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Singapore’s Foreign Domestic Workers Find Their Voices Online · Global Voices
Mong Palatino

Foreign domestic workers demand protection and better living conditions. Photo: Facebook / “HOME”
The Humanitarian Organization for Migrant Economics, or “HOME,” aims to “give voice to the voiceless” in Singapore by providing a platform (a website called “MyVoice”) for migrant workers to write and upload their stories, articles, photographs, and poetry. The advocacy group also offers assistance to abused workers.
According to government data, Singapore is home to 1.3 million registered foreign workers. More than 200,000 of these people are domestic workers, mainly from neighboring countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar, and India.
In recent years, reports have surfaced about domestic workers experiencing maltreatment at the hands of their employers. Case of abuse are rising, despite new laws designed to protect domestic workers’ rights. Last month, a Singaporean news website reported a story about the slave-like conditions of more than 9,000 foreign workers.
Many of the stories and poems published on MyVoice are heartbreaking testimonies that are seldom heard or reported in Singapore. These stories highlight the plight of foreign domestic workers, the majority of whom are young women who left impoverished families in their respective countries to seek better opportunities in Singapore.
Myrna Javier, for example, wrote a poem about a child whose mother is working in another country. An excerpt of the poem reads:
Father, where is my dearest Mama?
Tearfully ask the little one.
Papa can’t give her the right answer
That Mama went to seek for a job on a foreign land
To give us all the better life and free us all from all this strife.
Suppressed happiness in exchange of a dime to a dollar.
Scarcity, of everything, shelter, food and tattered clothes
Simple yet happy filled with love and unity.
Hush dear child, be patient and good.
Dear Mama will be home
Until then let’s smile at the sun and moon
She’ll be with us forever soon
Members and volunteers of HOME hold a solidarity event for a detained Filipino domestic worker in Indonesia. Photo: Facebook / “HOME”
Bhing Navato’s poem captures the experience of many domestic workers who have encountered abuse and sought assistance from groups like HOME:
When I decided to leave my country,
The hardest part was leaving my family.
When I looked at my children, it broke my heart
My husband’s teary eyes tore me apart.
I arrived here full of hope,
I prayed day by day so I could cope.
With three houses to clean in a week,
Rice and eggs for my meals, it really made me weak.
My sleeping area was inadequate,
Although I had a mattress, a pillow and a blanket.
Beside the fish tank was my place to sleep.
Every night, I told the fish,
You’re lucky, you have a crib.
I almost lost my temper one day
When she came to me with only harsh words to say.
I looked at her and thought this way:
The day will come when I will have my way.
Finally it happened, I finished my contract,
Asked for a transfer, but she wanted to send me back.
I was surprised, it was really unfair
I worked so hard, she didn’t even care.
So I decided to leave without permission,
Running away was my only option.
I went to HOME, they guided me all along,
They helped me in everything, taught me how to be strong.
Desi, an abused Indonesian domestic worker, found the inspiration to help others:
Though clueless about Singapore when I arrived in 2014, I was filled with hope. But, only a few days into my work, my employer started to abuse me very badly. A friend helped me escaped after seeing the fear in my eyes and black and blue swelling on my face.
HOME took me into their shelter. I was traumatized, frightened and extremely sad. It was a good intention that brought me to work in Singapore and I cannot understand why I was treated so horribly. That was probably why so many people came to help me.
Even though my family is far away, I have many friends who are very supportive. I don’t have to be embarrassed about my mistreatment because I have done nothing wrong. Now I have found a new dream, a mission in life: helping others. But first, I have helped myself.
This poem by Rosita Madrid Sanchez reflects the story of workers who learned to assert their rights:
As a foreign domestic worker, I have been away for 7 years, and within these years, I have been blindfolded myself. My rights were taken away by my employers and they took away the real me. I just let it go for the sake of earning dollars to send home for my kids.
I can’t be happy, I can’t be sad, I can’t feel the feeling of being a mother because I don’t have the rights to feel so. But you as an employer, do you feel the sadness when you are away from your kids, when you go overseas for work? Do you feel that from hearing the voice of your kids you will know if they are ok? How about me? I am a mother too, I am also human. I can feel these feelings, I can feel all that you can.
But starting this day, I am standing for myself. I am standing for my kids and I am standing for their future, for my future. Stop discrimination. Stop being blindfolded.
Maria Allen Cellan urges fellow migrant workers to keep pursuing their dreams:
Whatever our dreams are, we should never stop reminding ourselves why we are in a foreign country, working hard. We should always be thinking about what’s possible for us in our lifetime. I am pretty sure that most of us don’t want to spend the rest of our lives working overseas and away from our families. We need to keep our dream alive in our hearts, even as we are pushed to work harder and harder every day, enduring all the pains caused by work, all the sleepless crying nights, the homesickness, the starvation and even the lack of freedom and dignity for ourselves. All this endurance should not be wasted.

author: Mong Palatino


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Bahraini Court Refuses to Release Rights Activist Nabeel Rajab, Delays Verdict · Global Voices
Afef Abrougui

Prominent Bahraini human rights defender Nabeel Rajab to stand trial on October 6. Photograph by Majeed Tareef. Copyright: Demotix
Bahrain's High Criminal Court today delayed a verdict in the government's case against human rights activist Nabeel Rajab.
The director of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, Rajab has been jailed several times since 2012 for his activism and human rights work.
Rajab was arrested yet again on 13 June 2016 for criticizing Bahrain's participation in the Saudi-led war against Houthi rebels in Yemen, and for speaking out about torture in Bahrain's infamous Jaw prison on Twitter. The court postponed the verdict until 6 October and refused to release Najab in the interim.
#Bahrain: High Criminal Court postponed the trial of HRD Nabeel Rajab to 6 October for ruling. #ReleaseNabeel pic.twitter.com/9UBGmFwPOj
— Nabeel Rajab (@NABEELRAJAB) September 5, 2016
If convicted, Rajab could face up to 15 years in prison under Bahrain's penal code which prescribes a 10-year jail term for anyone who “deliberately announces in wartime false or malicious news, statements or rumors,” and two years for “offending a foreign country.” His tweets about Jaw prison could bring him an additional three years in jail for “offending national institutions.”
Left to right: Nabeel Rajab walks in a 2012 protest march with Ali Abdulemam (currently in exile) and Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, who is also in prison for his political activism. Photo by Mohamed CJ via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
In court, Rajab argued that his re-arrest was motivated by his involvement in lobbying US officials on the human rights situation in Bahrain and the Arabian Gulf region, not the charges that were filed against him.
Rajab originally was arrested on these charges in April 2015 before he was released in July of the same year. Yet prosecutors never closed the case and thus ordered his re-arrest on 13 June 2016.
الحقوقي #نبيل_رجب من المحكمة: إعتقالي جاء بعد انزعاجهم من مقابلتي مع وزير الخارجية الامريكي حيث استدعيت للتحقيق بعدها #Bahrain
— Nabeel Rajab (@NABEELRAJAB) September 5, 2016
Rights activist Nabeel Rajeb in court: my arrest took place because they [the authorities] got upset by my meeting with the US Secretary of State, as I was called for investigation afterwards
نبيل رجب من المحكمة: القضية كيدية وإعتقالي جاء بعدما رفضت إزالة اسمي من رسالة كتبها نشطاء خليجيين لاوباما اثناء زيارته للسعودية #Bahrain
— Nabeel Rajab (@NABEELRAJAB) September 5, 2016
Nabeel Rajab in court: this case is vengeful and my arrest came after I refused to remove my name from a letter addressed by activists from the Gulf [region] to Obama while he was on a visit to Saudi Arabia
On Monday, authorities further charged him with “undermining the prestige” of the ruling regime over a letter he wrote in prison, in which he described how he was punished for denouncing Bahrain's role in the war in Yemen and critiqued the United States’ inconsistency in responding to human rights violations in Bahrain. The letter was published on 3 September in the New York Times.
From the beginning, I was against the war. The civilian death toll was immediate and catastrophic, and I spoke out against the unfolding humanitarian crisis, calling for peace. Now, I am paying the price.
- Nabeel Rajab, “Letter from a Bahraini Jail,” via the New York Times
Human rights activists and groups in the region and across the world are campaigning for Rajab's freedom. On the occasion of his 52nd birthday on 1 September 2016, protesters gathered outside the Bahraini embassies in the UK and the US demanding his release.
Thank you to everyone who joined us to mark @NabeelRajab‘s birthday & call for his release! #ReleaseNabeel pic.twitter.com/LbwTh9d3rE
— English PEN (@englishpen) September 1, 2016
From outside @BahrainEmbDC we call on gov't of #Bahrain to #ReleaseNabeel! pic.twitter.com/lw2bheJhuV
— ADHRB (@ADHRB) September 1, 2016
Scottish National Party MP Margaret Ferrier tweeted her support:
.@NABEELRAJAB is spending his 52nd birthday today n a Bahraini jail – freedom of expression is being denied to him & many others #FreeNabeel
— Margaret Ferrier MP (@MargaretFerrier) September 1, 2016
Bahraini activist and co-director for the Gulf Center for Human Rights Maryam Alkhawaja tweeted:
Happy birthday @NABEELRAJAB. May u be reunited with your family soon. You are free despite their prison bars, that's y they fear u #Bahrain
— Maryam Alkhawaja (@MARYAMALKHAWAJA) September 1, 2016
Nabeel Rajab also was named “prisoner of the month” for September 2016, by the “Their Freedom, Their Right” campaign. Led by the Lebanese free-speech civil society group Maharat Foundation and the Egypt-based Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), the campaign calls for the release of one prisoner of conscience in the Arab region each month.
On Twitter, Maharat Foundation urged its Twitter followers to join the campaign to free Rajab:
يمكنكم دعم الناشط #نبيل_رجب عبر نشر صور ومعلومات عنه على فايسبوك وتويتر مع استخدام هاشتاغ #حريتهم_حقهم @NABEELRAJAB pic.twitter.com/l3d3jYXTeB
— Maharat News (@MaharatNews) September 1, 2016
You can support activist Nabeel Rajab by posting information and photos about him on Facebook and Twitter using the hash tag “their freedom, their right”.
Rajab is not the only one paying the price for his activism and political views in Bahrain. In the island kingdom of 1.2 million people, there are more than 4,000 political prisoners according to 2015 estimates from human rights groups.

source: news-globalvoices

license: Creative Commons - Attribution - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

author: Afef Abrougui


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Indians Ask: Is Visiting a Torrent Site Really A Crime? · Global Voices
Subhashish Panigrahi

