The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
SACSIS seeks to examine global issues, particularly as they relate to South Africa.
Lynn Parramore -
Like the accused witches of Europe, women in India have become scapegoats.
A cow, the symbol of all living things in India, may wander the streets unmolested. A woman, on the other hand, may not. Just weeks after the horrific gang rape in New Delhi that left a student dead and a nation protesting widespread violence against women, we learn of two more brutal attacks against women who were doing nothing more than traveling from one place to another.
Over the weekend, a village...
Na'eem Jeenah and Heidi-Jane Esakov -
On November 29, 2012 the international community overwhelmingly voted the ‘State of Palestine’ as a ‘non-member observer state’ of the United Nations (UN), yet the façade of statehood is already beginning to show. The successful passage of the resolution through the UN General Assembly is not the victory for Palestinians it has been made out to be. Rather, it might actually undermine their rights.
While the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) –...
Adele M. Stan -
A day after Walmart workers and their allies staged protests and rallies outside the company’s stores across the U.S., a fire erupted in a factory across the globe in Bangladesh, killing 112 workers who were trapped inside, where they sewed jeans and other apparel for the retail giant’s Faded Glory brand. Another 200 were injured in the fire. On Monday, the streets of Dhaka, the capital city, were filled with thousands of garment workers, who demanded justice.
The main doors of...
Eddie Cottle -
In 2008-09 Israel’s Blitzkrieg against Gaza resulted in the deaths of over 1400 Palestinians, four-fifths of whom were civilians and of which 350 were children. Amnesty International and other human rights groups had officially reported that Israel was in violation of international law as Israel had bombarded defenceless Palestinians with the white phosphorous bombs which caused most of its victims to be burned alive. Ironically in Greek, the word Holocaust means “sacrifice by...
Heidi-Jane Esakov and Na'eem Jeenah -
A ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel, which was to come into effect on Tuesday night, was delayed at the last minute due to ‘Israeli requests’. Despite the imminence of a ceasefire, Israel intensified its assault on the tiny, battered coastal strip as part of its ‘Operation Pillar of Cloud’. In response, rockets continued to fly, somewhat ineffectually, from Gaza into Israel. The Palestinian death toll, currently at over 130, will undoubtedly climb as...
Noam Chomsky -
Even a single night in jail is enough to give a taste of what it means to be under the total control of some external force.
And it hardly takes more than a day in Gaza to appreciate what it must be like to try to survive in the world’s largest open-air prison, where some 1.5 million people on a roughly 140-square-mile strip of land are subject to random terror and arbitrary punishment, with no purpose other than to humiliate and degrade.
Such cruelty is to ensure that Palestinian...
