TMP Online

The 8th March is International Women’s Day. To celebrate this TMP (The Multicultural Progressive) is putting a spotlight on Womens’ rights and liberation, throughout this week. As part of this, TMP has commissioned a special report into the state of women in the UK and internationally.

The London based Black Women’s Rape Action Project has produced this report exclusively for TMPOnline.

Since 5 February, women in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre (Bedfordshire) have been on hunger strike. They are protesting indefinite detention, lack of medical care and legal representation, and inadequate time and help with their legal claim. On top of this, they have suffered racist abuse and other violence from private agency staff. Many are mothers suffering separation from children, and most are survivors of rape and other torture. Their detention is contrary both to international law and Home Office regulations.

SOAS students showing solidarity with Yarl's Wood detainees

On day four of the strike, guards with riot shields ‘kettled’ the women in an airless hallway without access to water or toilets. Others were locked outside in freezing conditions for a sustained period of time. Four women, isolated from the others, were transferred to prison.  None of the women have been charged with committing any crime.

Despite efforts from the authorities to divide them,  at the start 84 women from many countries came together to organise the hunger strike.  Most of the detained women are from China, Jamaica, Nigeria, and Vietnam.

Last week John McDonnell MP tabled a parliamentary motion for an immediate independent investigation and a “moratorium on all removals pending the results of that investigation”.

Embarrassed Home Office officials wrote to all MPs denying that women were refusing food – they were getting food from visitors, they said. Women furiously pointed out that visitors are banned from bringing in food.

Other slurs were answered by the All African Women’s Group and Black Women’s Rape Action Project, based in Kentish Town ’s Crossroads Women’s Centre. Teams of volunteers continue to provide round-the-clock support to hunger strikers, providing lawyers’ visits media and contacts (publicity is a protection against abuse).  Sometimes the groups take on cases and stop removals themselves.

Cristel A miss of Black Women’s Rape Action Project said

“We are in daily contact with hunger strikers. Claims that women are treated with ‘dignity and respect’ mean nothing in the face of overwhelming evidence of appalling conditions and abuse. The case for mothers, rape survivors and other vulnerable women to be released grows stronger every day. ”

Stella Mpaka from the All African Women’s Group commented:

“Either children suffer alongside their mothers in detention or they suffer the pain of separation.  Ending the detention of children has to mean ending the detention of families. We know from the many acts of kindness, understanding and compassion from the public that there is widespread though hidden support for us. ”

Mothers will be taking their own action in Yarl’s Wood during the Mothers March for Recognition and Support for the Vital Work of Mothering, Sat 13 March, 2pm.

Activists showing solidarity with Yarl's Wood Hunger Strikers

Abahlali baseMjondolo Solidarity group in association with SOAS War on Want Society Presents:

The Right to Know: The Fight for Open Democracy in South Africa

- A Short Film Showing and Discussion -

7pm – Wednesday 3rd March

Room 4418 (4th Floor, SOAS Main Building)

Since the mid-2000s, a number of social movements in South Africa have organised and acted to improve the lives of those living in substandard housing and working, if at all, precariously in the informal economy and fighting against privatization, evictions, water-collection and electricity cut-offs.

These community-oriented struggles are based in the “illegal” settlements which are mushroom in and around major cities and sections of the countryside because of South Africa’s ongoing housing crisis. Loosely linked together in the Poor People’s Alliance, movements like AbM, the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, the Landless People’s Movement, and Abahali baseplasini (Rural Network), have taken direct action against government policy and official neglect.

Abahlali Website

UK group email list

Facebook event (please indicate if you’re coming)

UK group blog

All are welcome to enjoy the short film and discussion on these movements, as well as learn how YOU can help support their struggles.

“1° Marzo, una giornata senza di noi” – “1 March, a day without us”

Protest at the Italian Embassy
Monday, 1st March ,1-2pm
14 Three Kings Yard, London W1K 4EH

Immigrant people in Italy, France and other European countries, led by African people, have called an Immigrant Strike on the 1st March 2010 to protest: racist murders and attacks; police harassment; immigration controls; severe exploitation and inhumane conditions in agriculture and other work. Whilst many of the agricultural workers are men, immigrant women, including sex workers, have also been targetted.

The day of action will include strikes from waged work places, from schools, universities, shopping strikes, and demonstrations in many cities. Second-generation immigrants and non-immigrant people are also part of the co-ordinating committees helping to organise this “day without us”. (For more info please go to: see this link: mainly in Italian but some info in English) http://www.primomarzo2010.it/2009/10/chi-siamo.html).

Please also see the statement “Tangerines and olives don’t fall from the sky” (below) from the Assembly of African workers of Rosarno in Rome, Italy, January 2010 who on 8 January, were shot at by racists and fought back.

As women seeking asylum in the UK, many of us African, survivors of rape and other torture, mothers, detained without trial, destitute and facing racism in the UK, as immigrant and non-immigrant people, we are jointly organising this protest to support the 1 March Strike.

