Children abducted by Taliban as soldiers recovered by Pakistani security forces

Pakistani security forces have rescued dozens of children kidnapped by the Taliban to be used as child soldiers in the North West Frontier Province, which borders Afghanistan. Ranging in ages from six to fifteen, they were being trained to become suicide bombers, with hundreds more still in captivity and being brainwashed to kill for the Islamists. The Pakistan authorities are appealing to parents and any other citizens to inform them if they know of any other such children, and that they will do their best to retrieve them and rehabilitate them.

U.S. seeks military ties with Libya

Almost 30 years after Libya became synonymous with anti-American and anti-Western terrorism, the United States is now looking to establish and strengthen military ties with the North African nation.  The main goal of such ties would be to prevent terrorist attacks in North Africa by Islamic extremists.

Over a thousand visas permitting entry into the United States have been issued to Libyan citizens since April, when the United States started accepting such applications again for the first time since 1981.  In return, Washington is asking for more Americans to be admitted onto Libyan soil.

In 2004, a year after the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, Libya chose to simultaneously reveal and abandon its own weapons of mass destruction and related development programs.

California-style constitutional amendment proposals flood into Pakistani government

The Chairman of constitutional amendment committee Raza Rabbani is encouraging political parties, organizations, and even common citizens to submit proposals for amendments to Pakistan’s constitution.

Rabbani has revealed that suggestions have already been submitted from the public and reviewed. He appealed to the national and provincial Bar Councils to submit their proposals for constitutional amendments. The populace and related organizations are allowed to submit proposals until August 1, while political parties were allowed to present suggestions until August 10.

Bill against sexual harassment proposed in Pakistan

An anti-sexual harassment bill has been tabled in the Pakistani legislature by Sherry Rehman, the former Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting. The bill promises to protect women from all kinds of harassment in the workplace. She condemned the exploitation of women around the world, and called on them to make a collective struggle “against all forms of exploitation” in their societies.

As a member of the Women Workers Union (WWU), the spoke with authority to praise the current Pakistani administration, led by the Peoples’ Party of Pakistan (PPP) for patronising Pakistan’s “vulnerable community” of women.

In an earlier statement, newly sworn-in office bearers of the WWU demanded that the Pakistani government “weed out” all anti-labour policies and guarantee minimum wage levels for all workers, as promised by Prime Minister Sved Yusuf Raza Gilanithe Earlier.

A call to resist tribalism in Saudi Arabia

An excellent editorial can be found on the Arab News webpage, arguing that Saudi Arabia was founded as a modern state, and that several of its laws, especially those relating to marriage customs, represent a backslide into tribalism.

While the author makes a debatable claim that Shariah’s rulings are trusted in the Kingdom because “it considers all human beings equal”, he (or she, considering my inexperience with Arabic names) also argues that disagreeable rulings should be openly criticized.  This is especially true of those which “give superiority to blood ties and kinship over the values of justice and equality”, or which “view gender, color and race in a biased fashion.”

He or she openly argues that tribal customs (such as marrying off daughters to their cousins or forced divorces because of “unequal lineages” between the two spouses) are not universal, and that “civil society” regards the views of tribalism as “strange and unacceptable in our age.”

The author makes the further, excellent point that the negative effects of such “traditions” are not limited to the individuals involved, but affect the whole of Saudi society.

Many Afghan women now choose divorce over suicide

There is a growing number of women in Afghanistan who are choosing to divorce their husbands rather than commit suicide in order to escape their abusive husbands.

The patriarchal laws of Afghnistan regard divorce as a taboo, despite the fact that some husbands go as far as torturing their wives, both physically and mentally.

Outreach programs are the main vehicle for women to be informed about the possibilities of divorce, as well as discouraging women from burning themselves or committing suicide.  They are also helped to navigate the sometimes complex red tape of divorce law, which has led the number of divorces in Afghanistan to double over the past two years, with a corresponding reduction in cases of self-immolation.

“When we brought the number of self-immolation cases down, automatically the number of divorces went up because women realized that they could not solve their problems by burning themselves,” she said.
In Afghanistan, a man can divorce without needing his wife’s agreement. But if a woman seeks a divorce then she has to have the approval of her husband and needs witnesses who can testify in court that the divorce is justified.
“A man can, with great ease, tell the court that his wife’s behavior is inappropriate, that she does not behave in the home, and wants to divorce her. A man decides a woman’s future with one piece of paper,” said Maria Bashir, chief prosecutor in Herat.
A woman can appeal for a divorce on grounds that her husband is absent for a long time, he cannot adequately provide for the family, either financially or because he is physically incapable, or if he is impotent or abuses her to the point where her life may be at risk, Bashir said.
To get their husbands’ agreement for the divorce, women were usually forced to let the husband and his family keeps the children, a prospect that dissuaded many battered women. “Women prefer death to the pain of being separated from their children. This is why many women, before consulting the law, will resort to self-immolation, or suicide or running away.” “Afghan families think that a woman should not be divorced, whatever she goes through, she should be patient and put up with it. She should die before asking for a divorce,” Pakzad said.
Pakzad links the women with one of five or six law firms in Herat which take on divorce cases. “We don’t want to work against the law. We have an enemy in the Taleban and we don’t want to create another enemy out of the government but, the law needs to change and we need a (parliamentary) session on this to change it.”

