We came to the floating village of Peak Kantel by boat at the very end of the dry season. Ben Sok, the village chief, whose 78 years made him older than most Cambodians, welcomed us in his boat house. He offered grilled eel and tea and a long story about his village’s struggle to be… a village.
Ben Sok suggested we stay the night in the village school, a blue floating wooden primary, with a wooden railing where we could hang our hammocks and mosquito nets at nightfall. Evidently, the school was his pride. Very soon he came to tell us of the incident over a year earlier when government officials, accompanied by armed police, gendarmerie and military, came to take the school away. It was planned as the first step of evicting Peak Kantel.
Continue reading ‘Fighting to stay afloat, Cambodia, 12-14 March 2006′
I was stunned one morning last February when I opened the press and read that three Sri Lankan men, with whom I had been in contact and on whose behalf I had been working, had been executed several hours earlier in Saudi Arabia. It was upsetting and confusing. I was greatly distressed by such a brutal and sudden end.
It was a bright morning in Manhattan on the small patch of sidewalk they call Ralph Bunch Park, opposite the UN building. This was the day the First Committee of the UN General Assembly was going to consider a resolution on the international Arms Trade Treaty (ATT).
In June, at last came the chance to hand over our Control Arms ‘Million Faces’ petition to Kofi Annan, the then UN Secretary General. It had been collected thanks to work by arms control activists around the world over the last three years. The biggest photo petition ever!
It was a bright, cold December morning and I was cycling through the streets of London in an orange jumpsuit. Not something I’d normally do, but I had a good reason. I was on my way to an AI demonstration at Downing Street - organised to mark the beginning of a month of activism calling for the closure of Guantánamo and the return of UK residents. My role was back-up protestor - called into action if any of the eight others didn’t make it.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when we launched a campaign for the right to maternal and infant health care at a national health conference in Peru in July 2006. This was the first time I had launched a campaign on the right to health for the most vulnerable.
The attack left 40 dead –shot or burned to death including three babies and one crippled elderly man. Seven women were abducted during the course of that attack and held for several hours during which time they were gang raped by Janjawid fighters.