Asia

“I was terrified. I kept screaming, and then he threatened to punch my baby through my stomach if I didn't stop,” said a pregnant woman from Kachin State, describing her rape at the hands of a Burmese government soldier.

“I was so afraid. All I could do was cry while he brutally raped me,” she said, sobbing.

The hostilities between the Burmese military and ethnic Kachin get worse every day and the abuses are much worse than reported by the news media based outside the country.

Women should voice demands about their rights during the popular uprisings sweeping the Arab world to avoid being short-changed by post-revolutionary governments, Iranian Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi said.

Afghan women activists are at risk of being sidelined at a key international conference on Afghanistan's future scheduled for December 5, 2011, in Germany, Human Rights Watch said today.

Ten civil society groups from Fiji, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, will receive small grants between US$2500 and US$10,000 in 2011 to continue peace building efforts in the Pacific region.

Eleven years since its adoption, once again, the international community will be debating progress towards implementing a UN commitment to ensure that women are included in peace deals.

Before US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton left the podium at the International Conference on Afghanistan in London on 28 January 2010, she pointed to four women wrapped in green scarves and clustered together in the corner of the crowded press conference room and asked them to stand up.

"The greatest lesson of the Arab Spring, whoever rises to power in these countries, is that if basic human rights are not respected, it is impossible to guarantee security to people”, reveals Bernard Sabella, a Catholic professor of sociology at Bethlehem University in Rome for the conference "Women agents of change in the South Mediterranean." The last Nobel peace prize, assigned to the Yemeni Tawakkul Karman (along with

Nagaland State Women Commission Chairperson Sano Vamuzo has said that the impact of conflict on women has become a huge topic particularly in the conflict-ridden regions of the world, and the northeast has in recent years become a focal point for research and study from various angles.

Hundreds of Yemeni women on Wednesday set fire to traditional female veils to protest the government's brutal crackdown against the country's popular uprising, as overnight clashes in the capital and another city killed 25 people, officials said.