Monthly Archives: April 2021

The killings of African Americans at the hands of police officers has continued unabated in the United States. In the past year, the deaths of Breonna Taylor in her bed and George Floyd by public asphyxiation are two of the most egregious.

As the officer who knelt on Floyds neck was being tried for the killing in court, another officer shot and killed Daunte Wright.

Scholarly research has begun to document the traumatic consequences of police killings on African Americans. One study finds the effects on Black males meet the criteria for trauma exposure, based on the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, used for psychiatric diagnoses.

Besides police use of force in North America, one of the trajectories of my research focuses on armed insurgency in sub-Saharan Africa. I am beginning to observe in the U.S. some of the social conditions necessary for the maturation and rise of an armed insurgency. The U.S. is at risk of armed insurgencies within the next five years if the current wave of killings of unarmed Black people continues.

To begin, the armed insurgencies would not have a defined organizational structure. They may look like Mexicos Zapatista movement or the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta in Nigeria.

Entities operating independently will spring up, but over time, a loose coalition may form to take credit for actions of organizationally disparate groups for maximum effect. There will likely be no single leader to neutralize at the onset. Like U.S. global counter-terrorism efforts, neutralizing leaders will only worsen matters.

Using research and contextual experience from the developing world to make predictions about the U.S. in this regard is apt. There are many interrelated conditions for the rise of an armed insurgency. None of them in and of itself can lead to an armed insurgency, but requires a host of variables within social and political processes.

Transgenerational oppression of an identifiable group is one of the pre-conditions for an armed insurgency, but this is hardly news. What the U.S. has managed to institute on a national and comprehensive scale is what sociologist Jock Young calls cultural inclusion and structural exclusion.

A strong sense of injustice, along with significant moments, events and episodes like the killings of Taylor and Floyd are also important.

The racialized trauma from police killings adds to the growing sense of alienation and frustration felt by African Americans, but police killings arent the only way they experience disproportionate death rates.

African Americans have the second highest per capita death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic: 179.8 deaths per 100,000 (second only to Indigenous Americans with 256.0 deaths per 100,000). They are also at a higher risk of death from cancer, for example. The pandemic has compounded these deaths, adding to the disproportionately high unemployment rate and the impact of layoffs during the pandemic.

There is another, related variable: The availability of people willing and able to participate in such insurgency. The U.S. has potential candidates in abundance. Criminal records sometimes for relatively minor offences that mar Black males for life, have taken care of this critical supply. One study estimates that while eight per cent of the U.S. general population has felony convictions, the figure is 33 per cent among African American males.

Some of these men may gradually be reaching the point where they believe they have nothing to lose. Some will join for revenge, others for the thrill of it and many for the dignity of the people they feel have been trampled on for too long. Although 93 per cent of protest against police brutality is peaceful and involves no major harm to people and property, there is no guarantee that future protests about new police killings will remain peaceful.

The legitimacy of grievances of Black Americans among their fellow citizens is also an important variable. Their grievances appear to have found strong resonance and increasing sympathy within the broader population. Many Latino, Native American and white people see the injustices against Black people and are appalled. Black Lives Matter protests are now major multicultural events, particularly among young adults.

Read more: Derek Chauvin trial begins in George Floyd murder case: 5 essential reads on police violence against Black men

A sense that there are no legitimate channels to address the grievances or that those channels have been exhausted is also crucial. This is evident in the failure to convict or even try police officers involved in several of the incidents. A grand jury could not indict the officer whose chokehold led to the death of Eric Garner, despite video evidence. Such cases have led to a troubling loss of trust in the criminal justice system.

Any anti-police insurgency in the U.S. will likely start as an urban-based guerrilla-style movement. Attacks may be carried out on sites and symbols of law enforcement. Small arms and improvised explosive devices will likely be weapons of choice, which are relatively easy to acquire and build, respectively. The U.S. has the highest number of civilian firearms in the world with 120.5 guns per 100 persons or more than 393 million guns.

Critical infrastructure and government buildings may be targeted after business hours. The various groups will initially seek to avoid civilian casualties, and this may help to garner a level of support among the socially marginal from various backgrounds. The public would be concerned but relatively secure in understanding that only the police are being targeted. Escalation may ensue through copycat attacks.

The U.S. government will seem to have a handle on the insurgency at first but will gradually come to recognize that this is different. African American leaders will likely be helpless to stop the insurgency. Anyone who strongly denounces it in public may lose credibility among the people. Authenticity would mean developing a way to accommodate the insurgents in public rhetoric while condemning them in private.

I am often amazed that many people appear unaware that Nelson Mandela was co-founder of uMkhonto we Sizwe, the violent youth wing of the African National Congress, which carried out bombings in South Africa. The rationale provided in court by Mandela regarding his use of violence is instructive. Mandela told a South African court in 1963:

I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.

To predict that an armed insurgency may happen in the U.S. is not the same as wishing for it to happen: It is not inevitable, and it can and should be avoided.

Police reform is a first step. A comprehensive criminal justice overhaul is overdue, including addressing the flaws inherent in trial by jury, which tends to produce mind-boggling results in cases involving police killings. Finally, the judgment in the trial of Derek Chauvin for George Floyds death will have an impact on the trajectory of any possible future events.

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The United States is at risk of an armed anti-police insurgency - The Conversation CA

On Wednesday, after more than three decades of trying, the House Judiciary Committee advanced HR40, a bill to explore paying reparations to Black Americans for centuries of racism and oppression dating to the beginning of American slavery in 1619. The vote was along party lines, with Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, accusing the Democrats who passed the measure of trying to take money from people who were never involved in the evil of slavery and give it to people who were never subject to the evil of slavery.

Jordans is a common refrain among Republican members of Congress any time reparations come up. And much of the American public agrees with him. Only one in five Americans supports reparations, according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll last summer.

But Jordans argument isnt just morally dubious; its misleading. Slavery is far from the only evil America needs to account for in the reparations debate.

One less known wrong is the federal governments role in enforcing and furthering housing segregation. As late as the 1950s, the Federal Housing Administration refused to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods while facilitating the construction of affordable suburbs for white families.

Examples of this federally supported discrimination abound in the Bay Area. Consider Daly City, where, as historian Richard Rothstein has documented, the FHA financed the development of the Westlake neighborhood on the condition that the area be restricted to whites. Once established, that color wall remained largely in force until the passage of the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Similarly segregated housing developments were built across the country with the guidance and direct participation of the federal government. The impacts, both social and financial, linger to this day.

Home values are a major component of the racial wealth gap between Black and white families in the United States. And historians have traced this gap directly to discriminatory housing policies, including those of the federal government. The average home price in Westlake is currently over $1.2 million, according to Redfin estimates a boon to those who inherited them and an overwhelming barrier to the vast majority of potential buyers.

Slavery was arguably the greatest evil perpetrated in the history of the American republic. But it was far from the only evil directed at Black Americans with the complicity of the federal government. Either through ignorance, willful obfuscation or some combination of the two, Republican legislators are ignoring that history in the debate surrounding reparations. And theyve been successful in influencing public opinion on the matter.

One of HR40s primary goals is to correct the record and educate Americans about racism throughout our history including but not limited to slavery. That lesson is clearly needed. The reparations debate might not be so contentious if it werent so uninformed.

This commentary is from The Chronicles editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.

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Editorial: Slavery isnt the only evil we need to talk about in reparations debate - San Francisco Chronicle

Papua New Guineas first post-independence leader, Michael Somare, died of pancreatic cancer on February 26, aged 84. Somare was the most important political figure in PNGs history, having served as prime minister from 1975 to 1980, 1982 to 1985 and 2002 to 2011.

