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Monthly Archives: March 2014

War is over – now Serbs and Bosniaks fight to win control of a brutal history

23 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in War Crimes

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Bosnia

War is over – now Serbs and Bosniaks fight to win control of a brutal history

After survivors and bereaved families put up a memorial to the mass slaughter in 1992 of Muslims in Višegrad, the response of the Serb authorities in the eastern Bosnian town was as unsubtle as it was symbolic. They ordered the word “genocide” chiselled off the stone monument.

A group of Višegrad widows soon restored the word in lipstick, only for it to be obscured by municipal white paint a few days later. This is a battle the town hall is not prepared to lose. When it sent a surveyor and workman into the town’s Muslim cemetery with an angle grinder to erase the offending term on 23 January, they were accompanied by 150 policemen in riot gear. The message was clear.

The graveyard spat is a skirmish in a much bigger battle being fought in Bosnia – the continuation by bureaucratic means of the murderous four-year war of two decades ago. It is a struggle over collective memory and the power to write history.

“Those who committed the war crimes against us are still winning. They are killing our truth,” said Bakira Hasečić, a Višegrad survivor who was raped multiple times by Serb paramilitaries at her home and in the local police station in 1992. Her sister was raped and killed. Her 18-year-old daughter was raped and had her head smashed by a rifle butt, but survived.

Hasečić now runs the Association of Women Victims of War. She and other Višegrad rape victims tried to protect the monument last month but failed because the town authorities turned up an hour earlier than announced, and in force.

“The huge numbers of police in their uniforms and caps brought back the memories of 1992. You relive those moments. My legs were shaking. When we arrived, we had no idea they had already done that to the monument. People started crying when they found out. I couldn’t bring myself to look at it.”

However, the same morning and less than 200 yards away, Hasečić and other Bosniak survivors were successful in stopping another act of demolition. The Serb authorities want to knock down a house on Pionirska Street, where 59 Muslim women, children and pensioners were locked into a single room and incinerated on 14 June 1992. Relatives of the dead, with Hasečić’s help, are trying to restore the house as a memorial.

The town council has countered by expropriating the building, claiming the road needs to be widened. Yet the house is set well back from the existing road and the immediate Serb neighbours – who have mostly been supportive of the Bosniaks’ restoration attempts, offering to help with water and electricity connections – say no other houses on the street have been targeted in the same way.

But no one in the neighbourhood believes the issue is really about town planning. Serb nationalists are striving to suppress reminders of atrocities committed in the name of separatism, mostly against the country’s Muslims (known as Bosniaks) and to construct an alternative history in which Serbs were the principal victims. Many Bosniaks and outside observers fear that this refusal to come to terms with the past means there are few guarantees that such acts will not be repeated.

Bosniaks and Croats have also been slow to allow memorials to civilian victims from other ethnicities, but it is in the Republika Srpska, the Serb-run half of Bosnia, where the scale of the killing was by far the greatest, and where the culture of denial is now the deepest.

Višegrad is a grim example. An eastern Bosnian town set dramatically along a break in the white limestone ravines of the River Drina, it is home to Bosnia’s best-known cultural artefact, the 16th century Mehmed Paša Sokolović bridge, a graceful span of 11 masonry arches made legendary by the Yugoslav Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić.

In his 1945 novel, the Bridge on the Drina, it is silent witness to atrocities across generations. In 1992, it was spattered with blood once more. Serb paramilitaries calling themselves “The Avengers” and the “White Eagles” went on a killing spree through the town and surrounding villages, executing Muslims. Men, women and over a hundred children were slaughtered, many on the bridge itself, and their bodies dumped in the Drina.

The practice of barricading people into houses and setting them alight with grenades was reproduced several times. In another incident in nearby Bikavac, there were 60 victims, against mostly women and children.

A couple of miles outside Višegrad, young women and girls as young as 14 were held captive and repeatedly raped in the Vilina Vlas spa hotel. It was where the paramilitaries led by a pair of sadistic local cousins, Milan and Sredoje Lukić, made their wartime base. Muslim men were routinely tortured next door to where the women were raped and killed.

