[sacw] sacw dispatch (11 May 00)

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web - Dispatch
11 May 2000
________________________________
#1. On border crossing between India and Pakistan
#2. Joining Sri Lanka's Sword: Might of Censor's Pen
#3. Book Review: Unearthing the Tragedies of Civil War in Sri Lanka
#4. India: Press Note from PUHR
________________________________

#1.
[Recieved from Farroq Tariq on 11 May 2000; an article from Peter Boyle, a
journalist for
Green Left Weekly Australia on border crossing between India and
Pakistan.]

CRUEL BORDERS

By Peter Boyle

Less than a month ago I was walking the sad and dusty one kilometre
stretch at Wagha, the only open land border crossing between Pakistan
and India. Actually its not open to ordinary Pakistanis or Indians,
only diplomats and foreigners may cross and very few of them do these
days, complained one immigration official. "Our life is very boring",
he said before turning to cricket talk.

But that doesn=92t stop both countries stationing large garrisons of
>crack troops at this monument to a ridiculous border. These garrisons
have proudly displayed their hairy-chested battalion mottos, along the
lines of "We fight to the death!" or "You look at me funny and I'll
blow your head off!" Well, not exactly but that's the drift.

At mid-point of the crossing a double line of razor wire-topped
fencing stretches as far as the eye can see to the right and to the
left. It's Checkpoint Charlie meets Heat and Dust. Two lines of
sweating labourers are lined up on either side of the border waiting
to pass heavy bags of grain on to their opposite number. They are
dressed in bright blue or blood red costumes, like pretend coolies in
a Gilbert & Sullivan opera. Is it for show like the ceremonial
hostility displayed by the troops that stomp and strut in a famous
evening border closing ritual? Or is it so that they can be shot at
more easily should they stray across the sacred line?

Both sides of this border, the locals speak the same language,
Punjabi, and have the same culture. Beyond the Punjab, ordinary Indian
and Pakistani have a lot in common. They are sick of oppressive
governments dominated by greedy capitalists and big landlords and they
share a madness for cricket and popular song and dance movies from
Bollywood. The growing influence of religious fundamentalism =96 both
sides of the border -- has yet to dent the latter. But since 1962,
these neighbours have not been able to visit each other.

=46arooq Tariq, my host in Pakistan looks forward to the day when he can
"I could go to India for a cup of tea or I could invite my Indian
comrades for a Lahori Karahi Mutton", Tariq is the general secretary
of the Labour Party of Pakistan, one of the few parties that dares to
demand what ordinary folk both sides of the border want, that the
borders. For this they are accused of being manipulated by Indian
intelligence. The same nonsense happens in India, where troublesome
lefties are labeled agents of the Pakistan intelligence service.

"Both sides claim that terrorists will enter their borders if it is
opened. This is nonsense".

'Ordinary people have relatives on both side but are unable to visit
them. My house is only twenty kilometres from the border. But to go to
India, I must have an invitation from India, a copy of which must be
sent to the Indian Embassy. Then I must go to Islamabad, 384
kilometres from Lahore. It normally takes two three days to see the
immigration officer. Then they normally tell you that your case has
been sent to India and they will inform you after receiving the
approval. This can take a few months. If you are lucky, then they
might issue you a visa. This visa is not for India but for a city in
India. Then come back to Lahore."

"There are three ways to go to India. You must tell the Indian visa
officials how you are travelling. You can not change it afterwards.
You can go by train, two days a week. This train takes at least 24
hours to reach Delhi from Lahore. In train you are like a prisoner.
You can not leave the train before Delhi. There is only one bus from
Lahore to Delhi. It cost four times more than train. Air travel cost
six times more than bus. While you are in the Indian city you
mentioned in your visa application, you must register to police when
you arrive and leave."

One can't help feeling angry about this border.

