Turkish police fire tear gas in massive Istanbul protests
Published on Fri May 31Â 2013
Andrew Chung
Toronto Star
ISTANBULâIt was, on the surface, a dispute over sycamore trees and the fate of a modest urban park, but the heart of this ancient city became a ferocious battleground on Friday for the future of Turkey itself.
âWeâre not here because of the park or the trees. The trees are only a symbol,â said Caglayan Bulut, 31, an energy trader who came after work to the famed Taksim Square to support the protesters.
âThe prime minister is trying to impose on the people an Islamic lifestyle. The protests are to protect Ataturkâs revolution.â
The anger toward the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan was palpable in the streets leading to the square, which serves for citizens here what Tahrir Square does for Egyptians in Cairo.
Fridayâs protest was the largest so far against the government over its plans to replace a park in the square with a shopping mall modelled after an Ottoman-era army barracks called the Topcu Kislasi.
Police forces brutally cracked down on peaceful protesters earlier in the day, including with water cannons, and continued to forcefully disperse them late into the evening. At least 12 people were injured, including at least one lawmaker.
Tear gas settled thickly on the cityâs core and wafted into restaurants and hotels, choking tourists and patrons. One elderly woman screamed in pain from the gas; waiters rushed over to pour soothing milk down her face.
The cityâs centre was paralyzed for hours. The atmosphere grew tenser as the evening wore on, as protesters became bolder in confronting authorities. They frequently sang the Youth Anthem, celebrating the Turkish War of Independence.
Demonstrations spread to other cities, where protesters denounced what they called the governmentâs increasingly authoritarian tendencies.
Erdoganâs government has in recent years chipped away at the countryâs aggressively secular traditions so central to the vision of its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
The government has been increasingly viewed with suspicion among a vast sector of Turkeyâs citizens, whose own vision of modernity means to guard against religious interference in everyday life.
Bulutâs frustration toward the government drove him to have Ataturkâs name tattooed on his forearm in March. âI take my strength from this signature,â he said.
Two metres away from him, police loudly launched a series of gas canisters. He poured lemon juice on his hands and washed his face to counteract the tear gas.
âMy heart is crying right now for my country.â
Following the skirmishes, an Istanbul court Friday halted the park redevelopment project until parties submitted their legal arguments to court, the semi-official Anatolian News Agency reported.
But the protests have taken on wider significance about Erdoganâs policies. The government has in recent years loosened restrictions on the head scarf in public institutions and universities. Secularists have accused the government of trying to Islamicize education. Last week the parliament passed a law restricting alcohol consumption. And earlier this week it began work on a new bridge it will name after an Ottoman sultan who remains a divisive historical figure in Turkey.
Erdogan and his party, which has held power for a decade, still have the support of religious Turks and a growing middle class of pious Muslims.
Earlier in the week he dismissed the protesters. He said the park destruction would go ahead âno matter what they do.â
As the protesters see it, Erdogan is slowly changing Turkish society, which is 99 per cent Muslim. âHe is constructing the Turkey of 10 years from now,â Bulut said.
âBut he wonât succeed,â he added. âThis is our country.â
"Are we really prepared to say that we're powerless in the face of such carnage?" President Barack Obama asked on Sunday from Newtown, Conn., site of America's latest shooting massacre whose victims this time included 20 children.
The president is not powerless when it comes to gun control in the United States. But his power is limited.
To be sure, he's countered by pro-gun lawmakers and several influential gun rights lobbies, such as the National Rifle Association. And public opinion has been shifting away from gun control over the years.
But even if Obama wanted to take a "get tough" approach to the kinds of guns used in Friday's slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School, he knows he'd eventually have to face down the Supreme Court in its current makeup and two recent decisions that pointed to the country's history as reason to reinforce gun rights, as opposed to gun control.
From the outside, the U.S. might seem like an incomprehensible anomaly where some mysterious fascination with guns seems to lead to tragedies such as the one in Newtown.
But that reading misses the complex, historical relationship this country has with guns - a relationship that is rooted in the constitution and those recent interpretations by the court.
It also misses what underpins that relationship: a profoundly deep-seated need to protect one level of government from the power of another, and individuals from the power of government at any level.
The intensity of this dynamic makes Canada's federal-provincial wrangling seem like a duel between kittens by comparison, and is one reason why America's gun debate seems so perplexing.
The U.S. Constitution contains a provision that deals with guns indirectly. The Second Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights, says the following: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
That amendment was thought to assuage states' fears at America's founding that the new national government would try to disarm their own militias. The right was deemed to be one allowing states to maintain those militias and individuals to bear arms within them. This is a common theme of the constitution, protecting state sovereignty from federal government encroachment.
But in 2008, in a case called District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court upset this interpretation by declaring for the first time that the "central" right enshrined in the Second Amendment was actually that of an individual to bear arms for private use, for self-defence. With that, the court, sharply divided with five conservative justices winning the day, threw out D.C.'s tough handgun ban.
"Whatever the reason," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, "handguns are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defence in the home and a complete prohibition of their use is invalid."
Then, in 2010, in a case involving handgun bans in and around Chicago, the court extended this interpretation of the Second Amendment to state and local government firearm regulations.
In both cases, the court looked to history to argue the right of an individual to bear arms was always there. It was found in several of the states' own constitutions. It was assumed in the post-slavery era when Congress passed laws to counter Confederate states' attempts to disarm the freed slaves, codifying the "constitutional right to bear arms" for blacks.
The court has had its say, and what it said was unmistakable: Guns are part of the history of this country. They are protected by the constitution.
The United States, meanwhile, has a firearm homicide rate that is nearly 20 times higher than other high-income country. And every year, more than 12,000 people are murdered by guns in the U.S., according to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
It should be noted that the court took pains to say in both cases that the decisions didn't foreclose the possibility of maintaining certain types of gun control regulation, such as prohibitions for felons and the mentally ill, restrictions in schools or regulation of sales.
Lawmakers sympathetic to gun control could close a few loopholes - for instance, the ability to get around background checks if you buy at a gun show or through a private seller on the Internet - or re-establish an assault weapons ban.
But beyond that the court will scrutinize any regulation with a sharp eye - something Obama must keep in mind as he thinks not only about what power he has to change things, but also his legacy.
Mexico's Murder City: Ten killings tonight. Tomorrow, 13. The next day, 22
"They killed our sons in front of our eyes," says Maricrus Camargo. "We can expect anything now."
Ciudad Juårez is locked in a vicious drug war and extra police have only made it more lawless
Toronto Star
Date: 5/22/2010
Dateline: CIUDAD JUĂREZ, MEXICO
Andrew Chung
Staff Reporter
CIUDAD JUĂREZ, MEXICO-The light is falling, the heat is letting up and gunmen have arrived at the modest house with the concrete front yard where there is a birthday party going on. With quiet efficiency they approach the painted wrought-iron gates and begin spraying the adults with bullets. Three men crumple to the ground, dead. Two others succumb later in hospital.
The evening has begun with a massacre, but it's still early.
A couple hours later, a man will be lying in a semi-fetal position, dumped at the side of the road opposite a used car lot, his blank eyes still open, his head in a pool of blood. Just down the road, another man will be shot dead inside a convenience store.
