"Humiliating your Women is Humiliating all your People"

Posted by on December 20, 2010 No comments

On December 14, Sudanese journalist Halima Mohamed blogged on PulseWire. Pulsewire is a part of World Pulse, which is a global media and communication network devoted to bringing women a global voice. “PulseWire is a place where women and our allies can come together to transform our lives and the world.”

Halima reported some disturbing news. On the 14th, Sudanese Police and members of National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) brutally beat and detained dozens of women in Khartoum. The women are members of the Women Initiative Against Violence (WIAV) and, ironically, they were peacefully protesting the Public Law Order, which condones violence against women. Sudan has been governed by Islamic Shariah law since 1983 when it was introduced by former president Gaafar al-Nimeiri. The Public Order Law criminalizes acts such as the mixing of unmarried couples sitting together, drinking alcohol and women wearing trousers in public, and punishes them with fines or lashes.

Rights groups say the law doesn’t give guidelines about what constitutes an indecent act, leaving it up to the personal interpretation of each policeman. Amnesty International has called on the Sudanese government to amend its penal code and abolish laws that allow for flogging as a penalty, calling it “cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.” The introduction of Sharia law was one reason why people in the south, where most people are Christian or follow traditional religions, took up arms against the Arabic-speaking, Muslim north. After a 2005 peace deal, a referendum is due in January on whether the south should secede from Africa’s largest country.

Four World Pulse members, including physicians and journalists of all ages, were among the arrested women. The impetus behind the protest was a recent lashing of a young woman because she wore pants in public. This event was captured on video and quickly made the rounds online all over the world.

Khartoum’s police “contained an illegal assembly” today arresting 46 women and six men, because the organizers didn’t get permission for the protest, the police said in a statement on the Interior Ministry’s website. The detainees were released, but they remain under investigation for illegal assembly, disturbing public safety and public nuisance, the statement said. The women said they had tried to get permission for the protest but had been refused. The police declined to comment.

The arrest of the protesters captured the attention of many major media outlets: BBC, CNN, Reuters, etc. As the women started to gather, the police blocked most roads leading to center of Khartoum and prevented many cars and mini buses bringing women from adjacent areas to join the gathering. Undaunted, more than forty women got around the police blockage and assembled outside the Justice Ministry building holding banners condemning the law, while they were surrounded by riot police telling them to disperse. The women held their ground.

What many major media outlets neglected to mention, however, was that when faced with their passive resistance, policemen in plain clothes hit, kicked and otherwise brutalized the women, forcing them into submission. The women shouted “Humiliating your women is humiliating all your people,” as they were dragged and thrown into vehicles and hauled to prison. All detainees were eventually bailed out and set free.

Halima described the violence in more detail in the following statement. The photo included with this post is one of the photos she refers to from the university demonstration.

“One of the protesters was taken to the emergency unit to be treated. There were women in the middle of their sixth decades. Najlaa Sid Ahmed, World Pulse member and citizen journalist, was one of the arrested women. She told me over phone, from Khartoum, that police and security had beaten women regardless of their ages or health conditions, while insulting and calling them bad names. To have full idea on how security men subdue demonstrations and put under their sway, please have a look on these photos depicting such treatment to subdue a demonstration that took place in Darfur this month, when Zalinge University Students protested denouncing the killing of two of their colleagues.”

Halima reports that until recently women have been afraid to speak out against brutality “for fear of being stigmatized as indecent.” But this is changing. She describes one woman, a journalist, Lubna Al Hussein, who was sentenced to flogging for wearing pants. Al Hussein brought massive international attention to the issue because she invited media to her flogging. Ultimately she was required to pay a fine instead. Al Hussein now lives in France where we can imagine she enjoys the freedom of wearing pants.

Thousands of women in Sudan have endured the mental and physical anguish of being publically flogged, but that won’t stop them from continuing to fight for justice. Halima aptly describes the shortsightedness and stupidity of a male-dominated society that humiliates and suppresses its women in the following statement:

“For the sitting government women in pants are more dangerous than the hard living conditions. Women in pants are more dangerous than malaria, environment deterioration, war in Darfur, looming cessation of the South, Abyei issue that may ignite violence over a 2100 km borders densely populated by different southerner and northerner tribes. Women in pants are more dangerous than the high rate of illiteracy, mass migration of physicians to other countries. Women in pants are more dangerous than a country that falls apart and that four important parts of its frontiers are trimmed by its neighbors, when it turns a blind eye to their army violating its supremacy. Women in pants are more important than a president crippling the country, economy, reputation and force his people to be scattered in the four corners.”

