The Amnesty International Media Awards

The Amnesty International media awards was held on June 1st, 2010.

It recognise excellence in human rights journalism that makes a significant contribution to the UK public's understanding of human rights.

The awards, established in 1992, celebrate the breadth of reporting across different media and acknowledge the risks journalists take while reporting the stories that might otherwise remain untold.

The organization has presented ten awards for the very best human rights journalism over the past year spanning the full spectrum of broadcast, print and digital journalism.

In an unprecedented move this year's special award for journalists under threat went not to an individual or single organisation, but instead to all independent media working in Burma. The special award recognises the courage of journalists working in Burma, who pursue their legitimate work at great personal risk to themselves.

It took me a while to gather the reports of the winner-whether on TV, Radio or Newspapers-, but they worth the watch. Although i  have posted the articles and the videos here, but i advice you to go to the main source for more pictures, maps and information.

More on the awards 

And here are the winners:-
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GABY RADO MEMORIAL AWARD  

Jamal Osman, Channel 4 News

This award was established with the help of the family, friends and colleagues of the journalist Gaby Rado, who was found dead in Iraq in 2003. It recognizes a journalist who has been covering national or international human rights stories in broadcast or print media for less than five years.

More about Jamal Osman here 
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INTERNATIONAL TELEVISION & RADIO

People and Power: Ingushetia - A Second Chechnya?, Al Jazeera  

Antony Butts, Dom Rotheroe, Mike Chamberlain

you can read more here 

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NATIONS &REGIONS

Discrimination: Migrant Workers Rental Block, BBC Look North

Guy Lynn, Mark Hayman, David Weller

Here ( two videos included) or below :

Migrant worker face rental block

By Guy Lynn  BBC News  Estate agents are flouting race relations laws by discriminating against migrant workers on behalf of landlords, a BBC investigation found. Firms in Boston, Lincolnshire, were found using illegal techniques to stop foreign workers viewing properties. Three agents rejected a Polish worker sent by the BBC, while a BBC employee was allowed to view the properties. One firm denied it discriminated in this way, while another said it had created a new race-relations policy. There is no suggestion that the agents themselves are racist, but the behaviour uncovered has been described by human rights lawyers as a "disturbing and shocking" breach of the Race Relations Act of 1976 - which applies to England, Scotland and Wales. This act outlaws discrimination on the basis of race, religion, colour, religious beliefs, national or ethnic origins. Any discrimination against potential tenants or any plan to do so agreed with a landlord is also a breach of the National Association of Estate Agents mandatory code of practice for its members. 'Problems' Initially, migrant workers had complained to the BBC that they were having problems gaining access to rental properties. One of those was Greg Pacha who arrived in the town nine years ago from Poland. "Sometimes they tell you behind the office, 'Oh, you are not English, then?' What does that mean, oh? Does that mean I can't get the place? I could tell you 100 different stories but just change the name of the agent," he said. So an undercover BBC correspondent, posing as a landlord, approached most of the rental agencies serving the town to ask if it was possible to rent out a property and ensure those of a non-British nationality were prevented from viewing it. Many refused to break the law, but more than half of those contacted were prepared to discriminate against potential tenants on the basis of their nationality, on the instruction of the landlord. One agent, covertly recorded, said: "You can tell as soon as they speak, you can't tell by looking at them; particularly the Eastern Europeans. "We say to the migrants - well, which ones do you want to look at? Then we ring them back and say when we ring them back, 'Sorry, well, that one's gone'." Another agent explained: "I think of a reason - 'The landlord does not think you earn enough money - is not happy'. "I can't put on the paper, 'No Polish, Portuguese, Latvians, Lithuanians.'" 'The old days' Letting agents are often under pressure to keep their clients - the landlords - happy and may be subject to pressure to break the law, especially in hard economic times, but discrimination lawyers believe they should turn the business away immediately. Arpita Dutt, a discrimination lawyer at solicitors Russell Jones and Walker, told the BBC: "What they should be saying is, 'I can't do this, I can't act on those instructions. I can get you the best tenant for your property and try to meet those needs. But if I did it in the way you are asking me to do it, then that's against the law'."  "It feels like we may as well, in some cases, be going back to the days of 'no blacks, no dogs, no Irish', because that's what is being perpetuated at the moment by some of the agents and the landlords." Award-winning human rights lawyer Louise Christian found the transcripts disturbing. "I felt horrified, that in this modern day, the provision of housing is being withheld from people who need it because of their nationality or their race. Housing is an essential service that everyone needs over their head." All of the agents featured in the undercover filming on this web page were approached about the findings. B and B Mortgage services did not comment. AP Sales say: "It is not our practice to deny access to anybody, whatever their nationality, to any property we sell or let. Over 1/3rd of the 188 properties we let are let by us to non British nationals and we act for several non British landlords. We have an excellent relationship with all." Bruce Mather and co said: "Out of our 235 tenants, 93 are foreign nationals, which is 40% of all the people that we let to. Our firm employs foreign nationals to complete maintenance work. We see many positives in this situation and it has focused us to draw up and implement Company Policy in consideration of the Race Relations Act of 1976."  ==============================================

NATIONAL NEWSPAPERS

The Dark Side of Dubai, The Independent

Johann Hari

You can read it below or  here 

The dark side of Dubai

Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging. Johann Hari reports

Tuesday, 7 April 2009

The wide, smiling face of Sheikh Mohammed – the absolute ruler of Dubai – beams down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, a Shangri-La in the Middle East insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the region. He dominates the Manhattan-manqué skyline, beaming out from row after row of glass pyramids and hotels smelted into the shape of piles of golden coins. And there he stands on the tallest building in the world – a skinny spike, jabbing farther into the sky than any other human construction in history.

But something has flickered in Sheikh Mohammed's smile. The ubiquitous cranes have paused on the skyline, as if stuck in time. There are countless buildings half-finished, seemingly abandoned. In the swankiest new constructions – like the vast Atlantis hotel, a giant pink castle built in 1,000 days for $1.5bn on its own artificial island – where rainwater is leaking from the ceilings and the tiles are falling off the roof. This Neverland was built on the Never-Never – and now the cracks are beginning to show. Suddenly it looks less like Manhattan in the sun than Iceland in the desert.

Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history. 

I. An Adult Disneyland

Karen Andrews can't speak. Every time she starts to tell her story, she puts her head down and crumples. She is slim and angular and has the faded radiance of the once-rich, even though her clothes are as creased as her forehead. I find her in the car park of one of Dubai's finest international hotels, where she is living, in her Range Rover. She has been sleeping here for months, thanks to the kindness of the Bangladeshi car park attendants who don't have the heart to move her on. This is not where she thought her Dubai dream would end.

Her story comes out in stutters, over four hours. At times, her old voice – witty and warm – breaks through. Karen came here from Canada when her husband was offered a job in the senior division of a famous multinational. "When he said Dubai, I said – if you want me to wear black and quit booze, baby, you've got the wrong girl. But he asked me to give it a chance. And I loved him."

All her worries melted when she touched down in Dubai in 2005. "It was an adult Disneyland, where Sheikh Mohammed is the mouse," she says. "Life was fantastic. You had these amazing big apartments, you had a whole army of your own staff, you pay no taxes at all. It seemed like everyone was a CEO. We were partying the whole time."

Her husband, Daniel, bought two properties. "We were drunk on Dubai," she says. But for the first time in his life, he was beginning to mismanage their finances. "We're not talking huge sums, but he was getting confused. It was so unlike Daniel, I was surprised. We got into a little bit of debt." After a year, she found out why: Daniel was diagnosed with a brain tumour.

One doctor told him he had a year to live; another said it was benign and he'd be okay. But the debts were growing. "Before I came here, I didn't know anything about Dubai law. I assumed if all these big companies come here, it must be pretty like Canada's or any other liberal democracy's," she says. Nobody told her there is no concept of bankruptcy. If you get into debt and you can't pay, you go to prison.

"When we realised that, I sat Daniel down and told him: listen, we need to get out of here. He knew he was guaranteed a pay-off when he resigned, so we said – right, let's take the pay-off, clear the debt, and go." So Daniel resigned – but he was given a lower pay-off than his contract suggested. The debt remained. As soon as you quit your job in Dubai, your employer has to inform your bank. If you have any outstanding debts that aren't covered by your savings, then all your accounts are frozen, and you are forbidden to leave the country.

"Suddenly our cards stopped working. We had nothing. We were thrown out of our apartment." Karen can't speak about what happened next for a long time; she is shaking.

Daniel was arrested and taken away on the day of their eviction. It was six days before she could talk to him. "He told me he was put in a cell with another debtor, a Sri Lankan guy who was only 27, who said he couldn't face the shame to his family. Daniel woke up and the boy had swallowed razor-blades. He banged for help, but nobody came, and the boy died in front of him."

Karen managed to beg from her friends for a few weeks, "but it was so humiliating. I've never lived like this. I worked in the fashion industry. I had my own shops. I've never..." She peters out.

Daniel was sentenced to six months' imprisonment at a trial he couldn't understand. It was in Arabic, and there was no translation. "Now I'm here illegally, too," Karen says I've got no money, nothing. I have to last nine months until he's out, somehow." Looking away, almost paralysed with embarrassment, she asks if I could buy her a meal.

She is not alone. All over the city, there are maxed-out expats sleeping secretly in the sand-dunes or the airport or in their cars.

"The thing you have to understand about Dubai is – nothing is what it seems," Karen says at last. "Nothing. This isn't a city, it's a con-job. They lure you in telling you it's one thing – a modern kind of place – but beneath the surface it's a medieval dictatorship."

II. Tumbleweed

Thirty years ago, almost all of contemporary Dubai was desert, inhabited only by cactuses and tumbleweed and scorpions. But downtown there are traces of the town that once was, buried amidst the metal and glass. In the dusty fort of the Dubai Museum, a sanitised version of this story is told.

In the mid-18th century, a small village was built here, in the lower Persian Gulf, where people would dive for pearls off the coast. It soon began to accumulate a cosmopolitan population washing up from Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and other Arab countries, all hoping to make their fortune. They named it after a local locust, the daba, who consumed everything before it. The town was soon seized by the gunships of the British Empire, who held it by the throat as late as 1971. As they scuttled away, Dubai decided to ally with the six surrounding states and make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The British quit, exhausted, just as oil was being discovered, and the sheikhs who suddenly found themselves in charge faced a remarkable dilemma. They were largely illiterate nomads who spent their lives driving camels through the desert – yet now they had a vast pot of gold. What should they do with it?

Dubai only had a dribble of oil compared to neighbouring Abu Dhabi – so Sheikh Maktoum decided to use the revenues to build something that would last. Israel used to boast it made the desert bloom; Sheikh Maktoum resolved to make the desert boom. He would build a city to be a centre of tourism and financial services, sucking up cash and talent from across the globe. He invited the world to come tax-free – and they came in their millions, swamping the local population, who now make up just 5 per cent of Dubai. A city seemed to fall from the sky in just three decades, whole and complete and swelling. They fast-forwarded from the 18th century to the 21st in a single generation.

If you take the Big Bus Tour of Dubai – the passport to a pre-processed experience of every major city on earth – you are fed the propaganda-vision of how this happened. "Dubai's motto is 'Open doors, open minds'," the tour guide tells you in clipped tones, before depositing you at the souks to buy camel tea-cosies. "Here you are free. To purchase fabrics," he adds. As you pass each new monumental building, he tells you: "The World Trade Centre was built by His Highness..."

But this is a lie. The sheikh did not build this city. It was built by slaves. They are building it now.

III. Hidden in plain view

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out.

Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means "City of Gold". In the first camp I stop at – riven with the smell of sewage and sweat – the men huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them.

Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise.

As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.

Sahinal was in a panic. His family back home – his son, daughter, wife and parents – were waiting for money, excited that their boy had finally made it. But he was going to have to work for more than two years just to pay for the cost of getting here – and all to earn less than he did in Bangladesh.

He shows me his room. It is a tiny, poky, concrete cell with triple-decker bunk-beds, where he lives with 11 other men. All his belongings are piled onto his bunk: three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, and a cellphone. The room stinks, because the lavatories in the corner of the camp – holes in the ground – are backed up with excrement and clouds of black flies. There is no air conditioning or fans, so the heat is "unbearable. You cannot sleep. All you do is sweat and scratch all night." At the height of summer, people sleep on the floor, on the roof, anywhere where they can pray for a moment of breeze.

