Police have arrested a mother and father in Kashmir for allegedly murdering their teenage daughter by throwing acid on her in an honor killing. It is said to be the first of its kind in the Pakistani-administered region, although they are commonplace across Pakistan.
Anosh Zafar, 16, was attacked after her father, Mohammed Zafar, saw her ‘standing close’ to a boy, police claimed.
Police officer Imtiaz Ali claims Mr. Zafar and his wife confessed to killing the girl because they believed she had sullied the family’s honor. The couple was arrested on Tuesday and an autopsy confirmed that the girl died of acid burns, according to local government official Masood-ur-Rehman. Police say the couple’s eldest daughter brought the case, which took place in a small village in the southern district of Kotli, to their attention.
She became suspicious when her parents refused to allow mourners to see the face of the dead girl before burial, which is a normal practice in Kashmiri Muslim society. Raja Tahir Ayub, another local police officer, told the BBC the girl’s father was furious because he saw the girl ‘looking at two boys’ on a motorcycle.
Mr. Ayub said: ‘He took his daughter inside, beat her up and then poured acid over her with the help of his wife.’ The parents did not take the her to hospital until the next day and she died there. Muhammad Jahangir, the head of the hospital in Kotli said the girl arrived with more than 35% burns.
‘There was no way she could survive,’ he explained.
Scores of women are murdered every year for marriages or relationships not approved by their families in Pakistan. The government made acid attacks a criminal offense punishable with life imprisonment in March.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said that in 2011, at least 943 women were murdered, nine had their noses cut off, 98 were tortured, 47 set on fire and 38 attacked with acid.
My journey into the dark underworld of the US military begins on a rainy Tuesday morning in March 2008, with a visit to Tampa, Florida. I am here to meet Forrest Fogarty, an American patriot who served in the US army for two years in Iraq. Fogarty is also a white supremacist of the serious Hitler-worshipping type.
We meet in his favorite hangout, the Winghouse Bar & Grill. In our brief phone call, I’d asked how I would recognize him. “Just look for the skinhead with the tattoos,” he said. And sure enough, sitting straight to my right as I walk in is a youngish-looking man, plastered in tattoos, with cropped hair and bulging biceps. “You’re British, right,” he says, as we order. “I remember seeing black guys with British accents in Iraq, shit was so crazy.”
Fogarty tells me he was bullied at his LA high school by Mexican and African-American children, and was just 14 when he decided he wanted to be a Nazi. He has no qualms about flaunting his prejudice. When black people come into the bar, he emits a hiss of disapproval. “I just don’t want to be around them,” he tells me. “I don’t want to look at them, I don’t want them near me.”
As a young man, Fogarty was obsessed with Ian Stuart Donaldson, the legendary singer in the British band Skrewdriver, who is hero-worshipped in the neo-Nazi music scene. At 16, he had an image from one of Skrewdriver’s album covers – a Viking carrying an axe, an icon among white nationalists – tattooed on his left forearm. Soon after, he had a Celtic cross, an Irish symbol appropriated by neo-Nazis, emblazoned on his stomach. A few years later, he started his own band, Attack, now one of the biggest Nazi bands in the US. But it was never his day job. “I was a landscaper when I left school,” he says. “I kind of fell into it. I didn’t give a shit what I was doing, I was just drinking and fighting.”
For the next eight years he drifted through jobs in construction and landscaping, and began hanging out with the National Alliance, at the time one of the biggest neo-Nazi organizations in the US. He soon became a member. He had always seen himself as a fighter and warrior, so he resolved to do what two generations of Fogartys had done before him: join the military.
Fogarty was not the first extremist to enter the armed forces. The neo-Nazi movement has had a long and tense relationship with the US military. Since its inception, the leaders of the white supremacist movement have encouraged their members to enlist. They see it as a way for their followers to receive combat and weapons training, courtesy of the US government, and then to bring what they learn home to undertake a domestic race war. Not all far-right groups subscribe to this vision – some, such as the Ku Klux Klan, claim to prefer a democratic approach – but a large portion see themselves as insurrectionary forces. To that end, professional training in warfare is a must.
