|
FOR PUBLICATION
AHRC-ART-008-2010
January 22, 2010
An Article Series on Human Rights and Culture by the Asian Human Rights Commission
HUMAN RIGHTS & CULTURE - Vol. 2, ISSUE NO. 34
Welcome to Vol. 2, Issue No. 34.
In this issue we are pleased to bring you the poem, Is It Fair, by Miriam Wandia Kaloki, a poet from Kenya. Next we continue with excerpts from the collection of poems, Unknown Destination. We are pleased that we have a further contribution from Airyn Lentija entitled, The Joy of Living. Ms. Lentija works as a Domestic Helper in Hong Kong and her work speaks of the frustrations these ladies go through regardless of which Asian country they come from. Ms. Rita Loyd, also a regular contributor, has released a 36 minute video, In Search of Self Love. This video was accepted by an international on-line spiritual film festival and we are pleased to bring details of this and other aspects of Ms. Loyd¡¦s work. And finally, we have an article, AFGHANISTAN: New Book on Loss in Childbirth. This article introduces a 60-page colour booklet entitled, Veil of Tears which brings to light the terrible tragedy of the death of young children in Afghanistan. This article was kindly submitted by WUNRN.
Publications -- We are pleased to announce the release of the following publications, they are the book, The Phantom Limb: Failing judicial systems, torture and human rights work in Sri Lanka and the latest issue of Article 2. We are also announcing the publication of the forthcoming issue of Ethic in Action. Details of these publications may be found in the Publications section.
As always, the AHRC is grateful to all our contributors and we would like to remind our readers that your comments on this issue and contributions for future issues may be sent to ahrc@ahrc.asia.
You may view the previous issues and leave your comments at: http://hrculture.blog.humanrights.asia/.
******HUMAN RIGHTS & CULTURE******
Is It Fair?
Miriam Wandia Kaloki
Is it fair?
Being the only girl in the family
And having to be cut
Just like the boy?
Is it fair?
Being the only girl among 10 siblings
Never being exposed to education
Reason, I am a girl
Is it fair?
That all eyes are on me
To make sure all house chores are done
Since I am a girl
Is it fair?
That my word doesn¡¦t count
No matter my intelligence, even without schooling
My crime, being a girl
Is it fair?
That the world gives me funny glances
When I try to fight for my rights
Simply because I am a girl
Is it fair?
That my dad looks at me
And all he can see is wealth
Reason, I am a girl
Is it fair?
At such a tender age of 13
Suitors stream on our door step
Just because I am a girl
Is it fair?
That I grow old this fast
Due to responsibilities that are beyond me
Simply because I am a girl
Who will save the girl child?
From this grave
The society has caused her to dig up for herself
While so young
Is it fair?
The way she is being treated
The way she is manhandled
Just because she is a girl
Is it fair?
Just think about it
Then tell the world
Whether it is fair
 Miriam Wandia Kaloki (24) is from Kenya and has been interested for quite some time now in becoming a ¡¥voice¡¦ for women and young children subjected to violence and rape by parents and other family members. This is an issue which Ms. Kaloki has seen firsthand and by her work and involvement she tries to bring hope to the victims of this terrible abuse.
Ms. Kaloki is currently doing her masters in Social Statistics and has just started a project on gender based violence. She intends to continue her commitment in the area of gender based violence in her further studies and work.
******HUMAN RIGHTS & CULTURE******
Three poems by Ms. Kharbhih
Oh Kargil!
A wall built unconsciously!
Two nations?
The wall divided
To be broken down ¡V
For both sides.
The white clouds floating
Above them
Innocent people
How far will they bear?
The massacre for division.
Light rays of tomorrow
Does it bring sorry or twisted
Gratification
Rather live together
On the green mountains
A small hope that will present
Patience
I can stand in brave
Fulfil my crave
Mother Earth! Firms up.
We Advance
Many false visions are fastened to us,
Many unreal values surround us.
But man comes with these naturally.
I could write verses and more
To make the revolution
In this world to make it
We will be millions of victories.
It was then the invisible bars.
Teaching me to recognise my own
Voice.
To whom on our return we relate
Our vision
Every moment the sun rises
And we shall advance once more
We will never be afraid.
A Note
Dark scar of the night
To immortalise the past
With the eyes of the future
Every moment hoping to return
Man hidden behind childhood
With renewed fear in his marrow
At no cost shall I speak
The seed of one¡¦s own suffering
Grows into love for others.
