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Oct. 27— Thousands of mothers have lost the right to breastfeed at work after an employment appeal tribunal ruled that women have no legal protection when they return to their employment after their statutory maternity period.

The ruling reverses a previous decision that gave mothers the right to claim sex discrimination if employers failed to make proper provision for breastfeeding at work.

In a judgment seen by The Independent but not yet published, Helen Williams, 31, a flight lieutenant with the RAF, has been told that her landmark victory last year cannot stand. Williams became pregnant in January 2000 but was told that if she wished to continue to breastfeed beyond her maternity leave period she should take unpaid maternity leave. The RAF guidance on maternity arrangements also made clear that breastfeeding could not interfere with a servicewoman’s operational duties.

Although Williams wished to return from maternity leave on her agreed date and could not afford to take unpaid leave, she also wished to continue breastfeeding. She decided to resign.

Last year the employment tribunal ruled that Williams had been discriminated against on the basis of her sex. Williams said then: “I am delighted that the outcome of the tribunal should bring about changes that will give women greater freedom to choose to breastfeed their child without having to compromise their careers or their financial stability.”

But the new judgment by the appeal tribunal rejects any such right to allow mothers to breastfeed at work.

Julie Mellor, who chairs the Equal Opportunities Commission, which is supporting Williams, described the new ruling as a setback for working mothers. Mellor said: “Practical realities of modern mothers’ lives mean that many women return to work while they are breastfeeding. “

The appeal tribunal has ordered Williams’ case to be reheard by a separate panel.

The Health and Safety Executive has issued guidelines that include new risk assessments for mothers who have given birth within six months or who are breastfeeding. In its ruling the appeal tribunal acknowledged this, reinforcing an employer’s duty to assess the job of a breastfeeding mother to ensure that it presented no threat to her health or that of her child.

Source: Independent (UK)

Oct. 26— Two international peace activists have been shot by Israeli soldiers at a Palestinian refugee camp near Nablus.

Details of the shooting were released to Aljazeera.net within hours of the incident on Friday evening, but the identities of the injured are being withheld until their families can be contacted.

The Australian and American men were both shot in the legs at the Balata refugee camp and were taken to Rafidia Hospital where they are now undergoing treatment.

According to the representatives from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the two were shot after escorting Palestinian children away from Israeli soldiers who entered the camp.

ISM officials said two Palestinian boys were hit by rubber bullets, but the American and Australian volunteers were shot with live bullets and remain in the hospital.

Israeli army officials told Aljazeera.net that live rounds were also used to fire on Palestinian youths. Army officials said they were unaware of the shootings of the peace activists.

ISM officials told Aljazeera.net that Israeli soldiers fired indiscriminately inside the camp before cutting the electricity.

“They [Israeli soldiers] were shooting in complete darkness,” said Aron Baker.

Unarmed civilians

“There was no Palestinian gunfire; we were all clearly unarmed civilians; why were the soldiers shooting?” asked another ISM volunteer.

But the incident has again highlighted the risks international peace activists take in their effort to shed light on the plight of the Palestinian people.

In March 2003, 23-year-old American ISM peace activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death while trying to prevent an Israeli bulldozer from bulldozing a Palestinian home in the town of Rafah.

Five ISM peace activists were shot and wounded in July when Israeli soldiers fired on the demonstrators protesting against the construction of Israel’s apartheid wall.

And in September, two European ISM activists were jailed by Israeli authorities for trying to prevent the destruction of another Palestinian home. The pair were imprisoned for 10 days before being deported.

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Barrier turns holy city into hostile fortress

By Chris McGreal

Nu’man, Oct. 23— Jerusalem came to the unsuspecting people of Nu’man in 1967 as an imaginary line across their hamlet’s parched, rock-studded hills far beyond the city. In the wake of Israel’s drubbing of the Arab armies in the Six Day war and occupation of the West Bank, the conquerors drew a wide arc deep into Palestinian territory and declared it the new boundary of the Jewish state’s “eternal and indivisible capital.”

It hardly mattered to the bemused villagers even when Israeli bureaucrats, out of incompetence or malice, declared Nu’man’s houses inside this new greater Jerusalem, but said its people were residents of the West Bank.

