Libya to charge 21 rebel leaders in special court

Libya to charge 21 rebel leaders in special court.

If you can’t say something that helps, don’t practice for later. On #Libya

@Net_Anon My feeling: war is madness and cruelty.

We want to end pain for a people hurting, why subvert a force for change for falling short of embodying the final Manicheaen purge toward utopian socialist brotherhood– an investigation of the people in power in Libya will inform you of what we of course ought to know–that there are pecuniary interests, often ancient and at times repressive instruments of State, that will finally be in the Duke’s seat. But in immediately practical terms:

I had the privilege of witnessing a group of Libyans in DC this last week, boldly, rightfully demanding audience of grievances. Free Libya

1. It is almost an absurdity to imagine Gaddafi will be restored, or frankly leave Libya alive.

2. The NTC allows full access to reporters; and while human rights workers have reported on rights violations, the Obeidi scenario amongst other circumstances have proven that the rebel leaders (visible or occult) at least bow to imperatives of survival in relations, and we can expect for the time being humanitarian access.

3. The most realistic and productive undertaking for remote non-combatants (us) is NOT to attempt remote combat through political, rhetorical maneuvers–rather to facilitate a modicum of focus on the PEOPLE of Libya. This is not between the NTC and Gaddafi, it’s the Libyan people vs. Tyranny. Silent now – and one day, it’s Us versus Them.

Boundaries are old Shadows, and we live in the Dark @SabzBrach

This is a quick thanks to Joanne Michele, human rights activist, for her continued earnest and 100% volunteer work on OpAsylum. Joanne quoted Sagan, which brought to mind:

As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky. In our tenure on this planet we’ve accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage — propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders — all of which puts our survival in some doubt. But we’ve also acquired compassion for others, love for our children and desire to learn from history and experience, and a great soaring passionate intelligence — the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity.

Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet Earth. But up there in the immensity of the Cosmos, an inescapable perspective awaits us. There are not yet any obvious signs of extraterrestrial intelligence and this makes us wonder whether civilizations like ours always rush implacably, headlong, toward self-destruction.

National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars. Travel is broadening.

Carl Sagan

I thought this was relevant.

UN urges probe into reports of refugees left to drown off North Africa

17 June 2011 – The United Nations Human Rights Council today called for a comprehensive inquiry into allegations that sinking boats carrying migrants and asylum-seekers fleeing unrest in North Africa were abandoned to their fate at sea despite the alleged ability of ships in the vicinity to rescue them.

There have been several reports in recent months of refugees fleeing from Libya in overloaded or mechanically unsound boats drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. Early last month the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that nearly 600 people may have drowned when a boat broke up off the coast of Libya.

In a resolution adopted by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, the body expressed sadness over the death at sea of hundreds of people, mostly Africans, and cited accounts of survivors and family members who have stated that more than 1,200 others remain unaccounted for.

The Council voiced alarm that after having been compelled to make dangerous journeys, including in crowded and unsafe boats, the would-be migrants are subjected to life-threatening exclusion, detention, rejection and xenophobia.

It noted that despite efforts by countries of destination on the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea to host migrants and asylum-seekers fleeing from North Africa, the burden of problem fell disproportionately on neighbouring North African countries.

The Council “reaffirms the need to respect the humanitarian principle of non-refoulement from territorial waters and lands for the thousands of people fleeing the events in the North African region,” according to the resolution, sponsored by Nigeria.

It stressed that, “in a spirit of solidarity and burden-sharing, countries of destination should deal with the arrival of thousands of migrants and asylum-seekers in non-seaworthy boats in a humane way and in compliance with their international obligations.”

The Council requested the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to pay particular attention to the problem.

It also urged the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants and other bodies with related mandates to look into the plight of those fleeing by sea, including from North Africa, and who are denied assistance or rescue when approaching the countries of destination, and to report regularly to the Human Rights Council.

Darfur in the Shadows, Human Rights Watch

Darfur in the Shadows
from HRW
(Johannesburg) – Serious abuses have increased in Darfur in the past six months while the world’s attention has focused on Southern Sudan’s upcoming independence, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The United Nations Security Council, which will be briefed on Darfur on June 8, 2011, and the African Union should do much more to ensure that those responsible for continued war crimes in Darfur are held accountable and press the Sudanese government to end attacks on civilians in Darfur, cease arbitrary detention of rights activists, and reform the state security apparatus, Human Rights Watch said.