Yes Halima, women in pants are dangerous to the status quo because they are organizing and fighting for their rights and it is only a matter of time before they achieve the change they seek.

Let’s Declare Cyberwar!

Posted by on December 14, 2010 No comments

As a child, I remember playing “war” with my friends. Epic battles played out in our backyards with imaginary casualties lying at the feet of victorious warriors in paper hats. Unfortunately, many years later not much has changed in the minds of many otherwise reasoned thinkers.

A recent article by David Frum in “The Week”  exemplifies this phenomena. In his article “Wikileaks is an Act of Cyber War,” Frum argues that Wikileaks is the cyber equivalent of a roadside bomb as compared to the cyber attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, which he characterizes as an F-35 attack.

But are Wikileaks antics a form of cyber war as Frum and others suggest? The short answer is no.

Best described as a new form of warfare, a cyber-war must be distinguished from cyber-espionage, cyber-crime and other variants of online conflict. While the popular media will continue to use the term to describe anything that will help sell ad space, the term describes a conflict between states as described in the formal laws of war.

The problem today is that legal scholars have not fully figured out how to define a cyber-war since the modern rules of armed conflict were crafted prior to the advent of the Internet.

A short answer to what is a cyber-war is to look at whether the online actions resulted in death or destruction and can it be attributed to another state. There are no easy answers to these seemingly simple questions and other factors need to be addressed as well before declaring a cyber-conflict a “war.” But for purposes of the discussion about pro or anti Wikileaks hackers waging distributed denial of service attacks against credit card companies and the like, it is perhaps better to think in analogous terms. The current demonstrations in the U.K. by student protesters upset over increases in tuition rates seem a more apt comparison. While some students may believe that they are at war with the British government, theirs is a protest, plain and simple.

In the case of Wikileaks, what we are now seeing is a characterization of the cyber event as something defined by the beholder, thereby justifying retaliation. Calling something a war invokes a certain nationalistic fervor and a call to action. Unfortunately, this means spending money (lots of it) to protect us from enemies, real or imagined, forgoing personal freedoms for the common good (remember the Patriot Act?) and branding dissenters from the prevailing ideology as terrorists. It’s not inconceivable that donations to the Wikileaks defense fund could be considered financing a terrorist organization in the not so distant future.

Cyber-wars will befall us all but be patient and be warned. A real cyber-war is not something we will find entertaining on the evening news. Just as important, reckless use of the cyberwar moniker opens the floodgate of state-sponsored repression that makes the whining about Wikileaks look like child’s play.

Investing in Girls and Women Blog Series

Posted by on December 10, 2010 No comments

Today, December 10, was chosen to honor the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption and proclamation in 1948, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the first global declaration of human rights. I am honoring this day by announcing a series of posts about women and girls around the world.

We all can agree that investment in girls’ education makes simple economic sense. Here are facts that support this:

  • Babies born to mothers without formal education are twice as likely to die before age five.
  • The same babies are four times more likely to be malnourished.
  • The fertility rate of women without education is, on average, 60 per cent higher than the rate of those who attended secondary school.
  • Uneducated women are more vulnerable to HIV.

Most international institutions and organizations agree that empowering women and girls is the best way to solve world problems and eradicate poverty. In the following weeks we will give snapshots of the status of women’s and girls’ rights in different corners of the globe. Please stay tuned and give us your feedback!

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

–Arundhati Roy, Indian novelist, essayist and activist who focuses on issues related to social justice and economic inequality

Wikileaks: Guess Who Owns the Internet?

Posted by on December 8, 2010 No comments

This last week has not been the best of times for Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange. After the slow release of State Department cables that revealed embarrassing details of diplomatic musings, Assange has been threatened with death, sought to be prosecuted for espionage, jailed without bail for sex crimes, got denied services by a number of Internet hosting services, PayPal and Amazon, pilloried by all “right” thinking folks and a variety of other plagues. On the bright side, he may get the Man of the Year award from Time magazine and he did, after all, get out some of the leaked cables. All in all, it has been an interesting few days.

