Dear Readers:

Thank you for visiting my journalism portfolio.  I am updating this site less frequently than usual since I am on book leave this year: A Higher Calling (Chicago Review Press, 2010).  Please note, this site is in the process of relocating to DeenaGuzder.com

The Stoning of Soraya M.

Published on June. 6, 2009 in Payvand Iran News.

Press Screening in NYC on June 4, 2009.

Watch the movie trailer here.

Film Review: The Stoning of Soraya M.

By: Deena Guzder

In Southwestern Iran, roughly thirty-five miles outside of the city of Kerman, lies the small village of Kupayeh.  In 1986, French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam’s car unexpectedly stalled on the steep, narrow roads zigzagging along Kupayeh’s austere mountain ridges, stranding him in the wind-whipped village.  Walking among the sand-dusted brick houses, Sahebjam was accosted by a desperate woman, Zahra, who feverishly related a terrifying true story of a village conspiracy involving blackmail, misogyny, and murder. Zahra told the journalist that she, as a woman in Iran, no longer had a voice and she pleaded with him to “take her voice” and tell the world her story.

Speaking into Sahebjam’s tape recorder, Zahra recounts the tragedy of her 35-year-old niece, Soraya, who was stoned to death for the crime of adultery, a crime that she did not commit.  In 1994, Sahebjam exposed the village’s dark secret in his best-selling book, The Stoning of Soraya M.: A True Story.  In 2008, Director and co-writer Cyrus Nowrasteh adapted the film into a movie by the same name. Stoning will be released domestically on June 26.  The film already had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was the runner-up for the Audience Choice Award.

Related through husky-voiced Zahra (Academy Award nominee, House of Sand and Fog’s Shohreh Aghdashloo), Stoning centers on Soraya—a beautiful woman with wavy black hair that cascades down her slender shoulders—and Ali—a brooding, abusive husband smitten with a child-bride.  Ali wants to trade Soraya in for the younger woman, but realizes he cannot support two wives. Soraya refuses Ali’s offer of a divorce because she depends on her husband’s income to support their four children. Vindictive against his spirited wife and lustful over a 14-year-old potential bride, Ali spreads a vicious rumor that his wife is having an affair with a recent widower. Needing two witnesses, Ali blackmails a faux-mullah—by threatening to denounce him as a previous collaborator of the Shah—and the widower himself—warning that his mentally disabled son could be sent to an institution.  Under Iran’s Islamic law, adultery is punishable by stoning, but such sentences were only common in the early years after the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the pro-Western government and brought hard-line clerics to power. Iran’s reformist legislators have advocated abolishing death by stoning as a punishment for adultery, but opposition from hard-line clerics has quashed their efforts.

The town mayor in Stoning, Ebrahim is partially savvy to Ali’s political machinations and partially willfully ignorant. Ebrahim declares, that under Islam law, “women are guilty unless proven innocent and men are innocent unless proven guilty,” to which Zahra retorts, “Right, all men are innocent and all women are guilty.” While Stoning issues a strong indictment of Iran’s double-standard for men and women, the movie is not anti-Islam.  Stoning exposes the perils of violence rooted in religious righteousness; however, the film also depicts religiously inspired acts of great courage. Zahra positively evokes Islam when she speaks Truth to Power—telling Ali that “God is watching” him spin his web of lies—and later repeatedly exclaims “God is Great!” to a crowd of villagers as she helps the journalist escape with her story on a cassette.

Setting hard primary colors against shades of sepia, Stoning plays with light filters to visually divulge the tenebrous world of village politics, a world that systematically disenfranchises women. The film’s most indelible scene is eerily prosaic. Young boys roam the barren landscape for fist-sized stones. As the boys rap the stones against the unpaved ground, the beating intensifies, like a thunderous drumbeat heralding impending war. Donning a pristine white bridal gown, Soraya is escorted to her death by a fiercely protective Zahra amidst a blood-thirsty crowd.  Soraya’s last words are not a plea of innocence, but a condemnation of mob-mentality and the practice of stoning. Director and co-writer Cyrus Nowrasteh depicts every gruesome detail of the execution, in which Soraya is buried to her chest with her arms bound, and bludgeoned with jagged rocks from close range until she bleeds to death.

Only a person with a heart of stone could fail to recoil in horror during the film’s brutal finale. However, one hopes the film is not mistaken for a denunciation of Iran at a time when U.S.-Iranian relations remain strained. The film should renew outcry against not only death by stoning, but also death by lethal injection, fire squad, and electric chair. We must abolish the death penalty in all its nefarious forms whether in the remote, landlocked corners of Iran or in the sanitized charnel houses of the United States.

Warbling sound to foretell tragedy and depicting brutality with the same gruesome attentiveness as “The Passion of the Christ”, the film aims to arouse moviegoers’ furor.  Yet, let us not forget that international human rights groups have long lambasted the use of the death penalty not only in Iran but across the world. Let us hope that Stoning reignites global protests against the arrogance and inhumanity of the death penalty everywhere.