The estimates of the total number of victims in the Višegrad municipality range from 1,600 to 3,000. The rest of the area’s Muslims fled; most made their way south to Goražde, which became a Bosniak enclave and survived a three-year Serbian siege. Before the war, the Višegrad municipality had a population over 21,000, two thirds Muslim. Now the population is 12,000, 1,500 of them Bosniaks.

Today’s survivors are post-war returnees to the Višegrad outskirts, often living in villages or houses where their loved ones were executed. Twenty years after the bloodletting they remain a marginalised community, routinely denied the meagre social benefits doled out by Višegrad’s authorities.

After an interregnum in which slightly more moderate parties held sway, the Serb Democratic Party (or SDS for Srpska Demokratska Stranka) regained control of the municipality in October 2012. The extreme nationalist party of Radovan Karadzic, which hacked out the Republika Srpska and oversaw the “ethnic cleansing” of Muslims and Croats, is back in charge in Višegrad and 24 other Serb towns with its own version of what happened between 1992 and 1995, and its own way of doing things. Hence the municipal use of angle-grinders and bulldozers.

“With the old mayor we could co-operate much better. We had different opinions but it was discussed in a more civilised way,” said Bilal Memišević, the head of Višegrad’s Islamic community council. Both his parents were murdered in 1992, when he was studying abroad. “Since the SDS came to power, they started ignoring us. They don’t mention employment, or the economy. It’s all about the war and the manipulation of 1992. They have been able to target a vulnerable population and they have been successful. They have built an alternative reality.”

That alternative reality is visible everywhere in town. In the main square, there is large statue of a knight bearing a cross and a sword, dedicated to “the defenders of the Republika Srpska, with the gratitude of the people of Višegrad”. Nearby a large swath of land had been expropriated for a literary theme-park, Andrićgrad, masterminded by Emir Kusturica, Serbia’s most famous film director, twice awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

The complex, a pastiche on the town’s history, due to be completed in June this year, is being built on the site of a former sports centre that was used as a detention camp by Serb paramilitaries.

In mid-March each year, hundreds of Serbs come from around the region to parade through the town to commemorate Draža Mihajlović, the leader of the ultra-nationalist Chetnik movement during the second world war, who carried out a series of atrocities against Muslims in the Drina valley. They come as Chetniks, with long wild beards, fur hats, and black skull-and-crossbone flags. Many of the killers in 1992 dressed exactly the same way. It is a terrifying annual spectacle for Višegrad’s remaining Bosniaks, all the more so in 2010 when Mitar Vasiljevic, a Lukić henchman sentenced 15 years by the Hague war crimes tribunal for his part in the 1992 killings, made a triumphant return after early release. He paraded in full Chetnik garb and was given a hero’s welcome, complete with patriotic music and a motorcade through the town.

Milan Lukić himself was transferred from the Hague this month to serve his life term in Estonia. His cousin Sredoje is serving 27 years in Norway.

The most powerful man in town now is Miroslav Kojić, a soldier and secret policeman for Republika Srpska during the war and now Višegrad’s SDS representative in the Republika Srpska parliament.

He provides a legal defence of the municipality’s actions, arguing that there have been no convictions at the Hague tribunal specifically for genocide that would justify the disputed memorial. (Višegrad was taken from the list of municipalities in Karadzic’s genocide indictment to slim the charge sheet and speed up his trial, but the tribunal has declared the town was subjected to “one of the most comprehensive and ruthless campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian conflict”). As for Pionirska Street, Kojić says the issue is a long-running non-political town planning matter.

Of his own wartime role, Kojić – an energetic man with a piercing stare – is heated, launching into a strangely inverted version of Višegrad’s wartime history, in which Bakira Hasečić supposedly tortured Serb policemen and soldiers, and Višegrad’s Serbs withstood a brutal Bosniak siege in 1992 and 1993.

The narrative of Serb victimhood is pieced together from sporadic Bosniak acts of resistance during the war. After the former Yugoslav National Army bombarded Muslim areas of Višegrad at the outbreak of conflict in the first week of April 1992, a group of armed Muslims took some Serb policemen hostage and threatened to blow up a nearby hydroelectric dam if shelling continued. The dam was retaken by the army which then withdrew on May 19, handing the town over to Serb nationalists and paramilitaries that carried out the atrocities against Bosniak civilians.

