Untitled Document

Compiled by Seán Marquis

Oct. 22 (AGR)— The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) carried out five aerial strikes in the Gaza Strip on Monday, Oct. 20 in which 14 Palestinians were killed and about 100 were wounded.

Late Monday night, IDF troops were alerted to the area of Kibbutz Nahal Oz after receiving reports of an attempt to infiltrate into Israel from the Gaza Strip. The troops killed two Hamas men and then followed a pickup truck carrying four Hamas militants who apparently assisted the two men trying to infiltrate into Israel.

In the area of the Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip helicopters fired at the vehicle, killing its four occupants.

But according to witnesses, the first missile did not kill all the occupants of the truck and as they escaped, more missiles struck the main street in Nuseirat, a densely populated refugee camp.

Dozens of Palestinians rushed to the vehicle, including medical workers. The helicopters fired two more missiles, killing five civilians, among them a doctor, and wounding some 50 people, according to a report in Haaretz, an Israeli daily.

The IDF launched four other air strikes in Gaza City on Monday in the space of several hours, killing two members of the Hamas military wing and a passerby.

At least 23 other people were wounded in the first two strikes, Palestinian hospital sources said, including four children and a 70-year-old woman.

In the first assault of the day, in the Sajaiyeh neighborhood in the eastern part of the Gaza Strip, combat planes struck a Hamas weapons factory, the military said. Seven people were wounded in the strike, including two infants aged 2 and 3.

Palestinian sources said the structure belonged to Amar Mushtaha, an activist in the Hamas military wing. Mushtaha was lightly wounded, and was extracted from beneath the rubble of the destroyed building.

In the second strike, a helicopter gunship fired missiles at a pickup truck, killing three Palestinians — two members of the Hamas military wing and a passerby — and wounding at least five others.

Gaza blast hits US convoy

President George W. Bush has led international calls for the Palestinian Authority to crack down on militants following an Oct. 15 bomb blast on a US convoy that killed three US embassy personnel in the Gaza Strip.

Bush blamed the attack on the Palestinian Authority’s “failure to create effective Palestinian security forces dedicated to fighting terror” and Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat in particular.

The US embassy convoy was hit by what is believed to have been a remotely-detonated roadside bomb just inside Gaza.

Two of the victims — described as security contractors — died outright, the third afterwards and the fourth was in stable condition.

According to an initial report by the BBC, US diplomats and members of the Central Intelligence Agency were believed to have been in the convoy.

Later reports state that three “security men” or “three security contractors” were killed.

Mohammed Radwan, a Palestinian taxi driver, said he was at a nearby petrol station when the bomb went off.

“I was about to fill up my car with gas when I saw the American convoy passing. There was a Palestinian police car in front and then three big [US] cars. When the third one passed, an explosion went off,” he told the Associated Press.

The blast came just hours after the US — Israel’s closest ally — vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s controversial West Bank barrier.

The draft, introduced by Arab states, declared that the structure was illegal under international law and that construction must be halted.

Ambush kills Israeli soldiers

Palestinian gunmen killed three Israeli soldiers and seriously wounded a civilian on the night of Oct. 19 in an ambush near the West Bank settlement of Ofra, north of Ramallah.

Military sources reported that a bomb exploded as the troops were driving past, then gunmen opened a fierce barrage of automatic fire from the roadside. The wounded man was flown by helicopter for emergency treatment in a Jerusalem hospital.

Earlier, militants fired eight al-Qassam rockets from the Gaza Strip at towns and villages in Southern Israel. No casualties were reported.

The attack, seen as a major provocation, came as Israel began calling up five reserve battalions to serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The reservists, mostly in their twenties and thirties, will be deployed along the pre-1967 Green Line border, in the Jordan Valley and to protect Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip.

Compiled by Eamon Martin

Oct. 21 (AGR)— According to an investigation by the Ohio-based Toledo Blade newspaper, the elite Tiger Force unit of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division committed numerous war crimes over seven months in 1967 during the Vietnam War, including killing several hundred civilians, but an investigation was closed with no charges filed.