My only way out
A few miles away, in Afghanistan’s only hospital ward dedicated to self-burning, Dr Mohammad Aref Jalali stands over one his patients and asks how she feels. Twenty-year old Zarbakht’s entire body is cocooned in white plaster. She lies in bed on her back all day, like a mummy. She can barely move her lips to speak and her eyebrows, partly burned off, are knitted in pain. She says her family never visits.
“I had to marry at 14. I was compelled to marry because my family is so poor. I had no other way. After five years I couldn’t take it anymore, what else was I supposed to do?” Zarbakht said in a strained whisper, her jaw almost clamped shut by bandages.
For Dr Jalali, who confirmed there were slightly fewer self-immolation cases in Herat so far this year compared with 2008, it comes as no surprise that divorce is not something his patients are ever likely to contemplate.
“The problem is 80 percent of Afghan women are not literate, and they don’t have the means to solve their problems so they resort to extreme and desperate measures, like suicide,” he said.
Last year, of the 85 patients admitted to his ward, 63 died of their self-inflicted burns. – Reuters

Foreign workers granted more rights in Saudi Arabia

The city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia has just opened a new office for labour disputes, in order to provide for the needs of workers in the western region.  This is part of a new initiative by the Kingdom to allow labour disputes to be resolved more locally, rather than having to travel all the way to Riyadh to submit their complaints.

Known as the High Commission for Labor Disputes in Jeddah, it is only the second office of its kind in the Kingdom, and will be inaugurated within a few weeks by the Minister of Labour.  It is hoped that its opening will ease the pressure of labour disputes within the Kingdom, which currently hosts around 7 million foreign workers.  Paperwork will be filed faster, which means that the complaints can be resolved before the foreign plaintiffs’ Iqama (a sort of “green card”) expires and the workers are forced to abandon their cases and leave the country.

This sort of development should be lauded by all, especially liberals and Leftists, who believe in the right of labour to “go international” — for workers to be able to work in the country of their choice, and for the rights of foreign workers to be granted just the same as domestic, or native-born, workers.

Sufism the answer to radical Islam: Algerian government

The Algerian government is promoting Sufism, a branch of Islam associated with contemplation rather than combat, as a more moderate alternative to the ultra-conservative Salafism espoused by the Islamist militants of Algeria’s insurgency.

Television and radio stations have been created to promote Sufism and the “zaouias”, or religious confraternities, that preach it, along with a series of appearances by Sufi sheikhs on other stations. Zaouias are also being encouraged to arrange marriages, provide for orphans, teach he Koran, and distribute alms to charity.

Sufism espouses a kind of “separation between mosque and state”, encouraging its followers to keep religion out of politics. Hadj Lakhdar Ghania, a member of the influential confraternity, Tidjania Zaouia, openly lamented the rise of Salafism in Algeria, blaming it for the end of centuries of “peace and harmony” which he says used to characterize Algeria under Islam in the past.  “I don’t believe we should import solutions but rather use the Islam of our fathers to live in peace,” he said.

Turkey planning to improve Kurdish rights, recognition

Turkey may be planning to expand its Kurdish minority’s cultural and political rights in what the country’s president called an “historic opportunity” back in May

Still branding its Kurdish political opponents of the PKK (The Kurdistan Worker’s PArty) as terrorists, Ankara hopes to pre-empt an expected peace plan put forth by the group’s leader, Abdullah Ocalan, and put forth one of its own.

Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, whose AK Party first came to power in 2002, has already done much to improve the life of the country’s 12 million Kurds (which make up a whole sixth of the population). Such a move would also be viewed as a political coup for Turkey, which has long been under pressure from the European Union to expand minority rights for Kurds and other groups.

Potential steps which could be taken include allowing even more use of the Kurdish language and encouraging Kurdish militant separatists to surrender, which even the Turkish military, which has long been hostile to the Kurds, appears to favour such actions.

Political scientist Yalcin Akdogan, an adviser to Prime Minister Erdogan, also wrote in a recent article that reforms might include the creation of Kurdish television channels and the employment of Kurdish-speaking workers in the government. Even the restoration of Kurdish names to certain towns and villages and ending the ban on Kurdish language election campaigning are being considered.

Algerian violence down, people begin to party

After 40 years, the Pan African Festival of the arts has returned to Algeria. The city of Algiers recently hosted the two-week festival of African dance, theatre, music, and art, as a way to announce to the world that normal life is returning to the nation of Algeria.