SACW - 19 June 2013 / Turkey: Gezi Park resistance / India: Text of A K Ramanujan Memorial Lecture 2012 / India: Hindu Right terror; Ghar Wapsi + Ishrat Jahan / Letter to US Congress on surveillance

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 19 June 2013 - No. 2787
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Contents:

1. Stop the violence and listen to the people in Turkey:  Statements by feminist groups part of the Taksim Gezi park resistance movement
2. International civil society letter to US Congress on Internet and telecommunications surveillance
3. Full Text of A K Ramanujan Memorial Lecture 2012 by Girish Karnad
4. India: Creating a threatening other (Aruna Roy)
5. Concern about Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission - HRW release
6. India: Text of statement of Shamima Kausar, mother of deceased Ishrat Jahan
7. India - Hindutva terrorism in Karnataka: Malleswaram or Hubli 2 ?
8. India: "Ghar Wapsi" [a Return Home] and the Not-so-veiled Threat of the Sangh
9. India: Calcutta feminists arrested for protesting against the twin incidents of rape and murder of students | statement by NTUI
10. India: Good Man, Good Artist - An undiminished faith in life in spite of hard times (Ramachandra Guha)
11. Violence and protests could derail Bangladesh elections (Jason Burke)
12. Bangladesh: Guardian report false, intentional: Imran
13. India: Caste Is Not Past (Lavanya Sankaran)
14. France: Murder on the rue Caumartin (Valeria Costa-Kostritsky)
15. Urban Class Warfare: Are Cities Built for the Rich? |interview: David Harvey
16. IUF appeal: Support action to protect protesters and freedom of speech and assembly in Turkey - Join June 21 and 22 international protests

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1. STOP THE VIOLENCE AND LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE IN TURKEY: STATEMENTS BY FEMINIST GROUPS PART OF THE TAKSIM GEZI PARK RESISTANCE MOVEMENT
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DECLARATION by WOMEN’S COALITION TURKEY WE ARE CALLING UPON THE GOVERNMENT: IMMEDIATELY STOP POLICE VIOLENCE AND THE AGGRESSIVE, THREATENING AND CONDENSCENDING ATTITUDE AGAINST THE PEOPLE
The peaceful sit-in began to counter planned construction at the Taksim Gezi park, which would replace one of downtown Istanbul’s few green spaces with a shopping mall, has evolved into nationwide demonstrations and people’s resistance as a result of the brutal police violence and firing with tear gas  (...)
http://www.sacw.net/article4763.html

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2. INTERNATIONAL CIVIL SOCIETY LETTER TO US CONGRESS ON INTERNET AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS SURVEILLANCE
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We write as a coalition of civil society organizations from around the world to express our serious alarm regarding revelations of Internet and telephone communications surveillance of US and non-US citizens by the US government. We also wish to express our grave concern that US authorities may have made the data resulting from those surveillance activities available to other States, including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Canada, Belgium, Australia and New Zealand. Many US-based Internet companies with global reach also seem to be participating in these practices.
http://www.sacw.net/article4761.html

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3. FULL TEXT OF A K RAMANUJAN MEMORIAL LECTURE 2012 BY GIRISH KARNAD
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Let me say what a great honour it is for me to be here to deliver the First A.K. Ramanujan Memorial Lecture. He was a distinguished poet, both in Kannada and English, a folklorist, an ethnographer. He was among the first of Indian thinkers to take a serious look at oral tales, lullabies, proverbs, songs, in fact, at the richness of the world of women. He was a much acclaimed translator from Tamil and Kannada. I have no expertise in any of these fields. My claim to fame ---and certainly the reason why I have accepted the invitation to deliver this lecture---is that I knew him closely from the days when he was still unknown. He worked as a Junior Lecturer in a town called Belgaum when he was 27 years old
http://www.sacw.net/article4762.html

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4. INDIA: CREATING A THREATENING OTHER
by Aruna Roy
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    The political battle is now an economic one. Millions are forcibly displaced across the country for "development" and for the profit of others. An ostensibly democratic polity may use authoritarianism and violence on those on the margins but expands its repertoire to repress dissent in the mainstream.
http://www.sacw.net/article4760.html

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5. CONCERN ABOUT AFGHANISTAN INDEPENDENT HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION - HRW RELEASE
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Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s appointment of a weakly qualified human rights commission with little public consultation raises concerns about the country’s most important rights body.
http://www.sacw.net/article4759.html

