivors in Kampong Cham center
12 hours ago

brought the survivors to Pagoda. We made small funeral ceremony indicate Lak Kimseng who dead last Saturday
12 hours ago

enjoyed receiption under honorable of Queen of Spain’s right hand
12 hours ago

Busy lady.

Please join the petition at NISGUA.

Dear President Àlvaro Colóm,

I write to ask you to fulfill your promise to combat entrenched impunity in Guatemala. It is unjustifiable that the vast majority of the victims of the armed conflict, as well as victims of current human rights attacks, have yet to see justice for the crimes committed against them.

Although certain cases advanced in 2008, I am concerned that 99% of the atrocities committed during the internal armed conflict remain in impunity due to the failure of the Guatemalan State to effectively investigate and prosecute these crimes. The unit of the human rights prosecutor’s office in charge of crimes of the past has not prosecuted one suspect since it opened in 2005.

Instead, these cases are often stalled in ineffective investigations and legal motions. Judges often take months to issue rulings, and injunctions filed by defense lawyers (amparos) can take years to resolve before the cases even reach the prosecutorial stage.  This process only serves to delay – or completely deny – justice for the survivors.

In the national genocide case filed against Efraín Ríos Montt and his high command, a series of legal motions has delayed the declassification of military documents that could serve as key evidence towards prosecution.  Although a judge ordered their declassification in March of 2007, over one year later the Ministry of the Defense has yet to deliver the military documents to the Attorney General’s Office and the association of survivors.

On February 25, 2008, you publicly stated that military archives should be declassified and handed over to the Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office. To date, however, the documents remain classified information in the hands of the military.

Impunity rates for current human rights violations are inextricably linked to the failure to bring the crimes of the past to justice. In 2006 and 2007, the Unit for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders in Guatemala (UDEFEGUA) registered 466 attacks on human rights defenders, many of whom risked their lives by demanding accountability for crimes of the past. Nonetheless, the human rights prosecutor’s office did not prosecute any suspects in the 49 cases investigated during this period, while only three human rights defenders’ cases were resolved by other offices.  The prosecutors have not only failed to resolve individual cases, but they have also failed to investigate these attacks as part of a systematic pattern and practice designed to impede human rights work.

In the face of alarmingly high levels of impunity and violence, I ask you to fulfill your promise to prioritize the issue. I implore you to support the survivors’ right to truth and justice by ensuring that the military documents be declassified and promptly handed over to the public institutions as ordered. I ask you to advocate for changes to the Injunction Law that would halt the current practice of using legal motions to stall judicial processes. I further urge you to prioritize ongoing evaluations of the Attorney General and the Public Prosecutor’s Office to ensure that the institution be purged of employees linked to organized crime and to guarantee that the effectiveness of the institution significantly improve. Furthermore, I call on you to ensure that the government takes the necessary steps to guarantee the safety of human rights defenders.

Twelve years after the signing of the Peace Accords, the victims of the war deserve justice, just as human rights defenders today deserve to carry out their work without fear of reprisal. Now is the time to take a stand and prove your commitment to ending impunity and strengthening the rule of law in Guatemala and to encourage others in your administration to do the same.

Thank you in advance for your attention to the matter.

Sincerely,

Thomas Elsted

update:
I feel I should clarify that this letter was composed entirely by NISGUA, with a few minor correction by me. If you like, you can sign it here and email it to the presidential office in Guatemala.

En español:
(…)

So Washington reports that an intelligence comittee of the Senate is finally going to conduct an investigation of the CIA policies of detention and interrogation under the Bush administration. Do they mean the special methods of questioning? Do they want to revise the enhanced interrogation techniques, perhaps examine whether someone did something bad? Why fix something that’s not broken? As it turns out, they don’t exactly intend to find out whether the CIA broke any laws, but rather to “learn lessons from the programs and see if there are recommendations to be made for detention and interrogations in the future” … Maybe they’re planning to tidy things up a bit, I’m sure there’s a screw that could be tightened somewhere in there. But the agency will be undergoing scrutiny while it’s busy having its head and both arms stuck into two wars in the Middle East and who knows how many clandestine facilities outside the US for a good (or very bad) reason. CIA director Leon Panetta says CIA officers “should not face prosecution if they were acting on orders in accordance with Bush administration legal opinions”, which is to day, before the investigation beings, the chief is already admitting that members of his staff have been doing nasty stuff worthy of legal action on human rights abuses. But because they “did their job, they did it pursuant to the guidance that was provided them”, as if Bush & co. were a fraternity of friars lecturing schoolboys, and as if we’ve learned nothing from history about the free will … after more than sixty years. But if we have, then surely the findings of the intelligence committee – if it does its job diligently – should fall back on Panetta himself and his superiors … They can probably rest assured that it won’t come that far, though. It seems we’re awfully slow learners.

