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India’s post-Sept. 11 law on terrorism
more abused than used

By Ranjit Devraj

New Delhi, India, Mar. 31 (IPS)— Mohammed Haneef Abdul Razak Sheikh says he was held under India’s controversial anti-terrorism law for distributing food to victims of the anti-Muslim pogrom that swept western Gujarat state two years ago.

All the 287 cases booked under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) in Gujarat following the violence were aimed at members of the minority community.

Sheikh’s wife Yasmeen said that police, finding them away from home, grabbed hold of Sheikh’s brother and dragged him away after abusing other members of the family and ransacking the premises.

Sheikh was among those who gave testimony earlier this month at a People’s Tribunal organized by the voluntary National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and a coalition of other activist groups.

“Over the past two years, POTA has been used against juveniles, old people, members [of] minority communities, journalists, members of ‘dalit’ [low Hindu caste] groups, Adivasi [aboriginal] communities, women, political opponents and those struggling for socio-economic rights,” said Colin Gonsalves, one of the main organizers of the tribunal.

POTA, introduced by India in compliance with a UN Security Council resolution following the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, has ended up being used mainly to settle political scores, victimize religious and other minorities, according to the findings of the “People’s Tribunal.”

After listening to the testimonies, Ram Jethmalani, lawyer and union law minister at the time POTA was passed, confessed that he was gravely in error about its passage in April 2002.

“I supported the enactment of POTA but I did it because it was done in obedience to the UN Security Council resolution. I regret it now,” he said.

Jethmalani said he, like many others, had put faith in the honesty of politicians who said it would never be misused. “Today I have no doubt that it should go out lock stock and barrel.”

Concerns about the misuse of the law have also been aired by politicians and by the NHRC.

Others victims from Gujarat state testified that the police invariably made their arrests late at night, detained relatives of suspects and took away vital documents necessary to establish credentials.

Habib Bhai Karimi said he was detained for four days merely because his son Kalim, who was arrested, happened to be friendly with their neighbor, a religious preacher.

For his part, Om Prakash, a 10-year-old boy who was arrested in May 2003 under POTA following the murder of a village headman in northern Uttar Pradesh state, said his only crime was “being a member of the ‘dalit’ community.”

Many of the cases from Uttar Pradesh had to do with struggles for land rights rather than terrorism, say critics of the anti-terrorism law.

The bulk of the cases lodged under the anti-terrorism law have come from central Jharkhand state. A record 3,200 cases have been registered there under POTA, with several of them involving juveniles and nearly all of them targeted aboriginals or “dalit”.

When POTA’s passage was being discussed in Parliament in 2002, India’s Interior Minister Lal Krishna Advani declared that those who opposed it were being “anti-national.”

Advani and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the majority party in India’s Congress, got their way with the law largely because Parliament was then recovering from the shock of the Dec. 13, 2001 aborted attempt by a suicide squad to blow up the legislative building.

Objections raised by opposition politicians at the time — that the law loosely defined key terms such as “terrorist organization” and what constituted “support” for such organizations and “proceeds” from giving such support — were easily dismissed.

Long-time complaints that India’s criminal procedure code, drawn up during the repressive colonial period and still largely intact, was marked by deficient investigation and serious procedural lapses were ignored to produce what many said was a parallel and more draconian criminal system.

What followed was embarrassing even for the BJP. It had to stand by and watch while Vaiko (one name), a member of Parliament from southern Tamil Nadu state and a close ally, was picked up under POTA. Vaiko was incarcerated for making a speech praising the Sri Lankan militant group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam .

Vaiko, who leads a local party in the opposition in Tamil Nadu, was released on bail on Feb. 7, after spending 18 months in jail.

Gonsalves said the testimonies have greatly helped rising demands to have POTA repealed and get rid of “half-way measures” such as occasional amendments and a “review committee” set up by the government to examine cases of abuse.

“We plan to bring more voices of POTA victims to the forefront and have them documented so that we can build up a strong case for the repeal of the act,” he said.

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Palestinians riot as Israeli settlers
gain new foothold

By Donald Macintyre

Silwan, West Bank, Apr. 1— Armed Israeli settlers moved into this populous and largely rundown Palestinian neighborhood of East Jerusalem Mar. 31 as they opened a new front in their coordinated — and bitterly contested — effort to establish Jewish footholds in Arab districts of the city.

