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The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice

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Issue 12, July-August 2004

News from AP Partners:

• Chixoy Dam report nears completion, AP intern assists Rights Action in research
• Rights to generic medicines must be upheld, CDES says
• HHR finds justice slow-moving in Sri Lanka
• Amazon school emphasizes 'learning by doing'

News from AP:

• AP launches campaign to change Dictionary.com's 'Gypsy' definition
• AP nominates two partners for World Culture Open Award
• Summer Interns publish reports from abroad

News From AP Partners:

Chixoy Dam Report Nears Completion, AP Intern Assists Rights Action In Research

This summer, AP intern Carmen Morcos has witnessed firsthand the ongoing struggle of indigenous Guatemalans who were displaced and targeted for genocide during the country's bloody civil war. Carmen's work with Rights Action, an AP partner in Guatemala, is part of a much larger effort to document the human and environmental costs of a two decades-old development project that continues to create hardship for the communities in its wake.

Rights Action has been working as part of a coalition of NGOs to assess the legacy issues of the Chixoy Dam. Other partners in the Chixoy Dam Legacy Issues Project include the Center for Political Ecology, International Rivers Network, and Reform the World Bank, Italy. This fall they will complete a comprehensive history and assessment of the Chixoy Dam project and its aftermath, with the hopes of encouraging a negotiated settlement involving those who funded the project and the communities who paid the ultimate price to develop the nation's main source of electrical energy.

The Chixoy Dam was built in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at the height of Guatemala's violent civil war. Funded largely by the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the dam project required that multiple communities of indigenous people be displaced from their ancestral homes. Forced resettlement took place without adequate compensation, and often turned violent. Massacres of indigenous people occurred in Rio Negro, Pacoxom, Xococ, Agua Fria and Los Encuentros.

Ms. Morcos, a graduate student at Georgetown University, has been collecting testimony from displaced community members, mapping the areas affected by the project, and bearing witness to the devastation endured by survivors of mass murder.

In one of her earliest blogs, or online reports, on AP's web site, Ms. Morcos described the current situations for many community members.  "As of now, reparations and resettlement have gone as far as displacing community members of Río Negro to the village of Pacux, which is a small area of land at the edge of Rabinal (4 hours north of the capital), with wood board shacks, dirt roads, almost no electricity and barely any running water. This is in total contrast to the rich fertile land the community used to live on which is now flooded by the dam's basin."

On June 14, she watched as the remains of men, women and children were recovered from a deep well that had served as a clandestine mass grave in Pacux, Guatemala. "[The forensic archaeologists] have been digging for over a month and have found corpses of mainly men, all in atrocious positions with fractured or burned bones, wires or ropes around their necks, hands tied together, anything horrific one can imagine," she wrote.

The overall goal of the Chixoy Dam Legacy Issues Project is to encourage the World Bank and others to recognize their outstanding obligations to the affected communities and fund culturally appropriate and meaningful remedies. The Coalition is producing a report that documents, with testimony and supporting evidence, the dam development history and its links to environmental degradation, loss of resources, poverty, and community health. In addition to critically assessing the development planning and social impact mitigation process, the report outlines an array of community problems directly linked to failures in the compensation and resettlement program, and identifies remedial needs that have been described and prioritized by the affected communities.

Whatever the results of the report, it's clear that the affected communities will continue in their quest for justice. Ms. Morcos' blogs show the lengths and hardship survivors will go through to find remedy for their suffering. Four communities are writing books detailing their history, and hundreds of people are involved in giving testimony or organizing themselves to present their case to the world. At one meeting, "…community members came from many different communities, some 6 hours away, just to be a part of this whole process and have their voices heard. It was so heartwarming it was almost heart wrenching, considering what these people have been through. Many had had their wives and children massacred, some had seen it with their own eyes," wrote Ms. Morcos.

