April 2
SOMALIA:
Al - Shabab Militant Convicted of Journalist's Murder
A military tribunal in Somalia has convicted an alleged Al-Shabab militant of
killing journalist Hassan Yusuf Absuge, according to the National Union of
Somali Journalists (NUSOJ).
Absuge, who worked for Radio Maanta as head of programmes, was gunned down in
Mogadishu on 21 September last year. Adan Sheikh Andi Sheikh Hussein was today
found guilty of the murder and sentenced to death, NUSOJ says.
"We hope that the investigation and prosecution of this case signal the
commitment to eradicate the impunity for crimes against journalists in
Somalia," said Beth costa, IFJ General Secretary. "Many families of Somali
journalists who died in violence deserve justice. This conviction raises their
hopes of achieving that and they should not be let down."
NUSOJ, an IFJ affiliate, quoted the presiding judge as saying that there was
compelling evidence against Hussein, including the murder weapon which was
seized on him by security forces. The tribunal was also shown message exchanges
on his mobile phone discussing the journalist's murder with his superiors.
Omar Faruk Osman, NUSOJ's General Secretary, said that this is the 1st case of
a journalist's murder to be resolved by Somali authorities. He urged them to
pursue other killers who continue to enjoy impunity.
"We hope that justice will be similarly done for colleagues who were murdered
by criminals who are not afraid of rule of law," he added. "This verdict sends
a powerful message to them that their crimes will not remain unpunished."
Hussein was put on trial before a military tribunal as an Al-Shabab fighter.
The Islamist group claimed responsibility for Absuge's murder, accusing him of
'spying against Allah's forces'.
Last year, Somalia was ranked as one the deadliest countries for journalists in
the IFJ annual report on journalists and media staff killed in 2012, with 18
killings.
(source: All Africa News)
***************************
Disquiet about death penalty for man convicted of journalist's murder
Reporters Without Borders deplores the death sentence that a military court
passed yesterday on a man found guilty of radio journalist Hassan Yusuf
Absuge???s murder last September in Mogadishu.
"It is not up to us to decide the nature or severity of the sentences imposed
on those convicted of murdering journalists, but we cannot regard the
application of the death penalty as a victory," Reporters Without Borders said.
"We hail the measures taken by the authorities to identify and punish
journalists' killers, and thereby end the vicious circle of impunity that has
gone on for too long. But taking people's lives by applying penalties that
violate the most fundamental human rights is unacceptable."
The death penalty was passed on Adan Sheikh Abdi Sheikh Hussein, a member of
the Islamist militia Al-Shabaab, who confessed to Absuge's murder in the hope
of receiving a less severe punishment.
Employed by Radio Mantaa, Absuge was gunned down as he left the station on 21
September after covering a suicide bombing the day before that had killed
around 10 people including 3 fellow journalists.
The National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ), the Reporters Without Borders
partner organization in Somalia, released a report last November condemning the
impunity enjoyed by the enemies of news and information and reporting that 44
journalists had been killed in Somalia since 2007.
A total of 18 journalists were killed in Somali in 2012 alone, which was the
deadliest year for media personnel in the country's history.
Last month, the government offered a reward of 50,000 dollars (37,500 euros)
for information leading to the arrest of anyone who had murdered a journalist.
Yesterday's conviction of Hussein and the arrests of 3 people suspected of the
murders of the journalists Mohamed Mohamud Turyare and Abdihared Osman Adan
suggest that the authorities really are determined to end the impunity.
(source: Reporters Without Borders)
UNITED KINGDOM:
Death row inmate finds peace in Moulton
Home is where you are loved and are at peace - and it's sometimes in the most
unlikely of places.
That's certainly the case for Nick Yarris, who has found love in Moulton -
thousands of miles away literally and metaphorically from where he spent almost
1/2 his life.
9 years ago, Nick walked out of one of America's toughest prisons - after 8,057
days - 23 years - in solitary confinement on death row.
