Thammasat Massacre in Thailand 1976

Political tensions between leftist and rightist forces reached a bloody climax in October 1976. On October 5, right-wing newspapers in the capital published a photograph of student demonstrators at Thammasat University reenacting the strangling and hanging of two student protestors by police the previous month. The photograph, which was later found to have been altered, showed one of the students as being made up to resemble the king's son, Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn.

The right wing perceived the demonstration as a damning act of lèse-majeste. That evening police surrounded the campus of Thammasat University, where 2,000 students were holding a sit-in. Fighting between students and police (including contingents of the paramilitary Border Patrol Police) broke out. The following day, groups of Nawa Phon, Red Gaurs, and Village Scouts "shock troops" surged onto the campus and launched a bloody assault in which hundreds of students were killed and wounded and more than 1,000 arrested. That evening the military seized power, established the National Administrative Reform Council (NARC), and ended that phase of Thailand's intermittent experimentation with democracy.

On the dawn of 6 October 1976, the rightists began firing into the University campus with pistols, automatic rifles and grenade launchers. Although the students pleaded for a ceasefire, police chief authorized a free firing followed by paramilitary groups storming in. Students who surrendered were forced to lie on the ground and were beaten, some to death. Others were shot or hung and their bodies mutilated or set ablaze. Those attempted to escape by jumping into the Chao Phraya River were also shot. The barbarism lasted for several hours until the Border Patrol Police, Red Gaur, Navapol Gangsters, and the Village Scouts re-gathered at the Royal Turf Club and were dismissed.

Samak Sundaravej was awarded a position of a Minister of Interior in a military-backed civillian government. Whereas a large number of survived students and activists went into the jungle to join the Communist guerrilla fighters. These included a lot of at-present politicians, scholars and university lecturers e.g., Theerayuth Boonme, Jiranan Pitrpreecha, Seksan Prasertkul, Thongchai Winijakul, Sombat Thamrongtanyawong, Chingchai Mongkoltham, Adisorn Piangkes, Jaral Ditapichai, Weng Tojirakarn, Amorn Amornratananont, Jaturon Chaisaeng, Promin Lertsuriyadej, Poomtham Vechayachai, Surachai Sae-Dan, Prinya Thewanarumitkul, Terdpoom Jaidee.

Some students remained in the city but continued to be alliances of the underground movements e.g., Surapong Suebwonglee.

Peace deal between China and Thailand ended the support of the communist guerilla in Thailand. National reconciliation and amnesty by PM Gen. Prem Tinasulanonth brought a peaceful return of those students to Thai society whereby most of the bitter students could come to terms with the tragedy. Those who feel bitter with termination of Chinese support remain live on and preach on left-wing ideologies. Some like Promin Lertsuriyadej, Poomtham Vechayachaijoin Thaksin Shinawatra's business empire.

Many modern history textbooks in Thailand completely skip this event or include one-sided police reports from the time that claim student protesters had turned violent. Some play down the massacre as a 'misunderstanding' between the two sides while even the most accurate are fairly watered down versions of the event.

Thaksin Shinawatra, with his enormous wealth, can get the right combination of those brilliant old-time left-wing activists, old fashioned politicians and the extreme right-wing politicians to work for his empire. He appointed Samak Sundaravej in his late 70's, the supposed to be retired politician to lead PPP after the coup. It was a chance of a life time to be a Prime Minister for greedy Samak.

In the early months of his Prime Minister term, Samak Sundaravej, in an interview with a foreign mdia, shamelessly denied his involvment with October 6, 1976 Thammasat Massacre and said that there was only one died in that incidence. This Samak's interview challenged the conscience of those left-wing ideologists who lost their comrades in front of their eyes from the smear propaganda of the right-wing extremists.

Thaksin, the mastermind, is just very good at reliving all the parties to serve him. In this present day massacre, 32 years afterward, Samak Sundaravej the advocate, Salang Bunnak the marksman, the racketeers, the leftists such as Surachai Sae-Dan, Thongchai Winijakul, Jaturon Chaisaeng, Weng Tojirakarn, Adisorn Piangkes conspired a betrayal one over their comrades' graves and ashes.

