The Star Online: World Updates
The Star Online: World Updates |
- Syria's children shot at, tortured, raped - charity report
- Venezuela to probe Chavez cancer poisoning accusation
- Singapore police to share evidence with FBI on engineer's death
| Syria's children shot at, tortured, raped - charity report Posted: 12 Mar 2013 08:05 PM PDT BEIRUT (Reuters) - A boy of 12 sees his best friend shot through the heart. Another of 15 is held in a cell with 150 other people, and taken out every day to be put in a giant wheel and burnt with cigarettes.
Syria's children are perhaps the greatest victims of their country's conflict, suffering "layers and layers of emotional trauma", Save the Children's chief executive told Reuters. Syrian children have been shot at, tortured and raped during two years of unrest and civil war, the London-based international charity said in a report released on Wednesday. Two million children, it said, face malnutrition, disease, early marriage and severe trauma, becoming innocent victims of a bloody conflict that has already claimed 70,000 lives. "This is a war where women and children are the biggest casualty," chief executive Justin Forsyth told Reuters during a visit to Lebanon, where 340,000 Syrians have fled. Forsyth said he met a Syrian refugee boy, 12, who saw his best friend killed outside a bakery. "His friend was shot through the heart. But initially, he thought he was joking because there was no blood. They didn't realise he had been killed until they took his shirt off," he said. The Save the Children report cited new research carried out among refugee children by Bahcesehir University in Turkey which found that one in three reported having been punched, kicked or shot at. It said two thirds of children surveyed said that they had been separated from members of their families due to the conflict and a third said they had experienced the death of a close friend or family member. "All these children tell you these stories in a matter of fact way and then you realise that there are layers and layers of emotional trauma there," said Forsyth. Syria's civil war started with peaceful protests against the dynastic rule of President Bashar al-Assad. His forces shot at protesters and arrested thousands and soon the revolt turned into a civil war. Rebels now control large swathes of Syria. Millions have fled their homes for safer ground or neighbouring countries. Save the Children says 80,000 people are living in barns, parks and caves and children struggle to find enough to eat. Both government forces and rebels have been accused of targeting civilians and committing war crimes. Refugees say that Assad's soldiers are directly targeting children. Forsyth said he met one child who said he was in a prison cell with 150 people, including 50 children. "He was taken out every day and put in a giant wheel and burnt with cigarettes. He was 15. The trauma that gives a child is devastating." Save the Children says that some young boys are also being used by armed groups as porters, runners and human shields, bringing them close to the front line. RAPE AND EARLY MARRIAGE Rape is being used to deliberately punish people, said Forsyth, adding that it is underreported due to the sensitivity of the issue, especially among conservative communities. "In most conflicts, over 50 percent of rapes are against children. And I am sure that is the case in this conflict too." Fear of sexual violence is repeatedly cited to Save the Children as one of the main reasons for families fleeing their homes, according to the report. It said that there are also reports of early marriage of young girls by families trying to reduce the numbers of mouths they have to feed, or hoping that a husband will be able to provide greater security from the threat of sexual violence. Forsyth said that he met a Syrian family in Lebanon who told their 16-year-old daughter to marry an older man. "Her mother said she is beautiful and every time the (Syrian) soldiers came to the house she thought: 'They are going to rape her.'" "Rape is being used deliberately to punish people," he said, adding that girls as young as 14 are being married off. Save the Children works in neighbouring countries and within Syria but Damascus has restricted access to aid organisations, especially in opposition-held territory. The charity called for unfettered and safe access to humanitarian agencies, including "access across the lines of the conflict", and for Damascus to ease bureaucratic restraints. Despite pledges of $1.5 billion (1 billion pounds) by international donors for a response plan to help Syria's displaced, only 25 per cent has been funded, the United Nations says. (Editing by Kevin Liffey/Mark Heinrich) Copyright © 2013 Reuters | ||
| Venezuela to probe Chavez cancer poisoning accusation Posted: 12 Mar 2013 06:56 PM PDT CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela will set up a formal inquiry into claims that deceased President Hugo Chavez's cancer was the result of poisoning by his enemies abroad, the government said.