All African Women’s Group Global Women’s Strike Payday men’s network

contact:aawg2002@googlemail.com; womenstrike8m@server101.com; payday@paydaynet.org Tel: (020) 7482 2496 www.allwomencount.net, www.globalwomenstrike.net

SEE BELOW STATEMENT FROM AFRICAN WORKERS OF ROSARNO..
——————————————————-

“Tangerines and olives don’t fall from the sky”
from the Assembly of African workers of Rosarno in Rome (Italy, January 2010)

On 31 January 2010 we met to form the Assembly of African workers of Rosarno in Rome. We are the workers who were forced to leave Rosarno after we demanded our rights. We were working in inhumane conditions. We lived in abandoned factories, without water or electricity. Our work was underpaid. We used to leave the places where we slept every morning at 6, only to go back at night at 8 for 25 euros [about £22], not all of them ending into our pockets. Sometimes we could not managed to get paid after a day of hard work. We were going back empty-handed and our body bending with tiredness. For many years we have been discriminated, exploited and threatened in all sort of ways. We were exploited during the day and chased around at night by the sons of our exploiters. They beat us up, threatened us, pursued like beasts, kidnapped, some of us disappeared for ever.

They shot us as a sport or in someone’s interest. We continued to work. In time we became easy targets. We couldn’t take it any more. Those of us who had not been wounded by bullets, were wounded in their human dignity, in their pride as human beings.

We could not wait any more for some help which would never arrive, because we are invisible, we don’t exist for this country’s authorities. We made ourselves visible, we went into the street to shout that we exist.

The people didn’t want to see us. How can anyone demonstrate if he doesn’t exist?

The authorities and the police arrived and they deported us from the town because we were not safe anymore. The people of Rosarno were hunting us, lynching us, organised now in real chasing squads.

We were put in detention centres for immigrants. Many of us are still there, others went back to Africa, others are scattered around in the towns of Southern Italy.

We are in Rome. Today we have no job, no place to sleep, no belongings and no wages, which have not been paid by our exploiters.

We say we are part of the economic life of this country, but the authorities don’t want to see or listen to us. Tangerines, olives, oranges don’t fall from the sky. They are in the hands of those who pick them.

We had managed to get a job which we lost simply because we demanded to be treated as human beings. We did not come to Italy as tourists. Our work and our sweat are useful to Italy as they are to our families, who have placed many hopes on us.

We demand from the authorities of this country to meet us and listen to our demands:

We demand that the residence permit which was given to the 11 African men wounded in Rosarno for humanitarian reasons, be given to all of us, victims of exploitation and of our irregolar situation which left us without a job, abandoned and left behind in the streets. We want the government of this country to face its responsibilities and guarantee us the possibility of working with dignity.

Assembly of African workers of Rosarno in Rome.

International pressure on Uganda as the country attempts to pass an anti-homosexuality bill is important, but other nations remain havens of anti-LGBT oppression. Cary Alan Johnson and Ryan Thoreson call for an end to the criminalisation of same-sex relationships that is fuelling homophobia in Senegal and elsewhere.

BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS
Authors: Cary Alan Johnson and Ryan Thoreson
The global outcry against Uganda’s ‘Anti-Homosexuality Bill’ could not be more deafening. Opponents of the legislation have condemned the effort not just to put gays in prison, which is already the law in Uganda, but to further criminalise the ‘promotion of homosexuality’, require that suspected gays and lesbians be turned in to authorities, and to punish some individuals – including those who are HIV positive or those euphemistically called ‘repeat offenders’ – with death.

The governments of Canada, France and Sweden have branded the bill wrongheaded. From Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to President Barack Obama himself, the US, a major foreign donor to Uganda, has made its disapproval of the legislation clear. Usually silent religious leaders, from Anglican and Catholic church leadership to Saddleback church’s Rick Warren and other evangelical Christians, have condemned the bill’s promotion of the death penalty, imprisonment for gays and lesbians, and the threat its provisions pose to pastoral confidentiality.

The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) executive director Michel Sidibe has expressed deep concern with the bill’s potential impact on Uganda’s heretofore successful HIV-prevention efforts. And while both the African Union and the government of South Africa have characteristically failed to condemn the bill, several important African leaders, including former president of Botswana Festus Mogae and UN special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa Elizabeth Mataka, have spoken out firmly and forcefully. If the bill passes in this firestorm of criticism, it certainly won’t be for lack of unified, unequivocal condemnation.

This vehement response was absent less than a year ago and fewer than a hundred miles away, when the parliament of Burundi amended its penal code to criminalise consensual same-sex relationships for the first time in its history. Nor was it conspicuous when Nigeria considered criminalising attendance at gay-rights meetings or support groups in 2006. Now, horror at the cruelty of these new laws and growing evidence of direct involvement by the US religious right is leading to a subtle, but significant, sea change. Local LGBT (Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) and civil-rights movements are finding the voice to condemn these horrible new pieces of legislation and the international community is standing its ground. Last month, the government of Rwanda dropped a proposal to criminalise homosexuality in the face of pressure from rights activists and HIV-service providers inside and outside of the country.