His political career and legacy serve as another demonstration of the abject failure of bourgeois nationalism. Contrary to the various promises made by Somare and his colleagues in 1975 and afterward, the independent capitalist state in PNG has failed to advance the economic interests and social and democratic rights of the working class and rural masses. Still dominated by Australian imperialism, the countrys people remain among the most impoverished in the world, while PNGs extensive natural wealth, including minerals and energy, continues to be plundered for profit by transnational corporations.

Somare was born in 1936, to a father who worked as a police officer with the Australian colonial force. The PNG half-island had been under full Australian control since 1914, when Canberra seized on the eruption of World War I to take over the German-controlled northern part of the territory.

Somare inherited his fathers chiefly status within his East Sepik-based tribe in northern PNG. He trained as a teacher and spent seven years working in primary and secondary schools before becoming a radio and newspaper journalist.

He became active in politics after 1963 when authorities decided to bring down salary levels to what it was estimated the economy of the Territory could afford (in the words of one Australian official). This involved racist distinctions between pay rates for indigenous blacks and expatriate whites within the public service. The measure saw new local public service workers paid about half what white Australians were paid for doing the same work. Existing public service workers like Somare had their wages permanently frozen, with no possibility of raises through promotion.

With the new salary scheme it became practically impossible for any Papua New Guinean to move into one of the more comfortable houses, Somare explained in his 1975 autobiography. There was probably no other single issue that made Papua New Guineans more aware of the injustices of colonialism. [Sana: An Autobiography of Michael Somare, p. 43]

It is telling that the origins of the nationalist movement in Papua New Guinea lie not in a concern for the plight of the countrys masses under imperialist rule, but rather in the effort of a small and relatively privileged layer, including members of the chiefly elite, to advance its social and economic interests.

There was never a mass anti-colonial movement in PNG. Somare and his colleagues played an important role in blocking the entry of the masses into politics, fearing a challenge to their class interests and a disruption to their relationship with the Australian authorities. Somare occasionally drew the ire of the most reactionary and racist settler layers, but Canberra saw him as a trusted guarantor of Australian imperialist interests. This is why Somare was never imprisoned or harassed by colonial authorities in the pre-independence period.

His political career leading up to independence consisted of manoeuvring within the pseudo-parliamentary structure created by the Australian authorities as they prepared to hand over formal control. By the mid-1960s, previous Australian imperialist proposals to annexe PNG as a new state or territory had been abandoned. World imperialism was forging a new form of exploitative relationships with the previously colonised territories and the Australian government feared international censure if it was not seen to be making preparations for PNG independence.

A flag and national anthem were invented in 1961. Australia commissioned a World Bank survey of the territorys economy in 1965 (the greatest hopes in the mineral sector rest on general geological indications that the Territory, and western Papua in particular, may contain major petroleum fields, the report noted). It established the University of Papua New Guinea and Institute of Technology in 1967, with the express aim of training an indigenous ruling elite. A related initiative in 1964 saw the creation of a House of Assembly based on a restricted franchise, limited powers and reserved seats for white expatriates.

Somare won a seat on this body in 1968, after rising to prominence through his work in the public service trade unions. He was elected together with a group of fellow aspiring public servants who in 1967 had formed Pangu Pati (Papua and New Guinea Unity Party). Pangu was not a political party in the usually understood senseit had no mass membership, no clear program beyond aspiring to home rule for the territory, and its House of Assembly caucus lacked stability, as members variously joined or left the group. Somare nevertheless came to head a group that, as he described it, constituted a loyal opposition to the administration.

The establishment of formal independence

After the 1972 elections, Somare was able to muster a majority in the House of Assembly and was appointed chief minister.

This coincided with the election in Australia of Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who accelerated the preparations for independence. Whitlam was seeking to fashion a fresh face for Australian capitalism on the world stage amid growing denunciations of its White Australia immigration regime and racist treatment of the Aboriginal population. Whitlam saw PNG independence as a means of maintaining Australian hegemony in the South Pacific. Labor, he explained, had commitments, first, to our own national security, secondly to a secure, united and friendly Papua New Guinea.

Somare and his colleagues repeatedly expressed concerns that Whitlam was moving too quickly and suggested an extended home rule period before independence.

Somares record as chief minister from 1972 to 1975 underscores his conservative politics and commitment to the status quo. On the question of PNGs post-independence constitution, for example, he emulated Australias anti-democratic constitution, even retaining Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. He dismissed student demonstrations that broke out in Port Moresby when the constitution was announced, arguing that retaining the British monarchy was aimed at ensuring stability.

Ideologically, Somares Pangu Pati had been formed only on the basis of some vague sympathies for Tanzanias first post-colonial leader Julius Nyerere, together with an idealised promotion of the Papua New Guinean village.

After becoming chief minister, Somare issued Eight Aims in December 1972. These included a rapid increase in the proportion of the economy under the control of Papua New Guineans a more equal distribution of economic benefits including equalisation of income among people decentralisation of economic activity and an emphasis on agricultural development [and] a more self-reliant economy less dependent upon imported goods and services.

These aims, one historian explained, quickly became the cornerstone not only of economic planning but also a sort of instant government-sponsored ideology they acquired, or at least the government tried very hard to have them acquire, an almost religious sanctity. [Don Woolford, Papua New Guinea: Initiation and Independence, p. 220]

After independence, the Eight Aims were effectively dropped, along with associated talk within ruling circles of pursuing a non-capitalist, egalitarian village-based economic development. This had been nothing but a populist cover for Somares pursuit of a capitalist economic program, subordinated to the diktats of Australia and the US.

The first post-independence budget was unveiled by Somares finance minister, businessman Julius Chan, who declared that self-reliance now meant fiscal self-reliance, adding that easy days are over, with lower than expected Australian aid requiring austerity measures.

This set the stage for the subsequent domination of the PNG economy by transnational corporations that continues to the present day.

Somare in office

After taking office in nominally independent PNG, Somare headed a government that remained tied by a thousand strings to Australian imperialism. Canberras so-called aid funding comprised 56 percent of total PNG government spending in 1975, and by 1985, a decade after the end of colonial rule, this had only slightly declined to 33 percent.

During Somares first two terms in office (1975-1980, 1982-1985), very little, if anything, changed for the vast majority of PNGs population. There was no significant redistribution of wealth, change in land ownership, or shift in economic policy.

The first years of Papua New Guineas independence coincided with the collapse of the nationalist program of economic regulation and import substitution based on tariff protection that had been widely promoted and adopted in former colonial countries. From the late 1970s and 1980s, governments in the so-called Third World instead sought to integrate their economies into the capitalist world market by welcoming foreign investment on exploitative terms. This approach saw PNG transformed into a lucrative source of minerals and energy for many of the worlds largest transnational corporations.

Australian investments were protected after PNG independence, most importantly including Rio Tintos Panguna copper and gold mine that was opened in 1972 in the island province of Bougainville. The mine, one of the worlds largest copper sources, caused widespread environmental damage and triggered a separatist civil conflict in Bougainville that has not finally been resolved despite an end to fighting.

Just four years after independence, dissatisfaction with the government triggered student protests and workers strikes in Port Moresby. Tribal conflicts spiralled in some regions, including the Highlands. Extreme social inequality and lack of decent housing in the capital city also saw an increase in violent crime. Somare responded by declaring a state of emergency over much of the country in 1979, and threatening to deploy the military to crack down on strikes and demonstrations. This was only the first of many states of emergency, with the military repeatedly deployed in the Highlands and other parts of the country in the 1980s.

