Chronicle 2004: The unreported year

January
KASHMIR Islamic separatist leaders meet with the Indian Government for the first time in 15 years.
BANGLADESH Police in Khagrachari fire teargas at a demonstration of indigenous refugees still not rehabilitated since returning from camps in India in 1997.
INDIA The fourth World Social Forum takes place in Mumbai; 100,000 people gather at the four-day event to claim ‘Another World is Possible’.

February
INDIA Monsanto is awarded a patent on Nap Hal wheat, used for making the north Indian staple chapati, developed by generations of Indian farmers crossbreeding crops.
BANGLADESH An independent commission is set up to investigate corruption charges but is condemned by Transparency International as a ‘cynical deception’.

MARCH
PAKISTAN tests its longest range surface-to-surface missile yet, the Shaheen II – capable of reaching all of India’s major cities.

APRIL
SRI LANKA Backed openly for the first time by the Tamil Tiger rebels, the Tamil National Alliance wins 22 seats in the 225-seat parliament. President Kumaratunga’s United Peoples Freedom Alliance wins with 105 seats.
INDIA The Supreme Court orders the retrial of 21 Hindus acquitted of murdering 12 people during religious riots in 2002 after prosecution witnesses received death threats and withdrew their statements.
PAKISTAN Abdul Qadeer Khan, father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, is accused of helping African countries develop weapons in exchange for uranium.

MAy
AFGHANISTAN Three young schoolgirls are poisoned, apparently by militants angered at the Karzai Government’s reversal of a Taliban ban on female education.
NEPAL Prime Minister Surya Bahadur Thapa resigns. Protesters say his departure will ease talks with the royal regime on a return to democracy.
INDIA The Congress Party wins the election but Sonia Gandhi refuses the premiership following a Hindu nationalist campaign against her foreign origins. The new premier is Manmohan Singh.
PAKISTAN Opposition politician Shahbaz Sharif is deported while hundreds of pro-democracy protestors are arrested in Lahore. But the Commonwealth decides Pakistan has made enough progress on democratic reform to be readmitted.

JUNE
CHAGOS ISLANDS The British Government bars thousands of residents of Diego Garcia and outlying islands from returning home, overturning a previous high court judgment without debate. The islanders lost their homes to a US air and naval base over 30 years ago.
INDIA The new Congress Government announces plans to rewrite misleading history textbooks written by Hindu nationalist scholars. Hindu hardliners attack cinemas showing a film about a lesbian couple, smashing windows and ripping up posters.

JULY
AFGHANISTAN Three Americans accused of detaining and abusing Afghans in a freelance anti-terrorist operation appear in court in Kabul, insisting that the Pentagon knew.
INDIA The Supreme Court orders the Government to distribute money to over half a million victims of the Bhopal tragedy who have waited 20 years for compensation.
SRI LANKA The rebel Tamil Tigers continue to abduct former child soldiers for their forces, according to Human Rights Watch.

AUGUST
AFGHANISTAN Médecins Sans Frontières pulls out due to worsening security. Since March 2003, 32 aid workers have been killed here.
INDIA A bomb kills 16 people, mostly schoolchildren during an Independence Day parade in Assam. The banned United Liberation Front of Asom is suspected.
BANGLADESH Riots break out after a grenade attack on a rally of the opposition Awami League in Dhaka kills 19 and wounds hundreds more.
NEPAL A blockade by Maoist rebels cuts off the capital, Kathmandu causing widespread panic.

SEPTEMBER
INDIA 70 Indian environmental organizations and campaigners launch a drive to pressure the Government to adhere to environmental norms rather than clearing projects damaging to the country’s ecology.
PAKISTAN Fisherpeople observe a one-day hunger strike against a World Bank-backed drainage project that they claim will damage coastal livelihoods and biodiversity.

OCTOBER
BANGLADESH Tricycle rickshaw drivers call a dawn-to-dusk strike to protest against plans to ban them from the capital, causing chaos for Dhaka’s commuters.

NOVEMBER
BURMA The ruling military junta sacks the Prime Minister, General Khim Nyunt, seen by southeast Asian leaders as the best hope for returning the country to democracy.
NEPAL Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba gives a two-month deadline to Maoist forces to restart peace talks which collapsed last year over the demand for a new constitution.
SRI LANKA The Tamil Tiger rebels threaten to return to war unless the Government agrees to peace talks based on their blueprint for self-rule.

DECEMBER
PAKISTAN A bill strengthens the law against ‘honour’ killings, making the death penalty the maximum punishment. But killers can still buy their freedom by compensating the victim’s relatives.
THE REGION A tsunami caused by an earthquake in the Indian Ocean kills an estimated 40,000 people in India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and renders hundreds of thousands homeless.

REPRESSION IN PARADISE (below). The image on the right is not one normally associated in Western minds with the Maldives, which is known primarily as an Indian Ocean holiday destination guaranteeing sun, sand and scuba-diving. But it reflects the political turmoil this year in the islands, in which the 26-year autocratic rule of President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom has been challenged by mass demonstrations. Gayoom, an old crony of Saddam Hussein, first encountered serious trouble in September 2003 when riots followed the death of a young prisoner beaten by guards. The protest led to the launch in November that year of the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP). The Party had to be launched in exile in Sri Lanka yet in May 2004, when elections were held for the Special Majlis (the body that was to draft a new constitution), the MDP won 30 of the 42 seats contested.

Gayoom has paid lipservice to the idea of democratic reform but in practice has opted for repression. The detention of five leading dissidents led to the biggest protest in Maldivian history on 12 and 13 August – which in turn led to the arrest of 300 more dissidents, the imposition of a state of emergency that lasted until 10 October and a night-time curfew which is still in place. According to Amnesty International at least 69 people are still in indefinite detention and fresh evidence of torture and ill-treatment continues to emerge. The democratic movement will not go away – but it would certainly benefit from international pressure and support which, in a country economically dependent on Western visitors, is bound to count for a great deal.

Photo: Friends of Maldives

PALACES IN THE MAKING (below). There was a justifiable media focus on the elections in Afghanistan in October, which installed the interim leader Hamid Karzai as President. For all that there were clear instances of fraud, Karzai’s overall legitimacy is beyond doubt. But the successful election was a story that suited the US and its allies. The continued resistance of the Taliban in many areas of the country– and of the warlord Rashid Dostum in the north – were less comfortable topics.

Still less comfortable is the story behind this photograph, which shows Sherpur, a neighbourhood in Kabul where people have been forced out of their homes by the Karzai Government, more or less at gunpoint, to make room for the luxurious villas of influential commanders. Most of them are involved in the drug trade. The original inhabitants of the area have not, needless to say, been compensated.

Photo: Robert Knoth / Panos

FERRY THROUGH THE FLOOD (below). Major floods in Bangladesh, Nepal and eastern India in July and August were barely acknowledged by the international media. Here a Bangladeshi man pulls his mother and father through the flood waters near Bogura. The normal monsoon rains were exacerbated by the bursting of a dam upstream in Bhutan: 40 of Bangladesh’s 64 districts were flooded, dozens of people were killed and millions rendered homeless. The country’s disaster-management minister said that 20 million people would need food aid for five months because of the damage to crops and jobs.

Photo: GMB Akash / Panos , who also took the front cover picture.