Category Archives: South and Central Asia

How Nepal’s migration ban traps female ‘modern day slaves’ in the Gulf

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Rules intended to protect domestic workers have only made them more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, say activists

Amita* knew she had to escape. After five months of being assaulted, starved and being forced to work for 20 hours a day as a domestic maid in a suburban house in Kuwait, the 45-year old from Nepal seized her chance. While the household slept, she climbed out of a downstairs bathroom window and fled.

Amita managed to find the Nepali embassy, hoping that staff there would assure her safety and help send her home to Kathmandu.

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Burmese anger grows over pornographic video shot at Buddhist site

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Italian couple’s footage against backdrop of Myanmar’s ‘holy land’ provokes outrage

Outrage is growing in Myanmar after the emergence of a 12-minute pornographic video shot in Bagan, the country’s best-known tourist spot and Unesco heritage site featuring thousands of revered Buddhist pagodas.

The video was posted on PornHub by users who described themselves as a 23-year-old Italian couple.

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Pompeo touts partial ceasefire with Taliban in push for election-year troop reduction

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US secretary of state calls for significant drop in violence before formal peace talks can begin

Mike Pompeo has hailed “a pretty important breakthrough” in Afghan peace talks, as officials confirmed that the Taliban had agreed to a partial week-long ceasefire as a precursor to broader peace talks and the withdrawal of at least some US troops.

But the US secretary of state said that Washington still wanted to see a significant reduction in violence before formal negotiations could begin. “If we can get there – if we can hold that posture for a while – then we’ll be able to begin the real, serious discussion which is all the Afghans sitting at a table,” Pompeo said on Thursday.

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The cheating wife, her rich lover and a court case for ‘immoral’ Pakistan TV hit Meray Paas Tum Ho

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Creators of Meray Paas Tum Ho could be facing legal suit amid accusations the hugely popular show was ‘misogynistic’

A court in Pakistan has summoned the creators of a wildly popular television series after a petition was filed demanding they apologise for portraying Pakistani women as “greedy, selfish and non-professional”.

In the petition filed at the Sindh high court last month, lawyer Sana Saleem said the television series Meray Paas Tum Ho (I Have You) was “ridiculing a woman who makes the same decision as every other man in society”.

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Deaths of 16 Rohingya at sea raises fears trafficking ring has been revived

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Smugglers responsible for mass atrocities in Thailand may be linked to capsized boat carrying refugees from Bangladesh to Malaysia

Activists fear a dangerous transnational trafficking network is being revived after at least 16 Rohingya refugees drowned in the Bay of Bengal on Tuesday morning.

Bangladeshi officials said a wooden fishing boat carrying about 138 people capsized near Bangladesh’s St Martin’s island in the early hours.

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‘Feed them bullets not biryani’: BJP uses Delhi elections to stoke religious hatred

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Even for a party known for its openly Hindu nationalist agenda, the campaign has been one of their most brazenly anti-Muslim

Standing before a political rally in Delhi, Yogi Adityanath, the firebrand Hindu nationalist chief minister of Uttar Pradesh known for preaching hate and violence against India’s Muslims, did not mince his words.

The thousands of women who have been gathered for two months in the Delhi suburb of Shaheen Bagh in protest against India’s new citizenship law were “terrorists”, he said.

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‘No tigers here’: why Goa is in denial about its big cat population

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Officials claim there are no tigers in Goa. But the poisoning of a mother and three cubs has forced the issue into the open

As a child living in the Vagheri hills at the foot of the Western Ghats, Rajendra Kerkar would often hear the majestic roar of tigers echo across the mountains. It was never greeted with fear by the villagers in this remote corner of northern Goa; the name Vagheri translates as “home of the tigers” and coexistence with India’s national animal was part of their way of life.

Yet according to state authorities, these tigers do not exist; or if they do, they are just passing through. Unlike other states in India, where the presence of tigers has been celebrated, embraced and in many cases exploited for tourism, Goa’s tigers have instead been subjected to a strange charade, whereby their existence has repeatedly been denied or covered up by those in government.

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Stop ignoring us: Rohingya refugees demand role in running camps

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Refugees in Cox’s Bazar complain the international aid community does not utilise their experience and say the lack of education risks creating a ‘lost generation’

In a tea room just outside Bangladesh’s Rohingya refugee camps, a group of young activists fiddle with their phones, which have suddenly started pinging in chorus now they are finally reconnected to the internet.

To circumvent a government internet blackout around the camps in Cox’s Bazar, they have to break a ban on travelling to nearby Bangladeshi towns, from where they can communicate and coordinate messages for the international community.

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‘Honk more, wait more’: Mumbai tests traffic lights that reward the patient driver

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Trial resets traffic lights to red when the noise from car horns goes beyond 85 decibels

There is a truth universally acknowledged by drivers in India: honk your horn loud enough and the traffic lights will surely change to green.

But, fed up of impatient drivers inflicting a deafening roar every time they are forced to stop, police in Mumbai have come up with a new system to punish those who cannot wait at traffic lights in silence.

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‘I’ll put those monsters behind bars’: India’s law school for rape survivors

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Women who were forced into sex work are helped to seek justice by a unique scheme that trains them as lawyers

Saira* wants to become a lawyer so she can put her rapists in jail. “I want to fight my own case and put those monsters behind bars,” says the 31-year-old from West Bengal.

She may achieve her objective. In June, after three years of study, Saira will become the first student to graduate from a unique programme that offers survivors of sexual exploitation the chance to enrol in fully funded law courses.

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‘I’ll destroy your family’: India’s activists tell of false arrest and torture in custody

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Uttar Pradesh’s leading protesters against new citizenship law believe they were rounded up to quell further dissent

At 73 years old, Mohammad Shoaib had grown used to harassment from police. As one of India’s highest-profile activists, he had made a name fighting for Muslims falsely accused of being terrorists by the police, earning him powerful enemies.

