ARCHIVED FORUM: Gurdwara Tapoban Sahib
Nanak, Dukhiya Sabh Sansaar!!
Posted by : Kulbir Singh
Date: 7/16/2004 5:55 am
A tragedy has occurred in South India, where about 75 little children have died and many have been injured after their school caught fire.
This world is a strange drama set by Vaheguru himself. In one house celebrations go on while in the next house people are crushed because of deaths of their beloved ones.
Babur Baani of Siri Guru jee very beautifully describes happiness in those houses whose members were saved while cries in those houses where members were killed. What a be-wafa sansaar this is. May Guru Sahib bless us with his Naam and Gurbani - the only eternal things in this world.
Daas,
Kulbir Singh
Have you seen my child,’ ask sobbing parents
Friday July 16 2004 15:32 IST
KUMBAKONAM: At 8.30 a.m. when Revathi left her son at Lord Krishna Middle School little did she know she will be back four hours later to look for his body.
There is shock on her face as she pleads with government officials, volunteers and towns people to locate her son.
She is not alone. Sobbing and wailing parents have been rushing past the badly charred bodies trying to find their children. They have only one question on their lips, "Have you seen my child?" Many of them have collapsed with exhaustion.
No one is sure if their son or daughter is alive or dead. And if their child is alive what is the state of injury.
Gauri, who had been rushing from ward to ward looking for her child Vignesh, now has a dazed look on her face. Her husband Selva was in a similar state of shock.
Another mother Chitra, whose son Karthikeyan was a student of Class 3, cannot stop wailing. Her anger is directed at authorities who did not allow her to enter the burning school building to save her child.
Ramachandran, whose daughter was a student of Class 3, is equally devastated. He told this website's newspaper correspondent, "I am a coolie. I sent my child to this school as I wanted her to study in an English medium school. Now look what has happened."
The children who had suffered minor injuries were in an equal state of shock. Kamali, who gained consciousness after an hour of tragedy, wanted to know where her father was.
A huge pall of grief has descended over Kumbakonam town, which is finding it hard to live with the tragedy.
The Students Federation of India has demanded the immediate arrest of the school's correspondent.
India school inferno kills dozens
bbc
The fire spread quickly to adjacent buildings
At least 75 children have died in a fire in a primary school in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
About 100 children were admitted to hospital suffering serious burns.
About 200 children were said to be in the affected primary section of the school in Kumbakonam, 300km (185 miles) south-west of state capital Madras.
The fire will again raise questions of school safety - correspondents say many India schools lack even basic firefighting equipment.
Reports say the children were on the top floor of the three-storey Lord Krishna school, with only one narrow staircase available for escape.
The bodies are so badly charred it's difficult to identify the children
Police official
Chaos and grief
Most of the victims were girls and some teachers were also reported to be among the dead.
"Thirty-two children have been admitted to hospital with serious injuries," a local official, J Radhakrishnan, said.
One witness to the fire, S Kalidas, told the Reuters news agency: "Parents were crying, beating their chests and calling out for their children.
"People looked scared. They were running around for help and there was complete panic."
Cause unclear
There are conflicting accounts of how the fire began.
Some say there was a short-circuit in the electrical system.
However a police official, S Natarajani, told the AFP news agency it was caused by "an open firewood stove in the kitchen of the school where the midday meal for the children was being cooked".
The free midday meal is part of a government scheme to encourage poorer families to send their children to school.
Mr Natarajani said the fire spread from the kitchen to the top floor.
It appears that the roof of the school, which was thatched, caught fire rapidly giving the children little chance of escaping.
Burning sections of the roof fell to the ground, setting alight an adjacent school building.
Some rescuers tried frantically to reach the top floor. Others used hoses to tackle the blaze but suffered from a lack of water.
Police sources said the fire destroyed five classrooms.
The blaze is said to have broken out at about 1100 local time (0530 GMT), according to initial reports.
The school is located in a very narrow street making it difficult for rescuers to reach the scene quickly.
Grief-stricken parents have gathered outside the hospitals and school and senior officials have rushed to the scene.
One local district official said the school taught a total of 900 children between the ages of six and 13.
He said the fire had now been put out.
Kumbakonam is a temple town on the banks of the Cauvery river in a fertile rice-growing delta.
The fire is the second major blaze in Tamil Nadu this year.
At least 46 people were killed in an inferno that swept a marriage hall in the temple town of Srirangam in January.
After a public outcry, authorities ordered the installation of proper fire safety systems in public buildings, an order which observers say has yet to be fully implemented.
Re: Nanak, Dukhiya Sabh Sansaar!!
Posted by : kar kirpaa sabh rayN thheevaa
Date: 7/16/2004 11:19 am
As world looks elsewhere, a slaughter unfolds in Sudan
-Source: telus.com
AL-FASHER, Sudan (AP) - They shot him in his house. They blew her apart with a bomb. They cut him to pieces with swords. They dragged her into the desert and raped her.
As the world's attention was turned to crises in the Middle East, a slaughter has raged for 17 months in Sudan's Darfur region. Arab gunmen on horses and camels, backed by bombers and helicopter gunships, have razed hundreds of black African villages, killed tens of thousands and driven more than one million from their homes.
