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Mugabe denies continuing crises in Zimbabwe

By Andrew Meldrum

Pretoria, South Africa, May 24 — The Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, angrily denies that his country needs food aid and rejected charges that his government inflicts human rights abuses in an interview with Sky News released May 24.

In the interview, the first Mugabe has given to British media for several years, the leader clung to his position that British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government is responsible for whatever problems his country is facing.

He also attacked Bishop Desmond Tutu and Bulawayo’s Archbishop Pius Ncube as “unholy men.” Critics in Zimbabwe say the interview exposes Mugabe as a leader out of touch with the reality of his country.

“He is delusional about food production, in denial about violence, and abusive about Desmond Tutu, Pius Ncube, and other critics,” said Iden Wetherell, editor of the Zimbabwe Independent.

“This is self-evidently a leader who has lost direction. All he can do is shake his fists at a world he no longer understands.”

Mugabe said his government would not accept international food aid in the coming year.

“We are not hungry. It should go to hungrier people, hungrier countries than ourselves,” he said. “Why foist this food upon us? We don’t want to be choked; we have enough.”

He said Zimbabwe would produce 2.3 million tons of maize this year, though independent and international food monitors have dismissed the figures as fantasy and completely unrealistic. They warn of widespread famine if Mugabe does not permit international aid.

Mugabe rejected charges that torture, rape and terror are being inflicted by his youth militia on the opposition and the wider population.

“These are the allegations being made by people who do not want us to train the youth, who fear perhaps we are training the youth to be nationalistic, to respect their own culture and respect the African personality,” he said.

He denied documented reports of systematic human rights abuse by police and other groups, suggesting that any violence came from over-zealous supporters of his Zanu-PF party.

“We have millions of supporters in the country but you also get small groups naturally that act in order to demonstrate that they are strong in particular areas especially when they are provoked and in the majority of cases because of the provocation of MDC.”

Mugabe’s assertions fly in the face of several reports by human rights groups which state that police and groups allied to his party are responsible for more than 90 percent of the political violence in the country.

When confronted with the criticism of the retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu that Mugabe now resembles a caricature of an African dictator, he dismissed the Nobel peace prizewinner as “an angry, evil, and embittered little bishop.”

Mugabe said the archbishop “was a frightened man during the Apartheid era and the little he did was perhaps just to criticize in an innocent way. When called upon to do something that would distinguish him as supporter of the ANC, he didn’t.”

He also turned on the Catholic Archbishop of Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo, who has claimed that 10,000 Zimbabweans in his Matabeleland region died of hunger-related causes last year.

“That’s another Tutu, the bishop, an unholy man, he thinks he is holy and telling lies all the day, every day,” said Mugabe.

“Oh come on, 10,000 people, where did they die? Even show me a single person who died of hunger.”

Some Zimbabweans said the interview demonstrated that Mugabe has lost touch.

Mugabe repeated the assertion that he intends to serve out his current term, which lasts until 2008, when he will be 86.

He said he has no successor in mind.

Source: Guardian (UK)

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Report condemns detention of refugee children

By Sarah Stephen

May 26— A new report by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC) details the horrifying conditions that refugees and their children are subjected to in Australia’s detention centers — violence and despair, self-mutilation and suicide, and the infliction of severe, long-term psychological damage.

The 925-page report of a two-and-half-year HREOC inquiry into children in detention was presented to federal parliament on May 13. It calls for the release of all children from detention and for parliament to change the law to ensure that detention is no longer the first and only resort for asylum seeker children. It calls for decisions about the detention of children to be made by an independent court.

The damning report, titled “A Last Resort?,” found Australia’s immigration detention policy breached the international Convention on the Rights of the Child by seriously failing to protect the mental health of children, provide adequate health care and education and protect unaccompanied children and those with disabilities.

Commission members visited all the immigration detention centers in Australia and took evidence from a large number of individuals and organizations.

The report noted that between July 1999 and July 2003, 2184 children passed through Australia’s mainland detention centers. At its height in June 2000, the Australian detention system had 164 babies in detention. While some only spent a few months in detention, most spent up to a year.

In the six-month period from July to December 2001, there were 159 alleged, attempted or actual assaults in detention centers, 19 involving children.

The commission found very high rates of children injuring themselves, including suicide attempts.

The inquiry was barred from examining the conditions of the children detained in the Australian-funded detention center on Nauru, where 73 children are held.

Jack Smit from Project SafeCom argued that the timing of the report was “proof beyond doubt how shamed the Howard government is about its own atrocious dealings with asylum seekers, particularly children in detention... Without a peep, the report was tabled shortly after question time in parliament by the former immigration minister Philip Ruddock, without even so much as a speech.”