But while condemning new oppressive laws is important, it is just as important – and perhaps more pressing – to take measures to hold governments accountable for the daily violence and lifetimes of discrimination that LGBT people face in the more than 80 countries around the world that continue to criminalise homosexuality and the many more that impose penalties for those who challenge gender norms.

Take Senegal, for instance, where homosexuality has been illegal since 1965. The last two years have seen a dramatic escalation in homophobic persecution and violence, largely unnoticed by the international community and the world media. The country has experienced waves of arrests, detentions, and attacks on individuals by anti-gay mobs, fuelled by media sensationalism and a harsh brand of religious fundamentalism. Police have rounded up men and women on charges of homosexuality, detained them under inhumane conditions, and sentenced them with or without proof of having committed any offence. Families and communities have turned on those suspected of being gay or lesbian. In cities throughout the county, the corpses of men presumed to have been gay have been disinterred and unceremoniously abandoned. As the international community has laudably warned Uganda on the progress of its nonsensical law, arrests on charges related to homosexuality in Senegal – five men in Darou Mousty in June, a man in Touba in November, and 24 men celebrating at a party in Saly Niax Niaxal on Christmas Eve – continue largely unnoticed.

Responding to the homophobic extremism in the Ugandan legislation is hugely important, but it is no substitute for a broad and unequivocal condemnation of sodomy laws and anti-LGBT violence wherever it occurs. When just such a statement condemning grave violations of human rights on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity and calling for the end of criminalisation was brought to the UN General Assembly just one year ago, only 66 of 192 countries voted for it. At the time, the US was not one of them.

Even if the campaign against the anti-homosexuality bill succeeds, homosexuality will continue to be illegal in Uganda – just as it is in Senegal, where the lives of LGBT people are virtually unliveable. The test of our commitment to rights for all members of the human family, including LGBT people, is not whether we respond when the media turns its hot spotlight on a new, extreme piece of legislation. It is whether we are willing to commit our attention, resources, and political will in places like Senegal, where there are no cameras or reporters chronicling the impact of a decades-old law to hold us accountable. While the global sense of outrage at Uganda’s bill is inspiring, it will be a missed opportunity if this spirited condemnation of homophobic violence fails to become standard operating procedure.

* Cary Alan Johnson is the executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC). Ryan Thoreson is a research fellow at IGLHRC and co-author of ‘Words of Hate, Climate of Fear: Human Rights Violations and Challenges to the LGBT Movement in Senegal’. The opinions expressed here are the authors’ and not necessarily those of the organisation.

Original URL: http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/62380
2010-02-18, Issue 470

It can be frustrating to watch yet another sea of African children being used as window dressing for some other charity drive to guilt-trip the public into diving into their pockets. However last night’s Channel 4’s Dispatches was troubling viewing even for the hardened second generation African immigrant like myself.

Return to Africa’s Witch Children was intriguing follow up to the BAFTA and multi-award winning Saving Africa’s Witch Children. The first programme was harrowing and powerful, it instigated a deluge of international outrage towards the treatment of vulnerable children in Nigeria’s Akwa Ibom State. So much so that the State Government was duly embarrassed into bringing forth a Child Rights Act, which enshrined children’s right to education and criminalising the practice of stigmatising children as a witch. This state law however was 5 years overdue, under the then President Olusegun Obasanjo the federal government in conjunction with UNICEF had passed the Child’s Rights Act 2003 and by 2007 only 15 of Nigeria’s 36 State governments had enacted the Federal law.

It was pleasing to witness the admirable work of CRARN and Stepping Stone Nigeria; especially seeing the director of CRARN Sam Ikpe-Itauma’s struggle not only to provide shelter for the 170 children at his centre but also living with the death threats and alleged attempts made on his life from the hostile church leaders that have physically challenged and intimidated his organisation and partners such as the Nigerian Humanist Movement.

The idea that anyone can be a witch and therefore be bringing bad luck or “curses” upon a community is neither new nor uniquely African. European history has documented the persecution of (mostly) women as witches as far back as 1400s with the infamous witch-hunts. The myth of children witches in Africa is a relatively new and was believed to have been popularised in African communities during 1990s. This was in conjunction however along with Pentecostal or “Charismatic” forms of Christianity and it has grown exponentially and affects across Africa, and even the Diaspora in Europe as shocking demonstrated with Victoria Climbié.

Victoria Climbie was tortured to death partly because of witchcraft (source: BBC News Online)

Undoubtedly these myths fester in the bog of ignorance and poverty that many Africans face, in situations not dissimilar to their 15^th Century European counterparts, but it is not only poverty but also the predatory nature of “Christian” preachers and “prophets” that claim that they can deliver these children through abusive measures. Also bearing responsibility are the Nollywood movies that use the spiritualist themes not as tales of fiction but as propaganda portraying “true stories” of cautionary value. The fight of myth busting and the cultural purging of these attitudes are needed but also the fight for ending poverty is required as these children are not only the victims of superstition but of illiteracy and economic underdevelopment.