By the end of the night, there will be 10 killings in JuĂĄrez. The next day, 13. The day after that, 22.
 Here, death is like a Whac-A-Mole game, constantly rearing its head.
 A corpse hangs from an overpass. Another floats in the Rio Grande. A man's body slumps in his driver's seat, his severed head resting on the hood.
 It happens in store parking lots in broad daylight.
 In funeral parlours, homes, businesses, nightclubs.
 And though there are now around 10,000 police and soldiers in the city, the average person remains utterly unprotected.
 The cause is a vicious turf battle between two powerful drug cartels, and the war President Felipe Calderón has launched, with U.S. backing, against them.
 The main result so far? Escalating violence. Some are now calling this an epic failure of policy.
 "Even if they reduce the flow of drugs, it will come at what cost?" asks one Juårez journalist. "Tens of thousands dead?"
 Driving across the short, unadorned bridge from El Paso into dusty Ciudad Juårez is immediately jarring. One of the first things I notice is a sandbag fortification in front of an aging hotel. Behind it is a federal police officer in full armour and helmet, with a machine gun. I stop the car. A taxi driver warns me that my rental with its out-of-town plates is a target.
 Juårez resembles a police state. Streets are crawling with agents, outfitted like soldiers but more menacing; their faces masked like bank robbers, their eyes shielded by dark sunglasses, standing in the beds of police trucks covering each direction with their machine guns.
 Paradoxically, this heavy police and military presence has coincided with the region becoming increasingly lawless.
 In March, the Canadian government warned its citizens against travelling to Mexico, especially Juårez, following the ambush of three people linked to the U.S. consulate.
 There have been more than 5,100 killings here since 2008, when the Sinaloa cartel under Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman (one of the world's richest men, according to Forbes), seeking greater profits, began to fight for territory long held by the Juårez cartel. The government began fighting them both.
 The lives of Juarenses have changed completely in the face of the chaos. Few leave their homes at night. Tens of thousands have moved away.
 "I feel a fear I've never felt before," says Reina Alicia Hernandez Flores, holding her elbows and staring at the pavement, "like at any moment we could die."
 Hernandez is standing in the shade of a tree on Villa de Portal Street in south Juårez. I've come here because it's the site of a crime so wanton it jolted awake even the most desensitized to the violence.
 On the night of Jan. 30, dozens of teenagers were partying inside a peach-coloured house on the street. Their mothers used to say that if their kids were going to go out, they'd rather it be close by; it's safer.
 Not that night.
 Around 11, seven SUVs and trucks pulled up. Two blocked the intersections. Masked gunmen entered the house while others kept watch outside. The partygoers, boys and girls, were rounded up and shot in the head. Sixteen were killed - 11 teens and five adults - and more than a dozen wounded.
 Pictures of the aftermath show the floor of one room bathed in blood.
 Hernandez heard the shots from her home about five doors down. Her husband, who was outside smoking a cigar before bed, ran back in the house. "They're killing the boys!" he screamed. Hernandez bolted down the street but was stopped by the barrel of an AK-47, a glaring gunman fingering the trigger. She pleaded with him. "My son is inside! Please!"
 In seconds the executioners emerged from the house. "We're finished our work," she heard one of them say. They climbed into their trucks and drove off.
 The darkness made it difficult to find the body of her son Adrian, 17, amid the pile of corpses. From the way they were positioned, it appeared "they were all trying to protect each other," Hernandez said.
 At first, the state prosecutor, and later the president, claimed it was a drug-related vendetta. They changed their tune - and the president apologized - after evidence suggested otherwise. It appears gunmen for the Juårez cartel were looking for another party with rival gang members.
 Camargo says that before the incident, she used to think that the only people killed in this drug war were, as the president claims repeatedly, somehow involved in it.
 "But not now," she affirms. "A lot of people are innocent."
 I ask them how they feel about their city now. "They killed our sons in front of our eyes," Camargo declares. "We can expect anything now."
 Just that morning, she bought flowers from a mobile vendor. As she was arranging them, she was thinking of her son, crying.
 "Now I buy flowers for my son, instead of shoes."
 The "borderland" is extremely important to the cartels because it's worth billions. The U.S. State Department says 90 per cent of the cocaine destined for the U.S. flows through Mexico from its origins in South America. And up to 60 per cent of all illegal drugs are smuggled across a 350-kilometre stretch from New Mexico to Texas's Big Bend National Park.
 By extension, Mexico is also the main source of cocaine in Canada, since the U.S. is the major transit country for the drug smuggled into this country, says the RCMP.
 But few in the backrooms of Toronto nightclubs snorting the white powder think about the eroding security in Ciudad Juårez.
 At the scene of the five-person massacre earlier this night, in the middle-class Infonavit Casa Grande neighbourhood, I watch as the police, federal and municipal, mill about, filling out forms, talking on cellphones. I don't see any statements taken. Within a half-hour the police tape is gone, and so are they.
 Gustavo De la Rosa Hickerson, a human rights ombudsman with the Chihuahua state government, says the killers are almost never caught in this war. "Nobody is convicted of anything," he says. The conviction rate for drug-related arrests across Mexico is believed to be about 2 per cent.
 Cecilia Valenzuela de Mendez, dressed in a pink satin blouse, has been staring into space. Her son Arturo, father to a 4-year-old, is dead. Murdered in the family's own front yard.
 It was a relative's birthday party. Valenzuela was in the back of the house washing dishes when she heard the commotion and caught a glimpse of the killers as they fled. "They were wearing uniforms," she says.
 She starts to moan, like she's about to vomit. "It has come home to us," she wails. "What do I do?"
 The government has claimed that sicarios have used stolen police uniforms in the past. But public suspicion of the police and military is rampant.
 Virtually no one says they are to be trusted. One young man contends he was forced by federales - the federal cops - to withdraw money from an ATM. Others say they stop vehicles on false pretenses and steal valuables, or simply take bribes.
 Police in Mexico have long been corrupt; it's one of the scourges Calderón has tried to root out, as well as dishonesty in the justice system.
 Not all officers are crooked. On April 23, six federal agents and one municipal officer - a 22-year-old mother - were slaughtered in an ambush by a cartel-affiliated gang. They appeared to be honest cops trying to do their jobs.
 Before early April, when 5,000 federales took over from the Mexican army in leading the anti-drug effort here, ombudsman De la Rosa's office was investigating 220 complaints of abuse by the military, from illegal detention to torture to disappearances.
 Then one night he was threatened with a gun pointed to his head while stopped at a suburban intersection. Later, one of his bodyguards was killed. He fled to El Paso.
 He has since returned to work, but now there are complaints against the federales.
 Even municipal police officers like Arturo Muñoz are wary of the effort. In the middle of Muñoz's back is a hard lump. It's a bullet, still lodged there since he was shot in March while working as an undercover cop guarding a convenience store.
 "These federales come from far away and all they see is a big market to make money," the 20-year veteran officer says. "They're supposed to deal with the cartels but they're just looking for your car without plates so they can stop you, take $50 and let you go."
