The law ignores the Constitutional ban on “unreasonable search” and protecting personal documents. It also seeks to establish state-level control over an area of law that is the domain of the federal government. There is, for instance, no Arizona customs service or national border service. The border is a federal category, and immigration is controlled, by law, by various federal agencies and the jurisprudence of federal law. There is language in the law that is reportedly designed to prevent the federal government from interfering with state enforcement.

In unmistakably relevant and meaningful language, the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution reads:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The president announced before the law was even signed by Arizona’s governor that he has directed the Justice Department’s civil rights division to investigate whether or not specific provisions of the Arizona law would violate federal or Constitutional civil rights protections. Numerous rights groups have said they plan to mount one or more legal challenges to the law. Constitutional scholars have begun to weigh in and some Arizona law enforcement officials have said they think it will place an unfair burden on police, and possibly take them outside their real scope of legal authority.

According to the New York Times:

Hispanics, in particular, who were not long ago courted by the Republican Party as a swing voting bloc, railed against the law as a recipe for racial and ethnic profiling. “Governor Brewer caved to the radical fringe,” a statement by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund said, predicting that the law would create “a spiral of pervasive fear, community distrust, increased crime and costly litigation, with nationwide repercussions.”

While police demands of documents are common on subways, highways and in public places in some countries, including France, Arizona is the first state to demand that immigrants meet federal requirements to carry identity documents legitimizing their presence on American soil.

For Americans who grew up during the Cold War era, the specter of totalitarian dictatorship was often represented, even in children’s cartoons, by the scene in which policemen stop people going about their daily routines, demanding “Your papers please!” There are organizing efforts going on to stage massive protests against the law, and to pressure other states to pledge not to take such action. The Miami Herald reports that a loose association of truckers traveling into or out of Arizona are planning to stage a trade boycott of the entire state.

There is also a spreading effort, across Arizona and other states, to mount a political challenge to the Republican domination of state politics, with nearly 30% of the population of Arizona being of Hispanic descent. NPR correspondent Ted Robbins reports that:

The things that are circumstantial are the fact that a larger than general portion of the Hispanic population in Arizona is under 18. So, of course, they can’t vote. And then there’s also a lot of folks who are in the country either legally or not legally, but they can’t vote because they’re not citizens yet. So, if you pair them away, what you have is 17 percent of eligible voters are Hispanic. That’s of the whole population. So they don’t, you can see that that halves the number of total Hispanics in the state. So the numbers belie their electoral power.

There is some question as to whether this law is taking place specifically because Republican party leaders in the state do not believe there is any substantial electoral risk from alienating the Hispanic voting population, which tends to lean Democratic to begin with. Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) has sought to frame the legislation as an effort to fight back against “the murderous greed of drug cartels”, even as some fear the militant bandwagoning of prominent figures like Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who has called for the deployment of thousands of US military personnel to the Mexican border.

The law is in some ways an expression of deep cultural paradoxes running through the rightward shift of the Republican party nationally. The anti-tax “tea party” movement has spent the better part of a year trying to oppose Pres. Obama and his agenda as a “socialist” takeover in which the government will take an egregiously authoritarian role in the private lives and economic choices of individuals, with little hint of any such possibility. But the same militant conservatism appears to be the impetus for this law, which establishes an unprecedented right for law enforcement to involve itself in people’s daily routines, with almost no adherence to Constitutional principles of due process.

That psychological conflict, inherent in the apparent radicalization of the Republican party and its public policy agenda, may ultimately be a serious problem for the party in terms of the arithmetic of general elections and of elections of national scope. It may also allow the Democratic party to rouse an under-involved political constituency whose personal, family and community interests, not to mention a committed belief in the value of American Constitutional ideals, and motivate a wave vote against such measures.

The legal challenge will likely come from three fronts. There will likely be a federal response, at least insofar as the Justice Department will seek to instruct Arizona state and municipal law enforcement that the jurisdictional scope of this legislation is, due to Constitutional provisions, far narrower than the governor and the law’s backers would like. There will also be a civil rights response, coming from one or more prominent and community-based organizations. And there may be a citizen-based response, in which individuals targeted by the law, or who fear they may be targeted for unequal treatment, will sue the state or law enforcement.

The LA Times reports:

Obama signaled that a legal showdown might be possible and that his administration would “examine the civil rights and other implications” of the law. Department of Justice officials said they “were reviewing the bill” but declined to discuss the legislation further. Immigrant rights groups have vowed a court fight, arguing that regulating immigration is a federal matter.

[...] Hundreds of high school students left classes this week in protest, pouring into the plaza outside the state Capitol and urging a veto. Religious leaders and police chiefs — and thousands of callers to the governor’s office — pressed for Brewer to reject the bill. Some Arizona officials argued it would stigmatize the state much as its past refusal to honor the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. U.S. Rep. Raul M. Grijalva, a Democrat who represents southern Arizona, called for a convention boycott of his own state.

The measure not only sets up a serious showdown over the nature of long-standing civil rights protections, and a genuine national crisis of identity over the degree to which police action and the daily activities of citizens might be in conflict, but it also challenges the historic openness of American society. The ideological movement behind this legislation favors sealing the southern border of the United States militarily, and the official establishment of what has been called in the past the “Fortress America” model of immigration enforcement.

This confrontational model is tempting to those who believe it will bring added security, especially in communities where a rise in levels of chronic poverty or violent crime appears to be associated with the black market in human smuggling. But there is little evidence that such measures would address that problem. The most likely practical outcome is the widespread, institutionalized harassment of individuals, even US citizens, most of whom are in no way violating any law, even up to and including immigration law.

The immigrant identification law has been compared to the beginnings of apartheid, in which the status of individuals had to be officially determined and classified, ostensibly in the interests of “security”. And while the specific provisions of the law would erode individual liberties in serious ways — allowing law enforcement to demand proof of residency at any moment, for virtually any reason, and possibly subjecting citizens and policemen to legal penalty for not collaborating — it contains no specific provisions that would directly impact the activities of violent smuggling cartels.

As social networking technologies have evolved, they have become not just user-friendly in the extreme, but have created a global forum through which individuals and communities, organizations and governments, can work to build connectivity among people, and share information in a way that promotes opportunity, liberty and stability for women in even remote corners of the world. Social networking tools decentralize the flow of information, allowing for a more flexible, dynamic application of global communications platforms, handing the control of access and information to the people who seek or require it.

The central thrust of the event was cogently distilled in Gloria Feldt’s call for women to “employ every medium”, take advantage of any communicative vehicle, using all the tools available, to achieve the most comprehensive and dynamic delivery of the message. But the discussion drew from a diverse range of experience and focus, bridging the distance between the strictly technological approach to social media, questions of Jungian psychoanalysis and cultural consciousness, and the community fabric as it is affected by banking and lending practices.

Olivia Calderón, California Legislative Director for the New America Foundation’s Asset Building Program, brought this last point forward, discussing community outreach efforts designed to ensure predatory lending practices don’t undermine individuals’, families’ or communities’ ability to build value and lay the groundwork for a stable, prosperous future. These programs require a communicative engagement and benefit from a social media outreach and decentralizing philosophy that privileges acting locally.

