While armed opposition groups, including the Tehrik-e-Taliban, are responsible for much of the violence against civilians in Pakistan, it is important to remember that the Pakistani government also commits abuses against its own citizenry.
Many of our readers may be familiar with Netroots Nation, but for those who aren't Netroots Nation is a yearly conference on the use of online communications and new media to influence public debate and policy. The conference opened today and for the next four days panelists and attendees will be discussing issues ranging from primaries to blogging, twitter to healthcare reform.
This week marks the beginning of STAND Camp, a retreat to train this year's slate of STAND leadership for activism, community organizing, and more. The students are meeting at a camp in Maryland and include leaders from more than 60 colleges and high schools from around the country. Some of the students have recorded a short video to welcome the others and to say hi to the outside world. Take a minute to check it out!
Residents of Sar-e Pol province in northern Afghanistan have called on the nation’s Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) to exclude from the upcoming parliamentary elections two candidates accused of being former warlords. Haji Mohammad Rahim is a former commander of the Tajik-dominated Jamiat-e Islami faction and Gul Mohammad Pahlavan led an ethnic Uzbek militia in the nineties-both stand accused of abuses while serving in the militias.
Thousands of Burmese have fled their country following the Burmese military junta’s latest crackdown on dissent ahead of this fall’s elections. Muslims are the largest group of refugees, but members of the Karen, Kachin and Chin ethnic minority groups have taken flight as well. The refugees are headed to neighboring countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and Bangladesh, and to nations as far off as Australia.
24 Hours for Darfur has just released a unique and insightful look into the opinions of 1,872 refugees from Darfur now living in camps in Chad. This is the most wide-ranging and in-depth report yet released on how Darfurians see the origins and solutions to the conflict--a rare insight given the difficulty of collecting information in both Chad and Darfur.
According to a recently released report by Afghanistan Rights Monitor (ARM) 1,074 civilians were killed and 1,500 were injured in armed violence since January of this year. This marks a slight increase since the same period last year, when Afghan Rights Monitor documented the death of 1,059 civilians due to conflict. This total makes 2010 the deadliest year since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
