Friday, October 31, 2008

ஸ்டாலின் கொன்றவர்களை ரஷ்ய மனித உரிமை இயக்கம் நினைவு கூர்கிறது

உலகத்தில் பல நாடுகளிலும் மனித உரிமை இயக்கங்கள் இடது சாரிகளின் கைப்பிடியில் அகப்பட்டு மூடத்தனத்தின் குறியீடாக மாறி இருப்பது நமக்குத் தெரியும். இந்திய மனித உரிமை இயக்கத்தில் பெரும் பங்கு வகிப்பது யாரென்று பார்த்தால் யாரெல்லாம் ஆயுதம் தாங்கிப் போர் செய்து அரசாங்கத்தைக் கவிழ்ப்பதுதான் தம் முதற்கடமை என்று நினைக்கிறாரோ, யார் தாம் நினைத்த கருத்தோடு ஒப்பாதவரெல்லாம் கயவர்கள், சுடப்ப்ட்டு, வதைக்கப்பட்டு கொல்லப்படத்தக்கவர் என்று நினைக்கிறாரோ அந்த வகைக் குரூர சிந்தனையாளர்கள், ஜனநாயகம் என்பதில் சிறிதும் நம்பிக்கை இல்லாத வன்முறையாளர்களை எல்லாம் இங்கு காணலாம். இது பல பத்தாண்டுகளாகவே இப்படித்தான் இருக்கிறது. உண்மையில் மக்கள் மீது செலுத்தப்படும் வன்முறை, குரூரம், லஞ்ச ஊழல், வறுமைக்குக் காரணமான பிரிவினை வாதங்கள், குறுங்குழு வன்முறைகள், நாட்டை உடைக்க நினைக்கும் அற்பர்களின் ஆயுதப் போராட்டங்கள் ஆகியவற்றைப் பற்றி சிறு மூச்சு கூட விட மாட்டார்கள்.
இந்துக்கள்தாம் வன்முறையாளர், கிமு இரண்டாம் நூற்றாண்டில் இந்து மதம் நூறு பேரைக் கழுவேற்றியதை இன்று வரை மறைத்தே வைத்திருக்கின்றனர் என்று கண் முன் ஒரு பருக்கைச் சோற்றை வைத்துக் கொண்டு அது உலகை மறைக்கிறது என்று வாதம் இடுவர். அவர்களுடைய நாயகர்கள் யார் என்று பாருங்கள். ஸ்டாலின், மாவோ, லெனின், செகுவேரா, பால்பாட், கிம் ஜோங் இப்படி கொடுங்கோலரசு, கட்டாய உழைப்பு முகாம்கள், பெருந்திரள் கொலைகள் ஆகியவற்றைப் பயன்படுத்தி தம் மக்களை வெறெந்த எதிரிகளும் கொல்லாத அளவு கொன்று குவித்த கொலை பாதகர்கள்தாம்.

இன்று கூடத் தமிழ் சிறுபத்திரிகைகளில் இந்த இடது சாரி காரியக் குருடர்களின் பெரும் புளுகுக் கட்டுரைகள் அறிவுக் கொழுந்து என்று உலா வருகின்றன. ரஷ்யர்களை விட ரஷ்ய வரலாறு கூடுதலாகத் தமக்குத் தெரியும் என்று திமிராக வாதம் செய்யக் கூடிய புத்திசாலிகள் இவர்கள். ஆனால் உலக வரலாறு இந்தக் சித்திரக் குள்ளர்களின் கோணல் புத்திக்கு அப்பால்பட்ட பரந்த வெளியில் தேடுபவருக்கெல்லாம் புரியும் வகையில் தெரியும் வகையில் உலவிக் கொண்டிருக்கிறது.
தமிழ் நாட்டின் சிறு வேலி அடைப்பைத் தாண்டி சஞ்சரித்தால் உங்களுக்கெல்லாம் இந்த கிணற்றுத் தவளைகளின் இராக்கால ஓலம் இசை அல்ல, வேறு சுதந்திரக் குயிலோசை உலகெங்கும் இன்று ஒலிக்கிறது என்பது புரியும். தமிழ்ச் சிறுபத்திரிகை உலகின், ஏன் பெரும்பத்திரிகை உலகின் அவலச் சுவை நிறைந்த பொய்கள் நிறைந்த உலகைத் தாண்டி வாருங்கள். இந்த ரஷ்ய மக்களின் சோகத்தைக் காணுங்கள். ஸ்டாலின் பற்றிய பெரும் புளுகை ஏன் இந்த இடது சாரியினர் இன்னமும் தைரியமாக நம்முன் அவிழ்த்து விடுகிறார் என்பதைப் பற்றி யோசியுங்கள்.
_________________________________________________




The Moscow Times » Issue 4021 » News
Igor Tabakov / MT
Schoolchildren waiting to read out the names of victims of Stalin's purges during a 12-hour vigil on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad on Wednesday.
Names of Stalin's Dead Echo Off KGB's Square
30 October 2008By John Wendle / Staff Writer





"Kokarev, Alexander Danilovich, 30 years old. Expelled from the communal farm for being a kulak. Shot Jan. 31, 1938."

"Kokkinaky, Grigory Georgiyevich, 50 years old. Member of the council of defense attorneys. Shot March 8, 1938."

The names of the dead echoed softly off the face of the former secret police headquarters on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad on Wednesday as people young and old stepped up to a microphone to read off a handful of names from a list of those killed during the Stalinist purges.

Reaching the end of her list, Lyudmila Kazantseva's voice cracked, and she added one more name -- a name scribbled in by hand.

"And my father, Kazantsev, Yakob Yegorovich, 33 years old. Shot June 22, 1938. Don't believe that these crimes could not be repeated. Please, never forget," she entreated a small crowd of readers and observers.

On the eve of Thursday's Day of Victims of Political Repressions, the human rights group Memorial decided to hold a solemn ceremony on the square to read aloud a list of 30,000 people killed in Stalin's purges. The list was comprised solely of Muscovites who died in 1938.

Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin, the first reader at 10 a.m. Wednesday, called for the creation of a national memorial commemorating the victims of Soviet political repressions.


Igor Tabakov / MT
People reading off names of people killed in Stalin's purges Wednesday.

"It is good that we frequently recall the heroes of World War II. ... But remaining in the shadows is a no less enormous, monstrous layer of victims of political repressions," Lukin said.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Memorial head Arseny Roginsky have suggested that a monument or museum be erected at Moscow's Butyrsky prison or near the Moscow-Volga Canal, built by gulag prisoners between 1932 and 1937.

"This is a question for public consideration, but, in my opinion, it must be created in Moscow," Lukin said.

Yelena Zhemkova, the executive director of Memorial, said in an interview that she favored turning Butyrsky into a museum of the repressions and purges.

Some 300 people were expected to read out names by the time the ceremony ended at 10 p.m., Zhemkova said.

A steady flow of people showed up to read throughout the day, including the family members of those killed, like Kazantseva, as well as groups of university students and schoolchildren.

"Everyone knows what happened, but there is little exact information," said Viktoria Boguslavchik, 19, a student who volunteers with Memorial.

The sentiment was echoed by Kazantseva, 70, whose father was taken to Siberia and shot when she was only a few months old.

"I'm afraid people will forget, not because they are better off now and not because of the financial crisis, but because there is no information," Kazantseva said.


© Copyright 2007. The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.

மத நல்லிணக்கத்துக்காக 133 இந்துக் கோவில்களை மலேசிய முஸ்லிம்கள் இடித்தனர்.

இது கொஞ்ச நாள் முன்னேயே பரபரப்பாகத் தெரிய வந்த செய்திதான். செய்தி எல்லாம் மார்க்சிஸ்டு தேசங்களில் பல வருடம் கழித்துதான் மக்களுக்குத் தெரியும். கேரளா பாதி மார்க்சிஸ்டு என்பதால் சில மாதங்கள் கழித்துத் தெரிகிறது. இருக்கட்டும், இருக்கட்டும், எப்பவாவது தெரிஞ்சிகிட்டா சர்த்தான்.
தோழர்களுக்கோ, தோழர்களோடு ஒரே வண்டில போறதுதான் சொர்க்கத்துக்கு வழின்னு நெனக்கிற ஜன்மங்களுக்கோ இந்துக் கோவிலை இடிச்சா என்ன, அவெங்க இருக்கற வீட்டையே இடிச்சா என்ன? எல்லாம் நன்மைக்கேன்னு இருக்கணும்னு அவுங்க தாத்தன் பாட்டி எல்லாம் சொல்லி வச்சபடியே இடிச்ச புளி கணக்கா இருந்து கிட்டு இருக்காங்க போலெருக்கு. இருக்கட்டும், இருக்கட்டும், என்னிக்காவது புளியும் கரையுமில்லா? கரைஞ்சு புலியாகிடல்லென்னாலும், குறெஞ்சது வெந்நித் தண்ணியாகவாவது ஆகிட்டா சரித்தான்.

ஆனாப் பாருங்க, இந்த அமைதிமார்க்கத்து ஆளுங்க எப்பவுமே தனி வழிதான். நம்ம ஊரில இருக்கேல ஒரேயடியா மத நல்லிணக்கத்துக்காக எப்பவும் போராடி உருகித் தண்ணியா வழிஞ்சிடறாங்க இல்லியா. பாவம் இங்க அவங்க கையில இன்னும் அரசாங்கம் கெடக்கல்லெ, கெடச்சுதுன்னு வையிங்க எவ்வளவு ஆழமா மத நல்லிணக்கத்தைக் காட்டுவாங்க்கங்கிறீங்க. உங்களுக்கு குளிரே வெக்கும், அத்தினி பாசமாருப்பாங்க. அமைதி பாருங்க, அப்பிடின்னா அவுங்களுக்கு எத்தினி பிரியம்.
மலேசியாவுல பாருங்க மொத்த அரசாங்கமும் முஸ்லிம்களோட கைல தானே இருக்கு. மத்த மதக்காரங்க மேலெ ஒரே பாசம் பொங்கி வழிஞ்சு நாடே குளுந்து போயிக் கெடக்கு. பாருங்க பழைய கோவில்ல எங்கியோ காட்டுல்யும் மேட்டுலயும்லாம் இந்துக்கள் கோவிலைக் கட்டி வச்சா எப்பிடி ஜனங்கள்ளாம் போயி வர்றது. அதுவும் எங்க பாத்தாலும் கோவிலைக் கட்டி வைச்சா நாளன்னிக்கும் கோவிலே கதின்னு கிடந்தா அவுங்க குடும்பம்லா என்னாவுறது, குட்டிகள்ளாம் சோறு தண்ணீ இல்லாமக் கெடந்து தவிக்குமில்ல. அதுனால இந்துக்களோட நன்மைய உத்தேசிச்சு மலேசிய முஸ்லிம்களெல்லாம் சேந்து திட்டம் போட்டு இந்துக் கோவில்களை எல்லாம் இடிச்சு இந்துக்களுக்கு நன்மை செஞ்சிருக்காங்க. அதுக்கு நம்ம ஊர்ல இருக்கிற எல்லா முற்போக்குக் கட்சிகளும், தமிழ் நாடு பூரா இருக்கற தீவிர யோசனைக்காரங்க எல்லாம் கூட முழு ஆதரவு தெரிவிச்சாங்க இல்லெ. அப்புறம் என்ன பெரியார் கட்சி, இல்லியா? கோவில இடிக்கறத ஆதரிச்சாதான் பெரியார் கண்ட கனவெல்லாம் நெறவேறும் இல்லியா. அதான் இப்பிடி ஆதரவு.
இங்க பாருங்க, கோவில அப்பிடி எல்லாம் உடனே இடிக்க முடியல்ல. இடிச்சுட்டாக்க என்னா உற்சாகமாயிரும் எல்லா ஜனமும்.
______________________________________________________________

133 temples demolished in four years in Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur, Oct 29 : According to an official count, as many as 96 Hindu and 37 Buddhist temples were demolished in Selangor, in Malaysia, between 2004 and last year.

State Executive Council member Dr A. Xavier Jayakumar said the demolitions were carried out by the local authorities.

According to nstonline.com, so far this year, 54 new applications had been approved by the committee tasked with regulating non-Muslim places of worship. Among the applications are for 25 Hindu temples, 19 Buddhist temples and 10 churches.

Dr Xavier, who was answering a question from Lee Ying Ha, said that although the applications had been approved by the committee, they would still need approval by the state executive council before the new places of worship could be built.

--- ANI

மனைவி முஸ்லிமானால், மதம் மாற மறுக்கும் கணவனை விட்டுப் பிரிய வேண்டும்- முல்லா தீர்ப்பு

Does she have to leave her husband if he does not become Muslim?
Does a woman have to leave her kaafir husband if she becomes Muslim? What is the ruling if she refuses to leave him?.

Praise be to Allaah.

If a woman becomes Muslim and her husband is a kaafir, then the marriage is annulled, but she may wait until the ‘iddah ends, then if the husband becomes Muslim during that time, then she is still his wife, but if he does not become Muslim before the ‘iddah ends, then the annulment of the marriage becomes clear, starting from the time she became Muslim.

Can he go back to her if he becomes Muslim after the ‘iddah ends?

There are two scholarly opinions concerning that. The more correct view is that he may go back to her if she agrees, because the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) sent his daughter back to Abu’l-‘Aas ibn al-Rabee’ several years after she became Muslim, when he also became Muslim.

But if she refuses then they must be separated by force by the judge. End quote.

Shaykh Ibn ‘Uthaymeen (may Allaah have mercy on him)

Thursday, October 30, 2008

பில்லி சூனியம் என்று சொல்லி குழந்தைகளைக் கொல்லும் பாதிரிகள்

கேட்டாலே மயக்கம் வரும் போலிருக்கிறது, இந்த எவாங்கலியப் பாதிரிகள் செய்யும் கொலைகள், அக்கிரமங்களை எல்லாம் எப்படி ஆப்பிரிக்க மக்கள் பொறுத்துக் கொண்டிருக்கிறார்கள்? இந்த கிருஸ்தவம்தான் இந்தியரை சொர்க்கத்துக்கு அழைத்துப் போகப் போகிறதாக்கும்? எப்படி எல்லாம் பித்தலாட்ட்ம் நடக்கிறது. இதில் தமிழரின் எல்லா இலக்கியமும் கிருஸ்தவர்தான் எழுதினார்கள் என்று வேறு புருடா விட ஆரம்பித்திருக்கிறார்களாமே, கேட்டீர்களா? இன்னும் கொஞ்ச நாள் போனால் தமிழே கிருஸ்துதான் படைத்தார் என்றே சொல்வார்கள். நாமும் பூம் பூம் மாடு போலத் தலையை ஆட்டிக் கொண்டு ஆமாம கர்த்தரே என்று சொல்லிக் கொண்டிருப்போமோ என்னவோ?
_______________________________________


Children are targets of Nigerian witch hunt
Evangelical pastors are helping to create a terrible new campaign of violence against young Nigerians. Children and babies branded as evil are being abused, abandoned and even murdered while the preachers make money out of the fear of their parents and their communities

Watch the video: Child 'witches' in Africa, and click here to see a related gallery

* Tracy McVeigh in Esit Eket
* The Observer,
* Sunday December 9 2007
* Article history

The rainy season is over and the Niger Delta is lush and humid. This southern edge of West Africa, where Nigeria's wealth pumps out of oil and gas fields to bypass millions of its poorest people, is a restless place. In the small delta state of Akwa Ibom, the tension and the poverty has delivered an opportunity for a new and terrible phenomenon that is leading to the abuse and the murder of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children. And it is being done in the name of Christianity.