 Muñoz, who makes about $600 a month and has another job making garage doors to make ends meet, believes the corruption goes up very high. The traffickers wouldn't be able to move their products and guns past the hundreds of checkpoints in the city and countryside undetected. "If something happens," he surmises, "it's because they allow it to happen. It's not luck."
 Corruption is also top of mind for the woman who manages the finances at one of the city's more expensive funeral homes. I went there mistaking it for another that endured a massacre during a memorial service.
 This woman had her own story to tell. The business is being forced to pay $600 in weekly extortion. It began last October with a phone threat. The management didn't pay attention at first. The threats continued. The office was moved and staff began wearing jeans and running shoes to work, in case they had to flee.
 Then, gunmen shot up the front of the building with high-calibre rifles.
 Management began paying, says the woman, who asked that neither her name nor that of the business be published. "It was the only way. The threat was that the next time it will be dead people."
 All through the ordeal, the woman adds, the police would never come. But now that they're making payments - every Monday they get a call telling them where to take the money - the police "respond very quickly," she says, shaking her head.
 Reyes is optimistic for the future, despite the increasing violence. "This has nothing to do with the failure of federal policies," Reyes says. "It has to do with the flow of drugs into the U.S. over the last 15 years."
 The soft-spoken Reyes, a business lawyer by profession, sits behind a presidential desk in an elegant dark-wood panelled office in Juårez's city hall. He's had threats, including a pig's head at his front door. Most Juarenses believe he sleeps at his home in El Paso every night; he denies it.
 Reyes comes from a more left-wing party than Calderón, yet he staunchly defends the president. Calderón has been able to reduce the flow of cocaine through Mexico by 30 per cent, Reyes says, and so the cartels are "fighting for a larger piece" of a shrinking pie.
 Critics say Calderón has inexplicably thrown firepower at the cartels while ignoring other crucial elements in any fight against organized crime.
 Notably, argues Edgardo Buscaglia, a renowned expert on global organized crime, his government has ignored the thousands of legal enterprises linked to the cartels that allow them to launder money, move and distribute their products, and bribe soldiers and police.
 "As long as you don't dismantle the economic side of organized crime in the legal economy, you'll never get rid of their power to corrupt and exercise violence," explains Buscaglia, a professor of law and economics at the Autonomous Institute of Technology of Mexico.
 And why isn't this tackled? Buscaglia says it's simple: these businesses contribute to the political campaigns of all parties.
 Named after Benito Juårez, Mexico's first president from an indigenous native group and one of its most celebrated, Juårez is a mix of dilapidated and sparkling new. Until the recession, it was one of Mexico's richest cities, thanks to hundreds of cheap-labour maquiladoras producing everything from TVs to medical supplies for the world.
 The recession has hit hard: Juårez went from zero to 20 per cent unemployment in two years.
 But the other reason for the decline is the dramatic explosion in violence and the near impunity with which it all unfolds.
 Alfreda Varela's life as a reporter has changed dramatically in the past couple of years. Juårez used to have as many murders as any similar-sized American city. Now, all Varela reports on is death. On this night, he is speeding from one murder scene to the next for his all-news station, Channel 44.
 After 20 minutes at the scene, he and his crew move on to the next, the Oxxo convenience store.
 "It's historic what's happening here," Varela says.
 "Juårez's social structure is falling apart. All the executions, the kidnappings, the assaults, femicides, extortions, it's killing the economy, and the corruption is infiltrating all the police forces."
 Many think that once you set foot in Juårez you stand a good chance of being killed. It's a bit of an exaggeration. I worried for my safety only once, while standing before a concrete fence behind the home of celebrity singer and songwriter Juan Gabriel, on which sicarios, working for the Juårez drug gang, had written a graffiti message taking responsibility for the killing of the seven police on April 23. They suspected the police of providing support for the Sinaloa cartel. They threatened more carnage if this support continues.
 My guide was already nervous about being there. Not long after our arrival, a large white SUV with smoked-out windows rolled by, then backed up and turned down the street we were on. Keenly aware these were likely armed gang members, and remembering the death toll here, I held my breath.
 The SUV drove very slowly past, but didn't stop. I exhaled.
 I was beginning to understand what life feels like in Juårez.
---
Since Mexican President Felipe CalderĂłn took office in December, 2006, there have been about 23,000 drug-related deaths across the country. The most murderous city has since become JuĂĄrez. Some comparisons from 2009:
 Toronto: 62 murders
 Juårez: 2,660
 Baghdad: 1,545 deaths (with a population five times larger than that of Juårez)
 Afghanistan: 2,412 civilian deaths and 520 coalition military deaths for the entire country (population 29 million).
 Sources: UNAMA, Iraq Body Count, icasualties.org
 Part 1 of 3
  Watch Andrew Chung's video report from Ciudad Juårez online at thestar.com
Ciudad Jurez has become so dangerous that thousands of residents are desperate to leave. But Canada is accepting a shrinking number of refugees, arguing that Mexico is safe
ANDREW CHUNG Toronto Star
CIUDAD JUREZ, MEXICO-It was one of the finest restaurants in town. Hardwood floors, world-class wines, a chef who trained with Wolfgang Puck. People would cross the border from El Paso just for a night out at Aroma.
But on Father's Day, 2008, around 5 a.m., Aroma was in flames. In the weeks before, there had been threats and anonymous demands for "protection money."
"Of course it was protection' from themselves," says Reginaldo Kuchle, the 59-year-old owner.
It was one of the first cases of extortion since a deadly drug war had erupted in Jurez in 2008, and Kuchle didn't cave in. The result was the end of his business. When the threats continued, Kuchle moved to El Paso, Texas. Now Aroma sits on a popular strip of Mesa St., not far from downtown. Same restaurant, except on the other side of the Rio Grande.
"There's no way I would go back," Kuchle says. "Only crazy people can live over there."
More than 5,100 homicides later, the drug war has changed the way almost everyone lives in this city of 1.3 million. The poor hide behind closed doors. The wealthy have fled.
The exodus might be even greater if more were able to come to Canada. But our doors have all but closed.
Take a walk downtown along famous Jurez Ave., which, on one side, leads over the bridge to El Paso. Pharmacist Jos Monsivis is sitting in a wooden chair facing the sidewalk doing, well, nothing.
He says half of the businesses on the strip, many of them cantinas, bars and restaurants, have closed. There are no customers, especially American ones, anymore.
The local chamber of commerce says 6,000 businesses have closed in the past nine months, many of them because of extortion. This city has gone from zero to 20 per cent unemployment in two years.
Part of the reason is the global recession. But, Monsivis insists, "the main reason is the violence in Jurez. A lot of people are afraid to come here."
Monsivis says business is down 50 per cent. "I can't pay the bills, food, gasoline."
The violence has affected his family in other ways, too. "When I go home I am afraid because I don't know if the sicarios (drug cartel hit men) will come or there will be executions in front of us. We stay inside the house on weekends or holidays."
Victoria Chavez, 24, a worker in one of the many cheap-labour manufacturing plants called maquiladoras, says staff are no longer allowed outside during their breaks. The hundreds of maquiladoras - for companies such as Honeywell, Johnson & Johnson and Canada's Bombardier Recreational Products - are the lifeblood of Jurez, where workers, mostly migrants, often toil for as little as $10 a day.
