Day: February 17, 2010

by SIVARAMANI*

In the oppressive night
of our time of war,
our little ones
grow big.

Their lovely morning,
like the shape of a little bird,
is waylaid by every
blood-soaked faceless human body
lying across its way.
Their laughter,
ringing with the thrill of life lived
is broken by
crashing stone walls.
Our children
are no longer
children.

The silence of the starry night
is shattered by the burst of a
single bullet; it shatters
to nought the meaning
of all their child talk.
In the remaining light of the day
they forget to make
chariots out of the seeds
of the palmyrah fruit,
to indulge in the raucous play
of killithattu.

Instead
they know
when it’s time to shut the gate,
to listen to the dog’s bark,
to know its suspicious call,
to not ask questions,
to keep quiet when there are
no answers
to their queries.
They have learnt like cattle
to habituate themselves
to all of this.

To pluck the wings of the dragonfly
fashion sticks and poles into guns
turning friend into foe
in the game of murder;
This has become
our children’s play.

In the oppressive night
of our time of war,
our little ones
have become adults.

(Translated from the Tamil by Sumathy and Nirmala Rajasingam. The line ‘fashion sticks and poles into guns’ is courtesy
Chelva Kanaganayagam)

Himal

*(Sivaramani killed herself in 1991 in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, at the age of 23. She burned all her poems she could get hold of; only 23 survived. See Duke Journals for more. Ed.)

Police in Kahta, Turkey say they have recovered the body of a 16-year-old girl they say relatives buried alive in a so-called “honor” killing as punishment for talking to boys.

Turkish police found the girl’s corpse after following up on an anonymous tip. The tipster told police that the family killed the girl shortly after deciding her fate at a family council meeting. Her body was then buried under a chicken pen.

The girl’s family then reported her missing to the police. Police say that the girl had complained two months earlier that her grandfather beat her for talking to boys.

Police, who identified the girl only by her initials, M.M., said she had significant amount of soil in her stomach and lungs, indicating she had been buried while still alive.

“The autopsy result is blood-curdling. According to our findings, the girl – who had no bruises on her body and no sign of narcotics or poison in her blood – was alive and fully conscious when she was buried,” one source reported.

Examiner for more
Via IAOJ

by ADAMU

Everyone has become frozen in a sea of fear. If you are Muslim, you fear what Christians will say; and if you are Christian, you fear what Muslims will say. And even worse, both fear that their coreligionists will think they have let them and their faith down. But if we really want solve our problems, we should be mature and objective enough to apportion blame where it properly belongs without fear of anything. When news of the Jos crisis filtered out, one could have said what John Pilger said of Palestine during the recent Israeli offensive: “A genocide is engulfing the people of Gaza while a silence engulfs its bystanders.” In private, all leaders complain bitterly; but in public they try to outdo each other in being politically correct.

And those who choose to speak out say only the wrong things. We deplore statements by politicians who are more interested in posturing and playing to the gallery to capture votes and look like champions of a triumphal majority than in representing the legitimate interests of all of their constituents. Even if the statements credited to Senator Gyang Dalyop Datong were no so self-serving and insensitive, the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria should be worried that it counts among its supposedly distinguished membership politicians of such narrow-minded tunnel vision. It goes without saying that this or any other democracy has no chance or right of survival if, in its attempts to ensure the wishes of the majority prevail, it forgets to ensure that the legitimate rights of the minority are represented well and protected by law and in fact.

The call by the Bauchi State House of Assembly for the expulsion of indigenes of Plateau State from their state must be condemned. In its implications, it is almost as irresponsible as the call for the actualization of Biafra by MASSOB. Though their contexts are dissimilar and the frustration of Bauchi assemblymen understandable in the circumstance, that resolution ought never to be condoned. By falling to his level, every Bauchi assemblyman has become a little Jang, an ethnic cleanser without a gun—only a little bit more civilized than the Plateau State governor. If it is not all media posturing.

The media may itself have been guilty of trivializing the issue of the crisis and deflecting blame by harping on the issue of dead National Youths Service Corpers. And with their accounts of and comments on the Jos crisis, some writers, including the so-called distinguished columnists, may only have disgraced themselves and the profession of journalism, at least in the eyes of the survivors of this pogrom and all others who are aware of what has been going on in Jos.

