South Asian activists, academics, journalists urge Sri Lanka not to violate fundamental rights in the name of combating terror

Posted on May 5, 2019 by beenasarwar

 

SriLanka statement-Wire-collage

Top row (L-R): Sima Samar, Kanak Mani Dixit, Hamida Hossain. Bottom row (L-R): Uma Chakravarti, Shahidul Alam, Pamela Philipose, Beena Sarwar. Collage: TheWire.In

Thanks to friends who initiated this statement in solidarity with the artists, thinkers and people of Sri Lanka, that I have signed along with over 250 other activists, academics and journalists from across South Asia. Please feel free to endorse and share. Signatories include human rights activists from Afghanistan and Bangladesh, journalists from Nepal, Pakistan and India, and historians and feminists from India and Pakistan, among others who have been at the forefront of facing similar realities in their respective nation-states for decades. Full text below, updated from the version published earlier in TheWire.in.

 

May 2, 2019: Continue reading →

Filed under: 'War on terror', enforced disappearances, Freedom of expression, Human rights, Violence in the name of religion | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Human rights: Pakistan’s Ahmadis Faced with Death or Exile

Posted on October 20, 2014 by beenasarwar
Saad-Farooq

Saad Farooq, 26, shot dead in Karachi. “In Karachi, people are being killed every day. Doctors, professors, not just Ahmadis but also Shias and others,” says his father Farooq Kahloun, who still has four bullets in his body.

By Beena Sarwar

BOSTON, Oct 20 2014 (IPS) – Two years ago, gunmen shot dead Farooq Kahloun’s newly married son Saad Farooq, 26, in an attack that severely injured Kahloun, his younger son Ummad, and Saad’s father-in-law, Choudhry Nusrat.

Saad died on the spot. In Pakistan after travelling from his home in New York for the wedding, Nusrat died in hospital later. Four bullets remain in Kahloun’s chest and arm. A bullet lodged behind the right eye of Ummad, a student in the UK, was surgically removed months later (See his interview with BBC, while the bullet was still inside).

As an Ahmadi leader in his locality, Kahloun knew he was a target for hired assassins in the bustling but lawless metropolis of Karachi. General insecurity in Pakistan is multiplied manifold if you are, like Kahloun, an Ahmadi – a sect of Islam that many orthodox Muslims abhor as heretic.

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Filed under: Blasphemy Laws, Human rights | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

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