The water delivered to the camp in huge white containers isn't properly desalinated: it tastes of salt. "It makes us sick, but we have nothing else to drink," he says.

The work is "the worst in the world," he says. "You have to carry 50kg bricks and blocks of cement in the worst heat imaginable ... This heat – it is like nothing else. You sweat so much you can't pee, not for days or weeks. It's like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. You become dizzy and sick but you aren't allowed to stop, except for an hour in the afternoon. You know if you drop anything or slip, you could die. If you take time off sick, your wages are docked, and you are trapped here even longer."

He is currently working on the 67th floor of a shiny new tower, where he builds upwards, into the sky, into the heat. He doesn't know its name. In his four years here, he has never seen the Dubai of tourist-fame, except as he constructs it floor-by-floor.

Is he angry? He is quiet for a long time. "Here, nobody shows their anger. You can't. You get put in jail for a long time, then deported." Last year, some workers went on strike after they were not given their wages for four months. The Dubai police surrounded their camps with razor-wire and water-cannons and blasted them out and back to work.

The "ringleaders" were imprisoned. I try a different question: does Sohinal regret coming? All the men look down, awkwardly. "How can we think about that? We are trapped. If we start to think about regrets..." He lets the sentence trail off. Eventually, another worker breaks the silence by adding: "I miss my country, my family and my land. We can grow food in Bangladesh. Here, nothing grows. Just oil and buildings."

Since the recession hit, they say, the electricity has been cut off in dozens of the camps, and the men have not been paid for months. Their companies have disappeared with their passports and their pay. "We have been robbed of everything. Even if somehow we get back to Bangladesh, the loan sharks will demand we repay our loans immediately, and when we can't, we'll be sent to prison."

This is all supposed to be illegal. Employers are meant to pay on time, never take your passport, give you breaks in the heat – but I met nobody who said it happens. Not one. These men are conned into coming and trapped into staying, with the complicity of the Dubai authorities.

Sahinal could well die out here. A British man who used to work on construction projects told me: "There's a huge number of suicides in the camps and on the construction sites, but they're not reported. They're described as 'accidents'." Even then, their families aren't free: they simply inherit the debts. A Human Rights Watch study found there is a "cover-up of the true extent" of deaths from heat exhaustion, overwork and suicide, but the Indian consulate registered 971 deaths of their nationals in 2005 alone. After this figure was leaked, the consulates were told to stop counting.

At night, in the dusk, I sit in the camp with Sohinal and his friends as they scrape together what they have left to buy a cheap bottle of spirits. They down it in one ferocious gulp. "It helps you to feel numb", Sohinal says through a stinging throat. In the distance, the glistening Dubai skyline he built stands, oblivious.

IV. Mauled by the mall

I find myself stumbling in a daze from the camps into the sprawling marble malls that seem to stand on every street in Dubai. It is so hot there is no point building pavements; people gather in these cathedrals of consumerism to bask in the air conditioning. So within a ten minute taxi-ride, I have left Sohinal and I am standing in the middle of Harvey Nichols, being shown a £20,000 taffeta dress by a bored salesgirl. "As you can see, it is cut on the bias..." she says, and I stop writing.

Time doesn't seem to pass in the malls. Days blur with the same electric light, the same shined floors, the same brands I know from home. Here, Dubai is reduced to its component sounds: do-buy. In the most expensive malls I am almost alone, the shops empty and echoing. On the record, everybody tells me business is going fine. Off the record, they look panicky. There is a hat exhibition ahead of the Dubai races, selling elaborate headgear for £1,000 a pop. "Last year, we were packed. Now look," a hat designer tells me. She swoops her arm over a vacant space.

I approach a blonde 17-year-old Dutch girl wandering around in hotpants, oblivious to the swarms of men gaping at her. "I love it here!" she says. "The heat, the malls, the beach!" Does it ever bother you that it's a slave society? She puts her head down, just as Sohinal did. "I try not to see," she says. Even at 17, she has learned not to look, and not to ask; that, she senses, is a transgression too far.

Between the malls, there is nothing but the connecting tissue of asphalt. Every road has at least four lanes; Dubai feels like a motorway punctuated by shopping centres. You only walk anywhere if you are suicidal. The residents of Dubai flit from mall to mall by car or taxis.

How does it feel if this is your country, filled with foreigners? Unlike the expats and the slave class, I can't just approach the native Emiratis to ask questions when I see them wandering around – the men in cool white robes, the women in sweltering black. If you try, the women blank you, and the men look affronted, and tell you brusquely that Dubai is "fine". So I browse through the Emirati blog-scene and found some typical-sounding young Emiratis. We meet – where else? – in the mall.

Ahmed al-Atar is a handsome 23-year-old with a neat, trimmed beard, tailored white robes, and rectangular wire-glasses. He speaks perfect American-English, and quickly shows that he knows London, Los Angeles and Paris better than most westerners. Sitting back in his chair in an identikit Starbucks, he announces: "This is the best place in the world to be young! The government pays for your education up to PhD level. You get given a free house when you get married. You get free healthcare, and if it's not good enough here, they pay for you to go abroad. You don't even have to pay for your phone calls. Almost everyone has a maid, a nanny, and a driver. And we never pay any taxes. Don't you wish you were Emirati?"

I try to raise potential objections to this Panglossian summary, but he leans forward and says: "Look – my grandfather woke up every day and he would have to fight to get to the well first to get water. When the wells ran dry, they had to have water delivered by camel. They were always hungry and thirsty and desperate for jobs. He limped all his life, because he there was no medical treatment available when he broke his leg. Now look at us!"

For Emiratis, this is a Santa Claus state, handing out goodies while it makes its money elsewhere: through renting out land to foreigners, soft taxes on them like business and airport charges, and the remaining dribble of oil. Most Emiratis, like Ahmed, work for the government, so they're cushioned from the credit crunch. "I haven't felt any effect at all, and nor have my friends," he says. "Your employment is secure. You will only be fired if you do something incredibly bad." The laws are currently being tightened, to make it even more impossible to sack an Emirati.

Sure, the flooding-in of expats can sometimes be "an eyesore", Ahmed says. "But we see the expats as the price we had to pay for this development. How else could we do it? Nobody wants to go back to the days of the desert, the days before everyone came. We went from being like an African country to having an average income per head of $120,000 a year. And we're supposed to complain?"

He says the lack of political freedom is fine by him. "You'll find it very hard to find an Emirati who doesn't support Sheikh Mohammed." Because they're scared? "No, because we really all support him. He's a great leader. Just look!" He smiles and says: "I'm sure my life is very much like yours. We hang out, have a coffee, go to the movies. You'll be in a Pizza Hut or Nando's in London, and at the same time I'll be in one in Dubai," he says, ordering another latte.

But do all young Emiratis see it this way? Can it really be so sunny in the political sands? In the sleek Emirates Tower Hotel, I meet Sultan al-Qassemi. He's a 31-year-old Emirati columnist for the Dubai press and private art collector, with a reputation for being a contrarian liberal, advocating gradual reform. He is wearing Western clothes – blue jeans and a Ralph Lauren shirt – and speaks incredibly fast, turning himself into a manic whirr of arguments.

"People here are turning into lazy, overweight babies!" he exclaims. "The nanny state has gone too far. We don't do anything for ourselves! Why don't any of us work for the private sector? Why can't a mother and father look after their own child?" And yet, when I try to bring up the system of slavery that built Dubai, he looks angry. "People should give us credit," he insists. "We are the most tolerant people in the world. Dubai is the only truly international city in the world. Everyone who comes here is treated with respect."

I pause, and think of the vast camps in Sonapur, just a few miles away. Does he even know they exist? He looks irritated. "You know, if there are 30 or 40 cases [of worker abuse] a year, that sounds like a lot but when you think about how many people are here..." Thirty or 40? This abuse is endemic to the system, I say. We're talking about hundreds of thousands.

Sultan is furious. He splutters: "You don't think Mexicans are treated badly in New York City? And how long did it take Britain to treat people well? I could come to London and write about the homeless people on Oxford Street and make your city sound like a terrible place, too! The workers here can leave any time they want! Any Indian can leave, any Asian can leave!"

But they can't, I point out. Their passports are taken away, and their wages are withheld. "Well, I feel bad if that happens, and anybody who does that should be punished. But their embassies should help them." They try. But why do you forbid the workers – with force – from going on strike against lousy employers? "Thank God we don't allow that!" he exclaims. "Strikes are in-convenient! They go on the street – we're not having that. We won't be like France. Imagine a country where they the workers can just stop whenever they want!" So what should the workers do when they are cheated and lied to? "Quit. Leave the country."

I sigh. Sultan is seething now. "People in the West are always complaining about us," he says. Suddenly, he adopts a mock-whiny voice and says, in imitation of these disgusting critics: "Why don't you treat animals better? Why don't you have better shampoo advertising? Why don't you treat labourers better?" It's a revealing order: animals, shampoo, then workers. He becomes more heated, shifting in his seat, jabbing his finger at me. "I gave workers who worked for me safety goggles and special boots, and they didn't want to wear them! It slows them down!"

And then he smiles, coming up with what he sees as his killer argument. "When I see Western journalists criticise us – don't you realise you're shooting yourself in the foot? The Middle East will be far more dangerous if Dubai fails. Our export isn't oil, it's hope. Poor Egyptians or Libyans or Iranians grow up saying – I want to go to Dubai. We're very important to the region. We are showing how to be a modern Muslim country. We don't have any fundamentalists here. Europeans shouldn't gloat at our demise. You should be very worried.... Do you know what will happen if this model fails? Dubai will go down the Iranian path, the Islamist path."

Sultan sits back. My arguments have clearly disturbed him; he says in a softer, conciliatory tone, almost pleading: "Listen. My mother used to go to the well and get a bucket of water every morning. On her wedding day, she was given an orange as a gift because she had never eaten one. Two of my brothers died when they were babies because the healthcare system hadn't developed yet. Don't judge us." He says it again, his eyes filled with intensity: "Don't judge us."

V. The Dunkin' Donuts Dissidents

But there is another face to the Emirati minority – a small huddle of dissidents, trying to shake the Sheikhs out of abusive laws. Next to a Virgin Megastore and a Dunkin' Donuts, with James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" blaring behind me, I meet the Dubai dictatorship's Public Enemy Number One. By way of introduction, Mohammed al-Mansoori says from within his white robes and sinewy face: "Westerners come her and see the malls and the tall buildings and they think that means we are free. But these businesses, these buildings – who are they for? This is a dictatorship. The royal family think they own the country, and the people are their servants. There is no freedom here."

We snuffle out the only Arabic restaurant in this mall, and he says everything you are banned – under threat of prison – from saying in Dubai. Mohammed tells me he was born in Dubai to a fisherman father who taught him one enduring lesson: Never follow the herd. Think for yourself. In the sudden surge of development, Mohammed trained as a lawyer. By the Noughties, he had climbed to the head of the Jurists' Association, an organisation set up to press for Dubai's laws to be consistent with international human rights legislation.

And then – suddenly – Mohammed thwacked into the limits of Sheikh Mohammed's tolerance. Horrified by the "system of slavery" his country was being built on, he spoke out to Human Rights Watch and the BBC. "So I was hauled in by the secret police and told: shut up, or you will lose you job, and your children will be unemployable," he says. "But how could I be silent?"

He was stripped of his lawyer's licence and his passport – becoming yet another person imprisoned in this country. "I have been blacklisted and so have my children. The newspapers are not allowed to write about me."

Why is the state so keen to defend this system of slavery? He offers a prosaic explanation. "Most companies are owned by the government, so they oppose human rights laws because it will reduce their profit margins. It's in their interests that the workers are slaves."

Last time there was a depression, there was a starbust of democracy in Dubai, seized by force from the sheikhs. In the 1930s, the city's merchants banded together against Sheikh Said bin Maktum al-Maktum – the absolute ruler of his day – and insisted they be given control over the state finances. It lasted only a few years, before the Sheikh – with the enthusiastic support of the British – snuffed them out.

And today? Sheikh Mohammed turned Dubai into Creditopolis, a city built entirely on debt. Dubai owes 107 percent of its entire GDP. It would be bust already, if the neighbouring oil-soaked state of Abu Dhabi hadn't pulled out its chequebook. Mohammed says this will constrict freedom even further. "Now Abu Dhabi calls the tunes – and they are much more conservative and restrictive than even Dubai. Freedom here will diminish every day." Already, new media laws have been drafted forbidding the press to report on anything that could "damage" Dubai or "its economy". Is this why the newspapers are giving away glossy supplements talking about "encouraging economic indicators"?

