Go to http://www.youtube.com/user/unitedforhumanrights for videos about each of the universal human rights.

A new activist-minded magazine has seen the light of day: Independent World Report (IWR), a bimonthly newsmagazine about issues that don’t get their fair share of (or any) attention in mainstream media. Its credo is journalism for humanity, its reporters are from all over the world. Editor Tasneem Khalil is a Bangladeshi journalist now in exile in Sweden, a survivor of torture for working as an editor for the Dhaka-based Daily Star newspaper, as a news representative for CNN in Bangladesh, and as a consultant researcher for Human Rights Watch. Tasneem found me through my blog and asked me to write for IWR.

My contribution to the first issue is a piece on asylum children in Denmark in which I compare my experiences from the mid-nineties to the situation today. Things are quite different today, and in many ways much, much harder on children than when I used to live in an asylum center, as you already may have read about on my blog.

In the first issue of IWR you can also read an essay on religion’s role in the oppression on women, investigative reporting on forced child labour in the Uzbek cotton industry, an interview with former British diplomat who blew the whistle on torture, Craig Murray, and much more.

I am working on a piece for the next issue, this time about the ICTY. If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave me a comment in the next few days And make sure you browse through the excellent pieces in the first issue of IWR on independentworldreport.com.

14 years ago Ratko Mladić and his heavily armed soldiers began their holocaust against unarmed civilians in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, proclaimed by the UN as a “safe haven”. In his own words, Mladić did it in the name of the Serb people. They brutally murdered more than 10.000 Bosnians, among them babies too young to even have been named yet. Their remains were buried in mass graves. The Dutch UN soldiers watched all of it, and even helped separate men from women and children (most of the murdered Bosnians were men, but neither women nor children were spared – countless women were raped, for instance). In the years to come, the remains were dug up and scattered in order to hide the evidence – something not even Hitler had thought of. To this day there are people in the world who admire and idolize Mladić and all those who committed the holocaust with him. Mladić is still at large.

The survivors have seen no justice yet. Cases have been brought to international courts, without any useful outcome. A couple of years ago the Dutch government awarded medals to the soldiers who had been in Srebrenica during the genocide. Is having part in a holocaust really something to be proud of?

This I didn’t know. After Milošević had died in his cell in the Hague in March 2006 while being tried for war crimes, a group of about 3.000 citizens of Belgrade (mainly young people) walked down the main pedestrian street carrying balloons and chanting “Good riddance”. The march ended in a park where they let go of the balloons.

Sadly, a much, much bigger crowd (I read on B92 it was 80.000) was lamenting the death of the criminal in front of the parliament at the same time. But still, a nice little story of a group of dissidents. I imagine it wasn’t very easy for them, not least because of the massive verbal abuse against them I’ve found on the internet just looking for a couple of articles for more info. There were also plenty of violent attacks by Milošević’s fans in those days, among others on journalists from B92. A lot of buildings were set on fire and demolished as well.

The photos below I found in a Facebook group remembering the event.

June 15th-21st is the Refugee Week in the UK (other countries may only be marking the Refugee Day on June 20th), and on this occasion the British Red Cross has launched a campaign called Look Beyond the Label. The website tells you how you can join as a blogger, user of social networks like Facebook and Twitter or just plain in your e-mails.

In the videos in the campaign several refugees speak out. Among them Aldijana Bećirević from Bosnia-Herzegovina who had to flee her country in 1995. Today she is a solicitor specialised in immigration law. Her video is very moving, as you can see below. Make sure to see the others’ testimonies as well and find out how you can support the campaign at lookbeyondthelabel.org

Heard at the UNITED conference outside Sheffield (June 2-7. 2009):

- What worries me more than idiots like Nick Griffin of the BNP saying their stupid racist things are the governing parties saying “The BNP is a real danger and because of that we need to be tougher on immigration. If we don’t show the electorate that we’re tough on immigrants, they’ll end up voting for the BNP”. So they’re not doing anything about the danger, just trying to get the racists to vote for them.

A couple of months ago I reconnected with some childhood friends of mine on Facebook. Among them was the girl who used to be my best friend from when we were both still in diapers till I was deported from Bosnia-Herzegovina. I also found the girl who was my closest classmate. I lost touch with both of them when I got deported. Both the girls are Serb so they didn’t get deported anywhere.

We sent some messages back and forth about where we were in our lives now, all these years later. It was odd but alright.

Then I came across the news about the Serb authorities forbidding the use of certain Bosnian towns’ names which naturally ticked me off. I wrote a status update about it, ridiculing the decision. And these particular two girls who had once been so close to me turned out to be nasty beasts who hadn’t even understood the status update, but used it as an excuse to spill some nationalistic bullsh*t all over my profile.

For some reason I was really shocked. Then I wrote them one final message and deleted and banned both of them from ever seeing my profile again. I used to have some nice memories of them too but now I can’t think of either of them without feeling violently disgusted.

