Scilla Elworthy: Fighting Extreme Violence with Non-Violence| TEDTalk (Video)

How do you deal with a bully without becoming a thug? In this wise and soulful talk, peace activist Scilla Elworthy maps out the skills we need — as nations and individuals — to fight extreme force without using force in return. To answer the question of why and how non-violence works, she evokes historical heroes — Aung San Suu Kyi, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela — and the personal philosophies that powered their peaceful protests. (Filmed at TEDxExeter)

 

Dr. Scilla Elworthy* (born 3 June 1943 in Galashiels, Scotland) is the founder of the Oxford Research Group, a non-governmental organization she set up in 1982 to develop effective dialogue between nuclear weapons policy-makers worldwide and their critics. She served as its executive director from 1982 until 2003, when she left that role in order to set up Peace Direct, a charity supporting local peace-builders in conflict areas. From 2005 she was adviser to Peter Gabriel, Desmond Tutu and Richard Branson in setting up The Elders. She is a member of the World Future Council and the International Task Force on Preventive Diplomacy. She is also the author of several books and the Director of Programmes for the World Peace Festival held in Berlin August 2011.

She has been nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize, and in 2003 she was awarded the Niwano Peace Prize for her work with the Oxford Research Group.

*Bio Courtesy of Wikipedia and Dr. Scilla Elworthy 

 

Recommended Reading: Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century by Peter Ackerman & Christopher Kruegler (1994)

 

International Day for Street Children

The Day

The International Day for Street Children was launched in 2011 by the Consortium for Street Children (CSC), the leading international network dedicated to realizing the rights of street children worldwide, and is supported by Aviva, the world’s 6th largest insurance group. The day is celebrated by street children, NGOs, policy makers, celebrities, corporates and individuals across the globe.

2012

In 2012 the theme for the International Day for Street Children is ‘Challenging Perceptions’ – we are encouraging people to question what they think they know about street children. Challenge your perceptions by watching our film or reading about some common myths.

Key messages

• Across the globe there are large numbers of children surviving on the streets – it’s time we all took action to address this issue.
• Whether they are a runaway from Derby or a street child in Delhi, the factors that drive children to the streets are similar (and include family breakdown, poverty, and violence).
• One of the  greatest challenges faced by a street child is being recognized and treated as someone with rights.
• We must recognize that a street child has the same potential as any other child, given the opportunity.
• Although street children are vulnerable to the dangers of life on the street, they are also resilient and resourceful.
• Street children see themselves as able to make a positive contribution to society despite often negative attitudes towards them.
• We are calling for governments and society to join together and stand up for the rights of street children all over the world. Being a street child is not a crime.
• Street children adopt many tactics necessary to survive on the streets, such as begging, loitering and rough sleeping.
• Heavy handed treatment by authorities – such as violence and round-ups -  is all too common and must be stamped out.
• Rather than treat them as criminals authorities should understand the reasons for street children’s behavior and provide support.

 

Child Actors Shame Mexico’s Politicians with Mockumentary| MSNBC (Video)

MEXICO CITY — A video “mockumentary” that shows children as kidnappers, corrupt cops and drug traffickers has sparked a fierce debate in violence-torn Mexico, with some people calling it a needed wake-up call while others described it as political manipulation or even child abuse.

Kids playing the role of businessmen, criminals and corrupt officials are seen robbing, paying bribes and shooting it out in a mock Mexico made up entirely of children, all to the deceptively laid-back tune of the 1970s ballad “Una Manana,” or “One Morning.”

Produced by a foundation supported by private companies and universities and distributed over the Internet,the video ends with a direct message to the candidates in the Mexico’s July 1 presidential race

A little girl faces the camera and says: “If this is the future that awaits me, I don’t want it. Enough of working for your political parties instead of for us. Enough of cosmetic changes.”