Police fired tear gas at stone-throwing residents and arrested nine Palestinians after clashes when the settlers arrived in the early hours with police and security guards to occupy two buildings — one a seven-story apartment block — previously owned by Arabs below the walls of the Old City. Local Palestinians said that some residents had been beaten; a police spokesman, Shmulik Ben-Ruby, said that six police officers had been hurt.

Awad Rajabi, 55, said that he had been sleeping in his home next door to one of the occupied apartments, which he had been renovating for his son’s family after what he thought had been a straightforward purchase of it for 35,000 Jordanian dinars ($48,839) eight months ago.

“I hear a noise and went downstairs. There were about 20 or 30 settlers with border police, a police car, and jeeps. He said that they had shouted before breaking into the apartment: “‘This is our house.’ I said: ‘No this is my house.’” He added: “This is the first step; they want to dismiss us from the area altogether.”

Witnesses said that the settlers had carried boxes, chairs, tables, and potted plants into buildings, which they had purchased from a local Arab developer, and that a van packed with sofas and couches arrived. Others had hauled a water tank on to the roof of one of the buildings and installed a generator.

Rajabi’s daughter, Najat, 15, was behind their home at 7am, about to cross to another part of the extended Rajabi family compound — which houses about 120 of his relatives in 20 separate apartments — when she heard voices from the window of the home now occupied by the settlers’ group and saw part of a gun barrel.

“They said: ‘We killed Sheikh Yassin and we will kill you,’” she claimed. The operation was the first of its kind conducted by the Committee for the Renewal of the Yemenite Village in Shiloah -- Hebrew for Silwan — to “reclaim” land which is in sight of the Al Aqsa Mosque and Jewish Temple Mount and once belonged to a community of Yemeni Jews which was first established in the 1880s but was finally forced to leave during Arab riots in 1938. But the group is closely associated with Ateret Cohanim, an umbrella settler group of the hard-line national religious right, and follows similar settler operations in neighboring districts.

A similar group of armed settlers broke into and took over the home of a sleeping Palestinian family in nearby King David’s City last month.

As armed police patrolled the district, Daniel Lourie, a spokesman for the settlers’ committee, insisted that 66 years after the last Yemeni Jews had left, “We have returned Jewish families to the area with the idea of living side-by-side with the Arabs.”

Asserting the right of Jews to settle anywhere in their biblical “homeland,” he said the settlers -- who do not accept the idea of a separate Palestinian state — regarded the Yemeni district as a “microcosm of the whole of Israel.”

However, Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer who is a prominent opponent of the settler operations in the city, said the settlers had the goal of turning Jerusalem in to a “predominantly, if not exclusive, Jewish city.”

He said: “They are not numerically significant, but in its effect on the stability of Jerusalem, this is so contrary to the interests of the Israeli state that it is tantamount to pyromania.”

The settlers say that as in other such cases their purchases of the buildings were perfectly legal, though they declined to name the Arab vendors because of the risks of reprisals against them and their families for collaborating with Jewish settler families. While not disputing that the properties had been legally purchased by the settlers, the Rajabi family said it believes it was tricked by Muhammad Maraghi, a member of a prominent local family, who they named as the previous owner of both buildings, into handing over Rajabi’s savings for the same home.

Maraghi’s wife, Fatima — who had been occupying — and on Mar. 31 was herself evicted from, the top two floors of the otherwise empty apartment block, said that her husband had been in the United States since Mar. 27 and she did not know how to contact him.

Rajabi said: “I am destroyed by this. I borrowed the money to pay him and I have used up all my savings.”

She and other members of the Maraghi clan have placed a proclamation disassociating themselves from her husband, believed to be a nephew of Abu Musa, a prominent Fatah leader who rebelled against Yasser Arafat in the early 1980s, and describing him as an “outcast.”

The proclamation added: “We strongly denounce his action and we are loyal to the blood of the martyrs.”

Source: Independent (UK)

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Women hold the key to food security

By Joyce Mulama

Kampala, Uganda, Apr. 3 (IPS) -- Women’s right to land ownership could change the face of Africa and speed up efforts to achieve food and nutrition security.

