SACW - 25 June 2013 / Afghanistan: future? / Extremism Among Myanmar Buddhists / Pakistan: attack on Nanga Parbat Climbers / India: Disaster in the Mountains; Habib Tanvir; surveillance / Algeria Twenty Years On / Indonesia’s Fragile Democracy

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 25 June 2013 - No. 2789
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Contents:

1. Sri Lanka: Marking a shift in the national security discourse (Kishali Pinto Jayawardene)
2. Pakistan - India: Afghan Refugees the 2013 repatriation deadline from Pakistan and U.S pullout in 2014
3. In Afghanistan, back to the future (Vivek Katju)
4. Pakistan: Taliban attack on Nanga Parbat Climbers - reports and commentary
5. Taliban peace talk plans lead Afghan women to fear loss of rights
6. Shadow Puppets and Special Forces: Indonesia’s Fragile Democracy (Michael G. Vann)
7. Pakistan: Return of The Notorious Professor To Punjab University - Appeal to CM Punjab to take action
8. India - Uttrakhand: Gautam Bhatia on Disaster in the Mountains
9. India: It’s turning blood red (Harsh Mander)
10. India: 1948 | Extracts from Habib Tanvir: Memoirs
11.. India: Petition to Press Council of India - Inquire into serious violation of media ethics by Times of India
12. India’s Central Monitoring System (CMS) Threatens Rights : Human Rights Watch release
13. India - Gujarat: Statement re Continual Harassment of Labour and Environmental Activist Rohit Prajapati

FULL TEXT:
14. Naya Pakistan, where Salmaan Taseer’s murderer is a hero
15. India's Socialists Try to Find a Middle Way (Manu Joseph)
16. Extremism Rises Among Myanmar Buddhists (Thomas Fuller)
17. Algeria Twenty Years On: Words Do Not Die (Karima Bennoune) 
18. June Days of the mobilization of the society in Turkey
19. Lessons for Brazil From South Africa (Patrick Bond)
 
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1. Sri Lanka: Marking a shift in the national security discourse
by Kishali Pinto Jayawardene
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This is a time when moderation, commonsense and basic decency have been cast to the four winds in Sri Lanka. It is a time when hatred against different communities is hailed and felicitated. And President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s appeal to the media this week not to give publicity to rampaging monks of the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) certainly does not solve this problem. Rather, it exacerbates the issue.
http://www.sacw.net/article4806.html

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2. Pakistan - India: Afghan Refugees the 2013 repatriation deadline from Pakistan and U.S pullout in 2014
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PAKISTAN: Afghan refugees in Pakistan fear deportation More than 1.6 million people who fled Afghan conflict have been given a June 30 
http://www.sacw.net/article4803.html

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3. VIVEK KATJU - In Afghanistan, back to the future
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The U.S. has already gone to great lengths to accommodate the Taliban and Pakistan. Such is the measure of its strategic desperation that contrary to its earlier position, it has accepted the Taliban’s vague assurances regarding Afghan territory not being used to foment violence outside the country. Also, for many months the U.S. and its European partners had almost given up on the reconciliation process and the focus was on a credible Afghan presidential election so that an effective and cohesive political leadership, post-2014 and post-Karzai , could take on the Taliban insurgency. No statement or comment since June 18 mentions the political process as mandated by the Afghan Constitution at all.
http://www.sacw.net/article4799.html

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4. Pakistan: Taliban attack on Nanga Parbat Climbers - reports and commentary
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In an incident that appears to be unique in the history of Pakistan, nine foreign tourists and their Pakistani guide have been murdered in an attack that by mid-afternoon on Sunday was being claimed by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. There have been rare instances of foreign tourists being attacked or robbed, and two or three reported murders over decades, but never a mass slaying such as this.
http://www.sacw.net/article4802.html

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5. Taliban peace talk plans lead Afghan women to fear loss of rights
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Afghanistan’s women fear Taliban’s return to power would ’wipe away’ hard-won achievements of past 11 years
http://www.sacw.net/article4801.html

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6. Shadow Puppets and Special Forces: Indonesia’s Fragile Democracy
by Michael G. Vann
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Fifteen years ago last month, Indonesia’s President Suharto was overthrown following a series of student-led protests. In the violent chaos that ended the former dictator’s long and brutal reign, there was a wave of seemingly well-organized beatings, rapes, and murders of ethnic Chinese in major cities such as Jakarta and Surakarta, also known as Solo. Indonesia’s new democracy was christened in blood.
http://www.sacw.net/article4811.html