Everybody here waves Islamism as the threat somewhere over the horizon, sure to swell if their advice is not followed. Today, every imam is appointed by the government, and every sermon is tightly controlled to keep it moderate. But Mohammed says anxiously: "We don't have Islamism here now, but I think that if you control people and give them no way to express anger, it could rise. People who are told to shut up all the time can just explode."

Later that day, against another identikit-corporate backdrop, I meet another dissident – Abdulkhaleq Abdullah, Professor of Political Science at Emirates University. His anger focuses not on political reform, but the erosion of Emirati identity. He is famous among the locals, a rare outspoken conductor for their anger. He says somberly: "There has been a rupture here. This is a totally different city to the one I was born in 50 years ago."

He looks around at the shiny floors and Western tourists and says: "What we see now didn't occur in our wildest dreams. We never thought we could be such a success, a trendsetter, a model for other Arab countries. The people of Dubai are mighty proud of their city, and rightly so. And yet..." He shakes his head. "In our hearts, we fear we have built a modern city but we are losing it to all these expats."

Adbulkhaleq says every Emirati of his generation lives with a "psychological trauma." Their hearts are divided – "between pride on one side, and fear on the other." Just after he says this, a smiling waitress approaches, and asks us what we would like to drink. He orders a Coke.

VI. Dubai Pride

There is one group in Dubai for whom the rhetoric of sudden freedom and liberation rings true – but it is the very group the government wanted to liberate least: gays.

Beneath a famous international hotel, I clamber down into possibly the only gay club on the Saudi Arabian peninsula. I find a United Nations of tank-tops and bulging biceps, dancing to Kylie, dropping ecstasy, and partying like it's Soho. "Dubai is the best place in the Muslim world for gays!" a 25-year old Emirati with spiked hair says, his arms wrapped around his 31-year old "husband". "We are alive. We can meet. That is more than most Arab gays."

It is illegal to be gay in Dubai, and punishable by 10 years in prison. But the locations of the latest unofficial gay clubs circulate online, and men flock there, seemingly unafraid of the police. "They might bust the club, but they will just disperse us," one of them says. "The police have other things to do."

In every large city, gay people find a way to find each other – but Dubai has become the clearing-house for the region's homosexuals, a place where they can live in relative safety. Saleh, a lean private in the Saudi Arabian army, has come here for the Coldplay concert, and tells me Dubai is "great" for gays: "In Saudi, it's hard to be straight when you're young. The women are shut away so everyone has gay sex. But they only want to have sex with boys – 15- to 21-year-olds. I'm 27, so I'm too old now. I need to find real gays, so this is the best place. All Arab gays want to live in Dubai."

With that, Saleh dances off across the dancefloor, towards a Dutch guy with big biceps and a big smile.

VII. The Lifestyle

All the guidebooks call Dubai a "melting pot", but as I trawl across the city, I find that every group here huddles together in its own little ethnic enclave – and becomes a caricature of itself. One night – in the heart of this homesick city, tired of the malls and the camps – I go to Double Decker, a hang-out for British expats. At the entrance there is a red telephone box, and London bus-stop signs. Its wooden interior looks like a cross between a colonial clubhouse in the Raj and an Eighties school disco, with blinking coloured lights and cheese blaring out. As I enter, a girl in a short skirt collapses out of the door onto her back. A guy wearing a pirate hat helps her to her feet, dropping his beer bottle with a paralytic laugh.

I start to talk to two sun-dried women in their sixties who have been getting gently sozzled since midday. "You stay here for The Lifestyle," they say, telling me to take a seat and order some more drinks. All the expats talk about The Lifestyle, but when you ask what it is, they become vague. Ann Wark tries to summarise it: "Here, you go out every night. You'd never do that back home. You see people all the time. It's great. You have lots of free time. You have maids and staff so you don't have to do all that stuff. You party!"

They have been in Dubai for 20 years, and they are happy to explain how the city works. "You've got a hierarchy, haven't you?" Ann says. "It's the Emiratis at the top, then I'd say the British and other Westerners. Then I suppose it's the Filipinos, because they've got a bit more brains than the Indians. Then at the bottom you've got the Indians and all them lot."

They admit, however, they have "never" spoken to an Emirati. Never? "No. They keep themselves to themselves." Yet Dubai has disappointed them. Jules Taylor tells me: "If you have an accident here it's a nightmare. There was a British woman we knew who ran over an Indian guy, and she was locked up for four days! If you have a tiny bit of alcohol on your breath they're all over you. These Indians throw themselves in front of cars, because then their family has to be given blood money – you know, compensation. But the police just blame us. That poor woman."

A 24-year-old British woman called Hannah Gamble takes a break from the dancefloor to talk to me. "I love the sun and the beach! It's great out here!" she says. Is there anything bad? "Oh yes!" she says. Ah: one of them has noticed, I think with relief. "The banks! When you want to make a transfer you have to fax them. You can't do it online." Anything else? She thinks hard. "The traffic's not very good."

When I ask the British expats how they feel to not be in a democracy, their reaction is always the same. First, they look bemused. Then they look affronted. "It's the Arab way!" an Essex boy shouts at me in response, as he tries to put a pair of comedy antlers on his head while pouring some beer into the mouth of his friend, who is lying on his back on the floor, gurning.

Later, in a hotel bar, I start chatting to a dyspeptic expat American who works in the cosmetics industry and is desperate to get away from these people. She says: "All the people who couldn't succeed in their own countries end up here, and suddenly they're rich and promoted way above their abilities and bragging about how great they are. I've never met so many incompetent people in such senior positions anywhere in the world." She adds: "It's absolutely racist. I had Filipino girls working for me doing the same job as a European girl, and she's paid a quarter of the wages. The people who do the real work are paid next to nothing, while these incompetent managers pay themselves £40,000 a month."

With the exception of her, one theme unites every expat I speak to: their joy at having staff to do the work that would clog their lives up Back Home. Everyone, it seems, has a maid. The maids used to be predominantly Filipino, but with the recession, Filipinos have been judged to be too expensive, so a nice Ethiopian servant girl is the latest fashionable accessory.

It is an open secret that once you hire a maid, you have absolute power over her. You take her passport – everyone does; you decide when to pay her, and when – if ever – she can take a break; and you decide who she talks to. She speaks no Arabic. She cannot escape.

In a Burger King, a Filipino girl tells me it is "terrifying" for her to wander the malls in Dubai because Filipino maids or nannies always sneak away from the family they are with and beg her for help. "They say – 'Please, I am being held prisoner, they don't let me call home, they make me work every waking hour seven days a week.' At first I would say – my God, I will tell the consulate, where are you staying? But they never know their address, and the consulate isn't interested. I avoid them now. I keep thinking about a woman who told me she hadn't eaten any fruit in four years. They think I have power because I can walk around on my own, but I'm powerless."

The only hostel for women in Dubai – a filthy private villa on the brink of being repossessed – is filled with escaped maids. Mela Matari, a 25-year-old Ethiopian woman with a drooping smile, tells me what happened to her – and thousands like her. She was promised a paradise in the sands by an agency, so she left her four year-old daughter at home and headed here to earn money for a better future. "But they paid me half what they promised. I was put with an Australian family – four children – and Madam made me work from 6am to 1am every day, with no day off. I was exhausted and pleaded for a break, but they just shouted: 'You came here to work, not sleep!' Then one day I just couldn't go on, and Madam beat me. She beat me with her fists and kicked me. My ear still hurts. They wouldn't give me my wages: they said they'd pay me at the end of the two years. What could I do? I didn't know anybody here. I was terrified."

One day, after yet another beating, Mela ran out onto the streets, and asked – in broken English – how to find the Ethiopian consulate. After walking for two days, she found it, but they told her she had to get her passport back from Madam. "Well, how could I?" she asks. She has been in this hostel for six months. She has spoken to her daughter twice. "I lost my country, I lost my daughter, I lost everything," she says.

As she says this, I remember a stray sentence I heard back at Double Decker. I asked a British woman called Hermione Frayling what the best thing about Dubai was. "Oh, the servant class!" she trilled. "You do nothing. They'll do anything!"

VIII. The End of The World

The World is empty. It has been abandoned, its continents unfinished. Through binoculars, I think I can glimpse Britain; this sceptred isle barren in the salt-breeze.

Here, off the coast of Dubai, developers have been rebuilding the world. They have constructed artificial islands in the shape of all planet Earth's land masses, and they plan to sell each continent off to be built on. There were rumours that the Beckhams would bid for Britain. But the people who work at the nearby coast say they haven't seen anybody there for months now. "The World is over," a South African suggests.

All over Dubai, crazy projects that were Under Construction are now Under Collapse. They were building an air-conditioned beach here, with cooling pipes running below the sand, so the super-rich didn't singe their toes on their way from towel to sea.

The projects completed just before the global economy crashed look empty and tattered. The Atlantis Hotel was launched last winter in a $20m fin-de-siecle party attended by Robert De Niro, Lindsay Lohan and Lily Allen. Sitting on its own fake island – shaped, of course, like a palm tree – it looks like an immense upturned tooth in a faintly decaying mouth. It is pink and turreted – the architecture of the pharaohs, as reimagined by Zsa-Zsa Gabor. Its Grand Lobby is a monumental dome covered in glitterballs, held up by eight monumental concrete palm trees. Standing in the middle, there is a giant shining glass structure that looks like the intestines of every guest who has ever stayed at the Atlantis. It is unexpectedly raining; water is leaking from the roof, and tiles are falling off.

A South African PR girl shows me around its most coveted rooms, explaining that this is "the greatest luxury offered in the world". We stroll past shops selling £24m diamond rings around a hotel themed on the lost and sunken continent of, yes, Atlantis. There are huge water tanks filled with sharks, which poke around mock-abandoned castles and dumped submarines. There are more than 1,500 rooms here, each with a sea view. The Neptune suite has three floors, and – I gasp as I see it – it looks out directly on to the vast shark tank. You lie on the bed, and the sharks stare in at you. In Dubai, you can sleep with the fishes, and survive.

But even the luxury – reminiscent of a Bond villain's lair – is also being abandoned. I check myself in for a few nights to the classiest hotel in town, the Park Hyatt. It is the fashionistas' favourite hotel, where Elle Macpherson and Tommy Hilfiger stay, a gorgeous, understated palace. It feels empty. Whenever I eat, I am one of the only people in the restaurant. A staff member tells me in a whisper: "It used to be full here. Now there's hardly anyone." Rattling around, I feel like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, the last man in an abandoned, haunted home.

The most famous hotel in Dubai – the proud icon of the city – is the Burj al Arab hotel, sitting on the shore, shaped like a giant glass sailing boat. In the lobby, I start chatting to a couple from London who work in the City. They have been coming to Dubai for 10 years now, and they say they love it. "You never know what you'll find here," he says. "On our last trip, at the beginning of the holiday, our window looked out on the sea. By the end, they'd built an entire island there."

My patience frayed by all this excess, I find myself snapping: doesn't the omnipresent slave class bother you? I hope they misunderstood me, because the woman replied: "That's what we come for! It's great, you can't do anything for yourself!" Her husband chimes in: "When you go to the toilet, they open the door, they turn on the tap – the only thing they don't do is take it out for you when you have a piss!" And they both fall about laughing.

IX. Taking on the Desert

Dubai is not just a city living beyond its financial means; it is living beyond its ecological means. You stand on a manicured Dubai lawn and watch the sprinklers spray water all around you. You see tourists flocking to swim with dolphins. You wander into a mountain-sized freezer where they have built a ski slope with real snow. And a voice at the back of your head squeaks: this is the desert. This is the most water-stressed place on the planet. How can this be happening? How is it possible?

The very earth is trying to repel Dubai, to dry it up and blow it away. The new Tiger Woods Gold Course needs four million gallons of water to be pumped on to its grounds every day, or it would simply shrivel and disappear on the winds. The city is regularly washed over with dust-storms that fog up the skies and turn the skyline into a blur. When the dust parts, heat burns through. It cooks anything that is not kept constantly, artificially wet.

