CALL FOR PARTNERSHIP APPLICATIONS
WITNESS is seeking partnership applications from organizations based in Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, and Central Asia
WITNESS - www.witness.org - partners with local organizations around the globe, empowering human rights defenders to use video to document abuses and violations, and as a tool for advocacy. Since its founding in 1992, WITNESS has partnered with groups in more than 60 countries, bringing often unseen images, untold stories and seldom heard voices to the attention of key decision makers, the media, and the general public -- prompting grassroots activism, political engagement, and lasting change.
WITNESS collaborates with NGOs worldwide - our Core Partners - to incorporate video into their human rights advocacy. Over the course of 1-3 years, WITNESS trains and supports its partners in ‘video advocacy’ so that they effectively plan, film, script, produce and distribute video within a campaign for changes in human rights policies and practices. Within a given year, WITNESS works with 12-15 Core Partners around the world on specific human rights campaigns. We are currently looking for new partners based in Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, and Central Asia.
Please note that WITNESS works as a collaborator and facilitator - NOT as a funder. WITNESS partners with locally based human rights organizations – rather than individual activists, filmmakers, or journalists.
If you are interested in applying to become a WITNESS Core Partner, please read our Introduction to Partnership, Application Guidelines, and Letter of Interest Form for Partnership - all available on our website. To apply, please fill out WITNESS’ “Letter of Interest” form and submit it to partners@witness.org. We prefer electronic versions of the document, however you may also fax (718-783-1593) or mail it to:
WITNESS Attn: Partnership Application
80 Hanson Place, 5th Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11217
Due to the volume of applications expected, we are unable to respond to each application individually though we will send an email acknowledging receipt. A staff-member will then be in touch if there are any questions regarding your “Letter of Interest” and to let you know whether you should submit a full “Application”. (Please note that it may take up to 6 months to complete an application process including Letter of Interest and the full Application).
Although we are accepting partnership applications on a rolling basis, we strongly encourage all interested organizations to submit a letter of interest by May 31st.
For information on partnerships at WITNESS, please visit:
www.witness.org/partners
For WITNESS partnership application materials, please visit:
www.witness.org/apply
Genocide Watch has issued the following alert:
Press Release: Contact Genocide Watch: 703-448-0222 or
genocidewatch@aol.com
Ethiopian Army Murders, Rapes, and Kidnaps Sudanese Anuaks
(Washington, D.C. 15 April 2006): Ethiopian Army troops that invaded Sudan
three weeks ago in search of leaders of the Anuak ethnic group, partially
withdrew into Ethiopia Wednesday under pressure from the several Western
governments. However, some of the Ethiopian troops sent from Dimma,
Ethiopia reportedly remain in Sudan, reuniformed as troops of the Sudan
Peoples Liberation Army. They have reportedly pillaged up to thirty Anuak
villages and carried out mass killings and rapes.
Genocide Watch, Washington, D.C. based chair of the
International Campaign to End Genocide, charges that Ethiopian Army troops
tortured and murdered the chief of Pinythiinh village, Sudan when he could
not hand over guns that they accused him of hiding. The Ethiopian Army also
murdered five Anuaks in Obwodi village, Sudan (two women, two men, and one
child.) Inside Ethiopia, the army killed four Anuaks (three elders and one
child) and kidnapped ten boys in Tado village. Young men have also been
kidnapped in other villages and are being held in Pinyudo, Ethiopia. The
Ethiopian Army has systematically raped the women of Obwodi, Pinythiinh,
Tado, Nyiuum and other Anuak villages. Genocide Watch bases its charges on
multiple direct Anuak sources in Pochalla, Sudan, corroborated by
international organizations and Western governments.
The Ethiopian Army has carried out massacres against the Anuak
since December 2003 that have cost at least 2500 lives. Major oil reserves
have been discovered in Gambella province, Ethiopia, the Anuak homeland.
