“Captured Viet Cong. A Viet Cong prisoner captured during Operation Double Eagle, 20 miles south of Quang Ngai, Vietnam is brought into the collection area by Marines. Prisoners are blindfolded and tied to prevent escape attempts. The card on the prisoner’s black pajama shirt relates to circumstances of his capture.: 02/01/1966”

Over the course of the war, tens if not hundreds of thousands of
Vietnamese were detained by U.S. and allied South Vietnamese forces. For some it was only a minor inconvenience: they were held for a few hours, questioned, and then released.  Some were forced to spend a day baking in the sun, often with a burlap sack over their heads, but still escaped relatively unscathed. For many other Vietnamese, though, being detained would quickly turn into a nightmare ordeal of slaps, punches, kicks, sexual assaults, electric shocks, and the “water-rag” treatment or water torture — known today as waterboarding.

Shilpa Jamkhandikar at Reuters writes:

“If you thought the Delhi gang rape would cause a serious debate on women’s rights in India, you’d be half right. Let’s look at the other half: last December’s brutal incident seems to have put a spell on India’s politicians, holy men and otherwise educated people.

From suggesting that the rape victim should have called her rapists ‘brother’ to blaming her stars, plenty of reasons cited for the crime lay the blame on the women whom men brutalize, or portray women in ways that reveal our skewed attitude toward women and their place in our society. When given an opportunity to figure out ways to improve the  education and behavior of men, and thus try to reduce the  number of rapes that occur in India, many people revert to the  more traditional method: limit the rights of women.”

(Read the full article at: Reuters — Shilpa Jamkhandikar, “Short skirts, bad stars and chow mein: why India’s women get raped” | India Insight)

Over the course of the Vietnam War, tens if not hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were detained by U.S. and allied South Vietnamese forces. For some it was only a minor inconvenience: they were held for a few hours, questioned, and then released.  Some were forced to spend a day baking in the sun, often with a burlap sack over their heads, but still escaped relatively unscathed. For many other Vietnamese, though, being detained would quickly turn into a nightmare ordeal of slaps, punches, kicks, sexual assaults, electric shocks, and the “water-rag” treatment or water torture — known today as waterboarding.

“Van-Tuong, Vietnam….Staff Sergeant R.E. Steffy binds and blindfolds a Viet Cong who was taken prisoner.: 08/18/1965”

Over the course of the Vietnam War, tens if not hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were detained by U.S. and allied South Vietnamese forces. For some it was only a minor inconvenience: they were held for a few hours, questioned, and then released.  Some were forced to spend a day baking in the sun, often with a burlap sack over their heads, but still escaped relatively unscathed. For many other Vietnamese, though, being detained would quickly turn into a nightmare ordeal of slaps, punches, kicks, sexual assaults, electric shocks, and the “water-rag” treatment or water torture — known today as waterboarding.

“Vietnam….Viet Cong prisoners are being led to a helicopter landing zone for evacuation to the regimental collection point. 07/25/1965”

Photographs from the My Lai massacre, March 16, 1968.

In early August 1967, I arrived in I Corps, the northernmost district of American military operations in what was then South Vietnam.  I was there to report for the New Yorker on the “air war.” The phrase was a misnomer.  The Vietnamese foe, of course, had no assets in the air in the South, and so there was no “war” of that description.

There was only the unilateral bombardment of the land and people by the fantastic array of aircraft assembled by the United States in Vietnam.  These ranged from the B-52, which laid down a pattern of destruction a mile long and several football fields wide; to fighter bombers capable of dropping, along with much else, 500-pound bombs and canisters of napalm; to the reconfigured DC-3 equipped with a cannon capable of firing 100 rounds per second; to the ubiquitous fleets of helicopters, large and small, that crowded the skies. All this was abetted by continuous artillery fire into “free-fire” zones and naval bombardment from ships just off the coast.

By the time I arrived, the destruction of the villages in the region and the removal of their people to squalid refugee camps was approaching completion. (However, they often returned to their blasted villages, now subject to indiscriminate artillery fire.) Only a few pockets of villages survived. I witnessed the destruction of many of these in Quang Ngai and Quang Tinh provinces from the back seat of small Cessnas called Forward Air Control planes.

— Jonathan Schell, Seeing the Reality of the Vietnam War, 50 Years Late

Photographer: Larry Burrows, Vietnam, 1966

— Jonathan Schell, Seeing the Reality of the Vietnam War, 50 Years Late

Photographer:Larry Burrows, Vietnam, 1966

Cambodian men continued to be frequently trafficked for labour exploitation purposes according to a report by the International Organization for Migration (IOM).  According to the United Nations’ Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking, “thousands of Cambodians are trafficked annually. Cambodia is the sixth most frequent country of origin for trafficking victims after Ukraine, Haiti, Yemen, Laos and Uzbekistan.”
 

Indian women participate in a candlelight vigil protesting a leader of the ruling Congress Party on accusations he raped a woman in a village in Gauhati, India, Jan. 4, 2013. (Anupam Nath/AP)