006. Group or mass petitions

In the 1980's, after the Khmer Rouge lost control of much of Cambodia, displaced people flowed back into the capital city of Phnom Penh. Returnees created new settlements and villages when vacant housing was no longer available. One group of returnees consisted of traditional musicians looking for a central location to resume teaching their art. This group of musicians moved into the Bassac Theatre close to the Bassac and Mekong Rivers. Gradually more returnees gathered around this community and in 2005 the Dey Krahorm village consisted of an estimated 800 families.

In 2001, Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois and Rep. Howard Berman of California introduced a piece of proposed legislation named The DREAM, (acronym for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act. Under the proposed Dream Act undocumented immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally under parental supervision, would have an opportunity to obtain conditional U.S. citizenship with the possibility of achieving full citizenship upon completion of the process and by finally completing either two years of college or two years in the military.

The Irrawaddy river, the largest in Burma, begins at the confluence of the Mali Hka and N’Mai Hka rivers in the northern state of Kachin.

Seal hunting, or the slaughter of seals (depending on with whom you are speaking) has become a very controversial topic over recent years. In the past, seals were just another resource used by those living in Northern and more remote communities. The meat was used for human consumption and the oil for lamps and cooking. These particular products, as well as the pelts themselves were exported to other countries for further use. The hunt of these animals was also beneficial to ensure the number of cod fish remained high.

The Doukhobors are a group of Russian peasants who left the Orthodox Church following a schism and were named “douko-borets," meaning “spirit wrestlers.” Their Christian beliefs led them to adopt principles of pacifism, communal living and the sharing of the possessions, the rejection of church and state authorities, and vegetarianism.

During the 1970s, when Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship, the proposal of building several hydroelectric dams on the Xingu River was first presented. These dams were suggested as a way to increase energy supply to Brazil. The location of these proposed dams, along the Xingu River, was within the Brazilian Amazon in the region of Para, Brazil. The proposal was eventually put on hold, due to controversy regarding the dams’ potential location on idigenous land.

In 1989 The Fund for Animals, an organization of activists committed to protecting animals, focused their attention on the Hegins Shoot held annually in Hegins, Pennsylvania. The Hegins Shoot, also known as The Fred Coleman Memorial Shoot, was a Labour Day tradition that dated back to the 1930s. During the event, participants tried to shoot as many pigeons as possible; who ever could shoot the most won the event. Instead of naturally hunting for pigeons, the birds were held in cages and released in front of a firing squad. The event killed roughly 5,000 pigeons per year.

On February 23, 1991, a military group by the name of the NPKC, or National Peace Keeping Council, which was composed of Military academy graduates, sought to overthrow the current government in Thailand, which they believed to be a “parliamentary dictatorship”. NPKC quickly gained control over the government and formed the political party known as Samakki Tham.

In North America and Western Europe in the later half of the 19th century, women began to campaign in earnest for the right to vote. At this time women were second-class citizens. The 1870s were the start of the movement in Canada, but there were few Canadians that supported the women’s right to vote. Two of the groups that lead the way in Manitoba were the Icelandic feminists and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). The Icelandic women had settled near Gimli. These women established the first suffragette associations.

Coal is the main commercial energy in India and the government launched an internal improvement program in the early 2000s to bring energy to the hundreds of millions of people in the country without technology and other modern conveniences. Andhra Pradesh was the most ambitious state in this endeavor, as it proposed for 7 major and 30 smaller coal-powered power stations.

The First Nations people respect water and consider it a live giving force.

A heavy monsoon season had destroyed agricultural crops and led to a plague epidemic claiming nearly 10 percent of the population of Ahmedabad in 1917. During the period of intense plague outbreak from August 1917 to January 1918, the workers of the textile mills in Ahmedabad were given ‘plague bonuses’ (some of which were as much as 80 percent of the workers’ wage) in an attempt to dissuade the workers from fleeing during an outbreak of a plague.

On Valentine's Day 2011 Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker proposed his Budget Repair Bill.  This bill would eliminate the ability for several labor unions to collectively bargain with the state.  

The bill would also limit groups allowed to bargain to be able to negotiate only base wages for their members.  Additionally, this bill forced state employees to increase the percentage they would pay for health insurance from 6% to 12%, and retirement pension from less than 1% to 5.8%.  

Thailand is one of the world's largest exporters of shrimp, with customers all over the globe including the US, Europe and Australia. Walmart's purchases of Thai shrimp provided around 70 percent of the US market.