The US military has long been aware of these groups’ attempts at infiltration, but it wasn’t until 1996 that supremacist and neo-Nazi groups were specifically banned from the military, after the murder in 1995 of two African-Americans by a neo-Nazi paratrooper stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Fogarty was recruited the year after.
He knew that the tattoo he had riding up his forearm could be a problem when it came to enlistment. In a neo-Nazi underworld obsessed with secrecy, racist tattoos remain one of the clearest indicators of extremism for a recruiter, and in an effort to police the matter, the US military requires recruits to explain any tattoos. “They just told me to write an explanation of each tattoo and I made up some stuff and that was that,” he says.
Soon after Fogarty was approved, his ex-girlfriend and mother of his eldest child contacted the military. According to Fogarty, she sent a dossier of pictures to his military command that showed him at white supremacist and neo-Nazi rallies, as well as performing his racist rock with Attack. “They hauled me before some sort of committee, and showed me the pictures. I just denied it.” The committee, he says, “knew what I was about, but they let it go because I’m a great soldier”.
Fogarty remained in the reserves, until finally, in 2004, he was sent where he had always wanted to go: Iraq. Before he left for the Middle East, he joined the Hammerskin Nation – described by the Anti-Defamation League as the “the most violent and best-organised neo-Nazi skinhead group in the United States”.
Fogarty maintains that a good portion of those around him were aware of his neo-Nazism. “They all knew in my unit,” he says. “They would always kid around and say, ‘Hey, you’re that skinhead!’” He was confident enough of his carte blanche from the military that during his break from service in 2004, he flew not to see his family in the US but to Dresden, Germany, to give a concert to 2,500 skinheads, on the army’s budget.
When he was at Camp Victory in Baghdad, Fogarty even says a sergeant came up to him and said, “You’re one of those racist motherfuckers, aren’t you?” I ask how the sergeant knew about his racism. “The tattoo, I suppose. I can’t hide everything – people knew, even the chain of command.”
Another white supremacist soldier, James Douglas Ross, a military intelligence officer stationed at Fort Bragg, was given a bad conduct discharge from the army when he was caught trying to mail a sub-machine gun from Iraq to his father’s home in Spokane, Washington. Military police found a cache of white supremacist paraphernalia and several weapons hidden behind ceiling tiles in Ross’s military quarters. After his discharge, a Spokane County deputy sheriff saw Ross passing out fliers for the neo-Nazi National Alliance. And in early 2012, a photo emerged of a 10-strong US marine scout sniper unit posing for a photo with a Nazi SS bolts flag in Sangin, Afghanistan.
According to the military, the symbolism was unknown to the soldiers. “Certainly, the use of the ‘SS runes’ is not acceptable and scout snipers have been addressed concerning this issue,” marine corps spokesman Captain Gregory Wolf said.
The magnitude of the problem within the military is hard to quantify. The military does not track extremists as a discrete category, coupling them with gang members, and those in the neo-Nazi movement claim different numbers. The National Socialist Movement claimed 190 of its members are inside. White Revolution claimed 12. In white supremacist incidents from 2001 to 2008, the FBI identified 203 veterans. Because the FBI focused only on reported cases, its numbers don’t include the many extremist soldiers who have managed to stay off the radar. But its report does pinpoint why the white supremacist movements seek to recruit veterans – they “may exploit their accesses to restricted areas and intelligence or apply specialized training in weapons, tactics, and organizational skills to benefit the extremist movement”.