What is giving me pause with all that has gone on with Wikileaks is the ability of the U.S. government and one U.S. Senator to essentially override the rule of law and strong-arm major Internet companies to deny the organization to have access to services that would otherwise be available to any enterprise. After pressure from Sen. Joe Lieberman (CT-Idiot), Amazon closed down Wikileaks’ cloud storage account, claiming a violation of its terms of service. Likewise, Paypal summarily terminated Wikileaks account. Meanwhile, the Wikileaks site has come under attack from a hacker with pro-American leanings known as the Jester. Using an all to common attack known as a denial of service (DoS), this hacker has been able to overwhelm the site, effectively shutting it down. Not to be easily taken out, Wikileaks has found support from other online operations, creating many mirrored sites. In the mean time, the U.S., which through its various cyber agencies has complained vigorously about DoS attacks, has been silent on this particular attack.

More importantly, the pressure brought by the U.S. to shut off the Wikileaks release of the cables speaks to the susceptibility of the Internet to state pressure. How far will the U.S. go to stop Wikileaks? Does this event set the stage for a moderated Internet of the politically correct kind?

Its one thing when China or Iran shuts down bloggers but its quite another thing when a journalist challenges the U.S. of A. Somehow, a politically correct Internet is a far more scary thing than a batch of leaked cables.

Free Hamida Hassan

Posted by on December 3, 2010 No comments

In April 2009 we wrote a post called “Crack vs. powder: the drug law that continues to ravage Black communities”. The difference in drug sentencing laws between crack and powder cocaine was astonishing and reflected deeply entrenched racism. Since 1986, defendants caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine have gotten the same punishment, five years in prison, as defendants convicted of possessing only five grams of crack cocaine. That’s a sentencing ratio of 100-1.

Thankfully, in August 2010 President Obama signed a new law that will close the long-disputed gap in federal sentencing for crack vs. powder cocaine.  According to the PBS Newshour with Gwen Ifill, the new law reduces that dramatic disparity, cutting the ratio to about 18-1. And, for the first time in 40 years, Congress is rolling back a mandatory minimum sentence already on the books. The law won rare bipartisan support.

In an interview with former Arkansas Congressman Asa Hutchinson, who served as the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration under President George W. Bush, and Judge Reggie Walton, who sits on the U.S. District Court bench for Washington, D.C., Gwen Ifill explored the question of why this incredible disparity in drug sentencing existed in the first place. Judge Walton explained that crack cocaine was so devastating in inner-city communities, primarily because of the violence caused by drug organizations that were vying to stake out their turf. Also, there was a misperception that crack cocaine was something different chemically than what powder cocaine was. For these reasons crack cocaine developed more of a stigma than powder.

In response to the question of why attitudes have shifted, Congressman Hutchinson said “I remember when I was in Congress 14 years ago advocating for reducing this disparity, and — and many of my colleagues didn’t want to sign on to this because they didn’t want to be perceived as being weak on crime. They didn’t want to reduce the penalties for cocaine. And so it had to take a lot of very difficult stories to educate them, as well as the science catching up and the law enforcement community expressing, we need to change this for fairness.”

Gwen Ifill went on to point out that the new standards are not retroactive. And that the sentencing commission was silent on that point. Thus Hamida Hassan, a 42-year-old mother and grandmother who is 16 years into a 27 year prison sentence for a first time nonviolent crack offense, continues to languish in jail. In a recent All Things Considered, Ari Shapiro said that the Nebraska judge who heard her case said he didn’t want to give such a harsh sentence, but he saw no way to give a shorter term under federal sentencing guidelines at the time. Under the sentencing guidelines now in place, Hassan would have already served her time.

Jay Rorty of the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project is leading a campaign on behalf of Hassan and in his interview with Shapiro, he said “I have worked with prisoners for a long time and I’ve never seen the volume of letters and support from prison officials themselves in support of commutation.”

This interview was in the context of a discussion regarding the fact that President Obama has yet to exercise his pardon power and clearly Hamida Hassan is a great candidate. What is Obama waiting for? Is he afraid of political backlash? Is he afraid of being perceived as favoring someone with a Muslim name? Is this one more instance where the change we were promised will not materialize?

Hamida Hassan has been waiting 16 years. She, more than anyone, needs the Barack Obama we thought we elected in 2008.