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6. INDIA: TEXT OF STATEMENT OF SHAMIMA KAUSAR, MOTHER OF DECEASED ISHRAT JAHAN
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My daughter Ishrat Jehan was abducted, illegally confined and killed in cold blood by officers and men of the Gujarat police, in June 2004. She was killed as part of a larger conspiracy which had a political agenda. Ishrat’s murder was projected as an ‘encounter’ and justified by branding her a terrorist who had come with 3 other men to attack the Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. This was not the first fake encounter in Gujarat, other Muslims too had been executed in similar staged encounters, committed in the name of protecting the Chief Minster of Gujarat. Some of these other fake encounters, which are nothing but pre meditated extra judicial killings, are already under investigation and prosecution.
http://www.sacw.net/article4758.html

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7. INDIA - HINDUTVA TERRORISM IN KARNATAKA: MALLESWARAM OR HUBLI 2 ?
by Subhash Gatade
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The Karnataka police arrested nine persons with Sangh Parivar links for allegedly setting off a bomb in the court of the junior first class magistrate in Hubli May 2008. They were also accused of planting a live bomb on the Dharwad-Belgaum road. This points to the presence of Hindutva terror suspects in the state.
http://www.sacw.net/article4750.html

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8. INDIA: "GHAR WAPSI" [A RETURN HOME] AND THE NOT-SO-VEILED THREAT OF THE SANGH
by John Dayal
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a statement, that can well be taken as a threat, made by the head of the Sangh Parivar, Dr Mohan Bhagwat, that conversions will be “reversed”, a challenge he has knowingly thrown to the Christian Church in India. The last is a claim by the Sangh that they have indeed made as many as 200,00 Christians, mostly Dalits and tribals, into Hindus, a process they call “Ghar Wapsi”, a Return Home in the mistaken belief that all Dalits and tribals are anyway Hindus.
http://www.sacw.net/article4747.html

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9. INDIA: CALCUTTA FEMINISTS ARRESTED FOR PROTESTING AGAINST THE TWIN INCIDENTS OF RAPE AND MURDER OF STUDENTS | STATEMENT BY NTUI
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An impatient administration that tries to stifle the voice of protests, unmasks itself much more than critics can possibly do.
http://www.sacw.net/article4749.html

FULL TEXT
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10. GOOD MAN, GOOD ARTIST - An undiminished faith in life in spite of hard times
Politics and Play - Ramachandra Guha
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(The Telegraph, June 15 , 2013)	
I first heard of Sunil Janah in 1980. I was then much taken with the work of the British-Indian anthropologist, Verrier Elwin. A friend in Calcutta, the green activist, Bonani Kakkar, said that if I was interested in Elwin I must meet her mamu, who had worked closely with him. However, I was visually illiterate, and had never heard of a man who was one of India’s finest photographers. Bonani filled me in on some of the details.

Three decades later, I (and everyone else) can revisit the life and legacy of Sunil Janah, via his posthumously published book Photographing India, which contains a selection of his images along with a long autobiographical essay reflecting on his life and work. The book is a priceless record of social and political life in India, circa 1940 to 1970. Peasants, workers, politicians; artists, dancers, musicians; street scenes, factory scenes, sea scenes — all are captured through the attentive and wide-ranging lens of the photographer.

Sunil Janah was born in 1918, into a family of educated and cultured Bengalis. While studying in Calcutta University, he, like other idealistic young men, became attracted to the Communist Party of India. He was a keen amateur photographer, whose work was printed in popular magazines. When a major famine hit Bengal in 1943, the CPI’s general secretary, P.C. Joshi, asked Janah to tour the countryside and document the starvation that stalked the land. His photos, published in the party’s newspaper, People’s War, attracted widespread attention (and admiration). Janah now abandoned his studies and became a full-time photographer.

The 1940s were a defining decade in Indian history. Following the famine, Janah covered the negotiation for the transfer of power, Mahatma Gandhi’s fasts and walks for communal harmony, and the horrors of Partition. He became a close friend of Margaret Bourke-White, whose photographs of that period have acquired a certain immortality. Without Janah’s help — technical and social — Bourke-White might never have been able to do what she did. That she became world-famous while he was known only in a select circle never really affected Janah, who was as free of conceit and personal ambition as any man (or woman) I have known.

In 1948, the hardliner, B.T. Ranadive, took over as general secretary of the CPI from the charming and cultured P.C. Joshi. The party had no place any more for independent-minded artists. Abandoned by the communists, Janah fell in love with a gifted and strong-willed Bengali woman doctor, named Sobha. She helped give him a new direction. He then met Verrier Elwin, their friendship flourishing through many visits to tribal India, with one man taking notes and the other man photos. Later, Janah got a series of industrial commissions, photographing dams and steel plants. Still later, he turned his attention to classical dance. His portraits of Shanta Rao and Balasaraswati are among the best things he ever did.

