UNO must intervene in Gilgit to stop Pakistan led Genocide

Subject: UNO should intervene to stop genocide and rights violation in Gilgit Baltistan

I intend to draw your attention to a vital human rights issue which affects the two million people of Gilgit Baltistan. The region, declared disputed between India and Pakistan in 1948, is sandwiched strategically between India, Pakistan, China, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. UNO allowed Pakistan to assume temporary control over Gilgit Baltistan and stationed officials representing the UN Military Observer Group for India and Pakistan in both Gilgit and Skardu cities.

Till date, the natives of Gilgit Baltistan remain deprived of basic rights, the national identity and the right to self-governance as prescribed by the UN resolutions. On the other hand, gross level of human rights violations have continued to occur and in the aftermath of passenger’s massacre in Kohistan and Chilas, the right to free and safe travel has also been snatched away from the powerless residents. These incidents draw our attention towards involvement of militants and secret service personnel.

On February 28, 2012, militants wearing army uniform ambushed a bus in Kohistan and killed 18 Shia male passengers. Government has failed to arrest the assailants so far. The failure encouraged the terrorists who ambushed 34 buses near Chilas on April 3 2012 and killed dozens of Shia male passengers. The assailants numbering more than three thousand attacked the innocent passengers with stones, knives and automatic weapons. Eyewitness reports claim more than 50 deaths, scores injured and more than 100 abducted. The assailants torched 6 buses and pushed two in the Indus River.

The horrible incident occurred in front of police force and according to eyewitnesses; the police did not provide security to the passengers. Some local people of Chilas were later able to save the lives of 200 passengers.

Instead of arresting the miscreants of Gilgit Kohistan and Chilas, government resorted to imposing curfew in Gilgit city which has entered into 14th day. Under military control, life has crippled in the city and there is acute shortage of food and medicines. During the first ten days of curfew, there was a break of only 4 hours in which families arranged for food and water. The telecom system is completely blocked by the military and not news flows outside Gilgit. As majority of the workforce depend on daily wage labor for earnings, the curfew has forced them to remain shut in homes and lose the wages. Converting Gilgit Baltistan into a jail and denying basic food and medicine provisions is a gross violation of human rights. Military has arrested more than 100 youth from Gilgit.

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Jump To Institute for Gilgit Baltistan Studies


via UNO must intervene in Gilgit to stop Pakistan led Genocide.

Holocaust survivor finds haven as Muslim in Israel

For more than five decades, Leila Jabarin hid her secret from her Muslim children and grandchildren − that she was a Jewish Holocaust survivor born in Auschwitz concentration camp.

Although her family knew she was a Jewish convert, none of them knew of her brutal past.

It was only in the past week that Jabarin, who was born Helen Brashatsky, finally sat down and told them the story of how she was born inside Auschwitz, the most notorious symbol of Nazi Germany’s wartime campaign of genocide against Europe’s Jews.

In an interview with AFP to mark Holocaust Memorial Day which begins at sundown on Wednesday, Jabarin, now 70, chuckles as she talks about what to call her.

Her Muslim name is Leila, but in this Arab town in northern Israel where she has lived for the past 52 years, most people call her Umm Raja, Arabic for “Raja’s mother” after her first-born son.

Like most Jewish children, she also has a Hebrew name — Leah — but she just likes to be called Helen.

She was six when she came to live in Mandate Palestine with her parents, just months before the State of Israel was declared in May 1948.

They arrived in a ship carrying Jewish immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, which was forced to anchor off the coast of Haifa for a week due to a heavy British bombardment of the northern port city, she says.

via Holocaust survivor finds haven as Muslim in Israel.

Tomgram: Juan Cole, The Iran Conundrum | TomDispatch

 

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Check out Anis Shivani’s interview with me, focusing on themes from my book The United States of Fear, just up at Guernica magazine (a great online read by the way).  And remember, if you are an Amazon.com customer, arrive there via a TomDispatch book link, and buy anything whatsoever, book or otherwise, we get a modest cut of your purchase at no extra cost to you.  It’s an easy — and appreciated — way to contribute to this site. Tom]

Negotiators for Iran, the U.S., Britain, China, France, Russia, and Germany are to meet in Turkey this Friday, face to face, for the first time in more than a year.  There are small signs of possible future compromise on both sides when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program (and a semi-public demand from Washington that could be an instant deal-breaker).  Looking at the big picture, though, there’s a remarkable amount we simply don’t know about Washington’s highly militarized policy toward Iran.

Every now and then, like a flash of lightning in a dark sky, some corner of it — and its enormity and longevity — is illuminated.  For example, in 2008, the New Yorker’s indefatigable Seymour Hersh reported that the previous year Congress had granted a Bush administration request for up to $400 million “to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran,” including “cross-border” operations from Iraq.  Just recently, Hersh offered a window into another little part of the U.S. program: the way, starting in 2005, the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command spent years secretly training members of M.E.K., an Iranian opposition-group-cum-cult that’s on the State Department’s terror list, at a Department of Energy site in the Nevada desert.

Similarly, from time to time, we get glimpses of the U.S. basing and naval build-up in the Persian Gulf, which is massive and ongoing.  As for the skies over Iran, last year the Iranians suddenly announced that they had acquired — downed, they claimed (though this was later denied by the Americans) — an advanced U.S. spy drone, the RQ-170 Sentinel.  Indeed, they had the photos to prove it.  Until then, there had been no publicity about American drones flying over Iranian territory and initially the U.S. military claimed that the plane had simplystrayed off course while patrolling the Afghan border.

Last week, however, a range of typically anonymous officials leaked to Washington Postreporters Joby Warrick and Greg Miller the news that the CIA’s drone surveillance program over Iran was more than three years old, large-scale, and itself just part of an “intelligence surge” focused on that country.  According to their sources, “The effort has included ramped-up eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, formation of an Iran task force among satellite-imagery analysts, and an expanded network of spies.” In addition, under former CIA Director Leon Panetta, “partnerships” were built “with allied intelligence services in the region capable of recruiting operatives for missions inside Iran.”

Such reports and leaks give us at least the bare and patchy outlines of a concerted military, covert action, spying, surveillance, and propaganda program of staggering proportions (and that’s without even adding in the Israeli version of the same, which evidently includes the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists). All of this, we have to believe, is but part of an even larger set of intertwined, militarized operations against a modest-sized regional power with relatively limited military capabilities.  It’s a program that we’re sure to know less about than we think we do, filled with what former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would have called “known unknowns” as well as “unknown unknowns.”

via Tomgram: Juan Cole, The Iran Conundrum | TomDispatch.