"We can't go to parties or to nightclubs anymore," says 19-year-old Fabin Robles, interviewed in east Jurez, across the street from the spot where three men were killed in the parking lot of a department store. "We're afraid of house parties too, ever since those teenagers were killed."
On Jan. 30, 16 people, mostly teens, were slaughtered as they celebrated a birthday in a house in south Jurez.
"We're afraid we'll get shot on the street or in the discos," says a 29-year-old employee of a funeral home currently being forced to pay extortion money. "We're afraid of the checkpoints because (the police) steal our money or cellphones."
Another sign of growing social breakdown are reports that the sicarios are getting younger. With such a high unemployment rate, there are some 70,000 youth who are unemployed and not in school. One newspaper reported a recent poll of more than 4,000 students in Chihuahua state showed that 40 per cent aspired to become sicarios.
Then a video surfaced on the Internet, with the title "Sicario of Ciudad Jurez," showing a boy, about 5 years old, brandishing a 9-millimetre handgun and saying to the camera, "I'm an assassin of Jurez, now I have some work to do." After it was reported in the media YouTube took it down.
"It's like the war in Bosnia," declares lawyer Gustavo De la Rosa Hickerson, ombudsman for the human rights commission of the state of Chihuahua. "It's destroying families, people, the city itself."
De la Rosa has a nickname: "Santa Claus." With his ivory-coloured ringlets and long beard, and his great, round belly, he looks the part.
He's a harsh critic of President Felipe Caldern's hardline war on Mexico's vast and entrenched drug lords. The fight has led to the capture and killing of a number of them. But many more have escaped justice. One analysis shows that 98 per cent of those arrested go free. The war has also led to the deaths of about 23,000 people across Mexico. Caldern says most of these were somehow involved in the drug trade.
De la Rosa says there's little evidence to back that up. "Mexico needs a war against hunger, poverty, bad health, education. It doesn't need a war against drugs."
Amid the growing chaos, people are leaving in droves.
De la Rosa says more than 70,000 homes in Jurez have been abandoned, with more than 100,000 people having left for Texas or other cities in Mexico. (Other estimates suggest 250,000 have left.)
The human rights advocate counts himself among the escapees. He moved to El Paso last fall, after an incident while driving near his suburban home. When he was stopped at a red light, a man pulled up, got out and pointed a gun. "Be careful," he sneered, "or I'll kill you."
Not long after, someone came to De la Rosa's house to tell him his name was on a hit list. Then one of his bodyguards was killed.
Who was putting his life in danger, De la Rosa can't be sure. But his job has put him at odds with the country's military. Thousands of soldiers were sent to Jurez to strike at the cartels. De la Rosa was investigating dozens of complaints of abuse by soldiers, from illegal detention to torture to disappearances.
In April, most of soldiers were replaced by federal police agents, whose ranks have been vastly increased by Caldern.
He won't stop pursuing victims' justice, De la Rosa says, polishing off a late-night dinner of chiles rellenos in a jukebox bar in downtown El Paso. "This is a stupid war."
Threats and mass death in the rural outskirts of Jurez, such as in the town of El Porvenir, have led to more Mexicans showing up at border posts and applying for asylum, even if it means they'll be locked up.
Others are using tourist visas or, if they have money to invest, obtaining business visas. Still more have taken advantage of so-called "laser" visas, held by several million Mexicans, which allow users 30 days in the U.S. border region to visit family, shop or conduct business. Many are staying with family members already there.
El Paso's police chief, Greg Allen, estimates 30,000 Jurenses have legally crossed and are now living in his city. Many say that's low.
The violence has also spurred illegal crossings. Some of them end up at Annunciation House in downtown El Paso, whose specific mission is to help illegal immigrants.
"Just like we received migrants fleeing El Salvador and Guatemala in the '80s and '90s, just like we've seen thousands of economic refugees, we started seeing Mexicans fleeing the violence in Jurez and other parts of Mexico," says shelter director Ruben Garcia.
There is a woman there with a year-old baby whose husband and 8-year-old were killed recently. Another woman, who is pregnant, lost her father-in-law when he was kidnapped and then killed after she and her husband couldn't come up with the ransom money.
There is no hope for any of these people, most of them poor, to legally immigrate to the U.S. Asylum is the only possibility, but it's a long shot. Since 2006, only 242 have been approved, a coalition of El Paso human rights groups say. They've tended to be those at high risk of reprisal, such as police officers or journalists.
Garcia says the system is "politicized" out of fear that granting asylum to those fleeing the drug war "will open the floodgates."
Annunciation House wouldn't make any of the refugees available for interviews, citing their deep fear of the drug gangs. But it recently held a news conference demanding U.S. President Barack Obama review asylum policies.
Two residents spoke at the news conference, their heads completely covered by white cloth bags. They said they feared for their lives, but also being deported. "I am a refugee here in El Paso," said one. "We don't want to return to Jurez."
In decades past, Annunciation House has used an "underground railroad" of sorts to send refugees to Canada when the U.S. would not accept them.
Garcia says both the U.S. and Canada have a responsibility to help victims of the drug violence, because it is these countries' citizens who are consuming the drugs from which all of the death results.
"What is it Canada is doing as we now find ourselves with so many people knocking on our door?" Garcia asks. "Because what is at the heart of all of this? Your and my consumption of drugs, and the flow of exorbitant amounts of money."
Canada has no specific plans for Mexicans escaping drug violence, according to Citizenship and Immigration Canada. "All eligible claims made by Mexicans will continue to be reviewed by the independent Immigration and Refugee Board," a spokesperson says.
Nor are there plans to add Mexico to a list of "source countries" from which Canada accepts refugee claims by people still living in those countries. The claimants in these countries, which include Colombia, Guatemala and El Salvador, must be "seriously and personally affected by civil war or armed conflict."
Meanwhile, Canada's acceptance of Mexicans as refugees has dropped precipitously in recent years, from 28 per cent in 2006 to just 8 per cent last year. Many are denied on the basis that Mexico is a "democracy" and is able to keep its people safe.
And to staunch a rising tide of refugee applications from Mexico, last July Ottawa imposed visas for all Mexicans. Applications have since plummeted from an average of 1,000 a month to just 158 last December.
The Immigration and Refugee Board won't say how many of the visas in the past few years were due to Mexico's extreme violence.
In eerie contrast to Jurez, which is crawling with law enforcement officers yet suffered 2,700 murders last year, El Paso is the picture of calm. It had just 13.
In fact, it's the second-safest big city in America, according to CQ Press, a major periodical publisher focusing on American politics. And yet El Paso hasn't done anything unusual in trying to prepare for spillover violence, according to a police spokesperson.
But spillover has occurred. Last fall gang members came to Horizon City, an El Paso suburb, abducted 30-year-old Sergio Saucedo, and took him to Jurez. There they mutilated and killed him.
"It was really scary, and it shows that the gangs can come here," said a cousin of the victim in an interview, asking his name not be used.
Many of those who have already relocated to El Paso or nearby border towns have family members connected to the drug trade and are trying to stay alive.
Questions have even been raised about the Kuchle family, owners of the restaurant Aroma. They also owned a construction company in Jurez.