Dr Mohammed Raouf, the environmental director of the Gulf Research Centre, sounds sombre as he sits in his Dubai office and warns: "This is a desert area, and we are trying to defy its environment. It is very unwise. If you take on the desert, you will lose."

Sheikh Maktoum built his showcase city in a place with no useable water. None. There is no surface water, very little acquifer, and among the lowest rainfall in the world. So Dubai drinks the sea. The Emirates' water is stripped of salt in vast desalination plants around the Gulf – making it the most expensive water on earth. It costs more than petrol to produce, and belches vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as it goes. It's the main reason why a resident of Dubai has the biggest average carbon footprint of any human being – more than double that of an American.

If a recession turns into depression, Dr Raouf believes Dubai could run out of water. "At the moment, we have financial reserves that cover bringing so much water to the middle of the desert. But if we had lower revenues – if, say, the world shifts to a source of energy other than oil..." he shakes his head. "We will have a very big problem. Water is the main source of life. It would be a catastrophe. Dubai only has enough water to last us a week. There's almost no storage. We don't know what will happen if our supplies falter. It would be hard to survive."

Global warming, he adds, makes the problem even worse. "We are building all these artificial islands, but if the sea level rises, they will be gone, and we will lose a lot. Developers keep saying it's all fine, they've taken it into consideration, but I'm not so sure."

Is the Dubai government concerned about any of this? "There isn't much interest in these problems," he says sadly. But just to stand still, the average resident of Dubai needs three times more water than the average human. In the looming century of water stresses and a transition away from fossil fuels, Dubai is uniquely vulnerable.

I wanted to understand how the government of Dubai will react, so I decided to look at how it has dealt with an environmental problem that already exists – the pollution of its beaches. One woman – an American, working at one of the big hotels – had written in a lot of online forums arguing that it was bad and getting worse, so I called her to arrange a meeting. "I can't talk to you," she said sternly. Not even if it's off the record? "I can't talk to you." But I don't have to disclose your name... "You're not listening. This phone is bugged. I can't talk to you," she snapped, and hung up.

The next day I turned up at her office. "If you reveal my identity, I'll be sent on the first plane out of this city," she said, before beginning to nervously pace the shore with me. "It started like this. We began to get complaints from people using the beach. The water looked and smelled odd, and they were starting to get sick after going into it. So I wrote to the ministers of health and tourism and expected to hear back immediately – but there was nothing. Silence. I hand-delivered the letters. Still nothing."

The water quality got worse and worse. The guests started to spot raw sewage, condoms, and used sanitary towels floating in the sea. So the hotel ordered its own water analyses from a professional company. "They told us it was full of fecal matter and bacteria 'too numerous to count'. I had to start telling guests not to go in the water, and since they'd come on a beach holiday, as you can imagine, they were pretty pissed off." She began to make angry posts on the expat discussion forums – and people began to figure out what was happening. Dubai had expanded so fast its sewage treatment facilities couldn't keep up. The sewage disposal trucks had to queue for three or four days at the treatment plants – so instead, they were simply drilling open the manholes and dumping the untreated sewage down them, so it flowed straight to the sea.

Suddenly, it was an open secret – and the municipal authorities finally acknowledged the problem. They said they would fine the truckers. But the water quality didn't improve: it became black and stank. "It's got chemicals in it. I don't know what they are. But this stuff is toxic."

She continued to complain – and started to receive anonymous phone calls. "Stop embarassing Dubai, or your visa will be cancelled and you're out," they said. She says: "The expats are terrified to talk about anything. One critical comment in the newspapers and they deport you. So what am I supposed to do? Now the water is worse than ever. People are getting really sick. Eye infections, ear infections, stomach infections, rashes. Look at it!" There is faeces floating on the beach, in the shadow of one of Dubai's most famous hotels.

"What I learnt about Dubai is that the authorities don't give a toss about the environment," she says, standing in the stench. "They're pumping toxins into the sea, their main tourist attraction, for God's sake. If there are environmental problems in the future, I can tell you now how they will deal with them – deny it's happening, cover it up, and carry on until it's a total disaster." As she speaks, a dust-storm blows around us, as the desert tries, slowly, insistently, to take back its land.

X. Fake Plastic Trees

On my final night in the Dubai Disneyland, I stop off on my way to the airport, at a Pizza Hut that sits at the side of one of the city's endless, wide, gaping roads. It is identical to the one near my apartment in London in every respect, even the vomit-coloured decor. My mind is whirring and distracted. Perhaps Dubai disturbed me so much, I am thinking, because here, the entire global supply chain is condensed. Many of my goods are made by semi-enslaved populations desperate for a chance 2,000 miles away; is the only difference that here, they are merely two miles away, and you sometimes get to glimpse their faces? Dubai is Market Fundamentalist Globalisation in One City.

I ask the Filipino girl behind the counter if she likes it here. "It's OK," she says cautiously. Really? I say. I can't stand it. She sighs with relief and says: "This is the most terrible place! I hate it! I was here for months before I realised – everything in Dubai is fake. Everything you see. The trees are fake, the workers' contracts are fake, the islands are fake, the smiles are fake – even the water is fake!" But she is trapped, she says. She got into debt to come here, and she is stuck for three years: an old story now. "I think Dubai is like an oasis. It is an illusion, not real. You think you have seen water in the distance, but you get close and you only get a mouthful of sand."

As she says this, another customer enters. She forces her face into the broad, empty Dubai smile and says: "And how may I help you tonight, sir?"

Some names in this article have been changed.

====================================================

DIGITAL MEDIA

Chinese Petitioners, Financial Times

Jamil Anderlini, Edward Cheng

Here or read it below 

Punished supplicants

By Jamil Anderlini

Published: March 5 2009 20:07 | Last updated: March 6 2009 14:21

Punished supplicants

By Jamil Anderlini

Published: March 5 2009 20:07 | Last updated: March 6 2009 14:21

Anguished and aggrieved: petitioners seek justice in Beijing. More are likely to encounter repression than find satisfaction As dawn breaks over Beijing’s ancient Gate of Eternal Stability, a large crowd gathers in its shadow, in an alleyway just inside the old city walls. The scene, however, is anything but stable. Those gathered there are from the country’s downtrodden, people with grievances against the government who have made their way to the capital to petition China’s modern-day mandarins. When the crowd spots a foreign journalist, many rush forward waving their petition documents and shouting their grievances: “My daughter was murdered and the police did nothing,” says Yan Zizhan, a petitioner from Henan province. “I was beaten up by officials from the family planning department because I wouldn’t have sex with one of them,” says Liu Zhongwei, from Shandong province. China has seen an explosion of popular protests in recent years and, as the economy slows, the nation’s leaders have repeatedly made clear their concern that social unrest is on the rise. But in the absence of democracy or an independent legal system, the Communist party relies on a 3,000-year-old pressure release valve known as the “petitioning system” to deal with dissatisfaction among the masses. On paper, the system allows the lowliest subjects to take complaints directly to the highest authority in the land. In reality, this relic has itself become a tool of repression and a symbol of how incomplete China’s political transformation has been in comparison with its economic development over the last three decades. “There is no substantial difference between today’s petitioning system and the system in place 1,000 years ago,” according to Xu Zhiyong, a Beijing-based lawyer and human rights activist who, like many in China today, say the petitioning system is broken and needs to be abolished. “The three essential elements – the emperor, the officials and the injured citizens – have the same relationship. The emperor wants to resolve a portion of the people’s grievances so as to maintain the stability of his regime but the officials have their own interests to think about.” In olden times, if an aggrieved subject could make it to the capital, he was entitled to beat the imperial drum to attract the attention of the emperor or his staff. Today, modern transport and a host of grievances thrown up by wrenching social change mean the system is overwhelmed and the government spends more energy trying to dissuade people from petitioning than it does trying to resolve their problems. The Offices of Letters and Calls that are attached to every layer of the government in every part of China to accept petitions provide the only legitimate channel for citizens to complain about alleged crimes or misconduct perpetrated by officials. The one in the shadow of the Gate of Stability is the highest such office in the land. Visitors to this office soon notice the heavy-set men in civilian clothes watching the crowds of disgruntled petitioners. Known as jiefangren, or petition interceptors, they are government officials, police officers or sometimes just hired thugs sent by regional and provincial governments to repatriate petitioners before they cause a fuss in the capital. “Sometimes they will resort to violence to stop them,” says Mr Xu, the lawyer. “This place is like an alleyway in hell; with so much naked savagery and violence, it gives us a concentrated glimpse of all the sicknesses in Chinese society.” Many petitioners bring relatively minor business disputes that local officials are unable or unwilling to resolve. At the other end of the spectrum are accusations of murder, torture and rape inflicted at the hands of government and police officials. Many profess their devotion to the leaders of the Communist party and say that if only they can get their story heard, the benevolent modern-day emperor will punish their oppressors. “I trust in the party and the central government to bring justice to us ordinary people, otherwise I wouldn’t be here,” says Zhao Guang­jun, 43, a villager from Hebei province who is there to complain about local officials whom he claims took peasant farmers’ land and divided it among themselves, then hired gangsters to beat up the farmers when they complained. But very few will find any kind of resolution at the petition offices and most will have their lives made much worse. As many as 12.7m petitions were filed in 2005, according to latest government figures, but “some official surveys show that less than 1 per cent of petitioners achieve satisfaction”, says Jerome Cohen, a professor at New York University and expert in Chinese law. “It increases the grievance and frustration because people go from pillar to post without a remedy; everybody tries to transfer responsibility, if they are a government official, from their agency to another.” The formal evaluation criteria and bonus schemes of Chinese government officials depend partly on the number of petitioners from their jurisdiction, creating a powerful incentive for them to stop complaints reaching the central government. Beijing itself has an ambivalent view of the system, hailing it as an essential element of China’s “mass democracy” but fearful of outright rebellion by the multitude of petitioners who descend on the capital. In fact, the activities of the jiefangren are at the very least tolerated and usually facilitated by all levels of China’s government and police. In preparation for the Olympic Games last year, an order went out from Beijing to local governments to stop petitioners from coming to the capital, in order to “create a healthy social environment for the successful hosting of the Beijing Olympics”. Although the order from the Ministry of Public Security did say the system should be more responsive to people’s needs and officials must act in a “civilised” way, the emphasis was on stopping petitioners from ruining the show. This put pressure on local officials to step up their interception efforts. According to human rights groups, repression and illegal detentions increased during the Olympic period. Over months of interviews, the Financial Times heard numerous accounts and witnessed several examples of officials from the Offices of Letters and Calls or Beijing police working in collusion with interceptors to help detain and abduct petitioners. When interceptors identify people from their region outside the petition office, they approach them and try to get them to return home quietly, ostensibly so their grievances can be “resolved” locally. Some petitioners are promised quick fixes to their problems; others go willingly in the hope of a free trip home or a place to stay while in Beijing. Those who refuse to accompany these men are usually taken by force. Often they are taken to detention centres operating like private prisons and known as “black jails”. Mr Xu says: “Black jails are places used by provincial governments to illegally imprison petitioners; we call them black jails because, first, they are just like prisons – established by the government to restrict people’s freedom – and, second, they are ‘black’ because they have no basis in any laws or regulations and are totally illegal.” Such facilities exist all over China but especially in Beijing, where they are often no more than a few rooms in a hostel or an unused warehouse. Once detained, petitioners can be subjected to “thought reform” and “re-education” techniques that range from cajoling and threats to extortion, beatings and outright torture. In its submission last month to the United Nations quadrennial review of China’s human rights record, the government explicitly denied the existence of black jails or arbitrary detention, in what Amnesty International and other human rights groups describe as a whitewash. “Our law clearly prohibits private detention facilities and there are no such things as black jails in the country ... The law on detention further prohibits any abuse, physical or oral, of detainees,” Song Hansong, a senior official from the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the state prosecutor, told the UN review in Geneva. . . . But in researching this article, the FT visited a number of black jails in Beijing, talked to dozens of petitioners who had been detained in them and interviewed several “petition interceptors” who talked openly about their activities. Petitioners picked up by Beijing police are often taken to one of the city’s large “relief and service centres”, which are supposed to be homeless shelters but operate as clearing houses for interceptors, who arrive in cars with provincial licence plates and leave with petitioners from their region. One such detention centre, known as Majialou and conveniently located near the Gate of Stability petition office, holds thousands of people at a time, most of them petitioners, according to guards interviewed by the FT. China’s annual meeting of its rubber-stamp parliament, which convened on Thursday, is a peak time for petitioners in Beijing and the entrance to the Majialou facility has been crowded this week with hundreds of interceptors waiting to retrieve petitioners. “Sometimes there are so many petitioners the [Beijing police] have to bring them in buses,” says one of the security guards outside Majialou while indicating an empty city bus leaving the facility. “The interceptors are informed about people from their region and they come to collect them; if the petitioners aren’t willing to go, they’re beaten and sometimes they have their bones broken.” These “relief centres” operate in a legal grey zone, somewhere between formal detention facilities and black jails. They are the remnants of a system abolished four years ago, under which urban police could detain anyone without a residence permit and repatriate them to their home town. Petitioners who have been intercepted are usually kept only a few days in Beijing before they are sent home – where they are confronted by the very people they have accused of crimes and misconduct. If they refuse to give up their petitions, they will often be illegally detained for months, beaten, tortured or sent to extra-judicial “re-education through labour” camps for up to three years for daring to tarnish the names of officials. Even the state-controlled media have recently reported cases of local officials illegally committing healthy petitioners to mental health facilities to stop them from taking their protests to the capital. “One of the biggest headaches in Chinese justice today is that the police take many measures that are not authorised – and to assist them they use non-police people who are just ad hoc recruited,” Prof Cohen says. Many petitioners give up after a few attempts, once they get a glimpse of the horrors that await them. But others continue for decades, their initial complaint often forgotten as they seek justice for beatings and torture inflicted after they entered the petition system. Activists such as Mr Xu who dare to discuss politics say China’s top-down political structure is the main reason why the petition system has become so distorted. “Every level of the government is responsible to those above it, not to the people. So they really don’t care what befalls the people, they only care about the orders given to them by their leaders,” he says. Given the improbability of imminent political reform, the pressure on this system is likely only to increase in the coming months as China’s economy slows and many more lose their jobs. “Even during the fat years of the last decade China has witnessed an astounding number of public protests; now China is confronting lean years, this means there is going to be more public protest, not less,” says Prof Cohen. “There is no doubt China’s legal and petitioning systems are entering a period of considerable crisis.”    SICHUAN EARTHQUAKE AFTERMATH: ‘THEY ARE WATCHING US BUT I AM NOT AFRAID TO BE CAUGHT OR TO DIE ... I HAVE NO MORE HOPE LEFT’ Sitting in a dumpling shop in Beijing last November, Chen Xuefeng and Li Yan were upbeat as they recounted their first visit to the State Office of Letters and Calls. “They treated us so well, gave us tea and saw us to the door afterwards,” according to Ms Li. “They told us to come back in three months if we hadn’t heard anything.” The mood turned sombre as the women explained what motivated them to travel 2,000km from their home in Sichuan province to present their case in the capital. On May 12, Ms Chen’s son and Ms Li’s daughter were crushed to death along with 124 other children when their primary school collapsed in the Sichuan earthquake. A month and a half later, the Financial Times visited the school, where parents were holding a vigil and demanding an investigation into why the building had collapsed while most others around it remained standing. Wearing a T-shirt with the words “I love China”, Ms Chen pointed out the dangerously thin steel reinforcing beams, the shallow foundations and mortar and bricks that crumbled when squeezed. Local government officials initially showed sympathy for the parents’ plight and offered compensation in return for their dropping demands for an investigation. But when attempts to buy their silence failed, the officials turned to threats and intimidation. The parents’ phones were tapped and they were warned of dire consequences if they continued to “make a fuss”. “We are not afraid; only when those conscienceless people who built the school and ran the education department have got the punishment they deserve will I be able to stand in front of my child’s grave and tell him how he left the world,” Ms Chen says. During their November trip, which stretched their budgets to the limit, Ms Li, Ms Chen and two other parents visited three petition offices and even tried to present their grievance personally to Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister. That attempt was unsuccessful but the parents left Beijing in higher spirits, expecting a quick reply to their complaint from the central government. On their return to Sichuan, the threats from local officials increased and the parents were told it was illegal for them to meet or talk to foreign journalists. They received no response from Beijing and local police told them their case was hopeless. Ms Li had clearly lost her earlier faith when she returned to Beijing in mid-January with another group of parents from her late daughter’s school. On that trip, officials were much less cordial and refused to discuss the progress of their petition. The bereaved parents returned empty-handed to Sichuan. Although disillusioned with the petitioning system, they have vowed to continue fighting. “The government has been watching us very closely to stop us going back to Beijing. But I am not afraid to be caught or to die, because I have no more hope left,” Ms Li told the FT last week. “I will go again to petition in Beijing in May.” Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web. CONFUCIAN ACCOUNTABILITY: Through dynasties to disillusion China’s petition system dates back to the Zhou dynasty 3,000 years ago. It embodies a Confucian tradition that idealises an authoritarian yet benevolent ruler who puts the concerns of his subjects above the interests of corrupt officials. After the 1911 republican revolution, petitioning was abolished by the Nationalist government. The Communists reinstated it soon after their 1949 revolution. Experts say petitioning remains basically unchanged from the system in place 500 years ago in the Ming dynasty, when the formal evaluation of government officials began to take into account the number of petitioners who travelled to the capital from their region. A 2004 survey of petitioners by the China Academy of Social Sciences, an official think-tank, found that: ● 50.4% said they had been detained for petitioning; ● 53.6% said they had been beaten up on the orders of offficials; ● 94.6% of first-time petitioners believed on their initial day in Beijing that the central government truly welcomed petitions – by day seven this fell to 39.3%; ● 1.8% believed on day one that the central government would take revenge on them for petitioning – by day seven this rose to 60.7% important videos in this link. you can subscribe with FT for free. It won't take minutes :  http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/35997be8-08cb-11de-b8b0-0000779fd2ac.html

