Colombia: War strategies are accentuated in the preelectoral period

Serious human rights violations are being noted in Chocó and Cauca

We women continue to be the most affected by the actions of armed groups.





We confirm the need for humanitarian accords in the region.

Bogotá, 25 May 2011. The Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres launches an urgent appeal to the state institutions, to human rights organisations and to the international community in the face of grave violations of international humanitarian law that are taking place in the departments of Chocó and Cauca, where the civilian population is being held hostage and those engaged in armed clashes avoid their responsibility to distinguish between civlians and combattents.

For this movement of women, it is urgent to protect the population of these departments, especially women and girls, since the increase in the presence and activity of armed groups expose them to high risks. This circumstance provokes a climate of fear in the preelectoral period, generating in women even greater fear of taking part in public activity and so reinforces their exclusion from the political and social scene.

In Chocó in the past 15 days, 220 people were abducted and then released. There is a constant worry that these strategies of war that put at risk the afro and indigenous people who live in the area may continue.

In the department of Cauca, the activities of armed groups is increasing in three directons: firstly putting the civilian population in the crossfire, as is happening in the clashes between the army and the FARC in the north of the department; secondly in the threats against women leaders in the region that have been received in leaflets signed by offshoot groups from the AUC (paramilitaries) who operate in the region, and lastly it is evident in the deterioration of the practices of war and the imposition of terror by paramilitary groups, particularly directed against women with regard to control of their bodies. Consequently, the increase in the presence and activities of these groups in the region puts women and girls who have been victims of systematic sexual violence at the hands of these groups in an situation of extremely serious risk.

The women of Cauca and Chocó confirm that they continue to be involved in outbreaks of armed conflict and that there is no suitable response from the state to protect their rights

It's important to point ut that the dynamic of armed conflict in Colombia and the way in which it heightens favours the continued escalation of violence against women, often not reported because of the lack of judicial structures and of the absence of guarantees for the protection of their lives.

All this reinforces the postion of the Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres on the overriding necessity for a negotiated settlement to the armed conflict that allows us to put down the basis for a lasting peace in Colombia.

We women do not bear sons and daughters for the war

Demilitarise June 2nd

We are sick of war of arms, of military parades

The 2nd June is our national day, the festival women and men who recognise their aspirations in the Consititution that defines the rights of all, the right to work, the education, to health care..., and that repudiates war.

To reinterate our NO:

to WAR, to MILITARY SPENDING, to the CULTURE OF WAR, to the MILITARISATION of our land and our lives.

To say that we want a June 2nd that is DIFFERENT where we can celebrate as citizens of:

• a country that is welcoming, founded on respect, on listening, and on mutual recognition between men and women, natives and immigrants, between "us" and "the others".
  

• a country where young people can have a future and old people a dignified and peaceful life

• a country where common goods - air, water, land, energy, our artistic and cultural historical patrimony, the natural environment, the landscape
- remain outside the logic of the market

• a country that knows how to face internal and international conflicts without recourse to force.
  

• a country that invests not in arms and war but in culture, education, healthcare, employment.

We've had enough of easy apologies

Nato's intervention has made the situation worse since 2001, with bombings and deaths on a daily basis, and widespread disillusion caused by the license given to warlords. This has embittered social and human relations. No change of tactics can cancel western deeds from the minds of Afghans: firing on weddings, murdering civilians during celebrations,protecting the corrupt mafiosi who fill the government of Karzai. di cui s’è riempito il governo Karzai.

Samia Walid, member of RAWA (Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan

On 18 may, at Taloquan in the north of Afghanistan, 12 civilians were killed and at least 80 injured during a protest provoked by the latest killing of civilians - two women and two men - in a night raid by US special forces.

This is the fourth "incident" of the kind in a week. On 16 May, NATO forces killed a 10 year old girl and injured another 4 children in the eastern province of Kunar. On the 14th they killed a 15 year old boy during a night raid in the Nangarhar province. On the 12th, in the same zone, another night raid caused the death of a 12 year old girl and her uncle, a policeman.

NATO forces are currently carrying out around 600 raids every month. The raids have produced horrific crimes, including the killing of children. In one case, last year, soliders dug the bullets out of the bodies of two pregnant women to conceal their responsibility for the killings.

When it isn't possible to hide their responsibility, the NATO leaders offer apologies. But these apologies come too easily. The bitter message for the families of victims is that their loved ones are collateral damage - a price that must be paid.