Janah writes that he was always “careless about money”, spending it as fast as it came. He was, he says, “plagued by an uncommon lack of business sense, or more generally of all common sense”. He never claimed copyright on his photographs, which were ubiquitously reproduced in India and abroad, without his permission or consent. Meanwhile, his eyesight, always weak, started failing further. There may also have been an excessive fondness for good liquor (a weakness common to both artists and communists).

With her husband’s health and career declining, in 1978 Sobha Janah took a job in a hospital in London. Sunil joined soon afterwards. It was here, in the early 1990s, that I first met them. I would go see them in their Wimbledon home, where, over many cups of tea, Sunil would speak of his friend the anthropologist, whose Life I was now writing. He was wonderfully generous with his time, and with his genius — when my book went into production he developed (for free) some fabulous (and previously unpublished) photographs he had taken of Verrier Elwin.

After 25 years in England, the Janahs moved to the United States, to be closer to their children. Both died last year, within months of one another. But their legacy lives on in Photographing India. The text of the book brims with knowledge, wit, and compassion, like the man himself. The tone is nicely self-deprecatory, as in his account of taking 36 photos of Nehru to find that all were “abominable blurs”, since he had forgotten to align the lens with the rangefinder.

All across the arts — with the possible exception only of music — the most talented tend to be the most self-absorbed. The best painters, like Picasso, or the best writers, like V. S. Naipaul, are often bereft of generosity and compassion. Not Sunil Janah, however. He was a superb photographer who was also a very fine human being. His kindness to me, personally, was in keeping with his capacious appreciation of humanity as a whole. His talent is reflected in his portraits; his character, in his words. Consider thus these reflections from the essay that accompanies Photographing India.

Janah on pluralism: “Cultural diversity enriches life in any country and the use of religion, race, or native language, rather than domicile, as the defining identity for a state, and as a criterion for full citizenship, is a recipe for civil strife and for abominations like ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide.”

Janah on attitudes towards beauty and sex, past and present: “In the past, our civilization… embraced and rejoiced in all aspect of being human. It did not denigrate the erotic and the sensual in any way. The killjoy aspects of more than one culture, had, later, been inflicted on our people. Over a long period of time, the influence of Islam, which veiled and segregated women, and of the Christianity of the Victorian British, whose code of decency dictated that the legs of even their furniture be draped, had reversed the traditions of a culture that had never regarded sex or the human body as shameful.”

Photographing India has some nice paragraphs on the person who brought me to Sunil Janah, the maverick anthropologist, Verrier Elwin. These are readable enough, but better still are some remarks from an essay on Elwin that he published in the Times Higher Education Supplement in 1999. Here Janah writes: “Elwin rarely talked about his intimate feelings. I remember an evening when he was not well and I was visiting him in his Calcutta flat. He told me that, despite the weariness we cannot escape in the culture that we live in, we can have our moments of exultation and moments of great peace. As long as we know that we shall experience these again and again unexpectedly, the darker tunnels of misery and despair we may go through do not diminish our faith that life, even for a tormented person, can be wonderful and joyous.”

Janah’s own life was sometimes tormented and sometimes joyous. In spite of the hard times he passed through, the early optimism of his communist years never fully left him. At the end of his life, Janah wrote — in words that should be pasted on the study or studio of every writer and photographer:

“The world has not become any better. There are battlefields, hatred and guns around us. It is a sad, depressing world, but it is the only world we have. Irrespective of whatever messages words or pictures may convey, they rarely bring about immediate change in the minds and hearts of people. But they make people think, which, over a period of time, leads to social and political changes. So it is always worth one’s while to write that article, paint that picture, or take that photograph.”

Shortly before the Janahs died, I spoke with them over the phone. I asked whether I could approach the government of India to have Sunil’s negatives and prints transferred to his homeland. Sobha said that both of them hoped very much that this would happen, but wanted to make sure they would be kept properly. I passed their wish on to an excellent joint secretary in the ministry of culture; she was keen to pursue the project, but sadly was replaced soon afterwards. Knowing how the government works — or does not work — it may need a generous minded philanthropist to bring the archive of this remarkable Indian back to the land that he so loved and enriched.

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11. VIOLENCE AND PROTESTS COULD DERAIL BANGLADESH ELECTIONS
Fears mount that the eighth most populous country in the world will be plunged into chaos in runup to poll later this year.
by Jason Burke, Dhaka
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The Guardian, 18 June 2013
Fears are mounting in Bangladesh that violence and protests could derail elections later this year, though senior government officials are adamant that the polls will be free and fair.

Following street clashes last month and with oppositions parties planning a campaign of protests that will build in intensity through the summer, many are concerned that Bangladesh, the eighth most populous country in the world, will be plunged into chaos in the runup to the poll.

