The first night of my homestay during the Zapatista Little School, my guardian and her husband asked if their students had any questions. My classmate and I both had experience working with the Zapatistas, so we politely limited ourselves to the safe questions that are generally acceptable when visiting rebel territory: questions about livestock, crops,…
Jeremy Scahill found his way into journalism by volunteering at the independent news channel Democracy Now! where he assisted the investigative journalist Amy Goodman. His apprenticeship with Amy Goodman put Jeremy Scahill on good ground and he soon covered stories all over the world, predominantly in conflict zones like Iraq. The defining story and reason for his…
In April 2010, Baloch guerilla commander Dr Allah Nazar gave a ceremonious reception to Jagoo at a Balochistan Liberation Front’s (BLF) camp in Balochistan’s Awaran district. Those BLF fighters, who hadn’t seen Jagoo before, gossiped in hushed tones about his identity.
“He fixed a machine gun. A bullet had been stuck inside the gun and…
Enrique Dussel invites me in through the black gates that lead to his office at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma Mexicom. I am 45 minutes late but he wants to put time aside for me despite my delay. “You have come all the way from Pakistan after all,” he says. “It would be a shame if…
On October 9, 2013 a division Bench of the Patna High Court (PHC) absolved all the 26 persons of Ranvir Sena (RS) accused of massacre of 58 Dalits, including 27 women and 10 children in Laxmanpur Bathe village in Bihar's Jehanabad district on December 1, 1997of all the charges; 16 of them had been awarded…
I am convinced that if promises were bombs there wouldn’t be a soul left alive here. Promises come cheap and are the handiest tool to bamboozle people into believing fantasies they would otherwise reject as garbage. Here even the solemn but empty promises of courts recovering Baloch missing persons, of trying Musharraf for treason, of…
A few days back I.A. Rehman Sahib Director Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) in his piece, “Of prisoners’ rights” (November 14th, Dawn) wrote about the recent Federal Judicial Academy seminar, attended by luminaries of judiciary here, on prisoners’ vulnerability. Among other problems faced by the prisoners the overcrowding of jails in Punjab and Sindh…
In 1999 when Pakistani military dictator Prevez Musharraf seized power, his first target was Balochistan. He declared a war against Baloch people across Balochistan by arresting prominent Baloch leaders and threatening others to hit them in way they would not have imagined. He threatened the Baloch that it was not the 70s forgetting the fact that…
The grueling historic long march by the relatives of Baloch missing persons and extra-judicially killed persons having started on October 27th finally reached Karachi on the 22nd of November. They spent 27 days on the road walking thirty kilometers or more daily without a break. They were no extreme sports practitioners who would easily survive the rigors…
Hugo Chavez came a long way from being a military officer attempting a coup to overthrow Venezuela’s corrupted politico-economic system to leading the “Bolivarian movement” which resulted in massive transformations and support from the Venezuelan people. His death means that his successor has huge shoes to fill, but all indications show that the political space…