Burmese Rise Against Oppression

Arrests as Burma marks uprising
At least 20 people have been arrested in the Burmese town of Taunggok after staging a silent protest on the 20th anniversary of a major uprising.
They were detained after marching while wearing T-shirts which referred to the date of the uprising - "8/8/88".
Activists outside Burma are marking the anniversary with demonstrations.
The 1988 protests drew hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets, but ended with a violent clampdown and the deaths of at least 3,000 civilians.
The date 8 August 1988 was significant for the numerologically minded Burmese, and marked the start of six weeks of rallies against military rule.
[…] The BBC is banned from Burma - also known as Myanmar - but reports from opposition sources inside the country say at least 20 people were arrested in Taunggok, and that the number could be as high as 50.
[…] Three activists staging separate protests are said to have been detained in the vicinity of Rangoon.
In the city itself, opposition sources said they were concerned for the welfare of a young woman seen walking in the streets wearing a T-shirt bearing an image of detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
There have been few such open signs of the significance of the date in Burma, with reports suggesting monks and laypeople met in private for secret ceremonies to remember those who died.
Nyan Win, a spokesman for Ms Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD), told AFP news agency that the anniversary marked "an important historical turning point".
Until the 8/8/88 protests, Ms Suu Kyi was only known as the daughter of liberation hero Aung San, but her speech to the assembled protesters during the rallies propelled her to the centre of the pro-democracy movement.
Anti-China protests
Elsewhere in Asia, human rights groups and activists who fled in the aftermath of the 1988 protests held demonstrations outside Burmese and Chinese embassies.
"We are here because China is the main supporter of the military regime," Kyaw Lin Oo, a Burmese activist, told reporters outside the Chinese embassy in Bangkok.
"We want the Chinese government to understand the actual cost of their support to the people inside of Burma," he added.
Anti-junta protests also took place in Manila, Tokyo, and Delhi, and protesters joined wider demonstrations to mark the start of the Olympics in London, Brussels, Berlin and Hong Kong.
"As the world celebrates the opening of the Beijing Olympics, people should pause to remember the atrocities in Burma 20 years ago," said Elaine Pearson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights

Watch.[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7548770.stm

Burma, 8/8/88

Racial Bias in Drug War Verified

Reports Find Racial Gap in Drug Arrests
By ERIK ECKHOLM, Published: May 6, 2008
More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates
Two new reports, issued Monday by the Sentencing Project in Washington and by Human Rights Watch in New York, both say the racial disparities reflect, in large part, an overwhelming focus of law enforcement on drug use in low-income urban areas, with arrests and incarceration the main weapon.
But they note that the murderous crack-related urban violence of the 1980s, which spawned the war on drugs, has largely subsided, reducing the rationale for a strategy that has sowed mistrust in the justice system among many blacks.
In 2006, according to federal data, drug-related arrests climbed to 1.89 million, up from 1.85 million in 2005 and 581,000 in 1980.
More than four in five of the arrests were for possession of banned substances, rather than for their sale or manufacture. [my bold] Four in 10 of all drug arrests were for marijuana possession, according to the latest F.B.I. data.
Apart from crowding prisons, one result is a devastating impact on the lives of black men: they are nearly 12 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug convictions as adult white men, [my bold] according to the Human Rights Watch report.
[...] Some crime experts say that the disparities exist for sound reasons. Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York, said it made sense for police to focus more on fighting visible drug dealing in low-income urban areas, largely involving members of minorities, than on hidden use in suburban homes, more often by whites, because the urban street trade is more associated with violence and other crimes and impairs the quality of life.
“The disparities reflect policing decisions to use drug laws to try and reduce violence and to respond to the demand by law-abiding residents in poor neighborhoods to clean up the drug trade,” Ms. Mac Donald said. [What about the violence created in homes where mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters are incarcerated for possession, not making a profit over someone else's misery!? Ms. Mac Donald doesn’t care about the quiet violence of families being torn apart! She is a racist and a class criminal!]
[...] Police in a few cities including Denver, Seattle and Oakland, Calif., have said they are spending fewer resources on arrests for lower-lever offenses like marijuana possession.
In December, the United States Sentencing Commission amended the federal sentencing guidelines for convictions involving crack cocaine, which is more often used by blacks, somewhat reducing the length of sentences compared with those for convictions involving powder cocaine. But mandatory and longer sentences for crack violations remain embedded in federal and state laws.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/us/06disparities.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Uyghur Muslems Want Liberty!

The "terrorism" talking points sound like they came right out Michael Chernoff's mouth. But this is China!
Chinese Police Raid Houses in Xinjiang
2008.04.02
HONG KONG—Chinese police have conducted raids on several houses in the restive northwestern region of Xinjiang, possibly looking for weapons, sources in the area have told Radio Free Asia (RFA).
Authorities in Yengiyer township near Gulja (in Chinese, Yili) city raided four familiy homes belonging to Muslim Uyghurs, detaining several people, the sources said.
Police dug up the yard at one house, although they gave no indication what they were looking for, a Uyghur source in Gulja told RFA’s Uyghur service.
[...] Police dug up the yard at one house, although they gave no indication what they were looking for, a Uyghur source in Gulja told RFA’s Uyghur service.
[...] A Han Chinese resident of Alamatuya village in Yengiyer township said that at least one house had been searched by police in his neighborhood.
“Because the Uyghurs were causing trouble...They had explosives in their house,” he told RFA’s Mandarin service.
Several people detained
“Maybe someone reported it,” he said, adding that he believed the Uyghurs had been influenced by recent unrest in Tibet and were possibly connected to unrest in Gulja which was brutally suppressed by Chinese security forces in the 1990s.
[...] Many Uyghurs, who twice enjoyed short-lived independence as the state of East Turkestan during the 1930s and 40s, are bitterly opposed to Beijing’s rule in Xinjiang.
Beijing blames Uyghur separatists for sporadic bombings and other violence in the Xinjiang region. But diplomats and foreign experts are skeptical. International rights groups have accused Beijing of using the U.S. “war on terror” to crack down on nonviolent supporters of Uyghur independence.
[...] The raids come one week after several hundred ethnic Uyghurs staged protests following the death in custody of a prominent Uyghur businessman and philanthropist.
Numerous sources said the demonstrations followed the death in custody of a wealthy Uyghur jade trader and philanthropist, Mutallip Hajim, 38. Police returned his body to relatives March 3 after two months in custody, saying he had died in hospital of heart trouble. According to an authoritative source, police instructed the family to bury him immediately and inform no one of his death.
[...] China has waged a campaign over the last decade against what it says are violent separatists and Islamic extremists who aim to establish an independent state in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which shares a border with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia.
In March 2008, Chinese authorities announced that they had foiled a plot by Uyghur terrorists targeting the Beijing Olympics. In the early 1990s, Uyghurs in Xinjiang launched large-scale riots, attacking and killing Chinese officials. Chinese authorities alleged that such acts killed 162 people and injured another 440, prompting a harsh crackdown.
U.S.-based Human Rights Watch says authorities in Xinjiang maintain “a multi-tiered system of surveillance, control, and suppression of religious activity aimed at Xinjiang’s Uyghurs...At a more mundane and routine level, many Uyghurs experience harassment in their daily lives.”
“Celebrating religious holidays, studying religious texts, or showing one’s religion through personal appearance are strictly forbidden at state schools. The Chinese government has instituted controls over who can be a cleric, what version of the Koran may be used, where religious gatherings may be held, and what may be said on religious occasions.” http://www.rfa.org/english/news/2008/04/02/uyghur_raids/