Report PDF

“The UN Security Council brought the situation in Darfur to the ICC,” Bekele said. “Now it needs to firmly stand by its pledge to the thousands of victims and press for Sudan’s cooperation with the court.”

IPS Africa with Death Penalty Abolitionist in Uganda. The trap doors of the gallows

The quality of mercy is not strained, but falleth as the gentle rain from heaven

I know that last picture is disturbing. But if you’ve ever stood outside the courthouse or sat in your easy chair and called for a stranger’s death, you have to fucking look.

Life is subversive. AGAINST EXECUTIONERS

Edmary Mpagi and his cousin Fred Masembe were convicted by a Ugandan court and sentenced to death for the murder of a man who was later found alive.

Masembe died in prison before he could face the gallows while Mpagi spent 18 years waiting to be executed by the state. Mpagi said his conviction was based on fabricated evidence by the state. He claims a pathologist was bribed to falsely testify that he had carried out a post-mortem on the body of William George Wandyaka, the man Mpagi and Masembe were accused of murdering. Mpagi was released from prison in July 2000 after receiving a presidential pardon. He spends much of his time campaigning against the death penalty.

 

Excerpts of the interview follow.

Gaddafi Makes Human Rights History

Gaddafi is the first person to be accused by the International Criminal Court chief prosecutor of “enforced disappearance”, a phenomenon made notorious by the Argentinian and Chilean juntas of the 1970s and 80s.

Thousands of political opponents and trade unionists disappeared but no bodies were found, so no murder or kidnap could be proved.

ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo, who made his name leading the case against junta leaders in his native Argentina, said he now has evidence that in Libya “the behaviour is abduction, torture and disappearance. This is a tool to establish fear.”

The ICC judges are to announce within days whether they agree to crimes against humanity charges against Gaddafi , who would join Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir on the international wanted list.

 

read more 

“Look, you have forgotten the cat” #africa. ok, #libya

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points. Woolf

Antonio Hirsch, World Map

An article caught my eye this morning on Governmentinthelab, by Daniel Berhane, The subject, the statistical relevance  is representative of the continued refusal to renegotiate ancient relationships between what essentially makes up the developed world, the former colonies, and the Greater Incorporated  Commonwealth of Whitey, Roy, and Viceroy.

It describes a report by Freedom House:  Freedom in the World 2011: The Authoritarian Challenge to Democracy,  ranking African nations on some gradient of  ‘free’  ‘partly free’ and ‘not free.’ I can’t elaborate much more on what the authors purported to resolve with their study’s summation. A critic cited within the article wastes no time attacking Freedom House as oblique:

“…its near-Manichaean characterization of countries as free, partially-free and not free.”

The real problem is not that the terms are too generic,  but that the report is more of  the same answers towards sufficiently describing the problem, a process never capable of exacting change unto itself.

In South Africa they wait hours in lines for AZT, with other Sub-Suharan nations  which are often unable to keep the condom dispensers full through the day they are filled.  As with the “twitter revolutions,”  Africans do not need us to tell them they are a trodden-on people.

Africa, (the Confederation of variously Coincident Euphemisms); Southeast Asia, much of Oceania; South America, Central America: Flint, MI….no time recently were any of them glimmering Golden(brown) Boys, and now shock us with inexplicable collapse.

We already expect to be talking about abject poverty and health concerns–think of the shots, quinine, other preparations required for certain overseas travel–the Media delivers the suffering, swept from our doorstep, gathered in neat packages of bitter Dickensian tragedy, paired with patronizing cultural pastiche. We gawk at their squalor and have the nerve to buy their silence with “philanthropy.’     No mystery.

I don’t want to shove this down anyone’s throat.

But, while you’re here– Look at these various, essentially randomly-queried google images, maps of global colonialism, global AIDS, other stuff. The first is from 1910–

Let a man get up and say, “Behold, this is the truth,” and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

Virginia Woolf Bernard in The Waves

Much of the globe is oppressed by desperate need. Nearly 2 million children under 14 years old are HIV positive in sub-Saharan Africa alone, many of whom are part of the 12 to 16 million orphaned by HIV infected parents.

With  ARVs and decent primary care, and early diagnosis, there is very little need that infected EVER has to mean symptomatic.

We have applied the boot, and are describing the tread.

This is a beautiful realization: we’ve described the problem sufficiently. For the hope, let’s try countermanding.  We can be about the business of healing this history-old lie that you and I are different.