This is the view of some 500 delegates who attended a three-day international meeting on food security in Uganda’s capital Kampala. The gathering which ended Apr. 3 attracted delegates from 50 countries, 30 of them from Africa.

The meeting, organized by the Washington-based International Food Policy and Research Institute (IFPRI), sought to find a way to achieve food and nutrition security in Africa by 2020.

During the meeting, delegates heard that although women provide the majority of agricultural labor in Africa, their rights to land were restricted.

Statistics from women’s groups show that over 70 percent of African women are involved in agricultural activities. Most African economies are heavily dependant on agriculture.

“Women must have access to resources, especially land. If they do not own the land on which they farm, that is a problem. Women in Africa must be entitled to land ownership with or without their spouses because they are the ones who make use of the land in most times,” Isatou Jallow, Executive Director of Gambia’s National Nutrition Agency, told IPS in an interview.

According to African tradition, women acquire land only through marriage. In the event of the death of a husband or divorce, they lose the land. Despite intensive campaigns, some African countries still forbid women from owning property without the consent of their spouses.

Women delegates to the meeting have called for an end to gender discrimination in land ownership to ensure equal playing field between men and women. To achieve equality, they called for the inclusion of women in politics as a way of ensuring their participation in issues relating to productive assets such as land. “Women need to be involved in decision making so that they can tackle discriminative aspects of land ownership,” said Graca Machel, president of Mozambique’s Foundation for Community Development.

Eliminating gender discrimination, and addressing customary laws that are unfair to women when it comes to ownership of land, remains a vital intervention to achieving a common ground between men and women, says IFPRI.

“For example, the ability to inherit land, to join a credit and savings club, to start up a small enterprise, and to survive in the event of a family breakdown must be equal for both men and women. Customary laws in many countries treat women as minors, thereby restricting their rights to such assets and opportunities,” says an IFPRI report titled “In Women’s Hands: Increasing the Effective Participation of Women In Food and Nutrition Security in Africa.”

“In Lesotho and Swaziland, women are considered legal minors: they cannot own property, enter into contracts, or receive bank loans without a male relative,” says the report.

During the meeting, women demanded that governments work hand-in-hand with communities to phase out discriminatory laws. “Local community laws have to be looked into and governments should collaborate with communities to explore ways of introducing new rules that will ensure equality between men and women in land ownership,” Jallow said.

“Traditions cannot change within a day because they are deeply rooted. That is why governments have to be sensitive in introducing positive traditional values that are in the best interest of the community. Women would also be educated in the latest agricultural technologies to ensure sustainable food security in Africa,” Jallow continued.

Researchers have often maintained that even though women are the backbone of Africa’s agricultural sector, they lack technological skills to boost productivity.

Rosebud Kurwijila, who is in charge of Rural Economy and Agriculture in the 53-member African Union (AU), says, “Empowering farmers, especially women, will be important for uptake of technologies that can enhance agricultural productivity on the continent.”

Biotechnology, say researchers, can help women save time while increasing yields. IFPRI cites a project at the West Africa Rice Development Association where scientists have used biotechnology to develop a rice variety that has high yields, drought resistance and broad leaves. According to IFPRI, the variety substantially reduces weeding by women and children.

The US-based Rockefeller Foundation, which funds most agricultural projects in Africa, also supports biotechnology. “Biotechnology could be a technological option for small-scale farmers, mostly women, and there is need for agricultural bodies and governments to ensure that women are familiar with emerging technologies,” says Gordon Conway, president of Rockefeller Foundation.

Biotechnology is a controversial topic in Africa and around the world. Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Lesotho, and Zambia have all banned genetically modified food, citing environmental and health concerns.

Researchers believe IFPRI’s goal of achieving food security for Africa by 2020, and the United Nations Millennium Development Goals of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger by 2015, is attainable. IFPRI says there are about 800 million hungry people in the world. Of these, about 200 million are in sub-Saharan Africa.

The growing demand for gender equality, particularly in land ownership, was also discussed at a meeting of Heads of State and Government of the African Union held in Sirte, Libya on Feb. 27-28. While in Libya, African leaders committed themselves to “ensuring gender balance in access to training, education, land, natural resources, loans, and development programs.”