In Iran, women disproportionately suffer from executions by stoning; in the United States, the poor and the non-white disproportionately receive death sentences. As Amnesty International notes, “by working towards the abolition of the death penalty worldwide, Amnesty International USA’s Death Penalty Abolition Campaign looks to end the cycle of violence created by a system riddled with economic and racial bias and tainted by human error.” While the U.S. has sanitized the horror of killing people through lethal injections and electric chairs, it has not washed its hands of the accompanying guilt.  Iran must unequivocally renounce the barbaric act of stoning people to death, and the U.S. must similarly make a commitment against destroying human life.

Guzder has reported for Time Magazine, Mother Jones, United Press International, and other publications on human rights issues across the world. She is the author of a forthcoming book, A Higher Calling, currently scheduled for release by Chicago Review Press in 2010. Please visit: www.deenaguzder.com

Children’s Health and the Law

BLUE MARBLE [ENVIRONMENT + HEALTH]

Trusting God Over Doctor

By DEENA GUZDER / MAY 29, 2009

This is a follow-up to a previous article in Mother Jones

In Wisconsin, last week’s trial over Kara Neumann’s death raises new questions over children’s health care rights.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license

On May 20, 2009 a Wisconsin mother who followed an apocalyptic religious website said in a videotaped interview played at her trial that she did not call a doctor when her 11-year-old daughter was dying of untreated diabetes, but instead prayed for divine healing. “I just believed the Lord is going to heal her,” said Neumann. “I just felt that, you know, my faith was being tested.” During the trial, one of Neumann’s surviving teenage children defended her parents’ decision to eschew medical intervention. “Because God created everyone, and how can we be more powerful than God?” the teenager said. “Why should we diss him and think a doctor would be more powerful than God or trust a doctor more than God?”

Even after her daughter was pronounced dead, Neumann told a detective, “I’m not crying and wailing right now because I know she’s, I know she’s, she’s gonna come, she’s gonna come back.” Unfortunately, there was no resurrection.

Last week, after more than four hours of deliberation, a jury found Neumann guilty of second-degree reckless homicide. Neumann’s trial drew national attention and reinvigorated debates on where religious freedom ends and child abuse begins. Although the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1944 ruling in Prince v. Massachusetts clearly states that parents can make martyrs of themselves but not their children, thirty states—including Wisconsin—still have religious exemptions from child abuse statutes. “From 1975 to 1983 the federal government required states to enact religious exemptions to child neglect in order to get federal funding for state child abuse prevention and treatment programs,” explains former Christian Scientist Rita Swan, executive director of the nonprofit Children’s Health Care Is A Legal Duty. Swan began advocating against all religious exemptions after church members encouraged her to pray for her sick infant instead of call a doctor. Swan’s son died of meningitis. Next week, a Milwaukee lawmaker, assisted by a church, could introduce a bill that may change Wisconsin’s faith-healing law.

Meanwhile, a Minnesota mother and her cancer-stricken 13-year-old son Daniel Hauser emerged from hiding after a week of evading court-ordered chemotherapy. The boy suffers from Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which doctors warn has a 90 percent cure rate with chemotherapy, and a 95 percent chance of killing a person without it. Hauser’s parents had previously argued that chemotherapy conflicted with their religious belief in “natural” healing methods; however, at a hearing Tuesday, both parents said they would follow doctors’ recommendations. The change of heart suggests at least some religious adherents’ views on secular medical are malleable. Pediatrician Rahul K. Parikh writes that those who have lived through the living hell of cancer treatment can sympathize with the Hausers’ decision to flee although chemotherapy was ultimately the right decision: “Fighting cancer pits a person against potent drugs. But because of their horrid side effects, they take the doctors’ credo, “First, do no harm,” to its limits.” The Hausers didn’t refuse chemotherapy outright, but defied doctors and a judge’s ruling only after Daniel experienced some of its violent effects following one round. According to the Associated Press, at least five American families have had a parent flee with a sick child in recent years to avoid state-mandated medical treatments.

From bloodletting in the 19th Century to classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder until as recently as 1973, the medical establishment is far from perfect. Nonetheless, most people recognize that modern medicine has saved countless lives. “For me, what makes this especially tragic—and complicated—is that faith healing parents genuinely want to help their kids,” says Shawn F. Peters, author of When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law. “But they’re so committed to religious ideology that they fail to recognize the indisputable benefits of many standard medical remedies.”

Deena Guzder has reported on human rights issues from New York, Tehran, and Mumbai. She is the author of a forthcoming book on progressive religious radicals for social justice, currently scheduled for release by Chicago Review Press in 2010.

A New Battle Over Children’s Health Care

POLITICS + CURRENT AFFAIRS

Should Parents Who Call God Instead of the Doctor be Punished?

By DEENA GUZDER / MAY 13, 2009

Please click here to read this article in Mother Jones

In Wisconsin, this week’s trial over Kara Neumann’s death marks a new battle over children’s health care rights.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license

Last Easter Sunday, 11-year-old Kara Neumann of Weston, Wisconsin, lay motionless on her bed, too weak to walk or speak. If her parents had called the hospital that day, Kara might have lived. Instead, Dale and Leilani—followers of the Unleavened Bread Ministry, an online church that shuns medical intervention—knelt in prayer beside her. Kara died a few hours later of diabetic ketoacidosis, a result of undiagnosed and untreated juvenile diabetes.