The Toledo Blade said it found the Army had investigated the unit for 4 1/2 years, and found 18 soldiers had committed war crimes. But the Army filed no charges, and allowed soldiers who were under suspicion of committing war crimes to resign.

The newspaper said the accusations against the unit included killing women and children, torturing prisoners, and severing ears and scalps for souvenirs.

The paper said the Army’s investigation of Tiger Force found 27 soldiers who said the severing of ears from dead Vietnamese was an accepted practice. One soldier told the newspaper that troops would wear necklaces of ears to scare Vietnamese civilians.

Women and children were intentionally blown up in underground bunkers and were practically buried alive in mass graves, the newspaper reported. Elderly farmers were shot as they worked in their fields.

One soldier kicked out the teeth of executed civilians for their gold fillings.

“We would go into villages and just shoot everybody,” a former Tiger Force medic, Harold Fischer, is quoted as saying. “We didn’t need an excuse. If they were there, they were dead. It just made me sick.”

Sworn statements to army investigators, as well as interviews by the Toledo Blade, portray a unit on a rampage with the knowledge and encouragement of their commanders. A Pentagon spokesman, reading from a prepared statement, told reporters on Oct. 19, 2003: “Absent new and compelling evidence there are no plans to reopen the case. The case is more than 30 years old.

“The CID [Criminal Investigation Command] findings were submitted to proper authorities, the suspect’s commanders. Those commanders considered the CID findings and acted within their authority in deciding there was insufficient evidence of alleged crimes to successfully prosecute in a court-martial trial.”

The unit of 45 paratroopers was assigned to spy on North Vietnamese forces in Vietnam’s Quang Ngai and Quang Nam provinces between May and November 1967. In some areas, so-called “free fire zones” were declared by the US Army, allowing soldiers to attack enemy forces without direct orders from commanders.

According to the Toledo Blade, two soldiers who tried to stop the atrocities were warned by their commanders to remain quiet before transferring to other units.

The newspaper said it based its stories on interviews with more than 100 Tiger Force members and Vietnamese civilians, as well as thousands of government documents, some still classified.

The Toledo Blade said the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command refused to release thousands of records from the investigation. It also said Army spokesman Joe Burlas could not explain why no charges were brought in the investigation.

Sources: Agence France-Presse, BBC, Reuter

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Torture now routine for Putin’s police

By Nick Paton Walsh

Kazan, Russia, Oct. 19— Once the policeman’s gas mask was sealed tight around his face, Denis, 18, lasted 90 seconds before passing out. After a heavy beating by police fists and batons, Denis had still not confessed to stealing a car radio from a garage near his home. So two officers handcuffed his hands behind his back and clamped the “elephant mask,” as it is called, to his bruised head. They shut its valves and then waited.

“I thought it was all over, that I was going to die,” said Denis, a hardy car mechanic whose experience of police torture has left him unable to walk the streets without a gang of friends by his side.

Once the detainee was unconscious, the militsia, as the Russian police are known, panicked and dumped him in a cell. After he regained consciousness, he had still not signed a confession, so the police gave up and released him.

His friend Artur, who was arrested for the same alleged crime and beaten in the next room, was less resilient. He had heard people can die in police cells and so signed a confession prepared for him by the police after two doses of the “elephant mask.”

Denis and Artur are two young victims of Russian police torture, which human rights groups say is spiraling out of control. An investigation by The Observer has established that boys as young as 16 are being tortured with electric shocks, asphyxiation and heavy beating in order to extract confessions. Poorly paid and ill-disciplined police, under pressure from Ministers to keep crime clear-up rates high, are resorting to any means to get confessions.

A poll of 32,000 people from across Russia published last week showed a quarter considered their rights had been violated by the police or courts over the past year.

Last month, Amnesty International released a report on “rough justice” in Russia in which it cited a study by Krasnoyarsk University in central Siberia: 30 percent of convicts said they had been physically or psychologically tortured into giving a confession.

