Reporting on Conflict | Media Watch BlogPeacemakers Trust posts news, reports or announcements of interest to people studying or working in the field of dispute resolution, conflict transformation and peacebuilding. Inclusion of an item on the media watch blog does not imply endorsement or agreement of Peacemakers Trust with views expressed by authors of posted items.
The three phases of the roadmap are strongly interrelated. It is the role of the members of the Quartet not only to support the two sides in fulfilling their obligations under the roadmap but also to judge the readiness of each of the two parties to move from one phase to another.
(...more)In his moderator’s address at the start of the World Council of Churches central committee meeting in Geneva on 26 August 2009, the Rev Dr Walter Altmann said that the WCC – as well as the world at large – stands “at a crossroads in the presentâ€.
(...more)BAAN PHRUCHING – Till last year, the rice fields near this village that sits in the midst of a rubber plantation had remained abandoned. It was neglect that is easily explained: a steady rise in the price of rubber had been more enticing to the villagers.
Yet the fields overgrown with weeds had not gone unnoticed by a mother of two in this community of Malay-Muslims in Thailand’s southern region, which has been torn apart by a bloody insurgency now in its sixth year. The 45-year-old Halisa Manma felt it was time to restore the 72 hectares to help feed the 300 families of Baan Phruching and sell the excess rice in the market.
Halisa’s drive went beyond that initial spark to change the landscape of her village. She inspired 80 women…
(...more)Victims of human-rights abuses around the world increasingly are seeking justice American style — by filing lawsuits against deep-pocketed defendants.
The Alien Tort Statute, a one-sentence law enacted in 1789 authorizing foreign nationals to file U.S. civil actions against those who violate “the law of nations,” has been used often in recent years to sue major companies for alleged complicity in crimes overseas, including torture and murder. Defendants need only to have regular business contacts with the U.S. to be vulnerable to lawsuits…
In one of the most prominent recent cases, Royal Dutch Shell PLC paid $15.5 million in June to settle a lawsuit claiming it was complicit in the Nigerian government’s execution of activists who had protested Shell’s oil production in the country. Shell has denied wrongdoing.
(...more)BANGKOK – TO ERR is human; to forgive, divine, was the pithy view of Alexander Pope. In three years of political turmoil and economic drift, Thailand has seen plenty of error. But forgiveness is in short supply. Some politicians are calling for an amnesty for the rival street demonstrators who have brought Bangkok to its knees in recent months and the security forces who cracked down on them. Others insist that any amnesty must include MPs who were barred from public office by the courts. Almost everyone agrees that Thailand can move beyond its impasse only when the warring sides call it quits…
It may be premature to talk of forgiveness, says Duncan McCargo of Leeds University. Previous amnesties did not come during fierce contests for power, but only after the dust had settled…
(...more)Jews were pioneers of Labor reform in the United States, most famously for women workers. It is this legacy in particular that still leaves most of the grandchildren and great grandchildren of these folks voting Democrat despite their extraordinary financial success, much to the chagrin of successive Republican presidents.
There are divisions emerging between Jews on these matter, of late, however. Not surprisingly, the leading militants siding with Israel’s most violent policies are also the most opposed to labor rights, such as Sheldon Adelson. Adelson is one of the most extreme influences on American Jewish establishment politics today. This comes as no surprise to me. Moral bankruptcy in Israel’s treatment of Palestinians goes hand in hand with selfishness in labor relations.
(...more)BUENOS AIRES – In her 48 years, Natividad Obeso has already lived several different lives. There was the time when she lived in her native Peru as a successful businesswoman and mother of four. Then there was the time when she spent her days wandering the streets of the Argentine capital, penniless and alone, a fugitive of political persecution that she never understood.
And, fortunately, there came the time for a second chance, when she became an advocate for the rights of migrant women around the world. Almost without realising it, her efforts to defend these women brought Obeso to speak on their behalf at the United Nations High Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development, held in New York in September 2006.
(...more)August 26th of each year is designated in the United States as Women’s Equality Day. Instituted by US Representative Bella Abzug of New York and first established in 1971, the date commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment, the Women’s Suffrage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave U.S. women voting rights in 1920.
(...more)The armed conflict in Angola ended seven years ago, but the consequences of four decades of war are felt still today. And women seem to be bearing the brunt of the suffering.