The report found that two army privates in the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg had attempted in 2007 to sell stolen property from the military – including ballistic vests, a combat helmet, and pain medications such as morphine – to an undercover FBI agent they believed was involved with the white supremacist movement (they were convicted and sentenced to six years in prison). It also found multiple examples of white supremacist recruitment among active military personnel, including a period in 2003 when six active-duty soldiers at Fort Riley were found to be members of the neo-Nazi group Aryan Nations, working to recruit their army colleagues and even serving as the Aryan Nations’ point of contact for the State of Kansas.
The degree of impunity encountered by Fogarty and countless other extremists has caused tensions within the military. The blind eye turned by the recruiters angered many investigators whose integrity was being compromised. Hunter Glass was a paratrooper in the 1980s and became a gang cop in 1999 in Fairville, North Carolina, next to Fort Bragg. “In the 1990s, the military was hard on them, they could pick and choose,” he recalls. The change came after 9/11. “The key rule nowadays is ignore it until it becomes a problem,” Glass tells me. “We need manpower. So as long as the man isn’t acting out, let’s blow it off.” He recounts one episode in early 2005 when he was requested by military police investigators at Fort Bragg to interview a soldier with blatant skinhead insignia – SS lightning bolts and hammers. Glass worked with the base’s military police investigators, who filed a report. “They recommended that he be kicked out,” he recalls, “but the commanding officers didn’t do anything.” He says there was an open culture of impunity. “We’re seeing guys with tattoos all the time … As far as hunting them down, I don’t see it. I’m seeing the opposite, where if a white supremacist has committed a crime, the military stance will be, ‘He didn’t commit a race-related crime.’ “
By 2005, the US had 150,000 troops deployed in Iraq and 19,500 in Afghanistan. But the military wasn’t prepared in any way for this kind of extended deployment – and just two years into the war in Iraq, people were talking openly about the fact that it had reached breaking point. The slim forces needed fattening up and what followed constituted a complete re-evaluation of who was qualified to serve – a full-works facelift of the service unheard of in modern American history. In the relatively halcyon days of the first Gulf war in 1990, the US military blocked the enlistment of felons. It spurned men and women with low IQs or those without a high school diploma. It would either block the enlistment of or kick out neo-Nazis and gang members. It would treat or discharge alcoholics, drug abusers and the mentally ill. No more. While the Bush administration adopted conservative policies pretty much universally, it saved its ration of liberalism for the US military, where it scrapped many of the regulations governing recruitment.
Many of the wars’ worst atrocities are linked directly to the loosening of enlistment regulations on criminals, racist extremists, and gang members, among others. Then there are the effects on the troops themselves. Lowering standards on intelligence and body weight, for example, compromised the military’s operational readiness and undoubtedly endangered the lives of US and allied troops. Hundreds of soldiers may have paid with their lives for this folly.
Every year in Pakistan, there are at least 100 people attacked with acid — the majority women. Many more go unreported. The new documentary SAVING FACE is the story of two survivors of such attacks — their battle for justice and their journey of healing.
2012 Academy Award Nominee For Documentary (Short Subject)
WASHINGTON — Relatives of three American citizens killed in drone strikes in Yemen last year filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against four senior national security officials on July 17th. The suit, in the Federal District Court here, opened a new chapter in the legal wrangling over the Obama administration’s use of drones in pursuit of terrorism suspects away from traditional “hot” battlefields like Afghanistan.
The first strike, on Sept. 30, killed a group of people includingAnwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was born in New Mexico, and Samir Khan, a naturalized American citizen who lived at times in Queens, Long Island and North Carolina. The second, on Oct. 14, killed a group of people including Mr. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was born in Colorado.
Accused in the suit of authorizing and directing the strikes are Leon E. Panetta, the secretary of defense; David H. Petraeus, the director of the C.I.A.; and two senior commanders of the military’s Special Operations forces, Adm. William H. McRaven of the Navy and Lt. Gen. Joseph L. Votel of the Army.
“The killings violated fundamental rights afforded to all U.S. citizens, including the right not to be deprived of life without due process of law,” the complaint says.
Press officials with the C.I.A., the Pentagon and the Justice Department declined to comment.