 Hasina Kharbhih is the founder and president of Impulse NGO Network, an organisation working for child rights issues, especially child labour and combating trafficking of woman and children. The organisation is also involved in adolescent health and HIV education training, curriculum building, a village adoption programme and income generating. Hasina was the second person from India to be awarded the Commonwelth Youth Programme Asia Award in 2000, for social development. She has travelled widely through Asia as well as the US and Sweden. She has been a freelance journalist for almost 10 years, writing for newspapers and magazines and is presently writing for Wash Rag, a New York based magazine. In addition to editing books, her poems have been published widely in anthologies in India, China, Japan, Korea, USA, Canada, Ireland and also translated into French. (From the About the Author section in Ms. Kharbhih¡¦s book, Unknown Destination)
******HUMAN RIGHTS & CULTURE******
The Joy of Living
Airyn Lentija
 Raindrops flounce on harsh pavement in a blaze,
Flowers foot it to the beat of rain's droplets;
A revelry of the living.
Birds trail the titter of the naive leaves,
sprinkled with water's tears;
the beatitude of existence.
On the vastness of the land,
euphoric smiles luminescent
with a touch of moisture.
Not the caliginous darkness
can comprehend such symmetry;
the grandiosity of life.
All these I see¡K..
Upon hearing your sultry voice
And knowing you're free Across the miles,
my Eagle.
 Ms. Airyn Lentija works as a domestic helper in Hong Kong. Further details of Airyn¡¦s work may be found at: http://poetsforhumanrights.ning.com/profile/airyn?xgs=1
******HUMAN RIGHTS & CULTURE******
In Search of Self Love
A Short Video by Rita Loyd
Ms. Loyd¡¦s work has been seen in Human Rights and Culture on several occasions and it is always a pleasure to receive it. One of her paintings was used as the cover illustration for the AHRC publication, A Baseline Study on Torture in Sri Lanka.
 Ms. Loyd is an inspirational artist and poet and more of her work may be seen at: http://www.nurturingart.com/. The site is well worth a visit and her two earlier books, Expressions of Self Love and Unconditional Self Love are recommended reading for anyone suffering from feelings of isolation, frustration or depression. Many of her paintings have graced the covers of magazines such as The Natural Healer, The North Eastern Holistic Resource and Natural Awakenings, amongst others.
Ms. Loyd told us, ¡§In search of self love" (36 minutes) has been accepted in an international on-line spiritual film festival, http://www.cultureunplugged.com/play/2401/In-Search-of-Self-Love My dvd is a very, very simple piece of work. This film festival website is really neat because of all the different spiritual videos. I think you might like it.¡¨
The website may be found at: http://www.cultureunplugged.com
******HUMAN RIGHTS & CULTURE******
AFGHANISTAN: New Book on Loss in Childbirth
NAIROBI, 19 January 2010 (IRIN) - One of the most risky places in the world for a woman in pregnancy or childbirth is Afghanistan. An Afghan woman is 225 times more likely to die in childbirth than a woman in the UK, for example. There is hardly a family in Afghanistan that has not been touched by a tragic experience associated with childbirth.
In Veil of Tears, a 60-page colour booklet launched today, IRIN brings you a unique collection of personal stories of loss and courage in childbirth, as told by women, men and children from different parts of Afghanistan.
The stories were originally recorded in local languages, Dari and Pashto, for IRIN Radio broadcasts. Transcribed into English in Veil of Tears, they convey the immediacy and intimacy of the interviews conducted by IRIN reporters, who travelled in some cases for several days to reach the remotest villages in Afghanistan.
The testimonies in Veil of Tears offer some rarely reported perspectives on the issue of maternal mortality and as a compilation tell much about the state of today¡¦s Afghanistan in the words of some of its most ordinary citizens.
The interviewees in the booklet talk about the struggle to get enough nutritious food to sustain a woman through pregnancy, and to feed their families on any given day; they describe the awesome distances and terrain that separate people living in the villages from the nearest health facility; they describe the lack of proper roads and transport that may leave a donkey cart as the only option to attempt a life-or-death journey with a pregnant wife or mother to a hospital; they explain the cultural and social rules that might mean decisions by men are made too late to save a woman and her baby.
Fact Box
One in eight Afghan women will probably die in childbirth
An Afghan woman is 225 times more likely to die in childbirth than a woman in UK
Only 25% of Afghan births are assisted by a skilled birth attendant
Fewer than 13,000 health workers serve an Afghan population of 28 million
For more, see IRIN¡¦s regular reporting on Afghanistan
The women in these stories speak out, and some describe brave efforts to educate themselves against all the odds in order to fight for better reproductive health services for other women.
The Afghan government and its partners have made notable achievements, such as increasing the number of health facilities in the country from 400 in 2001 to 1,755 in 2008, and developing midwifery training programmes, but huge challenges remain to be tackled to make childbirth safer for Afghan women.