Rural Australians for Refugees’ Helen McCue said in a May 13 press release that the report is a shocking indictment of the government’s detention policies. “The accounts of physical and psychological abuse of refugee children under the federal government’s care contained in this report are sickening. The high incidence of depression and post-traumatic stress among refugee children caused by these actions makes me feel angry, disgusted, ashamed and deeply saddened that Australia is condoning such shocking practices. RAR calls on the government to protect these vulnerable children by ending its mandatory detention policy.

“The report confirms that the majority of children in detention have escaped from conditions of war and brutality in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact that more than 95 percent of the children processed so far have been granted refugee status highlights the senselessness of government detention policies.”

Referring to the riots, fires, guard brutality, and the use of tear gas and water cannon over the past three years, Dianne Hiles, spokesperson for ChilOut (Children Out of Detention), said in a May 13 media release: “No child should experience such things, not a refugee, not a citizen, not anyone... The report paints a catastrophic picture of children as young as nine self-harming. They drink shampoo, go on hunger strike, cut themselves, hang themselves and sew their lips.’’

Immigration minister Amanda Vanstone responded to the report by arguing that, as almost all the children have now been released on temporary visas, the commission’s findings were of mere “historical” interest.

The Refugee Council, however, pointed out in a May 13 media release that while there are now fewer children in detention, “the fundamental conditions that underpinned the worst abuses are still in place and there is nothing to stop them from being repeated.”

Responding to Vanstone’s routine argument that to release any children from detention would send a “message” to people smugglers, Robert Manne, writing in the May 17 Melbourne Age, described this argument as “self-evidently immoral — advocating the destruction of the lives of children to keep others away. It also makes no sense... It was through military repulsion after August 2001 and not mandatory detention that asylum seekers were eventually deterred.”

Source: Green Left Weekly

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Millions ‘warehoused’ without rights for 10 years or more

By Jim Lobe

Washington, May 24 (IPS)— More than 7 million of the world’s nearly 12 million refugees have been “warehoused” in dangerous border areas or urban slums without regard to their basic human rights for 10 or more years, according to the 2004 “World Refugee Survey” released May 24 by the US Committee for Refugees (USCR).

The report, which found a sharp rise in the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) — people who have been forced to flee their homes but are still living in their country of origin — during 2003, argues that refugee “warehousing” for such long periods of time is both legally indefensible and morally unacceptable.

“Warehousing is the practice of keeping refugees in protracted situations of restricted mobility, enforced idleness and dependency — their lives on indefinite hold — in violation of their basic rights under the 1951 Refugee Convention,” according to survey editor Merrill Smith, who authored the feature article in this year’s report.

“Encamped or not, refugees are warehoused when they are deprived of the freedom to pursue normal lives,” Smith noted in a statement, adding that the report’s launch marked the start of a global campaign to press governments and the international community to end warehousing and provide full rights to refugees under the Convention.

This year’s report found that the number of refugees and asylum seekers declined during 2003, from some 13 million at the end of 2002 to 11.9 million at the beginning of 2004. Most of the decline was due to the return of some 613,000 Afghan refugees from Iran and Pakistan and the return of some 130,000 refugees to Angola after that country’s 27-year civil war.

But while the net decline in the number of refugees was encouraging, it was more than made up by a net increase in the number of IDPs — from about 22 million at the beginning of 2003 to an estimated 23.6 million — by the end of the year.

The major increases took place in sub-Saharan Africa, especially Sudan, where as many as one million ethnic African people were forced to flee their homes in the western province of Darfur as a result of combined raids and attacks by government forces and Arab militias. About 120,000 crossed into Chad; the rest remain in Sudan.

Because they do not cross international borders, IDPs are much more difficult to track than refugees. Therefore, says the report, the actual number of IDPs in each country, as well as worldwide, may be much higher than USCR estimates. In addition, IDPs generally do not enjoy the same rights, protections and care that refugees are entitled to under the 1951 Convention.

The report found that Sudan alone, with about 4.8 million IDPs, accounts for roughly 20 percent of all such persons worldwide. It is followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with an estimated 3.2 million IDPs, Colombia, with nearly three million IDPs, and Uganda, with about 1.4 million.

Africa, which is already struggling with HIV/AIDS and the lowest per capita income levels of any other region, accounted for an estimated 13.1 million IDPs — or well over one-half of the world’s total IDP population. Six African countries — Sudan, DRC, Uganda, Angola, Cote d’Ivoire, and Liberia — all had more than half a million IDPs in their territories at the end of 2003.