Almost everyone goes to church here. Driving through the town of Esit Eket, the rust-streaked signs, tarpaulins hung between trees and posters on boulders, advertise a church for every third or fourth house along the road. Such names as New Testament Assembly, Church of God Mission, Mount Zion Gospel, Glory of God, Brotherhood of the Cross, Redeemed, Apostalistic. Behind the smartly painted doors pastors make a living by 'deliverances' - exorcisms - for people beset by witchcraft, something seen to cause anything from divorce, disease, accidents or job losses. With so many churches it's a competitive market, but by local standards a lucrative one.

But an exploitative situation has now grown into something much more sinister as preachers are turning their attentions to children - naming them as witches. In a maddened state of terror, parents and whole villages turn on the child. They are burnt, poisoned, slashed, chained to trees, buried alive or simply beaten and chased off into the bush.

Some parents scrape together sums needed to pay for a deliverance - sometimes as much as three or four months' salary for the average working man - although the pastor will explain that the witch might return and a second deliverance will be needed. Even if the parent wants to keep the child, their neighbours may attack it in the street.

This is not just a few cases. This is becoming commonplace. In Esit Eket, up a nameless, puddled-and-potholed path is a concrete shack stuffed to its fetid rafters with roughly made bunk beds. Here, three to a bed like battery chickens, sleep victims of the besuited Christian pastors and their hours-long, late-night services. Ostracised and abandoned, these are the children a whole community believes fervently are witches.

Sam Ikpe-Itauma is one of the few people in this area who does not believe what the evangelical 'prophets' are preaching. He opened his house to a few homeless waifs he came across, and now he tries his best to look after 131.

'The neighbours were not happy with me and tell me "you are supporting witches". This project was an accident, I saw children being abandoned and it was very worrying. I started with three children, then every day it increased up to 15, so we had to open this new place,' he says. 'For every maybe five children we see on the streets, we believe one has been killed, although it could be more as neighbours turn a blind eye when a witch child disappears.

'It is good we have this shelter, but it is under constant attack.' As he speaks two villagers walk past, at the end of the yard, pulling scarfs across their eyes to hide the 'witches' from their sight.

Ikpe-Itauma's wife, Elizabeth, acts as nurse to the injured children and they have called this place the Child Rights and Rehabilitation Network, a big name for a small refuge. It has found support from a charity running a school in the area, Stepping Stones Nigeria, which is trying to help with money to feed the children, but the numbers turning up here are a huge challenge.

Mary Sudnad, 10, grimaces as her hair is pulled into corn rows by Agnes, 11, but the scalp just above her forehead is bald and blistered. Mary tells her story fast, in staccato, staring fixedly at the ground.

'My youngest brother died. The pastor told my mother it was because I was a witch. Three men came to my house. I didn't know these men. My mother left the house. Left these men. They beat me.' She pushes her fists under her chin to show how her father lay, stretched out on his stomach on the floor of their hut, watching. After the beating there was a trip to the church for 'a deliverance'.

A day later there was a walk in the bush with her mother. They picked poisonous 'asiri' berries that were made into a draught and forced down Mary's throat. If that didn't kill her, her mother warned her, then it would be a barbed-wire hanging. Finally her mother threw boiling water and caustic soda over her head and body, and her father dumped his screaming daughter in a field. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she stayed near the house for a long time before finally slinking off into the bush.Mary was seven. She says she still doesn't feel safe. She says: 'My mother doesn't love me.' And, finally, a tear streaks down her beautiful face.

Gerry was picked out by a 'prophetess' at a prayer night and named as a witch. His mother cursed him, his father siphoned petrol from his motorbike tank and spat it over his eight-year-old face. Gerry's facial blistering is as visible as the trauma in his dull eyes. He asks every adult he sees if they will take him home to his parents: 'It's not them, it's the prophetess, I am scared of her.'

Nwaeka is about 16. She sits by herself in the mud, her eyes rolling, scratching at her stick-thin arms. The other children are surprisingly patient with her. The wound on her head where a nail was driven in looks to be healing well. Nine- year-old Etido had nails, too, five of them across the crown of his downy head. Its hard to tell what damage has been done. Udo, now 12, was beaten and abandoned by his mother. He nearly lost his arm after villagers, finding him foraging for food by the roadside, saw him as a witch and hacked at him with machetes.

Magrose is seven. Her mother dug a pit in the wood and tried to bury her alive. Michael was found by a farmer clearing a ditch, starving and unable to stand on legs that had been flogged raw.

Ekemini Abia has the look of someone in a deep state of shock. Both ankles are circled with gruesome wounds and she moves at a painful hobble. Named as a witch, her father and elders from the church tied her to a tree, the rope cutting her to the bone, and left the 13-year-old there alone for more than a week.

There are sibling groups such as Prince, four, and Rita, nine. Rita told her mum she had dreamt of a lovely party where there was lots to eat and to drink. The belief is that a witch flies away to the coven at night while the body sleeps, so Rita's sweet dream was proof enough: she was a witch and because she had shared food with her sibling - the way witchcraft is spread - both were abandoned. Victoria, cheeky and funny, aged four, and her seven-year-old sister Helen, a serene little girl. Left by their parents in the shell of an old shack, the girls didn't dare move from where they had been abandoned and ate leaves and grass.

The youngest here is a baby. The older girls take it in turn to sling her on their skinny hips and Ikpe-Itauma has named her Amelia, after his grandmother. He estimates around 5,000 children have been abandoned in this area since 1998 and says many bodies have turned up in the rivers or in the forest. Many more are never found. 'The more children the pastor declares witches, the more famous he gets and the more money he can make,' he says. 'The parents are asked for so much money that they will pay in instalments or perhaps sell their property. This is not what churches should be doing.'

Although old tribal beliefs in witch doctors are not so deeply buried in people's memories, and although there had been indigenous Christians in Nigeria since the 19th century, it is American and Scottish Pentecostal and evangelical missionaries of the past 50 years who have shaped these fanatical beliefs. Evil spirits, satanic possessions and miracles can be found aplenty in the Bible, references to killing witches turn up in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Galatians, and literal interpretation of scriptures is a popular crowd-pleaser.

Pastor Joe Ita is the preacher at Liberty Gospel Church in nearby Eket. 'We base our faith on the Bible, we are led by the holy spirit and we have a programme of exposing false religion and sorcery.' Soft of voice and in his smart suit and tie, his church is being painted and he apologises for having to sit outside near his shiny new Audi to talk. There are nearly 60 branches of Liberty Gospel across the Niger Delta. It was started by a local woman, mother-of-two Helen Ukpabio, whose luxurious house and expensive white Humvee are much admired in the city of Calabar where she now lives. Many people in this area credit the popular evangelical DVDs she produces and stars in with helping to spread the child witch belief.

Ita denies charging for exorcisms but acknowledges his congregation is poor and has to work hard to scrape up the donations the church expects. 'To give more than you can afford is blessed. We are the only ones who really know the secrets of witches. Parents don't come here with the intention of abandoning their children, but when a child is a witch then you have to say "what is that there? Not your child." The parents come to us when they see manifestations. But the secret is that, even if you abandon your child, the curse is still upon you, even if you kill your child the curse stays. So you have to come here to be delivered afterwards as well,' he explains patiently.

'We know how they operate. A witch will put a spell on its mother's bra and the mother will get breast cancer. But we cannot attribute all things to witches, they work on inclinations too, so they don't create HIV, but if you are promiscuous then the witch will give you HIV.'

As the light fades, he presents a pile of Ukpabio's DVDs. Mistakenly thinking they are a gift, I am firmly put right.

Later that night, in another part of town, the hands of the clock edge towards midnight. The humidity of the day is sealed into the windowless church and drums pound along with the screeching of the sweat-drenched preacher. 'No witches, oh Lord,' he screams into the microphone. 'As this hour approaches, save us, oh Lord!'

His congregation is dancing, palms aloft, women writhe and yell in tongues. A group moves forward shepherding five children, one a baby, and kneel on the concrete floor and the pastor comes among them, pressing his hands down on each child's head in turn, as they try to hide in the skirts of the woman. This is deliverance night at the Church of the True Redeemer, and while the service will carry on for some hours, the main event - for which the parents will have paid cash - is over.

Walking out into the night, the drums and singing from other churches ring out as such scenes are being repeated across the village.

It is hard to find people to speak out against the brutality. Chief Victor Ikot is one. He not only speaks out against the 'tinpot' churches, but has also done the unthinkable and taken in a witch to his own home. The chief's niece, Mbet, was declared a witch when she was eight. Her mother, Ekaete, made her drink olive oil, then poison berries, then invited local men to beat her with sticks. The pastor padlocked her to a tree but unlocked her when her mother could not find the money for a deliverance. Mbet fled. Mbet, now 11, says she has not seen the woman since, adding: 'My mother is a wicked mother.'

The Observer tracked down Mbet's mother to her roadside clothing stall where she nervously fiddled with her mobile phone and told us how her daughter had given her what sounded very much like all the symptoms of malaria. 'I had internal heat,' she says, indicating her stomach. 'It was my daughter who had caused this, she drew all the water from my body. I could do nothing. She was stubborn, very stubborn.' And if her daughter had died in the bush? She shrugged: 'That is God's will. It is in God's hands.'

Chief Victor has no time for his sister-in-law. 'Nowadays when a child becomes stubborn, then everyone calls them witches. But it is usually from the age of 10 down, I have never seen anyone try to throw a macho adult into the street. This child becomes a nuisance, so they give a dog a bad name and they can hang it.

'It is alarming because no household is untouched. But it is the greed of the pastors, driving around in Mercedes, that makes them choose the vulnerable.'

In a nearby village The Observer came across five-year-old twins, Itohowo and Kufre. They are still hanging around close to their mother's shack, but are obviously malnourished and in filthy rags. Approaching the boys brings a crowd of villagers who stand around and shout: 'Take them away from us, they are witches.' 'Take them away before they kill us all.' 'Witches'.

The woman who gave birth to these sorry scraps of humanity stands slightly apart from the crowd, arms crossed. Iambong Etim Otoyo has no intention of taking any responsibility for her sons. 'They are witches,' she says firmly and walks away.

And by nightfall there are 133 children in the chicken coop concrete house at Esit Eket.

· Watch the video: Child witches in Africa



* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

Go to:

இஸ்லாமிய சமூகங்களில் இன்னுமா அடிமை முறை இருக்கிறது?

இவர்கள்தான் இந்துக்கள், இந்தியாவை எல்லாம் நாள் தவறாமல் மேடை போட்டுத் தமிழ் நாட்டில் ஏசிக் கொண்டிருக்கிறார்கள் . தீண்டாமையை தாம்தான் ஒழிக்கப் போவதாக மார் தட்டும் இந்தப் புரட்டல் முஸ்லிம் அரசியல்வாதிகளுக்கு உலகில் பல இஸ்லாமிய நாடுகளிலும் இன்னும் அடிமை முறை இருப்பது தெரியாது போலிருக்கிறது. அவர்கள் தம் மூக்கைத் தாண்டி எதையும் பார்ப்பதில்லை, பாலஸ்தீனம்,காஷ்மீரம் இரண்டும் மட்டும் தினம் காலை ஒரு முறை கோசம் போட உதவும். என்ன சன்மங்களோ!
ராபர்ட் ஸ்பென்சரோ கிருஸ்தவர்களை மட்டும் அடிமைகளை வைத்திருந்தீர்கள் என்று திட்டுகிறீர்களே, ரோசம் இருந்தா அவங்கிளியும் போய்த் திட்டுங்கடா பாப்பம்னு ஒரு சவால் விட்றாரு. ஏய்யா, சும்மா இருந்தாலியே தலையை வெட்டுறன்னு சொல்றாங்கன்னு ஜெயமோகனே சொல்றாரு. எந்தலை எங்கிட்டியே இருக்கணும்னு நா பாட்டில் போய்க்கிட்டே இருக்கிறன். என்னை வந்து இந்த வம்புல மாட்டி விடுறியே என்ன் கொழுப்பான்னு அவரைக் கேட்கலாம்னா அவரு எங்கெ இருக்காருன்னுட்டுத் தெரியல்லியெ.
கீழே அந்த ஆளு எழுதினதில் இஸ்லாம் பத்தி எழுதினத மட்டும்தான் எடுத்து வுட்டேன். இவரு சொல்றதெல்லாம் நெசமாவா இருக்குங்கிறீங்க?

ஆனாக்க அவர் என்ன சொல்றாருன்னு பார்த்தா, இஸ்லாமில முஸ்லிம் அல்லாதவர்களெல்லாம் படைக்கப்பட்டதிலியே மோசமானவங்கன்னு சொல்லி இருக்கு, அதுனாலதான் அனேக அடிமைகளும் ஜிஹாத் போரில் பிடிபட்டவங்களா இருக்காங்கன்னு சொல்றாரு. அதுல பாருங்க இந்துக்களும் அடிமைகளா இருந்திருக்காங்கன்னுட்டு சொல்றாரு.
முஸ்லிம் அல்லாதவங்களை இப்பிடி அடிமையாப் பிடிச்சு வித்துக் காசு பண்ணாங்களே அந்த எண்ணிக்கை எத்தினி? 17 மிலியன் பேர் இருக்கும்னுட்டு சொல்றாரு. அதாவது கிட்டத்தட்ட ஒரு கோடியே 70 லட்சம் பேரை அடிமையாப் பிடிச்சு வித்தாங்களாம். என்ன ஒரு அருமையான ஆட்கள் இவங்க? இன்னிக்கு இந்தியாவில் இருக்கிற எல்லாரையும் விடுதலை செய்யப் போறாங்களாமில்லே?
இவிங்களெ நம்பலாமா?
இதிலெ பாருங்க இன்னிக்கும் பல முஸ்லிம் நாடுங்கள்ளெ அடிமை முறை இருக்குன்னிட்டு இவரு சொல்றாரு. நாம என்ன போய்ப் பாக்கப் போறோமா? இருந்தாலும் புகை இருக்கு, நெருப்பு இருக்குமான்னிட்டு யோசிங்க.
அவரு சொல்ற நாடுகள்லெ சவுதியிலே அடிமை முறையை சட்டத்தில் ஒழிச்சது 1960இல. யேமன், ஓமான் நாடுகள்லெ 1970லதான் அடிமை முறைய ஒழிச்சாங்களாம். நைஜர்ங்கிற நாட்டில் 2004 இலதான் ஒழிச்சாங்களாம். மாரிடானியாங்கற நாட்டில் இன்னும் இருக்காமில்ல. சூடான்ல இன்னும் அடிமைகளைப் பிடிக்கறத்துக்குப் போர் நடத்துற வழக்கம் அரபி முஸ்லிம்கள் கிட்ட இருக்குன்னுட்டு சொல்றாரு. 2007 இல கூட இப்பிடி சிறை வைச்சு அடிமையாக்கி இருக்காங்களாம்.
இதில பாருங்க சவுதிக்காரங்க ஏதோ தாங்கதான் இஸ்லாத்தோட கார்டியனுன்னிட்டு தெனம் சவுண்டு வுடறாங்க. சூடான் காரங்களோ தங்களுக்குத்தான் இஸ்லாம்ங்கிறத்துல எது நெசமான இஸ்லாம்னு தெரியும்னுட்டு தெனம் தப்பு அடிக்கிறாங்க.
மக்கா, ஏம்லெ இப்பிடி ஊரை எத்துறீங்கன்னுட்டு ஒரு சவுண்டு வுடலாம்னு வருது. ஆனா, நமக்கெதுக்கு வம்பு. இத்தினி பெருந்தலை எல்லாம் இவுங்க உட்ற கதை எல்லாம் நம்பிக்கிட்டுப் போய் கஞ்சி குட்சி, குல்லால்லாம் போட்டு சலாம் போட்டுட்டு வர்றாங்க. நாம என்ன ஏதோ ஓரமாக் கெடக்கோம். நமக்கெதுக்கு வம்பு, இல்லெ?