Screenshot of a Bittorent client. Image by Carl Sagan via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0
India has banned various large-scale torrent sites for a long time — this is old news. But under a new federal policy in India, one can be jailed for three years and fined 300,000 Indian Rupees (~US $4464) for downloading content on any of these blocked websites.
Netizens who regularly use these and similar services have become anxious about what the rule may mean for them. Last week, a new legal notice concerning copyright violations sparked widespread rumors that users could be penalized for simply viewing torrent sites.
The notice now appears when one visits any of the banned websites. It reads:
This URL has been blocked under the instructions of the Competent Government Authority or in compliance with the orders of a Court of competent jurisdiction. Viewing, downloading, exhibiting or duplicating an illicit copy of the contents under this URL is punishable as an offence under the laws of India, including but not limited to under Sections 63, 63-A, 65 and 65-A of the Copyright Act, 1957 which prescribe imprisonment for 3 years and also fine of upto Rs. 3,00,000/-. Any person aggrieved by any such blocking of this URL may contact at urlblock@tatacommunications.com who will, within 48 hours, provide you the details of relevant proceedings under which you can approach the relevant High Court or Authority for redressal of your grievance.
Soon after news of the notice began to circulate, the Chennai High Court – one of the oldest courts in India — issued a John Doe order to block as many as 830 websites, including several torrent websites such as thepiratebay.se, torrenthound.com, and kickasstorrents.come.in.
A torrent is part of a system that enables peer-to-peer file sharing (“P2P”) that is used to distribute data and electronic files over the Internet. Known as BitTorrent, this file distribution system is one of the most common technical protocols for transferring large files, such as digital audio files containing TV shows or video clips or digital audio files containing songs.
Within this system, files labeled with the .torrent extension contain meta data about files — e.g. file names, their sizes, folder structure and cryptographic hash value for integrity verification. They do not contain the content to be distributed, but without them, the system does not work. (via Wikipedia)
Indian tech news portal Medianama published a blog post arguing that it is the downloading of pirated content from certain banned websites and not accessing those website that should lead to the legal issues. The problem, it seems, lies in the poor wording of the notice. Medianama described this as “bizarre by any rational standard” and noted that, taken literally, it does not comply with the Indian Copyright Act.
Digital piracy legislation in India has been modified quite a lot in the recent times in general and over last five years in particular (Sections 63, 63A and 65 of the Indian Copyright Act of 1957 in particular.) But it has not been implemented with such force in the past.
This is not the first time India has put a blanket ban on such sites. In December 2014, 32 websites — including including code repository Github, video streaming sites Vimeo and Dailymotion, online archive Internet Archive, free software hosting site Sourceforge — were banned in India. They were later unblocked after agreeing to remove some ISIS-related content.
As they have in the past, tech-savvy netizens began suggesting hacks to mask or fake one's IP address. Sumiteshwar Choudhary, a practicing criminal and matrimony lawyer, described on Quora how the law had existed for quite some time but the government had never fully enforced it:
[..] The only reason that India has not been able to successfully ban these services is because the servers rest outside India and we don’t have any law to extend our jurisdiction to that extent today. As an end user if you download a pirated version of things you are not entitled to, you can be booked criminally under this Act and can face prison for up to 2 years…
Twitter user Prisma Mama Thakur criticized the ban, arguing that it should be a low priority in a moment when India has many other important problems to solve:
Thousands of cases pending, criminals roaming scott free. That's fine.
Lets arrest people who download #torrents https://t.co/VpSwnZV7lI
— Prisma Mama Thakur (@pra_ttitude) August 22, 2016

author: Subhashish Panigrahi


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Russia’s Pokemon Gulag · Global Voices
Kevin Rothrock

Ruslan Sokolovsky outside the Church of All Saints in Yekaterinburg. Image: YouTube. Edited by Kevin Rothrock.
If you’re interested in the Russian Internet enough to have made it to RuNet Echo, there’s a good chance you’ve already heard of Ruslan Sokolovsky, the young video-blogger from Yekaterinburg who’s been jailed for at least the next two months, while police investigate him for committing extremism and offending religious people. Sokolovksy’s alleged crime—the stunt that has people comparing him to Pussy Riot—was playing Pokemon Go inside a Russian Orthodox cathedral. If convicted of the charges, he could go to prison for up to five years.
On September 3, the day Sokolovsky was taken into custody, the Sverdlovsk region’s Investigative Committee released a press statement, explaining that “a local 21-year-old man” has been charged with violating two different articles of Russia’s criminal code. The statement doesn’t name Sokolovsky (whose age has been reported as 22 by most media outlets), but it’s clearly about him. The Investigative Committee doesn’t mention Pokemon Go, but its press release does specify that the suspect “uploaded several video files” to YouTube that expert analysis subsequently classified as “incitements of hatred or hostility.” The statement also vaguely describes Sokolovsky’s gaming stunt, saying he “violated the right to religion in a house of worship” (though it’s unclear how he managed this, walking around with his mobile phone out).
Following appeals by Yekaterinburg’s mayor, Evgeny Roizman, and the region’s leading independent news website, Znak.com, local Orthodox church officials say they will ask the court to show leniency and release Sokolovsky on bail. “Metropolit of Yekaterinburg and Verkhoturye” Kirill told Znak.com that he’s issued instructions to see how the church can help get Sokolovsky out of jail, saying he would like to involve the young man in charity work alongside Orthodox clerics. “Maybe this would help him see life differently,” Kirill explained.
Within hours, speaking through a member of a local public monitoring committee, Sokolovsky expressed his willingness to take such a deal, saying he still doesn’t believe that he committed any acts of extremism or offended anyone’s beliefs, but that he’s happy to enter into a dialogue with the Orthodox Church.
The man known today as Ruslan Gennadevich Sokolovsky was apparently born Ruslan Gofiulovich Saibabtalov. This revelation comes courtesy of Sergei Kolyasnikov, another Yekaterinburg-based blogger, who has viciously attacked Sokolovsky/Saibabtalov in a series of posts detailing his background and anti-religious activism.
Kolyasnikov offers the fact that Sokolovsky changed his name as evidence of something unspecified but sinister. Kolyasnikov highlights with suspicion that Sokolovsky’s atheist satirical magazine—self-titled and modeled directly on Charlie Hebdo—seems to enjoy impressive funding. In the magazine’s first edition, for instance, Sokolovsky wrote that advance sales were enough to hire four cartoonists, a printer, a logistics manager, and a publishing agency. Kolyasnikov suggests that there are larger forces at work, sustaining the magazine and Sokolovsky’s activism, more generally. The next bit of leaked information, he believes, supports this theory.
On September 4, Alexey Stolyarov (the infamous prankster “Lexus,” whose politics are generally patriotic and conservative) published a screenshot of an email inbox, claiming that “unknown persons” hacked Sokolovsky’s email before he was arrested. The image shows several identical messages that the blogger apparently sent to different foreign embassies, describing his perilous situation and asking for political asylum.
Allegedly hacked emails written by Ruslan Sokolovksy. Image: Facebook
“He specifically breaks the law, so that later, sitting at home, he can search for somebody to harbor him, so he can piss off from crappy Rasha,” Stolyarov wrote on Facebook, asking his subscribers to share the image.
In an overt effort to discredit him, Kolyasnikov also claims (without any proof) that Sokolovsky was detained after a late night of heavy drinking and taking ecstasy. Kolyasnikov also says he shared the drugs with a girl—a minor—who was found in his bed, when police raided his apartment to seize his blogging equipment. (Sokolovsky allegedly slept with many of his underage fans.) Kolyasnikov also contradicted widely reported information that Sokolovsky lives with his disabled mother, saying she actually lives in the city of Kurgan—almost 300 miles southeast of Yekaterinburg.
Dmitry Kalinin, a member of Russia's Social Monitoring Commission and now apparently one of Sokolovsky’s confidants, has verified some of Kolyasnikov’s allegations, revealing that Ruslan did indeed change his name at the age of 18, and that his mother does in fact live in Shadrinsk in the Kurgan region (“they talk a lot,” he explains).
Kalinin also writes that the “streamer” video-blogger “Diana Elias” has sent money to Sokolovsky’s mother, to help her with living expenses and also with lawyers’ fees for her son.
Diana Elias and Ruslan Sokolovsky: engaged to be wed. Image: Vkontakte
“Diana Elias” (presumably a stage name) is another young video blogger from Russia’s regions. Listed as “engaged” to Sokolovsky on Vkontakte, she claims to be 16 years old on Instagram (though earlier this year she said was born in August 2002, which would make her just 14 today). (To make matters more complicated, she says she’s 15 on the “streamer” website Twitch.) The romance between “Diana” and Ruslan appears to be something entirely virtual: she is based in the Siberian city of Kemerovo (more than 1,000 miles east of Yekaterinburg), and she hasn’t published a single photo of herself with Sokolovsky. (She also describes herself as Russian Orthodox, photographs herself attending church, and writes, “I only like Orthodox guys!”) (That said, she’s also perfectly open to mocking Patriarch Kirill on Vkontakte.)
Whatever the nature of her relationship with the RuNet’s now most-famous atheist, Diana Elias’ efforts to raise money for Sokolovsky’s legal defense are quite real. This past weekend, she raised at least 48,000 rubles ($735) for a lawyer in a video-streaming marathon. The fundraising drive even attracted a Skype call from Evgeny Volnov—another popular video blogger, who shares the same advertising manager as Sokolovsky. (While sympathetic to Sokolovsky's crusade against the Orthodox Church, Volnov, who’s known for pranks and “bro” humor, spent most of his call trying to persuade Elias to undress for better donations.)
That Sokolovsky has an advertising manager, incidentally, should come as no surprise: the blogger gained a reputation for jilting customers who buy ad space on his video blog, taking their money and never airing their content. These incidents led to several angry videos, where abandoned clients monologue into cameras about being ripped off. Fellow video bloggers subsequently filmed their own videos about the scandal, making for the “talk of the town” in Russia’s “streamer” world earlier this spring.
The “Sokolovsky!” YouTube channel currently has almost 300,000 subscribers, and the video of him playing Pokemon Go inside the Church of All Saints is nearing a million views. “You might say that Sokolovsky is more popular than the vast majority of the media outlets in Yekaterinburg,” writes Dmitry Kolezev, a columnist at Znak.com.
Sokolovsky’s popularity and polish are precisely what inspire so much support and suspicion online. Fans apparently love his gimmicks and graphics, while critics view his actions as too sophisticated for a man just barely out of his teens. It’s a familiar debate, where little is believed to be what it seems, and we see it in Russia nearly every time something emerges that is ostensibly a reflection of what interests ordinary people.