Feldt also suggested the need to act locally, explaining that while women complain of not being published as much as men in major newspapers, the most likely explanation is that they in fact submit a far smaller number of articles; she called on women to write to their newspapers, and to write for them, to publish and to create a base of discursive support for women and for women’s issues. Specifically, women could tap into grassroots networks with the aim of submitting at least 25 letters the to editor in support of every article published.

Tae Yoo, a Senior Vice President for Corporate Affairs for Cisco Systems, works on her company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs, building “public-private partnerships to create positive, sustainable change in education/capacity development and economic development”. She said the internet is “the most ubiquitous” mode of inclusive communication, where “groups can find each other, because they have common interests and strategies”.

Yoo also said new developments in technology and decentralized grassroots organization are “raising the bar for social media” in a way that can “empower women around the world” by promoting education, leadership, the building of constructive alliances and partnerships, as well as support networks fed by the technical resources of sometimes geographically remote individuals or organizations. The Cisco Networking Program, for example, now operates in 160 countries, though Cisco Systems itself is only physically located in 70.

Cisco opened the first Network Academies at Kabul University. As a result, women are able to learn that it doesn’t matter where one is, so long as one has acces to the infrastructure that allows for communication across borders. The use of social networking tools to provide access to a global network of potential collaborators, educators and sources of information, makes it possible to rapidly expand the resources available to remote communities, far beyond the limits imposed by geography and local economic and social trends.

Clare Winterton, Executive Director of the International Museum of Women, explained how her organization views “art as a winning strategy for gender equity”. The online museum uses thematically driven art exhibits to promote gender issues, educate people around the world and connect women and organizations that can play a productive role in driving progress toward gender equality and social justice.

Winterton framed “art as an entry point” for allowing women to learn more about their world, about the world beyond their own experience, and about their role, or potential role, in that wider society. A key question, she said, is how do we use art to bring new people to the table? “Women and men need different entry points and different touchpoints to really get inspired … and to take action”.

She went on to say that “the way we communicate, whether that be through art, or through marketing … is something we really need to invest in as a movement … to create a bridge to action, to connect men and women around the world”. In a review of reaction to the use of social media to inspire action, she reported that over 70% of people said they experienced three personal changes, while more than 6o% said they’d taken three steps toward action, as a result of the experience of gender-relevant online artwork and social networking.

Like Tae Yoo’s work at Cisco, to foster education and empowerment of women and girls in Afghanistan and elsehwere, Winterton’s work explores the connection between economic standing and women’s rights and potential for decision-making and free exercise of personal agency. Olivia Calderón’s work for the New America Foundation’s Asset Building Program, in California, also demonstrates the strong current running between economic degradation, social connectivity and women’s access to opportunity and security.

Calderón explained how her father and mother came to the US from El Salvador and Mexico, respectively, in hopes of building an asset base on which they could create a world of possibilities for their family. She said she learned from their experience how policy shapes the environment in which individuals, families and communities can build assets and translate their work into a more stable future. Public policy that allows for abusive lending practices undermines the freedom of individuals to tap their own talent and build a sustainable asset-base.

In Sacramento, she has worked to establish an college-savings account for all children, so that educational opportunity will not be determined by geography or socio-economic status. She also spoke of the ongoing work to create a portable IRA, allowing people to build a life-long pension they can carry from job to job, so their security in retirement need not be put at risk by one employer’s fortunes or misfortunes.

Key to understanding the role of banking policy and community asset-building was the fact that “the financial market of the 21st century has two faces”. For higher income families, financial services outlets “trip over themselves” to offer quality services and financial security, while for lower income families, the picture is very different: predatory lending, unstable mortgages, check-cashing counters and abusive pay-day lenders.

Projects designed to counter the corrosive effects of predatory mortgage lending, credit card abuses and pay-day lenders, both require and help to protect community organization. They are designed to foster not just the building of personal assets, but also of value in the community and a connective frame of mind, where collaborative action allows for a more cohesive planning that protects individuals, families and the fabric of human talent and trust around them.

Jean Shinoda Bolen spoke of the need to integrate issues of gender equality into a conceptualization of social interaction in light of the circle, which is to say, not linear power dynamics or the convenient geometry of hierarchical structures. The circle prizes parity, symmetry, and connectivity, and allows for communication to occur across a more constructive non-vertical network of relationships.

In light of the circle effect, Shinoda Bolen said that when women begin talking to each other, “the world changes for them”. They are awakened to the possibility of expanding the reach of their individual agency, building toward adopting spontaneous leadership roles and engaging in decision-making for a community broader than what they had previously understood as their own domain.

She also spoke of “putting a spiritual center in that circle”, coming to accept that in a sense, communicative expansion of one’s physical and psychological field of engagement equates to an “energy field”. Every circle formed is informed by circles that came before and will influence circles that come afterward. Communicative purpose, direction and intensity remains, and establishes a guide for future activity.

The Honorable Jackie K. Weatherspoon, who served in the New Hampshire House of Representatives for six years, explained that “New England has been the only region in the country that actually did an assessment of the platform for action for Beijing”. She also noted that as the people with the most knowledge, commitment and social capital, age, it becomes increasingly necessary involve young people, to inspire the same passion for a cause that brought the progress to date.

To engage young people, she spoke of events designed to function in a “cafe style”, with intimate, informal conversation, but in which the young people change location or groups every 15 minutes or so, to keep them engaged and expand their pool of shared interest. While teenage girls are experiencing real difficulties in their high-connectivity, media-intensive social environment —with cyber-bullying, depression, suicides, self-image crises, and the sometimes demeaning portrayal of women and girls in mainstream media—, social media offer one of the best means for young women to cultivate their own discretionary and leadership abilities, to find a place of meaning, and to inspire others to advance the cause of equality.

Elahe Amani, of the Women’s News Network, highlighted not only the effectiveness of social media in fostering awareness and by extension, social action, but the ways in which social media can provide women and girls with a greater sense of self-determination and courage, to allow them to speak out, to protest, to organize.

That cultivation of courage, that encouragement of the expansion of the reach of an individual’s voice, is one of the main attractions of social media generally, and a driving factor in the relationship of social media to inspiring and organizing social action and substantive change. Understanding the relevance of social media to the personal and social development of women of all ages can, or should, lead to a deliberate and coordinated effort to inform and reform the real-world experience of women and girls across the world.

In a new 6-page white paper, “Aiding Torture: Health Professionals’ Ethics and Human Rights Violations Demonstrated in the May 2004 CIA Inspector General’s Report”, PHR reports on physicians aiding in the abusive interrogation techniques some now say amount to illegal torture.

According to the PHR analysis:

The report details how the CIA relied on medical expertise to rationalize and carry out abusive and unlawful interrogations. It also refers to aggregate collection of data on detainees’ reaction to interrogation methods. PHR is concerned that this data collection and analysis may amount to human experimentation and calls for more investigation on this point. If confirmed, the development of a research protocol to assess and refine the use of the waterboard or other techniques would likely constitute a new, previously unknown category of ethical violations committed by CIA physicians and psychologists.