Background

Following the events of 14 October 1973 and the expulsion of the Three Tyrants--Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn, Praphas Charusathien, and Narong Kittikachorn--a new constitution was promulgated in 1974 and elected, democratic government resumed after a long period of military dictatorship. However, with parliamentary factionalism and the fact that there was no clear majority in parliament, the elected government was politically unstable. Furthermore, an economic downturn and the rise of student activism led to increased incidence of organized labor strikes, farmer protests, and rightist concern. Government land reform and other liberal economic policies of Kukrit Pramoj also increased the Right's wariness of increasing liberal sentiment in the country.

During this time, various extreme rightist organizations were given better support and preparation. The Village Scouts (Thai: ลูกเสือชาวบ้าน) were intensely trained and recruited to despise Communists and other "un-Thai" characters, and to fight for the "Nation, Religion, and Monarchy." The Village Scouts were closely tied to the Border Patrol Police. Other more extreme, underground rightist movements also grew. This included the Red Gaurand Navapol, the violent arm of the ultra-right, which were organized and trained by the Internal Security Operations Command. Anti-communist sentiment and fear mongering was hyped up in these organizations to the point that a monk, Kittivudho, publicly claimed that killing Communists was not a sin, but in fact, meritorious. Many rightist riots, fights, and protests were whipped up to terrorize liberals.

This anti-communist hysteria was summarized by a western diplomat: "The Thai government and press are forever explaining away their national problems by pointing at the communists ... the real enemy is alive and well and living in Bangkok, driving around in air-conditioned Mercedes."

Oil, War And A Growing Sense Of Panic In The US

Don't tell me that America would have invaded Iraq if its chief export was beetroot

Source: information clearing house

Robert Fisk

01 October 2003:(The Independent) Oil is slippery stuff but not as slippery as the figures now being peddled by Iraq's American occupiers. Up around Kirkuk, the authorities are keeping the sabotage figures secret - because they can't stop their pipelines to Turkey blowing up. And down in Baghdad, where the men who produce Iraq's oil production figures are beginning to look like the occupants of Plato's cave - drawing conclusions from shadows on their wall - the statistics are being cooked. Paul Bremer, the US proconsul who wears combat boots, is "sexing up" the figures to a point where even the oilmen are shaking their heads.
Take Kirkuk. Only when the television cameras capture a blown pipe, flames billowing, do the occupation powers report sabotage. This they did, for example, on 18 August. But the same Turkish pipeline has been hit before and since. It was blown on 17 September and four times the following day. US patrols and helicopters move along the pipeline but, in the huge ravines and tribal areas through which it passes, long sections are indefensible.
European oilmen in Baghdad realise now that Iraqi officials in the oil ministry - one of only two government institutions that the Americans defended from the looters - knew very well that the sabotage was going to occur. "They told me in June that there would be no oil exports from the north," one of them said to me this week. "They knew it was going to be sabotaged - and it had obviously been planned long before the invasion in March."
Early in their occupation, the Americans took the quiet - and unwise - decision to re-hire many Baathist oil technocrats, which means that a large proportion of ministry officials are still ambivalent towards the Americans. The only oil revenues the US can get are from the south. In the middle of August, Mr Bremer gave the impression that production stood at about 1.5 million barrels a day. But the real figure at that time was 780,000 barrels and rarely does production reach a million. In the words of an oil analyst visiting Iraq, this is "an inexcusable catastrophe".
When the US attacked Iraq in March, the country was producing 2.7 million barrels a day. It transpires that in the very first hours after they entered Baghdad on 9 April, American troops allowed looters into the oil ministry. By the time senior officers arrived to order them out, they had destroyed billions of dollars of irreplaceable seismic and drilling data.
While the major oil companies in the US stand to cream off billions of dollars if oil production resumes in earnest, many of their executives were demanding to know from the Bush administration - long before the war - how it intended to prevent sabotage. In fact, Saddam had no plans to destroy the oil fields themselves, plenty for blowing up the export pipes. The Pentagon got it the wrong way round, racing its troops to protect the fields but ignoring the vulnerable pipelines.
Anarchy is now so widespread in post-war Iraq that it is almost impossible for international investors to work there. There is no insurance for them - which is why Mr Bremer's occupation administrators have secretly decided that well over half the $20bn (£12bn) earmarked for Iraq will go towards security for its production infrastructure.
During the war, a detailed analysis by Yahya Sadowski, a professor at the American University of Beirut, suggested that repairing wells and pipes would cost $1bn, that raising oil production to 3.5 million barrels a day would take three years and cost another $8bn investment and another $20bn for repairs to the electrical grid which powers the pumps and refineries. Bringing production up to six million barrels a day would cost a further $30bn, some say up $100bn.
In other words - assuming only $8bn of the $20bn can be used on industry - the Bush overall budget of $87bn which now horrifies Congress is likely to rise towards a figure of $200bn. Ouch.
Since the 1920s, only about 2,300 wells have been drilled in Iraq and those are in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. Its deserts are almost totally unexplored. Officially, Iraq contains 12 per cent of the world's oil reserves - two-thirds of the world's reserves are in just four other countries, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait and the Emirates - but it could contain 20 per cent, even 25 per cent.
It's possible to argue that it was Saddam's decision to switch from the dollar to the euro in November 2000 that made "regime change" so important to the US. When Iran threatened to do the same, it was added to the "axis of evil". The defence of the dollar is almost as important as oil.
But the real irony lies in the nature of America's new power in Iraq. US oil deposits are increasingly depleted and by 2025, its oil imports will account for perhaps 70 per cent of total domestic demand. It needs to control the world's reserves - and don't tell me the US would have invaded Iraq if its chief export was beetroot - and it now has control of perhaps 25 per cent of world reserves.
But it can't make the oil flow. The cost of making it flow could produce an economic crisis in the US. And it is this - rather than the daily killing of young American soldiers - that lies behind the Bush administration's growing panic. Washington has got its hands on the biggest treasure chest in the world - but it can't open the lid. No wonder they are cooking the books in Baghdad.