Violence and strikes six years ago led to polls being postponed and eventually the declaration of a state of emergency and a military-backed caretaker government. A controversial tribunal investigating alleged war crimes dating back 42 years has polarised an already-partisan political scene. More than 70 died after it delivered its judgments in February.

Coming after the collapse of a factory producing clothes for the west with the loss of 1,130 lives in April, any political crisis would be expected to seriously damage Bangladesh's booming garment trade, which accounts for 80% of its exports, and would complicate efforts to improve conditions for the 3.5 million employed in the sector.

Gowher Rizvi, chief representative of the prime minister, Sheik Hasina, told the Guardian that preparations for the forthcoming elections, were "completely on track" and that the tribunal, probing crimes committed during the 1971 war in which Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan, was about bringing justice previously denied by "the twists and turns" of the country's history. A coalition led by Hasina's Awami League has been in power since a landslide victory in 2008.

"The government remains committed to elections. Barring some disaster outside its control, elections will be held on time and as per the constitution," Rizvi said.

However, many issues remain unresolved, particularly the demand from the main opposition party, the Bangladesh National party (BNP) for the Awami League to hand over power to a caretaker government. Sheikh Hasina, daughter of independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who was assassinated in 1975, insists she will lead the government into the polls herself.

Rizvi, her representative, said that all executive authority would be handed over to the country's election commission, and that "whatever it takes for free and fair elections" would be done.

This is unlikely to be enough for Khaleda Zia, the leader of the BNP and the widow of General Zia-ur Rehman who took power in 1977 and ruled until he too was assassinated in 1981.

A BNP official told the Guardian that party strategists believed Hasina and the Awami League aimed to force the BNP to boycott the poll, allowing them to keep power in a "one-party election".

"Incumbents always lose in Bangladesh. The government know they will lose this [election] and are ready to do anything to hold on to power," he said.

The BNP plans to ramp up street protests between the end of student examinations next week and the beginning of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, in July. This will give both sides an idea of what kind of muscle the party can deploy. Then the real battle can begin in the autumn.

Three elements are key: the role of Bangladesh's Islamist parties, the ongoing war crimes tribunal and the potential mobilisation of young voters alienated by the partisan politics of recent years. All three are interlinked.

Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), the main Islamist party and a long-term ally of the BNP, won only two seats in the 2008 elections. However, their voters can swing the result in dozens of crucial constituencies decided by wafer-thin margins.

The defendants in the so-called International War Crimes Tribunal are largely JI leaders, prompting charges that it is politically motivated. The government denies this.

Alongside JI, there is now a new force called Hefezat-e-Islam. Shah Ahmedullah Ashrafi, its deputy emir, told the Guardian that the movement had been founded in 2011 to protect Islam from the corroding influence of democracy, socialism and secularism.

In a madrasa on the banks of a branch of the heavily-polluted Buriganga river, on the edge of one of the largest slums in Asia, Ashrafi, 73, explained that Bangladesh was a Muslim nation but had been turned into a "country of Bengalis".

"The problem is the unbeliever … He has no principles," he said.

Hefezat-e-Islam organised massive demonstrations last month that ended in police killing an undetermined number of protesters and say they will take to the streets again to enforce their demands. A particular grievance is alleged government support for bloggers associated with the Shahbagmovement whom the Islamists accuse of being atheists who have insulted the Prophet Muhammad.

The Shahbag movement, named after a traffic intersection in the centre of Dhaka, saw hundreds of thousands of young people demonstrate earlier this year to demand death sentences for those found guilty by the tribunal.

But though, in interviews with the Guardian, young activists focused their anger on Jamaat-e-Islami, which they called "the terrorist group", a series of more inchoate discontents underpinned the movement too.

"Do they want an all-encompassing democratic revolution? No. Do they want liberal democratic governance within the existing political order? Yes," said Nurul Kabir, the editor of the New Age newspaper. As elsewhere in Asia, a new generation of politically conscious, urban youth are challenging established politics of patronage and demanding better, more responsive governance.

Imran, a 29-year-old doctor who effectively sparked the Shahbag movement with a Facebook post and who is now in hiding, said they would also soon launch a campaign of protests.

Abdur Razzaq, assistant secretary general of Jamaat-e-Islami, said: "Everyone has the right to come to the street and mobilise peaceful demonstrations."

It seems there is only one thing on which all are agreed: the struggle, when it comes, will be won or lost on the streets.