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PERIODICALS - CONSUMER MAGAZINES

Congo: The Horror, GQ

Ed Caesar, Susan Schulman

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Congo: The Horror

Ed Caesar
GQ, 7th January 2010

Britain spends £250,000 a day supporting the UN peacekeeping force charged with ending the war in Congo. So why is there no conclusion in sight to a conflict that has already claimed more lives than any since WWII? GQ reports from the shifting front line of a human rights catastrophe
The shoeless headmaster said it was an ordinary sort of massacre. The FDLR rebels came to the mud and brick village of Kinyandonyi on a Sunday afternoon, as they often do, when the pupils at his Adventist school were in lessons after their Saturday Sabbath, and the bi-weekly market was in full swing. The gunmen shot in the air at first, to scatter the villagers. Then, they lowered their sights.

Before this attack, the FDLR (or Democratic Forces For The Liberation Of Rwanda) had raided the village three times in the past two months. So the children knew what to do when they heard shots – run. As they fled, the rebels sprayed the crowd with automatic fire. Their twin aims were, as ever, to sow panic and fleece the local population, and on that Sunday, they achieved both with vulpine ease.
The rebels knew their supposed adversaries, the Congolese Army, were housed in canvas barracks just down the road, but they did not expect resistance. They judged correctly. The only Congolese soldier to die in Sunday’s attack was one apparently stranded in the village on an errand. The rest of the army stayed in their camp and waited for the storm to pass.
The raid lasted the whole afternoon and into the night. Houses were upturned for food, money and clothes. Meanwhile, civilians unfortunate enough to find themselves in the path of the FDLR were attacked. When I visited Kinyandonyi in the days that followed, Jerome, the headmaster – a graduate who speaks several languages, including fluent English and French, but who has no shoes – explained the precariousness of his existence. He told me that his village and the surrounding area had lost "many, maybe 50, maybe a hundred" people to attacks in a year.
"We are on the front line here," he said, looking down at the dirt road on which we stood. "The FDLR live" – he thrust his hand towards the forest on the western side of the track, as if directing traffic – "just there. One kilometre away, two kilometres away. If you are lucky with the rebels, they take everything you have. If you are unlucky, they take everything you have and then they kill you."
The children had nothing to give except their lives. Jerome said three of his pupils, all less than ten years old, died in the attack. When I interviewed a dozen other witnesses, the headmaster’s statistic could not be corroborated. One man said fewer had died; many said more. At the local hospital in Rutshuru, the authorities confirmed they had treated two young children and one teenager who had been gravely injured by gunfire, and that two of those children had lost their mothers in the same incident. Again, definitive numbers proved elusive. The only concrete facts about that Sunday’s events in Kinyandonyi, said the hospital director, were that the FDLR had opened fire on children, and fatally.
"Il y a eu des morts," she said. There were deaths.
--

Welcome to the war in eastern Congo. It is a war fought, in the main, not between opposing armies, but between the armed and the defenceless: a war fought on, and through, civilians. Nominally, the battle is between the combined Congolese Army (the FARDC, who are supported by the UN) and the Hutu rebels of the FDLR, some of whose commanders led the Rwandan genocide of 1994. But, in this festering conflict – where allegiances, political imperatives and potential solutions have fluctuated with the wind, and where motivations include ethnic rivalry, border security, short-term economic gain, and long-term access to the region’s bountiful mineral wealth – little functions as it should. Indeed, in more than a decade of conflict, only one fact has remained incontrovertible: il y a eu des morts.
The International Rescue Committee estimated, in 2007, that 5.4 million people had perished as a result of Congo’s wars since 1998, making it the deadliest conflict anywhere since WWII. It continues to kill 45,000 people a month, almost half of them children. Most die from disease. Around 980,000 people in North Kivu province alone remain "internally displaced" by the insecurity, and live in squalid camps under straw and tarpaulin. Meanwhile, a disturbing number of Congolese women (and, as I discovered on my recent visit to the warzone, an increasing number of men) are subjected to extreme and baroque methods of violent rape and sexual torture by gunmen.
What makes this conflict so distressing to witness is that eastern Congo should be a paradise. Its people are, by and large, gregarious, resourceful and eager to make a fast buck. Indeed, they confront their grotesque situation with a phlegmatic humour that can be quite disarming. I met a man in a refugee camp near Mushake – about 40km from Goma – a doctor who wore a battered suit. He told me that since his village was burnt by rebel forces two years ago he had been displaced three times. He had no money, and nowhere to call home. I asked him what his plans were for the future. He emitted a long, high giggle – the best answer to a stupid question.
The territory, likewise, is rich and memorable. Around Goma, for instance, the marble-top Lake Kivu reflects a Ravello hillscape, while further north the mountains wear their clouds like marabou shrugs. The ground is good for coffee, maize, bananas and sugar cane. Meanwhile, in the remote corners of North and South Kivu lie vast reserves of coltan, gold, cassiterite and tin. In Goma, you can hear the roar from the airport as the rusting Soviet Antonovs spirit the minerals away to eager international recipients (and, ultimately, to our mobile phones and fighter jets), but any wealth that remains in Congo resides in the pockets of army fatigues, and a few well-lined suits. Indeed, it is the continuing ability of the army and rival militias to raise "taxes" on the mines that gives the conflict oxygen.
At another time, in another place, Congo’s passion would never leave our front pages. But when was the last time you read about the crisis? In 2007, Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times, claimed that the war had been allocated "fewer column inches per million deaths than any other recent war". He was speaking for America, but the plangent silence is also true for Britain’s media, where Congo resides, at present, in the basement of our foreign news priorities.
In Britain, in particular, this reticence to report seems surprising. We may only have seven troops stationed in Congo – compared to thousands from Uruguay, South Africa and India – but we are the country’s largest bilateral aid donor. Indeed, we spend £250,000 a day supporting MONUC, the 17,000, soon to be 20,000, strong UN peacekeeping force in Congo. Even if our hearts remained stony at the sight of raped and dying Africans, you might have thought our wallets would twitch at the thought of so much public money being spent on a seemingly endless foreign war.

Perhaps the country, and the conflict, is simply too much trouble to understand. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), formerly Zaire, formerly the Belgian Congo, is a territory the size of Western Europe, and has been – even by central African standards – a basket case for years. After gaining independence from Belgium, the country was dominated between 1965-1997 by the charismatic, kleptocratic, American-backed dictator, known as "Jeff" to his friends, and as Mobutu Sésé Seko Nkuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga, or "the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake" to his people.