author: Kevin Rothrock


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Turkish Academicians Call for Solidarity Amid Post-Coup Attempt Witch Hunt · Global Voices
Ankara Resistance Post

Ankara branch of Confederation of Public Labourers’ Unions organised a press event last Saturday to protest the wrongful dismissal of their members. Photo by Ankara Resistance Post.
The failed July 15 coup attempt in Turkey has given way to a massive state investigation, thousands of arbitrary arrests and a slew of dismissals in the state sector, mainly from military and educational institutions.
The coup attempt was described by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as “a gift from Allah” to help cleanse state institutions of supporters of Fethullah Gulen, the Turkish Islamic cleric and former Erdogan ally the government accuses of plotting the coup from his point of exile in the United States.
The legal basis for the government counter-reaction is a state of emergency lasting into October that gives Ankara extra-constitutional powers, with the cabinet allowed to establish legislative decrees without recourse to a parliamentary vote.
Erdogan's “cleansing” seems to have turned into a witch hunt, however, as recent developments attest.
On the night of September 1, a legislative decree was promulgated to announce the dismissal of some 50,000 workers from the civil service for “having membership of, coherence or communication with terrorist organisations.”
The list includes 2,346 academicians and more than 20,000 teachers, many of whom claim to have no connection to Gulen or his Hizmet (Duty) movement, but have ended up on the state's radar anyway for voicing criticisms of the government.
The mass discharge operation came without any prior judiciary process, visible evidence, or the right to defence.
The lists of academic staff to be dismissed were allegedly handed in by university rectors at the request of Higher Education Board.
Günaydın. Bugünkü KHK ile beni de kamu görevinden atmışlar. Hiçbir delil yok, ama hüküm var. İslam faşizmi.
— Candan Badem (@CandanBadem) September 2, 2016
Marxist academician Assoc. Prof. Dr. Candan Badem from Munzur University: “Good morning. I have been discharged from the civil service with today’s legislative decree. There is no evidence, but a verdict. Islamic fascism.”
The left-oriented Egitim-Sen (Education and Science Workers’ Union) that represents more than 100,000 science and education workers, declared that with the latest decree, more than 100 of its members in schools and universities have been dismissed.
Mesut Firat, the secretary general of Egitim-Sen, said:
It appears that the expulsions have been conducted based on political profiling, rather than concrete evidence.
Some 41 of the discharged academicians were signatories to a “peace petition” initiated by Academics for Peace in January, which criticised the government for killing Kurdish civilians during operations against PKK militants, and called on Ankara to return to the negotiating table with the PKK.
Almost 2,000 academicians, who signed the petition across the country, were slandered by government officials, including Erdogan.
Hundreds of academicians have been detained, investigated and dismissed since then.
The Academics for Peace declared in a September 3 press statement:
The Government of Turkey is taking advantage of the State of Emergency rule to crack down on all critical voices, including those who have no relation to the Gulen organization or the coup attempt.
Some 20 out of 39 dismissed academicians from Kocaeli University were signatories of the peace petition and eight of the dismissed academicians from Ankara University also signed it.
Some had been subjects of investigations before.
Associate Professor Dr. Gulseren Adakli, former professor for the Faculty of Communications in Ankara University, and member and former branch chair of Egitim-Sen described her dismissal thus:
My dismissal from civil service within state of emergency has nothing to do with FETO [Fethullah Gulen Terrorist Organisation, as Gulen's Hizmet movement is named by Turkey's government] or any other terrorist organisation, and this fact is well known to the academic community, the government, and anyone who knows me. I believe a denunciation mechanism is in action. Everyone is trying to take advantage of the current atmosphere to reinforce their power.
Gulseren Adaklı, dismissed professor from Ankara University. Photo taken from Ankara University's department page.
Aysun Gezen, research assistant from the Faculty of Political Science at Ankara University and another board member of Egitim-Sen, claimed the list of discharged faculty from her department is linked to a previous incident when police brutally detained faculty members two years ago, after they attempted to protect students from a raid on the campus.
Research assistants Dr. Onur Can Tastan, Dr. Nail Dertli, Ahmet Ozan Deger, Celil Kaya and Aysun Gezen were dismissed from civil service. They were all detained at the campus in 2014 while they were protecting their students from police attack. Photo widely shared.
Esra Dabagci, a dismissed research assistant from Ankara University stated:
Taking advantage of the state of emergency, [the government] wants to oppress any opposition. They exile anyone who doesn’t support them by declaring them to be FETO members today, and something else tomorrow. It is a huge opportunity for [the government].
One recent investigation targeting research assistant Yasin Durak — another discharged academician from Nigde University — saw the rectorate recommend that a court sentence its staff member to between one and four years jail time.
Durak was accused of “insulting the president” based on an article published in the daily Birgun, where he compared Erdogan to a dragon.
Dismissed research assistants Esra Dabagcı from Ankara University (left) and Yasin Durak from Niğde University. Photo by Ankara Resistance Post.
Several departments and academic institutions in Turkey have released press statements in support of the academics.
One petition has been signed by 69 professors of the political science faculty at Ankara University in solidarity with their discharged colleagues.
All members of the Department of Sociology in Ankara University meanwhile vouched that their discharged colleague Esra Dabagci, whom they knew in both professional and personal contexts, had no known ties to the network of sympathisers of Gulen.
The Turkish Medical Association, some of whose members were expelled, condemned the attacks against the peace petition signatories in a press statement.
Yet another press statement released by the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions described some of the discharged academics as people “who have stood with scientific, secular and democratic education, spent their lives fighting for labour, nature and life, and called for peace […] Their dismissal on the [basis of allegations of involvement in] FETÖ and the coup attempt, is disgraceful.”
Two members of the party council of CHP (the main opposition Republican People's Party), and an advisor to CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, are among the dismissed academicians.
The discharged personnel will no longer be allowed to work in any Turkish university or any public institutions.
They may not litigate against their expulsion during the state of emergency, since domestic jurisdiction does not apply to legislative decrees. They can, however, apply directly to the European Court of Human Rights.
Although the AKP government moved to suspend the European Convention on Human Rights in lieu of the state of emergency, Kerem Altiparmak, an assistant professor at Ankara University, who specialises in human rights and international criminal law, says that even during such a state, the government is obligated to respect international law:
The limits to actions during state of emergency is described in Article 15 of the constitution. Based on this, legislative decrees cannot take precautions that contradicts with international law. […] According to international law, dismissal from civil service cannot be sanctioned against the principles of the state of law. One cannot be dismissed from civil service indefinitely without due process, given the right to defend themselves, and without looking into their role in anti-regime actions.

author: Ankara Resistance Post


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Want to See Venezuela’s Diversity in Action? Check Out the Dance Floor · Global Voices
Natali Herrera Pacheco

Scenes from a Venezuelan folk dance class shared by Camerino Company. Screenshot from the video distributed online.
On World Folklore Day, celebrated on August 22, Venezuelans took to the web to highlight some of the country's cultural expressions that they identify most with. Among these were dances rooted in African cultures that today occupy a special role as they have a large influence on Venezuelan identity.
One example was a video published by dance studio Camerino Company (via Drone Venezuela), which has nearly 300,000 views and numerous comments full of nostalgia from users who are a part of the recent Venezuelan diaspora.
The video features a so-called drum dance, which originated on the northern coast of Venezuela, and is possibly the most popular Afro-Venezuelan cultural art form among young people. Both on the coasts and in the rest of the country, it is common for parties to dedicate spaces for listening and dancing to the music of drums.
The choreography seen in the video above shows influence from a variety of styles that combine the traditional with the modern, a mix that may motivate a wider public to enjoy and even participate. Camerino Company's video is a strong example of how a cultural expression can have a place in dance academies while at the same time maintaining a link with popular celebrations.
Northern Venezuela is dominated from one end to the other by the presence of the Caribbean Sea. This fact has had very important cultural implications for the country.
Even before Spanish conquest, the vast coast was the scene of migration among indigenous peoples of the region, driven from one side of the continent to the other by powerful commercial and sociocultural dynamics. Since then, that flow has not stopped.
In this British map from 1736, one can see the territory known as the West Indies: the Caribbean and the Bahamas. Also, below, is visible the mainland territory of today's Venezuela.
In 1498, during his third voyage, Christopher Columbus arrived at the Tierra de Gracia, or the “Land of Grace,” which was controlled by an indigenous people known as the Caribs. Thirty years later, Europeans began to bring over the first African slaves, who – along with the indigenous population – were used to construct colonial settlements in this part of the “New World.”
Even today, after all these centuries, the Venezuelan coasts remain a quiet testimony to the course of history. The significant number of Afro-Venezuelans who live there represent both the past left behind and the richness of their present. The cultural heritage that this community has preserved from generation to generation is incalculable. From the countless prohibitions in the time of slavery, a metaphorical language was born that hid the pain of forced uprooting within sad love songs. Work songs, on the other hand, helped ease the load of endless labor, and lullabies helped children go to sleep.
Both music and dance were a means of communicating with several gods of the religions that Africans had brought to the West Indies, gods who eventually would become a part of mestizo religious rituals as well as influence secular celebrations.
Instruments like the quitiplás (a percussion instrument), the marímbula (a plucked box instrument), or the arpa tuyera (a type of harp) are a few examples of the variety of the musical heritage that Venezuelans inherited from Africa and have occasionally transformed to make their own. In many parts of the country, these instruments continue to be played; the music, danced to; and the techniques, taught.
The dancers featured in Camerino Company's video are surely not alone in their admiration for the drums and dances of Venezuela's coast. They and others like them are continuing a tradition that unites Venezuela in all its diversity with the rest of the Caribbean, but at the same time doesn't forget the wounds of a painful past that time and memory are still trying to heal.

author: Natali Herrera Pacheco


text:
Brazil’s Military Police Is Unleashed on a Growing Protest Movement · Global Voices
Raphael Tsavkko Garcia