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12. BANGLADESH: GUARDIAN REPORT FALSE, INTENTIONAL: IMRAN
New Age Online
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New Age (Bangladesh) 18 June 2013
The Shahbagh movement spokesman Imran H Sarkar Tuesday said the report regarding his hiding published in the British newspaper, Guardian, is totally false and intentional.
“The report is not only bogus but also intentional,” Imran told New Age Online over telephone.
Imran said the war crimes accused Jamaat-e-Islami might be behind the report to create controversy over the International Crimes Tribunal.
He said a press conference has also been convened Tuesday afternoon in front of the National Museum in Shahbagh and he will address reporters there. This will prove that he is not in hiding, he added.
‘Imran, a 29-year-old doctor who effectively sparked the Shahbag movement with a Facebook post and who is now in hiding, said they would also soon launch a campaign of protests,’ the Guardian reported Tuesday in its report titled ‘Violence and protests could derail Bangladesh elections’.
The report, in 15th para, said, ‘the defendants in the so-called International War Crimes Tribunal are largely JI leaders, prompting charges that it is politically motivated. The government denies this.’
Imran was seen publicly last on June 10, as the Shahbagh protestors brought out a procession in the capital protesting the daylong shutdown enforced by Jamaat-e-Islami.
The Shabagh movement led by Imran H Sarkar began on February 5 hours after  International Crimes Tribunal-2 awarded a life term to Jamaat-e-Islami assistant secretary general Abdur Quader Molla. The protestors took to the street demanding capital punishment for war crime convicts.

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13. INDIA: CASTE IS NOT PAST
by Lavanya Sankaran
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Published: The New York Times, June 15, 2013
BANGALORE, India — CASTE is not a word that modernizing India likes to use. It has receded to the unfashionable background. Newspapers reserve their headlines for the newer metrics of social hierarchy: wealth and politics, and those powerful influencers of popular culture, actors and cricket stars.

There are two stories we tell ourselves in urban India. One is about how education transforms lives. It is the golden key to the future, allowing people to rise above the circumstances of their birth and background. And sometimes, it does. In my own neighborhood, a few sons and daughters of cooks and gardeners are earning their engineering and business degrees, and sweeping their families into the middle class. Not many, certainly. But enough that this is a valid hope, a valid dream.

The other story is about how the last two decades of economic growth have fundamentally changed the country, creating jobs and income and nurturing aspiration where earlier there was none. New money and an increasingly powerful middle class are supposedly displacing the old social hierarchies.

These are exciting stories, even revolutionary in a country where, for centuries, the social order was considered immutable. Traditionally, Indian society was divided into four main castes. At the top, Brahmins, as priests and teachers; second came the Kshatriyas, the warriors and rulers; third, Vaishyas, who were merchants; last, Shudras, the laborers. And below them all, the Dalits, or untouchables, called Harijans, or “children of God,” by Mahatma Gandhi (for indeed, who isn’t?).

The castes were ostensibly professional divisions but were locked firmly into place by birth and a rigid structure of social rules that governed interaction between and within them.

That, famously, was then. Discrimination based on caste has been illegal in India for more than six decades. In today’s urban India, this land of possibility, separated from rural India by cultural and economic chasms, it seems reactionary even to speak of caste. Certainly it shouldn’t — and usually doesn’t — come up at work or at play or in the apartment elevator.

If it features in urban conversations at all, it is defanged, reduced to cultural stereotypes and amusing-if-annoying tropes that never bother with political correctness. Gujarati Baniyas of the Vaishya caste have a keen eye on finance. Tamil Brahmins do math and classical music. Nobody parties or fights harder than a Punjabi Khatri (of the Kshatriyas). It’s the equivalent, in America, of expecting the Asian kid to have good grades, the black man to be the best dancer and the Jewish guy to be well-read and have some slight mother issues.

As India transforms, one might expect caste to dissolve and disappear, but that is not happening. Instead, caste is making its presence felt in ways similar to race in modern America: less important now in jobs and education, but vibrantly alive when it comes to two significant societal markers — marriage and politics.

No surprise on that first one. Inter-caste marriages in India are on the rise but still tend to be the province of the liberal few. For much of the country, with its penchant for arranged marriages and close family ties, caste is still a primary determinant in choosing a spouse.

Politics is where caste has gotten a surprising new lease on life. After money and education, democracy is, of course, the third powerful force transforming Indian society. But Indians, it turns out, are passionate about the caste of their politicians. Nearly half of the voting population of even a highly educated city like Bangalore considers caste to be the No. 1 reason to vote for a candidate.

Democracy gives power to people who previously had none. But, like race, caste can shift political discussions from present-day merit to payback for historical injustices.

Six decades of democratic statehood have attempted to correct the imbalances of the past through “reservation” — job and education quotas for the so-called backward castes, like the Dalits. This program has been effective, in a fairly hit-or-miss fashion. Some say that nearly all university seats are reserved for lower castes, effectively blocking Brahmins from higher education. Others point out that the vast majority of high paying jobs are still in the hands of the top three castes.