“All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are ‘sides,’ and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.”
— Virginia Woolf

 

Operation Asylum is a network-building initiative whose motivating and all-peremptory concern is the identification and protection of “at-risk” foreign nationals abroad; especially regarding migrants, students, expatriates and other transitory individuals whose homeland conditions warrant they be granted asylum status under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.

Our aim is to utilize already established frameworks for managing distributed resources, via Grid Computing, to

1. prevent corruption of valuable data for remote users who are in especially dire need of reliable information (when their access is usually most vulnerable);

2. encourage and enable continual extension of grid access with an eye towards hard-wiring into the periphery of the Web as a general purpose auxiliary, should native access be compromised.

Operation Asylum started as a brainstorming session among a half-dozen or so people in a “Tinychat” room, in discussion without much confident direction.

The question being ganged-up-on: How do we help an unknown (relatively small) number of Libyan nationals studying abroad, who faced imminent (I thought) deportation and ensuing persecution and/or forced conscription into the Libyan regular army. A chance personal reference (only describable as stark serendipity, really) introduced the project to Joanne Michele, women’s/human rights activist (likely Jedi), and she  served to calm immediate panic about looming, imminent deportation.

This allowed for thought and planning of long term solutions that might keep these expeditionary scholars where they -belong–in our colleges and universities, learning, being a part of discovery, adapting our knowledge systems and their appended ethos to a better fit of our deeply social proclivities.

We talk about this a lot, it could work.

An Opportunity to Govern – “Long live Libya free and dignified”

 

“All eyes are now on the authorities in eastern Libya.”

Firstly, by way of correcting my earlier post: Qatar in fact is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention. It is, however, bound by customary international law not to return refugees to a country where their lives or freedom would be threatened, known as the principle of non-refoulement, and basic fucking decency.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees recognized Eman as a refugee at risk of ill-treatment if returned to any part of Libya and was preparing her emergency resettlement to a third country, when she was apprehended in Qatar and forced to fly to Libya.

The National Transitional Council has made a first step in the positive assertion of just jurisprudence on behalf of Libyans.

The NTC is the de facto ruling body in Libya’s east and parts of the west by popular and military success.  The NTC has denounced al-Obeidy’s forcible return, and guaranteed her freedom of movement.

“Eman al-‘Obeidy is absolutely free to move inside and outside the country, and she is free to meet with media, NGOs, and other organizations,” said Ahmed Jebril, foreign affairs spokesman of the NTC.

I earnestly encourage the Council to move immediately in securing  full protection for the Obeidi family, in the process of arranging for Eman to dispose her International adjudication without any coercive interference under their watch or domain.

Far greater than any military victory or geographic maneuver, the assertion of authority and responsibility to see that rights are protected will signal the formative ascent of a “People’s body,”  prepared to administrate  as a service the government on behalf of the governed.

Show us Eman, please.

27 March 2011  Statement regarding Eman Al-Obaidi – The Foreign Secretary of the Interim National Council of Libya condemns in the strongest terms the brutal and horrifying treatment and violence committed against our sister Eman Al-Obaidi. Her ordeal both during her detention and the violence committed against her by Gaddafi’s thugs at the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli yesterday (26th March 2011) in front of the world’s media was criminal, barbaric, and an unpardonable violence against her dignity, the dignity of the Libyan people, and all of humanity.

We demand the immediate release of Eman Al-Obaidi.

We also demand the immediate release of all children, women and men kidnapped and arrested by Gaddafi and his regime. Thousands of innocent civilians have been forcibly kidnapped and arrested by Gaddafi, his thugs and mercenaries. They must all be released now. We shall pursue every infringement of human dignity and human rights, and every act of violence and brutality against the innocent people of Libya to Libyan courts and the International Criminal Court and use all legal mechanisms at our disposal to bring the perpetrators to local and international justice.

We also demand the immediate release of all Libyan and foreign journalists and media personnel held by Gaddafi and his regime.

We urge all foreign journalists to continue to hold true, and witness, to their media vocation and expose the lies, deception and crimes against humanity committed by the Gaddafi regime, his thugs and mercenaries. We urge all journalists and their agencies to put pressure on the Libyan regime to stop restraining the foreign press at the Rixos Hotel and allow them freedom to travel and report.

Libyan conflict affects overseas students

http://license.icopyright.net/user/viewFreeUse.act?fuid=MTMwMTQ2Njk=