Palestinian children from the West Bank village of Masha run beside a newly erected concrete wall part of the controversial Israeli security fence around the West Bank and through Jerusalem. Israel vowed to push on with its controversial separation barrier with the West Bank despite a critical new UN resolution.

As the years passed, the 200 or so people living in Nu’man did wonder about the Jewish settlements creeping ever closer, but the hamlet’s ties were with the West Bank and that was just a short walk to the larger village of Al-Khas where most people shopped, worshipped or worked. Jerusalem’s boundary was for the Israelis to worry about.

As work on Ariel Sharon’s controversial “security fence” through the West Bank stalled while the Israelis and Washington wrangled over how deep it can cut into Palestinian territory, the government stepped up the pace of construction. What was once an invisible line is rapidly rising as a monolithic partition for many communities and a looming disaster for some such as Nu’man.

Altogether, almost 50 miles of fence and wall will carve through the city’s Arab neighborhoods and the occupied territories declared to be part of Jerusalem. It will force children from about 30 schools to find new ones, divide families that used to live just a couple of minutes’ walk apart and separate tens of thousands of people from their work.

“This is the greatest change to Jerusalem, and the way it will function, since Israel occupied the east of the city in 1967,” said Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer fighting a legal action against the Jerusalem section of the barrier. “East Jerusalem is a living organism that relies on its connections to the West Bank to survive. The wall is severing those arteries.”

To the north of the city, about 24,000 Palestinians will be ghettoized as the fence surrounds a neighborhood that will be on the Jerusalem side of the barrier but whose residents do not have permission to enter the city. To the south, the barrier already divides Jerusalem from Bethlehem, and part of Bethlehem from itself.

International pressure forced the government to alter the route of the fence where it was to slice through Al Quds university land, but it was a rare concession.

“The official policy is to maintain a ‘demographic balance’ of 70% Jews to 30% Palestinians in Jerusalem,” said Jessica Montell, head of the respected Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem. “It sounds very innocuous for what is a policy to drive people from their homes. There has been an explicit policy to use residency rights and building permits to make life difficult for Palestinians so they leave the city. To that we can now add the security fence.”

“People who go two meters down the road to take their kids to school were crossing an arbitrary line in the sand that is now becoming a massive structure.”

So far, almost 11 miles of the fence has been completed with one section grinding to a halt just a few hundred meters from Nu’man.

The Israelis say the villagers are living there illegally because they only moved to the area during the 1980s.

The claim infuriates Yusuf Dirawi. He says his family has lived there for generations, first in caves with their sheep and then in tents before the first solid houses were built around 50 years ago. He gestures to stone housing with construction dates in the 1950s carved above the door. Aerial pictures of the area show that the village was well established by 1967.

“How can they say we haven’t lived here all these years?” Dirawi asked. “They only have to look around. It’s obvious. But they don’t want to see.”

The first problems came before the fence. In 1995, the Israeli authorities barred the children of Nu’man from attending their nearest school, in a neighboring Arab village, saying that it was reserved for Jerusalem residents.

Harassment

“Then they destroyed the road connecting us to Jerusalem,” said Dirawi. “We received water from a village in the West Bank. They say because we are in Jerusalem we are not allowed to get our water from the West Bank.”

The harassment escalated in July as construction of the fence approached. Police came at night and arrested all the men they could find, Dirawi among them.

“I was arrested at 1:15am. We were taken to the Bethlehem checkpoint. We were asked to sign a document saying that we would not return to Israel, meaning Jerusalem. I refused,” he said.

The police returned five times over the following month, until human rights lawyers won a high court order preventing the detentions while a legal battle over Nu’man’s legal status is resolved.

Israeli officials decline to discuss the case, saying it is still before the courts. But Jerusalem’s chief administrative officer, Eitan Meir, has written to B’Tselem saying that Nu’man’s residents belong to a clan from Bethlehem and therefore their homes in Nu’man were only “temporary.”

The arc drawn in 1967 annexed 40 square miles of Palestinian territory into Jerusalem. Since then, Israel has built 12 large Jewish settlements on Palestinian land inside the boundary that are home to about 170,000 Jews. But almost every Palestinian application for planning permission in the same area is refused.