This, then, is the problem of discussing caste in India: the profound lack of information and contradictory data on the subject. Succeeding governments for years shied away from gathering caste-based data, preferring, with obscure political wisdom, to enact their policies in the dark. This changed in 2011, with the first Indian census to visit the subject in eight decades.

The ostensible reason for the caste census was to see where we were economically. But let’s have no doubt, the impact will be political.

Indian political parties have played caste politics for years. The powerful Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party and its derivatives have thrived on an anti-Brahmin platform in Tamil Nadu. The compelling rise of Mayawati, a Dalit woman who goes by one name, to chief minister of Uttar Pradesh was built on the support of her caste. But, once in office, her reputation as one of the world’s most influential female politicians was marred by corruption and mismanagement in her administration. Last year, her party lost control of Uttar Pradesh’s legislative assembly, and Ms. Mayawati resigned her position. Now, in an intriguing twist, she hopes to regain power by wooing not just Dalits but also Brahmins, arguing that the latter are newly marginalized.

The census results will give strategists their best tools for precisely targeting voters and tailoring campaign messages to caste concerns and fears. Caste will probably grow as a voter focal point, at the expense of administrative competency in economics, education, foreign policy, women’s rights, the environment and every other vital matter of governance that concerns a growing India.

So that is the fascinating conundrum of Indian society: on one hand, caste is losing its virility as India opens up opportunities and mind-sets, while on the other, the forces of democratic politics ensure that it will thrive and never be forgotten as a crucial social index.

Lavanya Sankaran is the author of the novel “The Hope Factory.”
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on June 16, 2013, on page SR9 of the New York edition with the headline: Caste Is Not Past.

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14. FRANCE: MURDER ON THE RUE CAUMARTIN
Valeria Costa-Kostritsky 
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(London Review of Books Blog, 10 June 2013)
Last Wednesday afternoon, Clément Méric, a 19-year-old university student, was punched by a skinhead wearing brass knuckles on rue Caumartin in Paris. He fell and his head hit a pole. He was declared dead the following afternoon.

Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent’s partner, said on Twitter that he believed the anti-gay marriage movement was to blame: ‘The Manif pour tous accepted into their ranks these fascists who killed Clément.’ He also reminded his followers of the threats made by the leader of Manif pour tous, Frigide Barjot, at a rally in April. ‘If Hollande wants blood, he shall have some.’ Most French newspapers agreed with Bergé’s analysis.

Now that blood has been spilled, Barjot denies any responsibility. The people at the Manif pour tous protests were ‘families with prams’, she said. She puts the blame on the law allowing gay marriage: ‘It’s started an ideological conflict. One shouldn’t be astonished that there are deadly repercussions which I deplore totally,’ she told AFP.

Julien Salingue, a political science student at Paris VIII University and a member of the NPA (New Anticapitalist Party) says that in recent months he and other activists have observed ‘far-right groups growing in universities, fights taking place regularly in Toulouse and Lyon, a trade union CGT activist getting beaten up. Identitaires’ – a far-right youth movement – ‘putting video clips online. As if all these small far-right groups had decided to become more visible.’

SOS Homophobie say they received 30 per cent more reports of homophobic acts in 2012 than in 2011. Wilfred de Bruijn, a Dutchman wo has lived in Paris for nine years, was attacked with his partner on 7 April. He published a photo of his badly beaten face on Facebook, with the caption: ‘This is the face of homophobia.’

Méric was involved in the campaign for equal marriage. A video shot on 17 April, 10 days after the assault on de Bruijn, shows him in the front line of a counter demo. Half of his face is hidden by a red bandana and he’s holding a sign that says: ‘Homophobia kills.’

For far-right groups, the Manifs pour tous have been an opportunity to recruit. ‘Just as we try to recruit within the most radical young people during social mobilisations,’ Salingue says. ‘After all, big right wing demos are quite rare.’

Dominique Venner, a veteran far-right historian, shot himself in Notre Dame to protest against the law allowing gay marriage. ‘Organising nice street demonstrations won’t be enough,’ his final blog post said. ‘We will need new gestures, spectacular and symbolic… This is a time when words have to be backed up by actions.’ Marine Le Pen paid tribute to Venner, saying on Twitter that his suicide was ‘an eminently political gesture aimed at waking up the French people’.

Méric’s murder was initially linked to the Jeunesses Nationalistes Révolutionnaires, a small but growing far-right group. The five people who have been arrested are said to be not members of the JNR but sympathisers of Troisième Voie, a small group created in 2010, for which the JNR do security. On Saturday, the prime minister announced that the JNR would be dissolved, and that Troisième Voie might be too.