Kuchle's son Oswald Kuchle Lopez, 38, was arrested while crossing into the U.S. in February and charged with wire fraud and falsely obtaining credit. He allegedly obtained $3.2 million in loans guaranteed by the U.S. Export-Import Bank.
The loans were to buy construction equipment, but the FBI alleged $1.1 million was sent to a man who was shot dead along with his son in 2008, "in what's believed to be a part of the ongoing drug war," the El Paso Times reported.
Reginaldo Kuchle denies any connection whatsoever with any organized crime group.
"I have worked since I was 8 years old and I have never been in trouble my whole life for nothing."
Kuchle says his son is innocent, and that the murdered man and his son were "in the wrong place at the wrong time" and had nothing to do with the drug war. He says the construction equipment was indeed bought and that any money paid to the man was for land purchases.
Kuchle instead criticizes the police for "doing nothing" to help them during the extortion threats. He mourns for his former city.
"I am living freely and secure in El Paso," he says. "I am lucky. I feel sorry for the people who cannot come."
Like Jos Monsivis, the pharmacist. He'd love to escape the violence and the economic insecurity with his wife and two children, aged 8 and 13. But he doesn't have the money or family connections over the border.
"I can't go anywhere to start over again," he says. "I wish my son could lead the life of a child and not like an adult with fear living inside his house.
"We are proud Jurenses," he says. "But right now we're very ugly."
Like any other frat boys, the brothers of Delta Lambda Phi might be expected to drink beer or party it up on occasion. But that other frat fundamental of chasing girls? On that score, not so much.
Read about Canada's first all-gay college fraternity
Jean Beliveau spent 11 years walking 75,500 kilometres across 64 countries with a simple message promoting peace for children. Then he returned home...
Brother of man who lost mayoral re-election bid makes good on threat to close only gas station
By Andrew Chung, Quebec Bureau Chief
Toronto Star
Nov 7, 2009
If promises are sometimes forgotten in politics, one ought to remember that George Patterson is not a politician. His brother James is.
And so when George, owner of the only gas station in the picturesque village of Sainte-Madeleine-de-la-Riviere-Madeleine, warned residents that if they didn't re-elect his brother as mayor, he'd turn off his pumps - he kept his word.
"I said I'd close them," George declared matter-of-factly. "It's no more serious than that."
Who says nothing ever happens in small towns?
"It's not so much a punishment (as) a protest," George added. "I'm against the new mayor."
"It's a funny way to protest," village manager Carole Giroux observed, "because not only does it punish the people who didn't vote for (James Patterson), it punishes those who did."
Forget Montreal and the corruption scandal that hijacked its election campaign.
In Ste-Madeleine - population 382 - with its hills on one side and sea on the other near the tip of the Gaspe Peninsula, political intrigue is all the more intense because of its size.
The place is so remote it has no cellphone service or high-speed Internet. Small enough to have just one general store.
James Patterson, a 59-year-old truck driver and member of a prominent local family, was mayor for 18 years before being dumped last Sunday by a vote of 159 to 130, in favour of councillor Joel Cote.
The voter turnout was an impressive 83.4 per cent. Nearly everyone in town.
"It's certain that politics in this municipality is rather difficult," Cote said in an interview. "The climate is not very inviting, the mood is not good."
As for the gas protest, "it's like holding the population hostage," Cote declared.
Everyone now has to travel to nearby towns - either 40 kilometres west, or 25 kilometres east - over hilly terrain, to fill up their tanks.
"It costs me $12 in gas, just to go get gas," Giroux said.
Cote noted that apart from extra costs, the roads can get very dangerous, with snow and ice. And "for older people it's a bit difficult to go get gas," he added.
Cote might suffer the most, because the 37-year-old physical education teacher must travel 75 minutes each way to work at a high school in the town of Gaspe.
However, with all the conflict and disagreement with the former mayor, "it's true that the brother of the mayor might not have wanted to see me at his garage."
George Patterson, 57, told the Star he didn't know how long he'd keep his pumps off.
But he said the town will be in the poorhouse because the new mayor "is an old councillor who knows nothing about development."
He denounced all the squabbling on council and said the next few years will be decisive.
The town is in store for some big projects, including most of the wind turbines planned for the region by Hydro-Quebec, and a possible mine to exploit the area's aluminum deposits.
Cote and the outgoing mayor disagreed on how to handle most of the files.
James Patterson could not be reached for comment.
Then there was the controversial sale, supported by Cote but not his predecessor, of a piece of village land to a local farmer. The decision not to put it on the market is now the subject of a lawsuit by a local resident.
As if that wasn't enough, there was also a brouhaha at the weaving club, when a local councillor demanded to take one of the machines to her own house, Giroux said.
How to explain so much fighting in such a small place?
Ultimately, corruption will determine how quickly South Sudan, now among the worldâs poorest nations, develops
Toronto Star
By Andrew Chung
Sun Jul 10 2011
KOLEL, SOUTH SUDANâSaturdayâs Independence Day, though raucously celebrated in South Sudanâs capital, Juba, was just like any other in Kolel, a village about 40 kilometres away.
Osman Junubi did as he does every day, spending time with his wife and children, trying to keep them fed. Pulling kernels off a cob of roasted corn. Handing out peanuts warmed over the coals.
If it werenât for the police training academy down the road, there would be little sign a government actually existed, at least from this vantage point.
Typical of the vast majority of places where most South Sudanese live, in the scrublands, forests and swamps of this country the size of France, there are no services in Kolel.
Thereâs no health clinic â though if they ask nicely the training academy medic might help. There is a school, but itâs not official. âClassesâ are held in an abandoned army barracks nearby. The âteacherâ? A local preacher.
There are no sewer pipes. People do their business wherever. In the tall grasses. Along walking paths. There is a single bore hole for water. For 500 people. When it doesnât work they use the river down the hill.
All this, on top of the daily struggle just to feed the family.
Junubi, a former soldier who is keenly diplomatic, cannot say if the government is spending its money wisely. âI donât know,â he replies. âWe never see it. Their income doesnât reach us.â
Still, he has hopes for independence. âMaybe the government will see us now,â he says, âbecause we are suffering.â
Back in Juba, the scourge of corruption in South Sudan is plainly visible for anyone who looks for it, and ultimately it will determine how quickly this nation, now among the worldâs poorest, develops. The countryâs secession from Sudan, against which it fought two civil wars over five decades, will do nothing to change this fact.
The grass and mud huts of Kolel stand in contrast to a waterside hotel in Juba, for instance, where these powers-that-be spend lavishly on rooms, food, cigarettes, beer and bottles of hard liquor.
Said one former hotel worker, candid only under the cloak of anonymity: âWe would bring to them one water. Itâs one dollar. And they would give a $99 tip.â
Sudanese pounds or American dollars? âDollars, my friend, dollars!â he said.
This has been going on for years, since the 2005 peace deal gave South Sudan autonomy and paved the way for Saturdayâs secession.
One could argue leaders have seemingly done a lot in a short period, not least of which is create a government. From zero to 32 ministries, a legislature, and state apparatuses as well. There are hundreds of new, unpaved, roads opened up across the South. The number of children entering school is still low but has quadrupled.
