swaneagle's Profile

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  • Vashon
  • US
  • Longtime peace worker and human rights activist, grandmother, artist, writer, researcher, speaker and performer. Focused on women, girls, rape, femicide, ecocide and genocide which must be halted.

Author's Comments

Refugees and the Risk of Rape

This is such an important article and such important discussion following. I very much appreciate your post Alaciel. The name of the article by Eve Ensler is "Broken UN Promise in Congo". Please, anyone who is in any way involved with the UN, insist on an investigation into the hiring of known death squads as Peacekeepers. This is an outright atrocity with no end.

Peace, swaneagle

Posted by swaneagle | July 26, 2009 1:42 PM

Refugees and the Risk of Rape

I am very concerned that the UN has hired death squad mercenaries, Kaibiles, from Guatemala, notorious for their heinous crimes, massacres and disembowelment of pregnant women. I wonder what these guys have done to make the situation for women raped in the Congo, where Kaibiles work as so called UN Peacekeeprs, even worse. According to a recent article by Eve Ensler of Vagina Monologs, rapes are on the rise in the Congo rather than being halted. She said UN Peacekeepers facilitate the rapers. What is that all about?

http://en.allexperts.com/e/k/ka/kaibiles.htm

I do not believe women Peacekeepers is the solution unless there are no arms, they are hundreds, if not thousands, devoted to nonviolent solutions. I am devoted to nonviolently putting an end to femicide, ecocide and genocide. I will work on this to my final days. I see mass rape spreading and not just in "official" war zones. Look at Ciudad Juarez in Mexico and Gautemala City where so many women are mutilated, tortured and killed. This is going on globally and has reached unprecedented proportions. I do believe soul force Gandhian direct action is our only hope. But it will take thousands, if not millions of us willing to give our lives to truly put an end to this insane madness.

There should never be any cultural justification EVER for killing women. We must quickly come together and generate powerful solutions. This is simply intolerable.

Posted by swaneagle | July 26, 2009 10:59 AM

The High Cost of Violence in Central America

The problems plaguing Central America as well as Colombia are spreading across the US. The power of well armed, extremely violent drug cartels and their gangs is not just going to disappear without the concerted effort of citizens wherever such murderous profiteering arises. I place much of the problem straight on the heads of the US military/industrial complex that has always valued money over human life and dignity. The escalated violence of the cartels is directly related to the hiring of mutinous troops from Mexico and Guatemala. In the case of Mexico, many of Los Zetas are graduates of the School of Assassins in Fort Benning, Georgia, who have taken control of many Mexican cartels. The Kaibiles were trained by US Marine Special Forces and are notorious for their extremes of brutality, including the hacking open of pregnant women then smashing the fetuses. They also have been working with the cartels and both these vicious groups are spilling into the US.

What troubles me very deeply is that the United Nations has hired Kaibiles as Peacekeepers in the Congo. Just wonder what influence they have had on the terrible major mistreatment of women and girls in that resource rich region being genocided out of existence like so many other nations plagued with free trade narce profiteering.

Americans are the most privileged, apathetic people on earth and what will we do to put a stop to so much of the violence that can be traced back to the military madness right here? What will we do, is what i think of daily........

In peaceful struggle,
swaneagle harijan

Posted by swaneagle | November 23, 2008 7:25 PM

The Threat of Depression and Suicide Among Latino Teens

The fact that Rafael is Indigenous is not mentioned at all. The value of speaking his first language, most likely unwritten, is not addressed. As one who has spent many years doing all i can to support Indigenous Grandmothers of Dine (Navajo) tribe in Arizona maintain their ancient ways, i have learned how acculturation harms people. Too few "educated" people honor and support traditional cultures that are still facing genocide. Among Native Americans in the US, the suicide rate is the highest among those forcibly relocated from the ancestral lands. Guatemala suffered genocide and still communities that speak out against the massacres of the 60's trhu the 90's are killed. No wonder Rafael suffered! His mother's illness is not the only part of this story. The term "Latin" is of European extraction which denies the Indigenous blood so many people carry who migrate north to the US. By calling them Latin, another level of silencing occurs. Any people working for human rights and justice should be required to have dismantling racism training. We need to be sensitized to the scope of what is possible. Tho Somali culture is extremely patriarchal and women suffer excision, the good from their culture should be valued along with the stand for basic rights of women, girls and all people who suffer from the myriad facets of oppression. Our approach to solution should be comprehensive rather than narrow.

Thanks so much for this piece and attention to the alienation young people endure that all too often leads them to death. Assimilation is not the only approach.

Peace, swaneagle

Posted by swaneagle | November 14, 2008 8:21 AM