First, the lives of NYSC guys are no more valuable than others that are being lost. Second, their death is mourned; but it is all presented in a way that suggests that their service is indispensable, and may not therefore next be available to a North that stands in greater need of it than the other sections of the country. Third, it is all depicted as though it is the Hausa-Fulani who are killing them; which, if true, that it is indeed the Hausa-Fulani who are killing Yoruba corpers, then the fight couldn’t have been over land ownership, as the Berom have been saying.

And it should indeed be more for crimes such as genocide and not just for the thievery of public funds alone that we must hasten to remove the constitutional immunity that has put perpetrators of crime beyond the reach of the law. Those guilty of genocide must be tried and punished with immediacy and with exemplary dispatch.

Unless this is done quickly, it is to be feared that we will witness the unraveling of the Nigerian Knot, the great untying of all the national ties that bind—exposing the meaninglessness of the very issue of nationhood, demonstrating the uselessness of land tenure system and ownership, and striking at the very heart of democracy—one indigene, one vote; one settler, no vote—all of them sacrificed at the altar and hallowed ground of ethnic cleansers on which representativeness has been made to fall helpless and prostrate before the issue of indigeneship. Therefore, right after genocide is punished, the nation should boldly tackle the obnoxious issue of indigene-settler syndrome throughout the country, and especially in Jos where Jang is unlikely to do anything about it.

Wherever he was, Jang had always proved unable to separate his position as governor from his extreme bigotry as an anti-Islamic Christian; or, is it really only and merely an anti-Hausa-Fulani Berom? Unable to stand the name of Muhammad, for instance, he was reported to have changed the name of General Murtala Mohammed College to Ramat College, Yola; not knowing that Ramat, the new name he chose happened to have been derived from one of the foremost attributes of Allah.

He also once stopped the annual conference of the National Association of Teachers of Arabic and Islamic Studies, NATA’IS, from taking place in Yola. Obviously, Jang is unaware that in the forefront for the promotion and propagation of Arabic language have been many prominent Christian Arab intellectuals; and its literature, especially its poetry, has been one of the most studied in the world, and the most translated by Christian Oriental scholar-missionaries. At the time he disallowed permission for the NATA’IS conference, Islamic Studies was a subject taught in all the secondary schools of Gongola State.

Daily Trust for more

by AMIRA HASS

People in Beit Sahur believe the Israeli settlers who claim that the Israel Defense Forces was responding to the settlers’ pressure when it started erecting a new guard tower last week in the eastern part of this largely Christian West Bank town. Locals do not, however, accept the army’s claim that the tower was added for professional, military reasons. The settlers vow to keep up the pressure – and Beit Sahur residents know all too well what they mean. In the last 18 months, settlers from the Gush Etzion area have been holding increasingly frequent protests against the “Arab construction” in Beit Sahur.

For their part, the settlers say the tower will eventually be integrated into a Jewish city that will connect the Gush Etzion settlement bloc with the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in East Jerusalem. The Beit Sahur residents have no reason to doubt either the settlers or the Har Homa neighborhood committee chairman, who declared that, “This could become a reality, just as Har Homa spilled beyond what was planned and expected.”

After the 1967 war, Beit Sahur lost 1,200 of its 7,000 dunams (1 dunam = 1/4 acre) to Jerusalem, with its greatly expanded municipal borders. Later, another 430 dunams of its land were appropriated by Har Homa, which crowds the town from the north. After various other “small” expropriations – nibbling at territory here and there for the purpose of building bypass roads – Beit Sahur and its 13,000 residents were left with a little over 600 dunams of non-built-up, agricultural land available for development.
Advertisement
From 1967 to April 27, 2006, much of this territory was occupied by the IDF’s Shdema base; the remainder was declared a closed military area, and sections of it that had been cultivated gradually withered. In 2006 Shdema was relocated, to the relief of all. The locals’ joy, however, proved premature: Back in 1995, Israel had designated those 600 dunams – regardless if the land was publicly or privately owned – as part of Area C. As elsewhere in the West Bank, that designation evolved into a permanent reality on the ground.

