GOVERNANCE & CONFLICT (Burma/Myanmar)

"Karen National Army guerrillas who are fighting the Burmese army for greater autonomy and an end to what they describe as ethnic cleansing." (Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

Burma's Convicts Become Unwilling Pawns in a Long and Bitter Civil War
By Esmer Golluoglu
The Guardian, September 30, 2011
"The scars on their shoulders and backs give it away. Its leaders may suggest otherwise, but Burma is a country riven by the world's longest running civil war. And the pawns are the Burmese convicts forced to work as porters on the frontlines. Made to carry heavy supplies, they are regularly beaten and used as human shields against landmines. Those who have escaped form a growing underclass of refugees on the Thai border, where they eke out a meagre living and face deportation at any time. 'I work for a day, eat for a day but I am now free,' said Thay Utoo Ong at the secret location where he and three others met the Guardian. 'With the army, I had to carry 35kg of water on my back for 13 hours every day, without food or water. I knew I was going to die if I stayed ... I would either starve to death or be shot dead. In January, the 32-year-old was one of 1,200 convicts taken to bolster a military offensive against ethnic insurgents. Many were subjected to torture or summary executions, or placed directly in the line of fire, recounted Maung Nyunt. 'One porter stepped on a mine and lost his leg; he was screaming but the soldiers left him there,' he added. 'When we came back down the mountain he was dead. I looked up and saw bits of his leg in a tree.' Since 1948 the Burmese army, or Tatmadaw, has been fighting a civil war against armed groups including the Karen, whose members want greater autonomy and an end to what they describe as ethnic cleansing.

WORK (Iraq)

Mass Grave in Iraqi Town Held Bodies of 40 Cabbies
By Michael S. Schmidt
The New York Times, September 11, 2011
"Iraq has been so inured by years of war, terrorism and sectarian strife that what would be a horrific crime of shocking proportions in most countries has gone barely noticed here. Several days ago, a mass grave was unearthed in Dujail, a town about 35 miles north of Baghdad. That was not unusual. Iraq is littered with such graves, some from the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein, others from the sectarian bloodletting that erupted after the American invasion. Dujail, in fact, is best known for a mass killing, that of 148 of its men and boys by Mr. Hussein’s forces after a failed attempt to assassinate him there in 1982. That was the case Mr. Hussein was hanged for in 2006. But this mass grave, security officials said, was the work of a gang of killers who had kidnapped and killed 40 Baghdad taxi drivers over the last two years in order to steal their cars. The police said the crime was unprecedented as far as they knew. But one would be hard pressed to find a mention of the killings in the Iraqi news media or on the street. Asked about the killings, a member of Parliament from Salahuddin Province, which includes Dujail, offered the standard critique of lax Iraqi security. 'Those areas are not being controlled by the security forces,' said the lawmaker, Suhad Fahil Hamid al-Obedi. 'Unfortunately, we are suffering from a weakness of our security forces.' The police said that the gang had stolen dozens of taxis over the last two years, killing the drivers and burying them in Dujail.

FAMILY & SEXUALITY (China)

"Duan Biansheng, one of many unmarried men in the 'bachelor village' of Banzhushan in Hunan province." (Tania Branigan)

China's Village of the Bachelors: No Wives in Sight in Remote Settlement
By Tania Branigan
The Guardian, September 2, 2011
"He wants a wife, of course. But ask what kind of woman he seeks and Duan Biansheng looks perplexed. 'I don't have any requirements at all,' said the 35-year-old farmer. 'I would be satisfied with just a wife.' His prospects of finding one, he added, are 'almost zero'. There are dozens of single men in Banzhushan village, perched high on a remote mountain peak in central Hunan province -- and not one unattached woman of marriageable age. Tens of millions of men across China face a future as bachelors. They are a source of pity, not envy, in a country where having children is central to life. Duan worries about growing old with no one to care for him. He chafes at the unhelpful pressure to wed from his parents and neighbours. The worst thing of all is the loneliness. This is the perverse outcome of the country's longstanding preference for sons, and its sudden modernisation. Traditionally, the family line is passed via men. When a woman marries, she joins her husband's family. Having a boy is a cultural and a pragmatic choice: you expect him to continue your lineage and support you in old age. The result has long been a surplus of men, because of female infanticide or excess female deaths through neglect. But in the last 20 years, the problem has exploded thanks to the spread of prenatal scans.

GOVERNANCE & CONFLICT (Palestine-Israel)

"Boys throw stones at Israeli soldiers." (AFP)