The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, was filed by Nasser al-Awlaki, who was Anwar’s father and Abdulrahman’s grandfather, and Sarah Khan, Samir’s mother. Lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights are assisting them in the legal action.
Eleanor Roosevelt was the driving force behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the United Nations passed in 1948. Since then, women have been at the forefront of human rights movements—pushing for human rights to be truly universal.
Some of the women in the video above are women’s rights activists and others are human rights activists who happen to be women. Whether it’s promoting tolerance in Pakistan, democratizing Egypt and Bahrain, or fighting for LGBT rights in Russia, these women face unique challenges, from sexism to gender-based violence. Yet they refused to be silenced.
Countries that carried out executions in 2011 did so at an alarming rate but those employing capital punishment have decreased by more than a third compared to a decade ago. Only 10 percent of countries in the world, 20 out of 198, carried out executions last year.
People were executed or sentenced to death for a range of offenses including adultery and sodomy in Iran, blasphemy in Pakistan, sorcery in Saudi Arabia, the trafficking of human bones in the Republic of Congo, and drug offenses in more than 10 countries. Methods of execution in 2011 included beheading, hanging, lethal injection and shooting.
Some 18,750 people remained under sentence of death at the end of 2011 and at least 676 people were executed worldwide.
Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases without exception regardless of the nature of the crime, the characteristics of the offender or the method used by the state to carry out the execution. The death penalty violates the right to life and is the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.
It’s International Women’s Day. The event, born of the socialist movement in the United States the early 1900s, has spread across the world in the century since.
But the day looks very different across the globe, much like the differences in the lives of women worldwide. Here’s how the event is being celebrated across in different parts of the world:
Pakistan: Female family members of missing Pakistanis are using the day to reiterate demands to know where their loved ones are. “For years, human rights activists have claimed that Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and other security agencies in Pakistan routinely abduct men without legal justification,” The Times recently reported.
Venezuela: Backers of President Hugo Chavez marched for the women’s event. Chavez, in power for 13 years, faces a challenge from candidate Henrique Capriles this fall, as frustration rises over surging homicide rates and the stagnant economy.
Turkey: Women splattered with artificial blood protested domestic violence, while the Turkish parliament passed laws that will try to protect women and children from abuse. “The discriminative implementations against women and domestic violence should be stopped,” President Abdullah Gul said, according to the Hurriyet Daily News.
Sudan: The day meant freedom for about 4,000 prisoners in Sudan who are being released to mark the day, the Associated Press reported. The prisoners included hundreds of women and children.
Peru: Feminist groups are reportedly calling on President Ollanta Humala to follow through on his campaign promises to ensure that the rights of Peruvian women are respected.
Egypt: Hundreds of women marched to demand the right to help draft the new constitution. “Women have yet to gain any significant influence in the new Egypt, revealing the complexities of defining gender rights in a nation colored by Islam, inundated by Western media permissiveness and ruled by military men operating in a cloistered realm of gold stars and salutes,” The Times recently reported.
Somalia: Women held a parade, the first one of its kind since the Shabab, an Islamic militant group, was ejected from the capital, Mogadishu, the Associated Press reported.
United States: It didn’t happen today, but last week the United Nations fund for gender equality announced in New York City that it would give out $10.5 million in grants to groups working to empower women in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe and Central Asia.
Know of another interesting event marking International Women’s Day around the world?
A Pakistani woman holds a picture of herself prior to being burned with acid. (Photo: Source Unknown)
The shocking tally highlights the scale of violence against women in conservative, rural parts of the Muslim country, where rape victims are routinely sentenced to death by village elders and murderers can escape court by paying blood money.
Zohra Yusuf, chairperson of The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said too many cases were dismissed by police as private, family affairs.
“It is one of the signs of a paternalistic and feudal society,” she said.
“The government introduced a law in 2006 to check this and at least more cases are now being registered.
