Word: ishak
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...mobilize a "no" vote. A heavy police presence and the arrests of 50 activists disrupted Kifaya's plans to stage nationwide protests. But Kifaya's vote boycott dented the legitimacy of the foregone outcome (officially 79.5% approval). While elections officials claimed a 27% voter turnout, Kifaya leader George Ishak put the number at no more than 3%; the truth is probably somewhere in between, hardly evidence of an enthusiastic electorate. Already Amnesty International had denounced the amendments as "the greatest erosion of rights in 26 years" and Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice called them "a really disappointing outcome...
...after being expelled. The raids also miss the main culprits, the employers and recruiters who sneak workers into the country, says activist Aegile Fernandez?a point government officials themselves concede. "We have produced 113 employers in court in the last two years, but they have never been convicted," sighs Ishak Mohamed, the Immigration Department's senior enforcement officer. "They have very good lawyers...
Bilal looks down at the bloody corpse of his neighbor, Mohammed Ishak, and says: "They must have hated him very much to put so many bullets into his body." Like other residents of Alue Bieng, an idyllically beautiful village in Indonesia's war-ravaged province of Aceh, Bilal heard the shots in the early hours of June 3 but didn't dare to venture outside until well past dawn. The sight that greeted him is so commonplace in Aceh as to be almost banal: Ishak, a 51-year-old farmer who was standing watch over Alue Bieng that night...
...Later that morning, Ishak's 20-year-old daughter covers him with a pink print cloth, which quickly turns crimson. The womenfolk then gather around the body and chant the Islamic prayer for the dead. The victim's mother and his 15-year-old son watch while his wife, Ainal Mardiah, sobs quietly. "I can't go home again, I'm very scared," she says over and over...
...Ishak's wife has good reason to be scared, as do many of the province's 4 million residents. Although the Indonesian government formally lifted a yearlong state of martial law in Aceh in mid-May, there has been no discernible difference in the lives?and deaths?of ordinary Acehnese. The army has yet to announce the withdrawal of any of the approximately 50,000 soldiers and police sent in to crush the separatist rebels of the Free Aceh Movement (also known by its Indonesian acronym G.A.M.). Bloody clashes are an almost daily occurrence, with security forces claiming to have...