Somares foreign policy was squarely in line with US-Australia Cold War imperatives. His loyalty to the Western powers found one expression in his enthusiasm for the British monarchy. After independence he accepted a seat on the Queens Privy Council and a knighthood (afterwards insisting he be referred to as Sir Michael). Somare also sought to appease the neighbouring Indonesian military junta that had come to power in 1965-66 through an anti-communist bloodbath. Somare endorsed Indonesias brutal invasion and occupation of East Timor from 1975 and welcomed the Indonesian dictator Suharto to Port Moresby in 1979.

PNG politics increasingly became dominated by unstable cliques of capitalist politicians and independents based on narrow parochial appeals in a country fragmented by hundreds of language or wontok groups and motivated by the crumbs of office and personal aggrandisement. To provide some small measure of stability, governments formed on the basis of unwieldy and shaky alliances have been protected by a 30-month period of grace when no-confidence votes are not permitted.

Somare was installed for a third term as prime minister in 2002 on the basis of a coalition of 13 parties and 20 independent MPs. His final term in office (2002-2010) saw greater friction with Canberra. Somare regarded the emergence of China as a significant power in the region as an opportunity to gain financial assistance as well as some leverage with Australian imperialism.

Somare initially agreed to the Australian governments Orwellian-named Enhanced Cooperation Package,

$A1 billion neo-colonial program aimed at inserting Australian police, legal officials, economists and other state officials into key positions of power in Port Moresby. The program was modelled on the 2003 Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI), an Australian military-police takeover of that Pacific country.

By 2006-2007, however, Somare withdrew support for the operation, in part because of Australian government provocations on PNG soil during its illegal vendetta against Solomon Islands attorney general Julian Moti. Somare won a national election in 2007 amid threats of an Australian military intervention and regime change operation. In 2011, however, his continued orientation to Beijing under the banner of a Look North foreign and economic policy saw the Australian government endorse his illegal ousting by political rival Peter ONeill.

Somares legacy

Somares domestic record is marked by the failure of successive governments, his own included, to alleviate the enormous poverty and social inequality that wracks PNG.

The country exports cash cropsincluding coffee, cocoa, coconut and palm oilas well as minerals such as nickel, copper and gold, and also oil and gas. The aggregated value of these exported resources since independence would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars. This has not flowed, however, to ordinary Papua New Guineans but to many of the worlds largest mineral and energy firms, mostly Australian and Americanincluding ExxonMobil, Chevron, Barrick Gold, BHP Billiton, Newcrest Mining, and Rio Tinto.

A tiny elite layer within PNG has accumulated significant personal fortunes, Somare and his family among them. In 2011, it emerged that he and his children owned a number of Australian beachfront houses and luxury apartments. The former prime minister was repeatedly accused of corruption, including accepting multi-million dollar corporate bribes though this was always denied and not proved in court.

For most people, so-called capitalist development after independence has been a disaster. Many mining and energy extracting operations have produced environmental crisesmost notoriously at BHPs Ok Tedi copper and gold mine, where waste chemicals were dumped for more than a decade in the 1980s and 1990s, with more than 50,000 people affected by the poisoning of the Fly River eco-system.

The country remains among the worlds most impoverished. Average life expectancy is just 65 years. Diseases including polio, malaria, and HIV-AIDS ravage the country, contributing to an annual death toll of more than 15,000 children, or one in every 13 children. Around three-quarters of the 8.5 million people still depend largely on subsistence agriculture. Just over half have access to electricity, and only a small minority access reliable power.

Within PNG villages and towns, there are numerous serious social problems, including alcoholism and family violence. Around one-third of the population is out of school and unemployed, and only 62 percent of adults are literate. Within the cities and towns, young people are afflicted by mass unemployment, lack of basic facilities, and a shortage of educational opportunities.

It is a damning indictment of Somare and the entire venal capitalist class he represented that they have proven unable to meet the democratic aspirations and basic social needs of the vast majority of the population.

A new generation of Papua New Guinean workers and youth will in the next period turn toward a new political perspective, based on socialist internationalism and Leon Trotskys theory of Permanent Revolution. Workers in the country confront the same exploitation, often by the same transnational corporations, as their fellow workers throughout the Asia-Pacific and internationally. A unified struggle with workers internationallyabove all in the Pacific states, Australia and Indonesianeeds to be based on the fight for a government of the working class and rural masses that will establish genuine democracy and end neo-colonial oppression through socialist policies directed to the social needs of the population.

From global Pandemic to global class struggle

2021 International May Day Online Rally

Saturday, May 1, 1PM US Eastern Time. Streamed at wsws.org/mayday.

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Michael Somare (1936-2021) and the failure of bourgeois nationalism in Papua New Guinea - WSWS

Though Yashica Dutts Coming Out as a Dalit was published in 2019, its selection as the winner of the 2021 Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar is a reminder of the timelessness of its appeal. It holds ones attention from first to last, as she threads her life story through the horrors of Indian casteism, particularly casteism as practised against Dalits.

Dutts family story mirrors that of the most upwardly-mobile Dalits throughout India reservations in higher education and government jobs have been absolutely central to their success story. Dutt is the third generation of a family where her father and both her grandfathers had successful careers in government service, having gained their jobs through the affirmative action policy mandated by Ambedkars constitution.

Reservations have undoubtedly been the single most important policy instrument through which educated Dalits have been able to shake off their shackles. Fettered, above all, by poverty, and entrapped in despised, very low-paying manual jobs, Dalits have been deliberately immobilised in these dreadful jobs, of which the cleaning of sewers is the most deadly. Dalit men die virtually every day somewhere in India, while doing this work, lacking the mandatory safety gear that ought to be provided to them. Nobody else wants to do these jobs so impoverished Dalits are forced, by sheer poverty, to perform them.

Yashica Dutts Coming Out as Dalit.

Remarkably, Dutts family members in Rajasthan came from the low manual scavenger caste, and yet they were able to climb up the social ladder. But the cost of this success was dramatically embodied in the young Yashica herself. Her remarkable and persevering mother realised that her daughter would need to attend good private schools in order to learn to speak English fluently. And this the young Yashica and her stalwart mother actually accomplished, at significant financial cost. But there was another, far greater cost the young schoolgirl had to hide her Dalit identity. She had to constantly pretend that she was upper-caste and succeeded in doing so.

Thus, by the time she was working as a fashion journalist in Delhi, she was passing as a young Brahmin woman, and was accepted as such. People seek to pass in many societies, but the phenomenon has been most discussed in the US, particularly when African Americans who look white seek to pass as white. Skin colour as Ari Sitas has noted, has no actual, ontological status it is yet another fabrication of the human mind.

Casteism is Indias racism and here in India the ludicrous, fabricated nature of caste/race identity is even more apparent, because racist divides are made between groups of people who are identical to each other in skin colour. One such group, always impoverished, is deemed untouchable, sub-human, without intelligence or worth while the other group, always wealthy, is declared to be upper caste, the acme of humanity, profoundly intelligent and naturally meritorious. Michael Sandel is right to dynamite the iniquitous notion of merit it has been used by Indias well-educated higher castes to claim that their intrinsic worth is annulled by the reservation system.

Also read: Aside From Atrocities, The Everyday Dalit Life Deserves To Be Told

All this Dutt skilfully weaves into her story, carrying us through her schooldays to the almost miraculous break she eventually got, which brought her to Columbia Universitys Masters programme in Journalism on a full scholarship. And as has so often happened in another social context, surrounded by people who did not think along racist/casteist lines Dutt began to realise that she did not need to feel ashamed of her Dalit parentage. Instead, the shame belonged to the upper castes of India who had consistently humiliated and denigrated Dalits in order to control their labour and thus enrich themselves. She now saw herself very differently, declaring, My history is one of oppression and not shame.