Stéphane François, a political scientist, told L’Express that the factors behind the rise of such groups include the economic crisis, the fact that the JNR claims to be anticapitalist, and the attempts of the Front National to rebrand itself as a more mainstream party and to publicly distance itself from its neo-Nazi acquaintances. Marine Le Pen immediately condemned Clément’s assault. Confronted on RTL radio by a journalist who played the statement of a witness saying one of the assailants was wearing a Front National T-shirt, she said it wasn’t true.

Yet Méric’s death was political. He was killed because he was a member of Action Antifasciste Paris-Banlieue. His face would have been well-known to neo-Nazi groups.

Jean-François Copé, the president of the UMP, who attended the Manif pour tous demonstrations, called for the dissolution of all ‘extreme’ political groups, ‘of the far right, and the far left’, whose ‘sole expression’, he said, ‘is violence’.

‘When was the last time a far-left activist killed someone in the street?’ Salingue asks.

On Thursday night, thousands of people gathered in cities across France to remember Méric. Some of his fellow students at Sciences Po objected to his being depicted as a ‘far left’ activist. ‘The left he was defending is the real left,’ they said.
- See more at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/06/10/valeria-costa-kostritsky/murder-on-the-rue-caumartin/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3512&hq_e=el&hq_m=2557824&hq_l=14&hq_v=21666722f2#sthash.wmNnAk36.dpuf

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15. URBAN CLASS WARFARE: ARE CITIES BUILT FOR THE RICH?
Today's class struggles are increasingly taking place in cities, says Marxist and social theorist David Harvey. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, he discusses how urbanization will play a key role in social conflicts to come.
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(http://tinyurl.com/pt7rtte)
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Why should a Marxist be concerned about major cities instead of the working class these days?

Harvey : Traditional Marxists admittedly see the avant-garde of the revolution in the industrial working class. However, since this is disappearing in the wake of Western deindustrialization, people are starting to grasp that urban conflicts will probably be decisive.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Over the course of the debt crisis, wages have decreased and social benefits have been slashed in Greece. Meanwhile, general strikes haven't generated enough pressure to reverse the changes. Can this be viewed as evidence to support your theory that the traditional proletariat can no longer paralyze a state?

Harvey : Yes. Today's working class is part of a wider configuration of classes in which the struggle centers on the city itself. I replace the traditional concept of class struggle with the struggle of all those who produce and reproduce urban life. Unions must look at the urban everyday existence -- a key for the social conflicts to come. In the United States, for example, this has prompted the AFL-CIO federation of labor organizations to start collaborating with domestic workers and migrants.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: One of the basic theses of your book "Rebel Cities" is that urban development solves the problem of surplus capital. One builds streets and develops property on credit -- and thereby attempts to escape recession.

Harvey : A report from the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco recently put it that way, saying that the United States has historically always surmounted recessions by building houses and filling them with things. Urbanization can solve crises -- but, more than anything, it is a way to get out of crises.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Are there current examples of this strategy?

Harvey : Where are economies currently growing the fastest? In China and Turkey. What do we see in Istanbul? Cranes, everywhere. And when the crisis broke out in 2008, China lost 30 million jobs within six months owing to drops in US imports of consumer goods. But then the Chinese government created 27 million new jobs. How? The Chinese used their enormous trade surpluses to mount a gigantic urban-development and infrastructure program.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Isn't such a short-notice crisis strategy aided by having an authoritarian regime like China's?

Harvey : Just imagine Obama ordering Goldman Sachs to give money to developers -- good luck! But when a Chinese bank gets an order from the Central Committee of the Communist Party, it lends as much money as is desired. The Chinese government forced the banks to furnish development projects with large amounts of money.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is this kind of urbanization necessarily a bad thing?

Harvey : Urbanization is a channel through which surplus capital flows to build new cities for the upper class. It is a powerful process that newly defines what cities are about, as well as who can live there and who can't. And it determines the quality of life in cities according to the stipulations of capital rather than those of people.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: At the same time, in Istanbul, the state housing association Toki has built several large housing estates for the poor. Does this contradict your thesis?

Harvey: No, because the residents of the so-called Geçekondus, the informal settlements lying at least on the city's outskirts, were summarily transplanted into developing areas 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the downtown area -- a massive expulsion.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The subprime crisis in the United States arose precisely out of the attempt to incorporate the lower classes into home-ownership. Reckless financial products were created so that even the poorest could obtain loans.

Harvey : Give credit! -- This battle cry pushed through the neoliberal agenda. But that's nothing new. During the McCarthy Era after World War II, the ruling classes already recognized that home ownership plays an important role in preventing social unrest. On the one hand, left-wing activities were combated as un-American. On the other, building was promoted with financial and mortgage reforms. In the 1940s, the proportion of owner-occupied homes in the United States was still under 40 percent. In the 1960s, it was already at 65 percent. And during the last real estate boom in the 2000s, it was 70 percent. In the discussions about mortgage reforms at the end of the 1930s, a key sentence was: "Indebted homeowners don't go on strike."