The Ethiopian government is attempting to repopulate the province with
settlers from the Ethiopian highlands, who view the Anuak as racially
inferior. Genocide Watch has declared a Genocide Alert.
A young professor of Middle Eastern studies is asked by a campus Palestinian student organization to be on a panel on the effects of the occupation. She makes some remarks about the humanitarian costs of the occupation on Palestinians and the necessity of a just political solution. Next thing she knows she is receiving e-mails accusing her of being anti-semitic, akin to someone who "shoveled Jews into the ovens at Dachau." She is surprised, comforted by the support of her colleagues, but, as an untenured professor, knows herself to be vulnerable. Her choices are to self-censor or, quite likely, lose her job. Her article about her experience appears below - under a pseudonym.
Everyone who has ever, even casually, worked on the human rights of Palestinians can probably sympathize with her. The moment you stand up for even one Palestinian child who has been shot, express concerns about Palestinians being tortured, having their homes destroyed, hey, even say the word "Palestinian" without "terrorist" in your next breath and you risk being branded an anti-semite.
Your interest, they'll tell you, is not on human rights. "Why aren't you focusing on human rights in Sudan or China instead? Surely because you are anti-semitic and are using this issue only as an excuse. Why do you ask Israel to be better than other countries? That's a sure sign of your prejudices."
What is particularly puzzling to me is that these words, these accusations come from people who generally have liberal points of view. They don't think torture is right (though of course, it's different when it's a Palestinian-cum-terrorist), they believe in freedom of speech and so forth. Indeed, many of these people join us hand in hand on other battles, against human rights violations in Latin America, Africa, Europe. They'll even stand against the death penalty in the US - that brutal act. But don't say a word about Israel.
If you do, you should expect not just to receive insulting mails and veiled or not so veiled threats. On the internet, you can expect the most obnoxious and terrible things written about you. Of course your job will be threatened - they will call your bosses and try to get you fired. But they might also get the Israeli intelligence services involved. Your phone might be tapped, you might get a strange visit from some art student, you may find you are actually followed when you travel (!). And whether you think you are paranoid or not, you may be afraid. Second guess yourself, there are so many other things to do in the world, why risk it all for something that's only marginal to your work anyway?
That's how they create terror. Those same people, services and so forth who are so ready to justify any action against anyone who might be a terrorist, use terror and intimidation techniques to get what they want: your silence.
Alas, these are the same techniques being used by the US administration against anyone who might oppose them: peace activists, civil rights activists and, you can bet on it, immigration activists. Criticize the US and you are branded unpatriotic or even a traitor. Intimidate to silence.
So let's not be silent. If advocating on behalf of human rights for all human beings, including Palestinians, is being anti-semitic, I'll stand up for your right to label me however you like.
Monday, April 10, 2006
The New Blacklists
By Leah Bowman
It's rare that I get an e-mail accusing me of being a Nazi, much less an expletive-laden one, but those were the words that stared back at me as I stopped by my office to check my e-mail after a particularly long day of teaching. The message immediately following that one had a subject line that read "anti-Semitic leftist professors."
I was at the end of my first semester of teaching Middle Eastern history at a large research university in the South. Like any new faculty member, my anxieties revolved primarily around not breaking the Powerpoint projector, not being mistaken yet again for a graduate student instead of a professor, and not spilling spinach dip on the dean at one of the innumerable faculty mixers held at the beginning of the academic year. Hate mail wasn't on the list.
Since neither of the letters specified exactly what I had done to place myself in the ranks of someone who, as one of the letters put it, "shoveled Jews into the ovens at Dachau," it took me a couple of days of inquiries and some Google searching to figure out what was going on.
Two weeks earlier I had spoken on a panel about the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It was on the closing night of a weeklong Palestinian film festival called "Life Under Occupation" sponsored jointly by a few human rights groups on the campus and a Palestinian advocacy group for which I am the faculty adviser. The group is a university-approved student organization that aims to educate and raise awareness about the plight of Palestinians living under Israeli rule. Similar organizations are found on many American campuses.
