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If there is a ‘move to outlaw pranks’ – and I couldn’t find that in the article you linked – it will just be a knee-jerk reaction, short-lived posturing. How could ‘Brits’ change Australian laws anyway?
I can see people who revere the monarchy would think it was a distasteful sort of prank on a woman who’s having problems in the very early stages of pregnancy, but the presenters couldn’t have foreseen that the person who took the call would kill herself.
Good to hear you’re still out there travelling the world and occasionally checking in. Not so good to hear about your family stuff. (We had one of those years too.) I must say Bangladesh has never appealed to me either, for exactly that reason, the sheer number of people. All being well with family, we’re going to get another short trip to Chilean Patagonia in January – enough wide open spaces for anyone. :)
That feeling of “something must be done” is one of the most dangerous impulses if not accompanied by a lot of thought and knowledge. “helping to build peace in the world” “Guilt was the main motivating factor for me” “I feel it is my duty because of the horror of what is happening there” don’t really cut it. Well, maybe they will feel they’ve done good, as they contribute to one side in a bloody civil war, alongside al Qaida and other Salafis. Maybe they’ll learn that fighting rarely helps build peace.
More on this. Stephen Sackur’s got a report in the Guardian today and will be covering it in Hardtalk and on News at Ten:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/15/honduras-human-rights-war-drugsThe quote below is from an article in openDemocracy, marking the third anniversary of the coup. It looks as if Facussé has managed to get the DEA and Honduran military to take out his rivals.
Nothing encapsulates Honduras’ problems more than recent events in the rural north-east of the country, parts of which are familiar to foreign tourists as the Bay Islands and in which there are also significant indigenous groups, notably the Garifuna and Moskitia communities. The region from which the ‘Contra’ war was launched against nearby Nicaragua is now a transfer zone for drug traffickers: the State Department asserts (with suspicious accuracy) that 79% of cocaine smuggling flights from South America land in Honduras, mostly in this region. Furthermore, it is also the location for several violent disputes in which campesino farmers are struggling to get or hold onto land against the depredations of big landowners.
The biggest of the land disputes is in the Aguan valley, where several communities are struggling to hold on to land in the face of violent repression by the police and private security forces, ranging from the destruction of whole villages to the assassination of community leaders. There have been more than fifty politically related deaths in this area alone. The main landowner implicated in the violence, Miguel Facussé, was described by the New York Times as ‘the octogenarian patriarch of one of the handful of families controlling much of Honduras’ economy’. He was also a strong supporter of the coup. In October 2011, Wikileaks released cables from the US embassy which revealed that he had been known to them as a cocaine importer since 2004.
President Lobo’s response to the violence has been ineffectual. It has ranged from sending in the army to trying to resolve the land disputes. Mythical insurgents from Nicaragua or Venezuela have been blamed for inciting the peasant farmers. Several communities are nevertheless clinging on to the land they cultivate, threatened rather than protected by the local police.
A second part of the country’s north east, Moskitia, has seen the latest escalation of the drugs war. In the early hours of 11 May, helicopters operated by the US Drug Enforcement Administration from a nearby US base fired on a boat which was wrongly thought to be carrying drugs. Four people, including two pregnant women, were killed and several more injured. This and subsequent events were investigated, not by US embassy officials or the Honduran government, but jointly by the Alliance for Global Justice and Rights Action. Reports from their delegation make grim reading. Far from recognising their mistake, the DEA-sponsored forces prevented people from helping the victims, violently intimidated the local community of Ahuas and did nothing to secure medical assistance for the injured – nor have they done so since. No drug traffickers were arrested and the only positive outcome was the seizing of 400kg of cocaine, apparently being carried in a completely different boat from the one attacked.
The whole article is here:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/john-perry/honduras-three-years-after-coup