On 23 January 2012 Keo Ratha, a Cambodian migrant worker at the Phatthana Seafood Factory in Thailand, contacted the Cambodian newspaper Phnom Penh Post to call attention to poor working conditions and broken contractual agreements with the factory and CDM Trading Manpower, the company which recruited hundreds of Cambodians to work at the factory.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia, is situated on the confluence of four rivers: the Upper and Lower Mekong rivers, the Bassac River and the Tonle Sap river. The surrounding area is flat and low-lying, subject to annual flooding. Natural lakes formed as the rivers changed course over time and communities grew up around the edges of these lakes, using them for fishing and aquatic agriculture. 

Beginning in 1948, the white “apartheid” government of South Africa forced the black majority to live as second-class citizens, condemned to poverty and restricted in their freedoms by a system of legalized oppression.  On the other side of the globe, in the 1970s, progressive activists in the United States found themselves absent a cause after the end of the civil rights movement and Vietnam War.  The blatant atrocity of apartheid seemed a good target.  Activists realized that American corporations were supporting the apartheid regime by operating subsidiaries in South Afric

Walpole was a maximum-security prison in South Walpole, Massachusetts. The campaign by prisoners under the National Prisoners Reform Association (NPRA) to take control of Walpole Prison, with support from citizen observers, formed part of a larger movement of opposition to cruelties of the prison system. At the time, prison abolition was on the agenda in U.S. society as an idea to consider. A 1971 prisoner takeover at Attica Prison acted as a lightning bolt by showing the horror of the prison yard. The NPRA emerged on a national level in this context.

Like students at many other colleges and universities at the turn of the millennium, students at Macalester College began to react against sweatshop and anti-union corporations that supplied the school store with apparel in 2000.  Inspired by student activism at Duke University the previous year and a highly publicized sit-in at the University of Pennsylvania the previous month, Macalester students escalated their campaign on Monday morning, March 6, with a sit-in on the steps of the President’s office.  

In December 1994, the city of Baltimore passed a city ordinance mandating that employees of companies receiving city contracts be paid a living wage (defined as a wage that keeps a family of four above the federally determined poverty level adjusted yearly for cost of living increases and inflation).

In 1917, the government of Alfredo Gonzalez Flores was overthrown in a coup d'état, wherein Minister of War Federico Tinoco seized power and appointed his brother, Jose Joaquin Tinoco, the new Minister of War. During this time the Tinoco regime severely curtailed civil liberties and the freedom of the press and assembly.

In 2011, the Independent Electoral Commission of Benin organized a new electronic voting system for the upcoming presidential election, which would require voters to be pre-registered in order to fill out their ballots. The Commission registered people by going door to door in 77 different Beninese counties. This method didn’t prove to be effective enough however, as around 1.3 million Beninese citizens were still not registered to vote. Many questioned the credibility of the voters role when such a large number of voters were unregistered by the end of February (close to election time).

Artificial baby milks—so called “infant formula”—became widespread commercial product during the early decades of the twentieth century. Among many companies involved, Nestlé’s was the biggest promoter, controlling more than 40% of the estimated $1.72 billion market. Nestle aggressively pursued the interest from infant formula with indiscriminate marketing. The marketing that evoked popular indictment was their promotion of infant formula in the Third World.

In South Korea, President Rhee Syngman of the Liberal Party won the March 1960 election with 88.7% of the votes. This implausible result was the result of election fraud: the day of the election the Liberal Party had stuffed ballots, switched ballots, and removed opposition ballots. On the eve of balloting, the police had also fired upon a group of Democratic Party supporters, killing eight. South Koreans in the city of Masan protested against the fraudulent election.

Having overfished their own fish stocks, European and other foreign countries have turned to African waters to sustain their fishing industries. At the time of this campaign, the EU had Fisheries Partnership Agreements (FPA) with seven West African countries including Mauritania and Mozambique and had an FBA with Senegal that the EU discontinued in 2006. The EU also had a Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) that managed the exploitation of living aquatic resources and ensured sustainable economic, environmental and social conditions.

South Korea had its 16th general election on 13 April 2000, and its outlook was not bright for many people. Many predicted that the new election would not diverge much from the scenes of the last election in 1996, which was largely problematic. Despite the democratic transformation since 1987, some incumbents and authority figures solidified their power through undemocratic means. Corruption was not hard to find in the election. Some played into and boosted the existing regionalist sentiments that had been largely shaped by the military dictatorship of the past.