In summer 1992, survivors of the concentration camps helped form a Bosniak First Višegrad Brigade which fought a guerrilla campaign for a year in the wooded hills on the west bank of the Drina, but never came close to surrounding or threatening the city before being driven back into the Bosniak enclave of Goražde in 1993. After surviving multiple rapes, Hasečić, did join the Bosnian army, but there is no evidence of her mistreating Serbs.

Today the Bosniak resistance effort is the justification for public memorials in central Višegrad for Serb soldiers and even Russian volunteer fighters on the Serb side, and the absence of equivalent monuments to Bosniak civilians. It is a pattern repeated around the Republika Srpska. Further up the Drina is the town of Foca which became a byword for mass rape during the war. Bosnian Serbs imprisoned Muslim women and girls and raped them on such a scale the town made legal history. As a result of what happened in Foca, such systematic rape was finally classed as a crime against humanity.

There is no sign of such a grim history in Foca now, just another granite and marble monument to the Serb fallen. There is also no plaque at the most notorious concentration camp at Omarska, now within an iron ore mine run by a Luxembourg-based multinational steel corporation, ArcelorMittal, which says it is a matter for the Serb-run local authority in Prijedor to decide. In the neighbouring camp, at Trnopolje, where torture and rape were rife and where hundreds of Bosniaks and Croats were killed, a concrete memorial to fallen Serb soldiers has been placed at the entrance inscribed with an ode to “freedom”.

In Višegrad, the remaining Bosniaks have become accustomed to the official state of denial. Omar Bosankić and Elvedin Musanović, two Muslim men in their mid-30s out strolling one recent afternoon on Višegrad’s bridge, insist that relations with their Serb neighbours are fine as long as the war is not mentioned.

“No one wants to admit anything. They never want to talk about it,” Bosankić said. As a 14-year-old boy, he helped fish bodies of murdered Muslims out of the Drina at night in his home village of Barimo, five miles downstream. “I still have images that come back all the time. There a woman with her hands tied behind her back and a man with a screwdriver still stuck in his neck.”

Musanović says that Bosniaks on the bridge were slaughtered with whatever the Lukićs’ “Avengers” or “White Eagles” could find, often blades of broken glass. A water tanker would come in the evening to wash away the gore from the ancient stones of the bridge where they now take their daily walk. In the absence of any jobs, there is not much else to do.

The two men are unimpressed by the municipality’s legal objections to the Bosniak memorial.

“What else happened here but genocide?” Bosankić asked. Twenty-six people were murdered in his village in August 1992, the youngest, Emir Bajrić, was only 12 years old. He points out that the fact that no one has so far been convicted for the crime does not mean it did not happen. “Everybody who lives here knows what happened.”

Another stolen generation: how Australia still wrecks Aboriginal families

22 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Indigenous Communities/Nomads

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Aborigines, assimilation, Australia, forced removal, forced separation, social engineering, stolen children, stolen generation

Another stolen generation: how Australia still wrecks Aboriginal families

The tape is searing. There is the voice of an infant screaming as he is wrenched from his mother, who pleads, “There is nothing wrong with my baby. Why are you doing this to us? I would’ve been hung years ago, wouldn’t I? Because [as an Aboriginal Australian] you’re guilty before you’re found innocent.” The child’s grandmother demands to know why “the stealing of our kids is happening all over again”. A welfare official says, “I’m gunna take him, mate.”

This happened to an Aboriginal family in outback New South Wales. It is happening across Australia in a scandalous and largely unrecognised abuse of human rights that evokes the infamous stolen generation of the last century. Up to the 1970s, thousands of mixed-race children were stolen from their mothers by welfare officials. The children were given to institutions as cheap or slave labour; many were abused.

Described by a chief protector of Aborigines as “breeding out the colour”, the policy was known as assimilation. It was influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis. In 1997 a landmark report, Bringing Them Home, disclosed that as many 50,000 children and their mothers had endured “the humiliation, the degradation and sheer brutality of the act of forced separation … the product of the deliberate, calculated policies of the state”. The report called this genocide.