Mobutu and his coterie bled the country dry. The Belgians had been cruel and rapacious colonial overlords, but they had at least left a passably efficient infrastructure. There were functioning hospitals. There was a train network. The roads worked. During his presidency, Mobutu maintained the cruelty, and abandoned any pretence at meaningful government, because his serious interests lay in maintaining prestige, and his European property empire. Indeed, he had quite a taste for the high life. He liked his champagne pink, and flown in by Concorde from Paris. Meanwhile, his starving subjects became acquainted with the only law that made any sense in Congo – se débrouiller: help yourself.

It was the 1994 genocide in the tiny, neighbouring country of Rwanda that pushed Congo from dysfunction to despair. In 100 days, between 800,000 and one million Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered by the majority Hutu population in a state-organised bloodbath. The genocide was effectively ignored by the UN, and by the most capable of its member states. Instead, it fell to an army of exiled Rwandan Tutsis, led by the current president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, to fight back. They did so swiftly and efficiently, prompting a mass exodus of Rwandans into Goma, the fetid Congolese border town.

The international community, which had so criminally failed to act during the genocide, saw a crisis. Two million refugees had sought shelter in neighbouring countries, and dozens of charities came to their aid. What was rarely spoken about was the presence, among the innocent, of thousands of Rwandans who had been complicit in the genocide. Indeed, the Hutu political hierarchy and key members of the interahamwe – the genocidal death-squads – were recognised as community leaders by the UN High Commissioner For Refugees (UNHCR) and given control over food distribution. The camps became towns; the interahamwe recharged its battery; the cancer that became the FDLR was allowed to grow.

The presence of the FDLR in the east of Congo has been at the heart of the conflict ever since. Rwanda is uneasy about having a genocidal force on its border – one official likened the FDLR to al-Qaeda – and has fought, overtly and through proxies, to keep the threat at bay. Certainly, Rwanda prefers to fight its battles on foreign soil. In 1996, Rwanda invaded Zaire, and, with a Zairean rebel group, fought their way across half a continent to Kinshasa, and installed their man, Laurent Kabila, as president. But, within two years, he had turned against his old backers.
In 1998, Rwanda invaded Congo again, this time using an army, in a war that became known as Africa’s world war. The conflict attracted the armies of eight countries, including Angola and Zimbabwe on Congo’s side, and Uganda and Burundi on Rwanda’s. Kagame’s stated aim was to create a buffer zone between his country and his potential attackers from the Hutu militia, but a notable feature of the bloody exchange was the willingness of every national army to trade in Congo’s mineral reserves.
In 2003, a shaky peace deal was established between Congo and Rwanda. Foreign armies went home, but local militias tied to both the Congolese and Rwandan governments continued to hold sway in the east. The war spluttered on, largely unnoticed by the world, for five more deadly years. Indeed, it was only in 2008, with the arrival to prominence of Laurent Nkunda, a rakish, media-friendly Tutsi warlord wearing a cowboy hat and a badge reading "Rebels for Christ", that the West woke up again to Congo. For once, in this bewildering, dangerous conflict, the press had an easy story, with great cheekbones.
Nkunda’s militia, the CNDP (which is tacitly backed by Rwanda, although, incredibly, they deny this) aimed to defeat the FDLR and "protect ethnic Tutsis". They also took control of a number of lucrative mines. But their war crimes were egregious, and their leader’s ambitions stretched too far, and when the CNDP reached the outskirts of Goma early last year, Rwanda was urged to call off its dog. Nkunda was arrested in a deal that incorporated his former troops into the Congolese army. Now, the FARDC is attempting to rout or demilitarise the FDLR with support from the UN, in an operation called Kimia II.
But Kimia II has been a disaster. Despite the arrest, in November, of two exiled commanders accused of managing and financing the FDLR from safe havens in Germany, the rebels are proving difficult to shift. Moreover, they are furious at the government’s decision to attack them. Their anger is being meted out on villagers. Meanwhile, the FARDC – whom the UN, and, by extension, Britain, is backing with transport, food and training – is proving equally villainous. Reports of mass rape and murders by the army abound. When I visited Congo in November, the CNDP were also threatening to disband from the FARDC over a pay dispute. Throw into this mess an increasing number of independent Mai Mai militias, as well as the Ugandan Joseph Kony’s barbarous Lord’s Resistance Army ravaging the north of the country, and you don’t have a war any more, you have a Cormac McCarthy novel.
--

In North Kivu’s militarised interior, you see the FARDC everywhere – trucks of dead-eyed boys resting their backs on rocket-launchers, rifles between their knees, daring you to look at them. Often, they travel not as groups, but as the only soldier on a civilian truck, piled high with goods, and carrying 40 or 50 brave souls on their roof. Every time I saw a Congolese soldier, a little shiver went through me. It was not that I thought they would do me any harm – the whelps could normally be appeased with a few cigarettes or some small Congolese notes – it was the stories I had heard. Every soldier was a reminder. And then, always, came a sobering thought: these are our guys. This is the army the UN expects to solve the crisis.
MONUC’s support for the Congolese army should keep them awake at night. The UN charter says the organisation has a "responsibility to protect", and where their troops can help to keep the peace, they do so. Certainly, I had cause to thank the Indian army when we smashed our 4x4 in the badlands north of Rwindi and were rescued from the wilderness – and the sound of distant Mai Mai gunfire – by three armoured vehicles’ worth of tooled-up Gurkhas. But if MONUC feeds, transports and ships weapons to FARDC units who commit war crimes, then they protect no one.
In the remote area between the towns of Pinga and Nyabiondo, for example, there has been, in the past months, heavy fighting between the FDLR and the FARDC. Last October, Human Rights Watch sent a fact-finding mission to the region and discovered a series of war crimes. In a number of attacks on villages in the region, at least 270 civilians had been killed by the Congolese army in the previous seven months, some within 15km of the nearest UN base at Nyabiondo. Most were women, children and the elderly. There were rapes and decapitations. The victims had been targeted because members of the FDLR lived among them, but the FARDC reportedly made no distinction between soldiers and civilians. This is a pattern repeating itself across the region, as soldiers punish villagers for their "support" of an opposing force.
The Nyabiondo massacres form one part of a long rap sheet of FARDC atrocities. On 17 October, for instance, the FARDC used seven Médicins Sans Frontières vaccination stations in the remote region of Kimua as bait – and then opened fire on thousands of civilians, many of them children. The number of fatalities from this attack is still unknown. At another refugee camp in the Shalio area of North Kivu, there was a similar attack in April, according to the UN’s own special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Philip Alston. Around 50 people were killed, and around 40 women were abducted and raped. Some had chunks cut from their breasts with machetes.
"From a human rights perspective, the operation [Kimia II] has been catastrophic," said Alston. "Hundreds of thousands have been displaced, hundreds of villages burnt to the ground, and at least 1,000 civilians have been killed. Women and girls have literally been raped to death in the most gruesome attacks imaginable."
Why is the army committing these crimes? The simple answer is, they are a hotchpotch, undertrained rabble which is rarely paid. Therefore, they loot. The Congolese government has enlisted MONUC to deliver pay to the FARDC, and they do so – but only at high levels in the rank structure. In true Congolese fashion, the generals and colonels help themselves to the majority of the cash, leaving the ratings with next to nothing. During my visit, some soldiers complained of being unpaid for five months. This same problem explains why MONUC cannot, as it has promised to do, refuse to pay abusive regiments of the FARDC. Much of the time, they have no idea which units actually receive the money.
At any rate, the army’s impoverishment only explains so much. Talk to UN staff on the record, and they will tell you that everything is going "in the right direction" with the Congolese army – that they are being trained into a decent force. Olusegun Obasanjo, the UN envoy to the region, talks of "reasonable success". But off the record, the highly professional soldiers who form MONUC’s command structure will tell you they are horrified at what they have witnessed.
"If you want to know why they loot and steal, then the pay issue is crucial," said one officer. "We can only ensure that it gets to a certain rank, and beyond that... it’s hard. But if you want to know why they rape and torture, the pay doesn’t explain that. These are not trained men. Often, their only qualification is that they have inherited a uniform and a weapon. As soldiers, they are shit, worse than shit. If they rape, it’s because they are sick bastards who need their testicles crushed."
In fact, raping and looting by Congolese armies is something of a tradition. In the late 19th century, when Congo was the personal fiefdom of King Leopold II of Belgium, and the army consisted of black conscripts under white officers, the rape of villagers was habitual and violent. Mobutu, likewise, ordered his soldiers to live off the land. Is it any surprise that today, seizure by force is seen by the army not so much as a transgression as the fulfilment of a basic right?
Over eight days, I met women from all parts of North Kivu who had been raped and tortured by soldiers and militiamen. The youngest victim I talked to was a 13-year-old girl – who had been held hostage for seven months in the forest by the FDLR and forced to have sex "at least five times a day" during that period. I also heard stories of infants and grandmothers being attacked. One rape, on its own, is evil enough, but there is a hyper-imaginative, Boschian quality to the sexual violence in Congo that is nearly impossible to process. To understand it better, I visited a woman who had seen everything.
Lyn Lusi is an amiable, wild-haired Brit who has lived in the country since 1971. Together with her husband, she runs HEAL Africa, an organisation that specialises in treating raped women, and which consists of a hospital in Goma and several care stations in the field. I wanted to know whether she had noticed an increase in the number of rapes since March, when the joint FARDC operations against the FDLR began, or whether what I had seen and heard was normal – or normal for this war.
She turned her computer screen to face me. On it was a picture of a patient who had come into the hospital the day before. The photograph showed the woman’s head, with blood surrounding her eye sockets and holes where her eyes should have been. Lyn told me the FDLR had raped her, and then taken the trouble to gouge out her eyes with a knife.
"Yes, there has been a horrendous increase in the level of violence since March," she said. "This operation has, I fear, stirred up a hornet’s nest. The cruelty..."
And there, she paused. I had a small understanding of what she meant. In Minova, an hour's drive southwest of Goma, along the lake, I had met a beaming woman with machete scars across her face. Her name was Masika, and she had made it her life’s work to care for femmes violées and their babies. She was a poor woman, and I asked her why she did it.
Masika said she had been raped several times herself. Once, in 1994, she watched soldiers murder her husband, cut him into bits "like a butcher", and throw his limbs around the room. Then, she was asked to rearrange him, as if he were an anatomical puzzle, before she was told to lie on her dead husband while the soldiers took turns to rape her. After the assault, they asked her if she was hungry, and forced her to eat her dead husband’s penis.
"The reason I help these women," she said, "is because I know about the pain."
I told Masika that I had heard an increasing number of Congolese men were being raped by the militias. Had she seen the same thing? Yes, she said. Five men came to her this year. One of them died, because the level of violence to which he had been subjected had caused him to bleed to death. "It is new, attacking men," she said, as if observing a change in the weather.
Lyn Lusi has witnessed the same trend. "They will do anything they can to inflict pain," she said. "We’ve seen several cases of male rape in the past year. Mostly, it involves inserting foreign bodies and sexual torture. In general, they will kill the men in front of the women, but I think they now see humiliating the men is just as powerful a weapon."
--
What is to be done? The situation in eastern Congo is, as Alston says, a human rights catastrophe. But it is much more than that. Congo, in general, is a profound civic disaster – a place where everyone wants a bribe and nothing works. Drive around the lava-blackened roads of Goma and the state of the failure, and the failure of the state, strikes you pungently. It is a town propped up by aid, where the rubbish mounts in the street, where every second car is a 4x4 belonging to a Western charity, where the only brightly coloured buildings are shops bearing mobile phone logos – a town where electricity fails, but where, if you know the right man, you can buy high-grade uranium on the street.
Amid this chaos, what chance of a resolution? MONUC talks of small victories against the FDLR, of demilitarising a significant number of moderate fighters and sending them back to Rwanda. And, no doubt, the rebels have been weakened – but not enough. They may only be a force of six or seven thousand, but they continue to wreak havoc and, more importantly, they continue to recruit. Indeed, they may soon have fresh allies. On my last day in Congo, a local journalist told me he had been contacted by a new warlord called Checka, who claimed to have 4,000 armed men at his disposal, a friendly relationship with the FDLR and a list of grievances against the government. Meanwhile, the FARDC (the UN’s boys, our boys, shamefully) have proved themselves a cowardly, criminal outfit. If there is a military solution to the FDLR, they are not it.
Wiser heads can conjure alternative strategies. As I prepared to drive into Rwanda – which 15 years ago was a sea of corpses, and today is a safe, functioning, if unashamedly authoritarian state – I took a look at the volcano that looms over Goma. Its name is Nyiragongo. Every decade or so – most recently in 2002 – it erupts. When the mountain blows, the smoke and lava smothers the town and its residents, forces evacuations, and adds to the collective misery. I knew about the volcano before I arrived in Congo. What I didn’t know until a Congolese friend told me, was this: Nyiragongo stands between Goma and another volcano called Nyamuragira, the most active in Africa. If Nyiragongo was not in Nyamuragira’s path, Goma would be endangered much more frequently. So goes the war in Congo. Get rid of one volcano, and there’s another right behind.

