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FOR PUBLICATION
AHRC-ART-012-2010
January 29, 2010
An Article Series on Human Rights and Culture by the Asian Human Rights Commission
HUMAN RIGHTS & CULTURE - Vol. 2, ISSUE NO. 35
Welcome to Vol. 2, Issue No. 35.
In this issue we are pleased to bring you the painting and accompanying poem entitled Humanity’s Earthquake by Jane Evershed. It has been a while since we have had the pleasure of Ms. Evershed’s work and we grateful for this submission. Next we have the final excerpts from the collection of poems entitled, Unknown Destination, by Hasina Kharbhih. In this issue we have also included some of the illustrations by Ahmed M. Elmaroli. It is always a pleasure to have a contribution, Candor’s Eclipse, from Airyn Lentija whose work exposes the difficulties and frustrations of Foreign Domestic Workers. We then have an article on female genital mutilation, a topic which we have covered quite extensively in Human Rights & Culture.
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 at: http://hrculture.blog.humanrights.asia/
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Humanity's Earthquake
Jane Evershed
I am crushed in the concrete
Of humanity’s deafening blindness
I am the child rescued
That you do not see,
My dead parents speak
From the rubble on my behalf
To you, For I am only two
I wonder, where am I?
My broken body is your body
You are my mother and my father now
Rise to the occasion
I am in Africa starving
I am in India thirsting for fresh water
I am in China working long hours
To make cheap goods for you,
But I am mostly in your heart
I need not your pity
Nor your money
I ask for your humanity
To retain my integrity
To make this world
What it is supposed to be
And I know
That you know inherently
What that is
So shed your fear
And disappear those dark forces
Threatening, in time,
To consume you too
Raise your heart into your mind,
Your love is truly
All the wealth required
For planetary healing
My devastated soul
Is your devastated soul’
Crying out for earth healing.
I am Haiti
I am Iraq
I am Afghanistan
I am Africa
I am Jordan
I am everywhere
Waiting for your heart
To bleed into mine.
 Jane Evershed is a mother, artist, activist and poet and PresenterMs. Evershed was born in England in 1959 and moved to South Africa at the age of nine, the experience of growing up during the racist Apartheid era taught Jane Evershed the nature of domination firsthand from a young age and informs her artistic consciousness to this day. Ms. Evershed’s activism began at the age of 21 when she was jailed briefly in South Africa for opposing the system of apartheid. She spent two years on The Board of Women Against Military Madness and was jailed briefly for activism against an arms manufacturer as part of the Alliant 28, all were found not guilty under the Geneva Conventions. More details of Ms. Evershed’s work may be found at http://www.evershed.com/
We are grateful to WUNRN http://www.wunrn.com for forwarding Ms. Evershed’s painting and poem.
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Three poems by Ms. Kharbhih (As this is the final excerpt from Ms. Kharbhih’s collection we are also including some of the accompanying illustrations. All of the illustrations are by Ahmed M. Elmaroli – ed).
Journey to Yanji (China)
Embracing blue mountains,
Towards the hill of hope
Towards the village of peace
White clouds floating free
 Wondering over the skies
Whole day
The evening sun appears dark
red,
They sailed away hundreds of
Miles
Ah! I was lost in a world of
Fantasy!
I ponder deep on the themes of
my poetry, for beauty and peace
While passing an unknown
country village.
Closing my eyes I listen
to the sounds
That I might go back one
Day
Deep in the mountain.
Terrorism
The absence of movements is not stillness
The absence of noise is not silence,
Being voiceless you couldn’t openly
COMPLAIN.
Being voiceless you couldn’t express your pain.
The power of the masses is made to sleep.
HATRED fumes in hundreds of homes
Manifest in a variety of syndromes.
WHAT A TIME?
WHAT A TIME?
WHAT AN AGE?
Who with bleeding hearts
Shall redden the pages.
New ideas merely can change,
Violence, terrorism and hatred prevail…..
The century can be wonderful
In case our lives are fruitful
What one sees arches?
One surely finds
The essence of existence is only time.
Children
 Children to not make concept,
How would they known that
The world is full of people,
Who sup on innocent Souls,
Voice has also got an existence –
Which transforms itself into many
Forms.
Children innocently asked….
Where the weeds of anger
sprout,
Human race is a complex
molecule.
I went forward and met a girl
She asked?
What all this you are doing
today,
The smile that blooms
As a flower in June.
 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)
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Candor's Eclipse
Airyn Lentija
Ugly shadow of mine,
spare me a minute please.
Let me verbalize my views
about lesser and greater deeds.