He had been convicted in 1982 of the rape and murder of a a young woman, who
had been kidnapped. 4 days after Linda Craig's beaten, stabbed and raped body
was discovered near a church, Nick was stopped by police for a traffic
violation.
The routine stop escalated into a violent confrontation, resulting in Nick's
arrest for attempted murder of a police officer. But things went from bad to
worse for the young Nick - who already had a rap sheet as long as your arm.
Between the ages of 13 and 21 he had been arrested dozens of times for crimes
including drug-related thefts and breaking and entering. He relied on drink and
drugs to block out the trauma of being raped when he was 7.
While in custody he accused an acquaintance of Linda Craig's murder - but when
the suspect was eliminated, Nick became prime suspect.
DNA testing on samples collected at the scene could not exclude him as a
suspect and in 1982 he was convicted and sentenced to death.
He was to spend the next 23 years fighting to clear his name - suffering blow
after blow, as well as severe beatings from which he still bears the scars.
But, sitting alone in his tiny cell, first awaiting the electric chair and
later lethal injection, Nick made a decision - to educate himself, devouring
thousands of books and completing distance learning courses.
Sitting across the table at a Spalding resturant last week, he said: "It was an
act of defiance. "I was always being called a rapist and murderer. I could have
become angry and bitter but I decided to make my mind beautiful so when they
executed me, they had wasted their time because I was beautiful inside."
As he talks of his life, Nick's mood swings from thoughful and pensive to one
of lighthearted joyfulness. But behind it all is a lingering pain.
He hasn't seen his daughter Lara, now 8, in almost a year, but is hoping a
court case later this month could lead to renewed contact.
If so, Nick's story could have the happy ending he once thought he might never
have.
He was only freed after he became so ill with hepatitis C in prison that he
begged for them to kill him. A judge ordered DNA evidence to be retested and he
was cleared.
Today he still suffers physical pain from the beatings he took, but the
"survivor's guilt" is harder to bear.
He said: "For more than 20 years my identity was bonded with those people on
death row, I cared about them. I believe life imprisonment is far worse than
the death penalty.
"But as long as I have love I have hope and Jesse has proved that."
Jesse - real name Jessica - is the reason he is rebuilding his life in
Lincolnshire.
After his release in 2004, Nick wrote a book, released in 2008. Jessica, then
aged just 18, was passed a copy by her boss where she worked at The Birds pub
in Spalding.
She was so moved by it that the fate of the man who had spent all those years
waiting to die preyed on her mind. In 2010 she sent Nick a message on Facebook.
Now living in St Leonard's On Sea on the English coast, Nick was not at a good
point and reacted badly. It led to him apologising and the 2 began to talk by
text.
Their relationship blossomed slowly, but the couple were concerned about other
people's reactions, thinking they would believe Jessica had been brainwashed by
this former death row inmate almost 30 years her senior.
They agreed to date, but Nick planned to return to the States after a year to
his remaining family.
He said: "One night I had a text from Jessica to say she needed to talk to me.
I drove the 350-mile round trip to Spalding. She told me that she couldn't be
happy knowing that when I left the UK I couldn't be happy.
"I couldn't believe someone so lovely could risk having her own life blown
apart to be in love with me."
"Her parents were worried and we had to go through a lot to be accepted but the
support from her family since has been overwhelming.
"It is 3 years now and in that time I have done nothing but try hard to show
that I don't deserve what happened to me.
"I inherited a hard work ethic from my dad and I now work 6 days a week doing
deliveries.
"We have a humble home and money is tight, but I am happy in Lincolnshire.
"I feel safe here. It is not like America, there are no guns on the streets.
"Jesse works in a pub and although I don't drink I go there and try to be
gregarious for her sake and I feel I have been accepted.
"That really hit home the first time Jesse's nan called me duck. I just love
that.
"I never put it out there what I have been through, but when something that big
has happened you can't hide from it, but neither can you be defined by it.
