Toward Freedom publisher writes about a recent trip to Rwanda, community justice courts in the country, the situation under current President Paul Kagame and Keith Harmon Snow's article on Paul Rusesabagina.Prisoner at Gacaca Court*
"We need more time. There's all these great campaigns going on and most of them are completely worthy of our supportÂ… We've had the 40 hour work week for a hundred and something years. So now it's time to go for the 30. We need more of just about everything."
For someone who faces death threats, swaps apartments regularly and hides the location of her organization from authorities, Yanar Mohammed, one of Iraq's leading feminists, hasn't lost her sense of humor.
Much was made of the looting of Iraq's National Library after the fall of Baghdad and the collapse of order in the capital. Less is known about the role of small private libraries and how they continue to provide some of the only access to scholarly material for Baghdad's intellectuals and academics. Hameeda Al-Bassam, a disabled Shi'a woman in Iraq, describes her work as a librarian, as well as the difficulties she faces, not only as a woman, but also as someone bound to a wheelchair.
On May 11, 1996, the CBS television program 60 Minutes made famous one of the more notorious statistics in the history of Iraqi-US relations. In an interview of then secretary of state Madeleine Albright, correspondent Lesley Stahl said, "We have heard that a half million children have died as a result of the sanctions [in Iraq]. That's more than died in Hiroshima."
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019