Reading Ambedkar, Dutt discovered, with delight as many of us have what a truly astonishing intellect he had and what a startling breadth of compassionate spirit. She marvelled that he had never tried to distance himself from his origins, but had instead used his tremendous learning and his great energies to set his people free. But, as she reveals, the great moment of reckoning arrived for her when young Rohith Vemula died by suicide in his Hyderabad University hostel on January 17, 2016, having been driven to despair by the actions including the withholding of his scholarship of the university authorities. To her horror, Dutt realised that this young PhD scholar, who had killed himself, was the same young man who had reached out to her two weeks earlier, requesting to be a Facebook friend.

Dutt tells us that, in this moment of truth, she realised that she could easily have been a Rohith Vemula a Dalit university student who had been institutionally murdered. This shocked her profoundly, because Rohith had done the diametrical opposite to her: he had never hidden his Dalit origins but had devoted himself whole-heartedly to working towards the emancipation of Dalits.

Within days of this profound realisation, Yashica Dutt had come out, revealing her Dalit identity to the whole world, even though she was aware that this would cost her the friendships and the esteem of almost all her upper-caste acquaintances and colleagues.

Her riveting book offers, in these dark and fearful times, a bright and beautiful hope that young people of Dalit heritage will be empowered to demand their right to live as equal citizens in India and will be enabled to do so. However, this, as yet, is a distant dream Dutt herself sees her future in the US. This is hardly surprising as long as caste-racism poisons our polity the most educated young Dalits will wish to leave our benighted society behind, to seek a better life abroad. Who can blame them? Even Babasaheb would have understood.

Karin Kapadia is an independent scholar.

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In the Memoir of One Young Woman, the Story of Indian Racism - The Wire

In my sons veins flowed the blood of Irish rebels, once proclaimed Ernesto Guevara Lynch, father of the legendary Che Guevara, who was proud of his Irish roots and how his family built a new life in Argentina after fleeing Ireland during the Cromwell era.

Rebellious Irish blood was essential during Latin Americas emancipatory struggles and it remains so today. Latinos and the Irish have been fighting imperialism together since the nineteenth century, when Irish immigrants, fleeing the famine and oppression caused by the British Empire, found in Latin America a new battleground to challenge the cruelty of colonialism.

The Irish and their descendants contributed to the formation of many of the new Latin American republics, such as in Chile with Bernardo OHiggins or those Irish present in the Bolivarian army. The converse is also true recall the Irish-Argentine Eamon Bulfin: it was he, born in Buenos Aires, who raised the Irish Republican flag at the General Post Office during the Easter Uprising in 1916.

The most famous Irish representative and central character of the Cuban revolution was Ernesto Che Guevara: his Celtic ancestors, the Lynches, suffered at the hands of Oliver Cromwell, the man who overthrew the monarchy and instituted his own control of England for several years.

Members of Ches family fled Ireland and went to Spain, later leaving for Argentina, while the country was still a Spanish colony. Ches great-grandfather even fought in the War of Independence against Spain in the middle of the nineteenth century. Like many other members of the Irish diaspora, the Lynches had important ties to their ancestral lands, although Che only ever spent one day in Ireland.

On that day, an Aeroflot flight to Havana from Moscow was diverted at Shannon Airport. The plane stopped to refuel but was unable to take off due to the fog. During his brief visit, Che said he was proud of his Irish ancestry and Irish connection, declaring that the Irish had overthrown the British Empire, referring to the Irish War of Independence, waged from 1919 to 1921.

These ties were not just in ancestral history. Fidel Castro became a revolutionary during his time as a student political organizer at the University of Havana, inspired by Julio Antonio Mella, a well-known founder of the Cuban Communist Party.

The militant Mella was exiled to Mexico after becoming a threat to the bloody dictatorship of Cuban president Gerardo Machado. There, he mobilized with other communists. Mellas mother, Cecilia McPartland, was born in Ireland meaning one of the greatest heroes in Cuban history, who inspired Cuban revolutionaries during the 1950s, was of Irish descent.

In 1981, when Irish Republican prisoners were in the middle of a historic hunger strike against the British state, it was Fidel Castro who once again sided with the oppressed.

The hunger strike was the result of a five-year battle between Irish nationalists and the British autocracy, which broke out after Margaret Thatcher stripped Republicans of their status as political prisoners. Led by Bobby Sands, an elected MP and member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the prisoners began, one by one, to refuse food. Ten strikers, including Sands, eventually died of starvation. Riots broke out in Northern Ireland, with thousands protesting indignantly.

Thatcher wasnt moved, but Castro was. The Cuban met Gerry Adams in 1981, then leader of Sinn Fin (We ourselves in Irish Gaelic), the centenary Irish leftist party for independence, and spoke with passion about the republican cause:

In speaking of international politics, we cannot ignore what is happening in Northern Ireland. I feel it is my duty to refer to this problem. In my opinion, Irish patriots are writing one of the most heroic chapters in human history, he told the audience of Republicans.

They ask only for something as simple as the recognition of what they actually are: political prisoners . . . Let tyrants tremble before men who are capable of dying for their ideals.

The Sinn Fin leader traveled to Cuba the same year and inaugurated a monument in honor of the ten killed in the hunger strike. Aaron James Kelly, Irish coordinator of the Network in Defense of Humanity, commented:

There is justifiable, demonstrable merit to the commemorative plaque that adorns La Calle OReilly in Havana with the words two island peoples in the same sea of struggle and hope. Cuba and Ireland have both experienced the damage wrought by empires.

Cuba, in keeping with its peerless internationalism and humanitarianism across the whole planet, was a crucial supporter of the struggle against British imperialism in Ireland, and indeed is now a key friend of the Peace Process and the next stage of that struggle.

In particular, the solidarity shown during the Hunger Strikes and in their wake by the people of Cuba was and is remarkable in its unbreakable commitment. On the Irish side, it is working-class, anti-imperialist and Irish republican movements that have reciprocated that solidarity.

Unlike the success of the Cuban Revolution, which I would regard as the most important of all revolutions in the last century because of its prophetic anti-colonial ethos and the world importance of its guiding values and subsequent actions, the War of Independence in Ireland was a stalled or arrested revolution that was eclipsed by reactionary forces. Not only because of the continued presence of British rule in the northern state but also so because of the hegemony exercised by fascists and conservatives in the southern state.

The lure of the US and the EU (imperialists, in other words) is strong and it is particularly despicable that people from an island that was deliberately starved by the British empire during An Gorta Mr (The Great Hunger or Famine) now gladly, and perversely in the name of a degradation of the words human rights, support US imperialism and its use of starvation as its weapon of war in the illegal, criminal blockade of Cuba.

Sometime in 1979 or 1980, Ronald Reagan was on the campaign trail for the 1980 US presidential election. In California, Reagan met thenIrish ambassador to the United States Sen Donlon, the latter striking up a conversation about the roots of the presidential hopefuls name.

You must be Irish, Donlon told Reagan. What part of Ireland do you come from? . . . With a name like Reagan, you have to be Irish. Reagan, however, had sold himself to the American population as a WASP.

Recalling his conversation with the future president, Donlon later claimed that when I told Reagan coming up to the election that his roots were definitely Irish, not English, he asked if that information could be kept quiet until after the election . . . He didnt want to change his package at the last minute.

Four years later, in the midst of sponsoring brutal counterinsurgency operations across Central America, Reagan came to Ireland on an official visit. A number of Irish groups had planned round-the-clock pickets against Reagans policies on nuclear weapons and his support for the Contras in Nicaragua. So concerned was the Irish government about a hostile reception for Reagan that it introduced new legislation just ninety minutes before his arrival, and then using it to round up thirty protesters from outside the US ambassadors residence.