Assimilation remains Australian government policy in all but name. Euphemisms such as “reconciliation” and “Stronger Futures” cover similar social engineering and an enduring, insidious racism in the political elite, the bureaucracy and wider Australian society. When in 2008 prime minister Kevin Rudd apologised for the stolen generation, he added: “I want to be blunt about this. There will be no compensation.” The Sydney Morning Herald congratulated Rudd on a “shrewd manoeuvre” that “cleared away a piece of political wreckage in a way that responds to some of its own supporters’ emotional needs, yet changes nothing”.

Today, the theft of Aboriginal children – including babies taken from the birth table – is now more widespread than at any time during the last century. As of June last year, almost 14,000 Aboriginal children had been “removed”. This is five times the number when Bringing Them Home was written. More than a third of all removed children are Aboriginal – from 3% of the population. At the present rate, this mass removal of Aboriginal children will result in a stolen generation of more than 3,300 children in the Northern Territory alone.

Pat (not her real name) is the mother whose anguish was secretly recorded on a phone as four department of child services officials, and six police, descended on her home. On the tape an official claims they have come only for an “assessment”. But two of the police officers, who knew Pat, told her they saw no risk to her child and warned her to “get out of here quick”. Pat fled, cradling her infant, but the one-year-old was eventually seized without her knowing why. The next morning a police officer returned to apologise to her and said her baby should never have been taken away. Pat has no idea where her son is.

Once she was “invited” by officials to bring her children to “neutral” offices to discuss a “care plan”. The doors were locked and officials seized the children, with one of the youngest dragging on a police officer’s gun belt. Many Indigenous mothers are unaware of their legal rights. A secretive children’s court has become notorious for rubber-stamping removals.

Most Aboriginal families live on the edge. Their life expectancy in towns a short flight from Sydney is as low as 37. Dickensian diseases are rife; Australia is the only developed country not to have eradicated trachoma, which blinds Aboriginal children.

Pat has both complied with and struggled bravely against a punitive bureaucracy that can remove children on hearsay. She has twice been acquitted of false charges, including “kidnapping” her own children. A psychologist has described her as a capable and good mother.

Josie Crawshaw, the former director of a respected families’ support organisation in Darwin, told me: “In remote areas, officials will go in with a plane in the early hours and fly the child thousands of kilometres from their community. There’ll be no explanation, no support, and the child may be gone forever.”

In 2012 the co-ordinator general of remote services for the Northern Territory, Olga Havnen, was sacked when she revealed that almost A$80m (£44m) was spent on the surveillance and removal of Aboriginal children compared with only A$500,000 (£275,000) on supporting the same impoverished families. She told me: “The primary reasons for removing children are welfare issues directly related to poverty and inequality. The impact is just horrendous because if they are not reunited within six months, it’s likely they won’t see each other again. If South Africa was doing this, there’d be an international outcry.”

She and others with long experience I have interviewed have echoed the Bringing them Home report, which described an official “attitude” in Australia that regarded all Aboriginal people as “morally deficient”. A department of family and community services spokesman said that most removed Indigenous children in New South Wales were placed with Indigenous carers. According to Indigenous support networks, this is a smokescreen; it does not mean families, and it is control by divisiveness that is the bureaucracy’s real achievement.

I met a group of Aboriginal grandmothers, all survivors of the first stolen generation, all now with stolen grandchildren. “We live in a state of fear, again,” they said. David Shoebridge, a state Greens MP, told me: “The truth is, there is a market among whites for these kids, especially babies.”

The New South Wales parliament is soon to debate legislation that introduces forced adoption and “guardianship”. Children under two years old will be liable – without the mother’s consent – if “removed” for more than six months. For many Aboriginal mothers like Pat, it can take six months merely to make contact with their children. “It’s setting up Aboriginal families to fail,” said Shoebridge.