But despite these successes, the forms of corruption are widespread and deep: kickbacks, nepotism, gross misuse of funds.
Most of the wasted money comes from South Sudanâs oil wealth. It currently receives 50 per cent of the revenues â the other half goes to Sudan. It amounts to about $2 billion annually.
Ask Deng Malual Leek, one of South Sudanâs most connected entrepreneurs, for an assessment of corruption, and he is blunt. âWe have 100 per cent corruption here,â he says, before qualifying the statement. âWe have only a few people who are uncorrupt, maybe 2 per cent.â
Leek, who returned after 15 years in the U.S. â where he even played with the Harlem Globetrotters â says officials and ministers regularly skim off contracts, and contracts are almost exclusively given to companies owned by government officials. âI bid for contracts,â he says, âbut I never get any. The only way is if you have a cousin or uncleâ in government.
Leekâs success has resulted from introducing to South Sudan companies that were essential and provided by no one else. For instance, his Giant Technologies is an Internet service provider.
The level of corruption is an open secret in South Sudan. Everyone seems to know about ministersâ houses in foreign countries, the private schools for their children in the West or other African capitals.
United Nations officials talk about it privately as well. They know who tends to abuse the system the most. And how in the absence of strong institutions, sometimes this kind of unregulated distribution of cash to a politicianâs tribal group runs amok.
Said one top UN official in Juba of corruption: âI canât put a number to it, but itâs likely to be quite significant, and not all is visible either.â The official mentioned there is corruption in how salaries are paid out and in the amount paid for contracts compared to whatâs standard.
He said this is less of a problem for donor nations, such as Canada, since they tend not to funnel money through the government.
South Sudanâs new president, the army Gen. Salva Kiir, talked about corruption in his inaugural speech Saturday, in front of delegations from around the world.
âIn order to develop our country and deliver on our development goals, itâs critical we fight corruption,â Kiir said. âAs president I pledge to you to do all I can to remove this cancer.â
He issued a warning to those corrupt officials that they wouldnât be welcome in government.
Kiir is viewed as less corrupt than most of his governmental counterparts. âHe lives pretty cleanly,â one humanitarian official said.
Leek agreed. âBut (Kiirâs) focus has been making sure we got independence. Heâs turned a blind eye to it. I think things will change now.â
Sudan Special Feature: A long journey out of slavery
Stolen by Arab slave raiders at age 6, William spent years in captivity in Sudan. His escape was possible because of the human kindness he encountered along the way
 The shouting and shooting outside, just beyond the three tamarind trees in the yard, shakes William awake. Eyes sprung open, he runs out onto the balcony and tries to focus on the chaos below.
There are men with horses. Kalashnikovs firing into the air. Black smoke and dust plumes everywhere. William rubs his eyes in disbelief, and in an unthinking panic, he decides to jump.
No sooner does he feel himself falling than he realizes he's been scooped from the air by one of those men on horses and roughly placed on the animal's back.
Of course, at 6 years old going on 7, he knows nothing about what was happening. Riding bareback on that horse, the world in front of his eyes consists of the wide back of a man whose face he couldn't see, his Palestinian-style keffiyeh billowing with every gallop.
About a kilometre away from his house, the man deposits William with a group of others boys, girls, teens, adults and cattle - all taken as booty in the raid. Some of the older boys are beaten, by one man with a wild Afro, in particular.
William stands there barefoot, in only his underwear, looking at the strangers around him. Tears stream down his face, creating lines of clean through the chalky dust.
"What's happening?" he remembers thinking. "Where are my parents, my brothers?"
That morning of terror and confusion would mark the beginning of William Wol Kiir Marik Boui's enslavement.
Slave raiding in Sudan didn't begin when the last civil war started in 1983, but became an insidious part of it. Arab groups like the Misseriya, backed by the Islamist government in Khartoum, would attack black African villages, like those of the Dinka, William's tribe.
Like thousands of others - some say tens of thousands - who were abducted during Sudan's last civil war, William would spend years as someone else's property.
But his story is not a tragedy. In fact, although its end is far from written, it contains more hope than many of his slave peers who are today free from their perpetrators, but not their pasts.
A 2005 peace agreement, which led to South Sudan's secession on July 9, largely ended slave raiding. Left behind, however, are countless former slaves, trying to make sense of a life, in part, dehumanized.
They're trying to reintegrate into society, but many can't find their families, or no longer speak the language. There are psychological problems. William to this day can't shake the feeling of being alone.
"The slaves are free," comments Glen Pearson, a former Liberal MP who does charity work in South Sudan, and who in past years tried to buy slaves their freedom. "But they're not empowered."
William lost his childhood to slavery. That's true.
But in a war that's often portrayed as Arab versus black, Muslim versus Christian, even as the central government and its proxies committed terrible acts fuelled by ideology and racism, there were Arabs and Muslims who disagreed.
And it's in these people, who were human beings before anything else, that William found redemption.
Now he lives among them, saving his cash to put toward an education. To put his past behind him. To make a better life.
IT'S A FAR CRY from the path he was walking barefoot on the burning ground, back in 1992.
William was so small and skinny, long toothpick limbs dangling from a dark fava bean body. After six days, each step painful, William and the others found themselves in the town of Meiram in the Northern state of South Kordofan.
From there they were distributed among the raiders. William was given to the man with the wild Afro. His name was Morad.
By this time, William had stopped crying. He was simply in a vortex of confusion and fear.
They would move to Morad's family compound outside of Meiram.
In comparison to other slaves, many of whom experienced unspeakable horrors, such as the removal of a digit or a limb for making a mistake, or repeated rape, or the humiliation of facial branding - like the cattle many were tasked with herding - William's life in servitude was calmer.
He was allowed to sleep and eat with Morad's other children, just not during holidays.
It didn't take long for Morad to try to remake William in his family image, in a Muslim image. He was given a new name: Abdullah. After a while, he was learning to speak Arabic and taken to mosque to pray like a Muslim.
Soon he was given responsibilities, like all the others, to look after the goats and animals. He was, after all, taken from his family for a reason: To work.
He would be beaten regularly, for any mistake. At least, William thought with twisted reasoning, he wasn't singled out - Morad would beat his own children, too.
To young William, Morad was a mountain of a man. Tall, dagger sheathed against his wiry bicep, his eyes made him look "like a man who is proud of himself," William recalls.
"He was the biggest racist. He hated Southerners. ... He treated them as slaves. He would call them jingei. It pretty much means, 'little piece of sh--.'"
William thinks this hate for Dinka came partly because Morad's brother was killed during a raiding expedition.
Three years passed. William's memories of his home village, Wonagok, were starting to fade. Escape never crossed his mind: He had no idea where his village was.
Then he met an old Dinka man. This man did not come to Meiram through a raid, but rather on his own in search of farm work. He encouraged William to run away. He told William the only way to do it would be to get to a larger town where he'd surely find Dinka. They'd help him find his way.
By then the Dinka boys had found ways to communicate with each other in the fields despite being forbidden from doing so. The older ones tried to help the younger ones, like William, figure out which clan they belonged to.
William's desire to escape grew.