“But the status of women in these societies means that anything they do is seen as a reflection of the family’s honor and that there is some sympathy for the perpetrators of these murders.”
WARNING:The video above is extremely violent and/or graphic. You must be 18+ years old to view it.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Taliban insurgents have released a video showing them killing 16 Pakistani men who were captured in a raid last month in a restive northwestern province, a spokesman for the Pakistani military said Monday, July 18th.
The graphic video shows the 16 men, most of whom appear to be police officers, standing in a line with their hands tied behind their backs. Four insurgents stand in front, holding assault rifles, with their faces covered by scarves.
One insurgent makes a brief speech in Pashto, the language spoken in the country’s northwest, accusing the men of killing six children in the Swat district.
“These are the enemies of Islam who originated from Pakistan,” he says, according to a translation of the statement posted by the Long War Journal, a Web site that specializes in reports on militancy. The speaker in the video describes the 16 men as “murtards,” or those who have abandoned Islam.
“They are the Pakistani police, soldiers and their supporters who recently lined up six kids in Swat and shot them execution-style,” the insurgent says. “These Pakistanis are now our captives, and we will avenge the death of the children by doing the same to them.”
A quick burst of gunfire follows. The men fall to the ground, and some can be heard moaning. Then an insurgent approaches them one by one and fires rounds at each man who still appears to be alive.
Another person, holding a video camera, films the execution and walks up and down capturing images of the victims. The video runs 5 minutes, 36 seconds in all.
No Taliban group had yet publicly claimed responsibility for the video, which was first shown on the LiveLeak video-sharing Web site.
Jackie and Mike Bezos have donated a personal gift of $25,000 to "The RaiseForWomen challenge," a fundraising initiative supporting nonprofits doing work to empower women and girls around the world. The donation, combined with $75,000 from The Skoll Foundation, brings to $100,000 the total in prizes going to the causes that raise the most funds. Ja […]
We are thrilled to announce a very successful first week in the RaiseforWomen Challenge, with over $126,000 raised! We would like to thank everyone who has participated in the challenge so far. We have under five weeks left –– until June 6 –– to raise as much as possible! Half the Sky Movement will be giving out weekly prizes to individuals participating in […]
I remember reading Betty Harragan’s Games Mother Never Taught You when it first came out over thirty years ago. As a woman entrepreneur, that book had a huge impact on me — both in how to navigate at work, a new universe that felt like I had been dropped onto Mars, and how I saw myself as an agent of change. This was long before cell phones, the Internet, an […]
True or False? Overly severe discipline in school does not improve student behavior, but pushes them out of school and into the school-to-prison pipeline. How much did law enforcement pay a witness in an Alabama capital punishment case for less-than-truthful testimony? How many victims of human trafficking sued Signal International, LLC on Tuesday for forcin […]
This was cross posted to The Huffington Post. Projecting his latest music video onto the sides of 66 buildings around the world over the weekend, Kanye West debuted his new song, "New Slaves." He rapped: I know that we the new slaves... Meanwhile the DEA, teamed up with the CCA They tryina lock n---s up, they tryna make new slaves See that's t […]
I have zero tolerance for schools that punish students for exercising their First Amendment rights. Students like Wesley Teague, who joked about his school's athletic department and Kyron Birdine, who was suspended for mocking standardized tests, did nothing more than exercise their right to freedom of expression. Free speech is a right that students ne […]
Headline Title: African Union: Reject Kenya’s attempt to shield its leaders from accountability 24 May 2013 The African Union (AU) must throw out the resolution tabled by the Kenyan government calling for the International Criminal Court's (ICC) case to be referred for trial in Kenya, Amnesty International has urged. President Kenyatta and Vice-Preside […]
Headline Title: Uganda: Activists arrested as disturbing crackdown on media continues 24 May 2013 The Ugandan authorities must end an attack on freedom of expression that has left several media outlets shut by security forces for a fifth day, Amnesty International said today after several activists were arrested for protesting against the crackdown.Armed po […]