Climate or population?

Source: Bangkok Post

The "elephant in the corner of the room" at the Copenhagen conference - population growth - has escaped notice, as it always does.

Are we seriously to believe that up to 80% more people (and 50% more energy consumption) by the year 2050 can be accommodated without increasing emissions? What nonsense!

The point our leaders fail to address is that global warming is just a symptom of the underlying problem _ over-consumption of the planet's resources. And the underlying cause of that is, simply, too many people.

What chance is there for the remaining forests, the remaining wildlife, the quality of the oceans and the atmosphere, with 80% more people consuming food, water, cooking fuel, housing, furniture, tiger gall bladders and all the rest?

You may wonder why our world leaders persistently fail to address the blindingly obvious.

Here's why. Declining population means less GDP _ a taboo topic in the ''mine's bigger than yours'' mentality that drives all global meetings. Politicians and businessmen, supported by the media, continue to brainwash the general public into believing that GDP growth equates with greater happiness (really? just ask the villagers at Map Ta Phut).

Also, thanks to the four to five year cycle of democratic elections, important long-term decisions are sacrificed for short-term expediency. ''How do we win the next election? Stimulate the economy! What about the environment? Sorry, too difficult _ leave that one to the next lot." Short-term-ism at its worst. Am I cynical? You bet! Our leaders allocated $6.7 trillion of our taxes to bail out the banks last year. At Copenhagen they've allocated just $30 billion to save the planet - and that's spread over two years!

We don't know what form the eventual apocalypse will take - wars over water when the glaciers disappear, surges of starving refugees flooding across borders causing governments to topple in their wake, Greenland slipping into the sea and taking out our coastal cities, ''weather events'' of such ferocity and frequency that international trade becomes difficult or impossible, a genetically modified nightmare rearing out of a globally-warmed swamp and going on the rampage, maybe all at once. It sure ain't going to be pretty.

The twin gods of democracy and economic growth are hell-bent on destroying the planet, so let's get prepared, let's brush up our survival skills for when the crunch comes. And let's do our bit to try to prevent it. Stop having babies _ now.

NIGEL PIKE

Aggression and Violence

Source: Future Positive

Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman

To understand the nature of aggression and violence on the battlefield, it must first be recognized that most participants in close combat are literally “frightened out of their wits.” Once the bullets start flying, most combatants stop thinking with the forebrain (that portion of the brain that makes us human) and start thinking with the midbrain (the primitive portion of our brain, which is indistinguishable from that of an animal).