The nomads would leave Meiram during the rainy season, from June to September, in part to avoid the tsetse flies that cause "sleeping sickness." They'd head west to sandy, arid Darfur.
So a plan was hatched. While the family went shopping for sugar and other staples in the market in Et Tibbun, William simply disappeared into the crowd.
"I escaped!" William smiles. Morad "looked for me but didn't find me."
Find Dinka. Find Dinka. They will take you home. It was all William could think of.
William joined some other Dinka boys in the market. They were homeless, shining shoes for money. They slept in the market each night.
Six days passed, and Morad found him. He was surprisingly conciliatory: "Why did you escape? You are like my child," Morad said. "You must come home."
William listened to Morad. As a child searches for any sign of love, he obeyed.
But life remained the same. William would tend to the animals, and he'd still get beaten. His urge to find his family intensified.
In the fourth year of captivity, his conversion to Islam became more resolute with his circumcision. But he still wasn't the same kind of Muslim. Now he was authorized to butcher chickens for consumption by the women and children, but not the men. Nor could he butcher something more important, like a sheep or cow.
He also couldn't marry a Misseriya girl. He'd have to marry another slave.
"To them," William recounts, "you are less in Islam."
Every night he thought about escape, about the words of the old man.
He would try three more times during the rainy seasons, fleeing to other groups of nomads, who would eventually break their word and turn him in to Morad.
Each time Morad would try to convince him that this life was as good as it gets for a Dinka boy.
He had to think of something better. Something more sure.
"Then I thought of the train," William says.
During the family's rainy-season migration to Et Tibbun, there was always a railway.
IT WAS AROUND his sixth year away from home. And with the family camped along the railway one afternoon, William realized the train was coming. In Sudan, the train often runs very slowly.
There was no time to think. He'd had enough of this life. He was not scared.
He ran.
He reached the train. But it was faster than it looked. He jumped for the platform on the caboose. Tottering, someone caught his hand. It was a police officer. An Arab.
"What are you trying to do?" the officer demanded as he pulled William up the railing. "Where are you going?"
William had briefly thought about what he'd do if he were caught. But not long enough to work out a plan.
"Adyla," he blurted out, not sure of where it was exactly.
"Why are you going to Adyla?"
William could think of nothing to say in reply. He decided to tell the truth. "He took me from my father and he beat me always," William pleaded.
"Do you know anyone in Adyla?" the policeman persisted. "Where is your father?"
Just as William was about to reply, the ranking officer interrupted. "Stop asking him questions," he commanded.
The officer, whose name was Noor El Din, gave William water and a place to sit. When they reached Adyla, he bought William some dates to eat.
William told him the whole story. Noor seemed to already know the theme. And William, a Dinka boy, was speaking Arabic with a Misseriya accent. He had to be telling the truth.
"Okay. Know anyone here?" Noor asked William. William shook his head. "So where are you going?"
William shrugged. "I want to go to town to find other Dinka and they will tell me how to find my father."
Noor looked at the boy and nodded. "I'll take care of you," he said. "Stay on the train with me until we get to Babanusa."
William never asked why Noor, an Arab like Morad, was helping him, but because of Noor, he was safely out of Morad's reach.
In Babanusa, William knew only to head to the market, where he found homeless Dinka boys again. This time he participated in scams like selling diluted perfume.
A friendship blossomed with an Arab boy, Dawod, who William would meet each day after Dawod finished school. He'd share his nuts and beans with William.
One day bullies were pushing Dawod around. William saw this, pulled out his slingshot and smoked the ringleader in the eye. With the boy bleeding, William and Dawod ran.
The police eventually caught up to Dawod's "Dinka" friend. William, so small and vulnerable, was thrown in jail.
It was Dawod's mother who fished him out, thanking him for standing up for her son.
William and Dawod played together more often after that, including at Dawod's house. At first he lied to Dawod's mother about being homeless, parentless. He felt ashamed. But eventually the truth came out. "I told her everything."
Dawod's mother invited William to stay with them. She even found him a job, tending to neighbours' goats, something he knew well. He made good money.
William did this for months. He appreciated Dawod's family for taking him in and helping him survive, but he was still far from home.
It was while driving a donkey-pulled water tank, at the filling station, that he met other Dinka boys, one of whom, Steven, was soon leaving Babanusa with his parents for the South. William asked to go with them, and they agreed.
A week later he simply stole away in the early morning. He didn't say goodbye to Dawod's family, just the same way he had left Noor and the train. He didn't want to leave anything to chance. He didn't want anyone to try and dissuade him. He especially didn't want to hear, "You'll never find them."
They reached Abyei, which straddles the border between North and South. William parted ways with Steven's family, and headed off, on foot, with a group going south toward Wonagok, an old Dinka man leading the way.
It took two days. William couldn't speak Dinka anymore, so some other boys had to translate.
Around 4 in the afternoon, the sun a bit cooler on the skin, the old man said, "Does he remember anything here?"
It appeared they'd arrived.
William looked around. He blinked a few times. He saw the three tamarind trees.
"Yes," he finally replied. "I think that is my house."
"Are you sure?"
No, he wasn't. But the trees, and the clearing in behind where they used to dance at night seemed familiar. He walked into the yard. There were voices in the cooking hut.
His sister Abok spotted him. She stood up and did a double-take.
"This is William?" she said, skeptically.
"Yes! This is William!"
It took only seconds before hue and cry was raised, causing a ruckus in the entire village. Neither William's mother, Alek, or father, Kiir, was home. But Alek soon came running, sensing an emergency.
When she saw him, she couldn't speak. She simply lifted her palms to his cheeks. Touched him there. Felt his head, his neck, his shoulders and arms.
"Is it real?"
She began to cry and shake. "I thought you were dead!" she sobbed.
After seven years, thinking she'd never see her William again, there he was, very much alive, a young teenager.
Kiir was at the market, where he worked every day, a few hours away by foot.
Someone fetched him by bike. William found out his father tried to look for him in Meiram, was captured himself, and escaped.
WILLIAM STAYED for a year and a half in Wonagok with his family. He fished and killed birds with the other boys. Tended the animals.
But he wanted more. He had learned to be self-sufficient as a homeless boy in Babanusa, where there were cars and he could watch Bruce Lee videos. Wonagok was so isolated. He wanted to see how far he could go.
So, typical William, he simply left, again without telling anyone. He made it to a town called Nahud in the west, where he began working at a guesthouse.
There was a church behind the house, attended by Southerners. He began going to hear the choir, and then he stayed for the sermons. He learned about Christianity. "It looked good to me," he says.
On Christmas Eve 2000, he arrived in Khartoum. He was astounded by the big buildings. By the buses and the shops. He went to meet a distant uncle who was also a teacher at a school run by Catholic priests.
He worked as a labourer in the mornings, and attended school in the afternoons. It took him nine years, but he finished high school, excelling in all subjects, except math, which he failed.
Among educated people, he began to truly understand what the Misseriya had done to him, he says. "I listened to songs created by Southerners during the war, about what the Misseriya had done, about the raids."
William turns up his hands. "I had no power to do anything about it. I was a little boy who didn't know who he was ... but when I started to think about what happened, I really felt sorry about how they treat people, not just me."