Thousands gather at the beginning of the demonstration. Photo by @uneoficial, free to use.
After last week's nationwide demonstrations against Dilma Rousseff's impeachment and against her replacement, President Michel Temer, Brazil witnessed a new wave of street violence this Sunday, September 5.
Organizers say that roughly 100,000 people attended the protest, walking from Paulista Avenue to Largo da Batata, a large square on the Western (and wealthier) side of the city. No violence was reported during the demonstration itself, but police reportedly attacked the crowd with tear gas once people were already making their way home. Michel Laub, a Brazilian writer who attended the rally, says the police moved with without any apparent provocation.
Democratize Agency published footage of the incident:
PM reprime ato antes do final. Guilherme Boulos chama a ação da polícia de “provocadora”. #ForaTemer #DiretasJa pic.twitter.com/9u0XCrJ4X1
— Agência Democratize (@agdemocratize) 4 de setembro de 2016
PM represses the demonstration before its end. Guilherme Boulos calls the police action “provocative”.
According to witnesses, a group of police officers—a special unit of the military police specialized in crowd control—approached the demonstrators outside a metro station and started beating people without provocation. Congressman Ivan Valente was present. He later denounced the behavior by the police:
Comando da PM diz que agiu a pedido do Metrô. Mas a segurança do metrô desmentiu a PM e disse que ñ houve vandalismo e que ñ acionou ninguém
— Ivan Valente (@IvanValente) 5 de setembro de 2016
Military Police command says it acted at the request of Metro [company]. But the security guards of the Metro denied that the Military Police version and said that there was no vandalism and never called for backup.
A rubber bullet mark at the body of an activist. Photo by Democratize, free to use.
A social scientist at a nearby bar says he heard explosions and ran towards the scene. He tweeted:
No caminho,soube q o pretexto p/a repressão brutal a uma MANIFESTAÇÃO PACÍFICA foi uma discussão da PM c/grupo q queria pegar metrô no largo
— Instituições Sólidas (@cyrusafa) September 5, 2016
On the way, I knew that the pretext for the brutal repression of a PEACEFUL DEMONSTRATION was a discussion of Military Police officers with a group that wanted to get on the subway station.
Alderman Nabil Bonduki published a video of the police response:
Lamentável. Policia militar ataca as pessoas na Faria Lima sem nenhum motivo após e encerramento do ato #ForaTemer pic.twitter.com/fE9HYsls9F
— Nabil Bonduki (@spNabil) 5 de setembro de 2016
Regrettable. Military police attacks people in Faria Lima for no reason after the end of the demonstration #ForaTemer
Cartoonist Laerte Coutinho added:
A beautiful demonstration, a quiet crowd, and long walk—in the end the Military Police contributes havoc, claiming vandalism. And it is this moment that the media uses as headline.
The Twitter account Midia Ninja recorded a video of one man's arrest – Hélio Ramos, 37, who was released by the police after midnight:
URGENTE Apos ato com mais de 100 mil pessoas PM ataca manifestantes sem motivo em SP pic.twitter.com/NXadRw6cuX
— Midia NINJA (@MidiaNINJA) 5 de setembro de 2016
The Twitter account of the Military Police later said that officers were only responding to certain vandals:
Em manifestação inicialmente pacífica, vândalos atuam e obrigam PM a intervir com uso moderado da força / munição química.
— POLÍCIA MILITAR – SP (@PMESP) 5 de setembro de 2016
In an initially peaceful demonstration, vandals acted and forced the Military Police intervene with moderate use of force / chemical ammunition.
A coffin is burned to symbolise Temer's government. Photo by Fernando DK/Democratize, free to use
BuzzFeed published a video of the Largo da Batata engulfed in tear gas:
O ato já tinha acabado. Em tumulto, PM dispara bombas e gás. pic.twitter.com/kwuRFC1XWd
— BuzzFeedNewsBR (@BuzzFeedNewsBR) 4 de setembro de 2016
The demonstration was over. In turmoil, Military Police shoots stun grenades and gas.
Police even fired tear gas into a bus, causing an elderly woman to faint and even causing discomfort for several children. Felipe Souza, a journalist for the BBC, was beaten by Military Police officers despite identifying himself as requested.
The Military Police also attacked people inside bars and restaurants. Democratize Agency recorded footage of some of these incidents:
A PM atacou bares e restaurantes nas proximidades do Largo da Batata após a manifestação. #ForaTemer #DiretasJa pic.twitter.com/Xb1ev88elU
— Agência Democratize (@agdemocratize) 5 de setembro de 2016
The Military Police attacked bars and restaurants near the Largo da Batata after the demonstration
There's also a video of police officers pepper spraying people chanting outside a bar:
Facebook user Vinicius Duarte wrote:
The Military Police of São Paulo believe that is “necessary means to contain disturbances” to throw tear gas into the subway.
Finds that “dispersal strategy” is to drive with a vehicle in front of a bar with people on the sidewalk and shoot pepper spray in their faces.
Tell that to any police commander in the world (except here, of course) and if you don't show pictures of the event, none of them will believe.
Twenty-six people, including eight minors, were arrested at the São Paulo Cultural Center, near Avenida Paulista, on suspicion of planning acts of vandalism during the demonstration, according to Ponte Jornalismo. One of the people arrested was Felipe Ribeiro, 27, who was at the library studying and says didn't plan to attend the demonstration.
Another six people were arrested during the demonstration for wearing black clothing and masks (a outfit associated with Black Blocs).
Eighteen of those detained have been indicted for criminal associations and the corruption of minors (other sources state that the number of underaged suspects is ten). They have all been released on the night of September 5, first the adults, whose charges were dropped by the judge, and then later that same night, the minors.
The supposed evidence against these individuals consists of several discovered items: gas masks and glasses used for eye protection, as well as mobile phones and personal items. The prisoners also spent eight hours without access to lawyers or their parents.
NGO Article 19 criticized the police's action:
As detenções dos jovens configuram violações ao direito de manifestação e à liberdade de expressão, as quais têm aumentado significativamente nos últimos dias em função do cenário político nacional. Além disso, a situação se mostra ainda mais preocupante pelo fato de os detidos terem sido mantidos incomunicáveis por horas e sem acesso à Justiça.
The arrests of the young people constitute violations of the right to protest and of freedom of expression, increasing significantly in recent days due to the national political scene. Moreover, the situation is even more worrying by the fact that the detainees were held incommunicado for hours without access to justice.
Pablo Ortellado, a professor at the Universidade de São Paulo, wrote on Facebook that police apparently hacked the suspects’ WhatsApp accounts to track their plans. Ortellado says law enforcement has exploited its power to “arrest for inquiry,” which he describes as an “illegal remnant of dictatorship.”

author: Raphael Tsavkko Garcia


text:
Cuban Journalist and LGBT Activist Sacked for Working With Non-State Media · Global Voices
Ellery Roberts Biddle

Cuban LGBT rights advocates at a gay pride march in Sagua la Grande. Maykel Gonzalez is second from left. Photo via Maykel Gonzalez/el Nictalope.
Cuban radio journalist and blogger Maykel González Vivero gave his final show on Radio Sagua on September 3, 2016, after the station terminated his contract due to González’ “collaboration with private media.”
Alongside his work narrating the program, “Por la Villa de Undoso,” which explored local history in the city of Sagua la Grande, the 32-year-old is an openly gay blogger, collaborator with other media and literary groups in Cuba, and an active member of the independent LGBT rights advocacy group Proyecto Arcoiris.
González reported via multiple media outlets that Radio Sagua station director Carlos Orlando Manrique explicitly condemned his work with independent Cuban news sites including Diario de Cuba. Diario de Cuba is openly critical of the Castro government and has contributors in both Cuba and the US. The website was recently blocked on the island, according to CubaNet (another site that has been blocked) and Global Voices’ contacts in the country.
In a public testimonial on Facebook, González described his experience at Radio Sagua. His troubles began in 2012, when he criticized the work of Mariela Castro Espín, the daughter of Cuban President Raúl Castro, who heads Cuba’s National Center for Sex Education and is a member of the National Assembly. González joined other independent advocates in critiquing Castro’s approach to LGBT rights advocacy, arguing that her efforts had fallen short on key issues of public import, mainly same-sex marriage and domestic partnership. He wrote:
Un policía me hizo ir a una oficina en el Comité Municipal del Partido. Feo que era, sucio, se veía cansado. Ese fue mi estreno con ellos, los invisibles. Me dijo entonces algo que se cumplió. “Si yo quiero -se jactó- puedo declararte contrarrevolucionario.”
A police officer made me go to an office at the Municipal Committee for the [Communist] Party….Ugly, dirty, he looked tired. This was my debut with them, the invisible ones. He then told me something that later would happen. “If I want,” he bragged, “I can call you a counterrevolutionary.”
González says he suspects that his critiques of senior Communist party member Marino Murillo, who served multiple terms as Cuba’s Minister of Planning and Economy between 2009 and 2016, didn’t help him either. He was re-assigned to different jobs within state media institutions multiple times after 2012, and then began pursuing work outside of state institutions. At one point, a state security officer told him:
No importa donde publiques, aunque sea tu blog. Siempre te vamos a revisar.
It doesn’t matter where you publish, even if it’s just on your blog. We will always be reading what you write.
In recent years, González has traveled to Europe twice. In 2014, he spoke on LGBT rights issues in Cuba at the UN in Geneva. Things grew worse for González after he attended the Stockholm Internet Forum in 2015.
El año pasado, los suecos me invitaron al Fórum de internet de Estocolmo. Cuando volví, todo era insostenible en la emisora. Antes de irme a Escandinavia la subdirectora me dijo: “Tú no vuelves”, como insinuándome que no volviera. Dejé el periodismo oficial, me fui a trabajar como burócrata en una oficina de Patrimonio, y me dediqué a escribir reportajes, notas, cualquier cosa, para la prensa emergente.
Y ya ves. Mañana saldrá mi último programa, el último conducido por mí, en una emisión que dará que hablar: va sobre el centralismo que coloca en la periferia a ciudades cubanas antaño muy prósperas, específicamente analizo el caso de Sagua la Grande, desde una perspectiva histórica.
Mi comentario literario (es ingenuo pensar que la crítica litearia es inofensiva, aunque no creo a los censores tan sagaces) ya no saldrá en septiembre en la revista cultural radial Por la Villa del Undoso.
Koniec para mí.
Se tardaron bastante.
Last year, the Swedes invited me to the Stockholm Internet Forum. When I got back, things were unbearable at the station. Before I went to Scandinavia, the sub director said to me: “you won’t return,” as if to insinuate that I wouldn’t come back. I stopped working for state media outlets and instead went to work as a bureaucrat in a state office of Cultural Heritage, and I dedicated my time to writing reports, short articles, whatever I could, for the new media outlets.
And now you see what’s happened. Tomorrow my last program will air, the last one directed by me, in a show about the centralized nature of small, outlying cities in Cuba that were once very prosperous, specifically Sagua la Grande, from a historical perspective.
My literary commentary (its naive to think that literary criticism is inoffensive, even though I don’t think the censors are that sagacious) will no longer appear in the culture magazine Por la Villa del Undoso.
Cognac for me.
It took them long enough.
While González’ personal account of his experience is unique, the hard facts of it are not. Journalists who were once employed by Cuban state media outlets represent a significant proportion of Cuba's blogging communities, both on the island and abroad. Between the recent firings of journalists such as González and Jose Ramírez Pantoja, among others, and the official condemnation of Uruguayan blogger and former BBC columnist Fernando Ravsberg, who has worked as a journalist in Cuba since the 1990s, it appears that more may soon be joining their ranks.