In conflict situations, this primitive, midbrain processing can be observed in the existence of a powerful resistance to killing one’s own kind. Animals with antlers and horns slam together in a relatively harmless head-to-head fashion, and piranha fish fight their own kind with flicks of the tail, but against any other species these creatures unleash their horns and teeth without restraint. This is an essential survival mechanism that prevents a species from destroying itself during territorial and mating rituals.

One major modern revelation in the field of military psychology is the observation that such resistance to killing one’s own species is also a key factor in human combat. *Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall first observed this during his work as an official U.S. Army historian in the Pacific and European theaters of operations in World War II. Based on his post-combat interviews, Marshall concluded in his book Men Against Fire (1946, 1978) that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen in World War II fired their own weapons at an exposed enemy soldier. Key weapons, such as *flame-throwers, were usually fired. Crew-served weapons, such as *machine guns, almost always were fired. And action would increase greatly if a nearby leader demanded that the soldier fire. But when left on their own, the great majority of individual combatants appear to have been unable or unwilling to kill.

Marshall’s findings were and have remained controversial. Faced with scholarly concern about a researcher’s methodology and conclusions, the scientific method involves replicating the research. In Marshall’s case, every available parallel, scholarly study validates his basic findings. One of these studies was Ardant du Picq’s survey of French officers in the Korean War when the rate of psychiatric casualties was almost seven times higher than the average for World War II. Only after the war settled down, lines stabilized, and the threat of having enemy in rear areas decreased did the average rate go down to that of World War II. Again, just the potential for close-up, inescapable, interpersonal confrontation is more effective and has greater impact on human behavior than the actual presence of inescapable, impersonal death and destruction.

Ardant du Picq’s surveys of French officers in the 1860s and his observations about ancient battles (Battle Studies, 1946), John Keegan and Richard Holmes’ numerous accounts of ineffectual firing throughout history (Soldiers, 1985), Holmes’ assessment of Argentine firing rates in the Falklands War (Acts of War, 1985), Paddy Griffith’s data on the extraordinarily low firing rate among Napoleonic and American *Civil War regiments (Battle Tactics of the American Civil War, 1989), the British army’s laser reenactments of historical battles, the FBI’s studies of nonfiring rates among law enforcement officers in the 1950s and 1960s, and countless other individual and anecdotal observations, all confirm Marshall’s fundamental conclusion that human beings are not, by nature, killers. Indeed, from a psychological perspective, the history of warfare can be viewed as a series of successively more effective tactical and mechanical mechanisms to enable or force combatants to overcome their resistance to killing other human beings, even when defined as the enemy.

By 1946, the US Army had accepted Marshall’s conclusions, and the Human Resources Research Office of the US Army subsequently pioneered a revolution in combat training, which eventually replaced firing at targets with deeply ingrained conditioning, using realistic, man-shaped pop-up targets that fall when hit. Psychologists assert that this kind of powerful operant conditioning is the only technique that will reliably influence the primitive, midbrain processing of a frightened human being. Fire drills condition schoolchildren to respond properly even when terrified during a fire. Conditioning in flight simulators enables pilots to respond reflexively to emergency situations even when frightened. And similar application and perfection of basic conditioning techniques increased the rate of fire to approximately 55 percent in Korea and around 95 percent in Vietnam.

Equally high rates of fire resulting from modern conditioning techniques can be seen in Holmes’ observation of British firing rates in the Falklands and FBI data on law enforcement firing rates since the nationwide introduction of modern conditioning techniques in the late 1960s.

The extraordinarily high firing rate resulting from these processes was a key factor in the American ability to claim that the United States never lost a major engagement in Vietnam. But conditioning that overrides such a powerful, innate resistance has enormous potential for psychological backlash. Every warrior society has a “purification ritual” to help the returning warrior deal with his “blood guilt” and to reassure him that what he did in combat was “good.” In primitive tribes, this generally involves ritual bathing, ritual separation (which serves as a cooling-off and “group therapy” session), and a ceremony embracing the veteran back into the tribe. Modern Western rituals traditionally involve long separation while marching or sailing home, parades, monuments, and unconditional acceptance from society and family.

