Pulitzer Center Untold Stories

East Timor: Crafting desks, building a nation

Kira Kay, for the Pulitzer Center

Eduardo Belo Soares showed me a photo of himself surrounded by rebel soldiers, taken on the eve of East Timor’s vote for independence 10 years ago. On their faces were expressions of weariness combined with a bit of shock – as if it was just occurring to these fighting men that now the hard work was about to begin: the birth of their new nation was at hand.

Belo Soares was once a rebel too; he worked in the hills with the guerilla forces, running their communications system and acting as informal spokesman of the movement.  Now he runs a carpentry shop and a security company in the center of the capital city, Dili. He says his transition from fighter to citizen has not been easy, but that helping to build his new nation is, as he calls it, a moral obligation for him and his fellow Timorese, one he takes very much to heart.

Local Thai NGOs discuss efforts to end commercial sexual exploitation

Deena Guzder, reporting for the Pulitzer Center

Bangkok, Thailand--Watch Narisaraporn Asipong of the Mercy Centre (a shelter for slum children in Bangkok) and Sarochinee Unyawachsumrith and Kurt Heck of Goodwill Group Foundation (an organization to empower disadvantaged women) speak about efforts to curb sex tourism in Thailand:

In Thailand, the  multi-billion dollar sex industry is driven by commercial transactions between rich tourists who use their economic clout to make unchecked demands on relatively poorer locals.  Bangkok-based NGOs note that a prerequisite for protecting and empowering vulnerable people is ensuring their socioeconomic welfare.  And, as Sarochinee Unyawachsumrith of Goodwill Group Foundation notes, tourists must stop thinking that everything in Thailand--including a human body--is for sale. Over 10 million tourists visit Thailand annually; corruption in the Royal Thai Police, especially since the political unrest of April 2009, affords these tourists a degree of impunity. 

Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J. is one of the few prominent U.S. politicians to propose legislation to curb domestic demand of the international sex industry. "The buyers of commercial sex must be sensitized to the harm they cause women and girls and to the fact their money fuels modern day slavery," Smith said at a joint briefing of the Congressional Caucus on Human Trafficking and the Congressional Victims' Rights Caucus in July 2009.  “A cultural shift that recognizes the link between commercial sex and the trafficking of women and girls would starve the modern-day slaveholders. If potential buyers knew of the unspeakable lives of servitude and degradation these victims suffer, I think they would think twice before laying down their money.”

East Timor: Ten Years On

Kira Kay and Jason Maloney, for the Pulitzer Center

Veterans, widows, children who never knew their fathers—all gathered on the red-earth hills overlooking the blue seas of the Wetar Straits. Before them, two dozen flag-draped coffins, very small, clearly designed to carry only a few bones each. For these families, this was a day of both great pain and great pride.

Ten years ago their tiny nation, East Timor, voted for and eventually won its independence from Indonesia after decades of often brutal occupation. The coffins contained the remains of Timorese guerilla fighters felled in battle, gathered from ad hoc burial plots across the country and brought here to be interred as martyrs at East Timor’s Metinaro war memorial, a vast and awe-inspiring series of terraced graves climbing up the hillside. Only the hymns of the Catholic mass were able to cover up the wails of grief from survivors for whom even the reward of victory was insufficient consolation.

Q&A with Pulitzer journalist on Afghanistan human terrain program

Post Your Questions and Comments Now!

An experimental Pentagon program embeds civilian anthropologists and social scientists with combat teams in Iraq and Afghanistan to help soldiers understand the local culture, known in military-speak as “human terrain."

Journalist Vanessa Gezari whose reporting on the Human Terrain program was supported by the Pulitzer Center, is responding to your questions and comments about her story in The Washington Post Magazine. 

Post your questions and comments for Gezari by September 1, 2009, and check back the week following to see her responses.

See Gezari's project page at the Pulitzer Center's website, where you can find slideshows and related and useful links to additional resources. Visit "Afghanistan: Human Terrain" to see all her dispatches from the field.

Listen to an interview with Gezari on NPR's Tell Me More on September 1st. See local listings here.

See Gezari's answers to your questions and comments:  

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Bangladesh: Easy Like Water

Glenn Baker, for the Pulitzer Center
It is monsoon season in Bangladesh, making the delicate balance between water and land more tenuous than ever. It was raining heavily when we disembarked from the ferry on Bhola Island and it continued to rain for much of the day. South of Dhaka some 205 km. (or 11 hours by ferry), Bhola is caught between the rising saltwater of the Bay of Bengal to the south and the ominous churning of the Meghna River to the east.

As Himalayan glacier melt increases, sending unprecedented volumes of water downstream, the river has grown and spread wider as silt buildup makes it more shallow, eating away at the shoreline.  While there is also evidence of significant accretion of land as silt creates new islands, this new land is not agriculturally viable for several years, so it does not help the recently landless. In addition, it may disappear as suddenly as it appeared. 

