Suchergebnisse

Excerpt from a novel banned in most of the Arab world The novel whose opening chapter we print below was published in Beirut in the early 1980s. Its author, a Palestinian, worked as a migrant teacher in Saudi Arabia, and now lives in Damascus. Najran Below Zero is banned not only in Saudi Arabia, but in most Arab-speaking countries. The story is set amongst the population of Najran — an area of Saudi Arabia near the border with North Yemen. Many of the people there, as in other parts of Saudi Arabia, are Arab migrant workers, forced to cross the border by the overwhelming poverty of their own countries, and compelled to accept the most menial forms of livelihood in order to subsist in the inflation-ridden economy of Saudi Arabia. The novel demonstrates the variety of means by which such a population is silenced: not only overtly by the Saudi security agents — the execution of one of their victims is the focus of the opening chapter — but equally by hunger and the exploitation of foreign enterprise, by old loyalties and new enemies, by community and dislocation, survival and escape. In the story, Abu Shannan provides the central thread; he has recently been released from prison, and is then co-opted by the royalist allies in the border region. Stephen Hayden, 'Mr', with his ever-present camera, represents the Western interests which bolster the Saudi regime. The Najran area and its population is typical of Saudi Arabia, but it has particular features which are significant in Yahya Yakhlaf's novel. Najran became part of Saudi territory in 1934, after a long dispute between the Yemeni and Saudi Arabian governments. In 1962 a military coup abolished the Imamate and declared the Yemen a Republic. During the civil war which followed, Najran was a loyalist stronghold, where the Imam of Yemen's troops (drawn to a large extent from the Zaydi tribal confederation) were bolstered by the support of the Saudi regime, and indirectly by that of Western interests.

The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that the CIA was not responsible for the deaths of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu on November 2, 1963. This conclusion only reaffirms a point that too few Americans understood—Vietnam's destiny lies ultimately with its own people.Ngo Dinh Diem met his death at the hands of his fellow countrymen in a coup d'etat planned and executed by the Vietnamese Army to achieve political goals important to the Vietnamese people. The story of the coup against Diem has been told in English by Marguerite Higgins, David Halberstam, and Robert Shaplen.

In recent years, it has become increasingly evident that executed prisoners are the principal source of supply of body organs for medical transplantation purposes in China. While most observers would acknowledge the moral dilemmas implicit in this situation, the chronic shortage of voluntary organ donors around the world has led some to believe that such practices may still be justified: through their deaths, after all, condemned criminals can contribute to saving the lives of innocent victims of disease. Recent research by Human Rights Watch/Asia has uncovered, however, important new documentary and other evidence demonstrating that China's heavy reliance on executed prisoners as a source of transplant organs entails a wide range of unacceptable human rights and medical ethics violations.In this report, Human Rights Watch/Asia calls on the Chinese government to ban all further use of prisoners' organs for transplant operations, provide precise statistical data on capital punishment and executions and comply with the United Nations' "Principles of Medical Ethics" relevant to the role of the medical profession in protecting prisoners against torture and other ill-treatment. It also calls on foreign governments, especially in the Asian region, to discourage or bar their citizens from obtaining organ transplants in China and on foreign funding agencies to adopt a policy of non-participation in all Chinese government-sponsored organ transplant-related research programs. It also calls on foreign medical and pharmaceutical companies which supply goods or services to China's transplant program to cease such activity until the Chinese authorities can demonstrate that executed prisoners' organs are no longer being used for transplant purposes.

The extent to which foreign sovereigns are entitled to immunity in municipal courts has attracted a vast literature, in recent years especially. The majority view now seems to be that immunity need not extend to commercial transactions entered into by the state, although the precise scope of this "exception" remains unsettled, and the role of international law in "extending" or "withholding" immunity has not yet, perhaps, been clearly analyzed. Indeed, it has been denied that there is any international law rule at all on the subject, a view that would presumably leave each state free to formulate, or negotiate, its own rule.