Ten days ago, Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov, a close associate of President Putin, had to declare internal corruption and brutality the police’s primary focus.

“We have declared now a war on corruption in our ranks,” he said, likening corrupt cops to “terrorists,” “because [they] commit crimes against society.” Yet simultaneously a group of MPs wrote to Putin demanding Gryzlov be sacked for tolerating brutality and corruption for so long.

Pavel Chigov, head of the Kazan Human Rights Center, said: “There is a systematic use of torture by police to secure confessions. Police have a huge number of cases to solve, and are under great pressure to keep conviction rates high. Torture is the easiest way to close a case.”

He said young men were particularly vulnerable as they fitted the criminal stereotype of petty robbers and thieves and were easier targets. “Police are also very badly paid,” he said. “Thus, about 90 percent of their time has to be given up to earning themselves more money over and above their salary [through private detective or protection work]. That leaves only 10 percent of their time free for genuine police work. Under such time pressure, torture is also the quickest way of getting a confession.”

Yet one senior Moscow officer said: “Several cases of bribe-taking and racketeering by our officers were recently discovered in Moscow and Stavropol. We have internal affairs departments to deal with that. But we have never detected any cases of beating or torturing.” He said even cases in which rioting football fans were manhandled were carefully investigated.

Yet Denis and Artur’s case — for which two officers have been suspended — joins a body of evidence to the contrary. A July report by the Committee for the Prevention of Torture at the Council of Europe said “a disturbing number of allegations of physical ill-treatment by members of the [police] involved violence aimed at the extraction of confessions from criminal suspects.”

Igor Kalyapin, chairman of the Nizhni Novgorod Committee against Torture, said: “Normally in the very few cases when the guilt of the policeman is proven, they are given suspended sentences and sacked from work.”

He said Russian law did not list torture as a crime and so police were tried for the minor crime of “abuse of office.” The longest sentence he had heard of was five years for electric shock torture.

Source: Observer (UK)

‘Hardcore’ criminals in UK to be tagged
Repeat offenders to be monitored by satellite

Oct. 19— Career criminals — the hardcore group of repeat offenders responsible for one-man crime waves — are to be tagged with tracking devices capable of detailing their every movement.

The move represents the latest application of electronic tagging technology, which is now assuming a central role in the British government’s attempts to cut crime.

Home Secretary David Blunkett is studying the findings of the Carter Review into electronic monitoring, which is understood to call for a huge increase in the use of tagging technology.

In anticipation of the move, the National Probation Service (NPS) is to launch three pilot projects to monitor the movements of what are termed “high-end” — serious — convicted criminals using satellite technology. Previously, the technology has been imposed on “low-end” offenders, or as an alternative to prison for those coming to the end of custodial sentences.

As part of the pilot, the NPS is looking to track the movements of so-called “prolific offenders” — those criminals whose actions are thought to be responsible for most crime in an area. Criminologists estimate that these offenders number anything between 10 and 20 in any county in the UK.

The monitoring devices, which, unlike normal tags, use satellite-positioning technology to pinpoint their location, will have built-in electronic diaries that can be downloaded by probation officers at the end of each day, providing a minute-by-minute record of where the offender has been.

The pilots, which will start within six months and run for two years, may also track sex offenders, pedophiles and those who have committed serious assaults.

But it is the devices’ ability to track prolific offenders that is particularly significant. “Prison isn’t effective for prolific offenders. They come out and they reoffend. These are people on short sentences who don’t get access to the rehabilitation they need, such as help with drug addiction or a chance to improve their employment prospects — the sort of things that would stop them reoffending,” said Lucie Russell, director of Smart Justice, the campaign group that seeks community-based solutions to crime. Eighty percent of 18- to 20-year-olds reoffend within months of leaving prison.

However, experts warned that the new technology, which will cost $2.5 million to test, has limits. “If, say, burglaries in an area have shot up, this will allow us to download the areas where an offender has been. But it will not tell us what they have done. It’s not going to be a panacea,” said Eithne Wallis, director general of the NPS.