author: Ellery Roberts Biddle


text:
Hong Kong Voters Elect Pro-Democracy Legislators to Defend the City’s Autonomy From China · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

Newly elected 23-year-old Nathan Law and his election team. Photo from Nathan Law's Facebook.
Hong Kong's political opposition won a majority 19 out of 35 seats in the city's legislative election on Sunday, September 4 — a significant victory that allows them to hold onto their veto power against the pro-China establishment.
Marginalised by Hong Kong's undemocratic political system, in which half of the 70 Legislative Council seats are elected by “functional constituencies” — business, professional, religious or specific social groups — the ability to veto proposed laws in the legislature is the last resort for the opposition to exercise their political influence.
This power has become especially important in recent years as Beijing has tried to tighten its grip on the city. Hong Kong is a special administrative region of China, and that status is supposed to mean a high degree of autonomy.
In 2014, thousands of people camped out in downtown Hong Kong for three months to demand genuine democratic elections in what became known as Occupy Central. In the wake of that movement, tensions between the political opposition and the government escalated, with some radical democrats filibustering the government-submitted legislation such as the budget with a large number of questions and amendments. Their non-cooperation strategy posed a serious challenge to the administration of Chief Executive Leung Chun Ying, and he urged the public to “vote them out” come the election.
The pro-China camp made many efforts to swing the election their way in the lead-up to the vote. The China Liaison Office, which represents the mainland in Hong Kong, stepped in to coordinate pro-China campaigns and was suspected of instructing employees of Chinese state businesses in Hong Kong on who to vote for. In an unprecedented move, the Hong Kong government barred six candidates from running over their views. And mainstream media outlets launched smear campaigns against pro-democracy candidates.
Despite the push, voters gave the opposition three more seats as compared to the last election in 2012, with a record-breaking 58 per cent turnout.
Moreover, voters have preferred young radicals over moderate democrats to represent them in the Legislature. Their choice is reflected in the two most eye-catching winners, Nathan Law Kwun-chung and Eddie Chu Hoidick, both of whom advocate the city’s autonomy.
Law, 23, won in the Hong Kong Island district with more than 42,000 votes, becoming the youngest legislator in Hong Kong history. He was a student leader of the 2014 Occupy Central sit-in. (See photo at top.)
Eddie Chu Hoi Dick and his election team. Photo from Facebook.
Chu, 38, gained more than 84,000 votes in the Western New Territories. He started his social activism as a citizen journalist at citizen media site inmediahk.net in 2005 and since then become an activist in city planning and land issues. (Full disclosure: I helped found inmediahk.net, and Chu is a personal friend.)
Both Law and Chu belong to the “localist” political camp. The term “localist” describes those who resist Beijing’s intervention in the city’s administration, development and way of life and demand the full realization of the principles of “one country, two systems” and “Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong” as written in the city’s Basic Law constitution as well as in the Sino-British Joint Declaration (which handed control of former British colony Hong Kong to China).
A total of six of the 19 seats won by the political opposition went to localist candidates in the direct elections in Hong Kong's districts, who took nearly 20 per cent of the total vote share. Popular commentary says their rise is a continuation of the the 2014 Occupy Central protests. A supporter of Nathan Law posted a banner from that pro-democracy movement, which protesters had unveiled before being forced out of the protest sites, declaring, “We'll be back!”
“We will be back.” Photo from Nathan Law's Facebook.
Indeed, the determination for Hong Kongers to vote is unprecedented. At one polling station, some voters who had lined up before 10:30 p.m., the official deadline for voting, had to wait for four hours to cast their ballot at 2:30 a.m.
Some polling stations are crowded with voters. Photo via Hong Kong Free Press.
The total number of voters stood at about 2.2 million, and approximately 60 per cent of the votes in the direct election went to the opposition.
As critics have pointed out, the localists will be a headache for Beijing, and Chinese authorities’ immediate prescription, as anticipated, is censorship. In mainland China, social media posts have been deleted, TV screens have gone blank, and news outlets have stopped updating the election results.

author: Oiwan Lam


text:
A Man in Crimea Self-Immolated to Save His Wife’s Cafe From Officials, Who Razed It Anyway · Global Voices
Isaac Webb

Yalta Harbor. Source: Victoria Vasilieva, Flickr, CC 2.0
Late last week, 75-year-old Yalta pensioner Alexander Strekalin poured acetone down his back, lit himself on fire, and collapsed near Primorsky Beach in the center of the city. Strekalin, a former deputy head of Yalta's city administration and years earlier a Chernobyl first responder, was taken to a local hospital, where he died two days later.
Умер в больнице предприниматель из Ялты, совершивший самосожжениеhttps://t.co/GdqEHYSCbr#стрекалин #самоподжог pic.twitter.com/KwUWey2oDJ
— Новости 24на8.рф (@24na8) September 5, 2016
The businessman from Yalta who set himself on fire has died in the hospital.
Strekalin’s self-immolation was the dramatic climax of a battle over Khottabych, a cafe registered to his wife, Mila Seliamieva, located on Primorsky Beach on the Black Sea. Several media outlets reported that Strekalin set himself on fire in protest of the local authorities’ attempts to tear down Khottabych, which has since been razed. Earlier, Strekalin warned local officials that he would kill himself if the city moved on his property.
Seliamieva told the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda that local authorities shut off the utilities to her cafe in May, and that this latest attempt to tear down Khottabych was the city’s eighth. Khottabych has been a fixture in Primorsky Park for more than 15 years, Seliamieva said: “We pay our taxes to the city regularly and have the building’s registration certificate, an agreement for the lease until 2018.” Mustafa Seliamiev, a relative of Seliamieva, said that Strekalin, “on more than one occasion, tried to compromise with the current authorities … but without any success. All summer we fought the builders, who, on the city’s orders, tried to tear down our café.”
A YouTube video posted on May 28 shows law enforcement officials forcefully removing Seliamieva and two other people from the Khottabych roof. An unidentified man asks Seliamieva to show her documents proving the legality of her business; later, a group of men begins to dismantle the building.
Andrei Rostenko, the head of the Yalta city administration, said back in May that Khottabych was an “illegal structure” that “violated all possible norms.” The leasers, he said had “not met sanitary and epidemiological standards [or] safety and labor laws,” or “taken appropriate fire prevention measures.”
Khottabych seems to have been targeted as part of a broader attempt by city officials to clean up the city’s downtown beaches. As Rostenko noted in May, “It’s no secret that residents and visitors in Yalta [don’t] like what was happening on Primorsky Beach. We need to stop the chaos, which has been going on for decades. If we don’t do something, we won't have a city anymore, but rather a village with stalls.”
Some in Crimea have praised Strekalin’s protest for bringing attention to state overreach on the peninsula. As Yalta-based activist Sergei Sardyko wrote on Facebook following Strekalin’s passing,
Умер Александр Иванович Стрекалин. Своей смертью он обратил внимание всей России на творимые в Ялте беззакония. Мы готовим большой митинг “Ростенко — в отставку!”, просим всех писать письма Путину с просьбой прислать в Ялту правительственную комиссию для проверки земельно-имущественных вопросов и отстранить от работы главу администрации Ростенко. Надеемся, что правоохранители заведут уголовное дело по статье 110 УК РФ “Доведение лица до самоубийства.”
Alexander Ivanovich Strekalin has died. His death draws the attention of the whole of Russia to the lawlessness perpetrated in Yalta. We are organizing a “Rostenko—resign” protest, and ask everyone to write a letter to Putin requesting that a government commission be sent to Yalta to address land and property issues, and to fire Rostenko. We hope that law enforcement officials will open a criminal investigation on the basis of Article 110 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation: “Incitement to Suicide.”
Attempts to clean up Yalta’s beaches resemble an ongoing campaign in Moscow to rid the city of “illegal businesses.” Nearly 100 shops and kiosks were torn down on the night of February 8-9, 2016, in a wave of destruction that has been dubbed the “Night of the Long Shovels.” Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin wrote on the social media website Vkontakte that the shops had been “erected in the 1990s with the open connivance or assistance of government officials” and were “dangerous for Muscovites.” The city launched a new wave of demolitions (the third overall) in late August.
In both Yalta and Moscow, city officials appealed to building codes and health requirements, as well as the overall benefit to the local population, to justify their trampling of individual rights. Property rights in Yalta, Moscow, and elsewhere in Russia seem to mean little when pitted against city, state, or even personal imperatives. Seliamieva has said that she plans to sue the city, but in the face of “eminent domain, Moscow-style,” she’ll be fighting an uphill battle.
Not to worry, though: Yalta officials have promised to take the “human factor” into consideration next time they demolish “unauthorized structures.” The deputy head of the city administration told the television network Crimea 24: “We, of course, have learned from this, and will take a more balanced approach to solving such problems in the future, accounting for the emotional qualities of a person.”

author: Isaac Webb


text:
Angered by Mobile App Censorship, Saudis Ask: ‘What’s the Point of Having Internet?’ · Global Voices
Afef Abrougui