• For more information on the history of the Chixoy Dam project, read the Advocacy Project's campaign profile "Struggle Against Impunity: The Rio Negro Campaign"

• Read Carmen's blogs from the summer

Rights To Generic Drugs Must Be Upheld, CDES Says

Weighing in on an issue of increasing importance to health rights advocates around the world, Juana Sotomayor, of the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CDES) joined other civil society organizations in demanding that no new limits be put on citizens' access to generic drugs.

On July 9, CDES, an AP partner in Quito, joined representatives of Doctors Without Borders, Red Cross Ecuador and twenty other concerned organizations, including national networks working with HIV positive communities, in an open letter to Ecuadorian President Lucio Gutierrez. The letter declared "there is no justification for realizing any type of modification [to existing law] that would endanger the access of the Ecuadorian population to generic drugs."

Signatories to the letter said they had learned of an Executive Decree under consideration regarding generic drug rights that would not even be in line with the agreements signed by the World Trade Organization in the Doha Declaration. Instead, the decree "would favor the monopoly held by the large pharmaceutical companies." Such a decree would "flagrantly violate the recommendations proposed by the human rights organs of the United Nation," the letter stated.

Drug patents, and the rights of countries to develop and sell generic versions of brand name, foreign-produced drugs has been an issue of contention in many international trade negotiations in recent years. In Ecuador, current law allows widespread sale of generic drugs, resulting in dramatically lower drug costs for the average Ecuadorian.

After the letter was published, Ecuadorian government spokesperson Yolanda Torres emphatically denied that the government was considering a change in existing law in the daily newspaper El Hoy.

The open letter helped to launch dialogue about the issue in Ecuador and internationally. Two Ecuadorian television shows, Dia a Dia and 30 minutos, ran stories in connection with the generic drug issue as it relates to HIV treatment worldwide. Several additional organizations, not only in Ecuador but also from Bolivia, Argentina and Costa Rica have joined the campaign by either signing the letter or sending their own version. The letter has also been widely circulated on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and HIV mailing lists.

• AP summer intern Christina Fetterhoff is working with CDES this summer. To read her reports, visit the CDES project page.

HHR Finds Justice Slow-Moving In Sri Lanka

The Home for Human Rights (HHR), AP's partner in Sri Lanka, has seen little progress in its campaign for student victims of police violence at Sri Pada College in Hatton, Sri Lanka. The frustrating pace of seeking justice for victims in Sri Lanka is all too typical, according to Michael Keller, an AP summer intern working with HHR this summer.

At Sri Pada College, an institution founded to educate Tamils in the Hill Country, police violently suppressed a student protest earlier this summer. Students claimed that their peaceful protest over school conditions was interrupted by police, who then advanced on the students with batons. Several students were injured so severely that they required hospitalization. The campaign was reported in AP's May/June newsletter.

HHR attempted to lodge a Fundamental Human Rights application on behalf of four injured students, but reported this month that a Sri Lankan Supreme Court judge dismissed the case. The judge told an HHR lawyer that the victims had provoked the police to attack them, and therefore HHR's Fundamental Rights application would not be accepted. 

HHR will now make a complaint to the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka and to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The judge's reaction is typical, as the Supreme Court often takes the side of the authorities rather than the petitioners, according to M. Sanathani of HHR.

The students of Sri Pada have few options, as the school is the only teacher's college serving Hill Country Tamils. Mr. Keller says the Sri Pada case shows the dead-end path of many human rights initiatives. "So there's discrimination, a protest, a violent response, and then what? Another protest? That's obviously no longer an effective option," said Keller.  "It typifies human rights work in Sri Lanka: you can only bring so much attention to a problem facing Tamils before you've pushed past the limits that the government is willing to accept." Mr. Keller's reports from HHR this summer offer a glimpse into the crucial, but often slow-moving legal realm of human rights work.  Allegations of police misconduct in an ethnic riot in Kandapola, and possible evidence of ongoing police detention and virtual enslavement of hundreds of Tamils - in one location alone - for over 15 years, are dramatic examples of the need for HHR's work. However, the plodding pace required to sift through government procedures also exemplifies the daunting task of seeking justice in a flawed system.