______________________________________________________
Slavery, Christianity, and Islam

By Robert Spencer
Monday, February 4, 2008, 7:45 AM
-----
\\\
||||
////
-------
Islamic Slavery

In the Islamic world, however, the situation is very different. The Muslim prophet Muhammad owned slaves, and like the Bible, the Qur’an takes the existence of slavery for granted, even as it enjoins the freeing of slaves under certain circumstances, such as the breaking of an oath: “Allah will not call you to account for what is futile in your oaths, but He will call you to account for your deliberate oaths: for expiation, feed ten indigent persons, on a scale of the average for the food of your families; or clothe them; or give a slave his freedom” (5:89). Jihad theorist Sayyid Qutb adduces this as evidence that in Islam “there is no difference between a prince and a pauper, a seigneur and a slave.” Nevertheless, while the freeing of a slave or two here and there is encouraged, the institution itself is never questioned. The Qur’an even gives a man permission to have sexual relations with his slave girls as well as with his wives: “The believers must (eventually) win through, those who humble themselves in their prayers; who avoid vain talk; who are active in deeds of charity; who abstain from sex, except with those joined to them in the marriage bond, or (the captives) whom their right hands possess, for (in their case) they are free from blame” (23:1-6). A Muslim is not to have sexual relations with a woman who is married to someone else—except a slave girl: “And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess. It is a decree of Allah for you” (4:24).

Why should such passages be any more troubling to anyone than passages in the Bible such as Exodus 21:7–11, which gives regulations for selling one’s daughter as a slave? Because in Islam there is no equivalent of the Golden Rule, as articulated by Jesus: “So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets” (Matt. 7:12). The closest Islamic tradition comes to this is one hadith in which Muhammad says, “None of you will have faith till he likes for his (Muslim) brother what he likes for himself.” The parenthetical “Muslim” in that sentence was added by the Saudi translator, and does not appear in the original Arabic; however, “brother” is generally not used in Islamic tradition to refer to anyone but fellow Muslims. Also mitigating against a universal interpretation of this maxim is the sharp distinction between believers and unbelievers that runs through all of Islam. The Qur’an says that the followers of Muhammad are “ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another” (48:29), and that the unbelievers are the “worst of created beings” (98:6). One may exercise the Golden Rule in relation to a fellow Muslim, but according to the worldview presented by such verses and others like them, the same courtesy is not properly to be extended to unbelievers.

That is one principal reason why the primary source of slaves in the Islamic world has been non-Muslims, whether Jews, Christians, Hindus or pagans. Most slaves in Islam were non-Muslims who had been captured during jihad warfare. The pioneering scholar of the treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic societies, Bat Ye’or, explains the system that developed out of jihad conquest:

The jihad slave system included contingents of both sexes delivered annually in conformity with the treaties of submission by sovereigns who were tributaries of the caliph. When Amr conquered Tripoli (Libya) in 643, he forced the Jewish and Christian Berbers to give their wives and children as slaves to the Arab army as part of their jizya [tax on non-Muslims]. From 652 until its conquest in 1276, Nubia was forced to send an annual contingent of slaves to Cairo. Treaties concluded with the towns of Transoxiana, Sijistan, Armenia, and Fezzan (Maghreb) under the Umayyads and Abbasids stipulated an annual dispatch of slaves from both sexes. However, the main sources for the supply of slaves remained the regular raids on villages within the dar-al-harb [House of War, i.e., non-Islamic regions] and the military expeditions which swept more deeply into the infidel lands, emptying towns and provinces of their inhabitants.

Historian Speros Vryonis observes that “since the beginning of the Arab razzias [raids] into the land of Rum [the Byzantine Empire], human booty had come to constitute a very important portion of the spoils.” The Turks, as they steadily conquered more and more of Anatolia, reduced many of the Greeks and other non-Muslims there to slave status: “They enslaved men, women, and children from all major urban centers and from the countryside where the populations were defenseless.” The Indian historian K. S. Lal states that wherever jihadists conquered a territory, “there developed a system of slavery peculiar to the clime, terrain and populace of the place.” When Muslim armies invaded India, “its people began to be enslaved in droves to be sold in foreign lands or employed in various capacities on menial and not-so-menial jobs within the country.”

Slaves faced pressure to convert to Islam. Patricia Crone, in an analysis of Islamic political theories, notes that after a jihad battle was concluded, “male captives might be killed or enslaved…Dispersed in Muslim households, slaves almost always converted, encouraged or pressurized by their masters, driven by a need to bond with others, or slowly, becoming accustomed to seeing things through Muslim eyes even if they tried to resist.” Thomas Pellow, an Englishman who was enslaved in Morocco for twenty-three years after being captured as a cabin boy on a small English vessel in 1716, was tortured until he accepted Islam. For weeks he was beaten and starved, and finally gave in after his torturer resorted to “burning my flesh off my bones by fire, which the tyrant did, by frequent repetitions, after a most cruel manner.”

Slavery was taken for granted throughout Islamic history, as it was, of course, in the West as well up until relatively recent times. Yet while the European and American slave trade get lavish attention from historians (as well as from mau-mauing reparations advocates and their marks, guilt-ridden contemporary politicians), the Islamic slave trade actually lasted longer and brought suffering to a larger number of people. It is exceedingly ironic that Islam has been presented to American blacks as the egalitarian alternative to the “white man’s slave religion” of Christianity, since Islamic slavery operated on a larger scale than did the Western slave trade, and lasted longer. While historians estimate that the transatlantic slave trade, which operated between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, involved around 10.5 million people, the Islamic slave trade in the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean areas began in the seventh century and lasted into the nineteenth, and involved 17 million people.

Also, the pressure to end it moved from Christendom into Islam, not the other way around. There was no Muslim Clarkson, Wilberforce, or Garrison. In fact, when the British government in the nineteenth century adopted the view of Wilberforce and the other abolitionists as its own and thereupon began to put pressure on pro-slavery regimes, the Sultan of Morocco was incredulous precisely because of the audacity of the innovation that the British were proposing: “The traffic in slaves,” he noted, “is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam . . . up to this day.” He said that he was “not aware of its being prohibited by the laws of any sect” and that the very idea that anyone would question its morality was absurd: “no one need ask this question, the same being manifest to both high and low and requires no more demonstration than the light of day.”

However, it was not the unanimity of human practice, but the plain words of the Qur’an and Muhammad that were decisive in stifling abolitionist movements within the Islamic world. Slavery was abolished under Western pressure; the Arab Muslim slave trade in Africa was ended by the force of British arms in the nineteenth century.

There is evidence that slavery still continues beneath the surface in some majority-Muslim countries as well—notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962, Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970, and Niger, which didn’t abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored, and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred, often raped, and generally treated like animals.

Some of the evidence that Islamic slavery still goes on consists of a spate of slavery cases involving Muslims in the United States. A Saudi named Homaidan Al-Turki was sentenced in September 2006 to 27 years to life in prison, for keeping a woman as a slave in his home in Colorado. For his part, Al-Turki claimed that he was a victim of anti-Muslim bias. He told the judge: “Your honor, I am not here to apologize, for I cannot apologize for things I did not do and for crimes I did not commit. The state has criminalized these basic Muslim behaviors. Attacking traditional Muslim behaviors was the focal point of the prosecution.” The following month, an Egyptian couple living in Southern California received a fine and prison terms, to be followed by deportation, after pleading guilty to holding a ten-year-old girl as a slave. And in January 2007, an attaché of the Kuwaiti embassy in Washington and his wife were charged with keeping three Christian domestic workers from India in slave-like conditions in al-Saleh’s Virginia home. One of the women remarked: “I believed that I had no choice but to continue working for them even though they beat me and treated me worse than a slave.”

Slavery is still practiced openly today in two Muslim countries, Sudan and Mauritania. In line with historical practice, Muslim slavers in the Sudan primarily enslave non-Muslims, and chiefly Christians. According to the Coalition Against Slavery in Mauritania and Sudan (CASMAS), a human rights and abolitionist movement founded in 1995, “The current Khartoum government wants to bring the non-Muslim Black South in line with Sharia law, laid down and interpreted by conservative Muslim clergy. The Black animist and Christian South remembers many years of slave raids by Arabs from the north and east and resists Muslim religious rule and the perceived economic, cultural, and religious expansion behind it.”

One modern-day Sudanese Christian slave, James Pareng Alier, was kidnapped and enslaved when he was twelve years old. Religion was a major element of his ordeal: “I was forced to learn the Koran and re-baptised Ahmed. They told me that Christianity was a bad religion. After a time we were given military training and they told us we would be sent to fight.” Alier has no idea of his family’s whereabouts. The BBC reported in March 2007 that slave raids “were a common feature of Sudan’s 21-year north-south war, which ended in 2005. . . . According to a study by the Kenya-based Rift Valley Institute, some 11,000 young boys and girls were seized and taken across the internal border—many to the states of South Darfur and West Kordofan. . . . Most were forcibly converted to Islam, given Muslim names and told not to speak their mother tongue.” Yet even today, while non-Muslims were enslaved and often forcibly converted to Islam, their conversion does not lead to their freedom. Mauritanian anti-slavery campaigner Boubacar Messaoud explains that “it’s like having sheep or goats. If a woman is a slave, her descendants are slaves.”

Anti-slavery crusaders like Messaoud have great difficulty working against this attitude, because it is rooted in the Qur’an and Muhammad’s example. Particularly when the slaves are non-Muslims, there is no verse of the Qur’an corresponding to Lincoln’s favored Bible verse, Genesis 3:19, that anti-slavery Muslims can invoke against those who continue to approve of and even to practice slavery.

Most Westerners have not troubled to learn this history, and no one is telling them about it. If they did, the entire slavery guiltmongering industry would collapse. And we can’t let that happen, now, can we?

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of seven books about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad.

References
• Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t.
• “Slave Trade Shameful, Blair Says,” BBC News, March 25, 2007.
• Mark Steyn, “The Man Who ‘Murdered’ Slavery: Two Centuries Ago, a British Backbencher Changed an Entire Way of Seeing the World,” McLeans, March 19, 2007.
• John B. O’Connor, “St. Isidore of Seville,” The Catholic Encyclopedia.
• Richard Furman, Rev. Dr. Richard Furman’s Exposition of The Views of the Baptists, Relative to the Coloured Population in the United States in a Communication to the Governor of South-Carolina.
• William Lloyd Garrison, speech at Charleston, South Carolina, April 14, 1865.
• Abraham Lincoln, “Reply to Delegation of Baptists on May 30, 1864,” in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Roy P. Basler, editor, Vol. VII, Rutgers University Press, 1953.
• Abraham Lincoln, “Story Written for Noah Brooks,” December 6, 1864, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Roy P. Basler, editor, Vol. VIII, Rutgers University Press, 1953.
• Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address.
• Social Justice in Islam.
• Bukhari Hadith, vol. 1, book 2, no. 13.
• The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude.
• The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century.
• Muslim Slave System in Medieval India.
• God’s Rule: Government and Islam.
• White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam’s One Million White Slaves.
• The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic War and the Fate of Non-Muslims.
Race and Slavery in the Middle East
• Hilary Andersson, “Born to Be a Slave in Niger,” BBC News, February 11, 2005.
• Barbara Ferguson, “Saudi Gets 27 Years to Life for Enslaving Maid,” Arab News, September 1, 2006.
• “Egyptians Who Enslaved girl, 10, Get U.S. Prison,” Reuters, October 24, 2006.
• “Kuwaiti Diplomat Accused of Domestic Slavery,” ABC7 News, January 17, 2007.
• Coalition Against Slavery in Mauritania and Sudan, “Sudan Q & A.”
• Aid to the Church in Need, “Religious Freedom in the Majority Islamic Countries 1998 Report: Sudan.”
• Joseph Winter, “No Return for Sudan’s Forgotten Slaves,” BBC News, March 16, 2007.
• Pascal Fletcher, “Slavery Still Exists in Mauritania,” Reuters, March 21, 2007.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

கல்லாலடித்துக் கொல்வதும் அமைதி மார்க்கத்தின் வழிதான்

கல்லாலடித்துக் கொல்லப்படும் பெண்ணைக் காக்க வந்த குழந்தை சுட்டுக் கொல்லப்பட்டது. அமைதி மார்க்கத்தின் ஷரியா சட்டம்தான் எத்தனை உயர்ந்தது பாருங்கள். இனியும் என்ன தயக்கம், அந்த மரண அமைதி வேறெந்த மார்க்கத்தில் கிட்டும், சேருவோம் வாருங்கள் என்று அழைக்கிறார் சோமாலிய ஷேக்.

_______________________________________________________________________________
A woman accused of adultery was stoned to death by Islamists in Somalia.

Asha Ibrahim Dhuhulow, 23, was buried up to her neck in front of hundreds of people Monday in a square in Kismayu and stones were hurled at her head. She was dragged out of the hole three times to see if she was dead.

Islamists said Dhuhulow wanted punishment under Sharia law.

"A woman in green veil and black mask was brought in a car as we waited to watch the merciless act of stoning," said Abdullahi Aden, who witnessed the execution. "We were told she submitted herself to be punished, yet we could see her screaming as she was forcefully bound, legs and hands."

When a relative and others surged forward to rescue her, guards opened fire and killed a child, witnesses said.

"[Dhuhulow] was asked several times to review her confession but she stressed that she wanted Sharia law and the deserved punishment to apply," local leader Sheikh Hayakallah said.

But her sister, who asked not to be named, said: "The stoning was totally irreligious and illogical

கிருஸ்தவத்துக்கு மாறிய முஸ்லிம் தலை வெட்டப்பட்டது

இதுவோ ஒரே அமைதி மார்க்கம். எங்கள் மார்க்கத்தை விட்டு மதம் மாறினால் மட்டுமே தலையை வெட்டுவோம். அதுவும் சும்மா வெட்டுவோமா? குரான் எல்லாம் ஓதி, சட்ட பூர்வமாகத்தான் வெட்டுவோம். அமைதியை நிலை நாட்ட வேறு என்னதான் வழி? இறுதியில் ஒரே மரண அமைதி எல்லாருக்கும் கிட்டும், வந்து சேருங்கள் இந்த மார்க்கத்தில்.

_________________________________________________________________________

October 27, 2008
Muslims behead Christian convert from Islam in Somalia



MansuurMohammed.jpg
Mansuur Mohammed: This offends no one

Last week at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Muslim students rolled their eyes and smiled with exasperation when I noted that all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence taught that the penalty for apostasy from Islam was death, in accord with Muhammad's words, "If anyone changes his religion, kill him." One young man, who was unusually polite, actually wrote a piece about it in the school paper, which I still intend to answer. But the consensus in any case was that I was representing a minority view as a majority one. Very well: I expect, therefore, that the UWM MSA will be organizing a rally in memory of Mansuur Mohammed, denouncing his killers, and calling upon Muslims everywhere to defend the freedom of conscience.

Is that too much to ask?

"Somalia: Christian Aid Worker Beheaded For Converting From Islam," from Compass Direct, October 27:

NAIROBI, Kenya, October 27 (Compass Direct News) – Among at least 24 aid workers killed in Somalia this year was one who was beheaded last month specifically for converting from Islam to Christianity, among other charges, according to an eyewitness.

Muslim extremists from the al Shabab group fighting the transitional government on Sept. 23 sliced the head off of Mansuur Mohammed, 25, a World Food Program (WFP) worker, before horrified onlookers of Manyafulka village, 10 kilometers (six miles) from Baidoa.

The militants had intercepted Mohammed and a WFP driver, who managed to escape, earlier in the morning. Sources close to Mohammed’s family said he converted from Islam to Christianity in 2005.

The eyewitness, who requested anonymity for security reasons, said the militants that afternoon gathered the villagers of Manyafulka, telling them that they would prepare a feast for them. The people gathered anticipating the slaughter of a sheep, goat or camel according to local custom.

