Mois : septembre 2007

Index September 2007

Najat M’jid – Morocco

Linked with the BAYTI Association, and with Interview de Madame Najat M’jid.

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « I made many personal sacrifices to achieve my life-long goal: the protection of children’s rights. I live in a rented flat and use my old car in order to pay the tuition fees of my daughters ».

She says also: « First of all, I love children. On returning to Morocco after my studies in France, I was walking one day through the streets of Casablanca and I saw a kid who seemed to have spent several days on the streets. I asked him what he was doing there, and was shocked when he replied that he lived on the streets. I did not think that went on in Morocco. A lot of anger welled up inside me and I realised the situation needed to be put right ». (full interview text).

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Najat M’jid – Morocco

She works for the Mother and Child Clinic, and for the BAYTI Association.

Najat M’jid is the drive force of the advocacy for children’s rights in Morocco over the last sixteen years. She has lobbied for and participated in effectuating new legislative reforms in the country, denouncing violations of Children’s Rights and raising awareness of children’s severe vulnerability.

Dr. M’jid has assumed her grassroots work through a number of foundations concerned with children’s welfare, at both national and international levels. She is a consultant for the UNICEF and the State Secretariat for Childhood, NGOs, and is the regional focal point for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), analyzing and evaluating issues regarding children sexual abuse, health, education, poverty and family rejection.

In 2000 Dr. M’jid was awarded a national prize for her work on Human Rights and was nominated for the Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor) in France. Najat has worked hard towards the adoption of national rehabilitative plans for vulnerable children and for the establishment of state-run agencies to deal with children’s problems.

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Fatimata Toure – Mali

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « I will retire the day when no one fears for their safety ».

Fatimata Touré was born in Gao (the sixth administrative region of Mali) in 1956. She is the leader of the Association of Women for Peace and Development in Northern Mali, an organization that works particularly in the regions of Gao, Tombouctou, and Kidal.

The Association of Women for Peace and Development in the North (AFPDN) has always worked for the awareness, formation, support and research of peace as well as its consolidation. Thanks to these varied efforts, communities have become aware of the necessity of voluntarily collecting weapons. She showed courage in denouncing the outlaws as well as the trafficking of war weapons …

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Fatimata Touré – Mali

She works for the Association des Femmes pour la Paix et le Développement au Nord Mali.

… The association has generated much more participation by women in questions of peace and development in the northern regions in particular and in Mali more generally.

Madam Touré Fatimata Touré, as leader of the association of women, has won the favor and confidence of the armed security forces and the communities of the north. She did not want there to be mistrust between the people in charge of security and the communities.

She is also involved in the process of reintegration of the former fighters of the Touareg movements. Three thousand former rebels were absorbed into the Malian army, the French police force and customs authorities. Those who were not employed were helped to find activities allowing them to reintegrate into civilian life.

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Nancy Rivard – USA

Linked with Airline Ambassadors, with Wings of Love, and with Nishikant Waghmare – India.

She says: « In 1993, I delivered my first bag of aid to a refugee camp in Croatia. From this singular act spawned Airline Ambassadors International (AAI). Over the last decade, our members have been at the forefront of a growing movement called « voluntourism. » Voluntourism offers a way for caring individuals to become positively involved in the global community by traveling To make a difference. Our members have traveled the globe, helping to lift children and communities out of poverty and, in the process, create lasting bonds of friendship and kindness throughout the world ». (full text).

Watch the video: NBC News with Brian Williams, Nancy Rivard, 2.55 min, added May 01, 2007.

Nancy Rivard lost her 54-year-old father suddenly to bladder cancer on Christmas Eve 1983. « I wondered what life was about that it could be taken from us like that, » she recalls. « I began to evaluate where I was going. » Nancy purposely got herself demoted from the management track at American Airlines and went to work as a flight attendant. With low-cost travel passes and a flexible schedule, she toured around the world, searching for a calling – for healing. « I kept asking, how can I make a difference? » she says. That pursuit of service eventually led her to becoming World Woman of Peace in 1999. (full text).

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Nancy Rivard – USA

She works for Airline Ambassadors.

Nancy Rivard has a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from Southern Methodist University and 25 years experience with American Airlines in management, sales, instruction and as a flight attendant. When her father died suddenly, she found herself deeply reevaluating her life priorities. She left a management job to return to flight attendant status to have time off to travel and pursue post-graduate research.

Extensive travel on a personal quest for meaning engendered in her a deep desire to serve humanity and a new vision for the travel industry. She lived with the Hopi Indians, adopted a girl in Sri Lanka, spent a month in the high Andes, and searched for spiritual teachers in Thailand, Africa, India, the Philippines and the former USSR.