In what may be the most alarming set of facts to emerge to date, there is now evidence that physicians working with the CIA were in fact studying human resistance to certain techniques. One PHR medical advisor says “Medical doctors and psychologists colluded with the CIA to keep observational records about waterboarding, which approaches unethical and unlawful human experimentation”.

The abusive treatment documented in the IG report include mock executions, the brandishing of guns and power drills, threats to sexually assault family members and murder children, “walling” — which entails repeatedly slamming an unresponsive detainee’s head against a cell wall—, and prolonged confinement in a small box that impedes nearly all motion.

PHR also found that contrary to official claims, the presence of physicians tends not to and did not, in the case of CIA interrogations, limit the amount of abuse inflicted on prisoners. In fact, says the PHR analysis, physicians’ presence permitted CIA interrogators to go far beyond the pre-determined limits for physical and psychological abuse.

Steven Reisner, PHR’s Psychological Ethics Advisor and the report’s co-author, says the IG report shows that:

The required presence of health professionals did not make interrogation methods safer, but sanitized their use, escalated abuse, and placed doctors and psychologists in the untenable position of calibrating harm rather than serving as protectors and healers. The fact that psychologists went beyond monitoring, and actually designed and implemented these abuses —while simultaneously serving as ‘safety monitors’— reveals the ethical bankruptcy of the entire program.

The revelations open up an entirely new area of potential criminal liability, and may also feed into the contention that officials who ordered and oversaw the program of abusive interrogations, not only knew it was in violation of existing laws, but conspired to find ways to cover up illegal activity. There is no decision as yet on whether the special prosecutor will call CIA physicians to testify about their role in the abuse or about what actions they helped to craft.

Socio-economic barriers to such free flow of information are just another kind of information control that establishes dangerous demographic stratification into privileged and marginalized groups. Governments across the world are using web filtering technologies to censor the information available to their citizens and crack down on dissent.

In China, in Iran, in Cuba, aggressive web filtering measures and electronic spying technology have been used to prevent the spread of information unfavorable to the government leadership, to obscure corruption, and to hunt and persecute members of a would-be democratic opposition. In China, web filtering censorship has perhaps reached its zenith, with major multinationals collaborating in the “Great Firewall of China”.

Web searches routinely rule out links that contain information banned by the government, and the government has explored barring any website not entirely in Mandarin from being viewed inside China. Talk of the parallel Chinese internet has given way to concerns the government has opted for a technologically more realistic total filtering program.

“Cyber dissidents” are now an entirely new area of press targeted by government censors and security forces. In China and Iran, cyber dissidents are jailed simply for linking to materials that the government has sought to keep away from the public eye. Iran’s government has repeatedly shut down opposition websites in order to prevent democratic assembly, to cover up violence against civilians or to obscure challenges to official diktat.

China recently delayed plans to implement a draconian filtering system based on a new “green dam” software platform. The government is believed to have been taken aback by the broad-based and persistent expressions of anger over the plans, as the nation’s population continues to move into contact with the online medium and is demanding more transparency.

But Pres. Hu Jintao came to office promising a “smokeless war” against the press and cyber dissidents, and China has been criticized across the world for efforts to manipulate the information made available to its citizens, including distortions of the unrest a year ago in Tibet and Sichuan and now in Xinjiang, which many say could foment violence against people of Tibetan or Uighur ethnicity, depending on the case.

Efforts to use internet filtering to cover up the massacre of unarmed civilians at Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989 are part of that ongoing war against the free press. The Beijing government fears acknowledging what took place there could delegitimize the current regime and sow political unrest. Pro-democracy advocates say that like any government in a free democracy, China’s government could acknowledge its mistakes, promote electoral reform, and liberalize its political process, without destabilizing the country.

In remote regions like Darfur in western Sudan or North Kivu in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, conditions of extreme danger for aid workers and violence against journalists means information filters very slowly through the population, worsening already catastrophic situations of persistent conflict and human suffering.

Violence against women in Darfur is persistent in part owing to the fact that Darfuri women have virtually no access to information distribution systems. They are almost never able to report crimes against them to any public authority or international group. And medical service workers are often unable to locate people in need of help, as the remote region is plagued by lack of communicative media.

There is also concern about the effects of internet usage on the development of human cognitive abilities. Social cognitive structures are thought to be directly affected by use of communicative media, and the internet as achieved fundamental alterations in the communicative structure of society; facing that reality, it must be a universal right of all people to participate in the direction and development of that medium in reference to their own daily lives.

In May, I reported on this for The Hot Spring Network:

“Cognitive science has revealed a human brain notable for its plasticity. It is not unreasonable to speculate that the Internet not only shapes itself to the mind but shapes the mind to itself”, writes Ana Menéndez in this month’s Poets & Writers magazine.

What can we do to impede the erosion of some of our most prized social-intellectual habits of mind, rooted in organic brain structure and in social networking (from campfire to empire, parliament to newsprint, to Twitter and The Hot Spring Network), while taking advantage of the power of the web?

The internet and attendant communications technologies have a visible decentralizing effectthat enhances the democratic influence average people can exert in the public sphere. In the US election of 2008, that was evident in online information sharing and organizing. In the Spanish election of 2004, it was evident in the popular outcry that was so ably communicated by sms, that helped uncover a government disinformation campaign.

Clay Sharky, of the TED initiative, explains in a video address how social networking services and a new generation of web applications and smart phones, are coming together to empower individuals across the world and bring about the end of “top-down” controls in the political sphere. This effect is operating even in authoritarian societies, where in some cases the best information available comes from individuals posting anecdotal reports online.

Perhaps the world’s most developed and advanced campaign for net neutrality, or legal constraints on internet service providers’ (ISP) ability to plan or carry out systematic filtering of content, has taken root in the US. Motivated by a fierce defense of First Amendment rights and an understanding of the democratizing effects of open flows of information, the net neutrality movement has won important victories both in Congress andamong federal regulators.

In March 2008, I reported for Cafe Sentido that “We are on the verge of a major communications and global economic revolution, in which major media, technological advances, cloud computing and dispersed optimization, adapt to and take over new models for living and producing in human society.” But that moment is being met with stepped up efforts by governments and businesses to control the freedom of ordinary people to access and control information.

Such efforts are a direct assault on democratic freedoms, and measurably impede the ability of people to gather information related to risks to their health or safety or to orchestrate the dissemination of information that may favor their social, economic or ideological interests. As the US Bill of Rights‘ commitment to a first-order freedom of the press shows, all other democratic rights are built on the foundation of a free and independent media culture. So access to the web must begin to be treated as a basic measure of human rights everywhere.

