Mission & Justice

20/6/08

Wars around the globe killed three times more people during the second half of the 20th century than previously estimated, according to a study released on Friday. Some 5.4 million deaths caused by armed conflicts occurred between 1955 and 2003 in 13 nations surveyed, ranging from a low of 7000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo to 3.8 million killed in Vietnam. Previous research, based on media reports or before-and-after census figures, have tended to severely underestimate war-related fatalities among both combatants and civilians, the new study argues. These so-called “passive” reports “are typically the only ones available during ongoing conflicts, and represent the most commonly cited sources for government and other estimates of war casualties, as in the current war in Iraq,” notes the study, published in the British Medical Journal. The number of civilian casualties in Iraq remains sharply contested, with some studies estimating the death toll at 10 times the figure given by the US military.

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Ian Munro; 21/6/08

The United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, wants more women peacekeepers and police to help counter “the abominable practice of sexual violence” resulting from armed conflicts. Mr Ban told a Security Council hearing on women and security that sexual violence posed a grave threat to the safety of women and girls in areas recovering from armed conflict. He called for future UN mandates to include clear provisions protecting women and children, and said he wanted more women to act as peacekeepers and to provide leadership. His comments came as UN peacekeepers in Darfur said the biggest problem now confronting the blighted region was the systematic rape of women and children as young as four.

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Paola Totaro; 21/6/08

We met Annie not long after moving into our new home in London. She came recommended via word-of-mouth as so many migrant domestic workers do. On day one, she arrived early and I found her waiting politely outside on the street ready to start work when the clock struck 9am.We had a cup of tea together before she began work and despite palpable shyness - had nobody asked her to talk about herself before? - she said she’d come to London in 2002 and had worked six days a week ever since as a cleaner, a housekeeper, an all-round helper with a number of families to maximise her earnings.

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Editorial: 20/6/08

The term “war or terror” rings all the wrong bells with international public opinion these days because of the way it has been misappropriated by President Bush to justify invading and occupying Iraq, demonizing Hamas, Hezbollah and similar organizations and generally refusing to have anything to do with anyone else he dislikes. It is a great pity because terror is no figment of a right-wing imagination. It is real, as people in too many countries know to their terrible cost — in Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Pakistan, Algeria, Spain or Lebanon. They are merely some of the more high-profile targets of the men and women of violence.  Because it is real, so is the struggle to defeat it. There is a war on terror. The fact that there is no obvious link between, say, the Tamil Tigers and Colombia’s FARC militants or Al-Qaeda and ETA — or equally that so many people find it unpalatable to agree with anything President Bush says — does not diminish that fact.

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Herve Couturier; 20/6/08

Diplomats from around the world have urged an end to the persistent plague of sexual violence during armed conflicts, at a meeting at UN headquarters. “Rape is a crime that can never be condoned. Yet women and girls in conflict situations around the world have been subjected to widespread and deliberate acts of sexual violence,” said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She was chairing debate today in the UN Security Council to demand an immediate end to the use of rape and all acts of sexual violence against women as weapons of war. The day-long debate, at the initiative of the United States, which chairs the 15-member council this month, was to adopt a resolution that “demands the immediate and complete cessation by all parties to armed conflict of all acts of sexual violence against civilians with immediate effect”.

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Mike Steketee; 18/6/08

Refugee numbers around the world are rising after a five-year decline, with conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq boosting the numbers. UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres says there is a threat of further increases because of multiple conflicts, bad governance, competition for scarce resources as a result of climate change and instability generated by food and fuel price rises that have hit the poor. The UNHCR’s report on global trends for last year, released yesterday, estimates the number of refugees under its responsibility rose by 1.5million to 11.4million, with the volatile situation in Iraq making a significant contribution. It was the second year of increases after five years of falls. The total excludes persons who are displaced by conflict but stay within their country: that number grew last year by 1.6 million to 26million.

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Tom Lasseter; 17/6/08

An investigation into terrorism suspects held in US prison camps around the world has found that possibly hundreds have been wrongly imprisoned. The eight-month investigation on three continents found that the US had wrongfully imprisoned suspects in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of “flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments”, reported the McClatchy newspapers website yesterday. McClatchy, the third-largest newspaper and internet publisher in the US, said it had interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials, primarily in Afghanistan, and several US officials and former officials. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of US military tribunal documents and other records.

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Adrian Hamilton,13/6/08

Not a tear was shed, nor a cheer raised. Not even the protesters have bothered to turn out as President Bush has wound his way around Europe on the final visit of his two-term occupancy of the White House. Instead, he has come almost like an anonymous diplomat to hold talks in private, say a few words to the cameras and — unless the UK has something very unexpected up its sleeve this weekend — to depart almost unrecognized, and certainly unacclaimed. There’s a fanciful version of this event, spun by the commentators in Washington and followed even by some here, which says the very anonymity of Bush’s visit is a tribute to the success of the relationship he has now developed with Europe. Where in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, relations were fraught and loud, now Bush and Europe are pretty comfortable with each other. The EU’s three main leaders — Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy — are pro-American.

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8/6/08; http://www.theage.com.au/world/us-leads-the-world-on-prisoner-numbers-20080607-2n96.html

The US has 2.3 million people behind bars, more than any other country and more than ever before in its history, Human Rights Watch says. This means an incarceration rate of 762 per 100,000 residents, compared with 152 per 100,000 in Britain, 108 in Canada, and 91 in France, the organisation said in a statement commenting on Justice Department figures released yesterday. The figures show a sharp racial imbalance in the US prison population, with blacks outnumbering whites by six to one. Nearly 11% of black men aged 30-34 are in prison, according to Justice Department figures. Human Rights Watch said blacks were 12 times more likely to be jailed for drug-related crimes than whites, though drug use was about the same in the two races. “Although whites, being more numerous, constitute the large majority of drug users, blacks constitute 54% of all persons entering prisons with a new drug offence conviction,” it said.

Irfan Yusuf; 7/608, Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney lawyer and recipient of the 2007 Allen & Unwin Iremonger award for public affairs writing.

- Inside Muslim Minds; Riaz Hassan; MUP
- Who Speaks For Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think; John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed Gallup Press

We don’t often associate the skin tones, exotic culture and poverty of the world’s largest Catholic continent with Catholicism. Few Australian Catholics would recognise the popular beliefs and practices of their Latin American co-religionists. So if I were to make an ambit criticism of Christianity based on the extreme poverty and draconian politics of Latin America, Catholics would be justified in poking their fingers at me and ridiculing my simplistic reasoning. But among those pointing at me in ridicule would be the polemicists and cultural warriors with three fingers pointing back at themselves. Google jihad. Featuring prominently is Jihad Watch, a blog moderated by far-right Catholic polemicist Robert Spencer.
It takes a certain degree of intellectual laziness (often combined with irrational prejudice) to attribute negative characteristics to an entire group of people, especially when members of this group rarely, if ever, regard themselves as sharing some uniform identity.

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