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7. Pakistan: Return of The Notorious Professor To Punjab University - Appeal to CM Punjab to take action
(Fauzia in America - Blog)
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Baloch was terminated based on findings of both the police and the University inquiries. These findings have not been overturned, only his termination has been quashed. No such pervert should have a place in a Pakistani educational institute. Whatever ‘special inquiry’ has been undertaken to return Iftikhar Baloch to his post must be immediately reviewed. Why the LHC had to give the final authority to overturn the legal University decision to the Governor also needs to be assessed. The Punjab CM said in a cabinet meeting today that “the culture of nepotism, corruption and favouritism needed to end, the rule of law must prevail.” We need to see the CM take charge of this case and show his support for a dignified environment in the educational institutions.
http://www.sacw.net/article4809.html

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8. India - Uttrakhand: Gautam Bhatia on Disaster in the Mountains
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In the past 30 years, the continual expansion of the population deeper into the hills has already left a passive trail of devastation - tourist hotels some as high as six-eight storey perch on cliffs, empty summer houses of the Delhi rich; an expanding road network on unstable hillsides, commercial activity along new tourist routes, loss of tree cover, expansion of agriculture into forests, and a rain of garbage along hillsides. It is a wonder that environmental disasters don’t happen more often. The river’s force within minutes can alter the topography of an area, as it did along the Kedarnath Gangotri belt last week. A sudden deluge engulfed religious sites at Kedarnath, Govindghat and Pandukeshwar, the tragedy occurring at peak tourist season, leaving hundreds dead, washing away cars and people.
http://www.sacw.net/article4808.html

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9. India: It’s turning blood red
by Harsh Mander
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The audacious ambush and bloody massacre of more than two dozen political leaders and their security guards in Darbha valley of Sukma district in south Chhattisgarh, raises again profoundly important questions about the legitimacy of violence as an instrument to battle injustice and oppression.Resistance to injustice is widely endorsed as the highest human duty in most cultures, but the debate is about the legitimacy of deploying violence in resisting and combating injustice.
http://www.sacw.net/article4810.html

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10. India: 1948 | Extracts from Habib Tanvir: Memoirs
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On IPTA (Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association) and PWA (Progressive Writers’ Association) in the first year after independence, from Habib Tanvir, the theatre maestro’s posthumous memoirs
http://www.sacw.net/article4798.html

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11. India: Petition to Press Council of India - Inquire into serious violation of media ethics by Times of India
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Online petition re Media Coverage on Disaster in Uttrakhand and Narendra Modi visit to the area.
http://www.sacw.net/article4796.html

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12. India’s Central Monitoring System (CMS) Threatens Rights : Human Rights Watch release
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The Indian government should enact clear laws to ensure that increased surveillance of phones and the Internet does not undermine rights to privacy and free expression, Human Rights Watch said
http://www.sacw.net/article4793.html

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13. India - Gujarat: Statement re Continual Harassment of Labour and Enviromental Activist Rohit Prajapati
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Comrade Rohit Prajapati, member of Radical Socialist, and veteran trade unionist and environmental activist, associated with Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti (Environmentalist organisation), Peoples Union for Civil Liberties, Jyoti Karmachari Mandal and Vadodara Kamdar Union (independent trade unions), and Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti, as well as connected intimately to the anti-fascist militants of Gujarat from before the 2002 pogroms, has been under various kinds of political harassment, both from the Narendra Modi government, and from the big business companies that have been making huge profits under Modi’s regime.
http://www.sacw.net/article4807.html   

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14. NAYA PAKISTAN, WHERE SALMAAN TASEER’S MURDERER IS A HERO
The Express Tribune, June 20, 2013
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In PTI’s Naya Pakistan, heroes blow up police stations and villains put men like Qadri behind bars. PHOTO: AFP/FILE

It’s hard to know where to begin when a lawmaker in the National Assembly says a cold-blooded murderer should be released. Only expletives follow when you realise it was a Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) MNA and former governor of Punjab Salman Taseer’s murderer Malik Mumtaz Qadri is the killer in question. A man sentenced to death by a court of law. 

These are the lawmakers we elected folks. Naya Pakistan has arrived. A country where we try to wash our hands off a war which is being fought on our soil, against our security forces by monsters we created with the money and complicity of the USA and Saudi Arabia.

