Seize today - Human Rights Day

Today Monday 10 Dec is a very important day - It is World Human Rights Day.

To those people in the Military Council, the soldiers and the police who like to beat other human beings up, and to Bainimarama and his cohorts, I give you Nelson Mandela's wise words to help you reflect upon what you are doing to this country, and to assist you to look into the darkest corner of your souls :

From his book: "Long walk to freedom"

"I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed.

A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness.

I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity."

From Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations and Nobel Peace Prize winner:

“Human rights are your rights. Seize them. Defend them. Promote them. Understand them and insist on them. Nourish and enrich them.”

And from Nelson Mandela's Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, Oslo, Norway, 10 December 1993

"Thus shall we live, because we will have created a society which recognises that all people are born equal, with each entitled in equal measure to life, liberty, prosperity, human rights and good governance.

Such a society should never allow again that there should be prisoners of conscience nor that any person's human rights should be violated.

Neither should it ever happen that once more the avenues to peaceful change are blocked by usurpers who seek to take power away from the people, in pursuit of their own, ignoble purposes.

This must be a world of democracy and respect for human rights, a world freed from the horrors of poverty, hunger, deprivation and ignorance, relieved of the threat and the scourge of civil wars and external aggression and unburdened of the great tragedy of millions forced to become refugees."

Fiji, if we are not careful of ending this reign of terror by the army, we too could end up being refugees in our own country, participating in our own civil war with our vulagi and the horrors of poverty and ignorance visited upon us because of our own inaction or wrong action.

If you feel strongly about this you may email me (veekaybee@gmail.com)with what you think we can do as a (non-voilent) collective force against this regime. Vinaka.