When the president arrived at Shannon Airport, he was immediately greeted by picketers. And once in Dublin City, a group of nuns led by the Sisters for Justice Convent carried a coffin inscribed with the names of three American nuns slain along with a Catholic lay worker by national guardsmen in El Salvador in 1980. The group also handed a petition to the Irish Foreign Affairs Department, signed by twenty thousand people in solidarity with the people of Central America.

Reagan, who had once renounced his Irish roots, found a country more than prepared to renounce his brutal policies in Latin America.

On the morning of Good Friday, 1916, Roger Casement was captured at Banna Strand, Kerry, holding almost two thousand rifles destined for use in Irelands Easter Rising against the British occupation. Casement had been a Knight of the Realm and longtime senior diplomat at the British Foreign Office, dismaying his captors with what they saw as treasonous behavior.

Condemned to death for his actions, Casement made a speech from the dock that resonated across the world. Speaking of the use of Irish soldiers during World War I, Casement proclaimed:

If small nationalities were to be the pawns in this game of embattled giants, I saw no reason why Ireland should shed her blood in any cause but her own, and if that be treason beyond the seas I am not ashamed to avow to it or to answer for it here with my life.

Where all your rights become only an accumulated wrong; where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruits of their own labours and even while they beg, to see things inexorably withdrawn from them then surely it is a braver, a saner and a truer thing, to be a rebel in act and deed against such circumstances as these than tamely to accept it as the natural lot of men.

Casements strident anti-imperialism had not only percolated during Irelands struggle for independence. Just six years earlier, Casement had been dispatched to the Putumayo then a disputed territory on the Amazonian borders of Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia to investigate the alleged crimes of the Peruvian Amazon Company (PAC), a British-owned rubber enterprise.

According to reports in the English magazine Truth, the PAC had forced the pacific Indians of the Putumayo to work day and night without the slightest remuneration except the food needed to keep them alive, and had used a group of Barbadians (British subjects) to allocate coercion. These tales of slavery-like conditions found particular resonance in Britain, and Casement, a British consul in Rio de Janeiro, was sent to investigate.

In the Putumayo, Casement encountered a horrific space of colonial exploitation; he estimated that forty thousand indigenous people had died since the beginning of the PACs rubber collection.

Though serving the British Crown, Casement viewed the struggles of the indigenous peoples of the Putumayo in comparable terms to those of his homeland, Ireland. Upon meeting a slave owner in northwestern Peru named Andres ODonnell, Casement wrote: To think that a name so great should be dragged so low!

Indeed, Casements decision to pit himself on the side of the colonised whether in the Congo, the Putumayo, or elsewhere would seal his fate; he was hanged at Pentonville Prison, London, on August 3, 1916. More than a century after his death, however, Casement is still remembered across the Putumayo. When Father Brendan Forde from Clontarf first traveled to southern Colombia a century later, he was reportedly addressed by locals as: Padre Brendan from Ireland, Rogers country.

This sharing of struggles, revolutions, and revolutionaries between Latinos and Irish is not just historical. The Irish parliamentarian representing South Down, Chris Hazzard, is one of those who maintains this bridge between both peoples from within his party, Sinn Fin.

Asked why it is important for Latinos and Irish to support one another, he responded:

Internationalism has always been at the core of Irish republicanism; indeed, Irish republicanism itself is a product of international ideas and influences. We have always been proud to stand firmly against colonialism and imperialism in Ireland and across the world, including Latin America. Sinn Fin proudly continues to promote that radical tradition today. International solidarity and our ongoing international work are a key component of our struggle for national liberation. Throughout the history of Irelands independence struggle, Irish revolutionaries have both given to and received from others much solidarity in the common cause of national and social liberation.

Link:

In Che Guevara's Veins Flowed the Blood of Irish Rebels - Jacobin magazine

The recent order of the Supreme Court disposing of an application seeking the release of Rohingya refugees detained illegally in a sub-jail in Jammu and threatened with deportation to Myanmar, a country currently in the grip of a violent military coup, is bereft of any cogent legal reasoning and lacks an understanding of international law obligations and constitutional protections for refugees and devoid of humanity. The United Nations has termed the Rohingya as the worlds most persecuted ethnic minority. In August 2017, the Myanmar military launched a clearance campaign in the Rakhine state (home to the ethnic Rohingya), forcing over 7,50,000 of them to flee to neighbouring states, escaping a military operation that killed, burnt and wiped out entire villages. Thousands of women were raped and tortured and thousands of children orphaned. Fleeing genocide at the hands of the Burmese military and ultra-religious Buddhist mobs in their home state, about 40,000 Rohingya entered India in waves, and settled in refugee camps across the country. They live in deplorable conditions, with scant access to drinking water, electricity or sanitation. Recently, the home ministry has issued circulars to states sharing borders with Myanmar to push back refugees fleeing the military bloodbath. Pursuant to this, some states issued orders, later withdrawn, not to provide food, shelter or even essential medical care to the refugees. The governments directive has been to identify, detain and deport these refugees.

Around March, over 170 Rohingya refugees were detained in Jammu after a biometric verification drive. This despite the detained refugees having UNHCR refugee cards, granted after a process of ascertaining their protection needs and determining that they are indeed refugees who have fled persecution. The police entered the camps, rounded up and detained men, women, elderly and left children behind. Panic gripped this community as families were separated overnight, family members were reported missing and reports of starving and wailing children began flooding the media. It was clear that these detentions were part of the larger crackdown against the Rohingya, who are a largely Muslim community and hence treated with hostility by our government that refers to them as illegal economic migrants and a national security threat.

The Indian government has in the past differentiated between illegal immigrants and refugees in the absence of domestic legislation, such as, in its treatment of Afghan, Sri Lankan or Tibetan refugees. They have been granted the right to apply for long-term visas for refugees in accordance with the governments 2011 protocol, thereby reaffirming its respect for the institution of asylum. The sudden volte face with respect to the Rohingya is clearly on account of them being Muslim. They are also excluded from the purview of the Citizenship Amendment Act, despite their fleeing what has been described as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, while hearing the application seeking a restraint on the deportation of those detained in Jammu jail, and their immediate release, asked how refugees could invoke Article 32 rights. He had to be reminded that Article 14 and 21 constitutional protections were equally available to every person, including refugees. This set the tone for the order that followed. The court first decided to distance itself from the genocide in Myanmar, with which four Indian states share borders stating that it cannot comment upon something happening in another country.

This abdication of responsibility is shocking in light of the fact that the killing of hundreds of innocent civilians by the military junta since the coup on February 1 this year, along with the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Rohingyas, has raised an international outcry. Earlier on January 23, 2020, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) gave a landmark judgment of grave significance in the context of the ethnic atrocities faced by the Rohingya in Myanmar. The court found that the Rohingya had suffered genocide and ordered the government of Myanmar to restrain their military forces from continuing with the oppression. This order was unanimously issued by a 15-member bench of the ICJ on a petition brought before it by the state of Gambia against the state of Myanmar, alleging that the crimes against the Rohingya violate the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. India ratified the convention in 1959; in fact, India, along with Panama and Canada was the force behind the adoption of the Genocide Convention on December 9, 1948. Despite Indias binding obligations, the Supreme Court chose to turn a blind eye to this factual reality of genocide and ethnic cleansing facing the Rohingya. The court ignored Indias binding commitment to non-refoulement and obligations in prohibiting genocide, both non-derogable norms of international law, on which the petitioner had based the application.