Five masked men emerged carrying guns, wielding Somali swords and dragging the handcuffed Mohammed. One pulled back Mohammed’s head, exposing his face as he scraped his sword against his short hair as if to sharpen it. Another recited the Quran as he proclaimed that Mohammed was a “murtid,” an Arabic term for one who converts from Islam to Christianity.

The Muslim militant announced that Mohammed was an infidel and a spy for occupying Ethiopian soldiers.

Mohammed remained calm with an expressionless face, never uttering a word, said the eyewitness. As the chanting of “Allah Akubar [God is greater]” rose to a crescendo, one of the militiamen twisted his head, allowing the other to slit his neck. When the head was finally severed from the torso, the killers cheered as they displayed it to the petrified crowd.

The militants allowed one of their accomplices to take a video of the slaughter using a mobile phone. The video was later circulated secretly and sold in Somalia and in neighboring countries in what many see as a strategy to instill fear among those contemplating conversion from Islam to Christianity....

Will Sanaa Nadim be outraged? What do you think?

Posted by Robert at October 27, 2008 7:50 PM
Print this entry | Email this entry | Digg this | del.icio.us
Comments
(Note: The Comments section is provided in the interests of free speech only. It is mostly unmoderated, but comments that are off-topic, offensive, slanderous, or otherwise annoying stand a chance of being deleted. The fact that any comment remains on the site IN NO WAY constitutes an endorsement by Jihad Watch or Dhimmi Watch, or by Robert Spencer or any other Jihad Watch or Dhimmi Watch writer, of any view expressed, fact alleged, or link provided in that comment.)

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

இஸ்லாமிய எகிப்தில் சாதி வேறுபாடே இல்லையாமே!

Photo Essay: Cairo’s Trash Collectors Down in the Dumps

By Preeti Aroon

Posted October 2008
Cairo’s zabaleen form the backbone of the city’s garbage disposal system. Largely scorned by Egyptian society, the trash scavengers recently lost one woman who had worked tirelessly for their well-being—Sister Emmanuelle, a Belgium-born nun who died Oct. 20 at age 99.




School of hard and smelly knocks: Two young students stand in front of their trash-filled home after coming back from school in al–Zabaleen, a poor area of Cairo, on Oct. 20. Belgium-born nun Sister Emmanuelle spent some 20 years here, helping establish schools and health clinics for poor trash scavengers known as zabaleen, a term derived from the Arabic word for “garbage.” At a school in Manshiet Nasser, a community populated by many zabaleen, children learn not only their ABCs (or Alif Ba, as an Egyptian would say), but the basics of trash collection and recycling, including how to track plastic bottles by computer.




Photo: KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images

Preeti Aroon is an assistant editor at FP.

Photo Essay: Cairo’s Trash Collectors Down in the Dumps

Carting it all away: A donkey is dwarfed by the enormous sacks of garbage it pulls on a cart through the trash-lined al-Zabaleen section of Cairo on Oct. 20, guided by a worker. Donkey carts are the zabaleen’s traditional mode of transporting refuse collected door-to-door from Cairo’s residents, typically for less than $1 a month. Cairo has an estimated 70,000 zabaleen, many of them descendants of poor farmers from Upper Egypt who migrated to the capital in the 1950s.





Photo: KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images


Photo Essay: Cairo’s Trash Collectors Down in the Dumps

At the bottom of the heap: Zabaleen, most of whom are Coptic Christians, rank decidedly at the bottom of Cairo’s social hierarchy. They work with garbage and raise pigs, a forbidden food in Islam, rendering them to be considered unclean by many from Egypt’s Muslim-majority population. Here, men sift through one of the great trash pyramids of Cairo on Oct. 20.



Photo: KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images



Photo Essay: Cairo’s Trash Collectors Down in the Dumps

Cash genies in these bottles: Zabaleen process about one third of the garbage generated by Cairo’s 17 million people. They recycle about 85 percent of it, painstakingly sorting the refuse into categories—plastic, metal, glass, paper, rags, organic waste—as these workers do on Oct. 20. Bags of plastic, metal, glass, and other recyclable items can be resold to businesses that turn the materials into new goods. Organic waste is fed to livestock, including pigs, whose meat can be eaten or sold to restaurants and hotels that serve Westerners who don’t face religious prohibitions against eating pork.




Photo: KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images


Photo Essay: Cairo’s Trash Collectors Down in the Dumps

A beloved nun passes away: Sister Emmanuelle, shown here in 2004, moved to Egypt in the early 1970s and spent the next two decades living among the zabaleen. She helped establish schools, gardens, and health clinics (many zabaleen contract hepatitis on the job). She was involved with efforts to provide vehicles for transporting garbage and worked on a project to create a composting plant that would turn the manure from the zabaleen’s pigs into fertilizer that could be sold. The organization she founded, Asmae-Association Soeur Emmanuelle, now has a presence in eight countries. On Oct. 20, Sister Emmanuelle died in France at age 99.




Photo: JEAN-PIERRE CLATOT/AFP/Getty Images


Photo Essay: Cairo’s Trash Collectors Down in the Dumps

A future that’s up in the air: To modernize its image, the Egyptian government wants to replace the zabaleen with sanitation companies that use gasoline-powered trucks to haul garbage to landfills. A few years ago, Cairo contracted with three European waste-management firms. Such firms, however, only handle about a third of Cairo’s trash, and many residents have been unsatisfied with their service. Additionally, sanitation companies have said they will hire zabaleen, but many scavengers have objected to the terms of employment. Here, a boy throws a ball upward in al-Zabaleen on Oct. 20. What will happen to the zabaleen? Right now, it’s a tossup.




Photo: KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images


Photo Essay: Cairo’s Trash Collectors Down in the Dumps

சவுதி அரேபியா: மசூதி பற்றி எரிந்ததில் இமாமின் மகள் மகன் பலி

சவுதி அரேபியா: மசூதி பற்றி எரிந்ததில் இமாமின் மகள் மகன் பலி ஆனார்கள்.

ஆழ்ந்த அஞ்சலியை செலுத்துகிறோம்.

இது பயங்கரவாத செயலாக இருக்குமோ என்று அஞ்சப்படுகிறது.

Mosque fire kills imam’s children
Hayat Al-Ghamdi | Arab News


ABHA: A son and a daughter of Sheikh Ahmed Al-Hawashi, imam and khateeb of Noorain Mosque in Khamis Mushayt, died on Tuesday in a fire that broke out at the imam’s residence that was attached to the mosque.

Al-Hawashi has called for an investigation into the fire that killed his two children — Anas, 2, and Tasneem, 4 — while they were preparing to celebrate Eid and injured a Civil Defense officer and four others.

The imam suspected that the fire was a criminal attack on the mosque. He added that there was a similar attempt seven months ago. He ruled out suggestions that an electricity short-circuit might have caused the fire.

Maj. Muhammad Al-Asimi, spokesman of the Civil Defense in Asir province, said the department’s operations room received information about the fire at 9:30 a.m., adding that seven fire-fighting units had been sent to put out the blaze.

He identified the four injured civilians as two Egyptians, a Bangladeshi and a Saudi.

Al-Asimi said security officers have launched an investigation to determine the reasons that caused the fire that had gutted part of the mosque including the imam’s home, prayer hall for women and its library.

Asir Gov. Prince Faisal bin Khaled yesterday visited the home of Sheikh Al-Hawashi and conveyed his condolences on the death of the imam’s two children. He was accompanied by Maj. Gen. Ali Al-Hazmi, director of police in the region, and other senior officials.

தங்களை பாதிரியார் பலாத்காரம் செய்தார் என்று ஆறுபேர் 2 மில்லியன் நஷ்ட ஈடு கோரி வழக்கு

தங்களை பாதிரியார் பலாத்காரம் செய்தார் என்று ஆறுபேர் 2 மில்லியன் நஷ்ட ஈடு கோரி வழக்கு

Area men say they were abused by priest

Mon, October 27, 2008



By JOE BELANGER, SUN MEDIA



Six men filed lawsuits today each seeking $2 million against the Roman Catholic Diocese of London alleging they were abused as boys more than 50 years ago by a priest at small parishes across the Chatham and Windsor area.

The lawsuits were unveiled at a press conference in Chatham held by the London law firm Ledroit Beckett, which specializes in abuse cases, especially involving priests.

The five men, who join a lawsuit launched earlier this year by Wayne Thibert, were boys between the ages of nine and 12 serving as alter boys at various parishes where Father Laurent (Lawrence) C. Paquette served between 1955 and his death in 1986.

They allege Paquette sexually abused them.




Their allegations have yet to be proven in court.

"These claims are so old, we really need the public's help in putting them together," said lawyer Rob Talach.

"We believe there may be other victims who haven't come forward."

Talach explained it's not unusual for male victims of childhood sexual abuse not to report their abusers until decades later, partly because of the shame of being abused by another man, but also the pressure of living in small French Canadian communities, such as Grande Pointe, where the church played a major role in family and community life.

"At the end of the day, they wish to now simply disclose the truth, seek justice and achieve healing," said Talach.

"They should be commended and not criticized for finally speaking out. It takes considerable courage and strength to speak aloud about something so traumatic. Criticism of their decision only discourages other victims from speaking and ultimately favours the perpetrators whose crimes will go undetected and unpunished." "It was to be a secret between him and me and he told me not to tell anybody," said the man, who kept the secret until he told his wife a few months ago. "Initially, it was fondling, but then it led to other things."

Talach said at least one of alleged victims has come under pressure from family not come foreword.

"Be it a young person who is struggling with abuse, or another victim from decades ago who just needs to know that it is never to late to deal with the crimes of their childhood," said Talach.

A diocese spokesperson said Paquette served at St. Anne, Tecumseh (1943-1950); Our Lady of Fatima, Windsor (1950-1952); St. Ignatius, Bothwell (1952-1955); St. Philip, Grande Pointe (1955-1967); St. Gregory the Great, St. Clair Beach (1967-1970); St. Joseph, River Canard (1970-1975); St. Thomas Aquinas, Sarnia (1975-1980); and St. Clement, McGregor (1980-1986).

"The Diocese of London takes any allegation very seriously," said spokesperson Mark Adkinson.

"When we received an allegation against Fr. Lawrence Paquette for the first time in January 2008, we conducted an investigation, informed our parish communities and made an appeal for anyone with information to come forward."

Adkinson urged anyone who feels they1ve been a victim of abuse by a priest to contact Father John Sharp, Bishop Ronald Fabbro's delegate on sexual misconduct. Talach urged victims to contact an independent "third party" for advice.

"We immediately respond to requests of funding for counseling and we will continue to do all that we can to ensure children and other vulnerable persons are safe," said Adkinson.

For the latest local coverage, read The London Free Press on the web or in print.

To subscribe to the print edition, click on our subscription page.

Joe Belanger is a Free Press reporter.

சிறுவயது பையனை பாலுறவு பலாத்காரம் செய்ததாக மிச்சிகன் 86 வயது பாதிரியார் வேலை நீக்கம்

UP priest accused of sexual misconduct
Associated Press
3:41 PM CDT, October 27, 2008


MARQUETTE, Mich. - An 86-year-old Catholic priest in Michigan's Upper Peninsula has been removed from duty after being accused of sexually molesting an underage boy.

The Rev. Aloysius J. Hasenberg served the Immaculate Conception Parish in Watersmeet.

Bishop Alexander Sample of the Catholic Diocese of Marquette said Monday a preliminary investigation found "sufficient evidence" that the allegation was true, although no final determination has been made.

The diocese said the alleged misconduct happened a number of years ago but church officials learned about it last month.



Sample is sending the case to the Vatican for further review and has informed civil authorities.

Hasenberg was officially retired but had continued celebrating masses at the Watersmeet parish since 1997. He has served numerous Upper Peninsula parishes since his ordination in 1949.

The diocese said it would forward a message seeking comment to Hasenberg's attorney.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

இளைஞர் இஸ்லாமை அவமதித்ததாகச் சொல்லி 20 வருடம் சிறை தண்டனை

Afghan student gets 20 years in blasphemy case
By AMIR SHAH Associated Press
Oct. 21, 2008, 8:48AM


KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan appeals court overturned a death sentence for a journalism student accused of blasphemy and instead sentenced him today to 20 years in prison.

The death sentence against 24-year old Parwez Kambakhsh came to symbolize Afghanistan's slide toward an ultraconservative view on religious and individual freedoms.

Prosecutors alleged that Kambakhsh disrupted classes by asking questions about women's rights under Islam. They also said he illegally distributed an article he printed off the Internet that asks why Islam does not modernize to give women equal rights. He also allegedly scribbled his own comments on the paper.

The head of today's three-judge panel, Abdul Salaam Qazizada, struck down the lower court's death penalty but still sentenced Kambakhsh to 20 years behind bars. The judge said the decision can be appealed to the Supreme Court.

"I don't accept the court's decision," Kambakhsh told The Associated Press as he was leaving the courtroom. "It is an unfair decision."

John Dempsey, a U.S. lawyer working for six years to reform the Afghan justice system, said Kambakhsh has yet to get a fair trial.

"Procedurally, he did not have many of his rights respected," said Dempsey, who has been following the case and was present for the trial. "He was detained far longer that he should have been legally held. The defense lawyer was not even allowed to meet the witnesses until a night before the trial."

Today, five witnesses from Mazar-e-Sharif — two students and three teachers — appeared before the judges.

The first witness, a student named Hamid who gave only one name, told the court he had been forced into making a statement accusing Kambakhsh of blasphemy by members of Afghanistan's intelligence service and a professor who threatened him with expulsion.

Other witnesses testified that Kambakhsh had violated tenets of Islam.

Kambakhsh was studying journalism at Balkh University in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif and writing for local newspapers when he was arrested in October 2007.

In January, a lower court sentenced him to death in a trial critics have called flawed in part because Kambakhsh had no lawyer representing him. At the time, Muslim clerics welcomed the lower court's decision and public demonstrations were held against the journalism student because of perceptions he had violated the tenets of Islam.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said earlier this year it was concerned that Kambakhsh may have been targeted because his brother, Yaqub Ibrahimi, had written about human rights violations and local politics.

Ibrahimi told AP today that his brother was sentenced because of the pressure from warlords and other strongmen in northern Afghanistan, whom he has criticized in his writings.

Reporters Without Borders called on President Hamid Karzai to intervene, and the International Federation of Journalists denounced the lower court's closed-door trial and Kambakhsh's lack of a lawyer.

திருத்துறைபூண்டியில் மாணவியுடன் மாயமான பாதிரியார்-விசாரணை

மாணவியுடன் மாயமான பாதிரியார்-விசாரணை
புதன்கிழமை, அக்டோபர் 1, 2008





திருத்துறைப்பூண்டி: மாணவியுடன் மாயமான பாதிரியாரை போலீசார் தேடி வருகின்றனர்.

திருத்துறைப்பூண்டியை சேர்ந்தவர் பிரான்சிஸ். டிவி மெக்கானிக். இவரது மகள் ஜெனிபர் (20). ஜெனிபரை ஆசிரியர் பயிற்சி பள்ளியில் படிக்க வைக்க கோரி அங்குள்ள சர்ச் பாதிரியார் விக்டரிடம் பிரான்சிஸ் உதவி கோரினார். விக்டரும் உதவுவதாக உறுதியளித்தார்.

இந் நிலையில் விக்டரை பார்க்க ஜெனிபர் சர்ச்சுக்கு சென்றார். ஆனால், நீண்ட நேரமாகியும் அவர் வீடு திரும்பவில்லை. இதனால் சந்தேகமடைந்த பிரான்ஸ் மகளை தேடினார். பாதரியார் விக்டர், ஜெபனிரை அழைத்துக் கொண்டு வெளியே சென்றதாக தகவல் கிடைத்தது.