In Naya Pakistan, a party comes into power, after nearly two decades of failing to gain any momentum, on the back of the supporters of MNA Mujahid Khan, a man who wants Qadri released.

It still surprises me, how Taseer was killed by Qadri who was one of Taseer’s bodyguards, while the rest of his security detail watched, guns in holsters. And then the silence was even more shocking, the silence of those in power then; those wanting to be in power and those planning to sail into power in the next elections on a wave of right-wingers.

Somehow that ugly silence was louder than the supporters of Qadri; the Facebook groups lauding him, the clerics rallying for him and the lawyers showering him with petals. That silence continued as the judge who sentenced Qadri left the country in fear. After all the radicalised crowd which shows up outside courtrooms to support a murder can only follow in his footsteps and do as they believe is just.

But the silence evaporated today, Naya Pakistan’s water just broke. Mujahid Ali Khan just gave birth to the ‘Naya Pakistan’ we should all have expected. And many of us were anticipating this horror show.

The lawmaker’s public stance is very much the voice of PTI, even if Dr Arif Alvi goes blue in the face saying otherwise. The MNA is in the National Assembly, representing PTI.


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15. LETTER FROM INDIA: INDIA'S SOCIALISTS TRY TO FIND A MIDDLE WAY
by Manu Joseph
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(The New York Times, June 19, 2013)
NEW DELHI — When two Indian socialists recently tried to describe a problem with a ceiling fan, they employed the language of revolution, probably out of habit.

“It’s all or nothing,” Nikhil Dey said, studying the fan, which either ran too fast or just stalled. “All or nothing,” muttered Aruna Roy, his close associate, looking amused in her small apartment in Delhi.

But after two decades of economic liberalization in India, vintage socialists are under unprecedented pressure to accept that there is such a thing as the middle path. As they fight to remain relevant as intellectuals who can influence government policy, they are trying to understand what exactly the idea of the middle path is in a nation that claims it is somewhere between a market economy that enriches the strong so that the rest can eat from the falling crumbs, and a humane socialist welfare state that spends hundreds of billions of rupees that it cannot afford to aid the weak and the unfortunate.

Independent India was created and, for decades, led by socialists who imagined that their good intentions would lead to a transformation of society, which turned out to be a poor analysis of human nature. The nation was eventually liberated from what they had wrought by a string of circumstances, including an extraordinary economic crisis in the late 1980s and the underrated fact that old men eventually die.

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it,” wrote the great theoretical physicist Max Planck. This holds good for all new ideas. India’s economic liberation was in no small part a liberation from its old.

But there are still many socialists left among the living and the influential, even the wise. And their most powerful fellowship is the National Advisory Council, or N.A.C., a group chaired by Sonia Gandhi, president of the governing Indian National Congress party. The N.A.C., which tries to influence Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on his social policies, is the conscience of the government and it aspires to be the halo. Ms. Roy was one of its most influential members, but in May she resigned over differences with the government. Also, she said in an interview days after her resignation, “I have lived in the city for too long. I want to shift my location for a long period to rural India.”

Socialism evolved in the West as a reaction against the most fundamental but maligned quality of wealth, which is that it is often not spread evenly. That socialism is a disastrous economic theory when imitated by a poor nation has unambiguous evidence in plain sight — almost the entire history of modern India. But Ms. Roy believes that India has too many extraordinary humanitarian problems to abandon its traditional view that the government must intervene with huge amounts of money to protect the poor, even at the cost of slowing down economic growth.

There are various types of socialists in India, not counting professional politicians. Ms. Roy and Mr. Dey, who work with the rural poor and study the effects of economic policies on the weak, are rare. But there are many on the lecture circuit, the type whose chests fill with pride when they are told they are incomprehensible. Then there are the writers, of course. As socialism claims to speak for the underdog, it lends itself to facile, dramatic and righteous prose. There are hundreds of young writers in India, some honest, some opportunistic, but almost all beneficiaries of the market economy, who try to achieve the sweet lament against capitalism through journalism, blogs, short stories and poetry.

India’s biggest businessmen are socialist merchants, at least in the way they approach business. Of innovation and the spirit of enterprise, they show very little. Instead they concentrate their resources on bending the rules, extracting favors from ministers and using their political clout and other methods of persuasion to clinch lucrative licenses — just the way their papas operated in the old socialist republic.