We ask those who still believe that NATO has a positive role to perform in Afghanistan - to prevent civil war or to improve the situation of women - to reflect on how they would feel if it were their own loved ones who were killed with such unconcern.

We are not ingenuous. We don't believe that the withdrawal of foreign troops will immediately bring about peace in Afghanistan. But we do believe that the presence of NATO troops is part of the problem, not the solution. Apart from the violence committed y NATO soldiers, the policy of creating alliances with fundamentalist groups and with warlords favours the use of armed force as a political strategy and makes the struggle of civil society more difficult.

Some people shrug their shoulders and say that warlords are part of the Afghan reality, a problem of the Afghan culture. We reply that warlords are a part of the Afghan reality, because it is a land that has been at war for decades. Warlords are not a part of the Afghan culture, they are a part of the culture of militarisation - which the presence of NATO forces can only reinforce.

Finally, we turn to the words of Samia Walid in an interview during her current visit to Italy:



Foreign forces must leave the country. A civil war could not be worse than what is happening now. It will be up to the people to decide their fate and if the resistance to fundamentalist revives, we will be with the women and men who want to build their own country.

Stay Human

There are men who struggle for a day, and they are good. There are others who struggle for a year, and they are better. There are some who struggle many years, and they are better still. But there are those who struggle all their lives, and these are the indispensible ones (Bertolt Brecht)

Vittorio Arrigoni, killed in Gaza a few hours after being abducte at the age of 36, asked us every day at the end of his articles to:

Stay human

Every day for years, Vittorio recounted in words and images, independently and impartialy, the real life, the struggle for survival of 2 million people imprisoned in Gaza, besieged , bombarded, starved, humiliated.

Vittorio chose to stay in that hell to help those who couldn't leave and to break the silence of indifference about the Gaza Strip, which had become a black hole in reporting, in politics - a gigantic black mark on the ethics and collective morals, smeared with indifference and complicity in the horror.

Vittorio has been murdered. His death today tears aside the veil that covers the Strip and speaks. You can still speak to us all, Vittorio, even though you are no longer here. You can still show us that injustice is insupportable.

Vittorio lived in Gaza for years. He chose to stay there, with his eyes to witness and with his body to show solidarity, because he had seen the theft of land, of water, the demolition of houses, the destruction of farms and of fishing boats (he was injured while accompanying fishermen pescatori, trying to protect them with his body from the armed attacks of the Israeli army, just like Rachel Corrie, killed at Rafah because she put her body between a bulldozer and a house).

Vittorio had seen people with cancer sent back at the Eretz crossing between Gaza and Israel "because of security issues". He had seen Palestinians treated with disdain, beaten, humiliated. He had seen the desparation of the fishermen who were prevented from fishing and he had seen the desperation of the farms, clinging to an olive tree while a bulldozer dragged it away. He had seen women give birth behind a mound because it was impossible to get to the hospitatl. He had seen fear and terror in the eyes of children and he had seen their broken bodies. He had seen premature babies die because the electricity was cut off for 30 minutes at the hospital. He had met girls and boys who had known nothing but sorrow since they were born. He had felt the cold that penetrates the bones in the freezing Gaza nights, without heating, without light. He was in Gaza during operation Cast Lead (December 2008 - January 2009) and witnessed the destruction of thousands of houses and the illing of 3000 people, including hundreds of children, who certainly were not firing rockets.

“Stay human”, Vittorio always said. Wherever we are from, we are part of the same community. Every man, every woman, every child on this planet, wherever he or she is born and lives, has the right to life and dignity. The same rights that we claim for ourselves belong to all the others, without exception.

We embrace the familiy, the volunteers of the ISM, he friends, the young people of Gaza who mobilised to try to save his life.

Let's stay human even if all around humanity seems absent.

Stay human for him, Vittorio Arrigoni, just, passionate, human

I am sure that the greatest contribution we can offer to the memory of Vittorio is to continue to work to support the population of Gaza and of Palestine in there struggle for freedom, justice and human rights

Mairead Maguire (Nobel peace laureate)

The gaze of women.

L'Aquila: Everyone has looked, but who has really seen it?

The committee Donne terre-mutate launches a national encounter.

To bring women from all over Italy to see L’Aquila as it is.