In the *Vietnam War, this purification ritual was turned on its head. The returning American veteran was attacked and condemned in an unprecedented manner. The traditional horrors of combat were magnified by modern conditioning techniques, and this combined with societal condemnation to create a circumstance that resulted in 0.5 to 1.5 million cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in Vietnam veterans. The mass incidence of psychiatric disorders among Vietnam veterans resulted in the “discovery” of PTSD, a condition that we now know traditionally occurred as a result of warfare, but never in such quantity.

PTSD seldom results in violent criminal acts, and upon returning to society, the recipient of modern military conditioning is statistically no more likely to engage in violent crime than a nonveteran of the same age. The key safeguard in this process appears to be the deeply ingrained discipline that the combat soldier internalizes with his military training. However, with the advent of interactive “point-and-shoot” arcade and video games, there is significant concern that society is aping military conditioning, but without the vital safeguard of discipline. There is strong evidence to indicate that the indiscriminate civilian application of combat conditioning techniques as entertainment may be a factor in worldwide, skyrocketing violent crime rates, including a sevenfold increase in per capita aggravated assaults in America since 1956. Thus, the latest chapter in American military history may be occurring in the city streets.

©2000 Killology Research Group ~ All Rights Reserved.

* Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, 1963. John Keegan, The Face of Battle, 1976. Jim Goodwin, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders: A Handbook for Clinicians, 1988. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, 1995. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, 8th ed., 1996. Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV Movie, and Video Game Violence, 1999.

Feeling the heat: Climate change and biodiversity loss

Source: Nature


Many plant and animal species are unlikely to survive climate change. New analyses suggest that 15–37% of a sample of 1,103 land plants and animals would eventually become extinct as a result of climate changes expected by 2050. For some of these species there will no longer be anywhere suitable to live. Others will be unable to reach places where the climate is suitable. A rapid shift to technologies that do not produce greenhouse gases, combined with carbon sequestration, could save 15–20% of species from extinction. The cover shows a species in the firing line. Boyd's forest dragon, Hypsilurus boydii, is found in Queensland, Australia. About 90% of its distribution would become climatically unsuitable by 2050, on maximum climate warming scenarios.

Leaked climate draft sparks anger

The climate change conference in Copenhagen is barely under way and already a leaked draft agreement is pitting developing nations against their wealthier counterparts.

If the documents are accurate, the proposal would see more power in the hands of rich nations, the UN's negotiating role sidelined and the Kyoto Protocol abandoned.

Developing nations are furious and say they will not sign on to an inequitable deal that they argue would limit their economic growth.

Al Jazeera's Alan Fisher explains.

The Crime of Genocide

Source: USHMM.org

United Nations Archives and Records Management Section

“[T]he allies decided in Nuremberg a case against a past Hitler, but refused to envisage future Hitlers, or like situations … In brief, the Germans were punished only for crimes committed during or in connection with the war of aggression. Crimes against humanity were not an independent category of crimes in themselves. They were only considered crimes when their connection with other crimes could be established.”
Unpublished memoir of Raphael Lemkin

In 1945, there was no specific legal definition for the systematic destruction of a particular group of people. It was not until 1944 that there was even a word for such an act and in 1948 that this act was formally criminalized in international law.

In 1944, a Polish Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) sought to describe Nazi policies of systematic murder, including the destruction of European Jewry. He formed the wordgenocide by combining geno-, from the Greek word for race or tribe, with -cide, from the Latin word for killing. In proposing this new term, Lemkin had in mind “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” The next year, the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg charged top Nazis with “crimes against humanity.” The word genocide was included in the indictment, but was used as a descriptive, not legal, term.

On December 9, 1948, in the shadow of the Holocaust and in no small part due to the tireless efforts of Lemkin himself, the United Nations approved a Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This convention established "genocide” as an international crime, which signatory nations “undertake to prevent and punish.” In the words of the landmark Genocide Convention:

[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a. Killing members of the group;
b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." - James Baldwin

Source: Dancing in the darkness

Rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse are sexual activities involving a person who does not or cannot consent.

Rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse are serious and devastating crimes. Sexual violence often causes emotional scars that can last for years, and fears that, if not addressed, can last for a life time. For many survivors rape and sexual abuse are a defining moment that divides their life, life before the abuse and life after.
The aftermath of any kind of sexual abuse is a challenging and difficult journey. The violence does not end with the rape, the sexual abuse, the assault, the insults and the humiliation. Sexual violence keeps repeating itself in a time that seems endless. It can be hard to understand how much pain remains after a rape, mostly because the trauma imprisons you from the inside and it's often misunderstood. Rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse survivors are left feeling vulnerable, angry, betrayed, frightened, violated, dirty, embarrassed and powerless.
Yet, there is the tendency to think that sexual violence needs to be hidden, particularly when it take place within familiar doors. A large percent of survivors are haunted by feelings of guilt, self-blame and shame, mostly due to the fact that in our society the common response to rape and sexual abuse is still embarrassment. Sadly, despite their epidemic proportions, rape, sexual assault andsexual abuse are still considered unspeakable crimes, something people prefer not to acknowledge. This unspoken statement suggests that rape and sexual abuse survivors should not speak about their experiences and spare others from an unpleasant issue, which as a result contributes enormously in increasing their isolation and pain. People who are mugged and robbed don't feel ashamed and no one treats them differently, but when the crime is linked to sexual violence suddenly everything changes.

We have to ask ourselves what it is that makes people want to look away.
The possible consequences of a sexual assault are uncountable. Each person reacts in a unique way, sexual abuse survivors might experience some, none, or even all of the following:

Anger
Depression
Drug Addiction
Eating Disorders
Fear of Intimacy
Flashbacks
Inability to Sleep
Nightmares
P.T.S.D.
Rape trauma Syndrome
Shame
Suicidal Thoughts
Self Injury
And many others..

The denial of chronic feelings, such as depression or frustration, it's very dangerous and can leave survivors in a perpetual state of needing to live a lie. As a result, often survivors feel cut off from the world and negatively affected in the way they interact with others. If survivors are too afraid or ashamed to face their true feelings and keep maintaining a false image, they will not be able to deal with their grief.

Seeking professional help can be one of the hardest things to do. Survivors may be scared that counseling will open a can of worms they don't want to see unopened, however, pain is a sign that something needs attention; counseling is a gift survivors can give to themselves - an expression of self caring. Being haunted by the past has a serious impact on a person’s emotional and physical well being. Therapy can help survivors of rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse to understand, accept and overcome.

Please remember that asking for help is a sign of maturity and strength and not of weakness. It takes a lot of courage.

War, torture and rape

Source: UNICEF

Many children suffer appalling violence as soldiers, but even those who remain 'civilians' can be subjected to horrific experiences. Anything that can be done to adults, however monstrous, can also be visited on children. Children have been tortured as part of collective punishments for whole communities, or as a means of extracting information about peers or parents. They have also been tortured as a way of punishing their parents, or in some cases simply for entertainment. Once immersed in this savage environment, differences of age soon seem irrelevant.

This also means that children are as likely as adults to be captured and imprisoned. The treatment of child prisoners is a matter of increasing concern—particularly in Rwanda where, for the first time in history, children have been imprisoned and are facing trial for genocide.

In these violent circumstances, women and girls in particular suffer the added trauma of sexual abuse and rape, which psychologists identify as the most intrusive of traumatic events. Without help, girls will carry the long-term effects of such abuse into their adult lives.

Sexual violence is particularly common in ethnic conflicts. In fighting in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, it has been deliberate policy to rape teenage girls and force them to bear 'the enemy's' child. A European Community fact-finding team estimated that more than 20,000 Muslim women have been raped in Bosnia since fighting broke out in April 1992.

In Rwanda, rape has been systematically used as a weapon of ethnic cleansing to destroy community ties. In some raids, virtually every adolescent girl who survived an attack by the militia was subsequently raped. Many of those who became pregnant were then ostracized by their families and community; some abandoned their babies, others committed suicide. In the Renamo camps in Mozambique, young boys, who themselves had been traumatized by violence, frequently inflicted sexual violence on young girls—threatening to kill or starve them if they resisted.

Even women and girls who are not physically forced to have sex may still be obliged to trade sexual favours for food, shelter or physical protection for themselves or their children.

The rise of sexually transmitted diseases, and particularly of HIV/ AIDS, is therefore inevitable. One factor contributing to the high rate of AIDS in Uganda could be that some women had to trade sex for security during the country's civil war. As a result, the next generation is at an even greater disadvantage, as more children are born with AIDS or are orphaned.