Are Dale and Leilani guilty of reckless endangerment? That’s a question juries will start to answer this week as Leilani stands trial May 14. (Dale will be tried separately in June.) If convicted, each parent faces up to 25 years in prison. “The free exercise clause of the First Amendment protects religious belief, but not necessarily conduct,” Judge Vincent Howard of Marathon County Circuit Court wrote when he ruled that the Neumanns must stand trial on charges brought by state attorney Jill Falstad. Howard has ordered all parties in the case not to speak to the media.

The highly anticipated trial has opened a new front in the long-running war between some religious communities and the medical establishment over children’s health care. “We are not commanded in scripture to send people to the doctor,” Unleavened Bread Ministries preacher David Eells said in a statement to his followers, “but to meet their needs through prayer and faith.” Under current Wisconsin law, his followers aren’t commanded by the state, either. Part of the legacy of the 1996 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which included a landmark exemption for parents who do not seek medical care for their children for religious purposes, is that parents cannot be accused of child abuse or negligent homicide if they genuinely believed that calling God, instead of a doctor, was the best option available.

While all states give social service authorities the right to intervene in cases of child neglect, criminal codes in more than half also provide additional protection for religious parents who forgo mainstream medical treatment. Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee) and the Church of Christ, Scientist in Wisconsin are currently working on legislation that may further impact children’s health care by creating an “affirmative defense” for religious parents who choose “faith healing” over mainstream medicine.

In light of Kara’s high-profile case, faith-healing communities around the country are worried about losing the right to treat their children according to their religious beliefs. “The way the law is worded right now is confusing and makes it seem like we have a shield to recklessly endanger children,” says Joe Farkas, legislative affairs representative for the Church of Christ, Scientist in Wisconsin. “Our church loves children and we want to protect children…We want to have an ‘affirmative defense’ where parents relying on Christian Science treatment are given a fair opportunity to explain why they believed their action was in the best interest of their child,” he adds. Christian Science, developed by Church of Christ, Scientist founder Mary Baker Eddy in the late 19th century, believes “Infinite goodness, realized in prayer, heals.” One Wisconsin-based Christian Science website features a montage of children’s drawings thanking God for healing everything from a severed thumb to a pet rat.

Not everyone is convinced that the Church of Christ, Scientist puts children before dogma. “Sen. Taylor should be deeply suspicious of their requests,” says former Christian Scientist Rita Swan, executive director of the nonprofit Children’s Health Care Is A Legal Duty. “The Christian Science church lobbies around the country for religious exemptions,” notes Swan, who dedicated her life to “protecting children from abusive religious and cultural practices” after watching her infant die of meningitis—another curable disease. “Our son was having convulsions and the faith practitioner said we had to look at the positive side—he was gritting his teeth because he was planning an amazing achievement,” said Swan. “Only when it was too late did we learn that symptoms of healing and divine intervention were actually signs of illness and suffering.” Since then, Swan has exposed unnecessary deaths, found outbreaks of polio and measles at Christian Science camps and schools, and interviewed adults who are handicapped today because their diseases and injuries went untreated during childhood. Nobody knows exactly how many children are affected negatively every year by their parents’ religious health beliefs, says Dr. Sara Sinal, who has written on religion-based medical neglect for Southern Medical Journal. “It is suspected that many deaths go unreported and unrecognized, particularly in closed communities.”

Religious objection to medical treatment can be traced back to the late 1800s in England, when a sect called the Peculiar People ended up on trial for allowing generations of children to die as a result of their decision to reject doctors and medicine. Today, many Christian fundamentalist groups routinely spurn some or all mainstream health care in favor of faith healing through prayer. Jehovah’s Witnesses accept some medical treatment but oppose blood transfusions, believing that only Jesus Christ’s shed blood can redeem them. Scientology eschews certain psychotherapeutic drugs. The Amish, who are members of an Anabaptist Christian denomination, often reject invasive medical procedures. Christian Scientist families similarly claim religious exemption from childhood vaccination programs and most routine medical care.

Mental illness is an area that remains especially taboo in orthodox religious communities. “A lot of fundamentalist Christians, including pastors, believe that people have mental illness symptoms because they do not pray hard enough or do not believe in God enough,” says John McManamy, mental health journalist and author of Living Well With Depression and Bipolar Disorder. McManamy notes that “religion is often a very positive experience for people with mental illness,” but extremists cling to a “medieval belief that mental affliction is the result of the work of the devil and lack of sufficient faith in God.”

More disturbingly, doctors who have religious objections to standard medical procedures now have federal protection. The most dangerous section of the so-called “conscience rule,” which went into effect in January, bars health care institutions and employers from requiring “any individual to perform or assist in the performance of any part of a health service program” if it would offend his/her religious beliefs or moral convictions.