We drove over narrow and severely potholed roads to the eastern side of the island near Lalmohan and hiked through mud to where the waves of the river lapped angrily at the shoreline, breaking off chunks of dirt as we watched.  The river is so wide here it  more closely resembles a brown sea, and you can't see the opposite side, miles away.  As with most of Bangladesh, the area is heavily populated.  We met many people who had moved their houses back from the shore 2, 3, 4, or more times as the shoreline crept westward, taking their cropland with it.

International NGO warns that the global recession will increase human trafficking

Deena Guzder, reporting for the Pulitzer Center

BANGKOK, Thailand--In August 2009, ECPAT International released a global report on the trafficking of children for sexual purposes around the world. The global recession will only increase the vulnerability of children to traffickers, according to the new report. "The recent economic downturn is set to drive more vulnerable children and young people to be exploited by the global sex trade," said Ms. Carmen M. Madrinan, Executive Director of ECPAT International.  Watch Giorgio Berardi, Program Officer for Combating Child-Sex Tourism (CST) at ECPAT International talk about efforts in Thailand to end child prostitution and trafficking.

  

Afghanistan: Vetting the Embeds

Nir Rosen, for the Pulitzer Center

This past July I was embedded with American soldiers in Afghanistan for a Rolling Stone Magazine article, with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. I was looking at American counterinsurgency and the declining security situation in Afghanistan, but first I had to get the military’s approval to even embed with them.

Nir Rosen resting at a checkpoint in Helmand manned by Afghan Police and American soldier. Photo Matthias Bruggmann

The Rendon Group, controversial since it conducted propaganda on behalf of the Kuwaiti and American governments to help build American support for a war against Iraq in 1990, is the company to whom the US military delegates the job of vetting reporters seeking to embed.

Last week Stars and Stripes reported that the Pentagon is employing Rendon to profile reporters.  I was shown a copy of the memorandum the Rendon group prepared about me. It is two and a half pages. A public affairs officer told me it was the most alarming report about a journalist that he had ever seen, and as a result I was grateful that Colonel Bill Hix was open minded enough to approve my embed despite the red flags raised about me.

“The purpose of this updated memo is to provide an assessment of freelance journalist Nir Rosen, and give a profile of his work, both through a summary of content and analysis of style, in order to gauge the expected sentiment of his work while on embed mission in Afghanistan.”

The Theft of the Mullah Kit

Vanessa Gezari, for the Pulitzer Center

DOORAI, Afghanistan – The Taliban rolled into the village at dusk. The call to prayer had gone out over the cold fields, and the dirt lanes were empty. The men were in the mosques, the women and children gathered in their homes. Shadows lengthened as the late winter sun slipped behind the mountains.

            In the main mosque, the men knelt on a reddish-brown carpet, a recent gift from the American soldiers who had built their base a few miles down the road. The village elders had been hesitant to accept anything from the Americans. The soldiers had offered to dig a well in Doorai, but the elders feared that the Taliban would punish them. The same went for a clinic, which would make the whole village a target.

“What about something for your mosque?” one of the Americans finally asked.

At first, the elders said no. Then they started talking among themselves.

“It’s not a gift for us,” one man finally said. “It’s for God.”

The Taliban wouldn’t be angry over a gift for God. Or would they?

100 Days to Copenhagen

Anna-Katarina Gravgaard, for the Pulitzer Center

As the world looks towards the December summit in Copenhagen, the Nepali government,World Bank, Asian Development Bank, DFID and Danish Embassy are arranging their own pre-Copenhagen negotiations for Himalayan nations. On August 31st and September 1st, representatives from the Himalayan region are scheduled to meet in Katmandu to debate and strengthen South Asian positions before the meeting in Copenhagen.

We’ve talked to Nepali experts on climate change and it’s impact on South Asia:

Executive Director of NGO Forum for Urban Water and Sanitation in Kathmandu talks about the conflicts brought on by water scarcity in Nepal:

Member of Nepali Parliament, Sunil Pant, talks about climate change and its impact on the poorest people of Nepal:

Bangladesh: On the boat to Bhola

Steve Sapienza, for the Pulitzer Center

I am writing from the overnight ferry from Dhaka to Bhola island. Glenn and I spent the morning shooting interviews and b-roll footage at a dismal slum in Dhaka that is home to over 1000 displaced people from the island of Bhola.  Bhola, one of six southern islands in Bangladesh, is home to 1.6 million people.  But many thousands of people are leaving Bhola as erosion caused by rising sea levels and strong currents swallows the land.  Some predict half the island could be gone in 30 years time.  Tomorrow we will be on Bhola island and interviewing local people who are losing their land to the hungry sea. Stay tuned...

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