I asked Josie Crawshaw why. “The wilful ignorance in Australia about its first people has now become the kind of intolerance that gets to the point where you can smash an entire group of humanity and there is no fuss.”

http://www.johnpilger.com

Self-harm sites and cyberbullying: the threat to children from web’s dark side

11 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Self-Harm, Young People

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Bullying, Depression, mental health issues, self-harm, social networks, suicide, teenagers, young people

Self-harm sites and cyberbullying: the threat to children from web’s dark side

“Some of the images do scare me, especially if it’s my friends. Once my friend cut lines down the side of his face as a ‘Chelsea Smile’, he put it online and it was the worst thing I had ever seen. He’s my friend, I don’t want to see him that upset. He got so much hate for it and ended up going into hibernation, nobody heard from him for over a week and we honestly thought he had killed himself.”

Frankie* is 15 and lives in the Midlands. For the past year or so she has updated her Tumblr blog most days. On other social networks she uses her real name, but on Tumblr – a blogging platform – she shares her darkest thoughts about depression, anxiety and self-harm anonymously. “The other day I put up a self-harm picture,” she says. “I was alone and in a dark place. […] Of course, nobody would help, but posting it boosted my confidence a little; finding it buried in amongst all the other self-harm posts reminded me I’m not alone.”

Fears about self-harm sites have been growing since the suicides of two teenagers who, it emerged, were obsessed with self-harm and depression blogs, with mental health campaigners and experts warning that the UK’s teens are at risk of becoming a lost generation if parents and adults cannot reach out to them across the digital divide.

Tallulah Wilson, a 15-year-old who killed herself in 2012, was caught up in a “toxic digital world”, according to her mother, while the parents of Sasha Steadman, a 16-year-old who died from a suspected drug overdose in January after looking at self-harm sites, said her “impressionable mind” had been filled “with their damning gospel of darkness”.

For the uninitiated, self-harm blogs present a surreal world of fantasy and pain. Countless sites dedicated to self-harm and depression are filled with images of bleeding wounds juxtaposed with pixelated gifs, flickering eerily with snippets of Hollywood angst. Helen, who is now 18, visited them regularly, before stopping to help herself move on from self-harming. “You have people asking you how to cut yourself deep enough because their therapist said it wasn’t bad enough,” she says. “I have had people tell me to kill myself. I think the most traumatic is when you find someone’s suicide note online and there is no way to actually get in contact with the person.”

Isolated and lonely, she used the blogs because they gave her a sense of belonging. “You want to find people who are similar to you. That is what humans do,” she says. “It starts off as trying to help, but then it becomes competitive and dangerous. You get sucked into this world of who can cut the deepest/be the skinniest and avoid notice by the outside world. You end up spending hours a day searching these sites for reassurance, but it just makes it harder.”

Keeping children safe online is the “child protection challenge of this generation”, according to Peter Wanless, head of the NSPCC. ChildLine, part of the organisation, registered an 87% rise in calls about cyberbullying last year, a 41% increase in calls about self-harm, and a 33% increase in calls about suicide, with the biggest increase among 12- to 15-year-olds.

While the internet provides unprecedented opportunities for young people to communicate and learn, it can be a dangerous place for vulnerable teenagers, says Sue Minto, the head of ChildLine. “Children are communicating in a way we have never seen before – all the time and instantly,” she says. “Personally, I think this kind of relentless exposure is the biggest challenge we have ever faced.”

Minto notes that while peer pressure and bullying have been around for a long time, the ability to be contacted at all times is new. The cloak of anonymity can lead children to make comments they would shy away from in “real” life, she says. “The pressure on children is immense and very worrying – there is no break for these young people, it is quite relentless. Children who are being bullied tell us there is no point in turning off their phone, because the messages will just be there waiting for them.”

A recent survey carried out by youth charities ChildLine, Selfharm.co.uk,YouthNet and YoungMinds revealed that 61% of the 4,000 young people who responded said they self harmed because they felt alone, while 25% cited bullying. Almost 40% said they had never spoken to anyone in the “real world” about it.

Rachel Welch, director of Selfharm.co.uk, which supports young people affected by self-harm, says there is a huge gap between what adults see of the online world and their children’s experience. “So many young people are drifting into a world where they are completely disconnected,” she says.