The students had been trying without success for close to a year to find a faculty adviser. Some of the people who had been asked to serve as the group's adviser were just too busy. Others apparently were nervous about having their names associated with a Palestinian group, even one dedicated to a just and peaceful resolution to the conflict for both Jews and Palestinians.
At the time, I confess I thought those people to be slightly paranoid. I'm now a little more understanding.
I wish I could say I became a target because of my passionate feats of oratorical brilliance and advocacy on the panel. In fact, overtired and underprepared, I said a few words about the humanitarian costs of the occupation on Palestinians and the necessity of a just political solution. Then I went home to catch up on some sleep.
A student in the audience who is the head of a pro-Israel group on the campus was apparently more impressed with my performance than I was. She wrote an article that appeared on a right-wing Web site, identifying me as someone who condoned terrorism and objecting to my use of the term "occupation" to describe Israel's military presence in the West Bank.
That's when the e-mails began arriving. I know now I was na?ve not to have expected something like this. Being a scholar of anything having to do with Islam, the Middle East, or the Arab world has become, in the post 9-11 era, a full contact sport.
Charging Middle East scholars with "anti-Semitism," "liberal bias," and "support for terrorism" has become (in fashion parlance) the new black of right-wing political discourse. Entire Web sites are devoted to exposing academics with expertise on the Middle East as dangerous radicals who pose a threat to the young minds of America. I have seen many of my professors, colleagues, and friends over the past few years placed on such blacklists.
The message to those of us who believe there must be room for ethical and reasoned debate on American involvement in Iraq, on the Israeli occupation, and on the war on terror has never been clearer: We are watching you. And we're going to take you down. I never thought I would be immune to it. I just thought I would have a little more time before it happened to me.
I'm luckier than many other young scholars who have found themselves in this situation. My departmental colleagues have been supportive, both personally and professionally. They reassure me that they will back me up when I get called into the dean's office someday because angry alumni and donors write letters asking why my institution allows student groups that "promote terrorism" to operate on the campus.
My supporters also let me know when faculty members in other departments -- people whom I've never met, seen, or spoken to -- write letters urging the department to help purge the campus of dangerous viewpoints and the faculty members who espouse them.
But my colleagues have also pointed out that as an untenured faculty member I am vulnerable. Just don't do anything "stupid" in your classes, they caution, and you'll probably be alright.
It's good advice of course. But I have to ask myself, What does it mean?
I do stupid things in my class all the time. I suspect every new teacher does. I forget to put the week's readings on the Web in time for the students to read them. There's always one student every semester whose name I continually get wrong. I snap at a student who is repeatedly disruptive in class instead of calling him into my office for a calm, rational talking-to about his behavior.
Still, I get my colleagues' message. Somewhere between teaching students to try to think critically about the world and their place in it and giving students a reading, delivering a lecture, or asking them to discuss issues that might land me in the middle of a public witchhunt, there's a line that can't be crossed. The problem is that no one can tell me where that line is.
Plenty of resources out there tell untenured professors how to teach, how to get grants, and how to balance the pedagogical side of their career with the imperative to publish. But there's nothing that explains how negotiate the road to tenure in a climate that is increasingly hostile to the meat and potatoes of a liberal-arts education -- classroom exposure to, and engagement with, alternative ideas.
So I stand in front of my class. I think about the articles I won't write and the book I won't publish if I inadvertently take a wrong step and have to spend all of my time defending my integrity as a scholar and a teacher to the university administration. I think of my partner having to deal, day after day, with a grumpy, depressed, and anxious spouse. I think of the career that I dreamed about during endless years of graduate school and dissertation writing that might be destroyed.
It is in that moment that I choose between educating my students and saving my own hide. And it is in that moment that those who want to stifle debate on campus win. They don't need to get me fired to shut me up. I'm already doing it to myself.