Follow these links for more information on:

• Press Freedom & Persecution of Journalists
• Net Neutrality & Internet Freedoms
• Human Rights & Democratic Freedoms

Beyond Utopia, it was a lust to fashion a paradise built on millions of purgatories. It was the paradox of a violent Heaven, a wisdom of intolerance, a corrupt purity, an abstraction drowned in the blood of innocents. In order to establish absolute power, either for themselves or their ideology, a purge was undertaken that would attempt to eliminate nearly all people of learning, leaving by one count only 4 highly trained Cambodian legal minds remaining.

The totalitarian nature of the purge was, like all political purges and all totalitarianism, based on the lie, the false promise of finality: The Khmer Rouge bet the lives of millions and the fate of their nation on the idea that once they had killed enough people, the perfect society would emerge and the ills that threatened their plans would be cured, purged successfully, overcome without risk of return.

If the political logic of the deranged practitioners of the Cambodian genocide are to be believed, they believed they could make a just and ordered world by attacking with thunder and steel everything vulnerable in the human beings they judged as outside their reach, and erasing human virtues like compassion, justice, tolerance, from the communities they favored, by shaping their society through a system of torture and murder.

The evils of the Khmer Rouge terror were nothing less than the wholesale abdication of humanity, in service of a power structure that elevated thugs and psychopaths, testing their merit by urging them to exhibit incomprehensible degrees of cruelty.

This is so much the case that in the ongoing trial of Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch (pronounced ‘Doik’) —a prison director accused of a vast array of war crimes, committed in furtherance of the Khmer Rouge purge—, the defendant has alternately broken down in hysterical demonstrations of guilt and regret and attempted to delegitimize testimony questioning the identity of witnesses by saying he had long ago had that person killed.

The metaphysical arrangement of such a regime of bloodlust could be classed as habitual psychotics —more than as physics or metaphysics—‚ behavior so far outside what even the perpetrator’s heart and mind can countenance, that it amounts to a deliberate casting off of any intellectual or moral coherence, a descent into something antithetical to the involvement of anything we might call human qualities.

By casting off the restraint that stems from having human qualities like conscience, moral compass, tolerance and civil social structures, in exchange for an experiment with habitual psychotics, the genocidal regime is able to spread the logic of its brutality, by disqualifying virtually anyone from the broad category of humanity, both the victims and its allies in perpetrating the killing.

This accounts for the mysterious inability of any moral considerations to explain or account for the logic of genocide. It is not logical; it is not intellectually or morally coherent; it is not actually in service of any reasonable or worthy political aim. It is the sowing of injury and contempt in a way that will take root, leaving a landscape of devastation and tragedy in its wake, the fundamental crippling of a nation for generations to come.

Now, long after the killing ended, Cambodia has finally been able to put together a legal process for prosecuting and punishing the crimes of that era (1975-1979), but only with the help of international jurists assisting in an ad-hoc “hybrid” tribunal system meant to enforce and expand the scope of Cambodia’s own evolving humanitarian law.

The trials are a criminal prosecution that stands in for what has been tried in other places, the “truth and reconciliation” process aimed at fixing crimes and grudges firmly in the past, in order to clear the terrain of the society’s future for something better and more humane. Each society that faces the horrors of such a history has unique circumstances, unique crimes to address, and unique demographic makeup that may favor one solution over another.

Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda, conceived a complex but broadly applicable process of community hearings, in which the perpetrators of the horrific Rwandan genocide openly confessed in front of their neighbors their involvement in the crimes of those 100 days in 1994 — when over 800,000 men, women and children were murdered by machete, dagger, fire and beating, by people who had always been part of their communities.

Kagame told Fareed Zakaria on Sunday’s edition of GPS —the “Global Public Square”— that “We had to bring the victims and perpetrators back together”, because those on either side of the genocide live in mixed communities everywhere across Rwanda. Zakaria praised Rwanda for finding a nuanced and well-thought solution to the problem of continued cohabitation of both communities, even as the nation seeks to recognize the genocide and prevent another round of the same, perhaps in retaliation or frustration for hard living conditions.

In fact, “spillover from the 1994 Rwandan genocide” is now sowing unrest in North Kivu, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Cattle rustling used to finance militia activity is fomenting inter-ethnic conflict among Hutus and Tutsis, some of whom are émigrés from Rwanda, having fled in the time of the genocide. As the Christian Science Monitor is reporting:

While the trade in blood cows finances rebel activity here, but it’s also a form of psychological warfare. Another major rebel group in the region, the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), is a predominantly Tutsi movement which sees itself as protecting its people. It also defends their traditional livelihood; For centuries, the pastoral Tutsi have measured a man’s wealth by counting his cattle.

“Nothing riles the CNDP and the Tutsi more than having their cattle stolen,” says Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. When they turn to battle, she says, the CNDP can be brutal: In a bid to regain villages controlled by Hutu militias, in April the CNDP killed over 100 civilians, some of them the elderly and children.

However galling or economically traumatic, the theft of cattle is substantially less significant than the mass slaughter of innocents, but the Kivu experience demonstrates how the unresolved fallout from the 1994 genocide is again stoking the fires of ethnic hatred. Can Paul Kagame do enough in his second term as president of Rwanda to establish a reliable civil society to effect a lasting truth and reconciliation process in which the crimes and animus of the genocide are relegated to the past?

The effects of the slaughter will be part of Rwandan life, part of the immediate life experience and family structures across the nation, for generations to come, as is the case in Cambodia, as among Europeans both Jewish and non-Jewish who lived through the Holocaust, as is the case for residents of the former Yugoslavia or of today’s Darfur. The false promise of the final solution will, in every case, become ingrained in the evolution of a people, and may impede any real ascent to ideal structures favoring harmony among rival groups.

We need to establish international structures with reach and authority that can detect and prevent such campaigns of slaughter. The prime minister of Turkey, Tayyip Erdogan, decries China’s treatment of Uighur muslims in Xinjiang province as “genocide”, though many believe the programmatic “ethnic reordering” in which Beijing has engaged is not as dangerous as more aggressive “ethnic cleansing”. But some say such situations as those in Xinjiang, or the North Caucasus, need to be viewed as early warnings and halted without further loss of life.

Framing a social plan of any kind in the logic of ethnic cleansing or political re-engineering implies the desire to use force to command the restructuring of communities. Doing so in a way that takes lives or forces entire ethnicities or groups of political dissidents out verges on what could be called a purge campaign. Such ideas of a final solution are tempting to the subset of political actors who disqualify their rivals from humanity and seek to sweep them from existence, and are the root structure of a burgeoning genocide.

International structures that can provide for monitoring such policies that put a society at risk of ethnic cleansing need to be established, tested and strengthened. Observation of crimes like those ongoing in Darfur, and possibly ready to flare up again in North Kivu or the North Caucasus, is not enough: observation with vocal protest which amounts to no intervention empowers the perpetrators and condones their worst actions.

Building consensus among the “great powers”, namely the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council, each of whom wields a veto power over any action taken by the Council, is the first step. Genuine issues of sovereignty can be addressed, but Moscow and Beijing could be persuaded to see that reducing inter-ethnic conflict wherever it exists, especially within their borders and in neighboring countries, is in the interests of their existing systems of government and influence abroad.

