Photo: Nasser Arrabyee/IRIN

The Akhdam community have been a target of some of the worst racism in Yemen (file photo)

SANA’A,  – Authorities in Yemen are yet to resolve the “marginalization” of the minority Akhdam people, weeks after thousands protested in the capital Sana’a over low pay and lack of work contracts, say community members.

“The Akhdam are not simply second class citizens,” a protester said from his tent in Change Square. “They are more like fifth or sixth class citizens; the lowest class in the whole republic.”

Despite speaking Arabic and practising Islam in the country for over 1,000 years, the Akhdam, who prefer to be called Al Muhamasheen, or “marginalized ones”, have never felt a part of the majority.

The most visible marker of the Akhdam’s status in Yemeni society is the menial occupations they perform. Men roam the streets on 10-hour shifts sweeping and collecting rubbish, while women and children collect up cans and bottles and beg for handouts.

Popular myth traces their arrival in Yemen to the 5th or 6th century, when the group’s Ethiopian ancestors crossed the Red Sea in a failed bid to conquer the southern corner of the Arabian peninsula.
 
After the arrival of Islam, so the myth goes, Muslim rulers defeated the Ethiopian army and sent them into exile. The ones who stayed were enslaved and relegated to the fringes of society, where they have remained despite the replacement in 1962 of a caste-like Imamate with the egalitarian promises of a modern state. They are thought to number around one million, mostly concentrated in urban slums in Taiz and Sana’a.

The prospect of democratic reforms envisaged in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) plan which pulled Yemen from the brink of civil war in 2012 raised hopes that the situation would improve for the Akhdam people, but little has happened yet.

Protests

In early April 2012, for the second time in as many months, some 4,000 street sweepers in the capital went on strike in protest over unfulfilled promises by the government to raise their pay and extend their daily contracts. After only a few days off the job, Sana’a’s streets became like an urban landfill site, forcing interim Prime Minister Mohammed Basindawa to negotiate with the disenfranchized group.

Nabil, a 30-year-old street sweeper living in Mukhayyim Aser, an Akhdam slum near the presidential palace, told IRIN a day after the prime minister promised permanent contracts to the temporary workers, “Basindawa has not changed anything…

“My friend has been working as a street sweeper for 35 years and still does not have a job contract,” he added. “That’s why we’re on strike.”

One prominent Akhdam is Nabil Al Maktari, president of the Yemeni Organization Against Slavery and Discrimination. He spent 2011 protesting alongside thousands of other Yemenis – students, professors, soldiers and political activists – demanding the overthrow of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh’s government.

According to Maktari, however, the new government has ceded some ground to the street sweepers. At the end of 2011, the prime minister’s office gave 50,000 riyals (US$235) to local Akhdam chiefs who represent the cleaners and provide them with protection. “But the workers never saw that money,” he said.

Even Saleh yielded to the workers’ demands, Maktari said, increasing their daily pay to 800 riyals ($3.75) at the onset of the Yemeni Spring in 2011. But despite the government’s concessions, Maktari said, “the street sweepers still have no holidays, not even during Eid. And if a tribal person kills a Khadem [member of the Akhdam community; which happened several times during the Yemeni protests] there is no way for his family to seek justice. Even though they’re Yemeni citizens, no laws exist for these crimes.”

Many Akhdam view the stop-gap measures by Saleh and Basindawa with suspicion. An elder in the Al Hasaba slum, in a pocket of Sana’a which saw some of the heaviest fighting during last year’s revolts, said officials from Saleh’s regime paid him and his neighbours to carry pro-Saleh signs at the beginning of the uprisings. “They don’t help us until they need help,” he said.

“No discrimination”

Government officials say there is “no discrimination” against the Akhdam and that they are like every other Yemeni before the law; and they point to the construction of public housing for the Akhdam in Sana’a’s Sawan area as proof.

Mohammed Al Eryani, assistant deputy mayor of Sana’a, told IRIN the Akhdam are perhaps the only employees of the central government who do not have benefits like permanent contracts and pensions.