When refugees in Africa were added to IDPs, the report found that a net total of 13.9 million Africans have been uprooted in the past five years. The leading sources of uprooted people — both IDPs and refugees — in Africa, adds the report, are Sudan (5.4 million), DRC (3.6 million), Uganda (1.4 million), Angola (1.3 million), Liberia (884,000), and Burundi (755,000).

With hundreds of thousands of Afghans having returned home in the wake of the Taliban’s ouster in late 2001, the largest number of refugees in the world as of the end of 2003 was Palestinian — some three million, divided between the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East which, as a result, holds 37 percent of the world’s total number of refugees.

Africa ranks second with about 3.2 million refugees, or 27 percent of the total, followed by South and Central Asia (1.9 million, most of whom are Afghans in Pakistan), East Asia and the Pacific (953,000), Europe (884,000), and the Americas (543,000 — or only about five percent of the nearly 12 million throughout the world).

But of those 12 million well over one-half have been warehoused in conditions that do not fulfill the requirements of the 1951 Convention, notes the report.

The Convention requires host countries to provide refugees with opportunities to work, move about freely, own property and receive an education, among other basic rights enabling them to live normal lives in dignity.

Instead, refugees are frequently confined to camps or other settlements in remote, desolate and dangerous border areas in conditions of hopelessness and despair, vulnerable to aggression, sexual abuse and the risk of attack and murder by militias and armies for protracted periods of time, the report says. Those who are not confined to border areas, on the other hand, are usually warehoused in urban slums where they are also deprived of basic rights.

“Presently, more than half a million refugees from Myanmar (Burma) have lived without the right to work or travel for up to 20 years in Thailand, Bangladesh, Malaysia and India,” says an article in the report by USCR Director of Policy Analysis and Research Gregory Chen. “More than half a million Sudanese are stuck in camps or segregated settlements that have been operating for two decades.”

“Over the course of 25 years, more than two million Afghan refugees have been in exile in Pakistan and Iran,” he noted, adding that more than two million Palestinian refugees live in camps and urban slums deprived of basic rights. In recent years, the estimated 1.6 million of those refugees in the West Bank and Gaza have lived in an almost constant state of military siege.

“Briefly put, condemning people who fled persecution to stagnate in confinement for much of the remainder of their lives is unnecessary, wasteful, hypocritical, counterproductive, unlawful, and morally unacceptable,” according to Smith.

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Prisons to the streets, US barbarism is rampant in Iraq

Compiled by Shane Perlowin

May 26 (AGR) — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld last year personally approved a series of aggressive interrogation techniques for suspected Taliban and al Qaeda detainees to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks and help prevent future ones, Pentagon officials said May 20.

Rumsfeld approved in April 2003 a request five months earlier by Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who had arrived at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in November 2002 to oversee prisoners. Miller sought permission to use a broad range of extraordinary “nondoctrinal” questioning techniques on an al-Qaida detainee, a general with the Pentagon’s Judge Advocate General’s office said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“There became some urgency because we had an individual that had some information that people at Guantanamo believed was important not just to 9/11, but to future events,” a senior Pentagon lawyer said.

The defense officials did not detail the procedures Miller had sought to use, or identify the detainee, but they said the prisoner was believed to have valuable information about future attacks by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network. Pentagon lawyers and interrogators clashed over the proposed procedures, which some of the lawyers said would violate international law.

This account is the first official acknowledgment that Rumsfeld had been personally involved in the development of interrogation policies for war detainees.

In other news, a military lawyer for a soldier charged in the Abu Ghraib abuse case stated that a captain at the prison said the highest-ranking US military officer in Iraq was present during some “interrogations and/or allegations of the prisoner abuse,” according to a recording of a military hearing obtained by The Washington Post.

The lawyer, Capt. Robert Shuck, said he was told that Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez and other senior military officers were aware of what was taking place on Tier 1A of Abu Ghraib. Shuck is assigned to defend Staff Sgt. Ivan L. “Chip” Frederick II of the 372nd Military Police Company. During an Apr. 2 hearing that was open to the public, Shuck said the company commander, Capt. Donald J. Reese, was prepared to testify in exchange for immunity. The military prosecutor questioned Shuck about what Reese would say under oath.

“Are you saying that Captain Reese is going to testify that General Sanchez was there and saw this going on?” asked Capt. John McCabe, the military prosecutor.

“That’s what he told me,” Shuck said. “I am an officer of the court, sir, and I would not lie. I have got two children at home. I’m not going to risk my career.”

