Reports

Following the outbreak of the third phase of the Sri Lankan civil war on April 19, 1995, the Sri Lankan armed forces and the LTTE engaged in acts of violence that had by July claimed the lives of hundreds of civilians. Among these were a massacre of 42 Sinhalese villagers in eastern Sri Lanka by the LTTE on May 26; the killing of five Muslim civilians in northern Trincomalee district by soldiers on May 6; and on July 9, the deaths of over 100 persons, including at least 13 infants, in a bombing of a church crowded with refugees displaced by “Operation Leap Forward,” a major military offensive launched on the Jaffna Peninsula that day.

The creation of a system of faceless courts to prosecute those accused of terrorism—justified as a temporary emergency measure—stands out as anti-democratic and in violation of basic human rights principles. Together with the impunity granted to government forces who torture, rape, and murder citizens, justice under Fujimori is two-faced: benevolent to soldiers, punitive to civilians.

Millions of workers in Pakistan are held in contemporary forms of slavery. Throughout the country employers forcibly extract labor from adults and children, restrict their freedom of movement, and deny them the right to negotiate the terms of their employment. Employers coerce such workers into servitude through physical abuse, forced confinement, and debt-bondage.

One year after President Clinton unconditionally renewed Most Favored Nation status for China and international pressure on China to improve its human rights practices dropped off dramatically, the Chinese government continues to impose tight controls on dissent and to engage in a pattern of systematic abuse of prisoners.

Hundreds of thousands of women and children are employed in Indian brothels—many of them lured or kidnapped from Nepal and sold into conditions of virtual slavery. The victims of this international trafficking network routinely suffer serious physical abuse, including rape, beatings, arbitrary imprisonment and exposure to AIDS.

On April 8, 1995, senior Mexican army officers invited us to discuss the human rights situation in Chiapas and offered information on the internal investigations conducted by the army into several violent incidents of the 1994 Chiapas uprising of the Zapatista National Liberation Army and its suppression.

By early 1995, the international tribunal established by the U.N. to adjudicate war crimes and crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia had indicted 22 individuals for serious violations of humanitarian law, including the crime of genocide.

eginning in June 1994, the government of Iraq issued at least nine decrees that establish severe penalties, including amputation, branding and the death penalty for criminal offenses such as theft, corruption, currency speculation and military desertion.

Haiti faced its first opportunity for genuine, democratic elections since the 1990 contest that brought Pres. Aristide to office with the parliamentary and local elections held on June 25, 1995.

This report — the fourth in a series — documents Russian forces' flagrant human rights violations against the civilian population in the ongoing conflict with Chechen rebels.

Two years after a bloody and devastating civil war, the human rights situation in Tajikistan remains precarious. Since the spring of 1993, refugees and internally displaced persons have returned to their villages in the southern province of Khatlon, from which the largest number of people were displaced following the war.

The U.S. has pursued the development of at least 10 different tactical laser weapons that have the potential of blinding individuals. The existence of most of these programs is not known to the American public, Congress, or even throughout the military, and services responsible for laser weapons seem largely unaware of the programs in research and development in other services.

For the last decade South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal region has been troubled by political violence. This conflict escalated during the 4 years of negotiations for a transition to democratic rule, and reached the status of a virtual civil war in the last months before the national elections of April 1994, significantly disrupting the election process.

After a year in exile, the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide have rebuilt their military infrastructure, largely in Zaire, and are rearming themselves in preparation for a violent return to Rwanda.

One year after the genocide began in Rwanda, the crisis continues. Despite calls for justice inside and outside the country, no criminal trials, national or international, have taken place. The Rwandan government is now arresting some 1,500 persons a week, producing life-threatening overcrowding and appalling treatment in the prisons and fostering insecurity among the population at large.