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In their book "Commonwealth," philosophers Michael Hardt and Tony Negri claim that the city is a factory for the production of common goods. Do you agree?

Harvey : A lot revolves around the definition of "urban commons." The fact that central squares are public is significant in terms of the right to the city, as the Occupy movements in New York and London demonstrated when they took over privatized parks. In this context, I like the historical model of the Paris Commune: People who lived on the outskirts returned to the city center in order to reclaim the city they had been excluded from.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Should Occupy movements push for a right to the city? House by house, park by park?

Harvey : No, for that you need political power. But these days, the left unfortunately shrinks away from large-scale projects requiring state policies -- voluntarily yielding power, in my view.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You are a Marxist and social theorist. In your latest book, you refer to the "art of rent," that is, when capital makes extra profits from local discrepancies. What exactly do you mean?

Harvey : Simply put, a monopolist can demand a premium for a sought-after commodity. These days, cities try demanding premiums by advertising themselves as culturally unique. After the Guggenheim Museum was built in Bilbao in 1997, cities all over the world followed its example and began developing landmark projects. The goal is to be able to say: "This city is unique, and that's why you need to pay a special price to be here."

SPIEGEL ONLINE: But if every city had a Guggenheim Museum or a philharmonic like the one currently being built in Hamburg, wouldn't there be a sort of inflationary effect when it comes to such flagship projects that would lead them to fail?

Harvey : The bubble has already burst in Spain, and many of the huge projects remain only half-finished. Incidentally, major events like the Olympic Games, the soccer World Cup and music festivals serve the same purpose. Cities try to secure themselves a prime position on the market -- like a rare wine of an exceptionally good vintage.

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16. International Union of Food Workers Appeal For Action
SUPPORT ACTION TO PROTECT PROTESTERS AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND ASSEMBLY IN TURKEY: JOIN JUNE 21 AND 22 INTERNATIONAL PROTESTS
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Burcu Ayan (IUF-UITA-IUL) <burcu.ayan at iuf.org>
Date: 18 June 2013 20:08
Subject line: #DIRENGEZI: STOP STATE VIOLENCE, RESPECT PEOPLES' RIGHTS

To all IUF affiliated organisations

Dear Sisters and Brothers,

#DIRENGEZI: STOP STATE VIOLENCE, RESPECT PEOPLES' RIGHTS

Support action to protect protesters and freedom of speech and assembly in Turkey: Join June 21 and 22 international protests

In response to formal requests from affiliates in Turkey, supported by other IUF unions, the IUF is calling on all its members to support the ongoing protests in Istanbul and throughout Turkey.

Time is of the essence and so we are asking you to act quickly and do whatever you can on 21 and 22 June by organising actions, demonstrations and marches at and around Turkish Embassy and Consulates. We anticipate this will be the first of a series of support actions. The dates coincide with actions organised by the IUF's sister global union, ITF, which represents transport workers workers and with major actions planned in Germany by workers with connections with Turkey.

Please find a contact list of Embassy and Consulates of Turkey here:
http://www.mfa.gov.tr/turkish-representations.en.mfa.

Also, please find attached a model letter that you should deliver to the Turkish Embassy or Consulate while gathering outside their building. You will need to explain to the highest rank diplomat available - ideally the Ambassador - that action is intended to ensure that Turkey guarantees its people their right to freedom of expression and assembly. The aim is to have the Ambassador or Consul pass this message to the Government in Turkey.

The demands of this protest are as follows:

·         The Government in Ankara should put an end to state violence against peaceful demonstrators and ensure that the right of freedom of expression and assembly is guaranteed in all public areas of Turkey.

·         Those responsible for the thousands of injured people and the deaths of Mehmet Ayvalıtaş, Abdullah Cömert, Ethem Sarısülük and Mustafa Sarı should be held accountable, dismissed from their posts and prosecuted before the law.

·         Detained citizens who attended the protests across the country should be immediately released with an official statement declaring that there will not be any investigations pursued into them.

·         All the legal and practical barriers against the exercise of trade union rights are removed and the right to strike is respected.

·         Detained trade unionists, journalists and all others unjustly held for legitimate acts of protests and political opposition should be released immediately.

Please organise actions and invite other trade unions, community activists and members of the media to increase the impact of your action.

We attach some artwork that can be used for leaflets, posters etc.

Please contact Burcu Ayan <burcu.ayan at iuf.org> at the IUF Secretariat.

Please remember also to send Burcu any action reports including photographs - these will be shared publicly on-line.

We look forward to hearing from you.


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South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web: 
www.sacw.net/

DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
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