Though many voters believed they were electing a pro-human rights president, Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, has demonstrated no mercy in executions, even for drug trafficking.
Author: Bertrand Hauger
NEW DELHI — Archana, who is just 15, is desperately trying to put her 3-month-old brother to sleep. He’s crying out for his mother, who died last week after going to a government-run sterilization camp. At least 15 others suffered the same fate, and scores of others are seriously ill after undergoing tubectomies at two Indian sterilization “camps.” Ongoing investigations point to contaminated drugs given to the women as a possible cause of death. But a dirty operating room and surgeries performed in a matter of minutes with unsanitized instruments have raised serious questions about India’s approach to population control […]
Considered history’s worst industrial accident, having killed thousands in a Dec. 3, 1984 gas leak at a Union Carbide plant in India, the health effects in Bhopal can still be felt today.
PUNE — Every morning Rebecca Kedari pulls a cart through an upmarket neighborhood in this city of 3.3 million to collect household waste. Ten years ago Rebecca would not even been able to enter this area of Pune, in western India. “Before I had to go outside the city to look for dry waste and bring it back. The work conditions were bad and collecting the waste took me at least 6 hours,” she says. She now wears a local government identity card, has a health insurance plan, and is part of the KKPKP — a waste pickers’ union set […]
JAKARTA — In a suburban part of Jakarta, we’re walking down a dirt road up to a very small pink house at the end of an alley. There are chickens running around, and children playing. It’s here that Indonesia’s first retirement home for transsexual and transgender people — known as waria in Indonesia — is being built. In the doorway, two elderly transgenders whose teeth are missing call out “good morning.” Inside, Yulianus Rettoblaut peers into a mirror while a friend goes about the daily ritual of applying her heavy makeup — thick white foundation, fake eyelashes, bright red lipstick […]
KARACHI — Khushboo Rafiq is the first person in her family not to pay a dowry, or bride price, to her husband Usman’s family. Khushboo works for an organization that advocates women’s rights. It was very important to her that her wedding represents the ideals and convictions on which she spends her professional efforts.” We used the wedding invitation to tell guests they should not bring any gifts,” she says. “We also made it very clear that no dowry was being paid. We also are donating our wedding dress to a charity for another couple to use in the future.” […]
A brave group of women are taking on the enormous task of finding and destroying millions of unexploded bombs in Laos, the most heavily bombed country, per capita, in the world.
In rural Idlib, marriage offices are fixing people up, but some say they’re exploiting the lonely during wartime by selling desperate women to overseas men.
MALAJPUR — Every February, people gather in the village of Malajpur, in the state of Madhya Pradesh, for a unique ghost fair. It’s one of India’s most celebrated festivals — an ancient event where exorcists rid the body of evil spirits. Amardas believes that a ghost has taken control of her sister-in-law, Dharmati Bai, who has been shouting strange words for more than a month now. “My sister-in-law must have been possessed by a ghost,” she says. “We’ve come to the Malajpur ghost fair to pay our respects to the temple. They’re treating her now, and I hope she’ll be […]
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Yoko Tawada, A Writer Split In Two
STOCKHOLM — Some say Japanese-born Yoko Tawada who has adopted Germany as her home is a writer with a split cultural personality. After 30 years, she still struggles to reconcile the differences. “Like two personalities, they don’t want to be one,” she says. “They didn’t want to tell one story. I couldn’t put them together. It’s impossible.” In Sweden to launch her 23rd book, The Naked Eye, the award-winning author says the story has links to her own experience traveling by train from Japan to Germany. “I came to Europe by the Trans-Siberian Railway,” she says. “It is a slow […]
AJMER — In India, 70% of the population lives in rural areas, mostly in poverty. But as a voluntary program has proven, impoverished people can become experts in solar power. Thanks to Barefoot College, an NGO based here in Ajmer, in the western part of India’s Rajasthan state, some 600 women have been fully educated about solar power, a small step towards eradicating poverty. Sunaina Das, 20, is reviewing all the components needed to make a solar lamp. Though she doesn’t know how to read or write, she’s learning to become a solar engineer. “I’ve come here for training,” she […]
The neighborhood in Seoul known to Westerns from Psy’s mega-hit single is also the place status-conscious South Koreans go to get married. But something is lost in all the ritz.
The new freedom of the Asian nation, also known as Myanmar, has drawn global investors in a race to profit from new development. But Burmese workers and farmers suffer the side-effects.
LOIKAW — Decades of armed conflict in Myanmar make it one of the worst-hit countries for landmines. Six years ago, the Karenni National People’s Liberation Front established a prosthetics factory in Karenni state, near the border with Thailand, to help people who have been disabled by landmines. The special feature of this enterprise? All of the people working at the factory are landmine victims themselves. One of them is Kyaw Win, a former soldier with the Karenni Army who has been fighting a separatist battle with the Myanmar military for decades. While on the battlefield, he stepped on a landmine […]
DEIR EZ-ZOR — On a pitch-black night, we wait in our taxi on the embankment. A fighter informs us there are wounded on the bridge, and that his comrades are trying to reach them. The official name of this deadly crossing — Siyasiyeh Bridge — has been discarded in favor of something much more apt: the bridge of death. Syria’s eastern city of Deir ez-Zor is effectively divided, split between government-run and opposition-held areas. The rebels briefly gained an upper hand when they captured the Siyasiyeh Bridge in late January, effectively cutting off regime supplies to the adjoining province of […]
For thousands of years, traditional boxing has been one of Burma“s primary national sports. But when the Southeast Asian Games are held in December, it will be conspicuously missing, as no other country fights in that style. The more internationally recognized Thai boxing, also known as Muay Thai, will be featured instead. “I was very keen on boxing, so I had sacrificed a lot. Finally, I earned a gold belt,” says Saw Ohn Myint, a former gold belt national champion in Burmese boxing. He says he would have loved to represent his country — officially known as Myanmar —before a […]
HOMS — I still remember April 18, 2011, when it seemed all of Homs turned out for the funeral of 12 people. Tens of thousands of men and youths exited the grand mosque of Homs, the coffins held aloft amid the multitudes. The procession headed to al-Kateeb cemetery, one of the most revered burial grounds for Muslims in the city. Twenty years ago, Homs residents were forbidden from burying their dead in al-Kateeb cemetery; it was running out of space and the final few places were reserved for only the most prominent sheikhs. They would be the lucky few accorded […]
HOMS — Five hundred and ten days have passed since the siege began in Homs, taking a toll on civilians and fighters alike. Homs, dubbed “the capital of the revolution” by activists for its early role in the revolt, has since been two-thirds destroyed by air raids and shelling. The mass protests that broke out in March 2011 were met with deadly military force, prompting the formation of local units of the rebel Free Syrian Army. Regime forces have worked since to quell the local rebellion; for the past year and a half, 14 neighborhoods have lived under a grinding […]