• Mr. Keller's weekly reports from Sri Lanka are available on AP's website, and offer a first-person account of the delicate yet urgent issues HHR faces each day.
• Read the May/June article on the Sri Pada college incident.

Amazon School Emphasizes 'Learning By Doing'

Bringing together representative leaders of multiple indigenous and campesino groups throughout Central and South America, the fourth session of the Amazon School, a joint initiative by CDES, AP's partner in Ecuador, and Earth Rights International, begins the first week of August.

The school is intended to strengthen the advocacy capacity of Amazon indigenous and campesino organizations as they fight for their rights in the face of common problems, such as those caused by extractive industries. Participants learn skills such as media campaigning, workshop design and facilitation, documentation, networking, and public speaking.

School session last from one to three months, and work to boost the first-hand knowledge of participants and their organization with a teaching philosophy of "learning by doing." Participants live together and attend classes and workshops for eight hours a day, which emphasize practical approaches to current issues.

Participants and teachers come from broad backgrounds, organizations, and countries. Over the years, 14 different indigenous groups from Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Guatemala have taken part in the seminars. Additionally, the campesino-mestizo peoples of Ecuador have taken part, with 4 representatives participating in past sessions.  Such diversity fosters exchange of knowledge unavailable from other sources, and encourages the development of networks between groups.

Christina Fetterhoff, an AP summer intern working with CDES this summer, will visit the school and report on this year's session in her online reports, or blogs. The school runs to September 10.

News from The Advocacy Project:

The Advocacy Project Launches Campaign to Change Dictionary.com's 'Gypsy' Definition

The Advocacy Project, with support from the Roma Information Project (RIP), an AP partner, and other prominent international Roma organizations, has launched an online petition campaign to protest an offensive definition of 'Gypsy' in one of the most popular online dictionaries, Dictionary.com.

One of Dictionary.com's entries for Gypsy is "one of a vagabond race... living by theft, fortune-telling, horse-jockeying and tinkering." Dictionary.com did not respond to e-mail requests from the Advocacy Project to address the racist and misleading definition.

AP has sponsored a petition that has been signed by 137 people in its first week, publicized only by word of mouth. The campaign is featured on the Czech version of the BBC online, and on the web site of Romea.cz, a leading Roma rights group in the Czech Republic. Members of The National Association of Gypsy Women (UK), the American Romani Alliance, and the international All Gypsies Group have signed the petition, as well as the Honorable Ian F. Hancock, of the University of Texas' Romani Archives and Documentation Center.

 "It never ceases to amaze me," wrote one petition signer. "Any such comments regarding any other ethnic group would result in lawsuits and human rights groups out for blood but the stereotypes and slurs regarding our people remain intact." Another said, "British newspapers are currently being sued for using this kind of language about 'Gypsies' - it is very outdated. Today, it's just plain racist."

As there are other, acceptable definitions under Dictionary.com's "Gypsy" entry, the Advocacy Project requests that this definition be removed or labeled as offensive slang, as other offensive racial slurs are labeled on the site.

Dictionary.com's disclaimer policy states that their entries are from third-party sources, and that therefore complaints should be made to the publisher of the offensive entry, in this case, the 1998 electronic version of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, originally published in 1913. The most recent editions of Webster's no longer contain the offensive definition. The Advocacy Project contacted Patrick Cassidy of MICRA, the company that created the 1998 electronic version of the 1913 Webster's. Cassidy confirmed that the definition in question dated from 1913, and said MICRA was willing to update their definition, but that it would be up to Dictionary.com to use the updated version.

AP will send a letter to Dictionary.com on August 2, presenting the petitions and requesting, again, that the definition be changed or removed.

The Advocacy Project's initiative is part of its 'Friends of Roma' outreach campaign, a listserv for individuals and organizations concerned about Roma issues.