“What should be a neutral planning tool to protect a green area is used to impose this ‘demographic balance’,” said Montell. “No Palestinian has been able to get a building permit in Jerusalem, only Jews get them. Israel says it is just enforcing laws that any other city in the world has, but it enforces them according to this ‘demographic balance’.”

When the fence around Jerusalem is finally put into operation in the coming months, the people of Nu’man will be trapped. Already barred from traveling into the heart of Jerusalem they will also find themselves cut off from the West Bank. Once they leave their village they will not be allowed to return. There will be nowhere for them to work or shop, or for the children to go to school.

“An official came here and told us this would be a ‘sterile area’ (free of Palestinians) or used for settlement expansion,” Dirawi said. “At first we didn’t see how they could do it. Now we know.”

Source: Guardian (UK)

San Jose, Oct 24 (IPS)— Opening Central America’s borders to a flood of products “Made in the U.S.A.” will hurt farming and other areas of the region’s economy, warned groups opposed to the free trade treaty currently in the works, as negotiators wrapped up another phase of the talks Friday without producing any important results.

In the eighth round of talks involving five Central American governments and Washington held Oct. 20-24 in the southern US city of Houston, Texas, the negotiators reached an agreement on investment rules, but put off decisions on more sensitive areas — like farm and textile trade — until December.

Trade experts are saying that Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, which are aiming for a Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) with the United States, are not prepared for the increase in consumption and the invasion of US products that the treaty would entail.

“We oppose the way the treaty has been negotiated, in that there has been great exclusion of social and productive sectors, and it will ultimately break down the social model that for more than 50 years has sustained the Costa Rican people,” says Alvino Vargas, secretary-general of the National Association of Public Employees.

Faced with the liberalization of the telecommunications sector to the detriment of Costa Rica and the “psychological war” against the population, the only viable recourse for putting a stop to the free trade agreement is for the people to take to the streets in protest, Vargas said.

He explained that what he refers to as the psychological war is the Costa Rican right-wing’s efforts to make it look like the only ones who oppose the treaty are the labor unions.

When in reality, he said, what has emerged is “a broad social movement that includes peasant farmers, indigenous people, women’s groups and small and medium entrepreneurs.”

“In the case of Costa Rica it is not possible that Mr. Robert Zoellick [US trade representative] could come and pound on President Abel Pacheco’s desk and make him yield on the telecoms issue and demand an opening in that area,” he said.

Vargas criticized the attitude of Zoellick, who told Pacheco on Sept. 30 during a visit to Costa Rica that the country could be excluded from the trade agreement between the so-called Group of Five and the United States if it does not agree to liberalization of its telecommunications market.

The union leader said that the fight to defend the Costa Rican Institute of Electricity (ICE) in 1999 unleashed a massive social movement that forced then-president Miguel Angel Rodríguez to withdraw his telecoms-liberalizing bill from Congress.

The opposition Citizen Action Party sent a letter to Pacheco demanding that he ensure there is transparency in the negotiations, stressing that very few Costa Ricans are aware of the contents of the treaty that is to be signed on their behalf.

Among the voices criticizing the process is former Costa Rican president Rodrigo Carazo (1978-1982), who believes it is a mistake “to make the people believe that the free trade agreement will only bring benefits.”

Carazo noted that Roman Catholic bishops “of Canada, United States and Mexico counsel our politicians, before getting caught in a tangle like their countries are in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), to meet in order to hear about all of the bad things that have occurred, so that they don’t make the same mistakes.”

Edgar Brenes, of the Salvadoran non-governmental National Foundation for Development (FUNDE), said that there is a conviction among negotiators to reach an agreement, even at the expense of the most vulnerable sectors, such as small farmers and entrepreneurs.

“The governments only discuss what is of interest to specific economic sectors,” he said.

Brenes added that the Mesoamerican Initiative on Trade, Integration and Development (CID), an umbrella group for numerous Central American non-governmental organizations, including FUNDE, has been closely following the talks and has found a “marked exclusion” of civil society in general.

