Archive for March 6th, 2006
Pakistani Earthquake Used as Opportunity to Steal Property from Widowed Women
According to the United Nations’ Integrated Regional Information Networks, the earthquake in Pakistan at the end of last year was used as an opportunity to steal land and other property from unmarried women.
Typical of such victims is Zumera Bibi. The IRIN report describes how Zumera and her four daughters left their house temporarily after the quake. While she was gone, her dead husband’s nephews seized the property and claimed it as theirs. According to the IRIN story,
Zumera has no sons, and as tradition dictates she and her daughters have no right to the property, which would revert back to the brothers of her husband on his death. Even though, under the law, her daughters should get at least a share in the inheritance, this is frequently denied to women.
Well there’s a shock from a part of the world where women can be raped as a method of tribal revenge.
The IRIN story goes on to say that,
In some cases, the claims of the women to hte property have been challenged, and according to reports received by NGOs active in quake-hit areas of North West Frontier Province (NWFP), women without mail family members have been forced to vacate homes or else hand them over to male relatives in the hope that, in return, they will help care for them and their children.
With apparently no credible system of property rights, it is easy to understand why Pakistan’s per capita GDP sits at a pathetic $2,400. In the process of impoverishing women like Zumera, Pakistan is impoverishing the entire nation.
Source:
Pakistan: Female quake survivors losing property. Integrated Regional Information Networks, January 3, 2006.
Tags: Pakistan
Overpopulation Doesn’t Kill People, War Kills People
A study in the January 7 edition of The Lancet claims that the ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo is killing as many as 38,000 people each month, largely by magnifying the levels of malnutrition and preventable disease in that country.
Based on surveys conducted in 19,500 homes in the Democratic Republic of Congo conducted from April-July 2004, the researchers concluded there were an excess of 600,000 deaths during that period that would not have occurred in the absence of the civil war.
An estimated 4 million people have died in the DRC since fighting began in 1998.
By the Lancet’s measure, the civil war in DRC is the single deadliest humanitarian crisis in the world at the moment, and yet receives comparatively little coverage or focus. As the study’s lead author Richard Brennan told the BBC,
Congo is the deadliest crisis anywhere in the world over the past 60 years. Ignorance about its scale and impact is almost universal and international engagement remains completely out of proportion to humanitarian need.
The backdrop of DRC’s civil war goes back to the Hutu/Tutsi conflict that led to genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Fearing that Congo leader Mobutu Sese Seko was not doing enough to stop Hutus in the DRC that Rwanda believe were planning attacks against Tutsis, Rwanda and Uganda backed Laurent Kabila’s successful coup against Mobutu. When Kabila turned on his supporters and attempted to expel Rwanda military forces in 1998, a civil war developed that soon involved 9 African nations in what has been called Africa’s world war.
There have been a series of truces and cease-fires, but violence has proceeded largely unabated.
Sources:
The Lancet Publishes IRC Mortality Study from DR Congo; 3.9 Million Have Died: 38,000 Die per Month. Press Release, International Rescue Committee, January 6, 2006.
‘Thousands’ dying in DR Congo war. The BBC, January 6, 2006.
Tags: Congo, Democratic Republic of the