Mrs. Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi, who believe that the government has to be magnanimous and appear to be so, represent the type of socialists who once formed the core of the Congress party. Ms. Roy, when she was a member of the N.A.C., always had Mrs. Gandhi’s ear. “I can definitely say that her sympathy for the poor is very genuine,” Ms. Roy said. “Therefore, any issue we took up got an immediate response. She listened very carefully and was moved.”

Ms. Roy is no longer in a position to directly influence Mrs. Gandhi or the government. But she hopes to instigate a rebellion among the poor to achieve the same result. She is particularly repulsed by the government’s reluctance to push through an ambitious bill that would provide free grain to two-thirds of the nation.

India has tried to end hunger for decades, but the food never reached the intended mouths because of a corrupt public distribution system. What has saved and continues to save millions of Indians from hunger are very cheap bananas and a biscuit packet, which reach every nook of the nation through the efficient distribution system of private enterprise.

Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People.”

A version of this article appeared in print on June 20, 2013, in The International Herald Tribune.

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16. EXTREMISM RISES AMONG MYANMAR BUDDHISTS
byThomas Fuller
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(Published: The New York Times, June 20, 2013)  
Buddhist monasteries associated with the fundamentalist movement, which calls itself 969, have opened community centers and a Sunday school program for children nationwide. 
TAUNGGYI, Myanmar — After a ritual prayer atoning for past sins, Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist monk with a rock-star following in Myanmar, sat before an overflowing crowd of thousands of devotees and launched into a rant against what he called “the enemy” — the country’s Muslim minority.

“You can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog,” Ashin Wirathu said, referring to Muslims.

“I call them troublemakers, because they are troublemakers,” Ashin Wirathu told a reporter after his two-hour sermon. “I am proud to be called a radical Buddhist.”

The world has grown accustomed to a gentle image of Buddhism defined by the self-effacing words of the Dalai Lama, the global popularity of Buddhist-inspired meditation and postcard-perfect scenes from Southeast Asia and beyond of crimson-robed, barefoot monks receiving alms from villagers at dawn.

But over the past year, images of rampaging Burmese Buddhists carrying swords and the vituperative sermons of monks like Ashin Wirathu have underlined the rise of extreme Buddhism in Myanmar — and revealed a darker side of the country’s greater freedoms after decades of military rule. Buddhist lynch mobs have killed more than 200 Muslims and forced more than 150,000 people, mostly Muslims, from their homes.

Ashin Wirathu denies any role in the riots. But his critics say that at the very least his anti-Muslim preaching is helping to inspire the violence.

What began last year on the fringes of Burmese society has grown into a nationwide movement whose agenda now includes boycotts of Muslim-made goods. Its message is spreading through regular sermons across the country that draw thousands of people and through widely distributed DVDs of those talks. Buddhist monasteries associated with the movement are also opening community centers and a Sunday school program for 60,000 Buddhist children nationwide.

The hate-filled speeches and violence have endangered Myanmar’s path to democracy, raising questions about the government’s ability to keep the country’s towns and cities safe and its willingness to crack down or prosecute Buddhists in a Buddhist-majority country. The killings have also reverberated in Muslim countries across the region, tarnishing what was almost universally seen abroad as a remarkable and rare peaceful transition from military rule to democracy. In May, the Indonesian authorities foiled what they said was a plot to bomb the Myanmar Embassy in Jakarta in retaliation for the assaults on Muslims.

Ashin Wirathu, the spiritual leader of the radical movement, skates a thin line between free speech and incitement, taking advantage of loosened restrictions on expression during a fragile time of transition. He was himself jailed for eight years by the now-defunct military junta for inciting hatred. Last year, as part of a release of hundreds of political prisoners, he was freed.

In his recent sermon, he described the reported massacre of schoolchildren and other Muslim inhabitants in the central city of Meiktila in March, documented by a human rights group, as a show of strength.

“If we are weak,” he said, “our land will become Muslim.”

Buddhism would seem to have a secure place in Myanmar. Nine in 10 people are Buddhist, as are nearly all the top leaders in the business world, the government, the military and the police. Estimates of the Muslim minority range from 4 percent to 8 percent of Myanmar’s roughly 55 million people while the rest are mostly Christian or Hindu.

But Ashin Wirathu, who describes himself as a nationalist, says Buddhism is under siege by Muslims who are having more children than Buddhists and buying up Buddhist-owned land. In part, he is tapping into historical grievances that date from British colonial days when Indians, many of them Muslims, were brought into the country as civil servants and soldiers.