While admitting the Akhdam are targets of some of the worst racism in the country, Eryani said the reason they have never been awarded contracts or other benefits is because they are unreliable. “One day a Khadem may wake up to find that his car won’t start, so he will spend the day fixing it instead of going into work.”

Asked whether the plight of the Akhdam would improve under the new government, a young street sweeper named Khaled in Mukhayyim Aser said: “So far, we haven’t seen any changes. Things have been almost the same as before the revolution got started. So to answer your question, no.”

A woman standing next to him said, “maybe”.

cc/eo/cb
source www.irinnews.org

Sarkozy may be getting out of the French politics. He lost the first round Sunday to Hollande. The two will now battle out in the second round within a month.

There were 9 Presidential candidates with the far right party candidate against immigration becoming number 3 during this first vote.

Sarkozy was the man who engineered the toppling and killing of the Libya former leader Muammar Gaddafi. He and the British Prime Minister David Cameron pushed for the removal of Gaddafi and went ahead to fund the rebels.

Some western countries joined them later and within time, the rebels were aided to victory.

End

DUBAI,  – New data out of Iraq shows what many psychologists suspected though little research has confirmed: Girls who have undergone female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) are more prone to mental disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Results of the research - conducted by Jan Ilhan Kizilhan of the University of Freiburg, an expert in psychotraumatology (psychotherapy for people who have suffered extreme trauma) – were published in the April-June 2011 edition of the European Journal of Psychiatry.

Kizilhan found “alarmingly high rates” of PTSD (44 percent), depression (34 percent), anxiety (46 percent) and somatic disturbances (mental disorders whose symptoms are unexplainable physical illnesses – 37 percent) among a group of 79 circumcised girls in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, aged 8-14, who did not otherwise suffer any traumatic events.

These rates were up to seven times higher than among non-circumcised girls from the same region and were comparable to rates among people who suffered early childhood abuse.

Last year, shortly after receiving the results of the research, Kizilhan said, the Kurdish parliament in northern Iraq banned FGM/C.

He told IRIN he hopes the results will also lead to more and better treatment of PTSD among girls who have undergone FGM/C, using special techniques which include the family in the process as much as possible.

The existence of FGM/C in the Middle East is less known than in Africa. Estimates of the prevalence of FGM/C in Iraqi Kurdistan vary wildly depending on the province, but surveys have indicated the overall figure could be around 40 percent. The region is home to five million people, but has just 13 psychologists and only one with expertise in psychotherapy, Kizilhan said.

ha/cb source www.irinnews.org

Photo: Heba Aly/IRIN

Child abductions have risen since a popular uprising overthrew former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak

CAIRO,  – A coalition of 100 Egyptian child rights advocacy groups is intensifying its pressure on the government to take measures to counter rising child abductions across the country, threatening to resort to the UN if the government does not take action.
 
“The government does not attach enough importance to the problems suffered by children,” Hani Helal, secretary-general of the Egyptian Coalition on Children’s Rights, told IRIN. “This leads to increasing violations against the children. But if the government does not act now, we will have to take the matter to the UN.”
 
A noticeable rise in child abductions has swept through the country, with the media reporting a new child abduction case every day – either in the capital Cairo or in the other governorates, putting parents on alert and challenging the police service.
 
The Interior Ministry has not given exact figures about the rise in child abductions, but independent security experts say it has increased as much as threefold since a popular uprising ousted former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. The political transition has been accompanied by an almost total collapse of Egypt’s security system, with police absent from the streets for extended periods of time.
 
“The kidnapping of children has become a very worrying phenomenon,” ex-policeman and security expert Maher Zakhry told IRIN. “Our country’s deteriorating security conditions make this crime more possible.”
 
Egypt’s National Motherhood and Childhood Council called on the government to take action against what it described as a “rising crescendo of child abductions”, warning against the serious consequences of turning a blind eye to the problem. The council has launched a new hotline service through which it can receive complaints by parents, refer them to police and better lobby the government.
 
