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Declare rape in conflict zones a war crime: UAE
Declare rape in conflict zones a war crime: UAE (Wam) / 26 September 2013 Foreign Minister Shaikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan on Tuesday urged governments to stand together to support the UN initiative to combat sexual violence in conflict situations, including condemning this crime and prosecuting and punishing the perpetrators in accordance with international criminal law. Shaikh Abdullah bin Zayed in talks with Ahmed Al Jarba, head of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, at the United Nations headquarters in New York on Tuesday. Shaikh Abdullah pledged the UAE’s continued support to the Syrian people and their aspirations to restore security and stability in the country. — Wam The following is the full statement he made during a UN meeting on the “Initiative to combat sexual violence in conflict situations” on the occasion of the declaration of international commitment to end sexual violence in conflict situations, being held in association with the 68th session of the UN General Assembly: “I am pleased to begin my speech by expressing my sincere thanks to my colleague, William Hague, UK Foreign Secretary, for leading this initiative aimed at preventing sexual violence in all its forms. “A great effort has been exerted to unite the international community and strengthen its determination to tackle this crime, stripped of all the meanings of humanity. As I believe in the awfulness of this crime, and the necessity of the world consensus to clearly denounce it, so I agreed to be the “World Supporter” for this initiative. “We live in a world of increasing conflicts and wars, such as those in Syria, for example. The crimes of rape and other forms of sexual violence that occur during these conflicts are not a new phenomenon. They have been repeated throughout history as a means to degrade communities, humiliate opponents and destroy them. “We still remained committed with our partners from the international community to eliminate this barbarism. We can no longer accept that such crimes will be an inevitable result of conflicts in the 21st century. We have to refer very clearly to them as a war crime. “It is a crime from which millions of people are suffering, with the worst practices and techniques, as described by a Bosnian rape victim who said, “He took my life without killing me”. There is nothing worse than that. “To address this issue, we start to promote a sense of responsibility towards the elimination of these crimes, so as to ensure that the criminal justice system in the states in which conflicts arise between different parties has sufficient expertise and capabilities to enable it to deal effectively with these crimes. “I know that Zainab Bangura, UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, has made unremitting efforts with a number of governments to help strengthen the police, military, and judicial capacities to address these issues. “Let me encourage you to continue these good efforts. I thank you for them. “We also need to make further efforts to strengthen the role of women and girls in all walks of life. I would like to emphasise that the UAE is a strong supporter of UN Women [the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women]. “The country provided an amount of two-and-a-half million dollars for UN Women in 2012 and recently committed to providing one-and-a-half million dollars in partnership with the United Kingdom in order to support the efforts of the Somali government in the fight against sexual violence during conflicts. “We look forward to strengthening the role played by UN Women under the leadership of Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. The strengthening of the role and empowerment of women means ensuring that education is provided, as well as giving them the opportunity to invest their talents in the labour market and to participate in decision-making in government and business sectors. “There are no quick solutions in this regard, but we must do what we can, and the UAE will continue to support this important work. “Let me finish my speech by urging all governments to stand together to support this initiative and to speak with one voice to express our condemnation of this crime and our common resolve to prosecute and punish it in accordance with the law.” Continue reading
India’s CBSE may open Dubai centre
India’s CBSE may open Dubai centre Muaz Shabandari / 26 September 2013 India’s largest education board has announced plans to set up a new centre for schools in the Gulf. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) centre will deal with student and school issues in an attempt to provide them with better services. “There is a definite need for a centre and over the next two or three months, we will have a sub-regional office in the Gulf region. The centre will most likely be in Dubai since it has the largest concentration of CBSE schools in the Gulf,” said board chairman Vineet Joshi. India’s Human Resource Development Minister Dr Pallam Raju, who was speaking with school principals in Dubai via teleconference, made the formal announcement on Wednesday. The CBSE chief also announced the board’s plan to start accreditation for all schools affiliated with the board. Inspection teams from India will visit schools in the Gulf region every five years to assess education quality as part of the plan. “We were working on developing this accreditation system for the last two years