As I staggered in the afternoon heat through the last of six
checkpoints a mirage of dancing bottles of cold beer appeared before
me. It was a mighty thirst (fuelled by the heat and a week in
prohibition-blight Pakistan). Today millions in India, Pakistan and
Afghanistan have become refugees with a much more desperate thirst as
the worst drought in 100 years has struck the region. The entire 1
million population of the Pakistan province of Baluchistan is fleeing
the drought. The same goes for the entire population of the Registan
Desert on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. This colossal human
movement only adds to the millions of refugees in the subcontinent
from the wars in Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Iraq, from repression in
Burma and from poverty in Bangladesh and Nepal. That's a lot of
refugees for a country with an average per capita income of just US$350 a ye=
ar.

Which brings me to a second cruel border.

Going through immigration at Sydney airport is a breeze if you have an
Australian passport or a passport from one of the other wealthy
countries of the world. Smiles, a cursory sweep of the passport and
you are through. It's a different matter if you have a passport from
one of the poorer countries. But breezing through with the little blue
wonder document, one would hardly notice the other queue. And you
wouldn=92t have the slightest reminder of the desert concentration camps
($52 million was allocated in the recent federal budget for two new
refugee detention camps) for those who have dared to "jump the queue"
=96 those dreaded "boat people".

It's not just the Australian border that's being fortified, of course.
There's a giant border around all the rich countries to keep the
millions of desperate refugees from that greater part of the world
that has been kept poor so that a tiny minority in our part of the
world can live like kings. It's a border that is being reinforced with
the most sophisticated technology available and with laws utterly
dismissive of human rights. Why? Because the world's richest aim to
squeeze even more out of the world's poor.

Crossing this border makes you angry. This is what the world has come
too. It should make you want to change it, with a passion.
________

#2.

New York Times
May 11, 2000

Joining Sri Lanka's Sword: Might of Censor's Pen

By CELIA W. DUGGER

Associated Press

What censorship looks like: military news was heavily edited in an
independent newspaper, The Sunday Times, in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

NEW DELHI, May 10 -- Sri Lanka's chief censor is an amiable executioner of
words. With lips slightly pursed as he pores over articles, he zealously
wields his thick black marker even as he shares a chummy exchange with
journalists sitting around his desk.

His job is to purge criticism of the government's faltering war on
separatist rebels from newspapers, radio and television. "Sometimes they
criticize army officers by name -- by name!" the censor, Ariya Rubasinghe,
said this week during an interview at his office in Colombo, the capital.
"That is nonsense."

Mr. Rubasinghe is very busy these days scratching out chunks of
objectionable copy. The government has recently suffered devastating
setbacks in its 17-year war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam,
and last week it imposed what journalists here said was the harshest
censorship of the press ever.

It also banned public rallies and trade union strikes that are
deemed contrary to national security, as well as "seditious" words,
defined as those spoken or written to try to create discontent among the
citizenry.

Like many governments at war, governments in this democratic nation
have periodically clamped down on the press during the long campaign
against the rebels, who have frequently used terrorist tactics in a
crusade to win a separate state for the Hindu Tamil minority.

But the new regulations are more far-reaching and include harsh new
penalties. A newspaper's printing presses can be seized, its offices
closed and its journalists punished for refusing to submit to Mr.
Rubasinghe's pen. The censorship rules are also imposed on foreign
correspondents and international news agencies filing articles from Sri
Lanka.

During a civil war that has taken more than 60,000 lives and scared
away many tourists and much foreign investment in this lovely island
nation of 18 million people, the curtailment of civil liberties is one of
the less noticed costs.

Mr. Rubasinghe, the government's director of information and chief
censor -- responsible for supervising a staff of 10 subcensors -- noted how
willingly the press has complied with the new rules. "They are 100
percent cooperative, except a very few," he said.

But Iqbal Athas, a veteran defense correspondent for The Sunday Times,
said: "They can arrest me, take my house, my vehicle. They can imprison
me for as long as a year without any legal process."