"It is part of who I am but look at what I developed from it.
"I found a sense of peace in hell - in the person I was - while they were
trying to murder me, and calling me rapist and murderer.
"When I was first set free I didn't know where home was going to be, but now I
know it's where people love you and I've found that here."
(source: Spalding Today)
*************************
Lost art of creating effective political protest; 'Lecturing, hectoring and
performance poetry are poor weapons in the efforts to motivate social change'
Belarus Free Theatre will perform their new play, Trash Cuisine, as part of the
Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer.
The show is described as "a capital punishment cafe" - with chef's specials
that include electrocution, hanging and lethal injection.
The performance questions capital punishment. Although 95 countries still carry
it out, Belarus is the only country in Europe that still enforces the death
penalty, under President Alexander Lukashenko. On stage the troupe serve up
food, dance and recount the brutal true stories from inmates and their
executioners. They re-enact interviews conducted with human rights lawyers and
desperate families of the executed.
Belarus Free Theatre is banned from performing in their home country. They
continue to do so, at their own risk, underground. And they take their message
abroad, to the rest of Europe - this summer to Edinburgh and London. They
bravely perform in their own country, where people go missing forever. And they
take an important message out and amplify it, refusing to be quiet.
But, when I saw Trash Cuisine, at the premiere in Amsterdam, I felt, not that I
was at a play, but that I was at a lecture. With the exception of one
well-choreographed dance scene, which propagandised little but managed to
convey serious menace, the rest of the performance was obvious and predictable.
Seated around me were those who agreed with the premise: execution is
horrendous, the secret way it is conducted, appalling. Trash Cuisine was
preaching to the converted. We all felt better about ourselves, on the night,
seated in a luxurious theatre, self-satisfied that we know what is right and
wrong.
So what? It is enough to just raise awareness, you might say. But I am not
convinced. It is vital to reflect on the role and the current state of
political theatre and political art more generally. If it adds nothing more
than a speech or a newspaper report could do, then it is not art. That we may
approve of the message doesn't make it good. It needs to expose the truth, but
not one that we can see easily for ourselves.
Every age has some form of political artistic response. This age, in what
people are starting to call an economic depression, has one too. Sadly, it
tells us a lot about the timid, directionless state of political protest and is
unlikely to create anything of artistic significance.
One of the more flamboyant manifestations of protest art is the flash mob
flamenco performed by the Seville based group, Flo6x8. The dancers enter an
everyday space - a public square, a bank - unexpectedly, singing and dancing,
taking everyone by surprise. There is an expressive, angry passion in their
interventions, a voice of protest against the current financial meltdown that
is hitting the Andalucia region hard.
But there is also a question to be asked: is it anything more than a display of
passivity? Don't let's kid ourselves. They are just stamping their feet with
frustration.
The energy and the edge of the political art of old is missing. There is
nothing like Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, Diego Rivera's
revolutionary murals, nothing like Picasso's Guernica or David's The Death of
Marat. What tends to happen instead is that art work repeats the obvious
complaint, what is said better elsewhere, without the insight that art can
bring.
Political art always had to tread a fine line. Some of Picasso's later work
came to be too closely associated with Stalinism to be effective. For it cannot
simply be agitprop. The Irish poet and playwright, Brendan Behan, when asked
once what his play The Hostage was about, what was its message, is said to have
replied: "Message? What the hell do you think I am, a bloody postman?" If you
want instruction, read a manifesto, go to a meeting.
In the past, political movements provided the inspiration for artists, when
artists were less isolated than they are today, which means it too now all too
easy for them to fall into clich???s.
As well as casting light on problems in a way that other forms of communication
cannot do, political art has to express a response in relation to - and in
conversation with - the people, for it to work.
Nowhere is the sorry state of political art and of protest more obvious that
the state of Occupy. This movement has been reduced to a whimper.