Prosecutors often file charges in religion-based medical neglect cases, and Christian Scientists have been convicted on charges of manslaughter. However, many convictions are overturned due to the ambiguity created by religious exemption laws, says Shawn F. Peters, author of When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law. “The argument that the law is confusing—you apparently can treat your child with prayer under one statute, but not under another—is a strong one that has worked for faith healing parents in some states,” says Peters. An Oregonian couple was charged last year with criminally negligent homicide in the death of their 16-year-old son, who died from complications of a severely painful but easily treatable urinary tract infection. Earlier this year, a judge refused to drop criminal charges against another Oregon couple in the death of their 15-month-old daughter, who likely would have survived had she received antibiotics. And on May 8, a court hearing for Colleen and Anthony Hauser began in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota; the parents, part of a Native American organization called the Nemenhah Band, claim a “spiritual right” to try to cure their 13-year-old son of Hodgkin’s lymphoma with healthy food and vitamins. Doctors contend their son has a 90 percent chance of recovery with chemotherapy and radiation.

The medical community has long grappled with religious traditions that jeopardize their patients’ health. “Fundamentalists tell us their lives are in the hands of God and we, as physicians, are not God,” says Dr. Lorry Frankel, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine and author of Ethical Dilemmas in Pediatrics. “We respect people’s religious beliefs and try to compromise, but we won’t deny treatment that will save lives.”

Organizations that have called for repealing religious exemptions include the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, National District Attorneys Association, Prevent Child Abuse America, National Association of Medical Examiners, and CHILD Inc. “Too often, deference to religion in contemporary American society has resulted in us subordinating all other values,” says Dr. Richard Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. “The law must recognize that the right of children to live supersedes the rights of their parents to free expression of religion.”

Deena Guzder has reported on human rights issues from New York, Tehran, and Mumbai. She is the author of a forthcoming book on progressive religious radicals for social justice, currently scheduled for release by Chicago Review Press in 2010.

Taste of Ancient Persia in Modern Mumbai

AMUSE-BOUCHE

Mumbai, India’s Parsi Restaurants: Get it While It’s Hot

By DEENA GUZDER / MUMBAI, INDIA / APR. 08, 2009

Please click to read this article in TIME Magazine, Asia & Europe Edition,  APR. 20, 2009

A TASTE OF HISTORY: Kohinoor’s son Afshin tends the counter at Britannia (Prashanth Vishwanathan / India Picture)

With the warmth of an endearingly eccentric relative, 86-year-old Boman Kohinoor of Britannia Restaurant, tel: (91-22) 2261 5264, in south Mumbai, exclaims, “You must try the berry pulav, which my wife introduced in 1982 after returning from a trip to Iran.” A waiter appears moments later with saffron golden rice and tender chunks of curried potatoes, fried cashews, wisps of crispy onions and ruby-red barberries imported from Tehran. “In Iran, the food is dry and bland by Indian standards so my wife experimented to find the right spices to liven up the dish,” says Kohinoor. “But the exact recipe is a closely guarded family secret.”

Kohinoor’s head chef, his son Romin, prepares other Britannia favorites such as sali boti (succulent cubes of mutton marinated in garlic-ginger paste, covered in a sweet cinnamon gravy, and sprinkled with crispy matchstick potatoes) and patrani machii (pomfret seasoned with coconut chutney and steamed in banana leaves).

Britannia — founded in 1923 by Kohinoor’s father, Rashid — is part of a dying breed of family restaurants run by Mumbai’s rapidly dwindling Zoroastrian, or Parsi, community. “Fifty years ago, there used to be around 500 Parsi restaurants along the stretch of south Bombay; now there are hardly 15 left,” says Kohinoor, who doubts his own restaurant will survive him.

Zoroastrianism, the world’s oldest monotheistic religion, was once followed by millions in ancient Persia, but today claims as few as 124,000 adherents worldwide. Despite fears of impending extinction, Indian Zoroastrians neither allow conversion into the faith nor recognize children of interfaith marriages, according to Ramiyar P. Karanjia, principal of a Zoroastrian religious school in Mumbai. These are some of the reasons why the community of 70,000, the world’s largest, is declining by about 10% every decennial census, according to UNESCO.

The Parsis’ culinary forte may have been their historic undoing. According to legend, the Arabs who invaded Persepolis during the Islamic incursions in the 10th century soon realized the only way to conquer the Zoroastrian warriors was to attack them after their traditional Sunday lunch of dhansak. The thick mutton stew served with cardamom-scented brown rice is extremely heavy and lulls its eaters into a siesta afterwards.

Today Paradise Restaurant in Colaba, tel: (91-22) 2285 5629, near Strand Cinema, serves the best dhansak outside of a Parsi home. Jimmy Boy, tel: (91-22) 2270 0880, off Horniman Circle in the Fort District, is the place to go for a taste of lagan nu bhonu — the traditional Parsi wedding spread — if you don’t want to wait for the increasingly rare occasion when two Zoroastrians tie the knot. The meal is always finished with baked wedding custard sprinkled with almonds, pistachios, cardamom and nutmeg powder. Ideal Corner, tel: (91-22) 2262 1930, off Pherozeshah Mehta Road, serves an auspicious meal that is usually eaten on Nowruz, the Zoroastrian New Year (March 21). But at Ideal Corner the yellow lentils, spicy prawn salsa and saffron rice are available every Monday. A la carte delicacies include mutton in coconut paste and cashew gravy (kid ghost) and okra in a spicy tomato sauce (khara bhendi).