President Chandrika Kumaratunga has chosen to censor those who have
most consistently warned about the shortcomings of the war effort at a
time when all the military gains made during her six years in power are
in danger of coming undone.

In a speech to the nation on Monday, Mrs. Kumaratunga -- who has
been credited with trying to stop the use of torture and extrajudicial
killings by the military -- said the emergency regulations were only
temporary and would be carried out so "there will be a minimum of
violations of fundamental human rights."

But opposition leaders accuse her of using the crisis to squash bad
news for political reasons. Parliamentary elections are to be held in a
few months, and the military reversals can only hurt her party.

The censorship is also unpopular with some voters. While she was on
her break, Iromi De Silva, a hotel worker in Colombo, tried to make sense
of Mr. Athas's column about the war in The Sunday Times, but she could
not follow it. There were large patches of white space where words would
have been. A cartoon showed a blindfolded man gagged by a sheaf of
emergency regulations.

"We don't get any news by reading this," Mrs. De Silva said in
disgust. "And we have a right to know."

Mrs. Kumaratunga won election in 1994 as a tribune of peace. Her
administration spent months negotiating with the Tigers, but the talks
broke down, and she decided to try to crush them militarily.

At the cost of thousands of lives, the military recaptured the city
of Jaffna, heartland of the Tamil-dominated north, from the Tigers, and
has held the city for five years. Now, Jaffna is at risk again; the
Tigers have put the government troops on the defensive and taken two
crucial military bases. They started another offensive today and claim to
have come within two miles of Jaffna.

Diplomats, military analysts and journalists say the government's
failings have been those of leadership, of strategy and of faulty, if not
corrupt, procurement of the basic tools of war. The war effort has been
led by Mrs. Kumaratunga's uncle, Anuruddha Ratwatte, whom she has
elevated from a reserve lieutenant colonel to a three-star general.

While the government-owned Daily News has blared headlines in recent
days like "Support President to Safeguard Lanka," independent newspapers
have been running columns with huge blank spaces stamped with the word
"censored."

Roy Denish, a 32-year-old correspondent for The Sunday Leader,
turned in a 2,200-word column. Most of it was cut out, including a simple
description of the military losses and the government's attempt to portray
them as part of a tactical withdrawal. Censors also eliminated reporting
that the air force's shortage of airworthy aircraft was "due to bungling
by Defense Ministry authorities."

International news agencies based in Colombo have also been
censored. Last Friday, on the first day the new rules were enforced, news
agency reporters said their descriptions of an opposition rally called
to protest the press restrictions were censored.

Lately Reuters, for instance, has been filing its main daily news story
about the conflict out of London.

The New York Times submitted a news article to Mr. Rubasinghe on
May 5, in which he made minor changes. This article on censorship was
reported in Colombo, but was not censored because it was filed from New
Delhi.

In Sri Lankan newspapers, which have been inserting the word
"censored" in places where cuts have been made, some deletions have a
kind of teasing quality. A column in The Island about India's role in the
conflict, written by a retired Sri Lankan Foreign Ministry official, K.
Godage, included these snippets: "Sri Lanka is in dire straits --
CENSORED," and "My question to Indian authorities is why they wish to wash
their hands off CENSORED."

But even Sri Lankan journalists who have been heavily censored by
Mr. Rubasinghe speak fondly of him. For six years, he has been the man
they called for the government's version of events, and he has always been
pleasant.

"Even when he does the most painful things, you can't get mad at
him," said Mr. Athas, 55, the country's leading military correspondent.

But Mr. Athas is a keen critic of censorship and of the government's
management of the war. In recent months his readers have been given
presentiments of the government's disastrous military performance.

His readers also know the lengths to which some people in the
military have gone to intimidate him. Two air force officers have been
charged with breaking into his home two years ago, holding an automatic
pistol to his head and terrorizing his wife and 7-year-old daughter.

At the time, Mr. Athas had been writing expos=E9s about the flawed
decisions of the air force and irregularities in its purchases of aircraft.