Occupy, which claimed to represent the 99 p%, but it turned did not, has turned
to performance poetry, in the UK, which activists say will garner support for
their cause. But poetry will not enliven Occupy, especially when the cause was
diffuse at best and one that had little, deep, support.
That they have reduced to playing with words indicates that something is wrong.
In this instance, their talk of poetry is just a way of accepting the reality
of failure rather than changing anything.
During the 1970s, with industrial unrest bringing the country to a halt,
political theatre had bite - but even then producers and directors knew the
limits. John McGrath, founder of 7:84, argued that: "The theatre can never
cause a social change." Not directly.
Instead, it could "articulate the pressures towards one, help people to
celebrate their strengths and maybe build their self-confidence." The role it
can play, he said, is "it can be the way people can find voice, their
solidarity and their collective determination". That is enough to ask.
Trotsky once argued that it was art's sincerity that made it a potentially
revolutionary force: "The struggle for revolutionary ideas in art must begin
once again with the struggle for artistic truth" he said, "not in terms of any
single school, but in terms of the immutable faith of the artist in his own
inner self." On art, he had a point.
Art provides an imaginative sphere in which future possibilities can be
explored. It could open our eyes to how things are, beyond their surface
appearance, and suggest how they could be. That vision could once again whet
our appetite.
(source: The Scotsman)
UGANDA:
Wife of Uganda's president denies Anti-Homosexuality Bill is designed for
persecuting gays
Uganda's Observer newspaper says recent talks between human rights campaigners
and President Yoweri Museveni have not had any noticeable effect on the
country's Anti-Homosexuality Bill.
The paper says the bill continues to loom large against the backdrop of Ugandan
politics.
It recommends long jail sentences for those convicted of homosexual acts and in
certain cases has suggested the death penalty.
Last month, a delegation from America's Robert F Kennedy Centre for Justice and
Human Rights met with President Museveni and his wife to discuss the bill.
The president, who believes gay people can be viewed as "deviants", accused
European countries of trying to promote homosexuality and sexual
liberalisation.
Mr Museveni was keen to downplay Uganda's reputation for violent homophobic
persecution and said any display of public affection - such as kissing his wife
- would be frowned upon in Ugandan society.
Uganda's Observer newspaper claims the president's wife, First Lady Janet
Museveni, reportedly told the delegation that the basis of the bill is not to
persecute gay people, noting that Ugandans do not necessarily kill them
although adding that they are not admired either.
The same message was reiterated by President Museveni.
Suggestions the bill would threaten Uganda's international human rights
commitments were also dismissed by MP Alice Alaso.
She said: "You (Westerners) have imposed on us enough of your bad practices,
right from guns, and we shall not allow homosexuality in Uganda because the
Bible forbids it."
(source: Pink News)
MALAYSIA:
7 more charged over intrusion
7 more Filipino men from the southern Philippines have been charged in the
Magistrate's Court here with waging war against the Yang Dipertuan Agong and
involvement in terrorism.
No plea were recorded from the men aged between 20 and 63 when the charges were
read to them, first in Bahasa Melayu and then in Bajau and Suluk by an
interpreter before Lahad Datu Sessions Court Judge Rajalingam a/l S.S. Maniam
who acted as Magistrate at a makeshift court at the district police
headquarters today.
5 of them are facing 2 charges, of waging war against the Yang di-Pertuan
Agong, under Section 121 of the Penal Code which carries the death penalty upon
conviction, and joining a terrorist group, under Section 130KA of the Penal
Code, which carries a life sentence and liable to a fine upon conviction.
1 accused is facing 4 charges, under Section 121, 130KA and Section 130E of the
Penal Code for recruiting terrorists or participating in terrorism, which
carries a maximum 30 years' jail and liable to a fine upon conviction.
He is also alleged on the 4th charge to have harboured terrorists, under
Section 130K of the Penal Code which carries a life sentence and liable to a
fine, or a maximum 20 years' jail and liable to a fine upon conviction.
