Monday, April 14, 2014

A00005 - Irene Fernandez, Champion of the Oppressed in Malaysia

Irene Fernandez, Champion of the Oppressed in Malaysia, Dies at 67

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    Irene Fernandez in 2012. Rahman Roslan for The New York Times

    Irene Fernandez, a champion of the oppressed in Malaysia whose indefatigable advocacy for better treatment of foreign migrant workers prompted her government to denounce her as a traitor and human rights groups to shower her with awards, died on March 25 in Serdang, Malaysia. She was 67.
    The cause was heart failure, Human Rights Watch said.
    Ms. Fernandez abandoned a career as a teacher in her early 20s to fight for social causes. She helped organize the first textile workers union in Malaysia and campaigned for women’s rights, improved consumer education and safer pesticides.
    Her signature crusade was for the rights of the poorest and most marginalized people in her relatively rich country: the migrant workers who do the dirty, ill-paying jobs most native Malaysians shun. Foreigners account for more than 16 percent of the work force in a population of 29 million people, and more than half the foreigners are in the country illegally.
    Coming from Indonesia, the Philippines and other Asian nations, these illegal workers toil in homes and at palm oil plantations and construction sites. Ms. Fernandez unearthed evidence of their being beaten and nearly starved. In an interview with The New York Times in 2012, she characterized the situation as “slavery days coming back.”
    As much as their labors are needed, the illegal workers irritate many Malaysians, as their counterparts do in many countries. Some Malaysians join government-sanctioned volunteer groups to seek them out.
    In September, the government began a campaign to arrest and deport 500,000 of these workers; it said their collective use of social services and public education was expensive and went against the government’s policy of relying less on unskilled labor.
    Ms. Fernandez condemned the deportation drive, partly because it failed to distinguish refugees from other foreign workers, she said.
    She achieved her greatest prominence in 1995, when she interviewed more than 300 migrant workers being detained by the government. They told her of rapes, beatings and inadequate food, water and medical care. In March 1996, after a newspaper printed a memo she had provided detailing her findings, the government charged her with “maliciously publishing false news.”
    Her criminal trial dragged on for seven years, one of the longest in Malaysian history. Stanley Augustin, the prosecutor, accused her of blackening her country’s reputation.
    “The court must take into account the interests of the nation,” he said. “Freedom of the press is not freedom to say anything you like. It must be confined and cannot hurt the public or national interest.”
    She was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison, then released pending appeal. In 2008, an appellate judge reversed her conviction.
    In 2012, Ms. Fernandez again outraged her government by telling an Indonesian newspaper that Malaysia was not safe for foreign workers because it did not have a legal framework or specific laws to protect them.
    “When she says something like that, doesn’t she realize that her actions do not help the country or the Malaysian people?” Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin said in an interview with The New Straits Times, an English-language Malaysian newspaper.
    Ms. Fernandez’s parents were Indians who moved to Malaysia to work on a rubber plantation when the country was under British rule. She was born there on April 18, 1946.

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    She traced her awareness of social and political issues to her childhood. As the daughter of a plantation supervisor, she was told not to play with laborers’ children. “I always found that a big conflict in me,” she told The Times.
    She became a teacher, but at 23 left the security of a government job for the uncertain life of an activist, working for various labor and rights groups, including the Young Christian Workers Movement.
    In 1991 she formed the organization Tenaganita (the name means women’s force in Malay), which ran shelters for migrants and victims of human trafficking. It eventually expanded its efforts to include men.
    Ms. Fernandez’s many awards include the Amnesty International Award in 1998, the International PEN Award in 2000, the Jonathan Mann Award in 2004 and the Right Livelihood Award in 2005.
    Her survivors include her husband of 35 years, Joseph Paul; two daughters, Katrina and Tania; a son, Camerra Jose; and two sisters, Josie and Aegile.
    She never lost her taste for battle. During her trial, she told The Los Angeles Times that she was ready for jail.
    “It will give me an opportunity to write a report on jail conditions and see what changes need to be made,” she said.