Foes of the government view the accusation as a typical Chavez-style conspiracy theory intended to feed fears of "imperialist" threats to Venezuela's socialist system and distract people from daily problems. Acting President Nicolas Maduro vowed to open an investigation into the claims, first raised by Chavez after he was diagnosed with the disease in 2011. "We will seek the truth," Maduro told regional TV network Telesur. "We have the intuition that our commander Chavez was poisoned by dark forces that wanted him out of the way." Foreign scientists will be invited to join a state committee to probe the accusation, he said. Maduro, 50, is Chavez's handpicked successor and is running as the government's candidate in a snap presidential election on April 14 that was triggered by the president's death last week. He is trying to keep voters' attention firmly focused on Chavez to benefit from the outpouring of grief among his millions of supporters. The opposition is centring its campaign on portraying Maduro, a former bus driver, as an incompetent who, they say, is exploiting Chavez's demise. "Let's take the president (Chavez) away from the political debate, out of respect for his memory, his family, his supporters," opposition candidate Henrique Capriles' campaign chief Henri Falcon told reporters. Polls from before Chavez's death gave Maduro a lead over Capriles of more than 10 percentage points. Capriles lost to Chavez by 11 percentage points in October. Capriles has tried to jump-start his campaign with accusations that Maduro and other senior officials lied about the details of Chavez's illness, hiding the gravity of his condition from Venezuelans. That sparked a torrent of attacks, with senior government officials using words like "Nazi" and "fascist" to describe Capriles, who has Jewish ancestors. In a televised message, Information Minister Ernesto Villegas read a letter to the "sick opposition" from the late president's daughter, Maria Gabriela Chavez, who has at times been viewed as a possible future successor. "Stop playing with the pain of a nation and a devastated family," she wrote. "It is unfair, inhuman, unacceptable that they now say we were lying about the date of his (death) ... Focus on politics, don't play dirty." Capriles was quick to respond with a flurry of tweets. "Never, in all these years, have I offended the president or his family. If one word has been taken thus by his family, I'm sorry," he wrote on Twitter. "I don't offend families as they have mine. They have even called me a Nazi, when my great-grandparents were murdered in a Nazi concentration camp," he added, referring to the government. ACCUSATIONS FLYING In an increasingly acrimonious campaign, both sides on Tuesday accused each other of planning violence. The opposition displayed photos circulating on the Internet showing an assault rifle and a pistol being held up to a TV screen that was broadcasting Capriles' face. They also said there were indications of plans to attack Capriles when he was scheduled to register his candidacy on Monday. In the end, aides went instead. Government spokesmen repeated accusations that opposition activists planned to disrupt Maduro's campaign. Trying to discredit Capriles, they waved photos of a plush New York apartment they said belonged to him, and displayed copies of university documents that they said showed he never completed a law degree. Capriles, a 40-year-old, business-friendly regional governor running for the opposition's Democratic Unity coalition, is trying to disassociate Maduro from Chavez in voters' minds. "He's attacking Nicolas Maduro, saying Nicolas is not Chavez," senior Socialist Party official and Maduro's campaign chief Jorge Rodriguez said. "Of course Nicolas isn't Chavez. But he is his faithful, responsible, revolutionary son. All these insults and vilification are going to be turned into votes for us," he said. Tuesday was the last day of official mourning for Chavez, although ceremonies appear set to continue. His embalmed body was to be taken in procession to a military museum on Friday. Millions have filed past Chavez's coffin to pay homage to a man who was adored by many of the poor for his humble roots and welfare policies, but was also hated by many people for his authoritarian style and bullying of opponents. Though Maduro has spoken about combating crime and extending development programs in the slums, he has mostly used his frequent appearances on state TV to talk about Chavez. The 58-year-old president was diagnosed with cancer in his pelvic region in June 2011 and underwent four surgeries before dying of what sources said was metastasis in the lungs. Maduro said it was too early to specifically point a finger over Chavez's cancer, but noted that the United States had laboratories with