Veil of Tears showcases some of the work of IRIN¡¦s Kabul-based radio project, which closed at the end of 2009 after six years of humanitarian radio production and journalistic capacity building in Afghanistan. IRIN¡¦s radio work continues in Somalia, where we broadcast daily humanitarian news and information directly to Somalia on shortwave and via partner FM stations in the country.
(This article was kindly submitted by WUNRN)
WUNRN
http://www.wunrn.com
Direct Link to 63-Page IRIN Report:
http://www.irinnews.org/pdf/Veil_oTears.pdf
IRIN Website Link: http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=87731
******HUMAN RIGHTS & CULTURE******
Publications
 Last week we announced the impending publication of the December 2009 issue of Ethics in Action. We are pleased to inform you that this issue is now available.
This issue presents the report on the Prevention of Police Torture in Sri Lanka project which was prepared and written by a group of evaluators from the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims (RCT) Denmark.
The Phantom Limb: Failing judicial systems, torture and human rights work in Sri Lanka
A Study of Police Torture in Sri Lanka by Morten Koch Andersen and Basil Fernando
 The Asian Human Rights Commission wishes to inform you about the publication of a new book on the failing judicial systems and the issue of the endemic torture practiced at police stations in Sri Lanka.
This study is a result of the cooperation between the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) and the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims (RCT).
The study was done in January 2008 and the data was processed during April and May 2008 at the AHRC office in Hong Kong. The idea and outline of the study was developed by Basil Fernando of the Asian Human Rights Commission and the processing and analysis of the data and the writing of the report was completed by Morten Koch Andersen of RCT.
The study seeks to explore the routine use of torture by the police and illuminate the widespread violence and human rights violations that are part of everyday life in Sri Lanka. It seeks to show the apparent neglect of the Sri Lankan state to stop these atrocities and provide adequate protection and remedies for the victims by ignoring publicly available information provided by state commissioned investigations and reports on the continuously declining state of affairs in the police force and the general deteriorating of human rights in the country.
Much human rights reporting that focus on crisis and immediate risks, dangers and sufferings tend to overlook historic processes and social ordering systems -- such as caste -- in their (often case based) illustrative descriptions of repressive practices, misuse and mismanagement of authority and the inadequacy of the justice system to protect the citizens. However, it is the proposition of the study that to investigate torture practices and the apparent inability to change the current state of affairs one has to explore the logics based in deep rooted social systems and attitudes. This insight offers an explanation for the socioeconomic bias in the enactment of torture and the reluctance and resistance to change in the criminal justice and political system. In this regard, caste as an ever present social ordering system in South Asia and Sri Lanka appears to be a viable and fundamental issue to include in the analysis to understand current human rights abuses.
The argument is that a 'debris' of the caste system somehow orders social perceptions, relations and actions in the unfolding of the criminal justice system, especially in the images of the mariginalized laboring poor. To do this, we will look into the interconnectedness of the early judicial system and administration and the caste system.
[Published in November 2009 jointly by the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), Hong Kong and the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims (RCT), Denmark. 80 pages, ISBN: 978-962-8314-47-8]
 Article 2, Vol.8. No.4 is now available.
Article 2 is a quarterly publication of the Asian Legal Resource Centre
This issue covers the following:
An essay on abysmal lawlessness & the zero status of Sri Lankans
By Basil Fernando, Director, Asian Human Rights Commission & Asian Legal Resource Centre, Hong Kong, with staff of the commission
The distinction between genuine and counterfeit actions for justice
The lost meaning of legality
The predominance of the security apparatus
The disappearance of truth through propaganda
The superman controller
Destroyed public institutions
The zero status of citizens
Further information on Article 2 may be found at: www.article2.org
******HUMAN RIGHTS & CULTURE******
The Asian Human Rights Commission is regularly issuing this article series on Human Rights and Culture in which various cultural expressions, poems, stories, pictures and other forms of cultural expression that are based on the theme of justice, will be published. A pivotal issue in modern literature is justice, particularly the enormous unleashing of injustice under fascist, communist and other authoritarian regime including those that pursue an unbridled market economy have generated responses from created writers. This search for justice is at the very essence of being human. Human beings are part of nature and part of each other. Perhaps the lines of John Donne are most relevant: ¡§... any man¡¦s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde;¡¨
Contemporary mass culture promotes violence and destruction. There are those who are opposed to mass culture and want to reclaim the best traditions of human culture within which justice remains a core issue. This column will provide space for those who wish to share their creative initiatives.
# # #
About AHRC: The Asian Human Rights Commission is a regional non-governmental organisation monitoring and lobbying human rights issues in Asia. The Hong Kong-based group was founded in 1984.
Posted on 2010-01-22
remarks:1 |