    *****

    Irene Fernandez (18 April 1946 – 31 March 2014) was a Malaysian human rights activist. She was a PKR supreme council member [1] and the director and co-founder of the non-governmental organization Tenaganita, which promotes the rights of migrant workers and refugees in Malaysia.
    In 1995, Irene Fernandez published a report on the living conditions of the migrant workers entitled "Abuse, Torture and Dehumanised Conditions of Migrant Workers in Detention Centres".[2] The report was based in part on information given to her by Steven Gan and a team of reporters from The Sun, who had uncovered evidence that 59 inmates, primarily Bangladeshis, had died in the Semenyih immigration detention camp of the preventable diseases typhoid and beriberi.[3][4] When Gan and his colleagues were blocked by Sun editors from printing the report in the paper, they passed it to Fernandez.[5]
    She was arrested in 1996 and charged with 'maliciously publishing false news'.[5] After seven years of trial, she was found guilty in 2003 and convicted to one year's imprisonment. Released on bail pending her appeal, her passport was held by the courts, and as a convicted criminal, she was barred from standing as parliamentary candidate in the 2004 Malaysian elections.[citation needed]
    In 2005, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for "her outstanding and courageous work to stop violence against women and abuses of migrant and poor workers".[6]
    Irene Fernandez's appeal at the High Court resumed on 28 October 2008. On 24 November 2008, Justice Mohd Apandi Ali overturned her earlier conviction and acquitted her, ending the thirteen-year case.[7][8]
    She died on 31 March 2014 of heart failure.[9]
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    A00004 - Melba Hernandez, Confidante of Castro

    Melba Hernández, a Confidante of Castro From First Volley, Is Dead at 92

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      Melba Hernández and Fidel Castro at the 1999 burial of a fellow revolutionary, Jesus Montane, whom she married. Jose Goitia/Associated Press
      When Melba Hernández met Fidel Castro in the early 1950s, she likened it to a religious experience. “I felt secure,” she said. “I felt I had found the way.”
      In an interview with Tad Szulc for his 1986 book, “Fidel: A Critical Portrait,” Ms. Hernández continued, “Fidel spoke in a very low voice, he paced back and forth, then came close as if to tell you a secret, and then you suddenly felt you shared the secret.”
      Ms. Hernández, who became one of the first four members of Mr. Castro’s general staff, and who died at 92 on March 9 in Havana, went on to share many secrets with the man she helped make the Cuban revolution — beginning with its opening volley, an attack on the Moncada army barracks in southeastern Cuba on July 26, 1953.
      For her revolutionary services, which included helping to start the Cuban Communist Party, Ms. Hernández was named a national heroine, among many other honors. After the Vietnam War ended on terms most Communists liked, she was her country’s ambassador to the united Vietnam.
      “For our people, she is one of the most glorious and beloved combatants of the revolutionary process, an everlasting example of the Cuban woman,” the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, on which Ms. Hernández served, said in a statement.
      In her later years, Ms. Hernández, her face crowned with snowy white curls, occasionally appeared at official events, accompanied by one of the Castro brothers. Fidel stepped down as president in 2006, citing ill health, and passed command to his younger brother Raúl.
      She was a presence throughout the Castro era, beginning when Fidel Castro was abandoning plans to run for Cuba’s national legislature as the candidate of a non-Communist party in favor of covertly plotting to overthrow the government. Both were young lawyers dedicated to serving the poor and dispossessed.
      That idealism turned deadly at the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba, on the southeast coast. More than 130 outnumbered, outgunned rebels — accounts differ on precisely how many — failed to capture military arms, their objective. As many as 60 were killed in the fighting or as prisoners. About 18 police officers and soldiers were killed.
      What was a disaster in human terms helped put the little-known Mr. Castro at the center of the opposition to the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Six years later, Batista was overthrown by Mr. Castro’s so-called 26th of July Movement.