Wallis, who this year traveled to the US to see a number of electronic monitoring programs in operation, said the NPS would introduce similar technology only if the pilots showed they were value for money.

“At the moment we don’t know whether passive tracking of certain individuals would be useful. It’s not the answer to everything. But potentially it’s a useful tool,” Wallis said, pointing out that the technology needed to be used alongside rehabilitation treatments.

News that “high-end” criminals are to be fitted with tags will reignite the debate over electronic monitoring, the use of which has shifted over the past 12 months.

Previously, most offenders fitted with tags were on curfew. But recently around half of those fitted with tags have been given them as an alternative to a custodial sentence, leading to claims that the government had been bounced into embracing the technology due to overcrowded prisons.

Of the new pilots, Russell said: “People see it as a soft option. There is still a belief in locking people up. The government needs to prove it is just as effective as sending people to prison.”

The new Great Game: how the ‘war on terror’ aids US energy interests in the Caspian

Analysis by Lutz Kleveman

Oct. 20— Nearly two years ago, I traveled to Kyrgyzstan, the mountainous ex-Soviet republic in Central Asia, to witness a historical event: the deployment of the first American combat troops on former Soviet soil.

As part of the Afghan campaign, the US air force set up a base near the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek. Brawny pioneers in desert camouflages were erecting hundreds of tents for nearly 3,000 soldiers. I asked their commander, a wiry brigadier general, if and when the troops would leave Kyrgyzstan (and its neighbor Uzbekistan, where Washington set up a second airbase). “There is no time limit,” he replied. “We will pull out only when all al-Qaida cells have been eradicated.”

Today, the Americans are still there and many of the tents have been replaced by concrete buildings. Bush has used his massive military build-up in Central Asia to seal the cold war victory against Russia, to contain Chinese influence and to tighten the noose around Iran. Most importantly, however, Washington — supported by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government — is exploiting the “war on terror” to further American oil interests in the Caspian region. But this geopolitical gamble involving thuggish dictators and corrupt Saudi oil sheiks is only likely to produce more terrorists.

For much of the past two years, I have researched the links between conflict in Central Asia and US oil interests. I traveled thousands of kilometers, meeting with generals, oil bosses, warlords and diplomats. They are all players in a geostrategic struggle — the new Great Game.

In this rerun of the first great game — the 19th-century imperial rivalry between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia — players once again position themselves to control the heart of the Eurasian landmass. Today, the US has taken over the leading role from the British. Along with the Russians, new regional powers, such as China, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan, have entered the arena, and transnational oil corporations are also pursuing their own interests.

The main spoils in today’s Great Game are Caspian oil and gas. On its shores, and at the bottom of the Caspian Sea, lie the world’s biggest untapped fossil fuel resources. Estimates range from 110 to 243 billion barrels of crude, worth up to $4 trillion. According to the US department of energy, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan alone could sit on more than 130 billion barrels, more than three times the US’s reserves. Oil giants such as ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and BP have already invested more than $30 billion in new production facilities.

“I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian,” said Dick Cheney in a speech to oil industrialists in 1998. In May 2001, the US vice-president recommended in the national energy policy report that “the president makes energy security a priority of our trade and foreign policy,” singling out the Caspian basin as a “rapidly growing new area of supply.”

With a potential oil production of up to 6 million barrels per day by 2015, the Caspian region has become crucial to the US policy of “diversifying energy supply.” It is designed to wean the US off its dependence on the Arab-dominated OPEC cartel, which is using its near-monopoly position as pawn and leverage against industrialized countries. As global oil consumption keeps surging and many oil wells outside the Middle East are nearing depletion, OPEC is expanding its share of the world market. At the same time, the US will have to import more than two-thirds of its total energy demand by 2020, mostly from the Middle East.