To make matters worse, “[the Obama administration] having considered the matter, adheres to its previously articulated position” on the rights of detainees in Afghanistan, which continues to defy both logic and the Geneva Conventions. Battlefield detainees held without charges by the United States in Afghanistan are not entitled to constitutional rights to challenge their detention, a predicament even worse than that of the prisoners of Guantánamo. Snafu.

Alison Des Forges (1942 – 2009)

Reading about genocide these days, a subject that has been intermittently on my mind since I became aware of the extend of the violence in Darfur in the fall of 2006. At the time the conflict had been raging since 2003, but whether because of the poor media coverage, or slow fermentation of my sociopolitical awareness of the world, somehow it had escaped my attention until then. That summer I had been discovering the work of Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, who had showed me that it was possible to work with art from one’s moral conscience, from a feeling of obligation and solidarity towards the world, without compromising aesthetic integrity or a poetic powerfulness. Jaar worked for on a six-year project to represent the 1994 Rwandan genocide, creating a series of works which he believed all failed in representing the genocide to the public. Today I’ve probably lost faith in most of those values of integrity, certainly departed from responsibility towards the art world, but at the time art school discourse was still having a heavy influence on me. When the reality of the conflict began to dawn on me, I saw that it was following the same pattern as the historical events in Rwanda that I was introduced to through the work of Alfredo Jaar. I tried to do art projects that dealt with the Darfur conflict, but it would be a shame to say that it went very well. It didn’t go well at all, but I’ll recognize it as a point of departure into the process that has let me to where I am now.

Today I came across the obituary of Alison Des Forges, historian and influential human rights activist with Human Rights Watch (HRW) for almost twenty years, and a forefront expert on the Rwandan genocide. Des Forges died on February 12 in a plane crash along with the 48 other passengers of a flight from Newark to Buffalo in upstate New York. Des Forges ‘dedicated her life to working on Rwanda and was the world’s leading expert on the 1994 Rwanda genocide and its aftermath’, and HRW characterized her as ‘the epitome of the human rights activist — principled, dispassionate, committed to the truth and,’ (this especially resonates with me) ‘to using that truth to protect ordinary people.’ I haven’t read any of her work – she authored the book ‘Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda’ (the title alone says something about the scale of conflict) – but here is a video commemorating the anniversary of the Rwandan genocide in 2004, from the HRW home page.

“Alison’s loss is a devastating blow not only to Human Rights Watch but also to the people of Rwanda and the Great Lakes region. [...] She was among the first to highlight the ethnic tensions that led to the genocide, and when it happened and the world stood by and watched, Alison did everything humanly possible to save people. [...] She never forgot about the crimes committed by the Rwandan government’s forces, and that was unpopular, especially in the United States and in Britain,” [...] “She was really a thorn in everyone’s side, and that’s a testament to her integrity and sense of principle and commitment to the truth.”

- Kenneth Roth, exec. dir. of HRW

Since I came to Guatemala for the first time, this world of grave human rights violations has become very present and real; although I live a very priviledged life of a westerner here, the hard reality and sad history of Guatemala is evident in the testimonies of people I meet, who lost their friend and family to the civil war, and in the faces of people I meet on the street. The unmistakable prevailing poverty of a majority of the Mayan population reflects the century-long discrimination of the indigenous peoples, an issue that have been hardly dealt with since the peace accords in 1996, when for the first time in history the Mayan population was even recognized by the constitution, as peoples in their own right. Close to half the population, they’ve always been brutally victimized and discriminated against; during the worst years of the Civil War (roughly 1978-85), they were directly targeted by the military governments, and under the presidencies of Lucas García and Efraín Rios Montt, over 200,000 Mayans were very brutally  killed, and tens of thousands disappeared. Although it was claimed to be an attempt to ‘pull up from the roots’ the support for oppostition resistance guerillas, you’d have to add four hundred years of racial discrimination to the causes of what was essentially the worst genocide of the Americas since colonial times.

There’s so much more to tell, and I will return in future posts to the subject. Night has fallen and I’m about to turn in, to the simple words of William Carlos Williams:

it is difficult
to get the news
from poems
yet men die miserably
every day
for lack
of what is found
there

.

Update Monday 16: a long feature on Alison Des Forges and Human Rights Watch on today’s show of Democracy Now. Amy Goodman interviews Kenneth Roth about Alison Des Forges, about Rwanda, genocide, and the Israeli/Palestine situation. If the link ceases to work, this should be a direct link to the show.

“… the legacy of the Rwandan genocide: It’s as if you took a picture of a family, and ripped it down the middle. And then tried to fit the halves back together again. Even with the best glue in the world, it’s never gonna be the same. People betrayed their deepest values in order to kill (…). Whether you look at it from the point of view of the victims or the point of view of the perpetrator, these are not things that can ever be forgotten.”

- Alison Des Forges