Tag Archives: culture of impunity

Three Years After Earthquake, Hundreds of Thousands of Haitians Still Homeless, Facing Eviction

April 24, 2013 at 8:22 PM
IDP camp Grace Village, Carrefour municipality, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, May 2012 (Photo Credit: Amnesty International).

IDP camp Grace Village, Carrefour municipality, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, May 2012 (Photo Credit: Amnesty International).

By Chiara Liguori and James Burke of Amnesty International’s Caribbean Team

“Be prepared, we will burn down your shelters, shoot you and throw you all out.”

“We’ll burn all the camp down and kill your children.”

“I will get you out of here by any means necessary.”

These are only a few of the recent eviction threats heard by residents of camps in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince which still house hundreds of thousands of those displaced by the January 2010 earthquake.

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Looking Forward, Ignoring the Past?

April 24, 2013 at 12:03 PM

ache rightBy Max White, Amnesty International USA Indonesia Country Specialist

Recently, Amnesty International released a comprehensive report, “Time to Face the Past,” documenting the disturbing failure by Indonesian governments, local and central, to establish the truth of what happened to victims of years of violence in the province of Aceh, Indonesia. The conflict left up to 30,000 people dead, many of them civilians; it is nearly eight years since the end of that conflict.

When President Obama came into office, he was encouraged to investigate and prosecute U.S. officials responsible for torture. In January 2009, the New York Times reported, “President-elect Barack Obama signaled in an interview broadcast Sunday that he was unlikely to authorize a broad inquiry into Bush administration programs like domestic eavesdropping or the treatment of terrorism suspects.” He stated that, “…we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

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