Saudi Arabia already blocks several other massaging and calling apps including Whatsapp and Viber. Cartoon by Hussam Al-Zahrani
Residents of Saudi Arabia can no longer make calls using the messaging and voice calling app LINE. Authorities blocked LINE's calling feature over the weekend of September 3, adding it to the long list of VoIP services and messaging apps entirely or partially blocked in Saudi Arabia.
The blocking of LINE angered Saudi users who took to Twitter to protest the conservative kingdom's Internet censorship policies. The sudden absence of LINE's calling features, alongside blocked services like Skype and Facetime, prompted user Abdelaziz Abdallah to ask:
#هيئة_الاتصالات_كفاية_حجب
زودن على ضعف الانترنت واسعار المكالمات جميع البرامج محجوبه
^ وش الفايده من تفعيل الانترنت؟ pic.twitter.com/MeU2S3aoG1
— عبدالعزيز بن عبدالله (@a_aA15) September 5, 2016
in addition to the slow internet, and the price of calls, all applications are blocked. What's the point of having the internet?
Apps blocked in the country include Viber, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram and Skype as seen in the graphic below, which was posted by user Mohammed Alarfaj on Twitter:
Apps blocked in Saudi Arabia. Viber and Facetime are blocked entirely, while Snapchat, Telegram, and Skype are partially blocked. Only calls are blocked on Whatsapp, Line, Google Hangouts and Facebook Messenger. Source: @iM7M7 on Twitter
The graphic explains that these applications and services were either blocked by the Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC), the telecom industry regulator in Saudi Arabia, or the telecom service providers operating in the country, without any official announcement. On its website and different social media platforms, the CITC has so far not posted any statement or announcement related to the blocking of LINE, which is operated as a subsidiary of South Korean tech giant Naver.
Using the Arabic language hashtags “enough blocking, telecommunication commission” (#هيئة_الاتصالات_كفاية_حجب), “blocking of line calls” (#حجب_مكالمات_اللاين), and “we demand the improvement of the Internet [service] in Saudi [Arabia]” ( #نطالب_بتحسين_النت_في_السعوديه), Saudis slammed the telecommunication industry regulator, the government, and operators for not prioritizing customers’ rights and consumer interests.
#نطالب_بتحسين_النت_في_السعوديه
الاشياء الي جالسة تسويها شركات الاتصال هو تنمر على الشعب بسبب انها الشركات الوحيده بالسعودية والشعب يحتاجها
— سلطان (@IsulzzxX) September 6, 2016
what the telecom companies are doing is a bullying of the people, since they are the only companies in Saudi Arabia and the people need them
#حجب_مكالمات_اللاين !!
طريقة رخيصة لزيادة دخل شركات الإتصالات في المملكة !
الحل بعد بضعه أيام ببرامج أخرى منافسة للاين.
— Motaz معتز السليم (@motazAlsolaim) September 4, 2016
Blocking Line calls is a cheap strategy to increase the profits of the telecom companies in the kingdom. In a few days, there will be a solution with other packages competing with Line
Addressing the CITC, the telecom industry regulator in Saudi Arabia, user Badr Al-Atibi tweeted:
تراعون فقط مصالح شركات الاتصالات والمواطن اخر همكم ،.اغلب الناس يكلم اقاربهم وابناءهم المغتربين عبر هذه التطبيقات #هييه_الاتصالات_كفايه_حجب
— بدر العتيبي (@bbdsbbd) September 5, 2016
you only care about the interests of telecommunication companies, the citizen is your last concern. Most people talk to their expat relatives and children using these applications
Abeer AlMutairi expressed concern that Saudis will eventually be left with one texting option, SMSing:
اتوقع اخرتها بيحجبون مايبقى الا الرسايل النصية:)، مايصير كذا حجب بدون أي أسباب مقنعة العالم تتطور وحنا نرجع للورا. #هيئة_الاتصالات_كفاية_حجب
— Abeer AlMutairi. (@iAbeerAlMutairi) September 5, 2016
Due to blocking, I expect in the end only SMS will remain. Blocking should not take place without any convincing reasons. The world is progressing, and we are going backwards.
Tasked with regulating the communications and information technology sector with the aim of achieving “a highly competitive environment for the provision of superior services to end-users and an attractive ecosystem for investors”, the CITC is responsible for censoring thousands of websites, and sending content removal requests to social media platforms.
Saudi Arabia is not the only country in the Arab region to block VoIP services. In the United Arab Emirates, providing such services remains the prerogative of the country's only two operators and service providers, Etisalat and Du. The UAE government owns a majority of shares of both companies. Earlier this year, Morocco, which has for so long been praised for liberalizing its telecommunications sector, banned VoIP services over mobile and wifi networks, under the pretext that Article 2 of the telecom law (law n°24-96) only allows for licensed operators to provide phone call services.


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Hackers Exploit Android Flaw to Target Iranian Activists · Global Voices
Center for Human Rights in Iran

Suspected state-sponsored hackers have intensified their attempts to break into the online accounts of Iranian rights activists in recent weeks by exploiting security vulnerabilities in Android smartphones. Photo from ICHRI.
A version of this article was originally published on the website of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.
Suspected state-sponsored hackers have intensified their attempts to break into the online accounts of Iranian rights activists in recent weeks by exploiting security vulnerabilities in Android smartphones, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran has learned.
On August 11, 2016 an unknown person sent a message on Facebook to a prominent Iranian political activist living in Paris and introduced himself as a former student. The hacker said he had created political stickers with the activist’s photo on them. He then sent a file, with an APK suffix, to the activist claiming that the file contained the stickers.
But the file actually contained malware. Soon after the activist opened the file, the hacker was able to take over the activist’s Facebook page and sent similar messages to the activist’s friends, some of whom worked at Radio Farda, Deutsche Welle and the BBC. One of the friends fell for the trap and lost access to his Gmail account for several hours.
Files with the APK extension are applications that can be installed on smartphones with Android operating systems. Users should only open these files after downloading them from reputable sources, such as Google Play. Unlike Apple’s iOS operating system, Android apps can be independently developed and installed. This has many benefits for independent developers, but it also makes it easy for hackers to prey on unsuspecting users and spy on them.
The file that was used to hack into the Paris-based activist’s account was created by DroidJack, an Android “Remote Administration Tool” that allows hackers to breach the security of a computer system.
List of locations accessed by hackers on a victim’s Android smartphone.
Investigations by the Campaign show that trojan malware created by hackers can gain remote access to a wide range of content on Android smartphones including messages, photos, audio files, apps, GPS locators, and contact lists. The hackers can monitor conversations and operations on the device without the owner’s knowledge. The hacker can even make phone calls and send messages from the victim's device.
The hacking victim’s photo was placed in the malware file to trick him into downloading it.
Hackers have also sent messages on Facebook to Iranian journalists living abroad and asked them to click on false links on Google Drive to “receive important urgent news.” These links have led to malware with similar capabilities.
Receiver: Hi XXXX dear
Receiver: This is my address XXXX@gmail.com
Hacked Account: [link]
Hacked Account: [link]
Hacked Account: It seems the documents are real on this drive
Receiver: XXXX, the files you have sent are locked and they need a password to be accessed
Messages sent to journalists from a hacked account.
The journalist whose Gmail account was hacked described the process as follows:
1. Hacker directs unsuspecting victim to false Google account sign-in page.
2. Victim enters username and password.
3. Hacker records victim’s username and password and submits an access request to Google.
4. Google sends a text message to the victim to complete the two-step verification process.
5. Victim inputs the verification code in the false Google sign-in page.
6. Hacker copies the verification code, which is valid for only 30 seconds, and signs into the victim’s account.
These kinds of problems don't discriminate. Regardless of where they live or what they do, users should always be cautious when they receive messages from unfamiliar sources, especially if those messages contain a link or an attachment. There are various services and experts online who can help with these challenges, but for non-expert users, Google has some simple ways to check these things and make sure they're safe.
Google Docs Viewer has a (slightly hidden) feature that makes it easy to view any online document via Google's processed HTML view.

author: Center for Human Rights in Iran


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Algerian Court Upholds Conviction of Activist Jailed for Insulting Islam on Facebook · Global Voices
Afef Abrougui

49 year-old Slimane Bouhafs blogs in support of religious minorities in Algeria.
On 6 September, an appeal court in the eastern Algerian city of Setif confirmed the conviction of activist Slimane Bouhafs for insulting Islam and prophet Muhammad on Facebook, while decreasing his jail sentence from five to three years.
On 7 August, a primary court sentenced him to five years in jail and a fine of 100,000 Algerian dinars (approximately US $900) for “offending the Prophet” and “denigrating the creed and precepts of Islam” under article 144 bis 2 of Algeria’s Penal Code. On appeal, the court of Appeals of Setif maintained his conviction, reduced his jail sentence to three years and dropped the fine.
Bouhafs, a Christian convert, and activist with the St. Augustine Coordination of Christians in Algeria which supports the rights of religious minorities in the country, regularly posts about the situation of Algeria's Christian minority on Facebook, his Google+ profile and personal blog. According to Amnesty International, he is also a supporter of the Movement for Self-Determination of Kabylia (MAK), an autonomous political group seeking autonomy for the region of Kabylia.
He was arrested on 31 July, over Facebook posts he published between May and June 2016. One of the posts reportedly cited as evidence against him was published on 21 June. In the post, Bouhafs shared a cartoon by the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo showing Prophet Muhammad crying with the following comment:
Muhammad cries because he lost in advance in Kabylia, but also in all of Algeria. His lie will disappear because the light of Christ is here, because he is peace, truth and the true path
The link to the Facebook post for which Bouhfsa reportedly went to jail currently shows no Charlie Hebdo cartoon. However, the same post along with the cartoon still appears on his blog.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both slammed Bouhafs’ arrest and conviction. The Algerian League for Human Rights (which appointed its lawyers to defend Bouhafs’ appeal) condemned the sentence for violating the Algerian constitution and international human rights standards, and called on the authorities to amend article 144 of the Penal Code which criminalizes insults to religion and state symbols. Algerian authorities repeatedly use this article to silence those who criticize the state or religion. Journalist Mohamed Tamalt is currently serving two years in jail for criticizing the country's president Abdelaziz Bouteflika in a poem he published on Facebook.


