Below, some of the reactions of two representatives of the Indigenous Community of Yakye Axa and Sawhoyamaxa. They participated in a workshop organized by Amnesty International and Civicus and told their story to participants.
Albino Gomez, Yakye Axa:
“What I liked most today was the participation of many people in the workshops and I am really happy with their interest in our case. They have also signed a petition to the Government of Paraguay requesting our ancestral lands back.
Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Irene Khan, is at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Ms Khan contributed to YouTube’s The Davos Debates, giving her view of the issues surrounding the Forum.
29 January: With virtually all foreign journalists barred from entering Gaza by the Israeli authorities during the three-week long conflict that began on 27 December, the story of the unprecedented scale of the Israeli military offensive there was told mostly through the pictures and film footage taken by local Palestinian journalists.
“Pictures don’t lie; they show the reality. The world seems to find it difficult to believe what Palestinians say or write about what happens to them but perhaps they may believe it if they see it,” a local cameraman told me.
Four Palestinian journalists were killed and several others were injured during the three-week conflict. Basel Ibrahim Faraj, a cameraman for Algerian TV, was fatally wounded when he was near a building in Gaza City which Israeli forces attacked on 27 December, the first day of air bombardment, and died a week later.
29 January 2009: Amnesty’s delegation participated in several workshops at the UFPA (Federal University of Pará) and UFRA (Federal Rural University of the Amazonia). The UFRA holds most of the thematic tents including the Human Rights tent and the Indigenous Peoples’ tent.
The representatives of the two indigenous communities of Yaky Axa and Sawhoyamaxa from Paraguay joined a workshop/forum organised by FIAN and HIC, two organisations working on the right to food and right to housing, called human rights and struggles over land, habitat and the environment.
28 January 2009: We read in the news that a home-made rocket was fired from Gaza to southern Israel by Palestinian fighters this morning, but it didn’t fall near any people. We saw yesterday at Sderot and Ashkelon police stations what these rockets – among them Qassems, Grads, Quds – look like: they are very crude, rusty 60, 90, or 120mm pipes about 1.5 metres long with fins welded onto them.
They can hold about five kilograms of explosives as well as shrapnel in the form of nails, bolts, or round metal sheets which rip into pieces on impact. They have a range of up to 20km, but cannot be aimed accurately. Anybody with some basic chemicals and scrap metal can make them. One can readily get a sense of why these rockets are inherently indiscriminate.
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29 January 2009: Amnesty’s delegation participated in several workshops at the UFPA (Federal University of Pará) and UFRA (Federal Rural University of the Amazonia). The UFRA holds most of the thematic tents including the Human Rights tent and the Indigenous Peoples’ tent.