To properly conclude a feast like this you must, as the Parsis say, “mithoo munoo” — make the mouth sweet. Visit Parsi Dairy Farm, tel: (91-22) 2201 3633, for a taste of agarni nu ladvo. This conical dessert is made by simmering pulses and grains in sugary ghee. It is traditionally eaten to celebrate seven months of a pregnancy, but the declining number of Parsi births means that nowadays members of the community simply enjoy the dessert whenever they please. “Parsis will go extinct, but not the Parsi food,” says Kohinoor. “Everyone loves the taste.”

Dangerous Liaisons

WORLD NEWS

Hong Kong Blames Law for Recent Spate of Sex-Worker Murders

By DEENA GUZDER / HONG KONG / Feb. 10, 2009

A 24-year-old male suspect was arrested on February 5, 2009, in connection with the alleged murder of a Thai prostitute in a Hong Kong apartment (Sam Tsang / SCMP)

(Please click here to read the article online on TIME.com)

In Richard Mason’s 1957 best-selling novel The World of Suzie Wong, a young English artist checks into the fictional Nam Kok Hotel in Hong Kong, not realizing it is also a bordello. He meets and eventually falls in love with Suzie Wong, an archetypal “hooker with a heart of gold,” and the novel ends happily.

But if The World of Suzie Wong was written today, it would likely be a horrifying whodunit that ends with police finding a semi-naked woman murdered by a suspected serial killer. Hong Kong, a metropolis relatively free of violent crime, has been shocked by a spike in murders of prostitutes including three sex workers who were killed in their apartments in January. The rising death toll is forcing the city’s conservative leaders to consider how members of the world’s oldest profession might be better protected under Hong Kong law. (Read about Amsterdam’s drive to clean up its red light district.)

After the recent string of murders, police have started conducting sting operations at sex-for-hire haunts and are offering rewards for information leading to arrests. All three of the women killed recently appear to have been robbed and murdered by someone posing as a client. Police found their badly bruised bodies on the floors of their apartments. Autopsies confirmed that they were each suffocated to death, leading police to suspect a serial killer was responsible. On Feb. 4, police arrested a local 24-year-old man in connection with the most recent killing, a 38-year-old from Thailand. The suspect remains in jail. “Enquiries are ongoing to ascertain whether the person arrested is connected to other similar offenses,” a Hong Kong police spokesman says.

Whether or not a serial killer is on the loose, the murders are part of a disturbing trend. Hong Kong, a city of 6.9 million, saw 36 murders last year, twice as many as in 2007. Six of the 36 were sex workers. In a particularly gruesome incident in May, 2008, a 16-year-old girl involved in sex trade was decapitated, flayed, chopped into pieces, and dumped at a local market where meat was sold. “We are very frightened of this dangerous situation,” says Jade, a 40-year-old Hong Kong prostitute who declined to give her last name. “We don’t know why these people want to kill us.”

Some policymakers, activists and scholars say these are crimes of opportunity — and that the law may be helping to create that opportunity. Prostitution is a shadow profession in Hong Kong. It is technically legal, but traditional brothels are classified as illegal “vice establishments.” Landlords who rent a single premise to more than one sex worker can face jail time. This means sex workers are forced to operate mainly as one-woman businesses out of their homes. There are approximately 1,600 one-woman brothels in Hong Kong, according to the Hong Kong police. Operating in isolation and without protection, these prostitutes are vulnerable to violent crime. Five of the six sex workers who were murdered last year, and all three killed in January, died in their workplaces.

Simon Young, director of the Center for Comparative and Public Law at Hong Kong University, says the current laws were designed to cut down on organized crime and pimping — it’s illegal for anyone except a sex worker to profit from the services rendered. But the code “is out of touch with reality,” Young says. “A clearer law must flow from a policy change that recognizes the existing law hurts many innocent people.”

There appears to be little agreement just what this change should be. Young suggests licensing prostitutes so the industry “is more controlled, regulated and safe.” Hong Kong lawmaker Margaret Ng is calling for changes so that more than one prostitute can operate out of the same apartment. That way, workers can watch out for each other. “We need to aim our efforts against organized crime instead of exposing sex workers to danger, especially when it’s a danger to their lives,” says Ng. “But I get the feeling that most people in the government don’t have a lot of sympathy for sex workers, so there’s not enough energy put into changing the law.”

Zi Teng, a Hong Kong sex-workers’ support organization, has tried to help prostitutes by subsidizing the installation costs of surveillance cameras and alarms in workers’ apartments. Zi Teng also organizes self-help groups in basic self-defense skills. But Elaine Lam, Zi Teng’s director, argues such measures might be less necessary if prostitution were completely legalized. Sex workers currently are stigmatized by society, which can make them a target for violent crimes, Lam says. “We have many cases where sex workers say they open their door for a client and they are attacked and stabbed because they are seen as bad people in society,” she says. “We need whole legal reform, where sex work is decriminalized and treated as a normal industry so it’s protected and respected.”