She founded Airline Ambassadors International in 1996 for airline personnel, like herself, who were able to travel frequently, in hopes of inspiring the public to also match their unique interests and skills to actual world need. The non profit organization is a voice in the travel industry for environmental and social responsibility. It has been recognized in the US Congress and is an NGO affiliated with the United Nations … (full text).

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Felister Chinthunzi – Malawi

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « There is no other time that I feel on the top of the world then when a childless couple conceives after years of trying ».

She says also: “I have kept my vision alive through determination and dependence on God, because it isn’t easy. It’s difficult to deal with people, as there is nothing for free mentality”.

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Felister and Prince Chinthunzi – Malawi

She works for Fasu Consultancy and Maternal Life International (FAMLI).

Felister Chinthunzi (50) is a trainer of trainers in natural family planning, reproductive health and HIV/Aids with FAMLI, a community-based non-governmental organization in Lilongwe. She heads the training service, sensitizing women on sexual abstinence before marriage and fidelity to avoid HIV infection. She is currently organising a community orphan care center for over 60 children.

“A happy family is but an early heaven.” Felister likes to quote John Bowring.

If all families had proper family planning methods and lived happily with each other, she would retire happily. She heads training at FAMLI, an organization that focuses on family planning and marriage counseling in Malawi. Since 1985, she has worked tirelessly in training families in natural family planning methods.

Thousands of women have changed their attitudes towards contraception through her efforts. Felister’s work has turned the misery of marriage and child bearing into healthy and happy homes. In her 20 years of work, Felister places lack of resources as a number one challenge.

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Siv O’Neall – Sweden

Linked with Axis of Logic.

Siv O’Neall was born and raised in Sweden where she graduated from Lund University. She has lived in Paris, France and New Rochelle, N.Y and traveled extensively throughout Europe. Siv retired after many years of teaching French in Westchester, N.Y. and English in the Grandes Ecoles (Institutes of Technology) in France. In addition to her own writing, Siv has also provided Axis of Logic with translation services. She has been living in France, first Paris, then Lyon for 30 years. In addition to her political activism and writing, her life is filled with family, music, animals, reading, traveling and « anything that pleases the eye or the palate ». (full text).

Bienvenu/Welcome aux pages web de/to the web pages of Siv & John O’Neall.

She writes: « The world has been taken hostage in the most gigantic, megalomaniac and malevolent plot that has ever been conceived by man. Words like democracy and freedom no longer have any meaning. We are all pawns in a huge game of ‘get-the-booty’ and ‘rule-the-world’. Individuals have strictly no value. People only exist so as to be used as slaves until they die from exhaustion or survive in utmost misery and total insecurity, until their children can take over in the same kind of miserable treadmill … (Read full long text: The Cracks in the Façade are Widening, The corporation is king, Published on Axis of Logic, by Siv O’Neall, Sep 13, 2007).

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Update: Thanks for this photo received from Siv O’Neall on July 26, 2011.

She works for Axis of Logic, today publishing as Intrepid Report.

She writes also: n the sixties and seventies, a group of right-wingers in the United States formed a society of vindictive and power hungry men who thought they could reinvent reality. Initially they received little notice and operated inside the American Enterprise Institute; that think tank became the womb for these megalomaniacs and their monstrous ambition of remaking the world. Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz were among them and the movement was to turn into a preposterous beast. The group called themselves Neoconservatives although they were hardly conservatives in the traditional sense and were very much out there on a new and tenuous limb … (Owning the World, The Great Illusion, April 16, 2007).

Read: The New World Order, or Stop Globalization, I want to get off, (A Crisis Papers Guest Essay, March 23, 2004); and: The Corporate Empire Rules the Planet, A View from Europe, July 19, 2005.

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Fatima Gazieva – Russian Federation

Linked with Women’s Information Network, Russia, and with Toita Yunusova – Russian Federation, and with Zarema Omarova – Russian Federation.

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « This is the will of God. He has granted me life so that I can help the least privileged victims of war. I have no right to betray them. They are waiting for me ».

Download: THE SITUATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS, 31/03/2005, 285 pdf-pages.

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Fatima Gazieva – Russian Federation

She works for Ekho Voiny / Echo of War (named on Prague Watchdog, on Chechnya Weekly, on FIIA Report 2003, on this fidh report on chechnya) and for Soyuz Zhenshchin Severnogo Kavkaza (Union of Women of the Northern Caucasus, as part of the Women’s Information Network).