Many people in Washington are particularly uncomfortable with the growing power of Saudi Arabia. There is a fear that radical Islamist groups could topple the corrupt Saud dynasty and stop the flow of oil to “infidels.” To stave off political turmoil, the regime in Riyadh funds the radical Islamic Wahabbi sect that foments terror against Americans around the world. In a desperate effort to decrease its dependence on Saudi oil sheiks, the US seeks to control the Caspian oil resources. However, fierce conflicts have broken out over pipeline routes. Russia, still regarding itself as imperial overlord of its former colonies, promotes pipeline routes across its territory, including Chechnya, in the north Caucasus. China, the increasingly oil-dependent waking giant in the region, wants to build eastbound pipelines from Kazakhstan. Iran is offering its pipeline network via the Persian Gulf.

By contrast, Washington champions two pipelines that would circumvent both Russia and Iran. One would run from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean. Construction has already begun for a $3.8 billion pipeline from Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, via neighboring Georgia to Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. BP, its main operator, has invested billions in oil-rich Azerbaijan, and can count on support from the Bush administration, which recently stationed about 500 elite troops in war-torn Georgia.

Washington’s Great Game opponents, particularly in Moscow and Beijing, resent what they perceive as arrogant imperialism. Worried that the US presence might encourage internal unrest in its Central Asian province of Xingjiang, China has recently held joint military exercises with Kyrgyzstan. The Russian government initially tolerated the intrusion into its former empire, hoping Washington would in turn ignore the atrocities in Chechnya. However, the much-hyped “new strategic partnership” against terror between the Kremlin and the White House has turned out to be more of a temporary tactical teaming-up. For the majority of the Russian establishment it is unthinkable to permanently cede its hegemonic claims on Central Asia.

Two weeks ago, Russia’s defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, demanded publicly that the Americans pull out within two years. Ominously, President Vladimir Putin has signed new security pacts with the Central Asian rulers, allowing Russian troops to set up a new military base in Kyrgyzstan, which lies only 35 miles away from the US airbase.

Besides raising the specter of inter-state conflict, the Bush administration is wooing some of the region’s most tyrannical dictators. One of them is Islam Karimov, the ex-communist ruler of Uzbekistan, whose regime brutally suppresses any opposition and Islamic groups. “Such people must be shot in the head. If necessary, I will shoot them myself,” Karimov once told his rubber-stamp parliament.

Although the US state department acknowledges that Uzbek security forces use “torture as a routine investigation technique”, Washington last year gave the Karimov regime $500 million in aid and rent payments for the US air base in Chanabad. The state department also quietly removed Uzbekistan from its annual list of countries where freedom of religion is under threat. The British government seems to support Washington’s policy, as Whitehall recently recalled its ambassador Craig Murray from Tashkent after he openly decried Uzbekistan’s abysmal human rights record.

Worse is to come: disgusted with the US’s cynical alliances with their corrupt and despotic rulers, the region’s impoverished populaces increasingly embrace virulent anti-Americanism and militant Islam. As in Iraq, America’s brazen energy imperialism in Central Asia jeopardizes the few successes in the war on terror because the resentment it causes makes it ever easier for terrorist groups to recruit angry young men. It is all very well to pursue oil interests, but is it worth mortgaging our security to do so?

Lutz Kleveman is the author of The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia (Atlantic Books)

Source: Guardian (UK)

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Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Oct. 18— In the industrial Mexican town of Ciudad Juarez, across the border from Texas, women look at every man as a potential rapist or serial killer.

In the past decade, more than 300 women have been raped, battered and strangled to death here, their bodies dumped on stretches of wasteland alongside abandoned cars and scraps of rubbish.

Most were under 25 and all were poor, which may explain why many of the cases remain unsolved. In virtually any other city, a massive manhunt for the killer or killers would have been launched years ago. But in Ciudad Juarez, where the men strut around in Stetsons and cowboy boots and regard women as playthings, the deaths are often explained away with a shrug as the result of domestic violence or score-settling by drug traffickers.

A handful of men have been convicted for the murders but the investigation by state police has been shoddy. The supposed culprits say they confessed under torture and victims’ families have doubts whether the right men are behind bars.