      To disguise themselves, the rebels needed army uniforms, and Ms. Hernández persuaded a sergeant to give her more than 100. At the insurgents’ hide-out on a rented farm, she sewed insignia of rank on their sleeves. She brought rifles or shotguns (accounts differ) to them in a florist’s carton.
      With Haydée Santamaría, the other woman in Castro’s original top leadership, she ironed the uniforms in dim light the night before the attack. The women prepared a chicken fricassee dinner that reverberates through Cuban revolutionary history as the last meal of either heroes or cannon fodder. They passed out glasses of milk.
      Mr. Castro initially vetoed sending the women on the mission, but was persuaded to dispatch them as nurses to help the wounded. Both were arrested when the mission failed.
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      The two were released from jail after serving five months of a seven-month sentence, and the still-imprisoned Mr. Castro used them as his trusted agents on the outside. He smuggled out letters written with lemon juice, which they made visible by ironing them. They oversaw the publishing of the text of Mr. Castro’s courtroom defense of himself and his revolution under the title “History Will Absolve Me.”
      The women led demonstrations demanding amnesty for their compatriots. On May 15, 1955, Batista released Mr. Castro and the others.
      By this time, Ms. Hernández had moved to Mexico to make contact with movement members exiled there. Her immediate assignment was to dissuade Batista opponents from supporting the former Cuban president Carlos Prío Socarrás, who had been deposed by the dictator.
      In July 1955, Mr. Castro joined Ms. Hernández and other top leaders who had assembled in Mexico, among them Raúl Castro, Che Guevara and Jesus Montane, whom Ms. Hernández later married. They bought a dilapidated yacht, the Granma, and made plans to use it to return a small expeditionary force to Cuba.
      Leaving from Veracruz, they arrived at Playa Las Coloradas, Cuba, on Dec. 2, 1956. Three days after the rebels had set off from the beach for the Sierra Maestra, they were ambushed by government troops. No more than 20 of the 82 who had come on the Granma survived.
      But the tiny invasion signaled the beginning of the guerrilla campaign that would lead to victory on Jan. 1, 1959. Ms. Hernández, who was not on the Granma, joined the insurgents later.
      Maria Hernández Rodríguez del Rey was born to middle-class parents on July 28, 1921, in the town of Cruces, in west-central Cuba. She earned degrees in law and social sciences from the University of Havana and worked as a customs lawyer for the government after graduating. Like Mr. Castro, she belonged to the Ortodoxo Party, which condemned the Batista government as corrupt and fruitlessly tried to enact peaceful changes.
      As the movement turned to armed insurrection, Ms. Hernández, one of the earliest recruits, joined what Mr. Castro called his “general staff.” Other members were Ms. Santamaría and her brother, Abel, Mr. Castro’s second in command.
      Ms. Hernández described the months leading up to Moncada as “militancy 24 hours a day” and said Mr. Castro had told his troops that “they had no right to get tired.” She told Mr. Szulc that “indiscretion, any kind of indiscretion” — including being only seconds late for a meeting — was cause for expulsion.
      Mr. Santamaría was killed at Moncada. Ms. Santamaría committed suicide in 1980. Mr. Montane died in 1999. The official Cuban news media reported that Ms. Hernández had died of complications of diabetes. Information about her survivors was not available.
      Ms. Hernández was showered with honors. She served as a deputy in the national assembly and in various governmental posts. In one, she oversaw women’s prisons. It was not clear whether she was in charge in later years when the Organization of American States and others accused Cuba’s penal system of human rights abuses.
      She was also secretary-general of the Organization of Solidarity of the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America, a Cuban political movement to promote socialism in the third world.
      Mr. Castro’s extensive correspondence with Ms. Hernández had its human moments. In July 1955, when he was in Mexico and she in Cuba, he complained that he could not find a good cigar.
      His political advice was blunt. In a 1954 letter from prison on the Isle of Pines in Cuba, he told her not to make unnecessary enemies, a possibility given her feisty nature. “There will be enough time later,” he wrote, “to crush all the cockroaches together.”
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      Tuesday, April 8, 2014