 

‘Discomforting Kids’
Dubbed “Ninos Incomodos,” roughly “Discomforting Kids,” the four-minute video opens with a pudgy kid-businessman waking up in the morning dragging on a cigarette, and closes with a kiddie-version of alleged drug lord Edgar Valdez, aka “La Barbie,” being dragged off to an overcrowded jail full of children by junior cops.

Little girls carrying purses scream and scurry for cover as boys their own age spray machine guns from huge SUVs and assault-rifle toting little cops run to detain them at gunpoint.

Despite the video’s grim images of knife-wielding, migrant-smuggling, gun-toting kids, all the major candidates had praise for it. Leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador called it “well done, it’s tough but it’s the truth.”

Earlier, the candidate of the former governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, Enrique Pena Nieto, wrote in his Twitter account: “I support the message of Discomforting Kids. I hear it all the time on the campaign trail; that ‘time is running out.’ It’s time to renew hope and change Mexico.”

Josefina Vazquez Mota, the candidate of President Felipe Calderon’s conservative National Action Party, tweeted that “the video of Discomforting Kids is a call that can’t be ignored. I accept the challenge, I want to join you.”

Excerpt, read:  Money, Drugs, Guns & Gangs: Child Actors Shame Mexico’s Politicians with Mockumentary | MSNBC

 

Schools as Battlegrounds: Protecting Education From Attack | HRW (Video)

In conflicts around the world, schools, students, and teachers are under attack. When schools are destroyed or students and teachers are threatened, children often drop out of school and don’t come back. Others continue amid violence and fear. Sometimes lives are lost; education is always a casualty.

Resources:

• Children’s Rights Division Education & Conflict | HRW

• Schools as Battlegrounds: Protecting Students, Teachers, and Schools from Attack | HRW

• UNESCO Report on Education Under Attack 2010

• Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack

• Other Human Rights Watch Resources

 

Worst of the Worst: The World’s Most Repressive Societies | Freedom House

This picture taken on March 30, 2011 shows an inmate pushing his hand out through a hole on a window grille at the Berbera prison in Somalia's breakaway republic of Somaliland (Photo: Tony Karumba /AFP/Getty Images)

Freedom House has prepared this special report entitled  Worst of the Worst: The World’s Most Repressive Societies, as a companion to its annual survey on the state of global political rights and civil liberties, Freedom in the World.   The special report provides summary country reports, tables, and graphical information on the countries  that receive the lowest combined ratings for political rights and civil liberties in Freedom in the World, and whose citizens endure systematic and pervasive human rights violations.

The purpose of this report is to  focus the attention of those who are working to advance respect for fundamental human rights around the world, as well as those who are actively engaged in suppressing  such rights. The report serves a reminder that over 1.6 billion people—more than 24 percent of the world’s population—suffer every day from the  basic indignities of not being able to express their thoughts and opinions, of not having a say in who  governs them and how the wealth of their land and labor is spent, and of being unable to obtain justice for crimes perpetrated against them.

Excerpt introduction: Worst of the Worst: The World’s Most Repressive Societies | Freedom House

Related: Least Free Places in the World, 2011| Foreign Policy (Photo Essay)

Postcards from Hell, 2011 –By Elizabeth Dickinson | Foreign Policy

 

Syria Accused of Torturing Second Teenager to Death –By David S. Morgan | CBS

(WARNING: Graphic video)

The body of a 15-year-old Syrian boy, bearing signs of what activists called torture, was returned to his parents six weeks after the boy disappeared.

Video footage of the boy’s body obtained by Al Jazeera from a Syrian source shows what appear to be gruesome wounds: Riddled with bullet holes, the boy’s body is missing an eye and several teeth, his neck and leg broken. A large part of his lower face is now a large hole.

Hundreds in the town of Jeeza mourned the death of Thamer al-Sahri Wednesday. The boy had vanished six weeks ago along with his friend, Hamza al-Khatib, a 13-year-old whose tortured remains were released by Syrian authorities in late May.