This week a group of American law makers representing Hispanic communities visited the city to talk to victims’ families and human rights groups and urged the Mexican government to solve the murders and bring closure to the families, many of whom are still not sure the remains they have been given belong to their loved ones. As if in mockery of their efforts, another woman’s corpse turned up in a plastic bag on Tuesday. She died from punches to the head, liver and chest.

Local press reported the woman was a drug addict who hung out with disreputable characters.

Paula Flores hopes the law makers’ visit and one by a UN team earlier this month will force the authorities to bring her daughter’s killer to justice. Like many other Mexicans, Ms Flores and her husband, Jesus Gonzalez, moved to Ciudad Juarez from a poor state, lured by the promise of jobs in one of the many factories called maquiladoras that churn out televisions, cars and textiles for export 24 hours a day. Their daughter Maria Sagrario Gonzalez, one of five children, had hoped to study computing but left school at 16 to join her father and sister working in a factory to put food on the table.

In their house in the Lomas de Poleo district on the edge of town, large photos of Maria, aged 17 with long dark hair and a dreamy smile, stare out from the wall. The couple last saw Maria alive on Apr. 16, 1998, when they kissed her goodbye as she headed to work. When she didn’t return, the family went to the police who said they could not by law report Maria as missing for 72 hours. “We looked for her day and night, in the hospitals, in the Red Cross, everywhere,” said Flores.

Maria’s body was found 14 days later in the desert outside the city. She had been stabbed and strangled. Police never told the family they had found the body. They learnt of their daughter’s death from a reporter. “I only saw my daughter in a sealed bag,” Flores said. She and her husband believe the authorities have deliberately obstructed investigations and that someone high up in government is involved.

Theories abound as to who is behind what women’s groups have dubbed the feminicide — from serial killers, drug cartels and gangs to satanic cults and organ traffickers. Life is cheap in this city of transients, used as a base for drug traffickers smuggling cocaine into the United States and for desperate migrants hoping to slip across the Rio Grande in search of the American Dream.

Mexico’s President, Vicente Fox, sent federal investigators earlier this year to help state police. Seven hundred federal police now patrol Ciudad Juarez’s streets armed with machineguns, but women say they feel no safer.

“It’s just the same, there’s been no improvement. I’m scared to go out,” said Julieta Renteria, a 23-year-old who works at a factory. Julieta lives in fear in Lomas de Poleo, where Maria lived. Several young women from the area have turned up dead, abducted as they walked home from work along unlit dirt roads.

Esther Chavez, who runs the Casa Amiga shelter for battered and sexually abused women, said there were numerous tales of police failing to carry out proper scientific tests, tampering with the crime scene and planting evidence. Mothers had to suffer police insinuations that the victims had invited trouble from the clothes they were wearing or that they had secret lovers. “The treatment given to the mothers shows the lives of their daughters are worth nothing,” she said.

Source: Independent (UK)

Penang, Malaysia, Oct. 17 (IPS)— The 12-month jail term handed down this week to a human rights activist for “maliciously publishing false news” — about atrocious conditions reported from immigration detention camps — signals that little has changed in the space for dissent and activism in Malaysia.

The trial of Irene Fernandez, of the non-government group Tenaganita, was said to be the longest-running criminal trial in Malaysian history.

The proceedings centered on the allegations in a memorandum Fernandez had circulated seven years ago alleging torture and deaths in camps, forced stripping of detainees, lack of proper diet, denial of medical treatment, filthy toilets, and corruption.

The magistrate, however, concluded Thursday that Fernandez had written her memorandum based on the information from former detainees without “effort to obtain the truth in their statements.” The court nonetheless allowed Fernandez a stay of execution pending appeal to the High Court, setting bail at $790.

“It is not easy to bear witness to the truth but it will be done,” Fernandez told IPS after the verdict. “I will continue my struggle.”

The rights activist was arrested in March 1996 and charged under the Printing Presses and Publications Act for circulating a memorandum entitled, “Abuse, Torture and Dehumanized Treatment of Migrant Workers at the Detention Camps.” The maximum penalty for this offense is a three-year jail term or a fine of up to $5,277.