The muscular and nationalist messages he has spread have alarmed Buddhists in other countries.

The Dalai Lama, after the riots in March, said killing in the name of religion was “unthinkable” and urged Myanmar’s Buddhists to contemplate the face of the Buddha for guidance.

Phra Paisal Visalo, a Buddhist scholar and prominent monk in neighboring Thailand, says the notion of “us and them” promoted by Myanmar’s radical monks is anathema to Buddhism. But he lamented that his criticism and that of other leading Buddhists outside the country have had “very little impact.”

“Myanmar monks are quite isolated and have a thin relationship with Buddhists in other parts of the world,” Phra Paisal said. One exception is Sri Lanka, another country historically bedeviled by ethnic strife. Burmese monks have been inspired by the assertive political role played by monks from Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority.

As Myanmar has grown more polarized, there have been nascent signs of a backlash against the anti-Muslim preaching.

Among the most disappointed with the outbreaks of violence and hateful rhetoric are some of the leaders of the 2007 Saffron Revolution, a peaceful uprising led by Buddhist monks against military rule.

“We were not expecting this violence when we chanted for peace and reconciliation in 2007,” said the abbot of Pauk Jadi monastery, Ashin Nyana Nika, 55, who attended a meeting earlier this month sponsored by Muslim groups to discuss the issue. (Ashin is the honorific for Burmese monks.) Ashin Sanda Wara, the head of a monastic school in Yangon, says the monks in the country are divided nearly equally between moderates and extremists.

He considers himself in the moderate camp. But as a measure of the deeply ingrained suspicions toward Muslims in the society, he said he was “afraid of Muslims because their population is increasing so rapidly.”

Ashin Wirathu has tapped into that anxiety, which some describe as the “demographic pressures” coming from neighboring Bangladesh. There is wide disdain in Myanmar for a group of about one million stateless Muslims, who call themselves Rohingya, some of whom migrated from Bangladesh. Clashes between the Rohingya and Buddhists last year in western Myanmar roiled the Buddhist community and appear to have played a role in later outbreaks of violence throughout the country. Ashin Wirathu said they served as his inspiration to spread his teachings.

The theme song to Ashin Wirathu’s movement speaks of people who “live in our land, drink our water, and are ungrateful to us.”

“We will build a fence with our bones if necessary,” runs the song’s refrain. Muslims are not explicitly mentioned in the song but Ashin Wirathu said the lyrics refer to them. Pamphlets handed out at his sermon demonizing Muslims said that “Myanmar is currently facing a most dangerous and fearful poison that is severe enough to eradicate all civilization.”

Many in Myanmar speculate, without offering proof, that Ashin Wirathu is allied with hard-line Buddhist elements in the country who want to harness the nationalism of his movement to rally support ahead of elections in 2015. Ashin Wirathu denies any such links.

But the government has done little to rein him in. During Ashin Wirathu’s visit here in Taunggyi, traffic policemen cleared intersections for his motorcade.

Once inside the monastery, as part of a highly choreographed visit, his followers led a procession through crowds of followers who prostrated themselves as he passed.

Ashin Wirathu’s movement calls itself 969, three digits that monks say symbolize the virtues of the Buddha, Buddhist practices and the Buddhist community.

Stickers with the movement’s logo are now ubiquitous nationwide on cars, motorcycles and shops. The movement has also begun a signature campaign calling for a ban on interfaith marriages, and pamphlets are distributed at sermons listing Muslim brands and shops to be avoided.

In Mawlamyine, a multicultural city southeast of Yangon, a monastery linked to the 969 movement has established the courses of Buddhist instruction for children, which it calls “Sunday dhamma schools.” Leaders of the monasteries there seek to portray their campaign as a sort of Buddhist revivalist movement.

“The main thing is that our religion and our nationality don’t disappear,” said Ashin Zadila, a senior monk at the Myazedi Nanoo monastery outside the city.

Yet despite efforts at describing the movement as nonthreatening, many Muslims are worried.

Two hours before Ashin Wirathu rolled into Taunggyi in a motorcade that included 60 honking motorcycles, Tun Tun Naing, a Muslim vendor in the city’s central market, spoke of the visit in a whisper.

“I’m really frightened,” he said, stopping in midsentence when customers entered his shop. “We tell the children not to go outside unless absolutely necessary.”

Wai Moe contributed reporting from Mandalay and Yangon, Myanmar, and Poypiti Amatatham from Bangkok.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 21, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Extremism Rises Among Myanmar Buddhists.