The Hong Kong police, for their part, argue that the current law is fair. It “strikes a reasonable balance between the human rights and privacy of sex workers, the well-being of other members of the community as well as the prevailing moral values of the community,” a police spokesman stated in an e-mail. “The police aim to prevent the exploitation of women and girls for the purposes of prostitution, to combat organized prostitution activities and to lessen the nuisance to members of the public that ‘vice activities’ may cause.” A more pressing goal, however, is to catch the men who are killing Hong Kong’s prostitutes.

Mekong Diaries: Art in a Time of War

BOOK REVIEW

A Somber Volume of Paintings Depicts the Vietnamese War

By DEENA GUZDER / HONG KONG / Feb. 05, 2009

Please click to read in TIME Magazine, Asia Edition,  FEB. 16, 2009 (PDF of Article here)

Capturing the conflict: Nguyen Thanh Chau’s On the Eastern Front, 1975 Courtesy HCMC Fine Arts Museum. Photo by Hans Kemp. (c) Asia Ink 2008

During the Vietnam war, America’s image of the conflict was shaped by news footage of battlefields dominated by miasmal jungle and of an enemy who was often portrayed as merciless and inhuman. But the war doesn’t look that way in the drawings, poems, letters and oral histories compiled in Mekong Diaries. Author Sherry Buchanan journeyed across Vietnam to gather previously unpublished material from 10 Vietnamese artists who resisted the U.S. The resulting volume is a moving alternative to common American narratives of the war and offers extraordinary insight into Vietnamese hearts, military and civilian.

About 100 artists served in the Mekong Delta during the 11-year conflict, tasked with recording battles and creating images that could be used to inspire civilians in the war effort. Sixty-two died in action. Some were regular soldiers as well as artists; others performed no military duties but chose to go on reconnaissance missions and into combat to create their works. Recruits were trained in drawing, and professors from the Hanoi College of Fine Arts traveled the Ho Chi Minh Trail to set up art courses in the Mekong Delta before dispatching their students into battle with sketchbooks, ink bottles and paint palettes.

Many of the works — like Quach Phong’s memorable watercolors — capture ordinary acts of resistance by beleaguered fighters armed with unsophisticated weaponry. Phong’s Farmer with Gun (1966) portrays a leather-faced guerrilla pointing a rifle to the sky in a defiant attack on a fighter plane. “Even though he had little hope of shooting it down, there lay his strength,” recalls Phong.

At other times, artists tried to depict the tense interludes between battle, documenting the interiors of their foxholes and bunkers. Some also painted furiously to preserve the landscape as it looked before the bombs and napalm. Nguyen Thanh Chau liked to capture the beauty of pink lotuses, malachite melaleuca trees and turquoise marshes under a lapis lazuli sky. “Whenever I saw a beautiful landscape, I forgot about the danger and stood up to draw,” he writes.

Artists devised ingenious ways to work while under fire. Hyunh Phuong Dong perfected the technique of squeezing clumps of paint straight onto paper and adding black outlines later, once he was out of harm’s way. “Their bombs cannot bury me,” he wrote in a letter to his wife from the Mekong Delta. “I can still work, paint, sing and write to you.” Another artist, Pham Thanh Tam, filled empty penicillin vials with paint, which he stored inside Russian-made 12-mm shell casings so that they wouldn’t break.

In a war that killed more than 3.8 million Vietnamese, many military artists came to see themselves as aestheticians of common life, offering a respite from the endless bloodshed. “Because war is too hard, it is the artist’s duty to create beauty,” says Pham Thanh Tam. “I wanted to convey uplifting, spiritual feelings and fragile emotions.” His delicate pencil sketch Carrying the Mail Down the Ho Chi Minh Trail (1967) captures an everyday tableau but poignantly so. In other pieces, iridescent young men and women in traditional dress perform the quotidian chores of transporting water and collecting wood.

Today, the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Museum holds the largest collection of what is known in Vietnam as Liberation Art. The biggest buyers — perhaps unsurprisingly — are American Vietnam War veterans seeking the catharsis of art. Mekong Diaries provides just that, and testifies to the ultimate futility of armed conflict. “If we were all artists,” writes another featured painter, Nguyen Thu, “there would be no war.”

Faith-Healers will be Judged

U.S. NEWS

When Parents Call God, Not the Doctor

By DEENA GUZDER / Feb. 05, 2009

Kara Neumann, of Weston, Wisconsin died Sunday, March 23, 2008, after her parents prayed for healing rather than getting medical help for a treatable form of diabetes. (Butch McCartney / Wausau Daily Herald / AP)

(Please click here to read the article online on TIME.com)

On Easter Sunday of 2008, 11-year-old Kara Neumann of Weston, Wisconsin, suffered waves of nausea as she lay motionless on her deathbed, too weak to walk or speak. Kara’s parents — both followers of the Unleavened Bread Ministries, an online church that shuns medical intervention — knelt in prayer beside their dying daughter. They did not call a doctor for help. A few hours later, Kara died of diabetes, a relatively common — and treatable — condition.