“What is worrying is that the sentence is meant to be a deterrent to the NGOs not to be active in human rights,” laments Fernandez. “It will create fear among people about associating with human rights groups.”

In a statement Friday, Coordination of Action Research on AIDS and Mobility (CARAM Asia), a rights network on migration and related issues, said: “It is highly regrettable that Irene Fernandez/Tenaganita was even charged for asking attention for an important public interest issue (problems of migrants).”

The guilty verdict coincided with the opening of the Organization of Islamic Conference in the capital Kuala Lumpur.

While the proceedings were going on in court, outgoing Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad was welcoming delegates to the OIC summit in the new administrative capital Putrajaya.

“Our countries must be stable and well-administered, must be economically and financially strong, industrially competent and technologically advanced,” he told delegates.

Ironically, migrant workers played a key role in constructing the grand, imposing monuments that dot Putrajaya. But despite their immense contributions in transforming the skyline of the nation, migrant workers remain vulnerable to exploitative working conditions and harassment.

They are also at the mercy of employment agents and have to fork out huge amounts of commissions ranging from $450 to well over $1,000 to these agents before they can come to Malaysia to work.

More often than not, they arrive on Malaysian shores indebted to family or friends, or after having sold off personal property to finance their trip.

In other instances, they are lured to Malaysia with promises of attractive salaries only to be shocked when they receive wage slips showing significantly lower take-home wages, usually after a host of deductions.

In a landmark decision on June 20, the High Court in the northern city of Penang ruled in favor of 52 Indian migrant workers who were duped by false promises of high wages when they were recruited for employment in Malaysia.

Despite this decision, rights workers point out that migrant workers often lack awareness of their rights. Many often cannot afford lawyers to take up complaints against errant employers. Immigration laws are stacked heavily in favor of the employers, who can easily get their workers’ permits revoked.

Activists have been lobbying for Malaysia to endorse the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families.

The convention entered into force in July this year, 13 years after it was adopted by the United Nations in 1990.

Fernandez’s jail term has also placed the spotlight on a law that many human rights groups consider undemocratic: the Printing Presses and Publications Act. Critics argue that this law has been used to stifle freedom of expression and press freedom.

Under the Act, publishers have to apply for a publishing permit for each periodical they publish — and they must apply for a new permit every year. Publishers — and anyone distributing memorandums like Irene did — can also be prosecuted for publishing “false news.”

Conspicuously missing in the uproar that greeted the Fernandez verdict was the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia (Suhakam), which has been roundly criticized as a public relations arm of the government in dealing with human rights abuses.

The Fernandez verdict has once again thrust the country’s judiciary under the glare of international attention. The judiciary has never really recovered from watershed events in 1988, when the top judge and five other senior judges were suspended ahead of a politically sensitive case that potentially could have threatened Mahathir’s position. It plunged to a new low in 1998-2000, with the widely criticized trials of Anwar Ibrahim.

Fernandez, a supreme council member of Anwar’s opposition party Keadilan, was a prominent figure in the “reformasi” movement that emerged in the wake of Anwar’s ouster.

She could be disqualified from contesting in the next general election if the 12-month jail term is upheld upon appeal. The election is widely expected to be held in the first half of next year.

The jail term handed down on Fernandez is likely to have a chilling effect on activism in the country and may deter apathetic Malaysians from getting involved in human rights work.

“The stifling of the freedom of expression of a migrant support organization/advocate first through the charge of publishing false news... is a gross violation of fundamental rights that have far reaching implications for the health of migrant and non migrant populations in the region,” CARAM-Asia added in its statement.

The verdict has shown that the human rights climate is not likely to change during the political transition to Mahathir’s successor, Deputy Premier Abdullah Badawi, who is also home affairs minister.

The sentencing “is a harsh reminder that Malaysia is not on the threshold of a spring-time for democracy and human rights with the impending change of Prime Minister in two weeks’ time,” said veteran opposition politician Lim Kit Siang.