But how dangerous are self-harm sites? Do they simply show teenage angst and creative expression, or highlight a worrying deterioration of teenage mental health?

Mary Hassell, the coroner presiding over the inquest of Tallulah Wilson, was concerned enough to write to Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, to warn him of a risk of future deaths without a greater understanding of children’s online worlds. Although Tallulah was treated by healthcare professionals, they didn’t have “a good enough understanding of the evolving way that the internet is used by young people, most particularly in terms of the online life that is quite separate from the rest of life”, she wrote.

A study into possible links between suicide and the internet has just been commissioned by the Department of Health and will report in two and a half years: a department spokeswoman said children’s mental health was a priority for the government and pointed to the introduction of “family-friendly filters” and internet safety into the national curriculum.

But for Sarah Brennan, chief executive of the youth mental health charity Young Minds, the real issue is ignorance of the scale of the problem, or even denial that the problem exists. The current NHS commissioning of youth mental health services is based on data collected in 2004 – the year Facebook launched.

“It is shocking that the government is allowing NHS commissioners to plan services based on out of date and inaccurate data,” Brennan says, adding that a Young Minds freedom of information request recently revealed that 34 out of 51 local authorities in England have reduced the budget for their children and adolescent mental health services since 2010, while a Community Care/BBC investigation this week showed that a growing number of seriously ill children are being admitted to adult psychiatric wards or sent hundreds of miles from home for hospital care.

“We are sitting on a ticking time bomb here,” says Brennan. “At the same time that we are seeing an increase in need, youth mental health services are being cut. There is an explosion of bullying online and young people struggling to cope with mental health issues, anxiety, eating disorders. If we don’t do something about it we could have a lost generation.”

What can be done? Since Tallulah Wilson’s suicide, Tumblr has introduced a warning that pops up when users search for terms related to self-harm, directing them towards sites offering support and calling on users to report blogs with “inappropriate content” so they can be taken down. A Tumblr spokeswoman said the site was “deeply committed to protecting our users’ freedom of expression”, but that it draws lines “around a few categories of content we consider damaging to our community, including blogs that encourage self-harm”.

And while there have been calls to shut down certain sites, such as Ask.fm – which allows users to ask anonymous questions and has been linked to teen suicides – teenagers and professionals spoken to by the Guardian agreed that simply banning sites or “dangerous” search terms was futile. Regulation can also backfire – recent efforts to impose opt-out “objectionable content filters”, backed by the prime minister, have resulted in sites such as ChildLine and Refuge also being blocked.

“We cannot put our head in the sand, simply blame these sites or hope to regulate our way out of this,” says Minto. “We are playing catch-up, but we need to take responsibility. You wouldn’t let your child cross the road without talking to them about road safety and the same goes for the risks of the internet – if we don’t tackle this it’s like opening the door and letting them walk through this cyberworld completely unequipped.”

Welch at Selfharm.co.uk agrees: “Calling for any type of ban is just missing the point. What we have to do is make sure our young people are emotionally resilient, emotionally aware and they know where to go to get help if they need it.”

Others say that while parts of the internet can be dangerous for vulnerable children, it can also provide the means to keep others safe and let them talk about their problems. As many young people contact ChildLine online as call its helpline. Online friends can be a force for good.

Samantha, a 17-year-old who started self-harming when she was 14, says her Tumblr site helped her recover from depression. “I felt like I belonged somewhere, they understood me in a way I felt I had never been understood before,” she says. At one point, she was off school with depression and spent all day online, answering 10-15 messages from other troubled teenagers every day. Now she “has a life” again and is online less frequently. “I’ve been told that I’ve saved lives and it made me feel good about myself that I was helping other people,” she says. “It’s really odd – but it works for me.”

Frankie, who is still working towards recovery, has mixed emotions. While she recognises that some blogs might encourage self-harmers, or make them feel worse, she still believes they can help. “I think for [people] like myself it can be reassuring just to know there are others out there that do it too [but] what scares me is thinking how many there are, how they are all posting it online, are they all cries for help? If that many people are crying for help then something needs to be done, and fast.”

*Names of young people have been changed. If you face any of the issues in this piece, you can call ChildLine on 0800 1111

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