YouSaid · the spoken record

Maradiaga

lines on the record
10
first
2018-09-05
most recent
2018-09-05
sittings or episodes
1
sources
un-security-council

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “That will require the engaged attention of the United Nations if we are to ensure peace and security before it is too late. With regard to the Security Council's mandate, I call on it to consider adopting a specific resolution on the critical situation in Nicaragua. I ask the members to allocate resources and create monitoring mechanisms for Nicaragua and for disarming the paramilitary groups. I recommend that the United Nations support the process of restoring the rule of law in Nicaragua. I leave the Council with the cry of a country that while small in size is huge in its desire to have a new opportunity for peace andjustice.”

    2018-09-05 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8340 (2018) · source

  2. “I realize that there are many crises in the world and that the international community must prioritize its efforts, and I sympathize with that. However, for more than a decade, Daniel Ortega's regime has benefited from being under the international radar. We are currently facing a situation that, in addition to causing unprecedented widespread atrocities within Nicaragua, is creating dangerous instability in a volatile region of the world. This is not just another human rights crisis that can be resolved internationally. This is a State policy of mass and systematic violence against unarmed civilians. A time bomb is ticking in Nicaragua. Crimes against humanity are taking place every day, creating an environment conducive to an internal conflict of major proportions that we still have time to prevent.”

    2018-09-05 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8340 (2018) · source

  3. “Masked gunmen, accompanied by police, burst into private Nicaraguan homes without a warrant. They consider possessing a blue-and-white national flag to be a crime. Human rights defenders and religious leaders of all denominations are being persecuted and threatened with death. Paramilitary groups have been invading private homes, arresting citizens at random and taking away their mobile phones. The slightest trace on a phone of an anti-Government tweet or message means imprisonment and serious forms of torture, such as genital amputation or the forced anal penetration of men and women using objects such as guns and rifles. There are doctors in Washington, DC, today who are testifying under oath about the diagnoses that they have made ofthat type of violation. Nicaragua is becoming a country without hope.”

    2018-09-05 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8340 (2018) · source

  4. “More than 300 people, which is a highly conservative estimate, have been murdered, including a friend of mine, the journalist Angel Gahona, who was shot in the head at the beginning of the crisis. My colleagues Cristhian Fajardo and his wife Maria Adilia are in jail, as are the leaders of the Movimiento Campesino, Medardo Mairena and Pedro Mena, as well as Irlanda Jerez and the university leaders Levis Rugama, Yaritza Mairena, Victoria Obando, Edwin Carcache and Alejandro Centeno. Another 240 other activists have been imprisoned for participating in the protests, and the number of political prisoners continues to rise. Today Nicaragua has become a huge prison that pretends to be under control. However, an atmosphere of terror and indiscriminate persecution reigns every day.”

    2018-09-05 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8340 (2018) · source

  5. “In a video that they recorded themselves, which went viral, they released me unharmed, saying, "Thank Commander Ortega that you are still alive." They said they had not yet been given permission to kill me. However, on 13 July, while I was meeting privately with students in the city of Leon, more than 30 people broke into the meeting room and beat me up, leaving me with several fractures. As I was being attacked by these Government-associated groups, I felt the same agony that I had experienced at 12 years old when I swam a freezing river to cross the border, with the feeling that I had lost the right to live peacefully in the country of my birth. Despite the pain, I now have the opportunity to tell the Council my story, while the voices of hundreds of other Nicaraguans have been silenced forever.”

    2018-09-05 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8340 (2018) · source

  6. “I was one of the first to be officially denounced, on 3 June, when the police apparatus that serves the Government accused me of terrorism and organized crime while I was in Washington, DC, meeting with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. That accusation has been a kind of death sentence for me, because since then I have received hundreds of death threats, police and paramilitaries have surrounded my home and office, and my family members have been intimidated. On 11 July, a group of at least 20 paramilitaries stopped my car. When they recognized me, they made me get out and detained me and my companions, keeping AK-47 rifles and other high-calibre weapons trained on me the whole time. They asked me ifI was ready to die.”

    2018-09-05 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8340 (2018) · source

  7. “Over the next few weeks, I watched in awe as tens of thousands of people peacefully took to the streets to protest for their civil rights. In April, like thousands of Nicaraguans, Ijoined several ad hoc groups to help the wounded who had not been admitted to public hospitals. I do not have time today to talk about the pain of seeing the bodies of so many young people shot by snipers. On 30 May, at the Mother's Day march, I saw a teenager's brains blown out by a bullet before my very eyes. I personally managed to survive an attack on 28 May, when paramilitaries tried to shoot me a few yards from my office. One of the most worrying aspects of this crisis is the criminalization of civil protest through the enactment of an anti-terrorism law that classifies any civic act of protest as terrorism.”

    2018-09-05 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8340 (2018) · source

  8. “A short time later, I returned to Nicaragua and started an academic programme to train emerging youth leaders in the principles of the culture of peace in my country. It was through my contacts as a university professor that, on the night of 20 April, I received desperate calls from several of my students. One of those calls, with the noise of firearms in the background, still tears at my heart. They said to me: "Professor, they are killing us - help us". That day, hundreds of young university students sought refuge in Managua Cathedral after Nicaraguan police shot at protesters indiscriminately. That afternoon, Alvaro Conrado, a 15-year-old boy, who went out to give the students water, died from a gunshot wound to the neck.”

    2018-09-05 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8340 (2018) · source

  9. “I know from my own experience the consequences of a conflict that spins out of control and expands throughout a region when it could have been prevented using the instruments allowed by the Charter of the United Nations and the inter-American system. When I was 12 years old, I lived in a refugee camp in the state of Texas, after having crossed alone, as an undocumented person, the border between Mexico and the United States of America, trying to escape the armed conflict in Nicaragua. I returned to Nicaragua in 1990, full of enthusiasm for the reconstruction of my country. The experiences of my childhood defined my commitment to human rights, disarmament and non-violence. It was thus that, in 2003, I became a Disarmament Fellow thanks to a United Nations programme here at Headquarters.”

    2018-09-05 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8340 (2018) · source

  10. “We thank you, Madam President, for your leadership in placing the situation in Nicaragua on the agenda. Few nations of the world have had such a difficult history of seeking peace as Nicaragua. The armed conflict that we suffered in the 1980s, which caused thousands of deaths and destabilized all of Central America, is still fresh in our memory. In that cyclical history of conflicts, Nicaragua has enjoyed the help of the international community when too much blood has already been spilled. I come before the Council to convey the urgency of a situation that threatens the peace and security of an entire region, as can be clearly deduced from the more than 23,000 Nicaraguan refugees who, in less than four months, have had to leave for neighbouring Costa Rica .”

    2018-09-05 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8340 (2018) · source