The petitioner had pointed out how, as a matter of legal principle, refoulement or sending refugees back to a place where they face persecution, has been held to be a breach of Article 21. In Ktaer Abbas Habib Al Qutaifi v Union of India, the Gujarat High Court held, This principle [of non-refoulement] prevents expulsion of a refugee where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. Its application protects the life and liberty of a human being irrespective of his nationality. It is encompassed in Article 21 of the Constitution. The same was held by the Delhi High Court in Dongh Lian Kham v Union of India (2016).

The court then went on to state that the petitioners claim to a right against deportation is concomitant with the right to reside in any part of the country (an Article 19 right available only to citizens). This is a misconceived compartmentalisation of these rights by the court when the guarantee of these rights flow from each other and form what is called the golden triangle of the Constitution. The Rohingya refugees have never claimed the right to reside or settle in any part of India but they have prayed for the right to life to reside in a camp without being threatened to be deported into a country where they face genocide, and the right to liberty by being afforded protection from arbitrary arrests, harassment and intimidation. By displaying such ignorance and insensitivity, the courts human rights jurisprudence has plummeted to an unpardonable new low.

Most striking, however, is the court echoing the governments submissions on the Rohingya posing an internal security threat, which the government raises as a bogey without any evidence. By reiterating the governments allegations in the operative part of its judgment and ordering the Rohingya be deported only in accordance with the procedure prescribed for such deportation, the Supreme Court has betrayed its lack of judicial consciousness with regard to the human rights violations of persecuted refugees and has displayed its capitulation to the governments divisive agenda.

This column first appeared in the print edition on April 17, 2021 under the title Persecuting the persecuted. The writers are counsel for the Rohingya refugees in the case before the Supreme Court.

See original here:

SC ruling on Rohingya is against Indias commitments to international law - The Indian Express

The reclamation of physical space is a fundamental requirement in resisting colonisation, and is a necessary precondition in the campaign for Aboriginal sovereignty. Last year marked some of the first protests to occur on the Domain parkland or Djarrbarrgalli in traditional Gadigal language. Gathering in Djarrbarrgalli was momentous for the Indigenous justice movement as it represented the reclamation of traditional land for its original purpose as a meeting place. These protests in mid-2020, which drew comparisons between the treatment of Black people in the United States and here, took place away from the colonial monuments that litter most of Sydneys urban landscape including Hyde Park.

The call to return to this space was instigated by traditional descendents of the area, who asserted their sovereignty and reclaimed the place as their own land after rediscovering its traditional name. These Gadigal descendents articulated that Djarrbarrgalli was a deeply important site of gathering and community in pre-colonial times, and to them it was the perfect place to come together today and continue fighting for justice and sovereignty.

I sat down with Nadeena Dixon one of the Gadigal descendents who was part of this process to discuss how the reclamation of Djarrbarrgalli came about during the 2020 protests. We discussed the Indigenous experience within Sydneys urban fabric, and the historical importance of reclaiming physical space to counter hegemonic cultural ideas within the colonial system.

***

Seth Dias: Can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your family?

Nadeena Dixon: Im Nadeena Dixon, Im an artist, an academic and a child of freedom fighters who have lived in the Sydney basin for 80,000 years. Im also an educator, so I think its important to talk and transcend the bullshit weve been fed through very limited [colonial] narratives.

My mum is Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor; a Gadigal Elder. She was born in a time when Aboriginal people werent actually recognised as human beings in Australia, so for the first 14 to 15 years of her life she was treated as Flora and Fauna. At that time, Aboriginal peoples lives were completely controlled by government legislation and we were monitored by the Aborigines Protection Board a very oppressive and dehumanising regime that was placed on Aboriginal people. Thats had a huge impact on us to this day.

My grandfather was Dr. Charles Chicka Dixon; he was heavily involved in the freedom fighter movement that brought about the 67 referendum that gave Aboriginal People the right to vote on their own sovereign land. He, being of the older generation, suffered extreme degradation, starvation, abuse and complete government control over his and all Aboriginal Peoples lives; adult people that had no rights, who werent even considered to be human. With the [child] removals policy we had lots of people, even in my own family, that were removed. They werent even able to form normal relationships because they had been institutionalised from such a young age, meaning they had no family structure or family environment to develop in. The impact [child removals] had on the psyche is far reaching through the generations, so we have inherited the legacies of intergenerational trauma, which is yet another reason to fight for justice.

SD: 2020 was a landmark year for the Black Lives Matter movement both here and overseas. How do you think this has shaped or influenced the Indigenous sovereignty movement in Australia?

ND: Weve always resisted as sovereign peoples who never ceded their sovereignty. We resisted from the very beginning. I suppose it hit this point where the world had to awaken to these realities. We realised that unless all of us are free, then none of us are free. This applies to all movements, such as marriage equality which came so late as well. Its like, why are we even talking about these things so late in the day? It feels like there is a great need for connection and meaning as a global community; we want to connect to something bigger than us. The same goes for climate action today as well its all interconnected. The planet doesnt care if were black, white or whatever. We have to come together and move above these illusions that separate us. The 2020 protests went a very long way in showing just how connected these things are and how united we need to be.

SD: Last year saw a change in venue for many Indigenous justice rallies, with Djarrbarrgalli (the Domain) becoming a key meeting point. Can you explain why this shift occurred?

ND: It was documented in the earliest colonial contact and mappings of the Sydney basin that all the prominent locations along the coastline had Aboriginal names. Growing up being a traditional descendent of the ancestors from this area, I always felt like our existence had been erased; and it literally had you know? Its been under attack from the very beginning of colonisation and weve been pushed out of the city over time. There were rulings made that enforced curfews for Aboriginal people they couldnt be within the city limits after dark. People were rounded up and put into missions mainly out at La Perouse, Western Sydney and other Aboriginal missions where they were basically monitored and surveilled. So all of our history and our beautiful legacy had just been erased from the landscape in such a short time less than 200 years out of 80,000 years of peaceful existence. We lived in another Black reality where we had such an awareness of these things existing, but the outer world didnt present or mirror any of that.

The site of Djarrbarrgalli is significant because it was a ceremony site; it was documented and known to be a ceremony site and a very significant area for Aboriginal people to gather and talk about important business. Then later on during the 1930s, there were significant Aboriginal people that would go there and speak about Aboriginal rights. There is an area within the site where people would stand on speaker boxes; people like Donny Dodd, Pearl Gibbs, Jack Patten and other community people. These were leaders who came out of Salt Pan Creek, which was a significant camp community of Aboriginal people that refused to live on the missions and be under the control of the government. There was an autonomous community that was quite large and lots of the early resistance of the 1930s came out of Salt Pan Creek.

***

As Nadeena articulates, there is a significant historical precedent of physical space being used as a base for counter-cultural development and political education against hegemonic ideas. One of the best examples of this is Salt Pan Creek.

Emerging in 1926, Salt Pan Creek was an autonomous camp of Aboriginal families and refugees. The new community had withdrawn from the Australian colonial project, rejecting the oppressive powers of the Aborigines Protection Board which required constant surveillance, containment and management of all Aboriginal people by settlers. Instead, they sought to establish a community where they could self-determine their future and launch a broader campaign for their sovereign land. The establishment of community and sovereign control in this historically rich place is seen by many as the beginning of the modern struggle for Indigenous Justice. Legendary Gumbaynggirr activist Gary Foley explains that the self-declared autonomy of Salt Pan Creek allowed the political growth and education of some of the foundational leaders in the movement. Historically influential Aboriginal leaders and some of those activists who spoke at Speakers Corner spent time there in the late 1930s learning and defining the modern Australian anti-colonial movement in Sydney. The political planning and education that came out of the Salt Pan Creek community culminated in the 1938 Day of Mourning protest. This was one of the first major protests held in Australia on the 26th of January, or Invasion Day, and is considered the first public rally in the modern fight for Indigenous justice. With a cultural landscape that is dominated by colonial ideology, the reclamation of any physical space to then practice and teach counter-cultural ideas of anti-colonial resistance, must be realised to achieve true justice for Indigenous People.

