There has been an eruption over the last few months from media agencies across the world reporting atrocities born out of ‘The Arab Spring.’ From the attacking and murdering of peaceful protestors, illegal detention of non-violent resisters calling for change in undemocratic regimes- the words Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen and many others countries from the current Arab uprising spring to mind. However, with news reports surrounding the current Middle East unrest-(and even this is heavily restricted and censored)- it begs the question as to how many other parallel situations, facing exactly the same sorts of human rights abuses are going ignored?

The Centre for Public Policy Analysis has released news of attacks on Viet-Hmong protestors who similarly are those in the Arab world, are demonstrating for the protection and promotion of their fundamental human rights and freedoms.

For over 30 years, the Vietnamese Government have continued to subject the Degar people, a peaceful ethnic minority Christian group, to arbitrary arrests, beatings and forced denunciations of their religion, with little or no repercussions at all. Seeking political autonomy and freedom to practice their religion, outside of the communist rule, the Degar people face continuous oppression and restrictions to living their lives, every day.

As the indigenous peoples of the Central Highlands of Vietnam, they are also sometimes referred to as the Montagnard people, which means ‘’mountain people’’, taken from the French colonial period in Vietnam. The Degar people constantly face the onslaught of rising communist ambitions, and the consequence of not adhering to the Vietnamese government’s demands. Since the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese have grown increasingly suspicious of the Degar people due to their Christian faith being a reason to cause them to sympathise with the French and Americans.

Bangladesh, since 2008, has been working to introduce the national ID card. This would ensure that the Bangladeshi population enrol into education and find jobs through a channel that would be somewhat more ‘legitimate’ than one that has been employed since the onset of Bangladesh, namely through bribes and monetary persuasion.

However the Rohingyans, a group of people who have been thrown out of Burma by the junta due to their ‘non-adherence’ to the Burmese culture, will be negatively affected by this action. Fleeing to Bangladesh from the mid-90’s, they now have set refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar and Teknaf where officially 200,000 reside in.

Following the state of emergency declared in October 1952, a violently aggressive counter insurgency was fought till 1960. Within this time official statistics say that 11,000 Mau Mau and other rebels were killed whilst just 32 white settlers during the emergency rule period. However, unofficial sources report a much higher number of deaths. The Kenyan Human Rights Commission says 90,000 Kenyans were executed during the uprising and 160,000 were detained in appalling conditions. Despite ambiguity as to the number of deaths during the bloody conflict, one thing remains clear; the UK authority’s gross misconduct towards rebellion detainees. It is reported that the detainees ‘were subjected to arbitrary killings, castrations, sexual abuse, forced labour, starvation and violence from camp guards’. This seems even harder to deny given the discovery of thousands of documents outlining the British army’s repressive tactics during the regime, which are soon be to exposed in a landmark UK case recently brought to court.

The foreign governments in agreement over the need for direct action to prevent a civilian massacre in Libya, could be felled by their own mission statement: to protect civilian lives and uphold the will of the people. Intervention by a superior external military force must by definition overtake the agency of the Libyan population, and, if ground enforcement is deemed necessary, the foreign intervention may subjugate the people’s will to its own military authority. Even if this is done in order to effect the will of the people by handing victory to the widely supported rebel forces, the conflict may drag on, support may splinter, and, once involved on the ground and for the long term, the allied forces may be blamed by the civilian population for the perpetuation of a conflict that would devastate their country, and for civilian casualties which would surely become inevitable over the course of the intervention.