In this context, and with the governments aiming to sign the treaty in December, the NGOs are planning to step up protests and to increase pressure on the legislatures in the five Central American countries that are to ratify the treaty once it is signed.

The first anti-CAFTA demonstrations took place Oct. 20 in El Salvador and Costa Rica, and organizers in the latter are planning another for Nov. 20.

According to Nicaraguan economist and sociologist Cirilo Otero, there are at least five basic premises for understanding CAFTA: “The political demands made by the United States, the reliance of our economies on that country, the impossibility of avoiding the treaty given the conditions of the global market, the dependence of the region’s governments on institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and their divisiveness when the time comes to negotiate.”

Otero says the Central American countries should form a solid negotiating bloc so that they can protect themselves in the economic areas where they are most vulnerable.

“In Costa Rica, it’s the telecommunications sector, in Nicaragua and Honduras it’s agriculture and textiles, and in El Salvador and Guatemala, services and trade,” he said.

The fact is that the region is not prepared for an increase in consumption, and the flood of US products could only be assimilated if citizens turn to sources of cash as diverse as “remittances [from relatives living in the United States], money laundering or drug trafficking,” commented Otero.

Oct. 20— Seven kilometers south of Kadoma town in Zimbabwe, a small farmhouse stands surrounded by a fence topped with razor wire. Some distance south of the farmhouse, a few cement buildings are clustered around several thatched huts. Children in torn and dirty clothes play in the red dust, oblivious of the insects and parasites that have infected their scalps and faces. Many of the children have distended stomachs, symptoms of their malnutrition.

A group of women watches the children from the door of a cement hut that was built years ago to house them.

There are 20 families living here, consisting of just over 100 people, including 50 children.

As one aid worker explains, these are the silent voices of Zimbabwe; while the farm owners fled with what little they could carry as war veterans and “Green Bombers” seized their properties, the farm workers were forced to stay behind and watch it all fall apart.

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) released a report in July in which it estimated as many as 240,000 farm workers had lost their jobs, 100,000 people had been forced from their homes and more than one million people — including the workers’ families — had been directly affected by the land reform process.

This particular farm was one of the 2 ,900 designated on Aug. 10 last year. According to Senzeni Sibanda, before the resettlement, life was good for the farm workers.

“We were living quite peacefully,” she explains. “We were happy, we had everything.”

Children were attending school, the people were well fed and were even making money to spend on themselves. As Sibanda talks, the children gather around and rip a loaf of bread apart, eating it ravenously. The women stand and watch; they probably won’t eat today.

The farm workers only learned of the resettlement when the former farm owner called them to the farmhouse and asked them to pack his belongings. That was the last they saw of him.

“Just soon after the farm was taken over we were told we were unemployed,” Sibanda says.

With their only source of income lost, the people were forced to fend for themselves.

With the help of the Zimbabwe Community Development Trust (ZCDT), the community has managed to start a small garden where they grow various vegetables to sell at the market down the road. But even that hasn’t been enough.

“We cannot get anything,” Sibanda says. “We can’t even pay school fees, medication, or anything. We are like people in a coma; we can’t see our future.”

According to a report from the Farm Community Trust of Zimbabwe (FCTZ), only about 100,000 commercial farm workers were still employed at the end of last year on the 20 percent of farms that were still operational. The rest have had to fend for themselves. To make ends meet, some have turned to doing odd jobs at nearby farms, panning for gold under railway tracks, and prostitution.

In Sibanda’s community, 12 people have died from disease — the prevalence of HIV/AIDS is presumed to be high — resulting from malnutrition and dehydration over the past seven months, and that number is expected to rise as the situation continues to deteriorate.

“We just need food and medication,” says Sharai Bava, whose husband was a farm worker. She indicates the head of one of her daughters, which is covered in scabs and flies.

“We are just like animals; we are rejected, we can’t eat good food, we can’t have anything.”

While life has been hard for these ex-farm workers, they have not been spared from the political violence. At the height of the land reforms, war veterans and the youth militia accused many farm workers of supporting the white farm owners and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

The United Nations estimated at the end of last year that more than 100,000 former farm workers had been chased from their homes.

In addition, dozens of ex-farm workers have been killed and thousands others forced to move due to the violence.