The Coalition on Children’s Rights says the number of calls about abductions it receives from parents has increased 300 percent – from one or two a day before the revolution, to six or seven on some days now. Helal says most of the people who call his coalition are poor and have no connections. They come from all governorates, but more often from Cairo and the coastal city of Alexandria. Most of the kidnappers know the families of the children they abduct, he added.
 
“We have major difficulties dealing with the government, which does not view children as first-rate citizens like everybody else,” Helal said. “But what I want to say to the government is that its silence will encourage criminals to kidnap even more children in the future.”
 
Advocates are calling for tougher action by the government against criminals; a larger police presence on the streets; and laws that would increase punishments for those who violate children’s rights. Many Egyptians, especially activists involved in the revolution, believe the government is intentionally neglecting safety and security to increase a desire for “the good old days” under Mubarak and to justify the continued rule of the military council that took over after Mubarak left.
 
Motives

Anecdotal evidence appears to indicate two main motives for the abductions – body organs and ransom money.

When Hayam Rabie left her one-year-old daughter, Alia, with neighbours in a vegetable shop while doing some shopping, it did not cross her mind that she would never see her again.
 
But when Rabie, a mother of two from the poor village of Damleeg in the agricultural governorate of Sharqia in the Nile Delta, came back one hour later, she could not find her daughter.
 

As a sign of Egypt’s deteriorating security conditions, child abductions have become an easy way for criminals to make money

That was one year ago.
 
“Until four months ago, I had hopes that I could find my daughter,” Rabie said. “But this hope turned to be a mere illusion.”
 
Rabie discovered that one of her neighbours had kidnapped the girl, hid her inside her home for few days, and then killed her before she put her body in a sack and threw it in a village canal.
 
Mahmud Al Badawi, head of local NGO Egyptian Society for the Assistance of Juveniles and Human Rights, says child abductions and organ trafficking are strongly interconnected in Egypt.

When Rabie’s relatives and neighbours broke into the house of her daughter’s kidnapper, they found empty blood bags, syringes and tubes.
 
“Nobody understood why an uneducated woman would need these tools,” Abdel Aleem Al Guindy, the girl’s father, said.
 
The mother of a child kidnapped in Alexandria told private Al Nahar TV in February that her son heard children screaming and calling for help while held by his kidnappers. His parents paid a ransom to get him back.
 
“One of the kidnappers told my son that the children would be sold to body organ traders,” the mother said.
 
Ransom
 
Security experts say most kidnappers demand a ransom from the parents of abducted children – starting at 5,000 Egyptian pounds (US$833) and going up to six million pounds (US$1 million), if kidnapped children’s parents are wealthy enough.
 
A famous construction mogul had to pay two million Egyptian pounds (US$333,000) in February to secure the release of his two grandchildren.
 
“As a sign of Egypt’s deteriorating security conditions, child abductions have become an easy way for criminals to make money,” ex-policeman Zakhary said.
 
He advises parents not pay ransoms, and instead to report the kidnappings to police. But child rights activists say the police do not have a very good track record of arresting or prosecuting kidnappers, and have only succeeded in rescuing children in a few cases.
 
In April 2011, police arrested five suspects in relation to the kidnapping of the daughter of Effat Sadat, a businessman and the nephew of the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, but only after Sadat paid the kidnappers five million pounds (US$833,000).
 
“Poorer parents, however, cannot find the money necessary for the return of their children,” said Al Badawi of the juveniles’ society. “This is why many of the abductions go unreported because the parents are simply not connected.”
 
ae/ha/cb
source www.irinnews.org

Photo: UNICEF

The campaign targets 12.5 million children under five (file photo)

CAIRO,  – Egypt will launch a four-day polio immunization campaign on 21 April targeting 12.5 million children under five, say officials.
 
“The vaccination drops are very important in line with the state’s policy of immunizing the children against this serious disease,” Amr Qandeel, assistant health minister for preventive medicine, told IRIN.
 
“We call on all parents to show up at health units and centres to allow their children to get the drops.”
 
Egypt was declared polio-free in 2006 after recording its last case in 2004. The campaign will cost the government US$5 million, Qandeel said, and involve 800,000 medical personnel.
 
ae/eo/cb
source www.irinnews.org