Cambodia is now facing its savage and inexplicable past, and doing the truly hard work of trying to adjudicate who pays the price for the crimes of a regime whose legal framework for ruling could not be justified as “legal” under any recognized notion of legitimate government. Evidence presented in court may show that some of those responsible for the crimes were following orders; the orders, and the legal authority behind them, must be shown to be beyond the scope of any allowable legal structure.

What faces Cambodia, however, is more than just judging the guilty; it’s accounting for all that was lost, all the cultural potential of the lives cut short, all the vision and humanity that will never be recovered. That ache is memorial and immemorial, tightly woven into the fabric of Cambodian politics, and transcendent; it must permeate what takes place in the future, but also be put aside so that the future can be free of it.

Estemirova, who had worked with assassinated investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya and was a winner of the , was a vocal critic of the Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov, who is accused of widespread human rights abuses, political killings and war crimes. Russian authorities, from the Putin era and into the Medvedev era, have refused to fully investigate allegations against Kadyrov, preferring to cast him as a patriotic hardliner unwilling to let Chechnya secede from the Russian Federation.

Kidnapped while leaving her home in Grozny, Chechnya, in the morning, her body was found at 17:20 local time (13:20 GMT) in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia, near the city of Nazran, according to Russia’s ITAR-TASS news agency. Madina Khadziyeva, a spokeswoman for the regional interior ministry told the press the victim had two wounds to the head and that “it was clear she had been murdered in the morning”.

Natalya Estemirova, a close friend and investigative colleague of Anna Politkovskaya, was one of the most prominent human rights campaigners still active in Chechnya. Politkovskaya was murdered on then President Vladimir Putin’s birthday, leading to widespread speculation it was meant to send a sign of allegiance to Putin, who backs Kadyrov’s hardline regime in Chechnya and had been openly critical of reporting by the crusading journalist.

Numerous critics both inside and outside of Russia have alleged that a shadowy network of political figures aligned with Pres. Putin —whose administration employed more active and former spies than any Russian government on record— was conspiring to eliminate critics and consolidate the Putin-centered power bloc that installed Kadyrov in Chechnya. Putin was initially dismissive of the significance of Politkovskaya’s murder, a reaction that shocked many, including political allies.

Now, various groups are calling for a full accounting of Russian political assassinations throughout the post-Soviet era, many of which have never been fully prosecuted or resolved.Human Rights Watch today “urged the Russian government to launch a full, independent, and transparent investigation into Estemirova’s murder”. The HRW statement reads:

“The Russian authorities should take every possible step to bring Natalia Estemirova’s killers to justice,” said Kenneth Roth, director of Human Rights Watch. “It seems to be open season on anyone trying to highlight the appalling human rights abuses in Chechnya. It’s high time the Russian government acted to stop these killings and prosecute those responsible.”

Is Russia getting away with murder in Chechnya? There has been triumphalist recasting of the entire Chechen conflict by Russian authorities in Moscow, who now say the resistance is dead and Chechnya is firmly aligned with the Russian Federation. But throughout the process of “resolution”, the assassination of activists, lawyers, and dissidents, has been a persistent stain on Russia’s Chechnya policy.

The pattern is so persistent and visible that Vladimir Putin has alleged it is part of a conspiracy by his political enemies to destabilize the Russian Federation. Some allege the underlying security strategy for Chechnya was to use overwhelming, indiscriminate and brutal force against anyone who would impede outright military reconquest by the Russian military. Putin often justified military and paramilitary actions critics called war crimes as an aggressive counter-terrorism effort to secure Chechnya.

According to the Huffington Post:

A report was released on the same day as Estemirova’s killing, which calls for Russian officials, including Prime Minister Putin, to be held accountable for crimes while they have been in office.

Today, President Dmitry Medvedev expressed outrage at the killing and pledged a thorough prosecution. A spokeswoman told the press the president views as evident the possible connection between her murder and her professional work. Medvedev will now be under pressure to demonstrate that his administration really is serious about prosecuting such political killings, though specific pronouncements on the process of the investigation or the security officials who will lead it have not been given.

But in powerfully ill-fated timing, Pres. Medvedev was in Sochi today, visiting with political and military leaders from Ingushetia, and praising the “success” of security operations to crush a separatist movement he termed “terrorist”. According to Radio Free Europe:

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said after meeting near Sochi with acting Ingushetian President Rashid Gaysanov that security forces have had “success” in their counterterrorism operation against Islamic militants in Ingushetia, RFE/RL’s North Caucasus Service reports.

Medvedev did not specify what he meant by success or where it was achieved.

The wave of violence includes a recent assassination attempt on the life of Ingushetian president Yunus-Bek Yevkurov. He survived the attack, but had to turn over power temporarily to Gaysanov. Medevedev has long been seen as part of the Putin bloc of power and an heir to Putin’s security policies. Russian military interventions in the Caucasus region have raised fears —and allegations— of the kind of abuses seen in the Chechen conflict.

There is concern Russian authorities have sought to further harden their security stance after making nice with US president Barack Obama, who while visiting Russia met with human rights campaigners and said the US was committed to seeing the spread of “universal values”, commentary many in Russia saw as open criticism of the Putin-Medvedev power bloc and its much maligned security policies.

The Guardian newspaper, for instance, is reporting:

The timing of her murder follows Barack Obama’s first visit to Moscow last week as US president. Obama met with Russian human rights activists and set out the US’s commitment to “universal values”.

The Kremlin responded with hardline pronouncements, with the president, Dmitry Medvedev, visiting the breakaway Georgian republic of South Ossetia on Monday. The trip appeared to be a direct rebuff to Obama who had said that both Georgia and Ukraine should be free to choose their own leaders.

Critics and dissidents have intensified their complaints of government interference with media and with rights campaigners and non-governmental investigations over the last decade. Questioning whether Estemirova’s murder is more evidence of “impunity” for political murders in Russia, the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) today praised Estemirova for her work with the group:

Reporters Without Borders is appalled and saddened by today’s murder of former journalist Natalia Estemirova, the Russian human rights NGO Memorial’s representative in Chechnya. …

Estemirova helped Reporters Without Borders conduct a fact-finding visit to Russia’s three Caucasian republics – Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan – in March. The information and analyses she shared with Reporters Without Borders reinforced our conviction that the Caucasus is on the brink of chaos and that human rights activists like her are bravely filling the gap left by a dwindling independent press.

RSF also demanded of Russia that: “The authorities must publicly condemn this murder and demonstrate a real determination to combat impunity.” RSF recently sent an open letter to Pres. Obama, urging him to call on Russian officials, during his meetings with Pres. Medvedev, PM Putin and others, to call to account all those responsible for violence against the press. The letter noted “According to our research, at least 20 journalists have been killed in connection with their work since Vladimir Putin became president in March 2000.”

This month alone, Estemirova was actively denouncing alleged involvement of Chechen security forces in a number of murders, including the home-invasion murder of Madina Iunusova, a young widow whose husband had been killed in a “police action” in Chechnya. In another case, Rizvan Albekov and his son Aziz were abducted by police, and subsequently gunned down with automatic weapons in what was intended to be an “exemplary punishment”.

