Graphic video of alleged torture by Indonesian forces | Asia | Deutsche Welle | 19.10.2010:

"The video is in two parts, a representative of the group told the Reuters news agency by phone. The first part shows military officers in uniform hitting and kicking some villagers in an effort to get the names of separatists. The second part shows two people being tortured, one with a knife at his neck, while in another scene, an interrogator apparently tries to burn the other man's penis with a burning stick. - The Associated Press news agency reports that the body of one of the victims was reportedly found near a river soon after the torture. The other victim had not been traced.

Police in Papua have questioned the authenticity of the video, while the Indonesian military chief, Agus Suhartono, said that the military would conduct an investigation. The military maintains a strong presence in Papua. The Papua police force is known to torture and abuse detainees. Similar allegations against the Indonesian police in the eastern province of Maluku were raised by the Australian media last month. Kopassus, the Indonesian special forces unit, is alleged to be responsible for the worst abuses. US-based Human Rights Watch has reported indiscriminate sweeps by Indonesian forces in West Papua."

Dozens of Islamic hard-liners protested against an international gay film festival in Indonesia's capital Tuesday, forcing the cancellation of several screenings. 

The Q! Film Festival, being held at foreign cultural centres in Jakarta, opened last week and was slated to run until Wednesday night. In its ninth year, it aims to raise awareness of gay issues. 

Members of the hardline Islamic Defenders Front — some wearing masks, white robes and turbans — chanted anti-gay slogans and said the movies were blasphemous. 

Showings at the Goethe Institute of Germany, which was being guarded by police, would not be disrupted, said Dinyah Latuconsina, the centre's program assistant. 

But the French Cultural Center and Japan Foundation decided to halt remaining screenings.

Related: Study finds rising intolerance among Indonesian Muslims @ Jakarta Globe.

An Iranian court has sentenced the so-called "blogfather" of Iran to 19½ years in prison, the semi-official Mashregh news website said Tuesday.

Hossein Derakhshan was "convicted of cooperating with enemy states, making propaganda against the Islamic system of government, promoting small anti-revolutionary groups, managing obscene web sites and insulting Islamic sanctities," Mashregh reported.

The 35-year-old Canadian-Iranian blogger and activist was also banned from journalistic endeavors and from joining any political parties for five years.

Derakhshan was arrested on November 1, 2008, and is being held at the Evin Prison in Tehran, reported the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.

Hamed Derakhshan, Hossein Derakhshan's brother, was shocked when he discovered the news of Hossein Derakhshan's sentence from an online news report.

"It targets exactly freedom of speech and expression. Maybe they are trying to make an example of him by giving him a heavy sentence," Hamed Derakhshan told CNN.

A prominent Iranian rights campaigner has been sentenced to six years in jail after he recorded an interview for the BBC's Persian language TV channel.

Emad Baghi was convicted of engaging in propaganda against the Islamic system, a statement on his website said.

The court charges referred to his BBC interview with Iran's leading reformist cleric, the late Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri.

Mr Baghi, 49, remains free, pending an appeal hearing.

The interview was broadcast after the death of Ayatollah Montazeri in December 2009. His funeral sparked a series of anti-government demonstrations across Iran.

Mr Baghi was arrested days later, then freed on bail in June.

In a separate case, he was sentenced in July to one year in prison and banned from political activities for five years, after being convicted of endangering national security in relation to his work defending prisoners' rights. An appeal court upheld the sentence on Tuesday.

....He has spent four-and-a-half years in prison over the past decade, and suffers from serious heart and kidney ailments.

Image by Robert Reed Daly via Flickr.INN.com:

A semiofficial Iranian news agency revealed that a prominent rights activist has been sentenced to six years in prison on various anti-government charges, but has escaped the death penalty.
ILNA said Saturday that Shiva Nazar Ahari has been convicted of moharebeh, or "waging war against Allah," a crime usually punishable by death. The news agency reported further that she was also convicted of plotting to commit crimes and agitating against the ruling system. Ahari was sentenced to six years in total and has been ordered to pay $400 as a substitute for 76 lashes.
Ahari is a founder of the Committee of Human Rights Reporters in Tehran. Human rights groups have dismissed the claims against her as "trumped-up charges" stemming from her participation in protest rallies after Iran's disputed June 2009 presidential elections.

Global Voices Online also reports on this.

"A Babylonian artefact sometimes described as the world's first human rights charter is to go on display in Iran after Tehran threatened to cut ties with the British Museum if it did not lend the object.

The Cyrus cylinder is a 6th century BC clay object inscribed with an account in cuneiform of the conquest of Babylon by the Persian king Cyrus the Great. It arrived in Iran today and will go on display soon at Iran's national museum for four months, state TV reported.

Iran said it was in a dispute with the British Museum for months over its request for a loan of the object and had repeatedly threatened to cut ties with the institution. At one point, a senior Iranian cultural official accused the museum of turning a cultural issue into a political issue.

The loan discussions, which began last October, took place during a time of tension between the two countries. Tehran is under pressure from the west over its nuclear programme, and it has accused Britain and other foreign governments of interfering in its domestic policies by stoking the street protests that followed the disputed presidential election in June 2009."

Mesbah Yazdi from Ayatollah Khamenei's Office: Democracy and Human Rights Have No Place in Islamic Theology:

Via.

More information here:

at least eleven protestors have been sentenced to death by the Iranian Judiciary following unfair trials and insufficient evidence justifying any punishment, let alone executions. Seven of the protestors on death row have been identified as: Mohammad Amin Valian, a 20 year student; Abdolreza Ghanbari, a 47 year old teacher; Motahareh Bahrami and Mohsen Daneshpour Moghaddam (husband and wife) and their son, Ahmad Daneshpour, together with two of their close friends, Rayhaneh Haj Ebrahim and Hadi Ghaemi (not related to the Campaign’s executive director of the same name).