"The moral, it seems, is do not expose corruption or misdeeds," he wrote
then. And now the government has explicitly forbidden journalists to
write about the military procurement process.

Mr. Athas said the government seems to have convinced itself, "If a
story isn't told, it hasn't happened."
_________

#3.

New York Times
May 11, 2000

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Unearthing the Tragedies of Civil War in Sri Lanka

By JANET MASLIN

ANIL'S GHOST
By Michael Ondaatje.
307 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $25.

n the Sri Lankan setting for Michael Ondaatje's delicately fragmented new
novel, the figure known as the artificer assumes special importance. This
is the artisan deemed worthy to paint eyes on a statue of the Buddha, a
task that may be done only at 5 a.m. (the hour of the Buddha's
enlightenment) with the help of a mirror, so as not to look straight into
the deity's gaze.

It is by this indirect means that "the artificer brings to light
sight and truth and presence," one of the book's many haunted characters
observes. The author, in contemplating the dreadful toll that the civil
war beginning in the mid-1980's has taken on his native land, aspires to
the same role.

As he did in "The English Patient," Mr. Ondaatje is able to commingle
anguish and seductiveness in fierce, unexpected ways. "Then he turned on
a slim hose and let it hover over each bone," he writes alluringly, "air
nestling into the evidence of the trauma as if he were blowing cool
breath from a pursed mouth onto a child's burn."

That image, for all its sensual loveliness, happens to describe a forensic
examination of the skeleton of a headless torture victim. Of the warfare
among government, antigovernment insurgents and separatist guerrilla forces
that provides the book's implicit backdrop, he writes: "And we were
caught in the middle. It was like being in a room with three suitors,
all of whom had blood on their hands."

"Anil's Ghost," like the 33-year-old heroine of its title, steps
into this catastrophe at a point when much of its damage has already been
done. Born in Sri Lanka but having spent much of her life in England and
America, Anil returns to her childhood home under the auspices of a
Geneva-based human rights organization. A forensic anthropologist, she is
part of a team investigating possible war crimes.

Peter Paterson/Knopf

Michael Ondaatje

"Anil had read documents and news reports, full of tragedy, and she
had now lived abroad long enough to interpret Sri Lanka with a
long-distance gaze," Mr. Ondaatje writes. "But here it was a more
complicated world morally. The streets were still streets, the
citizens remained citizens. They shopped, changed jobs, laughed. Yet
the darkest Greek tragedies were innocent compared with what was happening
here."

Anil finds herself paired for the investigation with a
government-selected archaeologist named Sarath, a remote man 16 years her
senior.

Together Anil and Sarath find four skeletons whom they nickname Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier and Sailor, the last a source of obsessive fascination.
Anil becomes convinced that pinpointing Sailor's identity and the
circumstances of his death will provide the damning evidence she and
Sarath are seeking. But only in this detective-story premise, and in the
curiously theatrical gesture that ends the book, does "Anil's Ghost"
adhere to any conventional storytelling patterns.

Like "The English Patient" (despite the exquisite fluency of Anthony
Minghella's screen adaptation) "Anil's Ghost" is a novel more in name
than in essence. The author of 11 books of poetry, Mr. Ondaatje brings an
oblique poetic sensibility to unraveling the mysteries at work here.
Layers peel away from both Anil and Sarath, with a past full of ghosts
for each of them and with assorted vignettes and memories scattered
across the book's fertile landscape. The path through this terrain is not
a clear or simple one.

The book drifts in flashback, for instance, from Guatemala to the Miami
bedroom where Anil has a tryst with her married lover, Cullis, who is as
much on her mind as Sailor the skeleton. She speaks about the Spanish
names for bones; he says he has written something about Norwegian
snakes. While Cullis sleeps, in the kind of effortlessly bewitching
gesture Mr. Ondaatje creates so gracefully, she photographs him, then
buries the film inside his suitcase as a souvenir.

