Cherry Bird, AIUK’s Country Co-ordinator for South East Asia, gave a talk on Sri Lanka, a once peaceful and prosperous country now mired in conflict. For decades there have been tensions between the majority Sinhalese, Buddhist population and the Tamil minority who are mainly Hindu. The Tamils are poorer and have felt excluded – remember the Tamil Tigers?
The Civil War lasted for 25 years, with a draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act enacted in 1979. Amnesty is concerned at the very high number of disappearances – estimated at 60,000. More recently the country has been ruled, in turn, by the Rajapaska brothers, described as muscular populists. Their time has now passed (one has fled the country) and a new president elected – Ramil Wickremesinghe. He has a lot to sort out.
Cherry reminded us that there’s a Regional Conference in Exeter next March – details to follow.
Members updated the meeting on appeals for a number of political prisoners, most prominently Alaa Abdul Fattah, imprisoned in Egypt and on prolonged hunger strike which has come to a head during the COP 27 conference. His fate is still uncertain.
As usual our own country co-ordinator for the Middle East and North Africa had been busy: she has written for Moroccan Rida Benotmane, charged with putting up critical Facebook posts. Another Moroccan, Fatimah Kassim is in solitary confinement and has now gone on hunger strike. Mohammed Ben Lima of Algeria has been sentenced to death in absentia, but is now being extradited by Spain.
Cherry made the point that writing to Embassies is an effective way of communicating. Amnesty’s programme on Kashmir is about to be re-launched. What pressure can be brought to bear on India for their human rights violations in the area? The UK has trade agreements with them.
Write for Rights
November/December bring us round to Amnesty’s annual letter writing campaign, Write for Rights. We will have a stall in St Mary Magdalene Church in the town centre from 10am-2pm on Saturday 10 December, which, most appropriately, is Human Rights Day. We will break from 12.30 to 1.30 when the church has a lunchtime concert, Opera Muses.
There’ll be no other December meeting – it would be good to see you on Saturday 10 December, when we’ll have information about this year’s Write for Rights cases. Come along and write a card to a prisoner of conscience.
Next meeting at the Quaker Meeting House will be Tuesday 10 Jan at 7.30pm.
Our meeting in December was transformed into a Write for Rights event, held by kind permission at St Mary’s Church, Taunton during their Saturday Coffee Morning on 8th December.
Every year, thousands of people in the UK write letters in solidarity with those suffering human rights abuses around the world as part of Amnesty’s Write for Rights campaign.
Instead of its usual monthly meeting in December, the Taunton Amnesty Group is holding a Write for Rights stall at St Mary Magdalene Church, Church Square (off Hammet Street), Taunton TA1 1SA, on 
The highlight of our November meeting was a talk by Federica Smith on the organisation she founded 18 months ago: RAFT – Refugee Aid From Taunton. By ingenuity, persistence and learning as they go, RAFT has sent aid to, among other needy places, Syria, Uganda (for Sudanese refugees), and the Ukraine. Their next shipment is to Lebanon.
Tuesday 8th December at the Silver Street Baptist Church, Taunton,
Atena Farghadani is a 29 year old Iranian artist; she was jailed this summer for over 12 years for her art and her peaceful activism. Since then she’s faced further charges: she shook her lawyer’s hand when he visited her in prison and is now facing charges of ‘illicit sexual relations falling short of adultery’.
Amnesty International Taunton Local Group 