According to the Spanish newspaper El País, the kidnappers put their prisoners on display in front of  a group of young men, ordered Albekov to confess his guilt in aiding Chechen rebels, then opened fire when he indicated he had not. They allegedly then threatened to do the same to anyone who had aided the rebels.

Estemirova had accused Kadyrov and his cronies of running sinister brothels filled with sex slaves, kept prisoner by threat of violence, and forced to service the soldiers who serve Kadyrov’s interests. She allegedly told a fellow journalist that Kadyrov had sought to strike fear into her in a private interview in 2008, adding that the authoritarian Chechen president seemed to her to be a “genuine idiot” and that his regime existed simply to serve the whims of his power.

• Frontline UK Hosts Debate on Gov’ts Impeding Press Freedom in War Zones (video)
• Court Clears Three Accused in Politkovskaya Murder
• Top Russian Human Rights Advocate Murdered in Cold Blood
• Trial of Accused in Politkovskaya Murder to Be Held in Open Court
• Politkovskaya Investigation in Disarray, Supporters Say Russian Gov’t Sabotaged Case
• Russian State-Owned Media Launch Smear Campaign Against Litvinenko
• Litvinenko Poisoning Death Now Carries Stain of Blame-the-Victim Allegations
• ‘Objectively Verifiable Truth Now Suspect’

The US president said he had called for $63 billion in US spending for health initiatives across the continent, including money to fight malaria, polio, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. Disease and conflict have devastated the population of Africa, reducing life-expectancy in many countries to under 40 years. Of the 27 nations with life-expectancy under 50 years, 26 of them are in Africa (Afghanistan is the other). Life-expectancy in Ghana is just under 60, a fact which underscores the positive quality-of-life gains that can emerge from peace and rule of law.

Many observers, including across Africa, have questioned why Pres. Obama chose Ghana for his first presidential visit to subsaharan Africa, especially given his close family ties to Kenya. Ghana’s record of multiple consecutive peaceful transfers of power has been cited as the most likely explanation for the choice: Ghana is seen by Obama and by other leaders as an example of good governance, the rule of law and democracy, in a region troubled by bloody sectarian conflict, ethnic cleansing and relentless threats of coups and armed takeovers.

Obama will also visit one of the final points of embarkation used by ships engaged in the centuries’ long atrocity of the transatlantic slave trade, which brought millions of Africans to the Americas. That visit promises to be somber and bracing, as the US president confronts the most shameful aspect of his nation’s heritage, and seeks to highlight the need to establish the universal moral basis for human rights and democratic freedoms.

As reported by VOA:

Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, will visit former slave trading center Cape Coast Castle where African slaves were shipped across the Atlantic for almost 300 years. Mrs. Obama is a descendant of African slaves.

Pres. Obama is using new media to reach out to people across Africa, to ask for their input and to hear their concerns and questions. Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites, as well as online media with continental reach, like AllAfrica.com, are being used to interact with and voice concerns to the president of the United States, in what could be called the first continent-wide online town-hall meeting in Africa.

Macon Phillips, Obama’s director of new media operations, told the Voice of America that “I think that it’s less about trying to market the President in a positive way, but it’s more about having a conversation and real engagement with people that hasn’t happened before”. Phillips also explained that in Africa, the focus of new media outreach involves mobile phones, due to their widespread usage and the relatively cheap cost of text messaging.

Phillips explained that Africans can contact the president directly via sms, to expand the scope of the conversation on Africa policy: “If you’re in Africa and you want to send a message to the president, you want to ask him a question, welcome him to Africa, or just comment on things in general, you can use the following short codes… If you’re in Ghana the short code is 1731?.

The short codes for other African nations include: Nigeria (32969), South Africa (31958) and Kenya (5683). For messages from across Africa, the following numbers can be used: 614-186-01934 or 456-099-10343. The AFP reported today that over 5,000 Africans had sent text messages to Obama, taking advantage of the opportunity to communicate their concerns and observations to the president of the United States.

Observers, including African politicians, historians and political scientists, say the selection of Ghana, seen as one of the few “established” democracies in Africa, is meant to send a message to powerful politicians in other states, like Kenya, where despite a tradition of democratic processes, violence continues to spring up after elections and corruption is a threat to long-term stability and openness.

The president stressed community-building efforts, civics and volunteerism. He sought to offer a message of hope and possibility, but warned that Africans’ own actions would be the key to achieving success:

To realize that promise, we must first recognize a fundamental truth that you have given life to in Ghana: development depends upon good governance. That is the ingredient which has been missing in far too many places, for far too long. That is the change that can unlock Africa’s potential. And that is a responsibility that can only be met by Africans.

Obama sought to highlight ways in which a lack of reliable government or rule of law, and the marginalization of the views of the public in public policy, were hampering development and leading to large territories having to survive without sustainable infrastructure or even healthcare facilities. Women, in particular, have been hard hit by a lack of reliable distribution of medical training, facilities and supplies.

As this publication reported in May:

The World Health Organization has found that 1,500 women are dying every day across Africa from pregnancy-related complications or during childbirth. The figure has not improved over the last decade, largely due to the lack of adequate medical facilities. An extremely high rate of maternal mortality, as many as 1,000 per 100,000 live births (fully 1% of women giving birth), makes the situation an extreme threat to women’s health.

Speaking of the crisis of global climate destabilization, and fresh from a Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, which he had convened, Obama noted that though Africa was less responsible for greenhouse gas emissions than any other part of the world, it would be most severely affected by the ravages of climate change.

He highlighted the risks to African nations from dwindling food supplies and the depletion of already scarce fresh water resources. He also said that the need to cooperate internationally to confront the climate crisis and reform energy-producing practices the world over could lead to an unprecedented opportunity for growth and innovation in Africa, including new developments that would slow climate destabilization and protect Africa’s food supply.

Obama told Ghana’s parliamentarians:

One area that holds out both undeniable peril and extraordinary promise is energy. Africa gives off less greenhouse gas than any other part of the world, but it is the most threatened by climate change. A warming planet will spread disease, shrink water resources, and deplete crops, creating conditions that produce more famine and conflict. All of us – particularly the developed world – have a responsibility to slow these trends – through mitigation, and by changing the way that we use energy. But we can also work with Africans to turn this crisis into opportunity.

Obama cited specific examples from Ghana’s history that make the west African nation an example of commitment to good governance:

Time and again, Ghanaians have chosen Constitutional rule over autocracy, and shown a democratic spirit that allows the energy of your people to break through. We see that in leaders who accept defeat graciously, and victors who resist calls to wield power against the opposition. We see that spirit in courageous journalists like Anas Aremeyaw Anas, who risked his life to report the truth. We see it in police like Patience Quaye, who helped prosecute the first human trafficker in Ghana. We see it in the young people who are speaking up against patronage, and participating in the political process.