Asked if he's angry with his captors, he shakes his head. "I don't blame them," he says. "I blame those who used them."
He means the government of Sudan.
William today is a graceful young man, 26 years old, still slight in stature, who thinks carefully before saying anything, something he had to learn early on.
He still lives in Khartoum, working at a restaurant owned by a man who yearns for a day when Sudan is more free.
William is waiting tables, saving his money, hoping to go to university one day. His dream is to be a lawyer.
Both his mother and father have died. His brothers are married down South. He lives alone, in a shed-like building, with no toilet or kitchen, but it's free, in exchange for acting as a guard for a building under construction next door.
"I feel lonely, yes," he says, "but to be lonely is normal for me. I have been that way all my life."
Knowing he still has far to go, he is grateful to the people who helped him get to where he is. The policeman on the train. Dawod's mother. Even his employers, who treat him decently.
"They will always be in my memory," William says.
For him, the idea of escape, and the help he received to do it, is more important than the years of servitude.
With that attitude, a life shaped by something so heinous might just turn out okay after all.
To this day, the derogatory term used by some Muslim Arab Sudanese in the North against black Southerners is abeid, or slave. That's partly because Southern blacks have been stolen as slaves for centuries.
Though the coastal states of West Africa were the most important source of slaves for the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the Americas, Sudan, at the base of the African horn, was a major supplier for the Arab slave trade, which began centuries earlier.
According to historians, Arabs forcibly brought slaves from East Africa, including present-day Sudan, across the Red Sea or the Sahara, to work in the Islamic world of the Middle East. They worked as labourers, but were also soldiers and concubines.
Modern slavery in Sudan cannot be separated from historical times, argues anthropologist Jok Madut Jok, author of War and Slavery in Sudan. "For example," he writes, "those Dinka areas that have witnessed the resurgence of slavery since the early 1980s were the same areas that had formed the slavery zone in historical times."
Similarly, the contemporary Arab groups engaged in slavery were the same slave raiders when Sudan was ruled by the Turco-Egyptians and then the anti-Turk Mahdists in the 19th Century, Jok explains, adding that the slave hunting was fuelled by racial, ethnic and religious discrimination against the black African Southerners.
In this way, the second civil war in Sudan, which broke out in 1983 and led to a breakdown in the uneasy coexistence between Southerners and certain nomadic Arab groups, which receive support from the government in Khartoum, only intensified slave raiding in the South.
'No longer oppressed' by nemesis to the north, Republic of South Sudan still faces tough future
By Andrew Chung
JUBA - South Sudan, oye!
They repeated the chant hundreds of times Saturday - the tens of thousands of South Sudanese who braved, unprotected, the intense sun and steamy, oppressive heat to witness the birth of their new republic, the world's newest country.
After the declaration of independence was read, at 1:25 p.m., joy turned to delirium as Sudan's flag was lowered and the Republic of South Sudan's raised.
For Samuel Malual, who fled the last civil war and lived in Khartoum for 20 years in a squatters' camp on the city's outskirts, regularly getting beaten by police, the symbolism was almost too much.
"I feel great," he said. "We have waited so long for this. It means we are no longer oppressed."
At long last, they were officially a sovereign nation, no longer attached to their longtime nemesis, the North, against which the South fought two civil wars over five decades, leaving about 2.5 million dead.
The new president, General Salva Kiir, signed a transitional constitution and then took the oath of office. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, the military leader since 1989 who presided over most of the last civil war, looked on.
Kiir did not mince words in his speech despite his northern counterpart's presence. "We have been bombed, maimed, enslaved and treated worse than refugees in our own country," he said. "We have to forgive, although we won't forget."
Delegations from around the world were there, including United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and former U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell - who had a hand in the 2005 peace agreement that led to today's secession.
Also present were British foreign minister William Hague, and African leaders such as Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and South Africa's Jacob Zuma.
Canada sent Deepak Obhrai, the parliamentary secretary to Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. In a statement, Baird recognized South Sudan and welcomed it "into the community of nations as an independent state."
No western leader who spoke acknowledged the presence of Bashir, who is wanted on charges of genocide in Darfur.
Despite recent aggressive statements, Bashir was conciliatory.
"The will of the people of the South has to be respected," he said, adding that "Sudan's unity would have been better."
Officially, South Sudan became an independent country as of midnight Saturday.
And people didn't waste time to start the party. They jumped on to the hoods of cars, waving banners and screaming "Freedom!" while others spun up clouds of dust on the dirt roads.
Music seemed to come from everywhere.
By 6 a.m., hundreds were making their way to a huge field opposite the mausoleum for John Garang, the founder of the Sudan People's Liberation Army and considered the father of the nation.
The SPLA, a guerrilla force, is central to the South Sudanese story.
It fought the last civil war that began in 1983 and lasted until 2005. Its commanders now hold the seats of power in the South's government.
Groups representing dozens of South Sudan's tribes were at Saturday's celebrations, many of them performing traditional dances.
Rose Gordon let out a high-pitched victory cry, wrapped in a banner that hailed the January referendum, in which nearly 99 per cent voted for secession.
She helped register voters. "God has listened to our prayers," she declared.
South Sudan becomes the world's 193rd country and Africa's 54th. But the country is also described by some far less flattering numbers.
The vast majority of people live on less than a dollar a day, and it has the highest maternal mortality rate in the world and a 27 per cent literacy rate.
In fact, none of the states that have emerged from colonialism since the beginning of the 20th century have started from a lower base than South Sudan, said Lise Grande, the UN's top humanitarian official in the new country.
"This is the most enormous state-building project yet attempted," Grande said.
There is also major corruption, which Kiir called a "cancer" in his speech.
And there are security threats both from within the new nation and without.
The government and SPLA are dealing with several rebel insurrections in Upper Nile state and elsewhere. Kiir renewed his guarantee of amnesty for those laying down their arms.
There are bloody inter-tribal conflicts, between the Nuer, Dinka and Merle tribes especially, that continue to kill hundreds.
And most threatening of all, there is the growing enmity with the North. Khartoum faces serious economic consequences from the separation, because about 80 per cent of Sudan's oil exports come from the South.
Since May, Bashir's forces have launched attacks or occupied several disputed border areas.
In May, his troops invaded Abyei, a region around which there are rich oil deposits.
Abyei is contested and was supposed to hold its own referendum on its status, which has now been put off indefinitely.
Bashir also continued Khartoum's aggression against anti-government elements by launching vicious attacks against SPLA soldiers and sympathizers in South Kordofan, but also by targeting civilians.
The targeting of civilians has long been a tactic used by the Muslim and Arab North's forces in its conflicts in the South, the Nuba Mountains and Darfur, where it used its Antonov bombers, fighter jets and militias on horseback to wage war over ethnicity and religion, along with oil and power.
The South is primarily black African and Christian or animist. It fought against the imposition of Sharia Law by Khartoum and what it considered extreme governmental neglect.
Indeed, there are still no proper paved roads in Juba, South Sudan's capital.
theartofmadeline
baratheonpilled
izzy806
titsay
blakekathryn
romaincrisis
annaxmalina
gummygunk
ellievsbear