Monthly Archives: August 2011

State Eliminators in Kashmir

By Sajjad Shaukat

During the Bosnian War (1992–1995), Serb forces slaughtered more than 10,000 Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina and buried them in the unamed mass graves. The ethnic leansing campaign of the state eliminators continued throughout areas controlled by the Serb Army. That genocide was repeated in Kosovo where several men and women were massacred and buried in a field.

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Nepal: Human Rights, Development and Constitution

Nepal needs to develop strategies, plans, and programmes to make optimum use of its own natural resources and thus avoid so much dependency on foreign aid. To bring about a lasting solution to the country’s problems, the connections between poverty, poor governance, and marginalization need to be carefully and urgently addressed.

Dr. Gyan Basnet

Development implies an intention to free people from overarching dependency and to replace it with self-reliance. But in contrast, it is a well-known fact that the debt repayment obligation of many developing countries has exceeded by far their ability to pay, and most of these countries have high poverty rates and face many serious social, economic, and political problems. Nepal is a country that has a huge foreign debt burden, and its total budget for development is dependent on the foreign aid, loans and the goodwill of donor bodies. Every year the dependency increases. So its people are caught in a poverty trap and, despite 40 years of planning and development effort, 45 per cent of its population today have an income of less than one US dollar a day. Poverty reduction should be the overarching goal of development, but Nepal’s efforts in that direction over the past five decades have failed to improve living standards.

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Bangladesh: New session starts amid calls for opposition return

Dhaka, Aug 18 (bdnews24.com)

The 10th session of the ninth parliament has started amid calls from ruling party MPs for the main opposition BNP to return to the House.

The session, chaired by speaker Abdul Hamid, started at 11am on Thursday.

Earlier, it was decided at a meeting of the business advisory committee led by the speaker that the session will continue until Aug 25.

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Kashmir unmarked graves hold thousands of bodies

Jason Burke

More than 2,000 corpses, believed to be victims of Kashmir’s long-running insurgency, have been found buried in dozens of unmarked graves in the divided region, an Indian government human rights commission report has said.

The graves were found in dozens of villages on the Indian side of the line of control, the de facto border that has split the former kingdom between India and Pakistan for nearly 40 years.

“At 38 places visited in north Kashmir, there were 2,156 unidentified dead bodies buried in unmarked graves,” the inquiry found.

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SAHR Condemns the Arrest of Anna Hazare and Other Activists

South Asians for Human Rights (SAHR) strongly condemns the arrest of Anna Hazare and other activists before their proposed fast for an effective Jan Lokpal Bill. In a democracy, all have a right to protest peacefully and the government must uphold the fundamental right of the citizen of speech and expression. This act of the government is ultra vires of the Constitution of India. Given the gravity of the issue of corruption it is essential that all views on the Jan Lokpal Bill are debated including the proposals of NCPRI.

Shehla Masood, a Madhya Pradesh based civil rights and environmental rights activist was shot dead by an unidentified person in front of her residence in Koh-e-Fiza locality in Bhopal around 11 AM on 16th August, 2011.

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