Hamza’s body was covered in burns and scorch marks – signs of being tortured by electric shocks and cigarettes. Hamza’s neck had been broken, his arms shot, and his genitals cut off. The torture of Hamza became an international rallying cry against the regime of President Assad.

Excerpt, read: Syria Accused of Torturing Second Teenager to Death –By David S. Morgan |CBS



Related videos:

• Torture in Syria (Video)
• CNN: “Rampant Torture” in Syria  (Video)

 

Freedom Riders | WGBH American Experience- PBS

FREEDOM RIDERS is the powerful harrowing and ultimately inspirational story of six months in 1961 that changed America forever. From May until November 1961, more than 400 black and white Americans risked their lives—and many endured savage beatings and imprisonment—for simply traveling together on buses and trains as they journeyed through the Deep South. Deliberately violating Jim Crow laws, the Freedom Riders met with bitter racism and mob violence along the way, sorely testing their belief in nonviolent activism.

From award-winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson (Wounded Knee, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, The Murder of Emmett Till) FREEDOM RIDERS features testimony from a fascinating cast of central characters: the Riders themselves, state and federal government officials, and journalists who witnessed the Rides firsthand. The two-hour documentary is based on Raymond Arsenault’s book Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice.

I got up one morning in May and I said to my folks at home, I won’t be back today because I’m a Freedom Rider. It was like a wave or a wind that you didn’t know where it was coming from or where it was going, but you knew you were supposed to be there.
— Pauline Knight-Ofuso, Freedom Rider

Despite two earlier Supreme Court decisions that mandated the desegregation of interstate travel facilities, black Americans in 1961 continued to endure hostility and racism while traveling through the South. The newly inaugurated Kennedy administration, embroiled in the Cold War and worried about the nuclear threat, did little to address domestic civil rights.

“It became clear that the civil rights leaders had to do something desperate, something dramatic to get Kennedy’s attention. That was the idea behind the Freedom Rides—to dare the federal government to do what it was supposed to do, and see if their constitutional rights would be protected by the Kennedy administration,” explains Arsenault.

Organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the self-proclaimed “Freedom Riders” came from all strata of American society—black and white, young and old, male and female, Northern and Southern. They embarked on the Rides knowing the danger but firmly committed to the ideals of non-violent protest, aware that their actions could provoke a savage response but willing to put their lives on the line for the cause of justice.

Each time the Freedom Rides met violence and the campaign seemed doomed, new ways were found to sustain and even expand the movement. After Klansmen in Alabama set fire to the original Freedom Ride bus, student activists from Nashville organized a ride of their own. “We were past fear. If we were going to die, we were gonna die, but we can’t stop,” recalls Rider Joan Trumpauer-Mulholland. “If one person falls, others take their place.”

Later, Mississippi officials locked up more than 300 Riders in the notorious Parchman State Penitentiary. Rather than weaken the Riders’ resolve, the move only strengthened their determination. None of the obstacles placed in their path would weaken their commitment.

The Riders’ journey was front-page news and the world was watching. After nearly five months of fighting, the federal government capitulated. On September 22, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued its order to end the segregation in bus and rail stations that had been in place for generations. “This was the first unambiguous victory in the long history of the Civil Rights Movement. It finally said, ‘We can do this.’ And it raised expectations across the board for greater victories in the future,” says Arsenault.

“The people that took a seat on these buses, that went to jail in Jackson, that went to Parchman, they were never the same. We had moments there to learn, to teach each other the way of nonviolence, the way of love, the way of peace. The Freedom Ride created an unbelievable sense: Yes, we will make it. Yes, we will survive. And that nothing, but nothing, was going to stop this movement,” recalls Congressman John Lewis, one of the original Riders.

Says filmmaker Stanley Nelson, “The lesson of the Freedom Rides is that great change can come from a few small steps taken by courageous people. And that sometimes to do any great thing, it’s important that we step out alone.”