But as to how such moments -- or those in which Anil writes a letter to
John Boorman about his film "Point Blank" or ponders lyrics to a song set
in New York State by the McGarrigle sisters -- connect with the book's
essential business in Sri Lanka, that remains indistinct. Frustratingly
so, since the scattered aspects of this voyage of discovery are separately
so powerful.

The book's real strengths lie in its profound sense of outrage, the
shimmering intensity of its descriptive language and the mysterious beauty
of its geography, with so many discrete passages that present the artificer
in Mr. Ondaatje so well. The atlas itself, artfully used -- with places
named Ambalangoda and Andigama, Ginigalpelessa and Boralesgamuwa --
enhances the sense of the gorgeously exotic throughout.

"The important thing is to be able to live in a place or a situation
where you must use your sixth sense all the time," says a surgeon in the
story, describing what is most inviting about this morally outraged,
viscerally vivid book. Like the elderly blind sage Palipana, Sarath's
mentor, who has had the gift of reading between the lines of texts to
glimpse hidden meanings, Mr. Ondaatje does not deal comfortably with the
obvious. But his sixth sense -- his poet's sense -- is akin to that of
Ananda, the book's character who is ultimately assigned the job of
imagining Sailor's missing features. What Ananda recreates is not the
literal physiognomy of Sailor. He conjures a different face, one that
means much more.
________

#4.

PEOPLE'S UNION FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

May 3, 2000
PRESS NOTE

=46ight Twin Evils of Communalism and Neo Colonialism : Swami Agnivesh

'Gandhiji ne kaha Angrez Bharat chodo, hum nara deten hain Videshi bharat
chodo'
Gandhiji had said 'Quit India', we say to foreign companies, Quit India',
declared Swami Agnivesh, veteran human rights crusader for the rights of
bonded labour speaking at a public meeting organized by the People's Union
for Human Rights (PUHR) on May 8.
The Swami gave a call for Liberation of the Country from foreign economic
domination and the poison of Communalism with a historic march to be
launched at August Kranti Maidan (from where the Quit India call was given
in 1942) on August 9, 2000 culminating on the farm of Lt Col Save that he
died trying to save on August 15. The PUHR has decided to take the lead in
organizing this mass rally to start at Mumbai and culminate at Umbergaon
with the hoisting of the national flag on Lt Col Save's farm on
Independence Day this year.
'Communalism and neo Colonialism have to be fought together; if they are
not we will all remain fragmented and never emerge as a united force',
declared the Swami. The Swami openly charged this government with
succumbing to IMF, World Bank dictated policies with no indepent scrutiny
and assessment of what is good for our country, our people, the livelihoods
and the environment. He openly brought in the lawlesslness of communal
forces who attack the minorities and the internal poison of communalism in
our polity. 'This internal poison and the sell-out to external forces is
going to sound the death knell for us if we do get organized quickly. "This
is not the time to keep quiet. Yeh log janta ki chati par bulldoxer chala
rahe hain. Yeh awwaz hame charon taraf sunani padegi.
The meeting had been organized to protest the brutal murder, in custody of
Lt. Colonel Save, by the Gujarat police. Colonel Save and other activists
of the Kinara Bachao Sangharsh Samiti had been peacefully protesting the
construction of a mega industrial port in Umbergaon when they were
lathi-charged before being illegally detained and beaten relentlessly in
custody. Lt. Col Save slipped into a coma from which he never recovered and
succumbed on April 20.
The presence of a large contingent of activists from Umbergaon and the
unexpected presence in person of Nikhilesh Pratap Save, son of the Col Save
added a poignancy to the occasion. Other speakers at the PUHR meeting
chaired by Justice Hosbet Suresh were former chief of the Indian Navy,
Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat and Father de Britto, Vasai. Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat
called upon retired men from the services to support the struggle in
Umbergaon and help instill confidence in the struggle that had been
shattered after Lt Col Save's death. Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat and Admiral
Ramdas will be together visiting Umberagon at the end of May 2000 to
support the local movement.
Addressing the gathering 26 year old Nihilesh questioned openly charged the
Gujarat government with the "political murder of my father." In somber
tones he said, "India's claim of being a democratic nation 'in a country
where a person cannot democratically state his views. This is lived Nazism
and fascism if protesting citizens, especially a soldier who fought for his
country is brutally killed in this manner".
During his speech, Nikhilesh read out from legal affidavits signed by
Umbargaon residents who had been detained illegally in the same lock-up
with Colonel Save on the night of April 7. These witnesses had described
the kind of treatment Col Save had received in custody. The witnesses could
hear the police beating him, taunting him about being a colonel from the
army, refusing to give him water and being forced to stand the whole night.
One of the affidavits quoted Col Save as saying that he would