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17. ALGERIA TWENTY YEARS ON: WORDS DO NOT DIE
by Karima Bennoune 
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(Open Democracy, 24 June 2013)
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the Algerian jihadists war on culture. Those who waged the intellectual struggle against fundamentalism in Algeria throughout the 1990s received little support internationally. Karima Bennoune pays tribute to those who fell in the culturicide, and warns of the urgent need to remember 

Black and white photo of street protest. Woman with megaphone and photograph, banners and placards in background.. Women protest killings in Algiers on March 22, 1994, carrying the
picture of Tahar Djaout, among others. Photo: El Watan

My father, Algerian anthropologist Mahfoud Bennoune called these systematic 1990s killings of intellectuals by the country’s fundamentalist armed groups a genocide. A law student then, I explained to him that the UN Genocide Convention did not protect political or social groups. But in my research about the unrelenting assault on Algeria’s intelligentsia that began in early 1993, I have come to understand my father’s use of the term. This was indeed an attempt by the radical Islamists battling the Algerian state to stamp out the North African nation’s culture and to wipe out those who shaped it. It was, as Algerian writer and artist Mustapha Benfodil describes it, an “intellectocide.” Benfodil, whose most recent installation, “Headless,” memorialized these assassinations, argues that “never, to my knowledge, have so many intellectuals been killed in so little time.”

On May 26, 1993, one of Algeria’s greatest writers, Tahar Djaout, was gunned down leaving his apartment in Bainem, a Western suburb of the capital Algiers where I lived as a child. The country reeled. Djaout, a Berber who wrote in French and had studied mathematics, who had penned numerous novels and volumes of poetry, founded the publication Ruptures, and been an eloquent critic of both the country’s government and its vicious fundamentalists, died a week later after lingering in a coma. “Algiers thinks about the corpse in its arms,” wrote J.E.B. on May 31 in a poem published in Ruptures. During those seven days, we waited to see if Djaout, and we ourselves, would awaken from this new nightmare; he never did, and the country would not for ten long years. “Tahar was assassinated by the inquisition,” proclaimed a headline in Ruptures after his death on June 2. 

The anniversary of this tragedy was recently commemorated by a somber colloquium in Algiers organized by the newspaper El Watan (The Nation) on June 1, entitled “Presence(s)of Djaout.” (El Watan director Omar Belhouchet himself survived a 1993 assassination attempt by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA).) As the poet Amine Khene said at the paper’s memorial colloquium, Tahar Djaout’s murder “was an assassination of Algeria and its future. Djaout was among that minority of intellectuals who could have formed the kernel of a democratic alternative.”

Back in 1993, thirteen days after Djaout’s passing, one of Africa’s leading psychiatrists, the erudite Dr. Mahfoud Boucebsi, another figure in a potential “democratic alternative,” was in the sights of obscurantist assassins. On the morning of Tuesday June 15, 1993, the 57 year-old vice president of the International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry was knifed at the entrance to his Algiers hospital. Boucebci had written pioneering works about single mothers, and won the Maghreb Prize for Medicine. In a 1991 interview, he described the fundamentalist takeover of Mustapha Hospital in Algiers. “I felt infinite pain in seeing these young men who thought they were all powerful and had suddenly become super-chiefs, and could command and humiliate a doctor.” Anouar Haddam, the loathsome spokesman of Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) who found refuge in the United States, said that Boucebsi’s killing was “not a crime but the execution of a sentence.” 

The next theocratic “sentence” was carried out one week later on the morning of Tuesday June 22, almost exactly twenty years ago. Mohamed Boukhobza, 52, a prominent sociologist and the director of the National Institute for Global Strategic Studies, was tied up and had his throat cut in front of his daughter in the Telemly neighbourhood in Algiers. I came home that day to my father’s apartment on the outskirts of the city to find him angrier than I could ever remember seeing him over the murder of his former university colleague.