And I know I'm not alone. I talk all the time with untenured friends and colleagues about how our attempts to be cautious in the classroom too often translate into self-censorship. We also share our feelings of anger and frustration that the political agendas of a few well-placed, well-organized people can dictate how we do a job for that we've spent years training for.
Yet in those feelings of anger and frustration I find reason to hope. Because it means that, in spite of the uncertainty and anxiety that come with teaching controversial subjects in an inhospitable intellectual climate, we haven't given up on the idea that it's still our job to teach our students that the world is a messy and complicated place; a place that is not easily reducible to simple political platitudes or clich?s about "us" and "them."
When that struggle becomes less important that getting tenure or leading a comfortable life, I know it will be time to start looking for another line of work.
Leah Bowman is the pseudonym of an assistant professor who teaches Middle East history at a research university in the South.
This article from the Daily Mail shows how ridiculous things have gotten. As I've posted in USA Watch the US government is using the Patriot Act to bug the homes and offices of "suspicious" people with foreign names. Now people *in England* are being stopped as terrorist suspect because they listen to suspicious - albeit popular - music.
Article from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=382039&in_page_id=1770&in_a_source=
'Playing The Clash made me a terror suspect'
by ANNE CAMPBELL, Metro 08:06am 5th April 2006
A mobile phone salesman was hauled off a plane and questioned for three hours as a terror suspect - because he listened to songs by The Clash and Led Zeppelin.
Harraj Mann, 24, played the punk anthem London Calling and classic rock track Immigrant Song in a taxi before a flight to London.
The lyrics to both tracks made the driver fear his passenger was a terrorist.
The words of the Clash track begin: "London calling to the faraway towns, now war is declared and battle come down." And Led Zep's Immigrant Song goes: "The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands, to fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming!"
Mr Mann, of Hartlepool, Teesside, had boarded the plane at Durham Tees Valley Airport when the flight to Heathrow was stopped and he was arrested by police.
He said he was told he was being questioned under the Terrorism Act and his choice of music had aroused suspicions.
Mr Mann said yesterday: 'The taxi had one of those tape deck things that plugs into your digital music player.
"I played Procol Harum's Whiter Shade Of Pale first, which the taxi man liked. I figured he liked the classics so put on a bit of Led Zeppelin - Immigrant Song - which he didn't like. Then, since I was going to London, I played the song by The Clash and finished up with Nowhere Man by The Beatles."
Mr Mann said he was 'frog-marched off the plane in front of everyone, had my bags searched and was asked 'every question you can think of'.
He added: "It turned out the taxi driver alerted someone when I arrived at the airport and had spoken about my music. He didn't like Led Zep or The Clash but there was no need to tell the police."
Durham Police said the action was taken 'as a result of information received' and the flight was stopped before take-off.
Colombian journalist Hollman Morris has received new threats against his life. This time it's in the form of a video, distributed in the southern part of Bogota, which names Morris and other human rights defenders as being guerrilla agents. Calling journalists who expose human rights violations and human rights defenders in general terrorist agents is a common tactic. In the US itself makes that link to spy on human rights and peace activists. In Colombia, it's akin to putting you in an execution list.
He was actually put in that list last summer, when President Uribe insinuated he was linked to the guerrilla. Previously, along with two other journalists, he had received a beautiful funeral wreath.
Morris is the producer and face of Contravía - a show dedicated to exposing human rights abuses in Colombia. He has also produced and directed documentaries and has worked with the BBC. He's one of the very few journalists who has traveled to different parts of Colombia to interview victims of human rights violations by government or paramilitary forces.
Fourty seven human rights defenders were murdered in Colombia in 2005 alone, while 15 more were kidnapped and/or tortured. Dozens have been subject to arbitrary detentions.
Mr. Morris' life is in grave danger. International pressure *may* help save his life.
Watch a 2005 Amnesty International interview with Mr. Morris