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Chileans Defend Critical Thinking as Officials Consider Changing High School Philosophy Class · Global Voices
Natali Herrera Pacheco

Recent controversy over changes in school curricula and the possibility of changing student inclinations towards studying Philosophy have Chileans reflecting on the importance of which subjects should be offered in schools. Photo taken by Pixabay. Licensed under Public Domain.
This week in Chile, social networks, academia, and the general public were abuzz with the news that philosophy might be removed from the list of required courses for high school juniors and seniors.
At first, it was reported that this change would turn philosophy into an optional course or even make it a part of the subject material covered in civic education class. However, the Ministry of Education responded saying that the proposal, far from limiting student access, sought to standardize the curriculum nationwide to make the subject more accessible for the majority of students.
The fate of philosophy class hasn't yet been decided, but in spite of this, many see the idea of meddling with the current set-up as something profoundly problematic. The ongoing debate involves deans, university authorities, professors, and, of course, the media. In any event, many believe philosophy's very presence in schools is being threatened.
Academics like Adolfo Estrella argued on the website El Desconcierto (which in Spanish means “bewilderment”) that philosophy should be one part of a complete curriculum that fosters critical thinking across different activities and school subjects:
(…) la Filosofía se defiende por sí sola. La asignatura de Filosofía, por su parte, merece ser defendida […]
[…] philosophy defends itself. The philosophy course, in turn, deserves to be defended […]
César Guadalupe, a professor and researcher at Peru's University of the Pacific, said in regards to the annexation of philosophy class into the civic education program that the most important thing was understanding that civic education imparts “legal, formal, patriotic, and philosophic” knowledge. For Guadalupe, it is essential to ask, “In the end, what is it that we want children to learn in school? Knowledge about certain subjects or an ensemble of abilities?” And, if it's the latter, “Which of those abilities do we want to reinforce?”
Guido Larson, a teacher for the Humanities Institute at Chile's Universidad del Desarrollo (in Spanish, University for Development), for his part commented that the proposed changes — whatever they are — don't seem to be well thought out.
And Guadalupe insisted that critical thinking is not exclusive to one subject:
El pensamiento crítico es una habilidad, una competencia que debe desarrollarse en la física, en las matemáticas, en la psicología o en la materia que sea. Uno puede reflexionar críticamente sobre la materia que desee.
Critical thinking is an ability, a competency that should be developed in physics, in mathematics, in psychology, or in any subject. One can critically reflect on the subject that one desires.
On the other hand, and in a bitingly ironic manner, Hernán Neira criticized the Ministry's plan:
Señora Ministra: tiene Ud. razón en eliminar Filosofía, ramo pérfido e inútil. Nuestros compatriotas, por ella, se preguntan cada día más por el sentido de la vida y quieren volver a ser humanos, hartos de ser consumidores de bienes materiales e inmateriales, como Educación Cívica.
Madame Minister: You're right to eliminate philosophy, that deceitful and useless study [from the educational program]. Because of it, our compatriots increasingly ask themselves about the meaning of life. They wish to once again be human beings, sick to death of being consumers of material and immaterial goods like civic education.
In a giant, endless mess of messages, Chileans expressed their opinion on what some considered to be a step that's consistent with the state of education in the country, with its high costs and a structure that many see as devoted to satisfy economic needs only. One can follow the conversation at #Derechoalafilosofía (#RightToPhilosophy), which has continuous opinions, articles, and debates:
Un #Chile sin memoria, sin educación cívica, sin filosofía, sin Historia, esta destinado al fracaso más rotundo
— Rocio Barrientos (@Chiobtos) August 30, 2016
A #Chile without memory, without civic education, without philosophy, without history, is destined for a most emphatic disaster
Others, in defending philosophy, asked the minister to roll any changes back or to do a better analysis that would allow this and other changes to be more effective.
: “Ministra, saque todas estas ideas raras de eficientismo barato” https://t.co/OnJ9z3CFP0 vía @eldesconcierto
— FernandoRubilar (@FernandoRubilar) August 30, 2016
“[Madame] Minister, throw out all of these weird ideas on cheap efficiency”
Filosofia, Cívica, todo cambió requiere validación docente y en Chile no se da. De ahí los fracasos y experimentación continúa #FilosofiaCHV
— marcelamomberg (@marcelamomberg) August 25, 2016
Philosophy, civics, any change requires teacher validation, and in Chile it has not been given. Hence the failures and constant experimentation
Even the Network of Chilean Philosophy Professors (REPROFICH) launched a campaign called “Petition to the Chilean Ministry of Education. A Defense of the Right to Philosophy” through the website Change.org. They hope to collect 2,500 signatures in order to validate academic and citizen opinions that align against the curricular alteration. At the moment of this article's publication, the page had gathered 1,830 signatures.
Among the demonstrations of support for the unrestricted presence of philosophy in classrooms, the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso shared a debate they hosted called “Defending Philosophy.” Both students and professors participated, defending the study of philosophy as something more than an accumulation of knowledge or an element within “Chile's market-driven education.” The participants’ main concern centered around the possibility of philosophy disappearing from schools due to educational disinterest once the class becomes optional or part of the class material for civic education courses. They believe that, considering the competitive structures that surround formal schooling in Chile, this fear could become a reality.
The discussion remains open, although it is hoped that both sides will eventually reach an agreement. Even though this news has generated controversy within Chile, it is perhaps important to remember that just one year ago Spain said goodbye to philosophy in their schools. This could suggest that the spaces for teaching humanities and critical thinking as we know them are experiencing radical changes. The impact on the formation of youth and of citizen behavior, however, remains to be seen.


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Detention of News Site Director Raises Concerns for Venezuela’s Freedom of Speech · Global Voices
Laura Vidal

“Free Braulio Jatar. Informing is not a crime” Image used by the campaign demanding Jatar's freedom on Twitter, widely shared online.
After fears of a forced disappearance that quickly flooded citizen media in Venezuela, news surfaced that Chilean-Venezuelan journalist and lawyer Braulio Jatar, director of the website “Reporte Confidencial“, is in custody of the national intelligence agency (SEBIN) on charges of money laundering.
According to family and co-workers, the whereabouts of Jatar were unknown for hours and he was unable to communicate and his home was searched. His sister also said through Twitter that Jatar was denied medication for a chronic condition.
“El gobierno es responsable de la vida de mi hermano”/ sobre salud del periodista Venezolano Chileno #BraulioJatar pic.twitter.com/ZMtWEc6MA1
— Caracas Organizada (@caracasorg) September 5, 2016
The government is responsible for my brother's life. [A video discussing] the health of Chilean-Venezuelan journalist #BraulioJatar
Jatar was detained along with over 30 other people — who were later freed — during a protest in the locality of Villa Rosa, in the island region of Nueva Esparta, in northeastern Venezuela. The Villa Rosa hashtag went viral on September 2nd and 3rd on Venezuelan social media when residents protested the presence of the president Nicolás Maduro.
According to social media users and videos shared online, when Maduro arrived in Villa Rosa, residents took to the streets, banging pots and pans (a form of protest called a “cacerolazo,” referring to the “cacerola” or casserole dish) and ultimately forcing him to leave the city.
The incident came in the wake of demonstrations in Venezuela’s capital, in which thousands of people campaigned for a referendum to recall Maduro.
Jatar's supporters believe that his news website's coverage of the protest in Villa Rosa is the real reason he’s in custody.
For the president of the National Association of Journalists, Tinedo Guía, the arrest is meant to silence Jatar’s Reporte Confidencial. In a story on Reporte Confidencial, Jara’s lawyer explained that the legal process had many irregularities and false accusations:
Denunció que el procedimiento de detención fue irregular, así como los hechos sucedidos seguidamente, al ser trasladado a la sede del Sebín donde fue entrevistado y formado el expediente a espalda de los que se establece probatoriamente en las actas del proceso, señalando la asistencia de testigos que en efecto no estuvieron, y eso vamos a acreditar que no ocurrió, así como se acreditó la existencia de un supuesto maletín con dinero, lo cual tambien es falso.
[Jatar’s lawyer] reported that the arresting procedures were irregular, as were the incidents that took place afterwards. [Jatar] was transferred to the SEBIN [the intelligence agency’s headquarters] where he was interviewed and where his file was opened, ignoring due process provisions. They indicated the presence of two witnesses that were not there, and they noted the existence of an alleged briefcase with money, which is also false.
The Victim’s Families Committee (CoFaVic), a group devoted to human rights protection, based in Caracas and created in the aftermath of the series riots known as El Caracazo, also urged the government to correct the irregularities that took place during Jatar’s arrest. For the organization, the uncertainty and the silence of the days before the intelligence agency acknowledged having arrested Jatar and other political prisoners can be seen as crimes against humanity, even if the people in question are still alive.
Chile’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Heraldo Muñoz, expressed concern for Jatar’s safety and assured being very attentive to anything that could happen to Jatar in Venezuela.
At the same time, a group Chilean politicians signed a petition letter demanding the Venezuelan government free Braulio Jatar. According to the Chilean media site The Clinic, the ex-minister of Public Works Sergio Bitar said:
Estoy seguro que el 99% de los chilenos tienen la misma posición. Un gran grupo de los firmantes hemos sido exiliados durante la dictadura de Augusto Pinochet y Venezuela nos acogió con su democracia […] Queremos agradecer esa democracia defendiendo los mismo derechos que los venezolanos nos ayudaron a defender…
I’m sure that 99% of Chilean people have the same position we do. Many of those who signed [the letter addressed to Maduro] were exiled during Pinochet’s dictatorship, and Venezuela received us in their democracy […] We want to thank that democracy defending the same rights that the Venezuelans helped us to defend…
Online, the hashtags #LiberenaBraulioYa [Free Braulio Now] and #BraulioJatar have been very active on Twitter since the moment of the arrest and are bringing greater visibility to the deterioration of freedom of speech in the country:
El caso @BraulioJatarA es el mejor ejemplo de que en Vzla la libertad de prensa es “condicional”. #LiberenABraulioYA
— María Elena Lavaud (@melavaud) September 5, 2016
Braulio Jatar's case is the best example of Venezuela's freedom of the press being “conditional”.
Jatar may join the growing list of political prisoners and politically motivated judicial processes under Nicolas Maduro's presidency. According to Amnesty International annual report, Venezuela's human rights defenders and journalists face attacks and intimidations, and “political opponents of the government faced unfair trials and imprisonment.”

author: Laura Vidal


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Filipino Fishers Living in a Scenic Cove Fight to Save Their Homes From Demolition and Land Grabbing · Global Voices
Karlo Mongaya