இதையடுத்து பாதிரியாரை செல்போன் மூலம் தொடர்பு கொண்டு பிரான்சிஸ் விசாரித்தார். அப்போது இருவரும் மறுநாள் திரும்பி விடுவோம் என விக்டர் கூறினார். ஆனால் இருவரும் திரும்பி வரவிலல்லை. இதையடுத்து திருத்துறைப்பூண்டி போலீஸில் பிரான்சிஸ் புகார் செய்தார்.

போலீஸார் வழக்கு பதிவு செய்து மாணவியுடன் காணாமல்போன பாதிரியாரை தேடி வருகின்றனர்.

கோவாவில் இந்துக்கோவிலை கிறிஸ்துவர்கள் உடைத்ததை எதிர்த்து அமைதியாக பந்த் நடந்தது

கோவாவில் இந்துக்கோவிலை கிறிஸ்துவர்கள் உடைத்ததை எதிர்த்து அமைதியாக பந்த் நடந்தது

Goa shutdown peaceful
20 Oct 2008, 1706 hrs IST, PTI

Print Email Discuss Share Save Comment Text:



PANAJI: Goa shut down call given by Hindu right wing organizations and supported by BJP was mostly peaceful and successful.


The police, however, vouched for stray incidents of violence including stone pelting at three buses at Mapusa town in North Goa and arrest of 14 people in different parts of Goa.

Police resorted to minor canecharge at Mapusa where mob came face to face with the police over closure of a hotel. The hotel owner, responding to the call given by Goa government not to adhere to the shut down call, had kept his establishment open which evoked strong reaction from the protestors.

Mandir Suraksha Samiti, a Hindu right wing organization, had called for a day-long shut down today protesting against the increasing instances of desecration of idols in the state.

The organisers had claimed that these instances reflect failure of law and order machinery in the state. The organisations including Hindu Janajagruti Samiti and Bajarang Dal actively participated in the shut down.

The idol desecration has become a contentious issue in the state, which has witnessed 500 such desecrations in the recent past by miscreants. Goa Chief Minister Digamber Kamat earlier had said that these desecrations are systematic attempt to temper communal harmony in the state. Goa's main opposition party BJP had supported the bandh.

"The shut down was 95 per cent successful. Most of the people closed their shops voluntarily. They were not forced to do it," Leader of Opposition Manohar Parrikar told reporters at Mapusa.

Mapusa, the home town of Parrikar, which is represented by BJP through the legislator, Fransic D'Souza, was the troubled spot during entire shut down call.



Click here to comment on this story.

அரிசோனா அமெரிக்காவில் இந்து கோவில் கட்ட கிறிஸ்துவர்கள் கடும் எதிர்ப்பு

இந்தியாவில் கண்ட இடத்திலெல்லாம் சர்ச் கட்டும் கண்றாவிகள், அமெரிக்காவில் சட்டப்படி நிலம் வாங்கி அனுமதி கேட்டு இந்து கோவில் கட்டுவதற்கு கடும் எதிர்ப்பு தெரிவிக்கின்றனர்

இந்தியாவில் சர்ச் கட்டக்கூடாது , மசூதி கட்டக்கூடாது என்று சட்டம் போட்டால்தான் இவர்கள் அவர்களது நாடுகளில் கோவில் கட்ட அனுமதிப்பார்கள்.

Hindu temple opponents won, now push too much
Comments 2| Recommend 0
Tribune Editorial


Chandler won’t be getting a Hindu temple near Galveston Street and Dobson Road after all. And the blame doesn’t fall on a meddling city government or a lack of respect for religious freedom. The culprit is the misplaced hope of the planned temple’s worshippers that they could ignore the prior restrictions on the property they had purchased.

From the outset, residents of the Five Clemens Place subdivision objected to construction of a 7,500-foot temple for the Sri Venkata Krishna congregation. The residents criticized the idea of something other than a home going on the site as too intrusive, despite the strong historical connection between neighborhoods and places of worship.

We observed in April 2007 that the city would be on shaky legal ground if it tried to interfere with construction of the temple. The City Council granted permission to build in June 2007.

But the prospective neighbors didn’t accept that outcome. So five homeowners sued the congregation several months later, calling attention to property deed restrictions that forbid such a use. A judge recently ruled those restrictions are clear and enforceable, Tribune writer Gary Grado reported Friday.

And this dispute still isn’t over after 18 months, as the suing residents now want the judge to deny the congregation any right to worship in the house that exists on the original property and was slated to be torn down.

This reaction would appear to be a slight against Hindus as an alternative religion in U.S., as it’s hard to imagine the neighbors would put the same effort into stomping out Bible study classes in someone’s home.

The opposition’s energy would be more productive if they were to aid the Hindu congregation in finding another location for a future temple that works for everyone. This certainly would enrich the karma of Five Clemens Place.

எங்கள் சொத்தை திருப்பித்தா- பாகிஸ்தான் இந்துக்கள் போராட்டம்

இந்துக்களின் சமூக சொத்தையும் தனியார் சொத்தையும் அபகரிக்கும் பாகிஸ்தான் இஸ்லாமிய அரசாங்கத்தை எதிர்த்து இந்துக்கள் போர்க்கொடி உயர்த்தியுள்ளனர்

மனித தன்மை அற்ற இஸ்லாமிய அரசாங்கத்தினர் மனம் மாற இறைவன் அருளட்டும்

Hindu community wants their property returned
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
By Aroosa Masroor

Karachi

A month has passed since the management of the National Academy of Performing Arts (NAPA) was issued a notification by the Sindh Provincial Culture and Tourism Department to vacate the Hindu Gymkhana, within whose premises NAPA is located. While the NAPA administration is struggling to defend its position, some members of the Hindu community say they are happy that their heritage site is finally being returned to them. “I don’t understand what is there to debate about vacating the Hindu Gymkhana. It is a declared property of the Hindu community and they have been fighting for its possession for decades now,” comments Architect Murlidhar Dawani, also a member of the Hindu community.

Since independence of Pakistan in 1947, the Hindu community of Karachi had been struggling to acquire possession of this site, which was known to host the elite of the community since 1921. However, post partition the property was handed over to the Evacuee Trust Property Board. Later, the Hindus who opted for Pakistan appealed to the government for the restoration of the premises so that it could be utilised for cultural activities and religious festivals. They say that their plea fell on deaf ears.

“Most of the elite from the Hindu community migrated to India after partition hence there were not many members to fight for the restoration of the Hindu Gymkhana. The majority of the Hindus who opted for Pakistan, particularly in Sindh, belonged to scheduled castes that were already suppressed and were unable to exercise any influence. The authorities hence did not pay attention to their demands,” comments Amarnath Motumal, President of the Hindu Panchayat, Karachi Division.

Motumal said that a movement to handover the gymkhana back to the Hindu community was first launched in the 1960s by activists Khubchand Bhatia, Seth T Motandas and Bhagwandas Chawla - the then president of the Karachi Hindu Panchayat. However, the movement was ended due to the 1965 war and later by the 1971 war.

Echoing similar sentiments is social activist and co-chairperson Pak-Hindu Welfare Association, Ramesh Mana, who has been an active part of the movement for the restoration of the Hindu Gymkhana which he re-launched in the 1980s when General Ziaul Haq’s government decided to sell the property. “Due to the government’s lack of interest in the issue after the 1971 war, most members were then discouraged and did not raise a voice until General Zia went to the extent of issuing orders to auction the premises,” informs Mana.

Another prominent Hindu of that time, P.K. Shahani, voiced his concern through the media and this compelled parliamentarians to raise the issue in the National Assembly. A stay order was then issued and the Hindu Gymkhana was protected as a heritage site under the Sindh Heritage Act. But this did not solve the problem. When General Pervez Musharraf’s government took over in 1999, he asked senior artiste Zia Mohyeuddin to establish a national institute of performing arts.

“As soon as the orders were issued, the next morning we saw the name plate of the Hindu Gymkhana removed and once again wrote to the government against the injustice meted out to the Hindu community, but because the President’s daughter, Ayela Raza, was also involved in the project we did not receive a positive response,” revealed Mana.

The community contends that the control of the premises should have been handed over to the Hindus instead of permitting the artistes to encroach upon the property that belonged to the Hindu community. Moreover, the recent influx of Hindu families from upper Sindh to Karachi has put pressure on the leaders of Hindu Panchayats who are worried about accommodating the needs of the entire population of Hindus in Karachi that amounts up to 1.5 million.

“The only empty space we have to celebrate festivals such as Holi and Diwali is a ground at the Swami Narayan Temple on M.A. Jinnah Road. But due to limited space at the said temple, most people avoid visiting temples on these religious occasions confining them to their homes,” complained Dawani. He further clarified that the community was not against the school of performing arts, but against what he called “the insensitivity of the successive governments that allowed such encroachment.”

The community has also filed a case in court for eviction of the premises. “We are not against the school. We just want them to return our space and establish the school elsewhere. Also, why could the Musharraf government not have ordered the Sind Club or Karachi Gymkhana to be vacated for these young students of performing arts? Why the Hindu Gymkhana?” questioned Dawani.

The recent controversy to vacate the premises, however, began not because the land had been encroached upon but when allegations were levelled against NAPA administration for violating the agreement signed with the Sindh Culture Department. The agreement restricted the administration from construction or alteration of a heritage site – as per the provisions of the Sindh Heritage Act. Although officials at NAPA have refuted the allegations saying that ‘they have not made any alteration to the original structure’, the Hindu community feels it is time the democratic government returned the property to them.

Mana stated that since some of the most renowned artistes of the country are on the board of NAPA, finding an alternative space ‘should not be a difficult task for them and the government should facilitate them’. But given the differences within the representative bodies of the Hindu Community in Karachi, it is unclear which body will be given the charge of the Hindu Gymkhana. There are currently four main representative bodies – Pakistan Hindu Council, Karachi Hindu Panchayat, Hindu Panchayat Karachi Division and Pak-Hindu Welfare Association – running parallel to each other.

When questioned by The News, Mangla Sharma, Chairperson of Pak-Hindu Welfare Association and Dr Ramesh Kumar, former MPA and patron Pakistan Hindu Council, who have jointly filed the case in court, were unanimous on the view that a governing body, comprising representatives from all the organisations as well as from all castes, will be formed once the property is returned to them.

The News made several attempts to contact MPA Mukesh Chawla but he was not available for comments.

கிறிஸ்துவ பயங்கரவாதிகளிடமிருந்து காப்பாற்றகோரி ஒரிஸ்ஸா இந்து தலைவர் உண்ணாவிரதம்

ஒரிஸ்ஸா இந்து தலைவர் லட்சுமாணந்தாவை கொலை செய்தவர்களை கைது செய்யும்படியும், இந்துக்களுக்கு பாதுகாப்பு வழங்கவேண்டுமென்றும் விஸ்வ இந்து பரிசத் தலைவர் உண்ணாவிரதம் இருக்கிறார்

Orissa VHP leader’s hunger strike enters second day
Oct 21st, 2008 | By Sindh Today | Category: India

Bhubaneswar, Oct 21 (IANS) A hunger strike by a Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader here demanding arrest of those behind the killing of Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati entered the second day Tuesday.

Senior leaders of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) including national vice president Jual Oram and state president Suresh Pujari went to the venue of the protest and extended their support to Swami Jeevan Chaitanya, a VHP central advisory committee member, who is on fast.

Swami Jeevan Chaitanya and 70 other Hindu saints have been protesting here with a charter of five demands.

‘We want the arrest of all those who killed Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati and those who conspired in the crime,’ Swami Jeevan Chaitanya told IANS.

‘Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati had named two persons prior to his killing and had said they were after his life. We want their immediate arrest,’ he said.

Swami Laxmanananda, a VHP leader, and four of his aides were killed in their Jaleshpata ashram Aug 23. The murders led to violence in Kandhmal district in which 36 people have been killed and more than 20,000 people have been rendered homeless.

While Maoist guerrillas have claimed responsibility for the killings, Hindu groups hold Christians responsible for the crime. Christians and their places of worship have faced large-scale attacks.

திரிபுரா குண்டுவெடிப்புகளுக்காக 3 பங்களாதேஷிகள் கைது

திரிபுரா குண்டுவெடிப்புகளுக்காக 3 பங்களாதேஷிகள் கைது

Agartala blasts: 3 Bangladeshis arrested
Sushanta Talukdar


GUWAHATI: The Tripura police on Thursday night arrested four persons, including three Bangladeshis, in connection with Wednesday’s serial blasts at Agartala. They have announced a cash award of Rs.1 lakh to anyone providing clues on those involved in the blasts.

Tripura Police spokesman Nepal Das told The Hindu that all the four arrested were produced before the court on Friday and it remanded them to police custody for seven days.

The illegal Bangladeshi nationals have been identified as Md. Joinal (28) from Chittagong, Roshan Jamam from Sylhet and Abdul Malek (22) from Rangpur of Bangladesh. The fourth person arrested has been identified as Nurul Amin (43) from Gajaria, who was earlier detained along with five others for questioning.

The Bangladeshis were arrested from Lankamura area of Agartala. Tripura shares an 856-km-long border with Bangladesh.

Investigating agencies recovered one mobile handset, a nine-volt battery and a residue of tiffin boxes from blast sites, which indicated use of a stronger terror module in triggering the serial blasts.

However, due to the low quantity of explosives, the intensity of the blasts was comparatively less, sources said. Police earlier said ammonium nitrate and fuel oil was suspected to have been used in making the bombs.

The Tripura government has decided to erect metal detectors in all pandals of Durga puja as part of stepped-up security measures for smooth celebration of the festival beginning on Sunday.

மணிப்பூர் மாநிலத்தில் குண்டுவெடிப்புகள் 17 பேர் பலி 30 பேர் படுகாயம்

மணிப்பூர் மாநிலத்தில் குண்டுவெடிப்புகள் 17 பேர் பலி 30 பேர் படுகாயம்

17 killed, 30 injured in Imphal blast
Imphal (PTI): At least 17 people were killed and more than 30 others injured on Tuesday night when unidentified militants exploded a bomb attached to a two-wheeler near a police commando complex in Imphal West district.

Sources said the victims included a few security personnel.

While 13 people died on the spot, four more succumbed to injuries in hospital. The death toll is likely to increase as the condition of several injured people is critical, sources said.

According to the first official report, the militants raided the place where security personnel and civilians were gambling ahead of the Diwali.

The injured were shifted to Regional Institute of Medical Science and Hospital and Jawaharlal Nehru Hospital.

மணிப்பூர் மாநில எம்.எல்.ஏவை இஸ்லாமிய பயங்கரவாதிகள் தாக்கினர்

மணிப்பூர் மாநில எம்.எல்.ஏவை இஸ்லாமிய பயங்கரவாதிகள் தாக்கினர்

திரிபுரா மாநிலத்தில் உள்ள மணிப்பூரிகளின் கோவிலிலும் இஸ்லாமிய பயங்கரவாதிகள் குண்டு வைத்தனர்.

Militants attack MLA’s house in Imphal
Iboyaima Laithangbam


IMPHAL: The house of T. Nandakishore, MLA of Imphal West district in Manipur, was attacked by militants on Sunday. A Chinese-made hand-grenade was thrown into the house but there was no casualty in the explosion.

Mr. Nandakishore said militants, identifying themselves as members of the Kangleipak Communist Party (Military Council), had sent him a message expressing their desire to talk with him on certain matters. So far, no militant organisation has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Bomb defused in temple


In Tripura, Manipuris have become targets of Islamic terrorists who had sneaked into the State from Bangladesh. On Sunday, a powerful bomb connected to a mobile phone was found in a Manipuri temple at Radha Nagar where a few thousand devotees had assembled on the occasion of Durga Puja. However, the bomb was detected and in the presence of senior police officers, including the Director-General of Police Pranay Sahay, it was defused.