Reprint: Freedom Riders | WGBH American Experience – PBS

 

Targeting Journalists | CBS News (Video)

The story behind the recent headlines of civil unrest in Syria, Libya and Egypt are reporters under attack for their online reporting. Journalism through the pipeline of the internet has been an effective tool in penetrating the borders of countries where the traditional media of newspapers, radio and television are controlled by the government. But it has also become the target of oppressive governments. Frank Ucciardo reports on the open-season against online journalists.

Targeting Journalists | CBS News

 

Man Raped & Extorted by Prison Gang, Ignored by Correction Officials –By Alan Prendergast | Denver Westword

In January 2010, Scott Howard, a 39-year-old federal prisoner, made his way briskly into a hearing room in the Robert F. Kennedy Justice Building in Washington, D.C. He was neatly dressed in blazer, slacks and tie, and quite nervous about what he was about to do. He was determined to not think about it too much, to just get it over with — like so much else that he’d been through over the past few years.

Targeted for extortion and sexual assault, Scott Howard was told by prison officials that he could “get along” or be a “whiner.”

The room was teeming with Department of Justice attorneys, law enforcement agents and corrections officials. Not exactly Howard’s kind of crowd; he’d tried to tell his story to such people before, only to be labeled a liar and a whiner. But the participants also included members of Congress, medical professionals, prison activists, counselors and sexual-assault survivors.

They’d all come to take part in a “listening session” on the wishfully titled Prison Rape Elimination Act.   Passed in 2003, PREA created a national commission to study the causes and costs of sexual assault behind bars and to come up with federal policies to attack the problem. Seven years and several blown deadlines later, backers are still waiting for United States Attorney General Eric Holder to adopt new standards incorporating the commission’s findings.

Howard had been invited to join the discussion because of his experiences behind bars — in particular, the three nightmarish years he’d spent in Colorado state prisons, doing time for fraud. It would be the first time he’d ever discussed his ordeal publicly.

When his name was called, he went to the microphone, trying to keep his hands steady as he studied the pages in front of him. “Thank you for allowing me to participate,” he began.

He explained that, although living in a halfway house, he was still in the custody of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons: “Before I was taken into BOP custody, however, I served time in the Colorado Department of Corrections, and it was there that I was repeatedly raped, assaulted and extorted by members of a large, notorious gang.”

The gang was the 211 Crew, a white supremacist group found in many Colorado prisons. 211 leaders pressured him for money and demanded that he help them in an ambitious $300,000 fraud scheme; their threats soon turned into physical attacks, then sexual assaults. He was forced to perform oral sex on gang members and anally raped.

“I spent well over a year trying to get protection by writing to officials,” he said. “My efforts to report were mostly fruitless — and often put me at greater risk. Because I am openly gay, officials blamed me for the attacks. They said as a homosexual I should expect to be targeted by one gang or another.”

Targeted for extortion and sexual assault, Scott Howard was told by prison officials that he could "get along" or be a "whiner."

Howard didn’t tell the whole squalid story. He didn’t mention the evidence of staff involvement with the gang that made his efforts to seek protection even dicier. He didn’t go into how, once he finally started “naming names,” as prison investigators demanded, they accused him of crying rape to cover up his own criminal activities. He barely referred to his last day as a Colorado prisoner, when, he says, he was put in a cell with one of the gang leaders and sexually assaulted again. Despite being a bare summary, the statement was still graphic — and powerful. At times his voice choked up, but Howard kept reading.

When it was over, he sat in the gallery and listened to other testimony by experts and survivors. Then the DOJ officials began asking questions, and some of the questions were directed at Howard. He was astonished. They’d actually paid attention. They’d even taken notes.

“That was very important,” he says now. “Having people listening to me and asking questions — it made me feel like I was being taken seriously at last.”

Howard accused inmate Phuong Dang of sexual assault.