After the 12 June 2009 presidential elections, thousands were arrested, hundreds were tortured, and dozens killed. Some authorities bluntly advocated for the use of violence against peaceful protesters and even killing them. Some had command responsibility for those who shot innocent people on the streets. Some had direct responsibility for what happened to dozens of arrested protesters in Kahrizak Detention Center, which resulted in the death of at least four of the detained.

The Campaign appeals to the Iranian authorities, that instead of sending innocent people to death row, they should hold responsible those who perpetuate violence in society–in order to prevent similar tragedies in the future. Until we fully know the role individuals and institutions had in directly or indirectly masterminding and participating in the systematic and deadly crackdown, we cannot ensure that such brutality will not occur again.

Last Saturday marked the 35th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge’s rise to power in Cambodia. You can read the absolutely great record of a Cambodian woman, who managed to survive the genocidal Govt:

The Khmer Rouge, I understood later, intended to eliminate the rich, the intellectuals, and anyone educated – like doctors, engineers and professors, the majority of whom tended to live in the city. For the Khmer Rouge these people were part of a dictatorial and corrupt regime that exploited the poor, and they sought to destroy everything they thought belonged to this world: buildings, luxury cars, villas, refrigerators.
…Everyone became quiet for a long time while wondering who would be the next victim. My heart was heavy with sorrow for the families of the deceased. Moreover, I had almost lost my daughters in the jungle during this same journey – a story too long to describe here.
With time, more and more of the new people died – from hunger, disease, from a plague of sheer exhaustion, but most of all from the massacres perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. They killed people on perfectly ridiculous pretexts: wearing spectacles, knowing how to read or how to open the door of a car, even for having a white mark on the wrist (a sign of having worn a watch). For the Khmer Rouge, these were all signs that the person concerned belonged to a rich, dictatorial class.
It was common to see a man whose face was pale, trembling with fear, being paraded through the village with his hands bound behind the back, guarded on either side by Khmer Rouge cadre carrying large machetes. It was terrifying: everyone knew that they were going to decapitate this man. The scene served its purpose of warning us that the Khmer Rouge wielded absolute power. We lived from one day to the next. We had no idea what might happen to us in the night or on the following day.

Read it all. :(

I wrote two days ago about Hector Aleem's current problems. Yesterday I received a mail from the responsible of the Free Hector Aleem group (I forgot to ask him if he could be named publicly) on Facebook to thank me for the post and to ask me to post this message:

A very good article (though it doesn't mention Islam or Islamic once) about Elham Madhin al Assi, the child bride who suffered haemorraghia and rupture in sexual organs, after her loving husband drugged her up, tied her up and raped her:

In their 2005 observations of Yemen, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child stated many concerns, including Yemen's inconsistency in defining a child's age, the low legal age for marriage of girls, and the fact that girls were marrying even younger than 15 years due to the lack of law enforcement.

Five years have passed and Yemen is still one of the worst places to be a child. The committee's September 2009 observations and recommendations are not for the light-hearted. In addition to their continued concern that the law still does not provide equal protection to all children under the age of 18, the committee is "deeply concerned" that the following offenses against children are not explicitly criminalized: illegal adoption, sexual exploitation, especially under the guise of "tourist marriages" or "temporary marriages," forced child labor, child pornography, and the sale of children -- with parental consent -- for their organs.

This is a human rights crisis in a country where grown men in parliament sit and argue for the right to marry children under the pretense of religious authority. The UN needs to do more than be "deeply concerned." Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Ann Veneman, UNICEF Executive Director, should visit Yemen and let them know that the world is watching their snail-paced response to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. We need to send a strong message that girls are not property to be sold or traded. Girls are not objects existing to prove men's "manhood" in Yemen or any other country in the world. 

It is quite a surprise to read this on Huffington Post, isn't it? Go ahead, read it all.

(PS: When I read it, it only had ONE comment, precisely saying that, if Israel would have had something to do with this, the page would have been full of comments against it...).

I have written before about Hector Aleem, a Christian Human Rights activist imprisoned in Pakistan after some Islamist group accused him of blaspheming in some SMS messages.

Christian human rights activist and director of NGO Peace Worldwide, Hector Aleem, was taken into custody in January 2009 because a militant Islamic group accused him of sending a ‘blasphemous’ text message from his cell phone. If convicted, he faces the death penalty under Pakistani law.
Prior to the 55-year-old’s arrest, Aleem was threatened by Islamic groups with assassination attempts and lawsuits because he objected to the illegal destruction of a church by Islamabad’s capital development authority (CDA). Muslim leaders threatened to kill him and his sons, and to forcibly convert his daughters to Islam.
Although a heart patient, Aleem has not been allowed to consume his medication and he has been denied visitation in prison. He was denied bail because Islamic mobs filled his trial courtroom and threatened to kill the judge, Aleem, and Aleem’s lawyer.
Aleem is the recipient of a peace award by Pakistan’s Prime Minister.

I received two days ago this from his son:

greetings my dear friends
as i asked you before to help us in collecting funds for my dad Hector Aleem but no body has replied me yet. Guys i am not asking very big amount just any amount you can afford just skip one burger from your daily life and send that amount to our pay pal that will help us alot. and also tell your fiends and other relatives, Actually we need funds before 20th April. Just imagine you are walking in our shoes and your dad waiting for justice and if you do not pay for his lawyer he could be killed any time in jail.... just imagine. this is our situation, contribute a little. please today you give us tomorrow God will give you more you have today. I am waiting for your response. please help us.

Here's the link http://tinyurl.com/hectoraleem 

You can also get to the same webpage clicking here, in case the other link is not working.

Free Hector Aleem.