To smell the scents and touch the broken remnents and to hold hands.

Donne terre-mutate Call us to L'Aquila 7 and May

www.laquiladonne.com

An Arab, a Jew, a human. We remember Julian Mer Khamis

Juliano Mer Khamis, Israeli actor and director, was the son of Arna, a Jewish Israeli woman, founder of the theatre school in the Jenin refugee camp, and of Saliba Khamis, a Palestinian from Haifa.

In 2006 he opened the Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp, as a school of theatre for Palestinian girls and boys, as a space for expression and freedom where they could “Find a new horizon, preserve their values of liberation and not fall into the trap set by the occupation to become the mirror image of their enemy. But for this it's necessary to construct a strong identity that doesn't give way to sendiments of revenge, that is based on universal values, culture, consciousness: If someone kills your daughter, and you have the strength to not kill his daughter, you have the strength to resist and to maintain your values. Then you will be able to beat them because you are stronger as a human being”.

For Juliano, this was the real struggle against the Israeli occupation because "What occupation is doing is destroying society”. But it was also a struggle against all fundamentalism to "build on the basis not of tradition or religion, but of freedom, of democratic structures, of a high level of education, of free opinion, of culture... To combat tradition is to combat the occupation”.

This commitment to freedom, starting with children, was an annoyance to those who did not share his dream of being“the connection, a door, a window”.

On 4 April, Juliano was killed by an armed man, his face covered, who had waited at the entrance to the refugee camp.

We will keep alive his memory and his dream of freedom

War is never the solution

Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya started with the usual pretext: to defend the civilian population - this time from the attacks by the forces of Gaddafi, up to a month ago, the firm ally of those who now bomb him.

We've seen the results of the military interventions and of the lies told to us about Iraq and Afghanistan: thousands of civilians killed and, after so many years, peace is still far away.

As the democratic organisations in Afghanistan say: “For the price of one day of war, we could have built all the schools and hospitals that we need and we could emerge from underdevelopment”.

This intervention is also in violation of article 11 of the Italian constition which repudiates war, and in which it is specified that not only wars of aggression (an offense against the freedom of other peoples) but also war as tool for resolving international conflicts: even if we are right in a conflict, our fundamental law prohibits us from imposing our point of view by force of arms and instead suggests that we use all diplomatic and legal instruments.




And we have many questions

• Why has the international community only now realised that Gaddafi is the head of an authoritarian regime?

• Why did the Italian government sign a economic-military treaty with Libya, which it has not cancelled with the necessary parliamentary vote?

• Why did Italy sell arms to Libya?

• Why did the Security Council of the UN vote for a resolution that allows anyone to go and bomb Libya, rather than defend the civilian population by sending an interposition force of civilian observers to verify the truce declared on March 18.?

• Why did the UN choose ex-colonial countries with large-scale economic interests in Libya to defend the rebels rather than countries that are really neutral in the conflict?

• Why does the fate of the Libyan opposition provoke so much international indignation and the intervention of NATO while this doesn't happen for other countries (Palestine, Bahrain, Sudan) ?

• Why has the Saudi regime sided with the Libyan rebels while repressing any attempt at democratisation in their own country and sending soldiers to repress protests in Bahrain(45 dead in the last few days)?

• Why do solidarity and respect for human rights not apply to the thousands of people who have been washed up on our shores in flight from poverty, conflict and dictatorship?

We are not indifferent to the fate of the Libyan population, just as we were not indifferent to the fate of migrants imprisoned in Gaddafi's camps as part of the treaty that our government with the support of the opposition signed with Libya and reconfirmed yesterday by parliament to allow deportation of immigrants to Libya. However, we have seen that military interventions are bound to fail from our experience of Kosovo (now a large US base) Somalia, Iraq, and above all Afghanistan where none of the declared humanitarian aims have been realised.

We consider humanitarian intervention to be a complete deception, not just because by definition we are against any war but because past and present experience prove it.

At the same time, migrants arrived at Lampeduas are abandoned in inhuman conditions, together with the local population, by the authorities who should take care of them, out of respect for those human rights that the "defend" only with weapons.

We refuse the military response to conflict.

We oppose the use of Italian military bases for this intervention.

We call for a real and effective arms blockade to all parties in the war.
We call for a cessation of the bombing.

War cannot be humanised. It can only be abolished

Albert Einstein