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PERIODICALS - NEWSPAPER SUPPLEMENTS

The Return of the Bloody Diamonds, Live Magazine

Dan McDougall, Robin Hammond

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The return of the bloody diamonds: Miners at gunpoint in Zimbabwe

In a remote corner of Zimbabwe, the true worth of a vast new diamond field emerges. Robert Mugabe's response? To allow his mutinous military to enslave villagers as miners and seize the profits - and destroy fragile protocols against blood diamonds.

Foreign Reporter of the Year Dan McDougall and photographer Robin Hammond risked their lives to get dramatic first-hand evidence of the unimaginable suffering of the miners for Live magazine. Their despatch poses the question - can you go into your local jewellers with a clear conscience ever again?

By DAN McDOUGALL

The mailashas emerge as cautiously as impala from the shadows of scorched yellow kikuyu grass that fringes the long highway to Mutare. Their name translates as 'smugglers'. It's our first sight of them. There are three in all and they're no more than 14 years old.
They reach out into the road at the approach of our slowing BMW and take a deadly gamble, forming their fingers into a distinctive diamond shape. In their damp palms are tiny grains of diamond. They have chosen the final thralls of dusk - a time of shadows and distraction, when the sights of army patrol rifles are blinded by the vast and sinking orange glow in the sky - to make their sales pitch to a car full of strangers.
Clicking o ff from his mother-tongue, Shona, our translator throws down his mobile phone in a panic and shouts at me to drive on.
'We mustn't stop,' he screams. 'They'll be dead in a week. The road is littered with the bones of smugglers. They are signing a death warrant by sticking their necks out on this cursed road.'
We've driven ten hours from the South African border in a fog of frayed nerves and o ff-road diversions to avoid army checkpoints. Posing as black-market diamond traders, we're travelling towards the very hell they are fleeing: Zimbabwe's Wild East. Here, within hiking range of the road we're driving, are the remote diamond fields of Marange, shallow earth mines uncompromisingly controlled by Robert Mugabe's henchmen.
The full extent of the diamond fields in eastern Zimbabwe became clear following discoveries made in June 2006. They're vast - 400 square miles - making the scrubland amid the bleakly beautiful mountainscape possibly the world's biggest diamond field. The finds were made by British prospecting firm African Consolidated Resources (ACR). It had just taken over the rights to explore the area from De Beers, which had failed to renew its mining licences despite having found diamonds before 2006.

There was an outcry in the West. Critics such as Global Witness claimed ACR was making little more than a Faustian pact with Mugabe, the most vilified leader on the African stage.
Maybe it was fateful, then, that in September 2006, Mugabe's Zanu-PF government reneged on the deal and seized back the mining rights to the region. When Zimbabwe's hyper-inflation made army pay almost worthless, soldiers rioted in the capital Harare.
Without the patronage of the military, Mugabe faced losing power. Against the ruling of the country's courts, he ceded mining operations to the direct control of the police and army.
Amid public confusion over ownership, a diamond rush began around the Marange fields. Over 10,000 illegal artisanal miners invaded the site and began working small plots. But by January 2007, the governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, Gideon Gono, warned that the country was losing up to $50 million a week through gold and diamond smuggling.

The diamond industry is a licence to print money for the military. With guns, brute force and a terrified population, everything runs like clockwork

The response of both the police and, in particular, the army to bring their interests under control was brutal. Launching Operation No Return in October 2008, the army ordered a shoot-on-sight policy, killing hundreds of illegal miners. Men were strafed by helicopter gunship, and a cordon was set up around the diamond fields. As many as 10,000 villagers living near the fields were relocated 15 miles away.
The army then set about doing the unthinkable: recruiting those same villagers under gunpoint and forcing them to dig for diamonds. This is the situation that remains today.
The UN is the only international body that can isolate pariah nations dealing in 'blood diamonds' - stones produced in conflict zones - and salve our consciences when we buy jewellery. It's backed by the Kimberley Process, whereby diamond-producing and trading nations commit to strict self-regulation to keep blood diamonds out of the world's supply.
As a Kimberley Process review panel prepares to rule on Zimbabwe's future as an exporter of gems, a Live magazine investigation has uncovered shocking first-hand evidence of the violent enslavement of alluvial miners in the eastern badlands of the former British colony. These men, women and children are being forced at the barrel of a gun by soldiers to dig out tiny diamonds from the earth with their bare hands, to pay the troops' wages and thereby keep Mugabe in power.

Our report, which we're submitting to the review panel, comes just weeks after the Zimbabwean government assured the world its diamonds were ethical. The situation as it stands makes a mockery of the Kimberley Process.
The young men stand at the roadside shaking. The youngest, weeping with fear, shouts and pleads with his captors. His mouth is foaming. Heknows that this is just the beginning of his torment. Handcu ffed together and forced to lean against a baobab tree, their trousers at their ankles, blood streams down their buttocks - a common sight in war zones: a humiliation and a warning to others. The soldiers sit nearby smoking cigarettes, waiting for the truck to come so they can carry on their torturing in private.
Everyone on this road is suspected of being a diamond smuggler. The road to Mutare has become one of the most militarised in all Africa. Army checkpoints scar the highway at 500-yard intervals. Everywhere is the detritus of soldiers: cigarettes, moonshine bottles and bullet casings. Scorched earth from cooking fires stains the lay-bys. At regular intervals, women stand behind pulled-over buses, their hands stretched in the air as their private parts are invaded and frisked by scruff y soldiers and radicalised youngsters from the Zanu-PF's youth training centres.

The youngest, weeping with fear, shouts and pleads with his jailers. His mouth is foaming. He knows that this is just the beginning of his torment

According to a 2009 Human Rights Watch report, army brigades are now being rotated in the Marange region to satisfy senior ranking o fficers from diff erent divisions so that more soldiers can profit from the diamond trade. The same report also states that villagers from the area, some of them children, are being forced to work in mines controlled by military syndicates.
At times you can almost make out the word ' diamonds' in slow-motion on their lips as the young soldiers ruthlessly tug at bra straps, sexually abusing, humiliating and tormenting their subjects. The motivation for the police and military to stop the flow of smuggling is simple and calculating: diamonds are their domain.
We are posing as diamond buyers from Israel, and are on the road just south of Mutare, the provincial capital on the Mozambique border. At each checkpoint the car is painstakingly searched. The soldiers will then pull us aside and produce small gritty slivers of diamond from hidden belt pockets in their military fatigues. The going rate for poor stones is $35 a gram. In the West, the price would be 20 times as high.

The closer we get to the mining fields the purer the stones become and the more our translator warns us our lives are in danger. Even with our cover as diamond dealers we are out on a limb here. At each checkpoint the soldiers tell us that most of the dealers are black - Nigerians.
We decide the only safe way for us into the diamond fields is to park ten miles away and hike into the bush at 4am. As we set off , in the darkness, everyone is terrified.
'If we are caught they'll shoot us and bury us in the bush until our bones are ready to be taken away elsewhere,' our translator says, on the verge of tears.
Heading to the diamond field of Chiadzwa, in the Marange district, we hear in the wilderness a pack of wild bush dogs ripping apart the carcass of one of their own. Hunted down by forest-dwelling illegal diamond prospectors and with no prey on which to feed, the desperate beasts have turned to cannibalism.

After three hours we're entering Chiadzwa's alluvial mine fields; a further three hours in the bush, doubts set in and the fear that we're lost deepens. We continue for five hours more even though we run out of water and are forced to drink from bore holes, where donkey droppings float on the surface of the water. Faced with sunstroke, there's no alternative. Finally we come across a group of illegal miners, each panning the parched, sandy earth.
From below the mountainside where we're standing, others emerge like shrews from holes in the ground, their black faces stained with grey dust and sand, their bloodshot eyes illuminated by dripping wax candles. They are some of the thousands of miners in the region who dig through the earth with blunt pickaxes and bare hands.
Some of the men and women who scrape through the dead earth here call the area the 'Eye' - as the mine gets more challenging and dangerous, the further you're drawn into it.
Most, without irony, call it churu chamai Mujuru - Mrs Mujuru's ant-hill. Mrs Mujuru is the country's Vice President and wife of its former army chief, General Solomon Mujuru. She is well known for her fondness for diamonds.
The dream that forces the miners to take extreme risks is not just a simple frosty-grey stone. They believe diamonds can bring liberation from their bonded status. Success is a stone no bigger than a newborn child's thumbnail; that's the price of freedom.
Like all miners in the region, these people are now working in small syndicates for the Zimbabwean military, each team satisfying individual soldiers who must pass the best gems further up the chain of command. According to the Human Rights Watch report, the syndicates are being operated with the full sanction of the Harare government.
The report says that at a time when Zimbabwe is struggling to pay civil servants and soldiers a stipend of barely $100 a month, the extra income from diamond mining for soldiers is serving 'to mollify a constituency whose loyalty to Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF, in the context of ongoing political strife, is essential'.
One of the miners, Jona, emerges from the ground shrouded in dust, looking like a ghost. At first, startled by our presence, he moves to run but he stretches out his palm for a few South African Rand in return for conversation.
'We have no choice but to do this,' he says. 'The soldiers rounded us up in the night and they have threatened to kill our families. It's always the diamonds. What do they mean to people in the West? What do they mean to you when my people, the Manyika, are dead men walking?'

He contemptuously spits out bitter peanut shells.
'We are forever in the eye of our killer: the Zimbabwean army sniper, the policeman, the spy. Our enemy is brutal but we must feed our children and mining here in the darkness is the only way out. It is pitiful and many of us have been killed but what else can we do?'
Jona says the biggest stone he has found in the fields was several years ago - from his rough description, a diamond of around 2.20 carats.
'We worked for the police back then and things weren't as intense, so we could get stones out. I sold that one for $200 to a businessman from Harare. You could see through a corner of it like a piece of glass.'
I tell Jona his stone might have fetched as much as £7,000 in Antwerp or London. He shrugs and kicks the ground at his feet.
'It was my chance to get out but I had to split the money and then, later, the police came to my house and took most of the rest. I was left with about $100 and they beat me to find that but I didn't give in. They hit my kidneys with batons over and over again. I passed blood for months and couldn't walk. But I kept my money.'
As we speak, a second miner in his mid-twenties approaches us and waves his pickaxe mockingly. He refuses to give his name but allows us to photograph him digging. He bears the scars and sorrows of a man three times his age. In his cracked hands are a few tiny grains of what looks like glass: tiny diamond slivers, practically worthless. He seems to think we are making a purchase, so he eggs us on to handle the miserable grey stones.

The soldiers stabbed me with their bayonets and beat us to the point that I couldn't feel pain any more

'We've been working this site for a month but found only a few diamonds. Further up the valley there is more promise - there we use shovels to dam o ff small sections of the streams. There are bigger diamonds in the centre of the Eye but the military hover over everyone there at gunpoint, watching the miners like hawks. When they are done, they search mouths, anal passages and even rip open wounds to see if miners have hidden stones in their flesh.'
As the man speaks the rain suddenly comes down hard, washing the blood-red mud from the ground over his bare feet.
'You must go,' he says. 'If they find you here they will kill us all.'
Just as the history of the Arab Gulf states is tied to the region's oil, the discovery of diamonds in Africa has shaped the continent's borders and remains one of the leading causes of conflict. It is no accident that Africa's most war-torn countries of the past decade - Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo - are also among its most diamond-rich nations, as well as the poorest and least developed.
In 2000 the UN responded to international outrage over illegal trade in blood diamonds from despotic nations such as Liberia and Ivory Coast by creating the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS). It requires all exporters to register their diamonds with their respective governments before any can be certified legal and shipped abroad with the paperwork.
Since then, mostly through clever marketing on the part of the diamond industry, the issue of blood diamonds has largely fallen o ff the political agenda. This is despite the appeals of pressure groups such as Amnesty International and Global Witness, who claim the problem is still a long way from being resolved.
The reality is that across the African continent, millions of miners - many of them children - continue to scour the earth at gunpoint looking for gems. Most of those that are found are sold well below their market value to illegal diamond traders.
The stones are then smuggled out to cutting centres around the world, without tax being paid. This means that none of the benefits of such mining find their way back to the people of Africa. Where they are mined responsibly - Botswana, South Africa, Namibia - diamonds can contribute to development and stability.
Where governments are corrupt, soldiers pitiless and borders porous, the stones remain agents of slave labour,murder, dismemberment, displacement and economic collapse.