***

When asked about some of the major historical anti-colonial protests in Sydney and the importance of place to them, Nadeena immediately asserted the importance of land to community and gathering.

SD: These major historical protests relied on important geographical bases of resistance, such as Salt Pan Creek, The Block in Redfern or La Perouse. Do you think Djarrbarrgalli could be the next site of resistance?

ND: I think it is, because it holds that energy of memory and it holds that energy of business [and] of coming together to benefit the broader community. Its a place where we can hold space to seriously discuss these issues, so even within a contemporary context we can go there for business and for ceremony I believe its the peoples court. So were holding court there to say this is what we want to happen, the power is with the people there and the people alone. In so many ways, the government has become a dictatorship and were being forced to live in their constructed realities which we dont align to, and its a system that doesnt value or include us at all, and chooses to value settlers instead. I think its this idea of gathering where my people could come together from all different clans and groups and give reverence to mark time, space and ceremony. The place [Djarrbarrgalli] becomes a magnetised space where you can assert intention for your cause, in this case resistance, in physical reality. It can become a portal or space holder for these energies and causes to gather power; this is the importance of a place to us and our struggle.

***

Since 1938, we have seen many militant protests and celebrations of Aboriginal survival on days such as Invasion Day. Without a reclaimed place like Salt Pan Creek to organise and educate from, some of the foundational figures in the movement may never have had the space to learn to lead this campaign and instigate the movement were still fighting for today. Power is expressed and sustained in the reproduction of culture, which manifests itself in physical space; the act of establishing a new self-determined community in Salt Pan Creek allowed for the reproduction of counter-cultural anti-colonial ideas in a physical space. This could not have been done under the constant surveillance imposed on Indigenous People by the Aborigines Protection Board. Much like then, today we also need a place to connect and build community. While we may not live there, the connection to Djarrbarrgalli enables many of the same counter-cultural ideas forged at Salt Pan Creek to be expressed and refined. Without Djarrbarrgalli, those leading this movement are forced to educate and communicate in physical space that exudes dominant cultural ideas and could therefore invoke traumatic memories.

The way physical space plays a fundamental role in perpetuating dominant cultural ideas can be seen across Sydney in two overarching ways. Firstly, the grid system and central planning arrangement here is an imposition of Eurocentric geometric ideals which can be observed across the colonial world. Settlers and early planners of the city believed that the grid system was a superior system which would allow them to position themselves in the centre of power and override the undulations of the natural landscape. Settlers then began a rapid process of containment of Indigenous People, pushing families and communities out into missions located on the outskirts of the grid system, where many still reside today. Early planners believed that the grid represented the European power of intellect and organisation. It is a clear tribute to Euclidean geometry as an urban form, a system seen in Greek, Roman and Victorian cities; imposing this system on the colonial world laid the physical foundations of Eurocentric cultural dominance.

Secondly, we also see the perpetuation of dominant culture across this city in the form of cultural memorials. Sydney is rife with these, with statues depicting Captain Cook, Governor Macquarie and Queen Elizabeth scattered across the Central Business District. Memorials or monuments may seem like a background concept in our day to day lives, but for those not within the dominant cultural group for example, Indigenous People living on their stolen land they serve as a constant reminder of the trauma of the revered figures and the political ideas from which they are excluded. Geographer Philip Hubbard argues that Both literally and figuratively monuments and memorials set dominant socio-spatial relations in stone. Reclaiming space enables marginalised groups to express their culture away from physical reminders of their oppression.

***

Nadeena explains that there are abstract and physical forms of land reclamation. To her, both are equally important and need to be fully realised in order for true sovereignty to be achieved.

SD: There has been a broader international movement to decolonise places by renaming them, would you support something like this for the Domain, and could the reclamation assist in the broader fight for Indigenous Justice?

ND: I think naming is extremely powerful it connects the energy of the language back to the Country that its come from, that its always existed within. So even us speaking the name is giving it power, and were putting a whole different shift in consciousness back into the place, into Country as a living entity. Its not the case that we build the city over the country and then it becomes a nameless and story-less space with no history. But what happens [after 1788], and what has happened historically is the erasing of the human connection to it all. Were hoping that by renaming, reclaiming and speaking the name back into awareness that were bringing back the energy of the countless generations that existed there.

SD: So in conclusion, what does reclaiming space mean to the Aboriginal community broadly?

ND: Im part of this emergent school of thought known as design sovereignty. There are so many ways that we can unpack space from Indigenous perspectives and methodologies In contemporary society, were told that were nothing; just a number among many. The idea of space for community dialogue, ceremony, sharing the difficulties and celebrating the wins, and where we people can feel a part of something bigger than ourselves will bring nourishment, joy and resistance. [It] is a fundamental requirement of achieving justice for our people. [Colonial] society has taken so much from us that can only be brought back from the grassroots, and from community, but it all starts from reclaiming space and restoring true sovereignty over this Country.

Read the original here:

Reclaiming Djarrbarrgalli: the spaces of anti-colonial resistance - Honi Soit

The fundamental difference in the organisational structure of the CPM and the TMC is another factor because of which the turncoats could not adjust to the new order and jumped to BJP as soon as they got the chance, notwithstanding the ideological differences between the parties

Editor's Note: The history of political violence and bloodshed in West Bengal is an election tradition since the 1940s, peaking during the 1960s and 1970s, and enduring till date. This is part three of amulti-part seriesexploring the origins, process and consequences of politically- motivated violence in the state. Read the first and the second part.

Sandeshkhali: Abhik Sardar (name changed), a former CPM member from Joygopalpur village in the Sandeshkhali II block in Basirhat district, is in a bind these days. A staunch Left Front member for most of his life, Sardar joined the Trinamool in 2016.

But in 2021, he is in hiding. Members of the Trinamool Congress, according to Sardar, are after his life because he joined the BJP in Bengal recently.

I did not have a choice. After the 2016 Assembly elections, the Trinamool forced me to join them," he alleges. Sardar is not alone.

Political parties estimate that at least 60-70 percent of Bengals CPM cadre was forced to join the ruling Trinamool Congress after the 2016 state Assembly elections, but they soon migrated to the BJP, allegedly because of rampant corruption and torture by local TMC leaders. Across most of Bengal -- especially in the districts of North and South 24 Parganas, Basirhat, Birbhum, Bardhaman, Murshidabad, Malda among others -- violence and intimidation was carried out to poach Left party workers into Trinamool - locally labelled the Lal TMC, indicating their move from the Left. The move ensured the TMCs complete domination of the panchayats, leaving no room for doubt about which party controls the state and its coffers.

Lal Trinamool

According to Sardar, he was one of the few that resisted jumping ship. "They charged me with several false cases including theft, loot, kidnapping and murder and under the arms act. These crimes were committed by Trinamool members, but they told the police it was my handiwork. I was not the only one targeted by them -- every CPM and BJP worker who did not agree to join the TMC was charged with false cases. The charges were serious. We would have been behind bars for years. We surrendered because we did not have any choice, said Sardar.