Fatima Gazieva was born 1960 in Kazakhstan. At the beginning of the 1990s, she returned to her historical motherland, Checheno-Ingushetia. Since 1995, Fatima has been taking part in the anti-war movement. Being an active member of the human rights organizations Soyuz Zhenshchin Severnogo Kavkaza (Union of Women of the Northern Caucasus) and Ekho Voiny (Echo of War), she strives to help the people of Chechnya who have become victims of the atrocities of the bloody Russian-Chechen wars. Her activities are getting more and more dangerous under the pressure of the Russian authorities.The war broke out in Chechnya in November 1994. Endless chains of roaring tanks moved along the roads, airplanes bombed innocent civilians in the streets. The tragedy of her people led Fatima Gazieva to the antiwar movement.

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Thomas Hammarberg – Sweden

He says: “Of course we are watching closely the issue on arrests of journalist. Moreover, we are generally evaluating human rights situation and for this reason we attach due importance to other fields. In December last year government approved action plan on human rights. The issue we take interest in most of all is to clarify to what extent exact and in details this plan is being realized now”. (full text, Sept 18, 2007).

Watch Thomas Hammarberg’s video, Sept 07, 2007: Not Returning IDPs to Their Homeland Violates Human Rights: Council of Europe’s Commissioner on Human Rights.

Download « Human Rights for Human Dignity: a primer on economic, social and cultural rights« .

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Thomas Hammarberg – Sweden

The Economist magazine asked a very important question on 22 March 2007: « Are not access to jobs, housing, health care and food basic rights too? » According to The Economist, such rights are not human rights: « …few rights are truly universal, and letting them multiply weakens them. »

Amnesty International disagrees. The right to adequate food, the highest attainable standard of health and education are as much human rights as are freedom of expression or the right to a fair trial. Nearly sixty years ago, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted recognising the principle that human rights are universal and indivisible — that all human rights should be enjoyed by all people. This is at the heart of AI’s mission … (full text).

Thomas Hammarberg was elected Commissioner for Human Rights on 5 October 2005 by the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly.

He took up his position on 1 April 2006, succeeding the first Commissioner, Mr Alvaro Gil-Robles. He was nominated for the post of Commissioner for Human Rights by the Swedish government.

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María Beatriz Aniceto Pardo – Colombia

Linked with UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and with Articles for Indigenous Peoples on our blogs.

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « Life and earth are the same. In our Nasa communities we fight for respect for our autonomy, our territory and our lives » … and: “I will remain here explaining and spreading the rights of my people ».

She says also very clearly: « the indigenous people have to organize themselves because they are constantly being attacked ».

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María Beatriz Aniceto Pardo – Colombia

She works for the Asociación de Cabildos NASA CHXACHXA (named on poverty and conservation.info), and for the Colombian Women’s Pacific Path (named on 4th European Social Forum).

“To speak about respect for our territory and for our lives is exactly the same, because life and the earth are the same and life depends on the earth », says Maria Beatriz Brown Aniceto, a 40-year-old indigenous Colombian woman. She was born in a Nasa resguardo, in the Valley of the Cauca, west of Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia.

Resguardo is the way she refers to her Nasa community and the territory where she was born, and from which she will never go away.

But once, when she was very young, she left the valley. « As the resguardo was far from the city and there were no highways, the children were first sent to school when they were older than usual, when they were able to undertake the long walk », remembers Maria. But Maria Beatriz had to begin to work early in life as a domestic worker and school was left behind. In the house where she worked she had to withstand maltreatment.

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Viviane Bikuba Cibalonza – Dem. Republic of the Congo

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « We have to work together for a better world » … and she notes: “It has not always been easy, considering the lack of financial support I face in running my organization. The African culture too has been misconstrued to keep women silent about violation of their rights or the defense of her rights when violated by her husband. Society and certain women do not make it easy », she is quoted in ‘Diagnostic’, a UN Newsletter. “Unfortunately we often notice that the worst enemies of the woman are her fellow women. Congolese women do not realize that when they go against other women, they perpetuate their inferior status in society and frustrate efforts to improve their condition.”

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Viviane Bikuba Cibalonza – Dem. Republic of the Congo

She works for Action for Law Education (AED),
and for the Centre d’Assistance Medico-Juridique (CAMEJ).

Viviane Bikuba (36) is a lawyer and founder of Action for Law Education (AED) and Center for Medical-Judicial Assistance (CAMEJ). She defends and promotes human rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Great Lakes Region. She specialized in human rights, pacification and specifically the fight against torture.

She says also: « We realized that violence against women was on the increase and especially in South Kivu. The victims were suffering from medico-sanitary problems that aggravated their trauma. The different forms of violence against women were identified as: violence by fellow women (family members, in-laws or neighbors), domestic rape or forced prostitution, notably from public servants who were no longer receiving their salaries and forced girls into prostitution and sexual harassment ».

Continuer la lecture de « Viviane Bikuba Cibalonza – Dem. Republic of the Congo »