experience in producing diseases. "He had a cancer that broke all norms," Maduro told Telesur. "Everything seems to indicate that they (enemies) affected his health using the most advanced techniques." Maduro has compared his suspicions over Chavez's death with allegations that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died in 2004 from poisoning by Israeli agents. The case echoes Chavez's long campaign to convince the world that his idol and Venezuela's independence hero Simon Bolivar died of poisoning by his enemies in Colombia in 1830. OPPOSITION'S UPHILL FIGHT The National Assembly was to debate this week a proposal by pro-government legislators to hold a referendum - possibly also on April 14 - on whether he should be buried at the ornate National Pantheon building in Caracas. Opponents are outraged at the prospect of a referendum stoking the emotion around Chavez at the same time as the presidential vote. Besides the wave of sympathy for Chavez, the opposition faces a well-financed state apparatus, institutions packed with government supporters, and problems within its own rank-and-file, still demoralized over October's presidential election defeat and a mauling at gubernatorial polls in December. At stake in the election is the future of Chavez's leftist "revolution," the continuation of Venezuelan oil subsidies and other aid crucial to the economies of left-wing allies around Latin America, from Cuba to Bolivia. The OPEC nation boasts the world's largest oil reserves. Though there are hopes for a post-Chavez rapprochement between Venezuela and the United States, a diplomatic spat worsened on Monday when Washington expelled two Venezuelan diplomats in a tit-for-tat retaliation. (Additional reporting by Marianna Parraga, Simon Gardner, Pablo Garibian and Enrique Andres Pretel; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Stacey Joyce) Copyright © 2013 Reuters | ||
| Singapore police to share evidence with FBI on engineer's death Posted: 12 Mar 2013 06:49 PM PDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Singapore's police have pledged to share with the FBI evidence they collected in the death of Shane Todd, an American engineer found hanged in his Singapore apartment in June, Singaporean foreign minister, K. Shanmugam, said on Tuesday. Todd's death is at the centre of what has become a delicate bilateral issue between Singapore and the United States.
Senator Max Baucus, who represents Todd's home state of Montana, has been pressing for more U.S. involvement into the inquiry into his death. He said he would "stop at nothing" to satisfy Todd's parents or determine that there had been no transfer of technology that might jeopardise U.S. national security. "Today's meeting is about getting answers, getting complete answers," said Baucus, who is also chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, which oversees trade deals. "So far we're unable to get the answers we need to know what happened to Shane, Shane Todd. We're unable to know the degree to which there might have been some breach of national security. So far answers have not been forthcoming," Baucus said. Todd's parents contend the 31-year-old's death was not a suicide, but that he was murdered because of his involvement in a project between Singapore's Institute of Microelectronics, or IME, and the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei shortly before his death. Shanmugam and Singapore's ambassador to the United States, Ashok Kumar Mirpuri, met with Baucus at his Senate office and then held a news conference about Todd's case. Shanmugan was meeting with Secretary of State John Kerry on issues including the case on Wednesday. "We are committed to working with and making it clear exactly what happened and getting to the bottom of it," Shanmugan said. "The Singapore police force will be happy to share the evidence it has obtained and the FBI can look through it," he said. He said all of the government's evidence would be presented for public enquiry, where Todd's family could hire lawyers and take part, and that Singapore had felt it was inappropriate to discuss the case before the enquiry. Huawei said last month it had not worked with an institute in Singapore on any projects in Todd's field of expertise, which was Gallium Nitride (GaN), an advanced semiconductor material that has both commercial and military purposes. Shanmugan said the IME is subject to "very rigorous audit" to ensure there was no improper transfer of technology. "We are very happy for a U.S. team to come down and look at the projects and it will be very clear that there was no transfer of technology." (Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; editing by Jackie Frank) Copyright © 2013 Reuters |
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