2
take legal action against the police who had treated him 'worse than we
treat our enemy on the front.' It also stated that after the beatings, the
witness heard the police speaking
on the phone, saying, " You said we were not taking enough action, you
should see what we have done now."
The most fitting tribute to his father, said Nikhilesh would be to carry on
the struggle against the proposed port that more than anyone else, Lt Col
Sav knew would also threaten the defence and security of the country.
"My father went through two wars and several border insurgencies. But we
never went through as much tension as we did on the day he was taken away
by the Indian police" said Nikhilesh.
The PUHR and other human rights groups have already demanded the immediate
punishment of the guilty policemen responsible directly for the murder. On
April 7, 2000 the Gujarat state reserve police brutally beat up peaceful
demonstrators protesting the proposed Maroli-Umbergaon project in Gujarat.
What is at issue here is peaceful protests against government's political
and economic policies that have included opening the western Indian
coastline to multiple ports. The economic, developmental and environmental
implications of such development have not been discussed publicly. In such
a situation, if locals who's land and livelihoods are immediately affected
by these moves protest and resist, does the government have the right to
use brute measures to stifle their voices?
On April 7, 2000 SRP platoons were brought into the area and their tents
put on privately-owned land. Local land-owners strongly protested against
this occupation of their lands, at which point, the SRP personnel and the
local police went on the rampage. The lathis and teargas spared not even
the women and children present in large numbers. It was the local Mamlatdar
who gave directions for the lathi charge and beating.
Thereafter the systematic detention of local activists by the police in the
guise of calling them for talks took place. In all, 28 men and 18 women
were illegally detained by the police. It was while in detention that Col
Save, Chandrashekhar Sagar, Haresh B. Macchi, Harsh R. Macchi, Narhari
Macchi and advocate Ulhas Macchi were beaten systematically by PSI Zala and
Deputy Superintendant of Police, Narendra Amin. The activists were released
on bail by the court the next day but held under Gujarat's preventive
detention law -PASA- for another 24 hours. The violence took place in the
midst of the chief minister, Keshubhai Patel inviting the locals for talks
on April 28!
Development rights for this mega industrial port project have been awarded
to NATELCO and UNOCAL Corporation (a US run oil and gas company).
The locals who have been leading the protest contend that the proposed site
is a breeding and spawning ground for fish and supports the fishing
industry in the area. The surrounding land is agriculturally fertile and
the protests are on the ground that fishing activity will be harmed,
fertile tracts of land will be acquired for laying railway lines and roads
and construction of warehouses.
The merits of the protest need to be settled democratically by opening the
issue of mega development and its impact on our people and resources for
public discussion and fair debate. The people's basic right to information
demand that we know of the policy economic and political decisions that are
going to affect and infringe on our livelihoods and lives. Using brute
force to stifle any dissent of government policy is a sinister indicator
that the government wishes to push through programmes and policies without
first opening them to a wider public debate.
Teesta Setalvad,
People's Union for Human Rights:
Mumbai: Teesta Setalvad, "Nirant" Juhu Tara Road, Mumbai 400 049. Telefax:
022-6602288; Phone: 022-6603927. Email: sabrang@b...
__________________________________________
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