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EDITORIAL

“If you’re a girl, you don’t have any rights!” You will be forbidden land, water, food, education, work, dignity and respect if you were not born in the right place, the right family, the right cast, and even more serious, with the right gender.

On behalf of the French Dalit Collective, we have questioned the French foreign ministry who answers us this month: “… France will act so that the Human Rights Council keeps on vetting the still too numerous discriminations based on employment and ancestry.”

French citizens are mobilizing for Janadesh 2007: the massive march and gathering led in India by Ekta Parishad. The goal of this great campaign is to give land back to the poor peasant populations. Often Dalits or from a low cast, it is their working tool and the only way to survive.

The Philippine organization PhilNet-RDI opens in Manila, in an urban area so, an original restaurant which gathers both peasants and city dwellers around meals, but overall around exchanges. They have thus the opportunity to get closer, to think together and to build the right for their people to define by itself its agricultural policy. Indeed, they are in the best place to respond to their needs, their food sovereignty, aren’t they?

We must not be caught off-guard: let’s keep on looking, denouncing inequalities, and let’s carry on building the means to overcome them.




Michèle Bruhat
FDH Activist / Paris

PARTICIPATING [citizen involvement]

Pakistan: Struggle against child labour is growing
Ground has been covered in Pakistani lands. Many children who were working in the textile industry, the building trade or the car industry are now entitled to have recreations. Others were even allowed by their employer to accommodate labour with school, when it is close to their work place. It is a little and a lot at the same time.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  read this article

DEMONSTRATING [public activism]

Indian peasants on the move for their land. Act I.
From October 2nd to 20th of this year, a significant non-violent mass action took place on the motorway linking Gwalior to Delhi, over 350 km: the Chetawni Yatra, the “warning foot march”. 400 peasants and Indian activists from 10 different states demonstrated to recover their lands.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  read this article

TRAINING [knowledge for action]

In Bangladesh, it is through the involvement of population that health is improving
Thanks to a cover which reduces contamination’s risks, the Motka Paikhana - hygienic toilets made with clay - have known a huge success, especially in the poorest Bangladeshi family. With one dollar, they can order them to the local potter, and with a little training, they even can make them by themselves!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  read this article

COOPERATING [sharing resources]

In the Philippines, peasants and city dwellers take their places at the table
September 2006, hundreds of people flow from all parts of the megalopolis of Manila, in the Philippines, to attend the inauguration of the Access Point, a new kind of restaurant. Devised by Philnet-RDI, an association which supports farmers’ organizations, this place between culinary art and alternative music, enables urban consumers and rural producers to meet around shared interests.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  read this article

INFORMING [exchanging ideas]

Nepal : information - repression / information – freedom
Nobody in Radio Sagarmatha’s team -102.4 MHz- is about to forget the month of November 2006! Precursor in its country and broader in south-Asian region, this Nepalese communitarian radio station has received the international solidarity award bestowed every four years by the Communitarian World Association (AMARC) of Pacific-Asia.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  read this article

TESTIMONY [culture and solidarity]

When in Pakistan art releases women from their enslavement
In a poor district of Mirpu Sakro in Pakistan, an old man stands up among the people, with his eyes full of tears. He is upset by the play Aurat Ki Kahani (Women’s story) to which he has just attended. “If the heroine of the play has managed to cast off her chains and to deliver herself from her husband, then I can go and say to my daughter to do the same”, he says.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  read this article

PORTRAIT [a meeting with…]

Hilma Safitri, a city dweller in the heart of Indonesian countryside
Hilma Safitri is member of the association Pergerakan. She has been acting for several years to improve Indonesian peasants’ conditions of life.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  read this article