A fishing village in Patungan Cove. Photo from Pamalakaya
At least 353 families in the fishing and farming community in the scenic Patungan Cove in Maragondon, Cavite, just two hours south from the Philippines’ capital Manila, are facing demolition to pave way for an eco-tourism and real estate development project.
Local residents have banded together to defend the community in the face of the heavy military and police presence that has been dispatched to implement their eviction. Uniting through the Save Patungan Now Movement, residents have put up barricades to block the demolition.
Patungan is located south of Manila, the capital of the Philippines.
A combined demolition crew of 1,000 police and military men began the demolition on August 22 and 23, which led to the destruction of at least 17 homes. A demolition order effective since July 12 has been signed by the courts to enforce the claim of the Maria Theresa Virata Properties and Holdings Corporation over the Patungan Cove.
Various people’s organizations led by the fisherfolk advocacy group Pambansang Lakas ng Kilusang Mamamalakaya ng Pilipinas (Pamalakaya) conducted a National Fact Finding and Solidarity Mission in the community last September 3 and 4. Pamalakaya Chairperson Fernando Hicap shared some of their findings in a statement:
Residents can’t go in and out of their community by land because the stationed security guards will block and harass them; they use boats for transportation either which is relatively expensive than taking a walk. We are investigating for a possible martial-law style of hamletting in Brgy. [village] Patungan.
Residents told delegates of the mission that tear gas and blank bullets were used by the demolition crew in their failed attempt to disperse the resisting crowds and dismantle the barricades. Policemen and private goons continue to besiege Patungan up to now.
Gathering of residents during the National Fact Finding and Solidarity Mission in Patungan last September 3-4. Photo credits: Pamalakaya-Pilipinas.
Empty tear gas canisters and blank bullets used during the demolition. Photo credits: Pamalakaya-Pilipinas.
The move to take over Patungan, which has been the site of the fishing community for over a century, is alleged to be masterminded by the Manila Southcoast Development Corporation (MSDC), which is owned by the Philippines’ richest man, Henry Sy.
Susan Agner of the Save Patungan Now Movement recounted:
Our forefathers have long been here, 150 years ago. They were the ones who cleared the area to be suitable for residential purposes. Now a giant ‘developer’ and Henry Sy suddenly came and want us to leave the land where we grew up to pave way for their money-making ventures.
One of the demolished houses. Photo credits: Pamalakaya-Pilipinas.
Residents put up barricades to guard against threats of demolition. Photo credits: Pamalakaya-Pilipinas.
Residents and activists unite in resisting the demolition and land grabbing activities of big corporations. Photo from Pamalakaya Pilipinas
Activists swim and protest while holding placards calling the government to stop the demolition of fishing villages in Patungan Cove. Photo from Pamalakaya Pilipinas.
The MSDC owns the Pico de Loro Beach Resort in the adjoining Hamilo Coast. According to some residents, the company's expansion plan involves the conversion of Patungan’s 602-hectare fishing and agricultural community into an exclusive resort and tourism hub. The area around Patungan is also the location of various resorts, including those owned by foreign companies. The MSDC has denied involvement in the demolition of the community.
For the residents of Patungan, the land-grabbing incident in their community is a test whether the Philippines’ new government will uphold its vow to stop all demolition orders that do not provide relocation to the poor.
Panoramic view of Patungan. Photo Credits: Pamalakaya-Pilipinas.

author: Karlo Mongaya


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Hong Kong Lawmaker Receives Death Threat Four Days After Being Elected · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

Eddie Chu talked to the press before he reported the death threat to the police. Photo from inmediahk.net.
Editor's disclosure: The author of this article is a personal friend of Eddie Chu Hoi Dick.
Threats of political violence in Hong Kong are rising rapidly in the wake of September 4 legislative elections. Newly elected lawmaker Eddie Chu Hoi Dick reported to the police on September 8 that he received “credible death threats” against him and his family after the election.
Though Chu received more votes than any other candidate in the September 4 legislative election, public support has not safeguarded him from political threats.
As an activist and investigative journalist, Chu has worked in recent years to expose collusion between the Hong Kong government, developers, rural indigenous leaders and triads (Chinese organized crime groups) regarding land development in the New Territories, a region of Hong Kong. In May this year, a village chief in Yuen Long warned Chu that if he continued to advocate for the construction of 17,000 public housing units in Wang Chau district, he would be attacked after election day on September 4.
Indigenous inhabitants of New Territories is a legal term invented by the colonial British government in the 1970s. It refers to the people descended through the male line from a person who had already settled in Hong Kong since 1898. This group of people enjoy a special right to build a small house in the New Territories if they can find suitable land. The status of indigenous inhabitants has to be approved by a group of village leaders who are in control of indigenous villages’ genealogies.
This group of rural leaders have become a powerful force in the New Territories, and extended their power to the government as this power is endorsed by Beijing through the system of functional constituency in the Legislative Council and the Chief Executive election committee.
Chu nevertheless questioned the rural leaders’ representatives during the election debate. On September 4, Chu was followed by two vehicles and saw a man taking photos of him and his election team members. Local media later exposed that one of the vehicles belongs to a man with a long criminal record.
Apart from Chu, another newly elected lawmaker from Western New Territories, Andrew Wan Siu-kin, also received a violent threat. The Democratic Party member found that someone had poured flammable liquid all over his election vehicle on September 2. The next day, he received a letter containing an incendiary device.
Since September 4, Chu and his family have not returned to their home home, fearing for their safety. A credible source revealed that the triad society had offered a price for Chu's killing.
Before he filed a report with police, Chu explained his situation in a press conference (statement via Eddie Chu’s Facebook page):
From 4th September, I have always realised these threats. My family and I stopped sleeping at home. We could not even returned to our home. We still believe that Hong Kong is a place with freedom of speech, where we can express ourselves freely. But at this moment, a LegCo member-to-be of the NTW with 84,121 votes is unable to return to his home due to death threats brought by his political views. We can say that there is no more rule of law. […]
Today we hope that police could investigate the series of happenings seriously and meticulously. Thus, I am unable to expose names and times to you all. But what I can say is that these threats are proximal and nearby, and the time is drawing near too.
The Hong Kong police are now providing Chu and his family with round-the-clock protection.
Democratic Party spokespeople say they believe Chu was targeted because he interfered with the illegal transfer of indigenous inhabitants’ rights in the development of small house units.
According to local “small house policy”, indigenous villagers in the New Territories have the right to build a house of their own. This right is non-transferable. However, secret deals are often made between rural elites and developers, and triad leaders also have stepped in to force indigenous villagers to transfer their land rights.
The Hong Kong government has turned a blind eye to the illegal transfer of these rights because both the triad and rural elites in the New Territories are generally loyal to Beijing.
This is not a brand new conflict. In 2013, members of triads mobilised to demonstrate support and safeguard Hong Kong’s top leader Leung Chun Ying’s town hall meeting from pro-democracy protesters.
During the September 4 Legislative election, two newly elected lawmakers, Leung Che-cheung and Junius Ho Kwan Yiu, representing rural privilege groups and triad-controlled developers’ interests were blessed by the Liaison Office of the Central Government in Hong Kong.
A number of civic organisations have issued statements condemning the persecution of Chu and others like him and urging the police to put an end to political violence that threatens the rule of law and freedom of speech.
Chu vowed that he would not submit to political violence after he reported the case to the police:
I will not submit to this kind of political violence – I will continue to fulfill my election promises, to monitor the government and make Hong Kong better.
I should be an example in protecting Hong Kong people’s freedom of speech, our freedom to express political views. We should not back down in the face of any violent threats – this is my promise to Hong Kong people.


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India’s Bihar Is Failing to Provide Adequate Healthcare to the Rural Poor · Global Voices
VideoVolunteers

A rural sub-centre turned into a storage. Screenshot from a Video Volunteers Video
This post originally appeared at Video Volunteers, an award-winning international community media organization based in India. An edited version is published below as part of a content-sharing agreement.
Ram Subhagram’s polio-stricken father withers in pain as he lies in the sub-health centre in Pranpur, in the Indian state of Bihar, hoping that a doctor comes to visit him soon.
But Ram knows that the wait could be indefinite. One in four people in rural India are living in poverty, and ill-health is one of the major causes of their misery. In case of an illness, their nearest government-funded health facility is a sub-centre, which caters to the healthcare needs of 5,000 people in general and 3,000 people in hilly, tribal and underdeveloped areas. And while Indian Health Ministry guidelines state a sub-health centre is to be operational 24/7, this centre has only opened occasionally for a few days a month over the last 20 years.
Ram has no other option but to wait for the centre to open to get treatment for his father because poverty makes it impossible for him to seek private medical assistance.
This particular centre's non-availability is so bad that residents have decided to use the abandoned space for storage. Video Volunteers community correspondent Surendra Sharma, who lives in the neighbouring village of Madanpur and reported this story, explained:
The Pranpur residents have started using the abandoned space as a storing place for fodder and the occasional shack for travelling relatives and friends.
The centre’s doors have a perpetual lock, but the unfinished buildings have no windows, which serve as a doorway into the buildings.
In Indian public health, a sub-centre is the most peripheral and first point of contact between the primary healthcare system and rural communities. Each sub-centre is supposed to be manned by one auxiliary nurse midwife, one female healthcare worker and one male healthcare worker. Sub-centres play an instrumental role in bringing about behavioural change and provide services in relation to maternal and child health, basic immunisation, check-ups and communicable disease prevention programmes.
However, the number of these health care facilities are inadequate, and many of them remain dysfunctional due to lack of funding and other issues. According to a report by the United Nations, 75% of the health infrastructure in India is concentrated in urban areas where only 27% of India’s population lives. The rural population of India is around 716 million people (72%) and yet they have to travel far to a nearby urban area for health issues as there are not enough medical facilities near them.
The sub-centre in Pranpur is one example of the shortcomings of this system. “On the rare occasion that the health centre is open, the nurse tells us that the centre has no medicines,” said a frustrated Ram Subhagram.
The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare is supposed to pay for the medicines and supplies, as well as provide for the salaries for the female healthcare worker and the auxiliary nurse midwife in addition to a contingency fund. That raises the question, if the health centre is allocated funds to operate for the entire year yet is only occasionally functional, is the allocated money being misused?
The women of Pranpur revealed to Surendra how not having an active sub-health centre, which is supposed to keep track of maternal and child health, including nutrition, immunisation, diarrhoea, etc., affects mothers and children. Brideshini Devi said:
The nearest hospital is 5-6 km away in Madanpur. Taking a heavily pregnant woman through bad roads poses a lot of threat to her life. We are unable to meet the rental expenses of the vehicle which cost Rs. 500, nor do we get a loan for the same easily.
The state of Bihar’s maternal mortality rate is the third-highest in the country at 219, which is higher than India’s national average of 178. The state also has 6.6 million chronically malnourished children, the second highest number of malnourished children in India.
A report by Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, the Indian branch of the People’s Health Movement, revealed that a Bihari citizen’s average out-of-pocket expenditure was Rs 41,000 (about 620 US dollars) per annum, which was mostly spent on drugs and diagnostics.
Below Poverty Line families who are unable to finance these expenses take loans or sell family properties, slipping further into the black hole of poverty that they aspire to get out of.
The Rural Health Statistics 2015 showed more ways in which the rural health infrastructure of Bihar is crumbling. According to the report, one health sub-centre in Bihar caters to over 9,000 people (against the norm of 3,000), one primary health centre caters to 50,000 people (against the norm of 30,000) and one community health centre caters to 1.3 million people (against the norm of 1.2 million).
Like Ram and Brideshni, there are several hundred Below Poverty Line families in the village of Pranpur who suffer due to this non-functional health centre.

author: VideoVolunteers