      A00003 - Adolfo Suarez, Prime Minister of Post-Franco Spain

      Adolfo Suárez Dies at 81; Led Spain Back to Democracy

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        Adolfo Suárez, center, with his successors Felipe Gonzalez, right, and Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo in 1998. Eloy Alonso/Reuters
        MADRID — Adolfo Suárez, Spain’s first elected prime minister after the Franco dictatorship and a key figure in the country’s transition back to democracy, died here on Sunday. He was 81.
        A family spokesman, Fermín Urbiola, announced the death. Mr. Suárez was admitted to a Madrid hospital last Monday with a respiratory infection that developed into pneumonia. He had been treated for Alzheimer’s disease for a decade.
        A lawyer by training, Mr. Suárez led a new generation of Spanish politicians who filled the power vacuum left by the death of Gen. Francisco Franco in late 1975.
        The government announced three days of official mourning and said that Mr. Suárez would receive a state funeral. In a televised address on Sunday, King Juan Carlos called Mr. Suárez “a loyal friend” who had helped lead the country back to democracy, calling it “one of the most brilliant chapters in Spanish history.”
        King Juan Carlos picked Mr. Suárez, who was then 43, to form a government in 1976. At the time, Mr. Suárez was a successful but relatively obscure apparatchik of the Franco regime. He had little of the power-brokering experience that was required to heal deep divisions in Spanish society after four decades of dictatorship and international isolation.
        Adolfo Suárez in 1977.Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
        Still, despite his ties to Franco, Mr. Suárez was relatively free of any of the stigma that might have attached to him as a member of the regime. He was too young to be associated with the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the early and most brutal period of Franco’s rule.
        By June 1977, when Spain held its first democratic election since 1936, the year the civil war began, Mr. Suárez “epitomized the changing face of Spain and the emergence of a new middle class,” Robert Graham wrote in “Spain: A Nation Comes of Age,” a book about Spain’s democratic transition.
        Mr. Graham, a foreign correspondent in Madrid during Mr. Suárez’s premiership, added: “His clean, youthful looks were in themselves a breath of fresh air. He represented what many Spaniards aspired to be — a provincial boy made good, with a devout wife and a large happy family.”
        The 1977 general election was won by the Union of the Democratic Center, formed just ahead of the vote as a loose, center-right coalition that included several candidates who had served in the Franco administration without being linked to its most Fascist component.
        Mr. Suárez did not run as the official leader of the U.C.D., but he made an address to the nation on the eve of the vote that positioned him at its helm. He could claim direct backing from King Juan Carlos, who had himself been handpicked by Franco and crowned only two days after the dictator’s death.
        “The point of departure is the recognition of pluralism in our society — we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of ignoring it,” Mr. Suárez told lawmakers in 1976.
        This pluralism included the Communist Party, which had been banned under Franco. In a secret meeting with Santiago Carrillo, Spain’s long-exiled Communist leader, Mr. Suárez offered to legalize the Communists in return for a pledge that they would join the election.
        His engineering a wave of political conciliation and a smooth switch to democratic elections — as well as a successful referendum on a new constitution in 1978 — were the high water marks of his premiership. Much of it afterward was rife with tensions within the leadership of his own UDC and cabinet reshuffles.
        Adolfo Suárez, left, then the Spanish prime minister, went to the aid of Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado, the deputy prime minister, during a coup attempt in the Spanish Parliament on February 23, 1981.Manuel Hernandez de Leon/European Pressphoto Agency
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        By the start of 1981, Mr. Suárez was facing an internal party rebellion and trailing in the polls behind the Socialist Party. His response was to resign, a decision he did not fully explain, although he hinted that any other option, including calling an early general election, risked making Spain’s return to democracy a “parenthesis in history” if the Socialists took power and provoked a takeover by the military, which was dead set against their running the country.
        In fact, in February 1981, a month after Mr. Suárez’s resignation announcement, a group of military officers did attempt a coup, starting with a takeover of the Congress of Deputies, the lower house of Spain’s parliamentary system, while it was in session voting on the appointment of a successor to Mr. Suárez.
        Stunned Spaniards followed events live on radio as members of Spain’s military police fired shots into the air and most lawmakers took cover behind their seats. A few, however, including Mr. Suárez and his deputy prime minister, Manuel Gutierrez Mellado, stood up to challenge the rebels.
        The coup attempt, denounced by King Juan Carlos in a television broadcast, was over within a day. Several officers involved were sentenced to long prison terms.
        Afterward Mr. Suárez sought a political comeback, leading a new party, the Democratic and Social Center, known as CDS. He was re-elected to the lower house of Parliament in 1982, but the CDS failed to make a major impact and gradually lost support. Mr. Suárez resigned his party leadership and retired from politics in 1991.
        Adolfo Suárez González was born on Sept. 25, 1932, in the agrarian region of Castile and Léon. His father was a lawyer. Mr. Suárez studied law at Salamanca University. He joined the ranks of the National Movement, the only political party under Franco, with the support of the governor of Avila, the city where Mr. Suárez’s family lived.
        Initially the governor’s personal secretary, he rapidly climbed the ranks of the National Movement and was promoted to his own governorship, of Segovia, another city near Madrid, in 1968. He spent a few years running Spain’s national radio and television.
        Mr. Suárez’s wife, María Amparo Illana Elórtegui, died of cancer in 2001. A daughter, María Amparo Suárez Illana, died of cancer three years later. His survivors include four other children.
        Although he had won popular support cast as an outsider to Spain’s establishment, Mr. Suárez was rewarded by the king with a noble title, Duke of Suárez, after stepping down as prime minister. His last public appearance was in 2003. Two years later, his family said Mr. Suárez had Alzheimer’s disease and could no longer remember having led Spain.
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