On Wednesday, four synchronised bombs went off in Tripura in two markets, a bus stand and a residential locality. More than 100 people were injured. Eight seriously wounded persons were airlifted to Kolkata and Guwahati. Top officials of the Intelligence Bureau, the National Security Guards and State police are working to track down the terrorists. So far, six suspects, including three Bangladeshi nationals, have been arrested.

The Tripura government has announced cash rewards of between Rs.1 lakh and Rs.5 lakh to anyone providing vital information that may lead to the arrest of the terrorists behind the blasts.

Security has been tightened in areas where there is a mix of Manipuris and people of Bangladeshi origin.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

தென்னமெரிக்காவில் பாதிரியாரின் குரூரங்கள் அம்பலமாகின்றன

The Torture Colony

In a remote part of Chile,
an evil German evangelist
built a utopia whose members helped
the Pinochet regime perform
its foulest deeds

By Bruce Falconer


Deep in the Andean foothills of Chile’s central valley lives a group of German expatriates, the members of a utopian experiment called Colonia Dignidad. They have resided there for decades, separate from the community around them, but widely known and admired, and respected for their cleanliness, their wealth, and their work ethic. Their land stretches across 70 square miles, rising gently from irrigated farmland to low, forested hills, against a backdrop of snowcapped mountains. Today Colonia Dignidad is partially integrated with the rest of Chile. For decades, however, its isolation was nearly complete. Its sole connection to the outside world was a long dirt road that wound through tree farms and fields of wheat, corn, and soybeans, passed through a guarded gate, and led to the center of the property, where the Germans lived in an orderly Bavarian-style village of flower gardens, water fountains, and cream-colored buildings with orange tile roofs. The village had modern apartment complexes, two schools, a chapel, several meetinghouses, and a bakery that produced fresh cakes, breads, and cheeses. There were numerous animal stables, two landing strips, at least one airplane, a hydroelectric power station, and mills and factories of various kinds, including a highly profitable gravel mill that supplied raw materials for numerous road-building projects throughout Chile. On the north side of the village was a hospital, where the Germans provided free care to thousands of patients in one of the country’s poorest areas.

All this was made possible by one man, a charismatic, Evangelical preacher named Paul Schaefer, who founded the community and who, until several years ago, remained very much in charge. Tall, lean, and of strong build, with thin gray hair and a glass eye, Schaefer lived most of his adult life in Chile but possessed only a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish; like his followers, he spoke primarily in German. Although the colonos of Colonia Dignidad dressed in traditional German peasant clothes—the men in wool pants and suspenders, the women in homemade dresses and headscarves—Schaefer wore newer, more modern clothes that denoted his stature. His manner was serious; he seldom smiled. The effect only deepened the sense of mystery that surrounded him.

Few outsiders ever gained access to the Colonia while its reclusive leader remained in power. An old Chilean newsreel, however, filmed at Schaefer’s invitation in 1981, provides a rare picture of life inside the community, a utopia in full and happy bloom. The footage shows a bucolic paradise of sunshine and verdant fields set among clean, fast-flowing rivers and snowy peaks. Its German inhabitants improve the land and work their trades. A carpenter assembles a new chair for the Colonia’s school. A woman in a white apron bakes German-style torts and pastries in the kitchen. Teenaged boys clear a new field for planting. Children laugh and splash in a lake. Schaefer himself, wearing a white suit and brown aviator sunglasses, takes the camera crew on a tour. Standing next to the Colonia’s flour mill, he extols the quality of German machinery. “We bought this mill in Europe,” he says in broken Spanish. “It is 60 years old, but we have not had to do any repairs on it.” Even today, this remains one of the only known recordings of his voice. It is crisp and baritone. Back outside, Schaefer leads the television crew to a petting zoo, where the reporter feeds chunks of bread to baby deer and plays with the colonos’ collection of pet owls. The newsreel concludes with a performance by a 15-piece chamber orchestra composed of young, female colonos in flowing white skirts and colorful blouses. The music is beautiful and expertly played.

These images were a reflection of Colonia Dignidad as Schaefer wanted it to be seen. Today, a quarter century later, with Schaefer gone and his utopia open to visitors for the first time, it looks much the same. On a recent trip to Chile, I made the four-hour drive south from Santiago. The village remains an oasis of German tidiness, with blooming flower gardens and perfectly tended copses of willows and pines. As I walked through it, there were very few people on the streets, and those I encountered smiled politely, then quickly retreated indoors. They did not invite conversation. I was reminded of what a Chilean friend, a journalist, had told me as I prepared for my visit. “You will get the uneasy feeling of crossing into some sort of twilight zone,” he had said. “You will see the way they dress, their haircuts. It’s like going back in time to Germany in the 1940s. Even though it is easier to talk to the colonos than it was a few years ago, things are still a long way from being ‘normal.’ Most of them are still quite afraid of speaking openly.”

The truth, so unlikely in this setting, is that Colonia Dignidad was founded on fear, and it is fear that still binds it together. Investigations by Amnesty International and the governments of Chile, Germany, and France, as well as the testimony of former colonos who, over the years, managed to escape the colony, have revealed evidence of terrible crimes: child molestation, forced labor, weapons trafficking, money laundering, kidnapping, torture, and murder. Orchestrated by Paul Schaefer and his inner circle of trusted lieutenants, much of the abuse was initially directed inward as a means of conditioning the colonos to obey Schaefer’s commands. Later, after General Augusto Pinochet’s military junta seized power in Chile, the violence spilled onto the national stage. Schaefer, through an informal alliance with the Pinochet regime, allowed Colonia Dignidad to serve as a torture and execution center for the disposal of enemies of the state. The investigations continue. In the months preceding my visit, police found two large caches of military-grade weapons buried inside the compound. Parts of cars had also been unearthed, their vehicle identification numbers traced back to missing political dissidents. Even as I stood in Schaefer’s house drinking apple juice, elsewhere on the property a police forensics unit was excavating a mass grave thought to contain the decomposed remains of dozens of political prisoners.



Colonia Dignidad perpetuated itself through a complex system of social controls. The pilgrims thought of themselves as an extended family based not on blood, but on absolute devotion to Schaefer. They called him “The Permanent Uncle.” Schaefer himself had selected the title and drilled into his disciples a definition of family he found in the Bible. “Who are my mother and father?” he liked to say. “Those that do the work of God.”

Schaefer offered his flock the possibility of a pure existence in the service of God. All that was required was the regular confession of sin. His followers proved eager to unload their guilt, and confession—personally received by Schaefer in a practice he called “Seelesorge,” or “care of the soul”—became the vehicle for their salvation. The pilgrims confessed to him in a variety of forums. Schaefer would summon them in small groups each day to discuss their sins; public confessions were heard at lunch and dinner; and, on Sundays, the entire community assembled for prayer and confession in a meeting hall adjacent to Schaefer’s house.

Within that family, people were divided into groups by age and gender, each with its own flag and insignia. A boy born inside the Colonia would spend the first years of life not with his parents (who themselves lived apart from each other) but with nurses in the hospital as one of “The Babies.” At six, he would graduate to a group called “The Wedges” and from there, at 15, to “The Army of Salvation.” By his mid-30s he would become one of “The Elder Servants,” a status he would retain until, at 50, he was ready to join “The Comalos,” a term that has no obvious meaning. Girls progressed through a similar series of groups, including “The Dragons,” “The Field Mice,” “The Women’s Group,” and “The Grannies.”

Group members lived together, six or more to a room, in dormitory-type buildings. They had few individual possessions: pajamas, a set of work clothes, a set of leisure clothes, and a week’s supply of underwear. Everything else, including their shoes, was kept locked away in a closet. Each morning, the colonos would assemble with their respective groups in the cafeteria for a breakfast of milk and bread with jelly. Then it was off to work, the men to the plants, mills, and craft shops, the women to less skilled jobs in the henhouse, the stables, and the kitchen. Some women were also assigned as nurses in the hospital. Both men and women labored together in the fields.

The days were productive. Schaefer exhorted his colonos to righteous sacrifice, frequently reciting the words “Arbeit ist Gottesdienst” (“Work is divine service”). Large signs attached to garden trellises and decorative iron latticework inside the Colonia reinforced the message with pious declarations like “Supreme Judge, We Await Thee” and “We Withstand the Pain for the Sake of Dignity.” The pilgrims worked 12 hours a day, often longer, with a short break for lunch. It was taken as a point of pride that they expected no payment for their labor, but gave it willingly for the good of the community. Their success with industry and agriculture provided the financial means necessary to fuel their philanthropic mission.

Given such high ideals, it is hardly surprising that the centerpiece of Schaefer’s utopia was a charity hospital. A gray, two-story building with unadorned windows and a tapered tile roof, the hospital stood on the far side of the village from the entry gate, with 65 beds, a maternity ward, and sterile operating rooms. Funded in part by state subsidies, its quality of care was excellent—the hospital was always busy and over the years provided full and recurring treatment for 26,000 people. The colonos sent buses or hired the few locals with cars to collect patients from their isolated villages. Sometimes entire families would arrive at once. The maternity ward was especially popular, as the hospital continued to supply local women with four and half pounds of powdered milk every month for the first six years of a child’s life. To this day, pictures of some of the thousands of Chilean babies born there remain posted on the wall of the reception area.



Paul Schaefer was born in 1921 in the quiet town of Troisdorf, near the Dutch border of Germany. He was a poor student, so clumsy that one day, while using a fork to untie a stubborn shoelace, he accidentally gouged out his right eye. It is said that Schaefer tried to join the elite Nazi SS corps a few years later, but was rejected because of this infirmity. Although he spent the war as a nurse in a German field hospital in occupied France, later in life he claimed that his glass eye was the result of a war wound.

After Germany’s surrender, Schaefer worked for a short time in the Evangelical Free Church as a youth leader, but he was fired when suspicion arose that he had somehow mistreated the boys in his care. He struck out on his own as a solo preacher, roaming the German countryside dressed in lederhosen, strumming an acoustic guitar, and encouraging all who would listen to confess their sins. Schaefer was a gifted speaker with a powerful charisma that, according to one colono who first met him at a prayer meeting in 1952, radiated from his body like beams of light. Within a few years, Schaefer had attracted several hundred followers and founded an orphanage outside of Troisdorf for war widows and their children, many of whom were impoverished refugees from East Prussia who had fled the Soviet occupation. Schaefer told them they were God’s chosen and that their destiny had been predetermined, offering them the sense of security they craved as they struggled to mend their lives. Those who joined the congregation agreed to pay 10 percent of their income to Schaefer and to confess daily.

Schaefer’s first experiment in community building did not end well. The mothers of two young boys living in the orphanage charged that he had molested their children, an accusation taken seriously enough for local judicial authorities to issue a warrant for his arrest. Schaefer fled to the Middle East, where, with two trusted lieutenants, he searched for a place to relocate his congregation. Soon after, he came into contact with the Chilean ambassador to Germany, who, unaware of Schaefer’s legal troubles, invited him to Chile.

A faded black-and-white photograph shows Schaefer stepping off the plane in Santiago in January 1961 in a long black winter coat and matching fedora, smiling faintly. Within a year, using funds collected from his congregation back in Germany, Schaefer bought an abandoned 4,400-acre ranch several hundred miles south of Santiago, which he and some 10 original settlers from Germany began to rebuild. By the end of 1963, an initial group of approximately 230 Germans—the bulk of Schaefer’s congregation—had emigrated from Europe to the newly named Colonia Dignidad (“dignity colony”). Two more waves of German pilgrims followed, in 1966 and 1973, most belonging to the 15 families that formed the core of Schaefer’s following. Over the years, the community expanded further through the adoption of Chilean children from impoverished local families. These Chilean colonos learned to speak German and became full members of the community.

In Germany, Schaefer’s congregation had been a loose gathering of devotees who lived on their own in scattered towns and villages. In Chile, that distance was closed, and Schaefer rapidly consolidated control. First, there could be no secrets. Private conversations were forbidden. “If two are gathered,” he often said, “they are under the Devil. If three are gathered, they are under Jesus.” Second, everything had to be confessed: whether the sin was in thought or in deed, he had to be informed. Third, no one could leave the property without Schaefer’s permission. Any violation, or perceived violation, of these rules would be punished.

All of this begged the question: why would so many people have chosen to subordinate themselves to Schaefer’s will? How did he achieve such power over them? In Santiago in early 2006, I spoke with Dr. Neils Biedermann, a Chilean psychiatrist, who, in association with the German Embassy, had been making monthly trips to Colonia Dignidad to study the psychology of its inhabitants. He offered observations from his work. “Everything was done to further the religion,” he explained. “Like in any sect, the colonos had a spiritual leader in Paul Schaefer, to whom they formed a strong attachment. There was a complex network of emotional connections in the Colonia. It was not a concentration camp system in which prisoners tend to think of themselves as individuals. It was a community, and the children suffered most of all.” The pilgrims may have come to Chile for their religion, but once there they became prey to a brutal and relentless cult of personality. “The older colonos punished the younger ones under orders from Schaefer,” Biedermann continued. “They were also the ones who were supposed to educate them. This involved keeping them away from their families, keeping them active all day, and principally keeping them obedient and disciplined. They did whatever they needed to do, including psychopharmacology and electroshock.” Over time, physical coercion became less necessary as the social system became rooted in the psyche of the individual.

Schaefer reinforced his power through an elaborate system of mutual betrayal. Members of the community were encouraged to confess not only to him, but to one another. A colono who heard the sinful confession could expect to be rewarded—typically with a reprieve of his own sins—if he informed Schaefer of the offense.

Every day at lunch and dinner, members of the community were expected to write the names of sinners on a blackboard near the entrance to the cafeteria. After everyone was seated, Schaefer would take his place at a small table facing the group, and, while his minions ate, he’d read through a microphone the names listed on the board. Each sinner was required to stand up and confess. To deny wrongdoing was a great offense, and the prudent among them became adept at inventing sins on the spot.

According to Schaefer’s teachings, women were temptresses whose sexuality, if uncontrolled, would drive men wild with desire and lead them to stray from God. Schaefer considered sexual intercourse a tool of the Devil. To protect men from corruption, he created in the Colonia an environment of minimal temptation. Women lived and worked separately from men. They wore ugly homemade dresses, so baggy that almost no trace of the female form remained visible. They rolled their long hair into tight, passion-proof buns, and the endless days spent toiling in the workshops or in the fields further depressed their frustrated libido.

But even then, men and women found ways of getting together. They still felt lust. They fell in love. Nature would not be denied so completely. When romantic relationships did develop, Schaefer decided their course. Sometimes he permitted couples to marry and, occasionally, to have children. More often he did not. When a man asked Schaefer for permission to marry, he entered into a game of sexual roulette. Schaefer might grant the request but then require that he be the one to select the bride. This seldom worked in the man’s favor, for the women Schaefer chose were almost always well beyond childbearing years. If, despite these elaborate precautions, a woman somehow managed to get pregnant, Schaefer would isolate her from the community until she gave birth. Afterwards she returned to work, while nurses in the hospital cared for her child. By Schaefer’s design, pregnancy was uncommon. To this day, no one knows why he discouraged couples from having children. What seems clear is that he did not care if the community endured after he was gone. Only about 60 children were born in the Colonia in the 30-odd years he spent at its helm; between 1975 and 1989, there were no births at all.

For Schaefer and his pilgrims, evil manifested itself most tangibly in the scourge of international communism. It should be remembered that they were Germans, many of whom had suffered terrible losses as the Russians swept through eastern Germany on their way to Berlin. Fear of a Soviet attack on Western Europe was, for many, the deciding factor in their choice to follow Schaefer to Chile. Their fearful worldview was heightened by their isolation: their only source of information about the outside world was faked television news spliced together from old footage, depicting a world overcome by war, famine, and death.