Today in Zimbabwe, diamonds are continuing to destroy lives. But until the international community brands these gems as 'blood diamonds', stones from one of the world's most troubled nations will continue to find their way on to London's Bond Street.
In some respects, Zimbabwe's soldiers have a tough job keeping track of their prized assets. Diamonds are tradeable and portable; they can be mined with a pick and shovel in many places. They also can be smuggled in many of the ways drugs are not. With diamonds there is no odour to aid border guards with dogs. Over the years, diamonds have been ingested, concealed in body cavities, hidden in wounds. Desperate people do desperate things - and never more so than when there is the prospect of riches in place of utter poverty.
A diamond rush - as has taken place in Zimbabwe - happens for a reason: people who live around the alluvial fields are starving and desperate.
'Young men cannot bear to watch their mothers, sisters and wives starve to death,' says our translator.
But those same factors that see miners lose diamonds to the brutal middlemen also work in their favour. On an international scale, tracing stones is virtually impossible.
Michael Vaughan, executive board member of the Diamantkring, one of Antwerp's four main diamond exchanges, said recently that regardless of protocol and the regulations imposed by the Kimberley Process, his entire business depended on trust. If diamonds have been smuggled by African rebels and re-packaged elsewhere he'd never know about it.
Eli Haas, president of the New York Diamond Dealers' Club, goes one step further.
'There is no way to tell where a diamond comes from. Diamonds don't have identifying marks and probably never will. You just can't look at a diamond and say, yes, it comes from Sierra Leone or the Congo. Only God knows this.'
A lawyer in Mutare, Zimbabwe's diamond capital, said, 'The diamond industry is a licence to print money for the Zimbabwean military. With any commodity in Africa, it's about securing your logistics and export routes. You run the army so you control the people, turning them into slaves to dig the earth for diamonds.
'You own the highways and control the checkpoints so getting the diamonds out is even simpler. Army and police lorries have the rule of the highways so getting to the borders, South Africa in the south or Mozambique in the east, is never a problem. You control customs on one side and bribe o fficials on the other. With guns, brute force and a desperate and terrified local population, everything runs like clockwork.'
We've been directed to a remote village at the edge of the Chiadzwa field. We enter the compound but there's a ghostly silence. The residents have long gone, beaten out of their homes by the military and moved 25 miles away. But a whistle goes out: watchmen looking out for soldiers. In a small hut we find Tendaimoyo. The search for his story has brought us as deep into the bush as we can get.
'We can live here by day, and then at night we go out and dig,' he says. 'But we change it around. I know what happens when we get caught digging outside the syndicates.'
As we speak, Tendaimoyo pulls down his trousers and bares the livid scars that cover his buttocks - the aftermath of a brutal army baton attack.
Sometimes reporting from Africa is hard; unless you have seen it for yourself, you are wary of fully accepting any account at face value. But these wounds are unmistakeable; they are raw and open and stand out against his skin. He sits in excruciating pain and tells us he is not finished. On his chest there are puncture marks from knives and through his kneecap a piercing hole - an open wound the size of a golf ball.
'The soldiers came here and found us at a digging site close by,' he says. 'We were working for them at that time but they told us we had produced no diamonds and we deserved to be punished. They gathered a crowd around me and stabbed me through the leg with their bayonets.
'Another of our group was stabbed in the stomach. They then beat us to the point that I couldn't feel the pain any more, and exposed our buttocks like they were playing a game. I looked at my two friends on the ground across from me. Their legs were streaming with blood. One of them had died, and blood was streaming from his eyes and ears. I passed out.'
In the dark recesses of his hut, Tendaimoyo is boiling traditional madhumbe, a wild indigenous tuber root found only in the foothills of Chiadzwa.
'My journey here was for my family. I was a cow herder but the owner of the cattle died, and the army took his animals for food. Then the army told us they wanted our land for mining so they poisoned our water to forcibly relocate us. Our only chance is here in the dirt. I have nothing to lose. They almost killed me before. As I lay on the ground I made my peace with my family - but they stopped.'
Tendaimoyo told me he had also survived the helicopter strafing by the Zimbabwean military.
'When the helicopters first came they dropped tear gas for the first hour. Then they started shooting. People were running wildly everywhere, stumbling over the dead. I saw children die. After it was over, they moved in with dogs and I witnessed women being bitten to death.
'They raid us every week now, even though 90 per cent of the miners here work for them as slaves. The raids are part of a circus, normally to empty the fields of workers so foreign inspectors cannot interview them.
'Now the army carries out raids - small units go out and target miners who aren't cooperating. They don't shoot them - they beat their kidneys until they bleed and the men pass out and die. Their bodies are put into holes and covered up. The site is then made o ff-limits and when the army comes back round again to remove the bones, the flesh has been eaten by insects and rats.'

At least a dozen miners interviewed by Live claimed that plain-clothes offi cers from Zimbabwe's Criminal Investigation Department had started the diamond rush by turning up in the Mutare area with suitcases full of freshly printed notes. The men said they'd been given the money by Gideon Gorno, the head of Zimbabwe's fragile banking system. At the time they claimed to be representing a government company called Fidelity. But there is no record that such a body ever existed. According to the miners, the di fference between selling black-market diamonds to the Zimbabwe CID in 2007 and the situation today is their freedom to move.
'We are in a locked-down world,' says Tendaimoyo.
'Everywhere there are patrols looking for diamonds. Women are intimately searched, men have teeth pulled out with pliers as a warning to others not to smuggle diamonds in their mouths.
'Before we were being exploited by corrupt politicians making a killing from our stones. Now we're prisoners and slaves. Things were better before. Each day they get worse. I was almost killed a few weeks ago and each day others like me are abandoned in the bush, eaten by dogs, unable to crawl out of the pits.'
As we hike out of the bush in the dusk, the journey is fraught and terrifying. At each rustle of grass we hit the ground, waved down by our point man. Suddenly we come across a village, somehow bypassed in the clearances. From the valley below the sound of prayer and penitence is floating across the air from the river. At the bank a dozen middle-aged women are gathered in the water in the red glow of evening. Their skirts, branded with biblical passages and proclamations to the Lord, are wrapped up to their knees in the murky water, exposing their heavy-set legs. The pastor is dunking one of their number into the water, time and time again, to rapture.
As we pass them, their hymns are lost to the noise of the bush. Mice biting and scratching, insects buzzing and in the distance the violent crack of a rifle firing somewhere in the remote hinterland.
Everyone holds their breath.
The Limpopo River flows before me precisely as Rudyard Kipling once found it: 'Grey-green... greasy... set about with fever trees.' On a distant bank, from the stumpy shadows, come the refugees - a long and familiar string of terrified Zimbabweans clutching overflowing plastic bags stu ffed with clothes, Bibles and dreams of a new life in Cape Town.
An untamed no-man's land of smugglers, corrupt security forces and a never-ending flow of illicit human traffi c across from the third world to the developed world, it is boom time in the drab South African border town of Musina, a remote community that has found itself at the centre of one of the world's worst refugee crises.
Today South Africa's borders are a shambles. There are just 190 police o fficers to control 2,300 miles of coastline and 283 o fficers on its 3,000 mile-long land border. As a direct result, there are between three and five million illegal immigrants in the country.
A 2008 report by South Africa's Auditor-General found no specific border intelligence had been carried out since 2004, nor has there been any specialised training for border control. Land points of entry either have insuffi cient or no critical equipment such as baggage scanners, CCTV cameras and hand-held explosive-detection systems. Where these are in place, they are often not used.
For the Zimbabweans fleeing oppression to a life of menial labour such incompetence is, in a perverse way, a godsend, at least if they can live long enough in South Africa without being assaulted and extorted by the police and xenophobic mobs. For diamond smugglers it is similarly an easy route out with gems.
At Musina's United Reformed Church the pews are packed with Zimbabweans praising Jesus. Some, despite their devotion, are full-time smugglers, members of trafficking syndicates such as the Maguma Guma gang, who 'help' hundreds of border jumpers trying to cross illegally into South Africa every day.
Using their contacts to pay o ff Zimbabwean security o fficers, the gangs bypass immigration and assist jumpers to cross the river on the underside of a disused train bridge at the Beitbridge border crossing. On the South African side of the border, they have cut holes in the three barbed wire fences. Using mobile phones to alert one another, they wait in the bush until army and police vans patrolling the border have passed and give the signal for jumpers to run through to the other side. This is all for a negotiated price of around $10.
Outside Musina's church, Mutseti Savo, 32, claims he lost both his house and his job in Mugabe's continuing Operation Murambatsvina ('Drive out the rubbish'), in which soldiers, police and ruling-party militias used murder, rape and violence to destroy the homes and small businesses of hundreds of thousands of poor people living on the outer edges of Zimbabwe's towns. Like many others who lost everything, he drifted east to the diamond fields.
'I know blood diamonds are all about war but there is no war in my country - except for a government that fights its own people. Unemployment and starvation lead you to do desperate things, to put your life on the line. Diamonds, gold, drugs... anything to get by and keep your family alive. In Zimbabwe there is no right and wrong any more, there is eating and starving - even now, when the West claims everything is good again. This is a lie.'
In the background a large group of Zimbabwean women sing hymns and choruses in Shona. I ask what they mean.
'These people are good Christians but even Christians can find it hard to forgive,' says Savo.
'These are not hymns, they are anti-Mugabe songs that are illegal back home. There they would be shot for singing such songs.'
As we walk away Savo sticks out a long pink tongue. Underneath is a tiny black diamond.
'OK, we've talked now. How much will you pay?'

The Kimberley Process:

Can it still stop the flow of blood diamonds?

From offices in New York and Tel Aviv, the movers and shakers in the international diamond community have looked on and listened to the information coming out of Marange with typical reticence. As Zimbabwe is a participant in the Kimberley Process, which regulates trade in diamonds, its diamonds continue to enter the trading markets of London, Antwerp and Dubai with the full sanction of the industry.

Many within the industry believe the horrors of Zimbabwe's diamond fields could sound the death knell for the Kimberley Process, which was established in 2003 to stem the flow of blood diamonds.

'The Kimberley's credibility is suffering at the moment,' says Annie Dunnebacke, a campaigner for Global Witness.

'If the Kimberley Process can't suspend a participant in those conditions (in Zimbabwe), then what's it even there for?'

Critics claim that part of the problem lies in the structure of the organisation. The scheme is voluntary and based on consensus being reached among participating countries, allowing political and commercial ties to come into play.

For example, the annual rotating leadership of the Kimberley currently has Namibia at the helm. Zimbabwe recently signed a uranium mining memorandum of agreement with Namibia, one of the world's largest uranium exporters. Zimbabwe, meanwhile, is believed to have uranium reserves worth billions of dollars.

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PHOTOJOURNALISM

Toxic Jeans, Sunday Times

Robin Hammond

unbelievable photos, you have got to see them.
Check them here 
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RADIO

Zimbabwe: What Mugabe Didn't Tell Us, BBC Radio 4 - Today Programme

Mike Thomson, Edward Prendeville, Ceri Thomas

unfortunately , i couldn't get the show or the podcast of the show or the transcript of the show.
(if anyone have it or can find it, please post it on the comment section or email me to post it )

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TELEVISION DOCUMENTARY &DOCUDRAMA

Burma VJ, More 4 / Magic Hour Films (JOINT WINNER)

Lise-Lense Moller, Anders Ostergaard

here 

Dispatches: Afghanistan's Dirty War, Channel 4 / October Films (JOINT WINNER)

Tom Roberts, Peter Lindley, Najibullah Razaq

here 
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TELEVISION NEWS

The End of Sri Lanka's War, Channel 4 News / ITN

Jonathan Miller, Nick Paton Walsh, Nevine Mabro, Bessie Du, Matt Jasper, Ben de Pear.

Here