But in late December, as he was brought into the police station in Lucknow, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, in the middle of the night, he felt something had shifted. “Police officers abused me badly while I was in their custody and they threatened me in many ways,” he said. “One [senior officer] said to me at the police station: ‘I will fuck your mother. I am going to throw all your family members in jail where they will rot for life. I will destroy your family’.”

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‘Mollah’s life was typical’: the deadly ship graveyards of Bangladesh

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Khalid Mollah died while working among the thousands who dismantle old ships in Chittagong. Now, in a test case that could transform the industry, his widow is suing the firm that sold the vessel for scrap

Khalid Mollah was uneducated, illiterate and out of work when, in early 2009, he left his pregnant wife Hamida Begum to take the 200-mile bus ride to Chittagong from the small village of Gopai, in northern Bangladesh. The young man’s destination was Sitakunda, the notorious, 20km stretch of wide beach and tidal mudflats just north of Bangladesh’s fast-growing second city.

Here, nearly 25,000 people work in dozens of ship-breaking yards, steel-rolling mills and factories to recover and sell on every bit of plate metal, deck, mast, funnel, hatch, gangplank, wire, nut, cable, bolt, wood and rivet that makes up the world’s giant ships.

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Gunman injures Indian student in attack on citizenship protest

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Suspected Hindu nationalist went live on Facebook before firing on march against new law

A suspected Hindu nationalist went live on Facebook to warn he was taking his “final journey”, minutes before opening fire on university students protesting against India’s new citizenship law.

One student was reportedly shot in the hand before police arrested the alleged gunman, who timed his attack on Thursday to coincide with the anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 by a Hindu radical.

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Investigation begins into alleged abuse of more than 500 boys in Afghanistan

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Government says schools to face more scrutiny after report that thousands may have been victims of paedophile ring

Afghanistan’s attorney general has launched an investigation into the alleged abuse of more than 500 schoolboys, following the discovery of a paedophile ring in the country’s Logar province.

Jamshid Rasooli, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office, said a committee had been appointed. “We are in the process of running a comprehensive, impartial investigation,” he said.

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US dropped record number of bombs on Afghanistan last year

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Warplanes dropped 7,423 bombs and other munitions, the most since Pentagon began keeping track in 2006

The US dropped more bombs on Afghanistan in 2019 than any other year since the Pentagon began keeping a tally in 2006, reflecting an apparent effort to force concessions from the Taliban at the negotiating table.

According to new figures released by US central command, US warplanes dropped 7,423 bombs and other munitions on Afghanistan, a nearly eightfold increase from 2015.

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Asia Bibi: Pakistani woman jailed for blasphemy releases photos in exile

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Bibi, freed last year and now in Canada, will release her autobiography on Wednesday

Asia Bibi, the Christian woman who spent eight years on death row in Pakistan for blasphemy, has released two photographs taken in exile, as she prepares for the launch of her autobiography on Wednesday.

The former farm labourer, whose case became one of the most high-profile human rights campaigns in the world, was freed last year and flew to Canada, where she was reunited with her family. They are all believed to be living under assumed identities, at a secret location, as they still receive death threats from extremists.

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Rajasthan’s women encouraged to remove veil in state campaign

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Chief minister argues initiative will empower women, but move sparks controversy in conservative Indian state

When women reach the polling booths to cast their vote in current village council elections in Rajasthan, they may be asked to remove their veil, showing their faces in front of strangers.

The move is controversial in this vast, conservative rural hinterland, where the veil is worn by Hindu and Muslim women as well as other groups.

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International court to rule on Rohingya genocide safeguards

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ICJ could impose protective ‘provisional measures’ to stop further killings in Myanmar

The United Nation’s highest tribunal is to deliver its decision on whether emergency measures are required to prevent Myanmar conducting genocide against its Rohingya Muslim minority.

The momentous pronouncement on Thursday follows a three-day hearing at the international court of justice in The Hague last month at which the Nobel peace prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi defended her country against accusations of systematic human rights abuses and war crimes.

Related: Aung San Suu Kyi pleas with court to dismiss genocide claims

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Ai Weiwei on his new life in Britain: ‘People are at least polite. In Germany, they weren’t’

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Devastated by his time in Germany, which he regards as still Nazi, the artist has moved. As he unveils a powerful virtual reality artwork, he talks about needing a monster to fight – and why he’d like to be a barber

‘When we filmed this,” says Ai Weiwei, “the elephants didn’t know what to do. Once they were used for labour, and now they have lost their job.” The artist is talking about the groundbreaking documentary he has just made about unemployed logging elephants in Myanmar. You watch the film, shot with 360-degree virtual reality technology, through a special headset. Turn your head slowly and your view gradually changes. Turn your head 180 degrees and the picture changes completely.

“When they lost their job,” he continues, “each elephant had a few people to take care of it, so those people also lost their job.” Ai (Weiwei is his first name and means unknown or future) relates to the elephants as readily as he does to the subject of the second part of his VR project – this one about the lives of Rohingya refugees in a Bangladeshi camp.

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‘The river is our home’: Bangladeshi boatmen mourn their receding waters

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Decreased flows caused by water-hungry neighbours, especially India, are damaging river communities

• All photographs by Kaamil Ahmed

Holding his downturned palm level with his waist, Musana Robi Das indicates how tall he was when he started working on Bangladesh’s rivers.

As a child he helped his father ferry villagers across local waterways. Now a tall and spindly 50-year-old, he has had to abandon that life as a boatman. The waters now sit so low that his services are unnecessary. So the past decade has instead been spent repairing shoes inside a dimly lit wooden booth in the village market.

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