Thousands flee Burma as army clashes with Kokang militias

Thousands of people have fled from northern Burma into China after fighting erupted between government troops and an armed ethnic group yesterday, breaking a 20-year ceasefire.

Witnesses in the Chinese border town of Nansan, in southern Yunnan province, reported hearing further gunfire today. Officials said about 10,000 refugees had arrived from Kokang, a mostly ethnically Chinese region where many Chinese nationals also do business, in the last few days.

Read More At the Guardian

Migrant workers face abuse in Lebanon

Too Many Obligations, Too Few Rights for Aymara Women

Teenage Aymara girls only mature as women in the eyes of their community when they are able to demonstrate great industriousness and knowledge of traditional tasks. But by virtue of that same condition they are denied rights, justice and access to community leadership positions.

These are some of the findings of a research study on gender rights in the Bolivian highlands, which illustrates the little-known reality of women who must skillfully manage a wide range of obligations, such as running the household, educating their children, making crafts and working in the fields alongside the men, while not fully enjoying their rights.

The aim of the study was to examine how gender relations are constructed in various indigenous peasant communities in Bolivia’s highlands, focusing on the values and views that shape social relations, the administration of justice and conflict resolution in connection with women’s rights, and analysing which aspects could help guarantee the full exercise of such rights and which tend to reproduce forms of gender oppression.

Read More At IPS

Iraqi Women Search for New Lives

Hiba's fate was sealed from the moment her mother decided to leave her to her father in Baghdad, Iraq, at the tender age of seven. At 15, he forced her to marry a cousin, who abandoned her 48 hours later after raping her. Unwilling to take her back, Hiba's father persuaded her to go to her mother, who, by then, was living in neighbouring Syria. But, at the Iraqi-Syrian border he sold her off to a stranger instead.

Trapped in a country where she knew no one, Hiba had no choice but to put her trust in the man who had bought her. He, however, turned out to be a monster. Over the next two years he forced her into prostitution.

Read More at News Blaze

Clinton Unveils U.S. Plan to Combat Sexual Violence in Visit to Eastern Congo

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with survivors of violent sexual assault the war-ravaged eastern Congo city of Goma in the first-ever visit by a high-level American official to the area. The staggeringly high number of rapes in the DRC have doubled and in some cases tripled since the deployment of a US- and UN-backed Congolese army force in January.

The staggeringly high number of rapes in the country have doubled and in some cases tripled since the deployment of a US- and UN-backed Congolese army force in the eastern Congo this January. The United Nations estimates that at least 3,500 women and girls have been sexually brutalized this year, adding to the 200,000 cases of rape recorded in the country since 1996. In a report released Monday, a coalition of international humanitarian and human rights groups blamed the army for the recent spike in violence and warned that the UN-backed peace effort was becoming a “human tragedy.”

Read More At Democracy Now!

Strategic Issues, Not Abuses, Are U.S. Focus in Kyrgyzstan

“You know what this is for,” Emilbek Kaptagaev recalled being told by the police officers who snatched him off the street. No other words, just blows to the head, then all went black. Mr. Kaptagaev, an opponent of Kyrgyzstan’s president, who is a vital American ally in the war in nearby Afghanistan, was found later in a field with a concussion, broken ribs and a face swollen into a mosaic of bruises.

Mr. Kaptagaev said that the beating last month was a warning to stop campaigning against the president, but that he would not. And so he received an anonymous call only a few days ago. “Have you forgotten?” the voice growled. “Want it to happen again?”

Mr. Kaptagaev’s story is not unusual in this poor former Soviet republic in the mountains of Central Asia. Many opposition politicians and independent journalists have been arrested, prosecuted, attacked and even killed over the last year as the Kyrgyz president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, has consolidated control in advance of elections on Thursday, which he is all but certain to win.

“This is how the authorities rule in Kyrgyzstan,” said Mr. Kaptagaev, 52. “They use criminal methods to keep power.”

Read More At the New York Times

Iraqis Freed by US Face Few Jobs and Little Hope

“We congratulate you on the release of your son,” read the letter, which was imprinted with the seal of the United States Department of Defense and written in Arabic. “His case has been concluded and we have made a decision that he needs to be released.”

With that, $25 in cash and a new set of civilian clothes, the detainee, Alaq Khleirallah, 27, was back out onto the streets of Baghdad. He is one of roughly 90,000 detainees who have been released from American detention centers in the past six years, a process that will end sometime next year, when the last center is to be transferred to Iraqi control. Almost 10,000 detainees remain in American custody.

They have received a grim welcome. Many return to families crippled by debt from months without a breadwinner. Insurgents see them as potential recruits — or American agents. Old friends, neighbors and even relatives refuse to greet them in public, suspicious of their backgrounds or worried that a few minutes of socializing could mean guilt by association when the authorities, as Iraqi officials often intimate, come to round them back up.

Read More at the New York Times

N. Korea's Hard-Labor Camps: On the Diplomatic Back Burner

A distillation of testimony from survivors and former guards, newly published by the Korean Bar Association, details the daily lives of 200,000 political prisoners estimated to be in the camps: Eating a diet of mostly corn and salt, they lose their teeth, their gums turn black, their bones weaken and, as they age, they hunch over at the waist. Most work 12- to 15-hour days until they die of malnutrition-related illnesses, usually around the age of 50. Allowed just one set of clothes, they live and die in rags, without soap, socks, underclothes or sanitary napkins.

The camps have never been visited by outsiders, so these accounts cannot be independently verified. But high-resolution satellite photographs, now accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, reveal vast labor camps in the mountains of North Korea. The photographs corroborate survivors' stories, showing entrances to mines where former prisoners said they worked as slaves, in-camp detention centers where former guards said uncooperative prisoners were tortured to death and parade grounds where former prisoners said they were forced to watch executions. Guard towers and electrified fences surround the camps, photographs show.

Read More at the Washington Post

Human Trafficking Plagues UAE

Gunman Attacks Tel Aviv Gay Centre

Two people have been killed and at least 10 others wounded when an unknown gunman attacked a community centre for gay teenagers in Tel Aviv before escaping.

Rescue services said that six of the wounded during the incident on Saturday were badly hurt.The shooting took place at the headquarters of the local lesbian and gay rights association on Nachmani street.

Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman, said the attack was "most likely a criminal attack and not a terror attack," while representatives of Tel Aviv's gay community said it was a homophobic attack.

Read More At Al Jazeera

SRI LANKA: Gay Community Takes Heart in Indian Court Ruling

This month, Sri Lanka’s gay and lesbian community, long struggling for acceptance and respect in a conservative, majority-Buddhist country, cheered a landmark court ruling in neighbouring India.

On July 2, the New Delhi High Court knocked down a colonial-era law to decriminalise consensual homosexual sex. It was a historic ruling on gay rights.

"The ruling marked a historic day for gay and lesbian groups in the region and all over the world" . Sex between people of the same gender has been illegal in most of South Asia, including Sri Lanka, for more than a century. Archaic laws promulgated by the British in the 1860s, classified gay sex as "against the order of nature".

According to Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, homosexual acts in India are punishable by 10 years in prison. A similar jail term is applicable in Sri Lanka, although no one has been charged or jailed yet for such an offence.

Read More At IPS