Within weeks, a Wisconsin state attorney brought charges of reckless endangerment against Kara’s parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann. The couple protested on grounds of religious freedom, but Judge Vincent Howard of Marathon County Circuit Court ordered Mr. and Mrs. Neumann to stand trial this spring. If convicted, each faces up to 25 years in prison. Unleavened Bread Ministries immediately released a statement saying the couple is being unfairly punished for the “crime of praying.”

The Neumanns’ highly anticipated trial has sparked new debate in a long-running battle over faith healing in the United States. Under current Wisconsin law, a parent cannot be convicted of child abuse or negligent homicide if they can prove they genuinely believed that calling God, instead of a doctor, was the best option available for their child. The law is part of the legacy of the 1996 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which included a landmark exemption for parents who do not seek medical care for their children for religious purposes. While all states give social service authorities the right to intervene in cases of child neglect, criminal codes in 29 other states also provide additional protection for parents who forgo mainstream medical treatment.

In light of Kara’s high-profile case, faith-healing communities around the country are worried about losing their right to treat their children according to their religious beliefs. “The way the law is worded right now is confusing and makes it seem like we have a shield to recklessly endanger children,” says Joe Farkas, legislative affairs representative for the Church of Christ, Scientist, in Wisconsin. The Church has teamed up with Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Lena Taylor to write new legislation that could repeal a provision in the state’s child abuse and neglect statute that exempts parents from prosecution in some faith-healing cases, while creating a new “affirmative defense” for parents who made a “reasonable attempt” to provide medical care for their child. “We want to have an affirmative defense where parents relying on Christian Science treatment are given a fair opportunity to explain why they believed their action was in the best interest of their child,” says Farkas. “Our church loves children and we want to protect children.”

Religious objections to medical treatment have historical roots that can be traced back to the late 1800s in England, when a sect called the Peculiar People ended up on trial for allowing generations of children to die as a result of their decision to reject doctors and medicine. Today, many religious groups routinely reject some or all mainstream health care on theological grounds, including Christian Scientists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Amish and Scientologists. “Fundamentalists tell us their lives are in the hands of God and we, as physicians, are not God,” says Dr. Lorry Frankel, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine and author of Ethical Dilemmas in Pediatrics. “We respect people’s religious beliefs and try to compromise, but we won’t deny treatment that will save lives.” Frankel says he’s taken Jehovah’s Witnesses to court in the past when they’ve refused blood transfusion for their children in life-threatening cases. “The judge invariably rules in our favor and I’ve never had a child denied care,” says Frankel.

Nobody knows exactly how many children’s health problems are exacerbated by a parent’s religious beliefs because “the system can only kick in if people become aware that a sick child is not getting care,” says Dr. Sara Sinal who co-authored a July 2008 article on religion-based medical neglect in Southern Medical Journal. “It is suspected that many deaths go unreported and unrecognized, particularly in closed communities.” Former Christian Scientist Rita Swan, executive director of the nonprofit Children’s Health Care Is A Legal Duty, estimates that since the 1980s 300 children have died of “religion-based medical neglect” in the United States. Shawn F. Peters, author of the 2007 book When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law calls the situation an unfolding tragedy. “Americans treasure religious liberty and it’s one of our bedrock freedoms,” says Peters. “Most of us realize that there have to be some limits to such freedoms.”

Deciding just what those limits are has increasingly become a matter for the state courts, with most judges coming down on the side of doctors like Frankel when young lives are at stake. In December, an upstate New York judge ordered two Amish parents to allow an operation needed to repair their infant’s life-threatening heart condition despite their religious objections to the procedure. Earlier in January, a judge refused to drop criminal charges against a couple in Oregon charged with second-degree manslaughter and criminal mistreatment in the death of their 15-month-old daughter who would have survived had she received antibiotics, rejecting their argument that prosecution would violate their religious freedom and parental rights. Last year, another Oregon couple were charged with criminally negligent homicide in the death of their 16-year-old son, who died from complications of a severely painful but easily treatable urinary tract infection.

Christian Scientists maintain that seeking medical attention is a personal decision and that the First Amendment protects their right to believe that “God’s infinite goodness, realized in prayer and action, heals,” as noted on the website of the The Church of Christ, Scientist. But a long list of major U.S. organizations have already called for repealing of existing religious exemptions, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association. “Too often, deference to religion in contemporary American society has resulted in us subordinating all other values,” says Dr. Richard Sloan, professor of psychiatry at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. “The law must recognize that the right of children to live supersedes the rights of their parents to free expression of religion.”

See the graphic on how Americans view God.

See pictures of the different faiths.

Exile’s Letter

BOOK REVIEW

Ha Jin’s New Book Explores Literature and Deracination

By DEENA GUZDER / HONG KONG / Jan. 29, 2009

Please click to read in TIME Magazine, Asia Edition,  FEB. 9, 2009  (PDF Here)

Ha Jin was a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army during China’s Cultural Revolution, before moving to the U.S. on a scholarship and, eventually, winning the National Book Award for his novel of a lovelorn Chinese army officer, Waiting. In his nonfiction debut, The Writer as Migrant, Ha Jin explores attempts by transplanted writers — among them Conrad, Nabokov and Beckett — to find connections between their adopted homes and native lands.