Another accused is facing 1 charge under Section 130KA of the Penal Code. The
prosecution was led by Sabah Prosecution Unit chief Jamil Aripin and Lahad Datu
Deputy Public Prosecutor Datu Shukor Abu Bakar.
The court also allowed the prosecution's request under Section 177A(2) of the
Criminal Procedure Code to transfer the case to the Tawau High Court. However
no date was fixed for mention.
Meanwhile, a police corporal was charged in the same court with intentionally
refraining from disclosing information on terrorist acts, under Section 130M of
the Penal Code which carries a maximum seven years' jail or a fine or both upon
conviction.
A total of 16 people have been charged with terrorism-related acts. On March
20, 8 were charged under Section 121 and Section 130KA. The case has been fixed
for re-mention at the Tawau High Court on April 12.
During the proceedings, the court would likely be briefed on the outcome of
discussions among the Attorney-General's Chambers, Sabah Law Association,
Malaysian Bar Council and Philippine Government pertaining to legal
representation for the accused persons.
(source: mysinchew.com)
**********************
Trio charged with kidnapping Japanese engineer
2 Nigerians and a Filipina were charged at the magistrate's court here
yesterday with the kidnapping of a Japanese engineer 3 weeks ago.
Okwara Victor Emeka, 40, Kalu Okoro Okeke, 31, and Divina Gu-tierrez Matias,
34, from the Philippines allegedly abduct-ed Shunsuke Kobayakawa, 50, in Jalan
Lebuh Pudu, and confined him in a condominium unit at Venice Hill, Cheras, at
11.30pm on March 13.
No plea was recorded from the 3 accused, who were charged under Section 3 of
the Kidnapping Act, which carries the death penalty, or life imprisonment, if
found guilty.
The 2 Nigerian men are said to be studying in Malaysia, while Divina worked as
a maid.
Deputy public prosecutor S. Malini Anne prosecuted while the 3 accused were
represented by counsel L.A. Gomes.
Magistrate Erry Shahriman Nor Aripin presided.
It was earlier reported that the victim had come to Malaysia on March 12 to
meet a woman, whom he had communicated through "Skype" about marriage.
After kidnapping the victim, the trio had allegedly demanded a ransom of
US$50,000 (S$60,878) from his family in Japan, which was to be credited into a
bank account in the Philippines.
(source: Asia One)
CHINA:
2 get death in trafficking 26kg of drugs
2 men were sentenced to death yesterday for transporting narcotics weighing
over 26 kilograms from Shenzhen City and selling them in Shanghai, the Shanghai
No.1 Intermediate People's Court ruled.
Prosecutors said Liang Guoyong, 38, was based in Shenzhen while Shi Runqiang,
48, was his partner in Shanghai.
In 1 case, the pair transported 3kg of the powerful sedative ketamine and the
highly addictive stimulant methamphetamine, also called meth or ice, in 2
different shipments to Shanghai in April 2012 by bribing a long-distance bus
driver.
Liang told the court he sold drugs to Shi for 220,000 yuan (US$35,420) per
kilogram, earning a profit of 15,000 yuan per kilogram.
In May, Liang sent another 23kg of ice and ketamine hidden in boxes via a
long-distance bus to Shanghai. Shi was caught by Shanghai police at an express
delivery outlet in the Pudong New Area after officers found the drugs in a
shipment.
Liang was caught by Shenzhen police at his home the next day. Officers seized
more than 6kg of ice and ketamine in his house, the court said. During the
trial, Liang admitted transporting and selling drugs to Shi, but denied he had
anything to do with the 6kg seized at the house.
The court said the amount of drugs that Liang and Shi transported was so large
that they deserved the death penalty.
According to the Chinese Criminal Law, convicts who have smuggled, transported,
sold or made more than 50 grams of methamphetamine could face a jail term of 15
years to life in prison, or death, depending on the amount of drugs.
(source: English Eastday)
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