(...more)Sotheara Chhim, Cambodian psychiatrist and director of the Phnom Penh based organisation TPO (Transcultural Psychosocial Organization), was heard as an expert on Tuesday August 25th. A testimony that was necessary to assess the trauma of the victims of the Khmer Rouge in the Cambodian society and its impact, both individual and collective. Unfortunately, the interpretation struggled, as some of the doctor’s answers were cut and the technical vocabulary was confused. The expert explained how the Khmer Rouge Tribunal could represent a starting point for healing and reconciliation and believed this process must be completed by another – later – mechanism on reparation.
(...more)As it is stipulated in the law establishing it the ECCC is a court grounded in the Cambodian judicial tradition which has sprung off from the French system which, in turn, is a part of what is known as the civil law system (as opposed to the common law which developed in Britain). This tradition is solely responsible for the spectacle we have been witnessing in the last few months which is the Duch trial.
(...more)With the expectation that the Obama administration plans to try to announce its Middle East peace-plan parameters and a rough calendar for a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian talks next month, U.S. Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell is due to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Wednesday in London, the State Department said Monday.
“What George Mitchell is trying to do is lay the foundation that will lead to the resumption of meaningful negotiations,” State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said at a Monday press conference.
(...more)The World Intellectual Property Organisation has opened its second Arbitration and Mediation Center in Singapore, in order to deal with IP disputes originating in Asia…
The first WIPO arbitration and mediation centre was set up in Geneva in 1994 and to date it has handled 30,000 disputes, according to WIPO.
(...more)UNITED NATIONS — UN chief Ban Ki-moon said Friday he was considering naming a top official to lead the fight against sexual violence and urged the General Assembly to create a dedicated institution for women’s rights.
“Despite some progress over two decades, the deliberate targeting of civilians through acts of sexual violence continues on a widespread and systematic basis,” Ban told the UN Security Council during a debate on “Women, Peace and Security.”
(...more)Ottawa — The new chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is uprooting the residential school inquiry’s head office out of Ottawa and planting it in a western location – likely Winnipeg – to be closer to former students and to symbolize its independence from the federal government…
“The residential school population is primarily a Western Canada population,†he said, estimating that about three quarters of the schools were located in Western and Northern Canada. “And so the survivor population is primarily in the west. Locating it outside of Ottawa was an easy decision.â€
(...more)KIGALI — For the last fifteen years after the devastating Tutsi Genocide, Rwanda has emerged from the ashes of genocide and embarked on the painful journey of national healing, unity and reconciliation as a pre-requisite for lasting peace, security, good governance and development.
Towards this goal, the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (NURC), was created after a parliamentary law was passed in March 1999. The law was further emphasised by the new Rwandan constitution of June 2003.
NURC has engaged Rwandans into a participatory consultative process to come up with a national unity and reconciliation policy whose core values include promotion of national unity based on ‘Rwandanness’, healing historical wounds through truth searching, acknowledgement and memory of genocide, confession, forgiveness and reconciliation.
(...more)The government of Thailand resumed its use of judicial state killing after a six-year hiatus on Monday, when two men were executed by lethal injection at Bang Khwang prison, central Thailand.
Bundit Jaroenwanit, aged 45, and Jirawat Poompreuk, aged 52, were convicted of drug trafficking on 29 March 2001 and subsequently sentenced to death. It has been reported that they were only given 60 minutes’ notice before their executions were carried out.
“As country after country abandons its use of judicial state killing, the resumption of executions in Thailand is a major step backwards,” said Donna Guest, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific Programme.
Although Thailand continued to hand down death sentences, the authorities did not execute anyone for six years, which the abolitionist movement had welcomed as an encouraging sign from the Asia region.
(...more)The photos from the Bed-In — actually two Bed-Ins, with a week at a hotel in Amsterdam and a week at a hotel in Montreal — have become iconic. There they are, dressed in white, sitting upright and talking to reporters, framed by signs reading, “Bed Peace” and “Hair Peace.”
The Bed-In was a publicity stunt: Lennon and Ono used their honeymoon to talk about peace during the height of the Vietnam War and the Cold War.
(...more)On August 18th, the Israeli Ministry of Defense informed American activist Tristan Anderson’s family and legal counsel that it considers his shooting during a nonviolent protest in the West Bank village of Nil’in, which left him critically injured, an “act of war,†absolving the soldiers responsible from any liability under Israeli law. Anderson was shot directly in the forehead with a high-velocity tear gas canister by Israeli forces on March 13th, 2009, suffering several condensed fractures and necessitating several life-saving surgeries. To date, he remains unconscious at Tel Hashomer Hospital in Tel Aviv; his prospects for recovery are as of now unclear.
(...more)Phnom Penh – Cambodian and Thai armed forces chiefs said 13 months of sometimes-fatal hostilities around the ancient Preah Vihear temple are at an end.
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