Some see themselves as ardent champions of their tribe (Ha Jin confides that he once viewed himself as “a Chinese writer who would write in English on behalf of the downtrodden Chinese”). Others are renegades or peripatetic cultural ambassadors or secluded misfits. Often, they are each of those things at different times. Those who wish to reach audiences in their new homes must also grapple with linguistic loyalty. Much of the book is about this — it would be, given that Ha Jin has chosen to write exclusively in English and takes issue with those who argue the ultimate betrayal is to choose to write in another language.

By acquiring a fresh command of the nuances and idiosyncrasies of an adopted language, migrant writers can help create, in Ha Jin’s view, a common lexis in which their “real passport” is their art. “I share Salman Rushdie’s conviction that something can be gained in translation,” says Ha Jin. So do a growing number of readers in an increasingly borderless world.

Scientists Shine Light on “Brown Cloud”

HEALTH & SCIENCE

New Study Gets Inside the World’s “Brown Cloud”

By DEENA GUZDER / HONG KONG / Jan. 23, 2009

A thick photochemical smog comprised of respirable suspended particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide hangs thick over the Causeway Bay district of Hong Kong, 22 January 2009

(ALEX HOFFORD / EPA)

(Please click here to read the article online on TIME.com)

Pilot John Horwood says the worse part about flying into Hong Kong is the suffocating, two-mile-thick blanket of pollution that hovers between 15 and 18,000 feet. “The whole cockpit fills with an acrid smell,” says Horwood, who started noticing the cloud in 1997. “Each year it just gets worse and worse.” What comprises this nuisance — a sprawling high-altitude mass of air pollution that stretches from the Arabian peninsula to the western Pacific Ocean — has long captured the curiosity of scientists. A report released in the Jan. 23 issue of Science breathes fresh air into that ongoing study, confirming that the mass, nicknamed the ‘Brown Cloud’ but comprised of several small, local clouds, is soot from human burning of wood, dung and crop residue, as well as industrial processes and traffic pollution.

Örjan Gustafsson, the study’s lead author, and his colleagues at Stockholm University conducted research with Indian scientists from January to April 2006 to determine that two-thirds of the cloud’s soot particles come from biomass combustion like household cooking and slash-and-burn agriculture. The researchers confirmed that the layer of haze — which many have blamed for the world’s increasingly extreme weather patterns — makes rain both more rare during the dry season and more intense during monsoons. And in South Asia, the cloud’s net effect on climate change, says the study, rivals that of carbon dioxide.

Scientists have been gathering different kinds of information about the mass for years. A 2008 study by the United Nations Environment Program, for instance, warned that 340,000 people in China and India alone die annually from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases that can be traced to human-induced emissions of combustible particles in these atmospheric brown clouds. It concluded that regional pollution’s impact can go global since winds blow soot across the world within weeks, and it, too, noted that brown clouds exacerbate deadly flooding and droughts.

But that report, like others before it, was inconclusive about what causes the clouds in the first place. “The new research is incredibly important because it refines our understanding of the clouds’ components,” says Achim Setiner, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program. “In each part of the world there are different atmospheric mixes that add to brown clouds’ cocktail, so this research helps show where governments should direct their money and efforts.”

The new findings imply that controlling biomass combustion, particularly the small-scale burning of wood and dung for home heating and cooking common throughout Asia and Africa, will be an important step towards improving the world’s air quality. Gustafsson, a professor of biogeochemistry at Stockholm University, urges environmentalists not to limit their efforts to curbing car traffic and coal-fired power plants. He says fighting poverty and spreading green technologies that limit emissions from small-scale biomass burning are equally important. “More households in South Asia need to be given the possibility to cook food and get heating without using open fires of wood and dung,” says Gustafsson. “The international community should step in and contribute to technology transfers towards solar heating and biogas, especially since the developed world is responsible for the climate situation that exists today.”

The silver lining of this massive brown cloud is that a boost in those technologies could decrease soot emissions — fast. “We can’t fix every environmental problem, but we can make a huge and immediate change by reducing black carbon,” says Veerabhadran Ramanathan, Director of the Center for Clouds, Chemistry & Climate at the University of California at San Diego. (Black carbon manifests as soot particles that comprise brown clouds.) While carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere respond on a sluggish 100-year timescale to reductions in emissions, soot particles, whose effects are equivalent to roughly half the warming damage that carbon dioxide does, have a shelf life of only a few weeks. Environmentalists have joined scientists’ call to urge governments to cut pollution by introducing more efficient heating stoves in developing countries and turning to solar power and other clean sources of energy. “We need sustainable growth in every city in this world,” says Edwin Lau Che Feng, director of the environmental group Friends of the Earth in Hong Kong. “Richer countries have a responsibility to transfer cleaner technology to developing nations and help them reduce emissions because developing nations are the world’s factory today.”