How Israel Takes Its Revenge on Boys Who Throw Stones
By Catrina Stewart
The Independent, 26 August 2011
"The boy, small and frail, is struggling to stay awake. His head lolls to the side, at one point slumping on to his chest. 'Lift up your head! Lift it up!' shouts one of his interrogators, slapping him. But the boy by now is past caring, for he has been awake for at least 12 hours since he was separated at gunpoint from his parents at two that morning. 'I wish you'd let me go,' the boy whimpers, 'just so I can get some sleep.' During the nearly six-hour video, 14-year-old Palestinian Islam Tamimi, exhausted and scared, is steadily broken to the point where he starts to incriminate men from his village and weave fantastic tales that he believes his tormentors want to hear. This rarely seen footage seen by The Independent offers a glimpse into an Israeli interrogation, almost a rite of passage that hundreds of Palestinian children accused of throwing stones undergo every year. Israel has robustly defended its record, arguing that the treatment of minors has vastly improved with the creation of a military juvenile court two years ago. But the children who have faced the rough justice of the occupation tell a very different story. 'The problems start long before the child is brought to court, it starts with their arrest,' says Naomi Lalo, an activist with No Legal Frontiers, an Israeli group that monitors the military courts. It is during their interrogation where their 'fate is doomed', she says. Sameer Shilu, 12, was asleep when the soldiers smashed in the front door of his house one night. He and his older brother emerged bleary-eyed from their bedroom to find six masked soldiers in their living room. Checking the boy's name on his father's identity card, the officer looked 'shocked' when he saw he had to arrest a boy, says Sameer's father, Saher. 'I said, "He's too young; why do you want him?" "I don't know," he said'. Blindfolded, and his hands tied painfully behind his back with plastic cords, Sameer was bundled into a Jeep, his father calling out to him not to be 'We cried, all of us,' his father says. 'I know my sons; they don't throw stones.'

GOVERNANCE & CONFLICT / FAMILY & SEXUALITY (Uganda / Congo)

"Dying of shame: a Congolese rape victim, currently resident in Uganda. This man’s wife has left him, as she was unable to accept what happened. He attempted suicide at the end of last year." (Will Storr/Observer)

The Rape of Men
By Will Storr
The Observer, July 17, 2011
"Of all the secrets of war, there is one that is so well kept that it exists mostly as a rumour. It is usually denied by the perpetrator and his victim. Governments, aid agencies and human rights defenders at the UN barely acknowledge its possibility. Yet every now and then someone gathers the courage to tell of it. This is just what happened on an ordinary afternoon in the office of a kind and careful counsellor in Kampala, Uganda. For four years Eunice Owiny had been employed by Makerere University's Refugee Law Project (RLP) to help displaced people from all over Africa work through their traumas. This particular case, though, was a puzzle. A female client was having marital difficulties. 'My husband can't have sex,' she complained. 'He feels very bad about this. I'm sure there's something he's keeping from me.' Owiny invited the husband in. For a while they got nowhere. Then Owiny asked the wife to leave. The man then murmured cryptically: 'It happened to me.' Owiny frowned. He reached into his pocket and pulled out an old sanitary pad. 'Mama Eunice,' he said. 'I am in pain. I have to use this.' Laying the pus-covered pad on the desk in front of him, he gave up his secret. During his escape from the civil war in neighbouring Congo, he had been separated from his wife and taken by rebels. His captors raped him, three times a day, every day for three years. And he wasn't the only one. He watched as man after man was taken and raped. The wounds of one were so grievous that he died in the cell in front of him. 'That was hard for me to take,' Owiny tells me today. 'There are certain things you just don't believe can happen to a man, you get me? But I know now that sexual violence against men is a huge problem. Everybody has heard the women's stories. But nobody has heard the men's.'

GOVERNANCE & CONFLICT (Libya)

The Short Life and Cruel Death of Libyan Freedom Fighter Izz al-Arab Matar
By Hisham Matar
The Guardian, August 26, 2011
"My cousin Izz al-Arab Matar, a 22-year-old final-year student in engineering, was shot in Bab al-Aziziya, Muammar Gaddafi's fortified compound in Tripoli, at 4.30pm on Tuesday 23 August 2011. 'Izzo', as his friends and family liked to call him, had joined the rebel front immediately after the revolution started on 17 February. He fought in the liberation of his hometown of Ajdabiya, helped liberate Brega and then went on to join the rebels in Misrata. He would return home to his family in Ajdabiya occasionally to rest, get a change of clothes and eat a proper meal before setting off again. Every time his mother would ask him not to leave. He would reply by jokingly quoting from Gaddafi's defiant, savage speech, made a few days after the rebellion began: 'Forward, forward.' She once asked him: 'Forward until when? When will you stop fighting?' 'When we reach Bab al-Aziziya,' he told her.

GOVERNANCE & CONFLICT (Libya)

"A wall outside the Benghazi courthouse bears images of men who have been imprisoned or killed by Moammar Kadafi." (Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)

1996 Prison Massacre a Spark in Libyan Revolution
By Raja Abdulrahim
The Los Angeles Times, March 19, 2011
"Every month for nearly 10 years, Ezzedin abu Azza's family traveled to the gates of Abu Salim prison in Tripoli to deliver a package of clothes, food and medicine, not knowing whether it ever reached him. They hadn't seen him since the day in 1993 when the 23-year-old was taken away for questioning by state security agents. But still they made their journey from Benghazi every month. Then, in 2002, the family was told he had died, six years earlier. Here in this eastern city that has long simmered with resentment over the brutal rule of Moammar Kadafi, the Abu Azzas were among the lucky ones. Other families would wait another six years, or longer, to hear that their loved ones were among a reported 1,200 political prisoners at Abu Salim who were killed, in a matter of hours, in June 1996 as they fought for better living conditions and the right to see their families. Other families have never been officially informed and only assume that their loved ones are among the dead. When the government in 2008 began notifying many of the families of the deaths, they set up mourning tents and posted obituaries. 'We were notified 12 years after his death,' many obituaries read, brashly pointing an accusatory finger at the government. Now, a decade and a half after the massacre, the prisoners' stories and an unprecedented call for justice by their families helped spark a revolution.