Will silence sling me to hell,
because I prefer to pray privately
inside my hushed room,
So I can meditate;
to adore my gracious God,
Away from the crowd,
Places where I can't concentrate;
Where all eyes are on me,
As if i'm a superstar getting praises,
because I memorize the Bible's verses?
Ugly shadow of mine,
why you've said I'm lesser than you?
Divergent to you,I'm tacit
when it comes to faith.
Still to vocalize God's word
when I'm on the street;
where people hear me in a while
and for few seconds kicking their feet,
to the beat of Bon Jovi's Hits
that keeps playing on the store nearby.
So,ugly shadow of mine,
how could you say you're greater,
when you never tried to look back
on the shadows of your shadow?
 Ms. Airyn Lentija works as a domestic helper in Hong Kong and her work exposes some of the frustrations and inequalities that she and her colleagues have to endure.
Further details of Airyn’s work may be found at: http://poetsforhumanrights.ning.com/profile/airyn?xgs=1
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FMG or Female Genital Circumcision is a topic that Human Rights & Culture has covered extensively in previous issues and this week we are pleased to bring you further information on the attempts to eradicate this horrendous practice. Unfortunately we did not have sufficient space to include all the articles which were kindly forwarded by WUNRN but have included the web links to the others accompanying this submission – ed)
West Africa - Actions against FGM
22 January 2010
Source: Reuters
* 34 scholars sign fatwa in Mauritania
* Mothers face sanctions in Niger
* Ethnic differences in rate of FGM
By Laurent Prieur and Abdoulaye Massalatchi
NOUAKCHOTT/NIAMEY, Jan 22 (Reuters) - Efforts to eradicate female genital circumcision in West Africa have taken a step forward with a fatwa against the practice in Mauritania and sanctions in Niger against mothers who subject their daughters to it.
Known also as female genital mutilation (FGM), the tradition involves removing external parts of a girl's genitals and sometimes narrowing the vaginal opening. Bleeding, disease and problems in urinating and childbirth can result for millions of victims each year in Africa and the Middle East.
In many parts of West Africa, cutting has been presented as a religious obligation for Muslim women, leading many to believe that if they are not circumcised they are unclean and that their prayers will not be heard.
"Are there texts in the Koran that clearly require that thing? They do not exist," the secretary general of the Forum of Islamic Thought in Mauritania, Cheikh Ould Zein, told Reuters of the fatwa signed by 34 imams and scholars.
"On the contrary, Islam is clearly against any action that has negative effects on health. Now that doctors in Mauritania unanimously say this practice threatens health, it is therefore clear that Islam is against it," he added.
The fatwa, or religious ruling, was signed on January 12 but became widely known only this week in a country where some 72 percent of women are estimated to have undergone FGM and where practitioners charge an average 25 euros a time.
"The fact that the religious leaders in Mauritania are standing up and doing this is quite amazing," said Molly Melching, executive director of Tostan, a Senegal-based organisation working in Mauritania on FGM.
MOTHERS FACE PUNISHMENT
The fatwa in itself is not binding, and would not have an impact on those communities practising FGM for centuries-old cultural reasons not linked to the arrival of Islam in Africa.
Yet it follows other tentative indications of a trend away from FGM in West Africa.
A Save the Children-backed campaign has seen 40 villages in Mali abandon the practice in a country where over 80 percent of the women have undergone FGM. In Senegal, the practice has been widely stopped since a law against it was passed in 1999.
In a sign that authorities in Niger are implementing a 2003 ban, 45 mothers in the southwestern town of Kollo received fines and suspended jail sentences of eight months this week for complicity in allowing their daughters to be cut.
Welfare specialist Moussa Hassane told Reuters that aside from the usual forms of excision, practioners in Niger used the technique to facilitate sexual relations with child brides.
Niger has one of the highest rates of early marriage in the world, with nearly 60 percent of women married between 15-19.
UN agency UNICEF statistics show a sharp fall in Niger in the incidence of FGM in the past decade masking stark ethnic differences, with three percent of Arab women circumcised but nearly two-thirds of some other tribal groups.
"A law is not what will change a social norm. For it to be sustainable it has to come from the people, a decision made by the people, because they really believe in it," Melching said.
Further information on WUNRN may be found at: http://www.wunrn.com Additional articles and information on FGM may be found at:
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LDE60L13C.htm
http://www.alertnet.org/db/an_art/58388/2010/00/21-170431-1.htm Mauritania - Muslim Imams Initiate Rare Ban on Female Circumcision
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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.
Online version: www.ethicsinaction.asia
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
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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.
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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 2010-01-29
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