I take comfort in the fact that this only happened with these two girls. Other old friends I reconnected with are still nice people

DENMARK. The Danish and Iraqi governments recently reached an agreement permitting the forcible repatriation of rejected Iraqi asylum-seekers to their home country, Politiken.dk reports. There are currently 282 rejected Iraqi asylum-seekers in the country, 23 of them children. More than half of them have spent between 6 and 11 years in Danish asylum centers.

Yesterday around 30 rejected Iraqis sought refuge in a church in Copenhagen. “We are persecuted in Iraq, now we’re persecuted in Denmark as well. This is out last chance of getting protection,” their spokeswoman Anne said to the Ritzau news agency (Danish).

Soon a Facebook page was set up in support of the Iraqis called “The Iraqis in Our Lady Church” (“Irakerne i Vor Frue Kirke“) which just a little over 24 hours later counts more than 3.400 supporters. The number is currently growing by the minute (it grew by 200 new supporters just while I was working on this blog post).

“We are a group of people who neither can, nor will tolerate the dispatches. For this reason we support the group of Iraqi people who have applied for asylum in “Vor Frue” church in Copenhagen. As citizens, we must take action, when the Danish authorities fail in protecting people who need protection,” the page says and demands permanent residence permit for the Iraqis.

The Danish Refugee Council strongly criticizes the government’s decision. In a newsletter (Danish) the general secretary of the NGO, Andreas Kamm, says that Syria has dealt with Iraqi refugees far better than Denmark.

“Many of the Iraqi asylum-seekers Denmark now wants to send back to Iraq have been in the country for 5-10 years. For most of that time the situation in their country has been so unstable that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has recommended that countries like Denmark give them protection. Denmark has ignored this. In stead the politicians have insisted that people go back to a country so clearly aflame”, says Andreas Kamm.

A growing group of activists supports the Iraqis by providing them with food, drink and other necessities. The church council has no plans of forcing the Iraqis out.

SETimes.com reports that the chief prosecutor of The Hague war crimes tribunal, Serge Brammertz, confirmed on Wednesday (May 6th) that the tribunal has destroyed around 1,000 pieces of evidence from mass graves in the Srebrenica area.

At first this was explained by the “poor condition” of the evidence. Then Brammertz added “public health” (!) as a reason for the destruction. Reporter Michael Montgomery writes on the web site of the Center for Investigative Reporting that UN sources told him the material was dumped because “it smelled bad”!

We’re talking about IDs, photographs and clothes of the victims, evidence of immense historic value – not to mention the value they would have had to the surviving relatives. Criminal lawyer Axel Hagedorn who represents the mothers of Srebrenica adds that the destroyed evidence could theoretically have contained DNA material belonging to the perpetrators.

I simply cannot wrap my mind around this. My first thought was that this has got to be a criminal offense, or rather many different ones. And yet there is virtually nothing about this in mainstream media. The destruction of evidence of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II makes few headlines.

Read also my earlier post ICTY: Silencing the truth

Freedom House has recently published a report on press freedom in 2008 which lists Bosnia-Herzegovina in the group of countries with “partly free” press.

Here is an excerpt from the text on Bosnia-Herzegovina:

“Although attacks are fairly uncommon, journalists throughout BiH remain subject to political pressure and threats of violence, including one uttered in October 2007 by the Serb human rights ombudsman. There is also concern over the influence of organized crime on the media. Meanwhile, the current RS prime minister, Milorad Dodik, has been accused of tightening control over the Bosnian Serb media. His government replaced the leadership of the official SRNA news agency and the semiofficial daily Glas Srpske in 2006, and the opposition has alleged that the RS public broadcaster, RTRS, shows a progovernment bias. In January 2007, the RS government initiated a boycott of BHT-1, the BiH public television station, over perceived disrespect for the RS and Bosnian Serb leaders. RS officials refused to give interviews or statements to BHT-1, and the station’s reporters were barred from RS press conferences. The boycott was lifted at the end of the month, after the general director of BHT-1 was replaced.”

There is a lot in this paragraph to be alarmed by, but I can’t help but going back to the absurdity of the human rights ombudsman threatening a journalist in 2007. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find anything on the subject on the web – if any of you readers know something, please share a link.

The report reminded me of an article at Balkan Insight about an attack on the journalist Slobodan Vasković for trying to film a Serb Orthodox Church in Trebinje for the popular political magazine “60 Minutes”. I remember it mostly because of the online game developed by the activist group Protest. In this game, you can join in on the authorities’ assaults on journalists, “the most popular game in our country”.

In general, Freedom House finds that press freedom continues to decline on a global scale for the seventh year. In terms of population, the survey found that only 18 percent of the world’s inhabitants live in countries that enjoy a Free press, while 40 percent have a Partly Free press and 42 percent have a Not Free press.

You can see the Map of Press Freedom here. Click on the map to choose a region or country or use the drop-down menu.