• Sign the petition
• Subscribe to the Friends of Roma listserv, or read past postings to the list.

The Advocacy Project Nominates Two Partners For World Culture Open Award

In July, The Advocacy Project nominated Francis Xavier of Home for Human Rights (HHR) in Sri Lanka and Dzeno Association's Radio Rota project in the Czech Republic for Humanitarian Service awards in the World Culture Open, a competitive, worldwide search that awards a $100,000 prize. HHR and Dzeno Association are AP partners.

The World Culture Open honors groups and individuals that are "engaged in making a real and measurable difference in the lives of people in their community, their country or their world."

Both partners are well deserving of this honor. Mr. Xavier has been documenting human rights abuses in war-ravaged Sri Lanka for almost 30 years. He and two other Tamil friends formed Home for Human Rights in 1997 to document the abuses of the state against its citizens, regardless of their ethnicity or religion. Throughout the persistent bullying and interrogations by the Sri Lankan government, Indian Peacekeeping Forces, and various militant Tamil organizations, as well as the bombing and shelling of his Jaffna offices, the military occupation of his Jaffna home, and the "disappearances" of two co-workers, Mr. Xavier continued his valiant investigative work.

In fact, he expanded it to include human rights monitoring in even the most remote corners of the island. In addition to his advocacy efforts, Mr. Xavier used his painstakingly gathered interviews, affidavits, police reports and other documents to support his quest for legal redress on all levels of Sri Lanka's corrupt judicial system for thousands of victims of torture, arbitrary detentions, disappearances, massacres, and other government abuses.

With a different cause in a different part of the world, AP found Dzeno Association's Radio Rota program to also be a laudable nominee for the WCO. Dzeno aims to support and develop traditional Romany values and solidarity among Roma regardless of social status. All of Dzeno's varied activities are geared toward this goal, but Radio Rota, the Dzeno Association's web-radio station, takes this mission one step further.  The station aims to develop, preserve, and share Romany culture, as well as educate the world – in a Romany voice – about the issues facing the Roma today. 

Radio Rota has been working since 2002 to advance and promote human rights through news, culture, and the creative arts, as well as through an important training program that prepares gifted Roma for the professional worlds of journalism and mass media.  The entire Romany nation benefits each time a talented Roma makes a name for him or herself in the mainstream media, and each time an all-Roma organization proves itself to be a professional and qualified broadcaster.  

AP wishes these nominees the best of luck. Successful nominees will be notified July 31, and will then make a presentation of their work this fall at a competition at Lincoln Center in New York. In addition to Humanitarian Service, the WCO bestows honors in the categories of Creative Arts and Holistic Wellbeing.

• Visit Dzeno online.

The Advocacy Project Interns' Reports Published

AP summer interns post weekly online accounts of their work with partners abroad, as a way of sharing, in real-time, the experience of their work with grassroots civil society organizations. But some AP interns have gone farther. By finding additional outlets for their field reports, the interns have taken the important but often unheard messages of our partners to an even broader audience.

Stacy Kosko, who is working with Dzeno Association, has had her blogs reprinted in two local papers in her Massachusetts hometown. An article she wrote for Dzeno about holocaust commemorations will be reprinted on the UN Observer and International Report's web site, an independent journal of international affairs.

One of Pia Schneider's blogs from Bosnia was published as a feature story on OneWorld.net, an online global network of over 1500 human rights and sustainable development organizations. 'Tales of Survival,' in OneWorld's July 8th Global Daily Headlines, highlighted Ms. Scheider's profiles of the women at Bosfam, AP's partner in Eastern Bosnia. "Writing about my life here at Bosfam and in Bosnia would not be complete without writing about the people I have grown very of fond of and with whom I interact on a daily basis – the staff and weavers of Bosfam," Ms. Schneider wrote.

• To read more about the summer projects or AP interns' blogs, visit the 2004 Summer Interns project page.
• In 2003, the online blogging by AP summer interns was featured in Wired magazine.

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