"They say they don't want to see black skin on this land again," said Issa Bushara, whose brother and cousin were gunned down in front of their horrified families during an attack by the Janjaweed militia.
Now, with many more likely to die of hunger and disease in camps in Sudan and neighbouring Chad, international pressure is mounting on President Omar el-Bashir's government to end the carnage. U.S. and UN officials, haunted by memories of inaction in Rwanda a decade ago, have made a series of highly publicized visits to the region. This week, African leaders also called on Sudan to act.
Even so, word of more raids continues to filter through with the starving, exhausted and terrorized families that trickle everyday across the 600- kilometre border into Chad.
At the Kounoungo refugee camp, 80 kilometres from the Sudan border, Zenaba Ismail sits on a dirt floor. In her arms, she cradles her sister's sleeping infant.
Janjaweed fighters burst into their home early one morning and shot the child's pregnant mother in the stomach. The shooting induced labour, and she died while giving birth.
"He cries all the time, but I have no milk to give him," said the tall woman with traditional scars etched on her hallowed cheeks. "Every time I look at this child, I see my sister, and I can't stop the tears."
More victims of the raids are dying now from hunger, thirst and disease than in the killings, UN officials say. They have described the region as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
"We are late in Darfur. We have to admit that," UN Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland said on a visit last week.
He blamed government obstruction, the remoteness of the area, a failure to get adequate funding and preoccupation with the Iraq war, which made the world slow to respond to the unfolding disaster.
If humanitarian workers can't reach the estimated two million in desperate need, the death toll could surge to 350,000 by the end of the year - a conservative estimate, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The crisis developed from long-standing tensions between nomadic Arab herders and their farming neighbours. It became violent after two black African rebel groups took up arms in February 2003 over what they consider unfair treatment by the government in faraway Khartoum in their struggle over political influence and resources in Darfur.
The rebel groups and the refugees accuse the Sudanese government of arming the mostly Arab Janjaweed, a name that means "horsemen" in the local dialect. They point to systematic and co-ordinated attacks backed by Antonov airplanes, helicopter gunships and pickup trucks.
The government denies any complicity in the militia raids and says the warring sides are clashing over the region's scarce water and usable land.
Humanitarian Affairs Minister Ibrahim Hamid Mahmoud conceded some abuses may have taken place in Darfur, but insisted there was no "systematic, well-organized violence."
"The major problem for humanitarian activities is the rebels," he said.
Satellite photos acquired by USAID in June show that some 56,000 mud-brick houses with grass roofs have been torched in nearly 400 Darfur villages. The Janjaweed also burn down trees, steal food and cattle, and blow up wells and irrigation canals in a scorched-earth policy that human rights groups describe as "ethnic cleansing."
With few villages left, survivors escape the militias by hiding in nearby hills, foraging for food in the trees and sneaking back at night to use the few functioning wells.
But even this last refuge is being overrun.
Tous-a Abdel-Hadi's family survived a raid on their village only to lose three men when Janjaweed fighters overran their camp in the West Darfur hills.
"My son tried to hide in a cave, but they found him there and shot him," the aging woman said, wiping away tears of grief and relief moments after crossing a dried-up riverbed into Chad. "I wish he was with me now."
In another attack, Janjaweed caught three teenage girls, raped them and broke their legs, Abdel-Hadi's family said. Unable to travel, the girls stayed behind in the hills while their extended families made the long and dangerous trek to the border.
Travelling by night and sleeping during the day, they took nine days to reach safety. When they finally set foot in Chad, women in the group fell to their knees and wept. They were immediately surrounded by other refugees, among the approximately 15,000 living in the sand under thorn trees on the outskirts of the desert town of Bahai.
With a cry, 21-year-old Amani Adom recognized her 18-year-old cousin, Soureya Mohammed, among those who came to welcome them.
"It has been six months since we last saw each other," Adom said, as the two women hugged and cried. "I didn't know if she was alive or dead."
In April, when the world marked 10 years since the 1994 slaughter that killed at least 500,000 in Rwanda, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan warned that a new genocide could unfold in Sudan.
Since then, UN officials have shied away from such politically loaded terms, saying Janjaweed fighters appear to include members of some of the same three main ethnic groups targeted in the raids.
UN officials estimate that between 15,000 and 30,000 people have been killed. But some analysts put the figure much higher. Many victims were left where they fell, their families too frightened to stop to bury them.
While men are often shot on sight, women are being abducted and raped, refugees say.
Sakina Mohammed Idris, a 19-year-old student, said she was grabbed from her boarding school and taken with 41 other women and girls on a 21-day forced march through the desert.
"On the way, they would rape the girls and steal cattle," said the young woman, who was among the estimated 12,000 people living in makeshift shelters at Zam Zam camp, near the North Darfur town Al-Fasher. When the men tired of the girls, they were released.
"They spoiled me three times," Idris said sadly.
UN leaders say success in containing the violence and averting more deaths will depend on continued international pressure and vigilance.
"This is going to be a crisis for years to come," Egeland said.
"We are afraid that when the secretary general is gone . . . this crisis will be forgotten."