Headline Title: ‘We expect anything from the authorities' 24 May 2013 The two men are so scared they don't want to be named.They know that if the authorities in their home country, the United Arab Emirates, hear them criticize the human rights situation in the country, their families will pay a high price.Both activists are part of a group of 94 c […]
Tweet Widget Facebook Like Email American companies investing in Burma should not let new US government reporting requirements lull them into complacency on human rights concerns. The US “Reporting Requirements on Responsible Investment” in Burma went into effect on May 23, 2013. (New York) – American companies investing in Burma should not let new US govern […]
Tweet Widget Facebook Like Email Human Rights Watch has over 100 staff tweeting human rights developments from around the world. Here are some of their most popular tweets from the last seven days. Most Popular on Twitter - Top Tweets of the Week Human Rights Watch has over 100 staff tweeting human rights developments from around the world. Here are some of […]
Tweet Widget Facebook Like Email Serious electoral flaws and human rights abuses by the Iranian government undermine any meaningful prospect of free and fair elections on June 14, 2013. Dozens of political activists and journalists detained during the violent government crackdown that followed the disputed 2009 presidential election remain in prison, two for […]
Today not only marks the start of the Memorial Day weekend and with it the beginning of summer, it also marks seven days until the Illinois House of Representatives adjourns from Spring Session.
Yesterday, the President nominated Chai Feldblum to serve a second term as a commissioner on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Her first term ends in July.
Abortion-rights this week were bolstered by court rulings in Arizona and Arkansas. As for the military's treatment of women, the negative news went on, as a U.S. West Point military sergeant was accused of photographing and filming female cadets taking showers.
Global efforts to improve maternal health are ready for fine tuning when it comes to the Middle East and North Africa. This will be the aim of researchers gathering ahead of this month's global conference on women's health in Kuala Lumpur.
As the world's top performer on gender equality, Iceland needs to sustain its achievements and bridge remaining gaps on employment and gender based violence, a group of independent United Nations experts today urged as the country's newly formed Government took office.
The United Nations human rights office today said it was "concerned" about the legal rights of Guatemalans after a high court overturned the 80 year prison sentence against former military leader, Efrain Ríos Montt.
More than 260 million people across the world are still victims of human rights abuses due to caste-based discrimination, United Nations independent experts warned today, urging South Asian countries to strengthen legislation to protect them.
In this week’s address, President Obama commemorates Memorial Day by paying tribute to the men and women in uniform who have given their lives in service to our country. Transcript | Download mp4 | Download mp3 read more
At a town hall meeting today on school safety at the Classical Magnet School in Hartford, I got to hear firsthand how Connecticut is leading the nation in adopting common-sense solutions to reduce gun violence and improve school safety. In the aftermath of the massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School last December, the courage and resilience of teachers, […]
The Obama Administration has made improving the quality and efficiency of the health care system a priority. Already we have put in place new payment and care models that reward doctors and hospitals for providing high quality and efficient care to their patients. We are working with hospitals to identify gaps in patient safety and ways to reduce preventable […]
This week marks the one-year anniversary of the Digital Government Strategy, and we want to take a moment to reflect on a recent White House Executive Order about open data. This Executive Order and accompanying Open Data Policy [PDF 6MB] requires that, going forward, all data generated by the federal government be made available in...
“Ahora el video de la Cascada de Tratamiento de VIH también está disponible en español” Recently we shared an animated video about the HIV treatment cascade in the United States that has quickly become one of the most-watched videos ever on the AIDS.gov YouTube channel . We’re pleased to share the Spanish language version of this...
Today marks one year since we released the Digital Government Strategy (PDF/ HTML5), as part of the President’s directive to build a 21st Century Government that delivers better services to the American people. The Strategy is built on the proposition that all Americans should be able to access information from their Government anywhere, anytime, and on any […]