To assure the defense of his utopia, Schaefer organized a paramilitary unit of several dozen men, trained in military tactics and martial arts. On some Saturday nights, a shrill alarm would summon them to a meeting. As one former unit member later testified to German government investigators, once the troops were assembled, Schaefer would enter the room and say, without apparent irony, “Good evening, Comrades,” to which those present were required to respond, “Good evening, General.” If the reply came late or lacked sufficient enthusiasm, Schaefer grew upset. Each man was required by regulation to carry a sidearm. Schaefer checked the weapons carefully to make sure that they were loaded and had their safeties on. Any man who failed the inspection lost his right to carry a gun. With any urgent business related to Soviet world domination resolved, the men dispersed into the night, searching the darkness for communists.

The outer perimeter of Colonia Dignidad was marked by eight-foot fences topped with barbed wire, which armed groups of men patrolled day and night with German shepherd and doberman attack dogs. Guards in observation posts equipped with shortwave radios, telephones, binoculars, night vision equipment, and telephoto cameras scanned the landscape for intruders. These were, of course, imaginary. But if invaders were to succeed in getting through the perimeter, they would come upon a second tier of inner defenses: strands of copper wire hidden around the village, which, if stepped on, triggered a silent alarm. Doors and windows in most buildings were equipped with armored shades that could be drawn shut in the event of an invasion. Dormitories were outfitted with alarms and surveillance cameras, and the entire village sat atop an extensive network of tunnels and underground bunkers. When the alarm sounded, as it frequently did during practice drills, men belonging to the security force grabbed their rifles and waited on their doorsteps for instructions.

With no genuine external enemies to fight, Schaefer and his most trusted lieutenants turned their energies inward. The practice of confession provided them with plenty of people to punish. The guilty were starved, threatened with dogs, or beaten—sometimes by Schaefer himself, more often by others acting on his orders. The harshest treatment was reserved for those who, for one reason or another, Schaefer simply did not like. He called them “the rebels.” They could be identified by their clothing: the men wore red shirts and white trousers, the women potato sacks over their long dresses. The other colonos despised them, usually without knowing why.

One such rebel was a Chilean colono named Franz Baar, adopted by the Germans at 10. By the time he was a teenager, Schaefer singled him out as a troublemaker. As Baar now remembers it, a group of men approached him one day while he was working in the carpentry shop and accused him of stealing the keys to one of the dormitories. When Baar denied it, he was beaten unconscious with electrical cables—his skull broken—and loaded into an ambulance. He awoke some time later in the Colonia’s hospital, where he would remain as a prisoner for the next 31 years.

Baar was kept in an upstairs section of the hospital never seen by the local Chileans who sought treatment there. As he later described to me, his days began with a series of intravenous injections, after which the nurses brought him bread and a plate with 12 to 15 different pills. Once satisfied that he was properly medicated, nurses delivered his clothes and shoes, hidden from him to reduce the likelihood of escape. After he dressed, a security detail escorted him to his job at the carpentry shop. Baar worked on heavy machines in a cramped space. The injections and pills slowed his movements and made him clumsy. Today, scar tissue on his forearms maps the places where the electric saws bit into his flesh. Baar was forced to work late into the night, sometimes until 3 A.M. He was not permitted to eat with the rest of the community. Instead, his meals were delivered to him at the carpentry shop, where he devoured them in isolation.

A still worse punishment awaited in rooms nine and 14 of the hospital, where Baar and other colonos unfortunate enough to draw the full measure of Schaefer’s fury were subjected to shock treatments. A female physician worked the machines, her manner detached and clinical. Patients were strapped down and fitted with crowns attached by wires to a voltage machine. Baar told me how the doctor seemed to enjoy watching him suffer. “She kept asking me questions,” he said. “I heard what she was saying and wanted to respond, but I couldn’t. She was playing with the machine and asking, ‘What do you feel? Are you feeling something?’ She wanted to know what was happening to me as she adjusted the voltage.”

Escape was difficult, even for those not held in the hospital. A rebel named Wolfgang Mueller tried to escape on three separate occasions. Twice—once in 1962, and again in 1964—he fled to the home of a Chilean family in a nearby town, and twice members of the Colonia’s security force found him there and brought him back. Both times, Mueller was beaten and forcibly sedated. On his third and final escape attempt in 1966, he made it as far as Santiago, where he received police protection and sought refuge in a German Embassy safe house. On orders from Schaefer, 15 colonos stormed the house in an attempt to recapture him. After a fistfight with police, they fled. Soon after, Mueller left Chile and found safety in Germany, where, despite his repeated accusations against Schaefer, government officials took no action. Mueller remains there today and operates a small nonprofit organization to combat the abuse of children by religious sects.

At the opposite end of the social spectrum from the rebels was a group of boys Schaefer affectionately called his “sprinters.” If Schaefer wanted to speak with someone working in a remote corner of the property, he sent a sprinter off to summon him. Schaefer trained his sprinters to assist in even the most mundane of personal tasks, like helping him to put his shoes on or holding the phone to his ear as he spoke. No job was too small. For the boys lucky enough to be chosen, the position brought pride and power.

But this special status was also a source of trouble for them. It was an open secret that Schaefer was a pedophile, just as the authorities had accused him of being long before in Germany. He enjoyed taking sprinters along during his daily tour of the Colonia. Because zippers were inconvenient, their uniforms included loose-fitting athletic shorts with an elastic waistband. He allowed his favorite sprinters to stay overnight in his room in a child-size bed set up alongside his own, sometimes sleeping with two or more sprinters at once. His routine, it later emerged, included feeding them sedatives, washing them with a sponge, and sexual manipulation.

All challengers to Schaefer’s authority—real or imagined—were rooted out and destroyed. No one inspired greater love and admiration among the children of the Colonia than Santa Claus. It is said that in the days shortly before Christmas one year in the mid-1970s, Schaefer gathered the Colonia’s children, loaded them onto a bus, and drove them out to a nearby river, where, he told them, Santa was coming to visit. The boys and girls stood excitedly along the riverbank, while an older colono in a fake beard and a red and white suit floated towards them on a raft. Schaefer pulled a pistol from his belt and fired, seeming to wound Santa, who tumbled into the water, where he thrashed about before disappearing below the surface. It was a charade, but Schaefer turned to the children assembled before him and said that Santa was dead. From that day forward, Schaefer’s birthday was the only holiday celebrated inside Colonia Dignidad.

The Colonia was, in effect, a state within a state, and Schaefer aggressively expanded the reach of his territory. Its original 4,400 acres ultimately grew to some 32,000. The expansion was not always peaceful. In a particularly brutal case, Schaefer seized control over a small chapel and several acres of church lands that lay adjacent to the Colonia’s entrance. The nuns who lived there were determined to stay, but the colonos stole their animals, cut off their water supply, flooded their latrines, fired off guns, and shined bright lights into their windows at night. They beat young children on their way to catechism, surrounded the chapel in barbed wire, and circulated fake videos of the nuns participating in orgies with priests. Finally they set fire to the nuns’ house and watched while it burned to the ground. Schaefer then claimed the church’s land as his own.

He had a favorite saying: “Every man has his price.” And, in an impoverished country like Chile, that price was well within Schaefer’s means. He selected his friends for their strategic value and lavished the most important of them with gourmet cakes and cheeses, money, cars, and free vacations. He seldom failed to get what he wanted.



On September 11, 1973, the right-wing military junta of Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile, toppling the socialist government of Salvador Allende in a bloody coup that left the former president dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. In the chaotic days that followed, scattered groups of Allende’s supporters fought isolated street battles against Pinochet’s soldiers, but the resistance was short-lived. Within a week, the entire country was under military control. The new regime declared a state of emergency, suspended the constitution, disbanded congress, banned political parties, and imposed strict censorship on the press—all in the name of turning back Allende’s socialist experiment and rescuing the country from international communism.

Despite his early success, Pinochet was convinced that underground networks of leftist plotters remained. In the months following the coup, at least 45,000 people were rounded up and hauled off to makeshift detention centers for interrogation. There are no reliable statistics for how many thousands were tortured, but, by year’s end, more than 1,500 people had been killed. In June 1974, Pinochet created the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA)—a secret police force, separate from the rest of Chile’s intelligence establishment and loyal only to him, designed to hunt down and eliminate his political enemies. DINA agents routinely kidnapped regime opponents and delivered them to secret torture and execution centers located throughout Chile—including Colonia Dignidad.

Germany and Chile enjoyed a long history of military cooperation, reaching back to the late 19th century, when Prussian officers from the renowned Kreigsakademie in Berlin oversaw the modernization of the Chilean army. A mutual respect developed and persisted through World War II, during which the young Lieutenant Pinochet, fresh of out of military school, openly sympathized with the Nazis and became “enchanted by Rommel,” as he later admitted. Drawing as it did on this history, the connection between the colonos and the Pinochet regime was classically symbiotic. Paul Schaefer needed political allies and protection for his eccentric community; Pinochet’s agents needed discreet services and a secure base of operations.

Colonia Dignidad, according to a former DINA agent assigned there in the mid-1970s, maintained powerful radio equipment, facilitating communication between DINA commanders in Chile and their agent saboteurs and assassins stationed abroad. In 2005, Michael Townley, an American expatriate and former DINA officer implicated in several high-profile assassinations and bombings, testified to a Chilean judge that the Colonia had also housed a secret laboratory, where government scientists developed chemical weapons. Schaefer’s primary contribution to Pinochet’s operations, however, came in the instruction of DINA agents in the science of torture. Soon after the coup, arrested political dissidents began to disappear into Colonia Dignidad.

One who survived is Luis Peebles, a 60-year-old psychiatrist at a public hospital in a working-class neighborhood of Santiago. In early 2006, we sat down together in an empty office in the hospital, where he described the week he spent as a political prisoner in Colonia Dignidad in February 1975. Peebles had been the commander of a clandestine anti-Pinochet militia until his capture by government soldiers. Initially jailed at a naval base in the coastal city of Concepción, he remembers how, early one Sunday morning, several plainclothes agents arrived at the base, bound his hands and feet, blindfolded him, and stuffed wet cotton into his ears. They forced him into the back of a truck and drove for several hours. Along the way, Peebles tried to piece together his location. He felt the truck turn off the highway and slow onto a dirt road. There was the strong odor of cow manure. Peebles thought he heard the muffled sounds of birds and flowing water. When the truck finally stopped, he took a deep breath. The air was clean.

He was taken to an underground cellar that smelled of linoleum and wood polish, stripped to his underwear and fastened down with leather straps to an iron bed frame. His blindfold was replaced with a leather cap that came down over his eyes. It had a chinstrap that held his jaw firmly in place and earflaps equipped with metal wires. More wires were taped to his ankles, thighs, chest, throat, anus, and genitals, all hooked into a voltage machine. The first session lasted six hours. As Peebles was being shocked, his torturers sometimes beat him with a rubber cattle prod that emitted still more electric currents. They stabbed him with needles that caused his skin to itch. They put out their cigarettes on his body and applied a sticky substance to his eyes and mouth; sometimes, if he screamed, they shoved it down his throat.

His interrogator wanted to know the identities of regime opponents and the locations of weapons caches, but for long periods there were no questions at all. An older man, directing the others, spoke with a strange accent that Peebles first understood to be Brazilian or Portuguese, but later recognized as German. “He was teaching them how to do their job,” Peebles told me. “He was saying, ‘You have to do it slowly. You have to push here.’ Once or twice he punched me very hard below the belt. He realized that they weren’t doing anything to me down there, so he said, ‘You should also do it here,’ and he started beating me.” As he was being shocked, Peebles thrashed around violently. His muscles tensed and his struggling caused the bed frame to buckle almost in two. Sometimes his blinders slipped out of place, allowing him brief glimpses of his surroundings. There were egg cartons and potato sacks on the walls, presumably to absorb the sound of his screams. At one point, he caught a glimpse of the older man who was directing his torture. He had tan skin, sunken eyes, and thin lips. “He gave the impression of being a hard man,” Peebles remembered.

In the following days, as his torture continued, Peebles lost all sense of time. He fell in and out of consciousness. At times, he believed he was going mad. He thought he was going to die. When he asked for a blanket, his torturers doused him with warm water, quickly followed by cold water. When not being tortured, Peebles was kept in a cell about 20 paces down a corridor, blindfolded and strapped to a metal grate. He received no food or water for what must have been several days. When he was finally fed, it was what his torturers called “pig food”—a dense mass served in a rusty can. The smell turned his stomach. He ate it anyway. At night, he tried to sleep, but his guards kept him awake. He heard the steady hum of an electric generator. Above the noise, he could hear footsteps upstairs. He came to believe that he was being held in a basement of some kind, maybe underneath a cafeteria or a restaurant.

Eventually the torture stopped. Peebles’ clothes were returned—laundered and neatly folded—and his captors drove him back to the naval base in Concepción. Several months later, he was released and he fled to Europe. Over the next few years, as rumors of Colonia Dignidad’s alliance with the Pinochet government emerged, he came to suspect that he had been tortured there. He told his story to the German chapter of Amnesty International, which, in 1977, used his testimony, together with that of other torture survivors, to produce a 60-page report called “Colonia Dignidad: A German Community in Chile—A Torture Camp for the dina.” Schaefer’s lawyers immediately filed libel charges in a German court, initiating a legal battle that would prevent distribution of the Amnesty report until late 1997. Meanwhile, Peebles settled in Brussels, where he continued to speak out on his own. In 1980, he was visited by a German reporter named Gero Gemballa, who was preparing a television documentary about the Colonia. He showed Peebles several reels of videotape he had obtained. They appeared to be home movies shot by the colonos themselves. The footage went on for hours, but one of the images, as soon as he saw it, focused Peebles’s attention. It was a fleeting shot of Schaefer, the “hard man” who had supervised his torture. Years later, after Pinochet left power, Peebles drew a map of the bunker where he had been tortured and gave it to a Chilean judge who was investigating Colonia Dignidad’s human rights abuses. The judge reported back that Peebles description closely matched a bunker uncovered inside the Colonia, even down to the paneling on the walls. Over the years, more survivors stepped forward, claiming that they too had been tortured in Colonia Dignidad. In 1991, having studied the allegations, Chile’s National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation concluded “that a certain number of people apprehended by the DINA were really taken to Colonia Dignidad, held prisoner there for some time, and that some of them were subjected to torture, and that besides DINA agents, some of the residents there were involved in these actions.”

Contract torturing was not the worst of Schaefer’s collusion with the Pinochet regime: executions, perhaps of entire groups of prisoners, were sometimes carried out. No bodies have ever been found, but some remorseful DINA agents have talked. One, testifying in a German court on behalf of Amnesty International, said that he visited the Colonia to deliver a prisoner to a man known as “the Professor,” one of Schaefer’s pseudonyms. While the agent sat down to a formal dinner, the prisoner was led away by the Professor and several other Germans. After a while, the Professor returned, accompanied by a black German shepherd. “On entering,” the agent said, “he made a gesture using both arms, which, according to my way of thinking, meant the prisoner was dead.”

In truth, no one knows how many people were killed inside Colonia Dignidad. One former colono recently told Chilean government investigators that, on Schaefer’s orders, he once drove a busload of 35 political prisoners up into the Colonia’s wooded hills and left them in an isolated spot by the side of a dirt road. As he drove back down alone, he heard machine gun fire echoing through the forest. No bodies were ever recovered. According to at least one former high-ranking colono, the bodies of executed prisoners were exhumed in 1978, burned to ash, and dumped in the river. Others claim that the dead were buried in individual graves scattered about the hills and valleys. All that seems certain is that many of the prisoners who went into Colonia Dignidad were never seen again.



Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to investigate Colonia Dignidad, most compromised from the start by Schaefer’s network of protectors within the Chilean political and judicial establishment. In 1968, the Chilean government sent a parliamentary delegation to investigate Wolfgang Mueller’s accusation that he had been tortured there. Schaefer entertained the politicians with children’s choirs and gourmet food, and the delegation ultimately determined, after minimal deliberation, that Mueller’s allegations were unfounded. Later, in 1982, the German government, following evidence collected by Amnesty International, issued a request to the Pinochet government for cooperation in a joint investigation of Schaefer’s community. The request was denied, as were two others in 1985 and 1988. Only after Pinochet left power in 1990 did Schaefer’s support system begin to collapse. The new government, headed by Patricio Aylwin, a former senator and longtime opponent of Paul Schaefer, revoked the Colonia’s status as a nonprofit, charitable organization, cut off state funding for the hospital, and initiated a financial audit of the colony’s businesses. The colonos fought back with protest rallies and hunger strikes.

Despite the growing public controversy, little changed inside Colonia Dignidad. Schaefer carried on without interruption. He launched a new educational initiative called the “Intensive Boarding School,” a kind of immersion program, in which select local Chilean students were invited to live, work, and study in the Colonia until they reached the age of 18. Local families proved eager to participate. The program seemed like a good thing—at least to the parents—until, in the winter of 1996, a 12-year-old student named Cristobal Parada smuggled a secret note to his mother. He wrote, “Take me out of here. He raped me.” She managed to rescue him at considerable risk to Cristobal and herself and drove him to a nearby medical clinic, where a physician verified that the boy had been raped. Cristobal’s mother feared that the local police would be of no use, or, worse, that they would return her son to the Germans. She fled with Cristobal to the anonymity of the capital, where she sought out the chief of Chile’s national detective force, a man named Luis Henriquez.

A proud and seasoned professional, Henriquez had, in his 25 years on the force, been exposed to the darker aspects of human nature. In the early 1970s, he had served as one of Allende’s bodyguards and was there, inside the presidential palace, when Allende had committed suicide. In a country rife with conspiracies, Henriquez held a rigid belief in facts. “The truth has only one version,” he liked to say. “There are no different truths.” His was an unsophisticated view of the world, but, notably, one uncorrupted by Schaefer’s influence.

In mid-August 1996, a judge in Santiago issued a warrant for Schaefer’s arrest on charges of child abuse, asking Henriquez to execute it. Inside the Colonia that summer, life went on as before. The investigation taking form in far-off Santiago remained invisible to Schaefer and his followers. Local children continued to visit on weekends and holidays, the Intensive Boarding School remained in session, and, by all accounts, Schaefer continued to enjoy the sexual pleasures of his sprinters. The pattern was interrupted only when word of the arrest warrant reached Schaefer and his lieutenants. A meeting was called on August 20, 1996, to discuss what should be done. Schaefer seemed badly shaken. As the colonos discussed how to proceed, he kept his head down and never spoke a word. Shortly thereafter, he disappeared into the Colonia’s network of subterranean bunkers and tunnels. It is widely believed that he was there, underground, when, on November 30, 1996, Henriquez muscled his way into Schaefer’s utopia for the first time.

Henriquez had hoped to capture Schaefer by surprise. He went in with 30 armed policemen in a caravan, but as his team made its way up the long dirt road, it was spotted by the Colonia’s lookouts, who gave warning. The caravan busted through a sequence of gates and only slowed as it approached the village itself. Henriquez had given orders to his men, should they come under fire, not to retreat, but to move deeper into the village for cover. To his surprise, resistance was minimal.

“The colonos were like zombies, or maybe like robots,” Henriquez would later recall, “They were machines: on/off, on/off, on/off. They didn’t change moods like normal people.” Though Schaefer’s followers were generally subdued, at times they became aggressive, and, in a few cases, they physically assaulted the police. Henriquez assumed these outbursts signaled that they were getting close to Schaefer, but in the end, Henriquez and his police went home empty-handed.

Over the years, Henriquez conducted more than 30 raids on the Colonia, always with the same goal in mind: to capture Schaefer. Theories abounded as to where he might be. The colonos insisted he was dead. Others claimed he was hiding in the underground tunnels. Still others were convinced he had fled the country. Henriquez came to believe that Schaefer remained in the Colonia for some time after that initial raid. “I have no doubt,” he told me, “that sometimes we were just seconds from catching him.”

No one knows when Schaefer actually left Colonia Dignidad. Some say it was 1997, others later than that. What is clear is that at some point in the late 1990s, he fled the area, never to return. The curious thing is that very little changed afterward. The colonos continued to live life as they had under Schaefer’s rule, redirecting their allegiance to one of his senior lieutenants. In time, they attempted a democratic experiment, electing a council of leaders to manage their affairs. But under pressure from the older pilgrims, those most loyal to Schaefer, the council soon disintegrated, and the colony was left without a formal hierarchy, under the de facto leadership of a small group of colonos who managed the community’s businesses. Meanwhile, Henriquez continued to conduct his raids, even after he knew Schaefer had fled. “We couldn’t just say openly that he had left, that he was no longer there, because we needed a reason to remain there looking for all the other parts of the investigation,” Henriquez explained. “There was a lot more that we needed to find out.”

As time passed, some colonos eventually cooperated with the investigators, showing them where the files on Pinochet’s political enemies were kept, leading them to underground bunkers and tunnels, and giving the locations of weapons caches and mass graves. Although the graves had been emptied, investigators did find several car engines and side panels from vehicles that belonged to political dissidents who had disappeared.

In July 2005, police unearthed Schaefer’s collection of military weaponry. The stockpiles, buried in at least three different locations, included some 92 machine guns, 104 semi-automatic rifles, 18 antipersonnel mines, 18 cluster grenades, 1,893 hand grenades, 67 mortar rounds, 176 kilograms of tnt, and an unspecified number of rocket launchers, surface-to-air missiles, and telescopic sights. Also found were German-language instruction manuals and large quantities of ammunition. According to investigators, many of the weapons were of World War II vintage. Others, such as the grenades and the machine guns, appeared to have been produced in the Colonia’s own facilities.

Acting on a tip from one of the colonos, investigators moved Schaefer’s bed and lifted up an area rug to access a trap door hidden among the floorboards. Underneath, in a small chamber, was an assortment of what one of the police officers described to me as Schaefer’s “fantasy weapons”—three pencils that could shoot .22 caliber rounds, two equipped to fire darts, a dart-shooting camera, and several shootable walking canes. Schaefer was getting to be an old man by the time he fled. Among the other weapons, police found a walker capable of delivering an electric shock of 1,200 volts.



I met Luis Henriquez in January of 2006 at a hotel bar in Santiago as I was preparing for my first trip to Colonia Dignidad. He is an old man now, with gray hair and thick glasses, and retired from the police force in 2003. “All of these people have been mutilated in more ways than one,” he warned me. “They have no individual will. They have no individual power. They have no sense of sexuality. The younger ones may be able to change the way they think, but not the older ones. They’re sending their kids to school, and they’re trying to be normal, but it’s just another performance for them. They think only in terms of friends and enemies. In many ways, they will think of you as an enemy who is coming to stick his nose where he should not.” In the persona of a colono, he said, “‘We’re clever at performing. We shall give him cake and apple juice. We shall be nice to him although we know he is our enemy.’’ That’s the way they will probably relate to you.”

Traffic passes freely through what used to be the Colonia’s outermost gate—its imposing white metal trellis left to rust against a collection of boulders by the side of the road. Farther on stands a reception house, where an elderly German woman dutifully records visitors’ names before waving them through. A dirt road winds through a field of soybeans and arrives at Schaefer’s former residence. It is now a guesthouse, used to entertain visitors. A group of young colonos invite me into the living room for sugar cookies, and, as Henriquez had predicted, glasses of homemade apple juice. Organic, no preservatives, they tell me, with insistent, uncomfortable grins. The conversation revolves around new plans for improvements to the Colonia—a micro-power generation plant, a methane gas plant, and a home for the elderly. Another initiative, already under way, is to develop tourism. For a price, outsiders could now hunt for rabbits in Paul Schaefer’s woods or fish for salmon in the river where Santa Claus went under. I set off for the village restaurant to meet the tourism director, a Chilean named Victor Briones, said to have been one of Schaefer’s sprinters.

A fair-skinned man in his late 20s with a round face, Briones offers me coffee as we sit down together, just upstairs from the bunker where Luis Peebles had been tortured years before. He tells me that the Colonia had already welcomed vacationers from Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and the United States. The volume remains modest, but he is optimistic. Traffic is expected to increase, he says, with the opening of a new, nationally funded hiking trail that will pass through Colonia Dignidad. He appears to have mixed feelings about this. “We want security,” he says, “security in every aspect.” I ask him how he intends to control the story of the colony’s history, how members would respond to questions about hidden weapons, Pinochet, pedophilia, torture, and mass graves. He tells me flatly that he is training a group of colonos to serve as tour guides. Did he mean they would gloss over the truth? He says, no, they would tell the truth, and would emphasize that the young people in the Colonia were innocent of any wrongdoing.

Briones’s insistence on the innocence of youth was a tacit condemnation of the old. In Santiago, I had been told about a controversial letter written by a group of newly married colonos and addressed to the older generation. The letter, read aloud at a community meeting the previous spring, described the darker aspects of life under Paul Schaefer—the sexual abuse, the torture, the perversion of religion into a control mechanism. It represented the colonos’ first real attempt at an open conversation about their past and the question of responsibility: “Our parents have got to understand that they fall into the web of blame, because as individuals they did not have the strength or the nerve to oppose the dictatorship of Paul Schaefer. Regrettably, they became accustomed to obeying orders and instructions like it was natural, and they left aside consideration, peaceful meditation, reason, and conscience. They contributed to the undermining of their own human dignity.” The letter was not well received. The older colonos did not appreciate being singled out, and a rift was opened between young and old that has yet to mend.

I am invited to a monthly community meeting, a formal, ritualized affair still held in the room where Schaefer took confessions. Programs, distributed at the door, list the topics to be discussed. Inside, I find the chairs neatly arranged into five long rows before a wooden podium with a microphone. There is to be a celebration later in the evening in honor of a group of young colonos who have just graduated from college—the first generation to do so. Several dozen champagne bottles are arranged on a makeshift bar in the back of the room. I take a seat in the last row and watch the colonos file in. Most are elderly Germans, who come in using canes, walkers, and wheelchairs. The younger generation is a mix of Germans and Chileans, whose young children play hide-and-seek through the crowd. Several shake my hand as they squeeze past on the way to their seats. The sun is sinking below the mountains outside, but the room is sweltering, so the doors and windows are opened wide. By the time things get under way, promptly at 8:15 P.M., swarms of mosquitoes have moved in to feed.

The business portion of the meeting is dispatched with German efficiency. One of the new leaders takes the podium and suggests that the time has come to return the small church seized from the nuns to its rightful owners. “It’s important to understand that we will be giving it back, not giving it up,” he says, fixing his gaze on the older colonos in the room. An uncomfortable silence erupts. Several people shift in their chairs, but there are no objections. It is as close as anyone came that night to mentioning Paul Schaefer.

There is a short break, after which recent college graduates—newly minted nurses, accountants, and engineers—take turns thanking the community for its generosity. The Colonia had paid their tuitions in the hope that some might choose to live and work there after graduation. With so many of the initial pilgrims old and weak, the return of the younger generation has become a matter of survival.

A party follows the speeches. A young man tells me that he and several friends were out until 4 A.M. the night before singing karaoke in a local bar. There is talk of purchasing a karaoke machine for the Colonia. I wander over to the dessert table, stocked with cookies and German cakes. A young woman is handing out frozen coffees topped with whipped cream. I take one and find a perch near an old piano in the corner. Someone taps me on the shoulder. It is a grandfatherly German man, short and overweight but powerfully built, with a leathery face and sparse white hair. He gives his name as Heinrich Hempel. He seems like a kindly man. Later, I learn that he had been one of Schaefer’s enforcers. In return for his loyalty, Schaefer had allowed him to marry, and his son is among the group of college graduates being honored that night. Hempel confides that during World War II, as the Soviets were pushing through Eastern Europe, his family had been forced out of East Prussia and thrown into a Soviet labor camp in Poland. They spent five years there, under terrible conditions. His brother and sister froze to death in the snow. He describes the high fences that had surrounded the camp in Poland and draws them in my notebook with coils of razor wire at their base. He tells me that after his release, he had gone to Germany and joined Schaefer’s congregation. I ask him why he had moved to Chile. He thinks for a moment, smiles, and says, “I came here to do five years of charity work. But then I forgot how to leave.”



Four years ago, Carola Fuentes, a Chilean television journalist, visited Franz Baar, the man who had been held for 31 years, and his wife, Ingrid, in Chiloé, a remote island off of Chile’s southern coast, accessible only by ferry, where the newlywed couple had settled after escaping the Colonia the previous year. Fuentes was in the early stages of an investigation of Colonia Dignidad, and a lawyer in Santiago representing Cristobal Parada and other abused boys in a class action suit against Schaefer had recommended that she speak with the Baars. The couple told Fuentes that high-ranking colonos had been making frequent trips to Argentina, and that Schaefer was almost certainly there, perhaps near Buenos Aires. They also noted that when Schaefer went underground, several of his favorite nurses and bodyguards went with him. If any of those people could be located, there was a good chance he would be found.

Fuentes spent the next 13 months tracking down leads. Chilean authorities had information suggesting that Schaefer was in Buenos Aires, but, due to tense relations with their counterparts in Argentina, they could not be sure. As a journalist, Fuentes required no official permission to work in Argentina. Guided by frustrated Chilean officials, she followed the trail of evidence until it led her to a townhouse in an expensive gated community near Buenos Aires. She believed that Schaefer was inside, and notified the police. A 24-member SWAT team surrounded the townhouse on the morning of March 10, 2005, but was forced to wait most of the day for an Argentine judge to issue a warrant for Schaefer’s arrest. When the warrant finally arrived around 3 P.M., the SWAT team burst through the front door with Fuentes and her camera crew in tow. Inside they found three German men and two women—the bodyguards and nurses that the Baars had predicted would be with Schaefer. The police put them to the floor and asked if Schaefer was in the house. They said he was and pointed to the bedroom. Fuentes followed the policemen across the hallway with her camera. She later described the scene: “I saw this old guy, very lost in space, lying on the bed. He was absolutely not dangerous. I remembered what the Baars had told me. He didn’t match the image of this bad, evil guy.” Schaefer did not resist arrest. As he was being hauled away in handcuffs, Schaefer only groaned and quietly mumbled a question over and over: “Why? Why?”

Paul Schaefer was extradited to Chile aboard a military transport plane several days after his arrest and placed in a maximum-security prison in Santiago. In May 2006, he was convicted of child molestation and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He received an additional seven-year sentence in August 2006 for weapons violations, and three for torture. Further prosecution is being considered on charges of forced labor, tax evasion, kidnapping, torture, and possibly murder. Schaefer is 86 and confined to a wheelchair. His health is poor and he is attended full-time by a nurse, but his mental condition seems to have improved: “He was cold and arrogant,” said one of the judges who interrogated him for several hours in Santiago. “Every so often he would call in the nurse to check his blood pressure. When I asked him questions, he pretended not to hear.”

At one of Schaefer’s first interrogations, an orderly wheeled Schaefer into the room and pushed him to an empty spot beside Luis Peebles. Their arms touched. The judge asked Schaefer if he remembered the man sitting next to him. Schaefer turned and, with his one good eye, looked Peebles up and down. After a pause, he said, yes, he did remember him: Wasn’t he a lawyer who had once worked for the Colonia? “No,” Peebles responded. “I was once a guest in your home. You were very unkind. I never did anything to you or the Colonia, so why were you so cruel to me?” Schaefer went silent. Suddenly he began to have trouble understanding Spanish.

Bruce Falconer is a staff writer in the Washington Bureau of Mother Jones.

This article is copyrighted by the author. It may not be reproduced without permission of the publisher.
For reproduction or distribution rights, please contact scholar@pbk.org.
__________________________________________________________

Copyright © 2008 The American Scholar. All rights reserved.