A lot of people are taking Howard seriously these days. Since his talk in Washington a year ago, he’s emerged as a highly visible “survivor speaker” for Just Detention International, a nonprofit active in the campaign to stop sexual abuse in prison, and a caustic critic of Colorado’s DOC and its treatment of rape victims. Last summer he settled a civil-rights lawsuit against several DOC officials for $165,000.

The settlement came as Howard’s attorneys were seeking a hearing to investigate how and why the Colorado Attorney General’s Office had failed for years to produce a critical document in the case — a 2005 entry in Howard’s inmate file that corroborated his claims of seeking help and being ignored. The document, which only surfaced after a private law firm got involved in the defense of a second Howard lawsuit, also casts doubt on the veracity of several sworn affidavits filed by case managers and supervisors claiming that Howard never told them that he was being threatened and extorted.

Winning his case was a major victory for Howard. Finding the proof that he wasn’t lying was even greater vindication, though. Behind bars, all kinds of crimes are committed in secret, and prisoners soon learn to keep quiet about them. Exposing the most heinous violations can be almost impossible when staff attitudes about rape and homosexuality are as convoluted as those of the predators — and Howard says that’s what made the Colorado prison system particularly dangerous for him.

Excerpt, read more: Man Raped & Extorted by Prison Gang, Ignored by Correction Officials –By Alan Prendergast | Denver Westword

Related: Turned Out Sexual Assault Behind Bars -Multi-part Documentary (Video)

No Escape:  Prison Rape in America -Documentary (Video)

 

An Uprising in Egypt: 85 Million Voices Speak As One

The Egyptian capital Cairo was the scene of violent chaos on [last] Friday, when tens of thousands of anti-government protesters stoned and confronted police, who fired back with rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons. It was a major escalation in what was already the biggest challenge to authoritarian President Hosni Mubarak’s 30 year-rule. They are demanding Mubarak’s ouster and venting their rage at years of government neglect of rampant poverty, unemployment and rising food prices.

 

CAIRO — Egypt’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood and the secular opposition banded together Sunday around a prominent government critic to negotiate for forces seeking the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, as the army struggled to hold a capital seized by fears of chaos and buoyed by euphoria that three decades of Mr. Mubarak’s rule may be coming to an end.

The announcement that the critic, Mohamed ElBaradei, would represent a loosely unified opposition reconfigured the struggle between Mr. Mubarak’s government and a six-day-old uprising bent on driving him and his party from power.

Though lacking deep support on his own, Dr. ElBaradei, a Nobel laureate and diplomat, could serve as a consensus figure for a movement that has struggled to articulate a program for a potential transition. It suggested, too, that the opposition was aware of the uprising’s image abroad, putting forth a candidate who might be more acceptable to the West than beloved in Egypt.

In scenes as tumultuous as any since the uprising began, Dr. ElBaradei defied a government curfew and joined thousands of protesters in Liberation Square, a downtown landmark that has become the epicenter of the uprising and a platform, writ small, for the frustrations, ambitions and resurgent pride of a generation claiming the country’s mantle.

“Today we are proud of Egyptians,” Dr. ElBaradei told throngs who surged toward him in a square festooned with banners calling for Mr. Mubarak’s fall. “We have restored our rights, restored our freedom, and what we have begun cannot be reversed.”

Dr. ElBaradei declared it a “new era,” and as night fell there were few in Egypt who seemed to disagree.

Excerpt, read: Opposition Rallies to ElBaradei as Military Reinforces in Cairo -By Anthony Shadid & David D. Kirkpatrick |NYT

 

Related: Egypt Cuts Off Internet Access Following Street Protest | Bloomberg (VIDEO)

Egypt’s Crisis: Mubarak Family Profile – By Martin Evans | Telegraph UK

President Obama Speaks About  the Situation in Egypt (VIDEO)

Clinton ‘Deeply Concerned’ About Violence Against Egypt Protesters in Egypt |PBS Newshour (VIDEO)

Egypt’s Front Pages: Read All About It | The Economist