Shuck also said a sergeant at the prison, First Sgt. Brian G. Lipinski, was prepared to testify that intelligence officers told him the abuse of detainees on the cellblock was “the right thing to do.”

Officers at the prison have blamed the abuse on a few rogue, low-level military police officers from the 372nd, a company of US Army Reservists based in Cresaptown, Md. The general in charge of the prisons in Iraq at the time has said that military intelligence officers took control of Abu Ghraib and gave the MPs “ideas.”

In the prisons

The Washington Post says it has seen hundreds of videos and photos which show previously unseen abusive methods used at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib jail.

In sworn statements, detainees said they were beaten, sexually humiliated and force-fed pork and alcohol.

A video has also emerged showing a detainee being dragged along the floor. The grainy image also shows another prisoner being slapped across the face, while one naked Iraqi crouches on the floor.

The new photos include one of a prisoner being menaced by a soldier with a dog.

In other abuses depicted in the latest pictures: A naked prisoner who appears to be covered in excrement is paraded down a corridor; a hooded detainee is pictured in a state of collapse; a US soldier appears to be raining blows on detainees sprawled on the floor.

The Washington Post report also describes a video clip in which a shackled inmate repeatedly slams his bloody head against a metal door, before collapsing.

One detainee, named in the report as Ameen Saeed al-Sheik, said he was asked by a soldier whether he believed in anything.

“I said to him, ‘I believe in Allah.’ So he said, ‘But I believe in torture and I will torture you.’ ” He said one soldier struck his broken leg and ordered him to curse Islam. “Because they started to hit my broken leg, I curse my religion,” the paper quoted him as saying. “They ordered me to thank Jesus I’m alive.”

In the streets

Ever since the occupation began, there have been regular stories of American soldiers who were attacked by insurgents on the streets of Iraqi cities and reacted by spraying the entire area with wild, indiscriminate gunfire, killing and maiming innocent Iraqi bystanders. Other accounts, however, are even more sinister.

Before he was jailed for a year last week for failing to return from leave, another soldier who served in Iraq, Sergeant Camilo Mejia, said a friend of his, a sniper, had shot a child about 10 years old who was carrying an automatic weapon. “He realized it was a kid,” said Sergeant Mejia. “The kid tried to get up. He shot him again.” The child died.

Few images exist of such incidents, not least because journalists seeking to record them have ended up dead themselves. Thanks to the persistence of one or two news organizations that have lost employees in Iraq, these deaths are among the few to have been independently investigated. After an award-winning cameraman, Mazen Dana, became the second Reuters employee to be killed, the agency hired a security company and carried out an exhaustive inquiry which found few differences of fact with the military investigation, but which differed radically on the conclusions.

The soldier who shot Dana claimed he had made “sudden movements” which made him think the cameraman was about to fire a rocket-propelled grenade, that he was blinded by the sun at the time, and that he could not distinguish at a distance of 225 ft between an RPG and a television camera.

Despite pages of evidence proving the sun was not in the position claimed, and photographs demonstrating the visible difference at 225 feet between a camera and a large weapon, the US military is sticking to its finding that

the journalist’s death was “justified based on the information available ... at the time.”

If an organization with the international clout of Reuters cannot get the Pentagon to admit an error might have been made, the survivors of last week’s slaughtered wedding party have even less chance that their version of events will prevail. But the incident illustrates several of the concerns expressed about the operations undertaken by US forces in Iraq, including their ignorance of Iraqi culture, their isolation from local people and their over-dependence on firepower.

“The British military tends to have far more open dealings with the local population than the Americans,” said Christopher Bellamy, professor of military science at Cranfield University. “While the British rely more on local intelligence to warn them of trouble in advance, US forces have a ‘stand-off’ posture, which means trouble tends to erupt without warning. As a result they need to deliver enormous amounts of firepower to overcome it.”

The insistence of the US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, on a “war lite” policy, said Bellamy, meant that “American forces have to make up in firepower what they lack in manpower.”

“The philosophy is almost that of the wagon train, and tends to lead to the ‘spray and slay’ behavior we have seen,” said Bellamy.

“It is hard to over-estimate the lack of awareness of most American soldiers in Iraq,” said a military source. “Many, perhaps most, have never been abroad before. They see their mission as giving democracy to the Iraqis and enforcing stability, and find it very difficult to understand why the Iraqis aren’t grateful. They have no idea that they are seen as arrogant and aggressive.”

Sources: Inter Press Service, Independent (UK), Guardian (UK), BBC, Associated Press, Reuters, Washington Post, LA Times, ABC News

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