Across Africa, we have seen countless examples of people taking control of their destiny, and making change from the bottom up. We saw it in Kenya, where civil society and business came together to help stop post-election violence. We saw it in South Africa, where over three quarters of the country voted in the recent election – the fourth since the end of Apartheid. We saw it in Zimbabwe, where the Election Support Network braved brutal repression to stand up for the principle that a person’s vote is their sacred right.

He said that “history is on the side” of those people who stand up in the face of dark forces and seek to establish and defend democratic systems and sideline autocrats and put aside violent repression in favor of open government and participatory democracy. He also praised Ghana’s last president, who turned over power peacefully to a rival party and its new president, John Atta Mills, whom he said is “serious about reducing corruption”.

More Africa news and comment:

• Niger Unrest Could Be Attempt to Control Uranium Supply
• Obama Interview with AllAfrica, in Anticipation of Ghana Visit (video + transcript)
• Diversify Wheat Crops to Prevent Fungus-induced Global Harvest Collapse (discussion)
• Kenya Massing Troops for Intervention in Somalia
• Ug99 Stem Rust Fungus Could Wipe Out 80% of World Wheat Crop
• 400 Billion € Solar Project Makes Sahara into Key EU Energy Partner
• Bongo, Leader of Gabon for 42 Years, Dies
• Shell Agrees $15.5 Million Settlement in 1995 Killing of 9 Activists
• NOW Examines UN Peacekeeping: Record Deployments to 20 Countries
• Explaining Away Violence Against Women in Darfur, Sudan Gov’t at UN
• ICC Issues Arrest Warrant for Bashir, Charged with War Crimes
• Zimbabwe power-sharing talks collapse over allocation of ministries…
• African Nations & Movements Have Tools to Effect Change, when International Pressure Aims to Help

The UN spokesman said the slaughter of further numbers of ethnic Tamil Sri Lankan civilians “seems inevitable” as he charges the government appears to have “no end except the end-game”: the UN has warned the Sri Lankan government against indiscriminate military action in civilian areas, and today there have been calls for an independent investigation, including possible charges of war crimes and/or crimes against humanity for the still unconfirmed but reportedly high number of civilian dead.

Between the government’s language of outright hostility toward any notion of ceasing fire to allow civilians to escape to safer ground, the intensity of the fighting, and the pledge to “eliminate” the LTTE once and for all, critics allege there is a kind of “final solution” mentality taking hold in the government’s military strategy, by the logic of which the assassination of journalists, the encampment and even direct bombardment of civilians, and the use of illegal cluster munitions are all considered to be legitimate parts of the struggle against the LTTE rebels.

A senior UN official, Vijay Nambiar, chief of staff to Sec. Gen. Ban Ki-moon, has arrived in Sri Lanka to meet with the government and pressure officials to cease firing on areas where civilian casualties are likely. Ban himself is reported to be considering a trip to the troubled nation, at the invitation of Pres. Mahinda Rajapaka.

Seeking to exert pressure on the Sri Lankan government, US Sec. of State Hillary Clinton has said the time is not right for the International Monetary Fund to evaluate a loan request from the government for $1.9 billion. She has reportedly intimated that the US would seek to block the loan from going forward as long as the Sri Lankan military continues to operate in a way that puts civilians at risk.

Pres. Barack Obama spoke Wednesday of his grave concern for the humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka, where some 190,000 displaced people are now at risk for disease, hunger, or the ongoing violence between government forces and the Tamil Tiger (LTTE) rebels. Obama called on the LTTE to lay down its arms and allow civilians to flee, and he called on the government to allow civilians to find genuine security from military action and to cease all bombardment of civilian areas.

He also warned that without immediate intervention, the situation in the Tamil region of Sri Lanka threatened to become a humanitarian “catastrophe”, in line with mounting concerns emerging from the UN secretary general’s office, the top of the international diplomatic community.

On Wednesday, a hospital was shelled for the second time, reportedly killing 50 civilians. Reports demonstrating the government’s launching heavy artillery munitions into civilian “safe zones” have been broadcast worldwide by the BBC and others, and accusations of using weapons banned by international law, such as cluster munitions and/or the incendiary chemical fluid white phosphorous, have emerged from the war zone.

The government in Colombo has said it will not heed demands from the UN, the US or the international community broadly, to cease its operations to provide civilians enough time to escape danger, saying it would allow the Tigers time to regroup. That puts the government at odds with the UN Security Council and possibly in a position to face criminal charges, while aid groups worry that civilians are being treated as hostiles, possibly by both sides, simply for being trapped in the war-zone.

With such large numbers of people displaced and lacking basic nourishment or infrastructure, the potential for an epidemic outbreak, of cholera, for instance, is severe. International health workers have warned that failure to reach the displaced civilians with adequate supplies and care could lead to a public health emergency in Sri Lanka.

• UN High Commission for Refugees reports on Sri Lanka
• Café Sentido reporting on Sri Lanka situation

Zhao was secretary general of the central committee of the CCP from 1987 until he was deposed due to his opposition to the government’s hardline crackdown on student demonstrators gathered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, in June 1989. Zhao was subjected to 16 years of house arrest, and died in 2005. But the journals were so secret, their existence has not been confirmed until now.

According to The Times newspaper of London:

So sensitive is this document, the first memoir ever to be made public by such a senior Chinese party official, that even its existence had been kept a closely guarded secret. Speculation had been rife during his nearly 16 years of house arrest and after his death in 2005 as to whether the man with the most intimate knowledge of the events of June 3-4 1989, had provided his own account of those dramatic days.

Zhao reportedly describes how on 17 May 1989, in a top-level secret meeting with party “elders”, like Deng Xiaoping, a decision was made without even a vote by the politburo to declare martial law. Despite objections from Zhao Ziyang, the nation’s leaders planned a violent, military-based crackdown to end pro-democracy demonstrations.

Zhao resigned his office. He writes of those troubled days, “At that moment, I was extremely upset. I told myself that no matter what, I refused to become the General Secretary who mobilised the military to crack down on the students.” On 19 May, he went to Tiananmen Square and with then aide (now Chinese premier) Wen Jiabao at his side, delivered a tearful plea to students to end their demonstrations peacefully and disperse.

What Zhao wrote of the events of 3 June 1989 is the first known account acknowledging the government’s massacre of innocents. He wrote of the dark emotion at witnessing the crackdown, knowing it had been planned, observing: “On the night of June 3rd, while sitting in the courtyard with my family, I heard intense gunfire. A tragedy to shock the world had not been averted, and was happening after all.”

A top aide to Zhao Ziyang, Bao Tong, says there is no doubt as to the authenticity of the memoirs, but that he was unaware of their existence until after Zhao’s death. Bao had been jailed for 7 years as part of the government’s effort to eliminate all history of dissent as to the events leading up to and taking place at Tiananmen Square. Bao says Zhao’s family had no knowledge of the existence of the memoirs, because the former party leader had sought to protect all of those close to him.

