Category Archives: South and Central Asia

US plans to evacuate thousands of interpreters before Afghanistan pullout

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• Operation expected to include up to 50,000 people

• Interpreters and families fear reprisals from Taliban

The United States is planning to evacuate a group of vulnerable Afghan interpreters before the US military completes its withdrawal from Afghanistan so they can wrap up their visa applications from safety, according to officials.

The evacuation of the at-risk Afghans will include their family members for a total of as many as 50,000 people, a senior Republican lawmaker told Reuters.

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Water of death: how arsenic is poisoning rural communities in India

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‘A crisis is brewing’, experts warn, with contaminated water exposing villagers to increased risk of cancer and affecting children’s brain development

Nine members of Pankaj Rai’s family have died from cancer over the past 20 years. But the 25-year-old farmer from Bihar only found out their deaths were likely a result of arsenic poisoning when his father got sick.

In 2017, Pankaj took his father, Ganesh Rai, to the Mahavir Cancer Institute & Research Centre in Patna. Ganesh had stage 4 kidney cancer. But Dr Arun Kumar, a scientist at the institute, identified the severe skin lesions on his body as signs of arsenic poisoning.

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‘A haven for free-thinkers’: Pakistan creatives mourn loss of progressive arts space

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‘Tragic’ closure of Sabeen Mahmud’s community venue T2F in Karachi comes as PM Imran Khan accused of fostering censorship and intolerance

Danial Shah turned to Sabeen Mahmud, for help with his first photo exhibition when all other organisations refused to show his work. Shah’s photographs cover political and cultural issues, such as local elections and women’s rights. Some refused to work with him on political grounds, while others did not reply at all.

After a meeting at Mahmud’s community space, T2F, in Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, she agreed to host his exhibition. But Mahmud, a 40-year-old human rights activist who oversaw a programme of progressive arts at T2F, did not get to see Shah’s first exhibition. She was murdered a few months after their meeting.

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Myanmar: Facebook promotes content urging violence against coup protesters – study

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Posts ranging from wanted posters to death threats remain online for months, breaching platform’s own standards

Facebook is promoting content that incites violence against Myanmar’s anti-coup protesters and amplifies junta misinformation, despite promising to clamp down on the misuse of its platform, according to a study.

An investigation by the rights group Global Witness found that Facebook’s recommendation algorithm continues to invite users to view content that breaches its own policies. After liking a Myanmar military fan page, which did not contain recent posts violating Facebook’s policies, the rights group found that Facebook suggested several pro-military pages that contained abusive content.

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Deadly traffic: the fuel drivers caught up in Pakistan-Iran border tensions

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As the two countries crack down on smuggling, those forced to cross the border ‘for survival’ face a perilous journey

Karim Jan* spent the festival of Eid al-Fitr sitting in the scorching May sun as he had spent the previous five days, waiting in a long queue of traffic to get into Iran. Like hundreds of other drivers, Jan came to this desolate town of Mand, on the Pakistan border with Iran, from across Balochistan.

As they waited, some drivers slept in their Iranian pickup trucks , known as Zamyads, while others slept out under the open sky.

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Myanmar reports highest Covid numbers since coup as concerns over health system grow

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State hospitals are barely functioning as humanitarian crisis unfolds across the country

Myanmar has reported what is believed to be its highest daily increase in Covid cases since the February coup, as concerns grow over the country’s collapsed health system and the junta’s continued crackdown on medics.

Myanmar’s Covid response was plunged into chaos when the military seized power on 1 February, detaining the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi.

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Hungary’s LGBT protests and Juneteenth Day: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

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A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms from China to Colombia

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United Nations condemns coup in Myanmar and calls for arms embargo

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Rare move by general assembly demonstrates widespread global opposition to military junta

In a rare move, the UN general assembly has condemned Myanmar’s military coup and called for an arms embargo against the country in a resolution demonstrating widespread global opposition to the junta and demanding the restoration of the country’s democratic transition.

Related: Trial of Aung San Suu Kyi begins in closed courtoom in Myanmar

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‘We have more in common than what separates us’: refugee stories, told by refugees

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In One Thousand Dreams, award-winning photographer Robin Hammond hands the camera to refugees. Often reduced by the media’s toxic or well-meaning narratives, the portraits and interviews capture a different and more complex tale

Robin Hammond has spent two decades crisscrossing the developing world and telling other people’s stories. From photographing the Rohingya forced out of Myanmar and rape survivors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to documenting the lives of people in countries where their sexuality is illegal, his work has earned him award after award.

But for his latest project the photographer has embarked on a paradigm shift: to remove himself – and others like him – from the process entirely. Instead, as part of an in-depth exploration of the refugee experience in Europe, the stories of those featured are told by those who, arguably, know them best: other refugees.

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‘Disability is possibility’: a mission to bust myths in India – photo essay

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The photographer Vicky Roy has been travelling around the country documenting people with disabilities. The project, Everyone is Good at Something, hopes to tell their stories and challenge the stigma they face

  • Photographs by Vicky Roy

When he isn’t working on the farm or making things out of jute, Gobinda Majumdar likes to walk to a tea stall near his home in Assam to buy sweets for his nieces. All this he explains with tactile signing, the only means of communication for the 37-year-old, who cannot speak and has no hearing or sight.

Born deaf, Majumdar then went blind at the age of two after contracting rubella. Life has its challenges but he hopes to find a wife. “My younger brother is married so why not me?” he told the photographer Vicky Roy, who visited him in Kamrup district as part of a project to share stories of people with disabilities in rural India.