and we have launched it now. It will be compulsory for all CBSE schools to get accredited. Those schools that fail to receive an accreditation will be given one chance, failing which their CBSE affiliation will be revoked,” said Joshi. “The accreditation system will follow a peer assessor scheme where two assessors from private agencies and one CBSE observer will evaluate the school over a period of two days. A list of recommendations will be presented to the board and it will then be examined.” The educational board has selected 12 private agencies to nominate CBSE school principals who will qualify to be peer assessors after completing an accreditation test. The new system is being implemented to protect student interests and improve teaching and learning standards. “Schools associated with CBSE are not supposed to commercialise and, therefore, education cannot be looked at as a product. There has to be a culture of continuous improvement and the accreditation system will help them in this aspect,” added Joshi. Reports by education regulators have constantly highlighted the need for CBSE to move away from rote learning and the board has responded by announcing a series of changes over the last few years. “We are looking at consolidating the changes we have done since we started implementing them four years back. We value suggestions raised by schools and it reflects some of the issues which they may face.” Each year, the board affiliates 800 new schools and the new accreditation policies are expected to come a long way in improving education standards in Indian schools following the curriculum. muaz@khaleejtimes.com Continue reading
Pakistan quake island unlikely to last: Experts
Pakistan quake island unlikely to last: Experts (AFP) / 25 September 2013 A small island created in the Arabian Sea by the huge earthquake that hit southwest Pakistan has fascinated locals but experts say it is unlikely to last long. The 7.7-magnitude quake struck on Tuesday in Baluchistan’s remote Awaran district, killing more than 200 people and affecting hundreds of thousands. Off the coastline near the port of Gwadar, some 400 kilometres (250 miles) from the epicentre, locals were astonished to see a new piece of land surface from the waves. “It is not a small thing, but a huge thing which has emerged from under the water,” Gwadar resident Muhammad Rustam said. “It looked very, very strange to me and also a bit scary because suddenly a huge thing has emerged from the water.” Mohammad Danish, a marine biologist from Pakistan’s National Institute of Oceanography, said a team of experts had visited the island and found methane gas rising. “Our team found bubbles rising from the surface of the island which caught fire when a match was lit and we forbade our team to start any flame. It is methane gas,” Danish said on GEO television news. The island is about 60 to 70 feet (18 to 21 metres) high, up to 300 feet wide and up to 120 feet long, he said. It sits about 200 metres away from the coast. Gary Gibson, a seismologist with Australia’s University of Melbourne, said the new island was likely to be a “mud volcano”, created by methane gas forcing material upwards during the violent shaking of the earthquake. “It’s happened before in that area but it’s certainly an unusual event, very rare,” Gibson said, adding that it was “very curious” to see such activity some 400 kilometres from the quake’s epicentre. The so-called island is not a fixed structure but a body of mud that will be broken down by wave activity and dispersed over time, the scientist said. A similar event happened in the same area in 1945 when an 8.1-magnitude earthquake at Makran triggered the formation of mud volcanoes off Gwadar. Professor Shamim Ahmed Shaikh, chairman of the department of geology at Karachi University, said the island, which has not been named, would disperse within a couple of months. He said it happens along the Makran coast because of the complex relationship between tectonic plates in the area. Pakistan sits close to the junction of three plates — the Indian, Arabian and Eurasian. “About a year back an island of almost similar size had surfaced at the similar distance from the coast in the Makran region. This would disperse in a week to a couple of months,” Shaikh said. Gibson said the temporary island was very different from the permanent uplift seen during major “subduction zone” earthquakes, where plate collisions force the Earth’s crust suddenly and sometimes dramatically upwards. For example, in the massive 9.5-magnitude earthquake in Chile in 1960 — known as the world’s largest ever — whole fishing villages were thrust “several metres” upwards and wharves suddenly located hundreds of metres inland, Gibson said. Such uplift events are relatively common in the Pacific’s so-called “Ring of Fire”, a hotbed of seismic and volcanic activity at the junction of several tectonic plates. A thundering 8.0-magnitude quake in the Solomon Islands in 2007 thrust Ranogga Island upwards by three metres, exposing submerged reefs once popular with divers and killing the vibrant corals, expanding the shoreline outwards by several metres in the process. During the massive 9.2-magnitude earthquake off Sumatra which triggered a devastating tsunami across the Indian Ocean in 2004, several islands were pushed upwards while others subsided into the ocean. The Aceh coast dropped permanently by one metre while Simeulue Island was lifted by as much as 1.5 metres, exposing the surrounding reef which became the island’s new fringe. Continue reading