The Times reports:

The recordings include conversations in which he answers questions as well as sections that are apparently dictated from a now-vanished written document. The tapes took Mr Zhao about two years to make and he then found a way to pass them to several trusted friends. The materials were hidden and gathered together after his death, but much of the process remains a secret.

The former aide said the memoirs will serve as “an extremely valuable historical document both for China and for the West”.

Despite hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, and reports of rapes per year exceeding 10,000, eve of the government supporting the use of rape as a “tool of war”, the study counted only those cases where the government’s narrow legal definition of rape (”proven” and documented prior to any investigation) permitted actual charges and an eventual conviction. Despite the session’s being advertised as focusing on “women in conflict”, not one aspect of conflict, in the abstract or the particular, was mentioned, save the sparing now-and-then references to “the camps”.

The study lays out what its authors call “Four years of success in combating violence against women in Darfur 2004-2008?. It announces “a task force to study the role of Government and Women Organization in Women Protection Darfur Experience” and openly says the project was “a response to the false accusations stating that Sudan Government has done nothing to protect Women in Darfur”.

The study also explains actions taken by government ministries to speed women’s access to medical treatment immediately after any violent assault (”Circular No. 2?, 23 October 2004), but the provisions form a system of bureaucratic processes that are likely to impede women’s access to legal advice, medical treatment and justice. The report also included mention of a National Plan of Action (NPOA) to investigate violence against women and treat victims, as well as directives to local “police and medical workers” in the “application” of Circular No. 2.

But the NPOA itself is tainted by the open direction that it be used “to respond to international claims and accusations”. Though there are provisions for “raising awareness” about violence against women, via the Ministry of Information, a process to be organized by a dedicated special committee, the mission of countering international perceptions about extreme violence and mass rape means there is pressure to file reports of reduced or scarce violence against women (”Four years of success in combating violence against women”), incentive to not report, not address, to cover up, what violence there is.

While certain promising language was used, such as an Advisory Council on Human Rights hosting workshops in Nyala and Al Fasher discussing “Rights of victims / Violence against women in international, regional and domestic law / Legal aid and victims”, the process as described does not facilitate women coming forward for treatment or to demand justice.

Workshops and protocols feature in the report’s claims about Sudan’s efforts to curb violence against women in Darfur. Observance of the dictates of UN agencies also features prominently, though specific evidence of effective observance of the UN’s human rights standards or of any actual acts to bring the treatment of women in line with international law is totally lacking. The report and the hearing both are devoid of any reference to a large-scale investigation into allegations of mass rape or of the military carrying out acts of violence against women.

A key specific point of contention is women’s access to medical treatment and to pressing criminal charges, in the wake of an assault. According to the report, a 2006 protocol, developed in coordination with UNFPA, directed clinical treatment for rape, including a requirement “to ensure documentation of medical history” and recognize women’s right to that documentation.

But all of this glosses over an underlying stain on the report and the process of organizing these new plans of action to protect women: the number of cases actually prosecuted is so low as to leave the reader in shock. (Several people stood up and walked out of the presentation at UNHQ last Thursday, as the report’s figures came to light.)

In fact, during the SWPC presentation, we were informed that women require the medical documentation in order to file charges or prompt an actual investigation. They cannot even seek justice without the medical documentation the government says women are entitled to have. Afterward, this reporter was told specifically that they cannot imagine any other way in which rape could be investigated, except in light of an immediate medical examination.

In Darfur, where all manifestations of officialdom provoke fear and suspicion among the ethnic African population, where doctors are exceedingly scarce, where confidentiality is not standard and where police may be military personnel, enemies of those seeking justice, and possibly even involved in the crimes reported, most victims of rape are, by virtue of this highly bureaucratic system, effectively barred from seeking justice at all.

The number of cases of rape officially recognized by the government report for all of Darfur in 2004 were just 19. In 2005, the total was 32. And in 2006, the figure dropped to just 10 overall. The Human Rights Watch (HRW) global report for 2007, covering the events of 2006, cites “serious abuses of civilians, including forced displacement, rape, killings, and increasing attacks on humanitarian aid workers.”

It is improbable that with the mass violence in Darfur in 2006, with specific documented cases of conflict-related rape, that the figure could be as low as just 10. It would make Darfur, in the midst of a chaotic, genocidal conflict, the safest place in the world for women, in terms of risk of suffering rape. The HRW report even specifies the following:

The establishment in 2005 of a national tribunal to respond to the crimes in Darfur had no effect on the continuing impunity of militia leaders and government officials responsible for crimes against humanity.

The report delivered at the UNHQ by the panel from Sudan gave no information whatsoever regarding the involvement of officials and government-backed militia in crimes against civilians, much less of any effort to combat that problem. We also received no detailed information about the actual ongoing activities of the national tribunal, the women’s security unit or the clinics we were told were planned for community-level assistance to victims of sexual assault.

Obviously, the entire report is a logical nonsequitur in that such low levels of sexual assault would imply little need for a National Plan of Action to combat it, much less the construction of dedicated confidential clinics at the community level. But while the Sudanese government’s study, with its stated mission of refuting “false” accusations from abroad, claims to demonstrate a low incidence of rape in Darfur, HRW reported in 2007 that as of 2006:

Rape and sexual violence continue to be pervasive throughout Darfur, with attacks on women and girls taking palce both in the context of hostilities between the warring parties as well as when internally displaced women and girls travel outside camp settings to collect firewood and other items. In just one example in August [2006], aid workers reported that more than 200 women and girls were sexually assaulted over a five week period in Kalma, the largest diplaced persons camp in south Darfur.

The HRW report is also explicit in charging that the ruling party “made no substantive effort to investigate or prosecute those individuals reponsible for the most serious crimes in Darfur”. The SWPC report focused on laws, plans, protocols and an “initiative” designed to start raising awareness about violence against women. Again, we saw little evidence that any substantive actions have yet been taken, and not one community center was cited as evidence of the government’s plan actually working for victims.

During the Q&A session after the presentation of the SWPC report, several questioners raised issues about the veracity or credibility of the figures reported. The extremely low rape statistics were of particular concern, and reports by Amnesty International and the BBC, both supported by documentary evidence, were decried by the presenter as distortions and lies.

When pressed on the existence of “centers” where confidential medical treatment, advanced counseling services, and female-only police, would be made available to women, the presenter clarified that she had not intended to give the impression such centers (plural) existed, but that there was “one center”, whose location, functions and achievements, she did not name.

It is clear the event was staged as part of an information campaign, designed to beat back attacks on the government of Omar al-Bashir, indicted just a week before by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is also clear that the report given demonstrates a clear awareness of the need to conceal the facts on the ground, which were never mentioned during the nearly two hour presentation.

The issue of protecting women during conflict, the stated purpose of the meeting, was never directly addressed, as the conflict itself was not raised. Again, the only reference to the conflict in Darfur was the use of the word “camps” at intervals. Ultimately, it appears women in Darfur are less well served than they are hampered by the process laid out by the government for prosecuting rape allegations, and other forms of violence were left completely unaddressed by the panel.

• Originally published 18 March 2009, at CafeSentido.com