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‘Where should we go?’: thousands left homeless as Karachi clears waterways

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As Pakistan’s supreme court backs bulldozing of homes blamed for floods, critics say government has no proper plans for residents

Maqsooda Bibi, 62, did not know the house she had lived in all her life would be demolished, forcing her whole family to become homeless. But on Monday, Pakistan’s supreme court backed the Sindh government in bulldozing her home and hundreds of others, legalising the eviction of thousands who live along narrow waterways – nullahs – that crisscross Karachi.

The verdict came as Bibi and hundreds of others held a protest outside the court. “We hoped that the court would ask the government not to make us homeless, but it did the opposite. Our children also protested on Sunday and urged the supreme court to stop demolition. It seems no one here cares for the future of the poor.”

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High in the Himalayas, villagers hit by Covid are left to fend for themselves

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In India’s remote peaks, the pandemic’s toll is worsened by lack of medical facilities, roads and information

Phalguni Devi has spent a fortnight living in a cattle shed. Looking out on a rainy afternoon in early June, she worries that if the rain does not let up, her fever will worsen.

Devi, 51, shares the shed with a cow and two cats, and this has taken its toll. Herbal concoctions have not worked and the visit to a pharmacist in the nearest town, in the Nijmola valley in the Himalayas, which took an entire day, did not help.

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UN put Rohingya ‘at risk’ by sharing data without consent, says rights group

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Refugees tell Human Rights Watch they fear forced repatriation and persecution after personal details passed on to Myanmar

The UN may have put hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees at risk of persecution or involuntary repatriation back to Myanmar after improperly collecting and sharing refugees’ personal information with Bangladesh, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), which is urging an investigation.

Over the past three years, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) has registered more than 800,000 Rohingya refugees living in Bangladeshi camps in order to provide them with identity cards needed to access essential aid and services.

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Eradicating polio is finally within reach. Why is the UK taking its foot off the pedal? | Anne Wafula Strike

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Instead of cutting the aid budget – including 95% from the plan to stamp out the disease – Britain should take a global lead

Despite the Covid pandemic, there have been just two recorded cases of wild polio in 2021 – in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the two remaining hiding places for the disease. But eradication is not guaranteed. Polio is virulent and spreads quickly. Even one case poses a threat to unvaccinated children everywhere, which is why a new strategy launched last week by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) outlines a plan to utilise this small window of opportunity for the world to end polio for good.

A 99.9% fall in polio cases globally in recent decades is thanks in large part to the GPEI and its supporters. The British government’s recent announcement that it will slash its contributions to the GPEI by more than 95% has been a body blow. The funding cut amounts to almost a quarter of the annual World Health Organization polio eradication budget.

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Blood brother: the Kashmiri man who is India’s biggest donor

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The ‘blood man’ of conflict-racked Kashmir has donated 174 pints of blood since 1980 but feels ‘crushed’ by his poverty

Shabir Hussain Khan was taking an afternoon nap when he heard a commotion outside his house. A friend had been injured in a football match and had lost a lot of blood. Khan, who did not have any transport, rushed to the hospital by foot to donate some. It was 4 July 1980. Yesterday the man known locally as the “blood man of Kashmir” donated his 174th pint of his blood to strangers at the public hospital close to his Srinagar home.

“Blood is not something you can buy in the market,” says Khan, who has an O-negative blood group. “In those days blood donation was not common, nor were blood banks. The way blood is available readily now, it was not like that before. Also there was no connectivity at that time. We only had radios and two or three landline phones in the entire locality.”

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Delta variant of Covid spreading rapidly and detected in 74 countries

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Concerns over impact on poorer countries, while richer governments try different containment measures

The Delta variant of Covid-19, first identified in India, has been detected in 74 countries and continues to spread rapidly amid fears that it is poised to become the dominant strain worldwide.

With outbreaks of the main Delta strain and several of its sub-lineages confirmed in China, the US, Africa, Scandinavia and the Pacific, concern increasingly is focusing on how it appears to be more transmissible as well as causing more serious illness.

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UK aid cuts to Bangladesh NGO a ‘gut punch’, says charity head

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Withdrawal from long-term partnership catastrophic, says Brac, affecting women and girls’ education and those in extreme poverty

The UK government’s funding cuts to the world’s largest international non-governmental organisation are a “gut punch” after a successful 10-year £450m partnership, according to a director.

Asif Saleh, executive director of Brac Bangladesh, said the cuts will leave hundreds of thousands of girls without an education, millions of women and girls without access to family planning and hundreds of thousands of people in extreme poverty without support.

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‘I’m sacrificing myself’: agony of Kabul’s secret sex workers

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Decades of war and grinding poverty have forced more Afghans into risky double lives to survive

When Zainab met her first client almost two years ago, she was drunk, drugged-up, and had passed out by the time he started raping her. She had never touched alcohol before, but was told she’d be better off unconscious. Terrified, she reluctantly agreed.

The man was gone when the then 18-year-old woke up; her body in pain, her thoughts filled with regret.

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Jailing of Afghans for Lesbos migrant camp fire a ‘parody of justice’

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Lawyers criticise 10-year terms given to four asylum seekers, saying three should have been tried in juvenile court

Draconian prison sentences handed down to four Afghan youths found guilty of starting the fire that destroyed the Moria migrant camp on the Greek island of Lesbos last year have been described as a “parody of justice”.

Defence lawyers called the penalties “unfair”, saying three of the accused were under the age of 18 at the time and should have been tried before a juvenile court. The asylum seekers received 10-year jail terms each.

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‘My dream was buried’: the children of India orphaned by Covid

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Officials and NGOs say orphans now face the double threat of neglect and being vulnerable to exploitation

Nitish Kumar will never forget the day he and his sisters buried their dead mother in the back garden.

Just 32, Priyanka Devi had died from Covid on 3 May. Neighbours and relatives refused to help with her burial, and all the family’s money had gone on hospital fees.

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