About 100 families, owners of the newly freed-up private land, planned to redeem it from the barrenness imposed on it by the IDF when it seized the territory for “security needs.” However, according to Abu Ayman, one of the landowners, Beit Sahur Mayor Hani al-Hayek warned him back in 2006 that under Israeli civil administration regulations for Area C, “heavy machinery” – that is, tractors or bulldozers – could not be used there, under threat of the confiscation of the machinery. Planting and sowing are allowed, says Abu Ayman – who as a young man tended and picked some of Beit Sahur’s famous fakkus fruit, also known as an Armenian cucumber – but land reclamation is prohibited. This holds true for the privately owned agricultural land that stretches across the neighboring hills and the valley between them.

Haaretz for more

An 8-year-old who was born a biological boy and suffers from mental problems caused by gender identity disorder has attended a public elementary school as a girl since last fall, a local education board in Saitama Prefecture said Friday.

The decision was made to make school life comfortable for the second grader who has had a desire to ‘‘become a girl’’ since kindergarten and begun to feel distress after entering the elementary school at having to stand to use the restroom, officials of the board said.

The school continues to keep him designated as a boy on its register.

There has been a case in Hyogo Prefecture where a boy was accepted to school as a female student. But making such a change while a student is in school is extremely rare in Japan, where schools generally struggle to cope with the agony students face with the disorder.

The boy in Saitama was diagnosed in March last year as having gender identity disorder, a term used to describe people facing a gap between their biological and mental sex identities, and his doctor recommended treating him as a girl so that he can adjust to school life.

Japan Today for more

by PRATAP CHATTERJEE

Agility, a Kuwait-based multi-billion dollar logistics company spawned by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, is facing criminal charges for over-billing the U.S. taxpayer on more than $8.5 billion worth of food supply contracts in the Iraq war zone. If the lawsuit, scheduled for February 8, is successful, the company could owe the U.S. government as much as $1 billion.

Originally known as Public Warehousing Corporation (PWC), Agility boasts that it once supplied one million meals a day to U.S. soldiers and contractors in the Middle East. The company’s Mercedes trucks hauled delicacies from ice cream to lobster tails to feed soldiers living on military bases scattered throughout Iraq. Today it has new contracts to provide food to the U.S. Agency for International Development in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa and – until about a month ago – was supposed to ramp up food delivery to the troops newly posted in southern Afghanistan.

In a lawsuit filed on November 18, 2005, Kamal Mustafa Al-Sultan accuses Agility of cheating him of a share of profits from the lucrative contract because he refused to go along with alleged corruption. A former business partner of PWC/Agility, Sultan is a cousin of the company founder and CEO, Tarek Abdul Aziz Sultan Al-Essa.

After conducting a grand jury investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) joined Kamal Sultan and filed criminal charges against PWC/Agility on November 9, 2009, immediately boosting the original lawsuit’s chances of success.

“We will not tolerate fraudulent practices from those tasked with providing the highest quality support to the men and women who serve in our armed forces,” said Tony West, assistant attorney general for the District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, in a press release. “As this case illustrates, the Department of Justice will investigate and pursue allegations of fraud against contractors and subcontractors, whether they are foreign or domestic.”

Joint Venture Leads to Fall Out

PWC was part of the Sultan family’s business empire that is grounded in high-end supermarkets and mega-stores across the Middle East. (See Sidebar.) Starting in the late 1990s, Tarek Sultan teamed up with ex-U.S. soldiers to bid on lucrative U.S. government projects. PWC’s first major contract, initially advertised in May 2002, was for a U.S. Defense Supply Center called Prime Vendor Subsistence to supply food eaten on U.S. military bases in the Middle East in anticipation of the invasion of Iraq. (Halliburton/KBR cooks and serves the food, but it does not supply it.)

At the time, Tarek Sultan had no experience in food supply, nor did he have a personal track record with the U.S. military – a requirement for bidding on the contract. However, KMSCO – run by his cousin, Kamal Sultan – had multi-million dollar U.S. military contracts dating back to1996 for “life support, food supplements, and ice.” In a January 2007 interview with CorpWatch, Kamal Sultan says he agreed to create a joint venture with Tarek in June 2002 to provide PWC with the qualifications to bid.

Corp Watch for more