The ruling party, according to Sardar, inducted them soon after they surrendered, and promised them that the charges will be dropped. A few months later, Sardar was nominated for the Panchayat elections under the Trinamool banner and was elected to an important role, managing land affairs in the Sandeshkhali II block region. Sardar says that this was just the beginning of the horror. He and his associates were forced to terrorise the locals into voting for the Trinamool. The ruling party also indulged in rampant corruption and money laundering, he says. Unable to put up with this torture, Sardar left the Trinamool and joined the BJP. Looking around suspiciously in the deserted lane of the village where he talked to this correspondent, Sardar confesses that he is currently on the run because the police (under orders from the local TMC leaders) are again hunting for him.

But as the popular saying goes, truth is rarely pure and never simple. Dig a little deeper, and the story becomes clearer. The TMC was not looking to recruit Sardar or the other former CPM members to merely bolster their cadre base. Sardar, like several other members who were poached by the TMC, joined the party because they had no choice but to join the ruling party, because, after 2011, the CPM had lost all sway in the state that it commanded for decades.

"When the TMC came to power, the so-called CPM loyalists across Bengal realised that they will have no footing unless they attach themselves to the reigning power of the time. Party work in Bengal has very little to do with ideology. It is all about power and domination in this part of the country, saidAbesh Das, a local teacher who is also a social activist in the region.

If you are with the ruling government, you have certain clout, you command a certain level of respect and fear. And those who have tasted that kind of power and the perks that come with it, have a hard time letting it go. It is a vicious cycle, Das said.

***

Ashalata Sardar (name changed) is busy cleaning the floor of what seems like a house under construction. A former Left member from Monipur village -- about 75km from Kolkata and close to the Bangladesh border in Basirhat district -- Ashalata and her husband Arup Sardar (name changed) were coerced into joining the Trinamool like several of their peers. The family traditionally backed the Left front government till Mamatas Trinamool came to power in 2011. According to political observers in the state, a partisan cleansing followed in Bengal. Soon after the 2011 state assembly elections, the TMC targeted CPM workers/loyalists and supporters and forced them to join the party.

They did not attack us directly. But everyone around and near us was being threatened and beaten into submission. There was widespread unrest in a way that homes were being ransacked, people went missing overnight. We did not want that to happen to us or our family. Fearing for our lives, we joined the Trinamool in 2014, Ashalata said.

She fought the next local elections under the TMC banner and was elected village pradhan. The appointment was a mere formality. My opinions as a councillor did not matter. Decisions were made by someone else and I was there merely to sign on the orders - no questions asked, Ashalata said. When I asked, I was told to go on a sick leave for a year. Sheikh Shahjahan, local Trinamool block president, is the one who handles all the matters in the area. I didnt have a voice.

Lal TMC becomes Lal BJP

According to Sardar and Ashalata, they closely witnessed the domination of the Trinamool and the high-handedness of a few local leaders during the 2018 panchayat elections. We saw how they kept people from exercising their fundamental right to vote in 2018. We were expected to do the same. I resisted and openly told the local villagers that the TMC is not here to serve, but to rob democracy, said Sardar.

In the 2018 elections, the BJP witnessed a huge gain in their vote share in Bengal. The Trinamools panchayat capture in 2018 acted as an inflection point, decimating the Left and propelling the BJP to the status of the main Opposition party. The ruling party wasable to prevent opposition candidates from filing nominations. As a result, the Trinamool won walkovers in 34 percent of gram panchayat seats, 33 percent of the panchayat samiti seats and 25 percent of the zilla parishad seats. Unabated violence claimed over 25 lives, and re-polling was ordered in 573 booths across the state. In contrast, in the 2013 panchayat elections, re-polling was ordered in just 21 booths - the number of booths going for a repoll in 2018 was 27 times more than 2013.

Following the incidents of the 2018 local body elections and the unprecedented violence, the TMC -- according to Ashalata -- targeted those former CPM members who spoke out against these atrocities of TMC. But local activists tell a different story.

According to a SUCI (Socialist Unity Centre of India) leader from Bodo Tushkhali village in North 24 Parganas, who wished to remain anonymous, it was no coincidence that CPM turncoats like Ashalata and Sardar started speaking out against'' TMC just around the time when the BJP started gaining ground in the state.

The fundamental difference in the organisational structure of the CPM and the TMC was another factor because of which the turncoats could not adjust to the new order, and jumped to BJP as soon as they got the chance. But the move came with its own set of new, violent incidents in the districts.

The TMCs insecurity was clear when they were terrorising their own supporters against voting. Ballot boxes were snatched and ballot papers were signed or dumped in the water. The BJP got a boost as the TMC disallowed any electoral opposition, in order to consolidate their power. The TMCs regime has become worse than CPMs violent rule, said the SUCI leader.

According to Sardar, when he started speaking out against the TMCs corrupt practices and violent methods, they targeted him. My business was targeted, they tore down a part of my house, explosives were hurled at my house and my family was threatened. To save myself and my family, I joined the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2021.

When asked how a staunch CPM follower joined the ideologically opposite BJP, Sardar, Ashalata and Arup Sardar had similar responses. CPMs ways were violent too, but it was not mindless. They had strong ethics. The TMC is morally corrupt. They are robbing people of their basic right to vote. We dont have the freedom to speak uninhibitedly. We will be targeted if someone sees us speaking to a reporter," said Arup. When asked why he didn't return to the CPM after leaving the TMC, Arup said, The Left will not return to power this year, it cant win the elections. We joined the BJP to defeat the tyrannical rule of Mamata and her party. Even though ideological rivals, we have to survive now. Wait and watch, a majority of Left supporters in the state will vote for the BJP this time."

Bhagyadhar Mandal, a long-time BJP member and a former pradhan from Monipur panchayat, said that BJP workers in the region and other parts of the state have only been defending themselves against the brute force of the TMC. The ruling party targets villagers and locals who support the BJP. They hurl bombs at women and children, they destroy homes, there is a complete collapse of democracy. We cant freely voice our opinions. How can you expect no opposition? Corruption is rampant but we cant speak up against it. If we do, we are targeted. How can you expect democracy when the opposition cant question the government?

Political observers, however, noted that this cyclical violence on the ground is part of the larger culture of violence that Bengal has witnessed over decades and now it has the new entrant BJP in the mix as well.

A former Anandabazar Patrika journalist who is currently the BJP candidate from Suri in Birbhum district -- Jagannath Chattopadhyay -- said that political and electoral violence in Bengal is the unfortunate gift of the Left regime. CPM terrorised voters, especially the poor in rural Bengal because they believed thats the only way to have power over the electors. Thats how the Left remained in power for 34 years. The TMC followed in their footsteps, but the control that CPM had over their cadre is missing within the TMC, said Chattopadhyay. Under the CPM, he elaborates, the lumpen crowd that unleashed most of the violence was used sparingly and only for specific assignments. Under the Trinamool, this lumpen crowd has become the grassroots leadership. But now that the lumpen CPM and TMC cadre form a majority part of the state BJPs cadre, will the culture of violence continue?

Our cadre in BJP strongholds is livid, because many of our workers and party members have been killed. And they want payback after 2 May. But the BJP leadership does not believe in tit for tat, especially when it comes to violence. We have already lost many. But at the same time, people have been wronged. The TMC has charged countless people in false cases just because they are in power, and they can. In the last three-four years, almost 30,000 fake cases have been registered against BJP supporters and workers. People have not forgotten this State-sponsored police oppression over the last decade, says Chattopadhyay

Basirhat assembly constituency in the North 24 Parganas of Bengal voted on 17 April. Abhik Sardar, still in hiding, spoke to this correspondent over the phone. Police have charged me with two murders in the last three weeks. I had nothing to do with those cases. But they are still hunting for me. I could not even cast my vote today.

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CPM to TMC to BJP: Political violence used to consol..e power in Bengal has driven cadre to switch loyalties - Firstpost