On Tuesday June 29, 1993, exactly one week later, I woke up early to an unrelenting pounding on the sturdy metal front door my father had recently installed. By then, as El Watan later described it, “every Tuesday a scholar fell to the bullets of… fundamentalist assassins.” Mahfoud Bennoune was a politically outspoken professor whose anthropology class - in which he dared teach Darwin - had already been visited by the head of the FIS who had denounced him as an advocate of “biologism,” until - as a former student in that class recently reminded me – Dad had ejected the man. On June 29, 1993, whoever was pounding on our door would neither identify himself nor go away. My father tried repeatedly to get the police on the telephone. Perhaps terrified themselves by the rising tide of armed extremism that had already claimed the lives of many Algerian officers, the local police station did not even answer. However, we were lucky that day. The unwanted and unidentified visitors eventually departed. We never knew why, or exactly who they were. Someone would return a few months later, leaving a note on the kitchen table. “Consider yourself dead.” They wrote “death to” before our name on the mailbox.

Subsequently, Algerian fundamentalists would post Mahfoud Bennoune’s name on lists of those to be killed in extremist-controlled mosques in Algiers, along with the names of so many others – journalists, intellectuals, trade unionists, women’s rights activists. They would murder more of my father’s colleagues, his friends and relatives, and as many as 200,000 Algerians in what came to be known as “the dark decade.” No matter how awful things became, the international community largely ignored these events. The world would leave all those victims of fundamentalism to fend for themselves.

Finally, my father would be forced to flee his apartment and to give up teaching at the University. That was when I came to understand that the struggle against Muslim fundamentalism and terrorism waged by countless people of Muslim heritage in many countries is one of the most important – and overlooked - human rights struggles in the world. Sadly, this is even truer now twenty years later.

Close up photo of man in smiling conversation holding cigarette. Salah Chouaki, noted education expert and
dedicated leftwing activist, murdered on
September 14, 1994 The intellectuals who were killed first by extremists in Algeria were mainly those who had most quickly and clearly understood the nature of the beast. My father’s friend Salah Chouaki, a leftwing school inspector and esteemed education reformer, had warned in one of the last articles he published before being gunned down on September 14,1994 by the GIA that “the most dangerous and deadly illusion… is to underestimate fundamentalism, the mortal enemy of our people.” 

Published after his death, Tahar Djaout’s final book, The Last Summer of Reason - Algeria’s “1984” - describes the rise of extremism in chilling detail, and projects what the country would look like if the fundamentalists took over – by elections or by force. In Djaout’s theocratic hell, roadblocks catch inappropriately garbed women. Young men are brainwashed against their more liberal fathers. Minds are closed, families destroyed. But some refuse to submit.

The novel’s hero, Boualem Yekker - whose family name means “stood up or awoke” in Tamazight (Berber) - is a free-thinking book seller. As Djaout described Yekker, “[he] was one of those who had decided to resist, those who had become aware that when the hordes confronting them had managed to spread their fear and impose silence they would have won.” Djaout himself, Boucebsi, Boukhobza, Chouaki and many of the other targeted intellectuals were like Boualem Yekker, and their murders were meant to quash their resistance, and silence its expression. Yet, others continued to stand up. Even when my father was driven from his home, he remained in the country, and continued to publish pointed criticisms of both the armed fundamentalists and the government they battled. In a three part series published in El Watan in November 1994, called “How Fundamentalism produced a terrorism without precedent,” he denounced the terrorists’ “radical break with true Islam as it was lived by our ancestors.”

The leftwing women’s group RAFD (refuse) was born after the funeral of one of the slain scholars, and its members took to the streets with their heads uncovered, carrying photos of the dead and wearing cloth targets in protest. Their philosophy was rather like Djaout’s. “If you speak out, they will kill you. If you keep silent, they will kill you. So speak out, and die.” 

Those who waged the intellectual struggle against fundamentalism in Algeria in the early nineties, who spoke out and died - or lived - received almost no support internationally. Algerian psychologist and women’s rights advocate Cherifa Bouatta says there is still tremendous anger at those internationally who could have been the allies of progressive anti-fundamentalists but were not. “No one said, ‘we are with you.’”  Moreover, governments like that of the U.S. and Britain had only made things worse by pumping money into the anti-Soviet jihad in faraway Afghanistan which had a direct effect on Algeria; the worst killers in the 90s conflict were known as “Afghans” for their experience as foreign fighters in that “jihad.”

The Algerian state killed too, though in far smaller numbers, used widespread torture against terror suspects, and disappeared as many as 8,000 people, but the conflict in the nineties was primarily about the fundamentalist assault on Algerian society. Moreover, the intellectuals targeted by the fundamentalist armed groups tended to be fiercely independent figures who were both critics of the state and extremism.

Back then, the wave of fundamentalist blood-letting among people of letters began in March 1993, with the shooting of Djilali Liabes, a sociologist and former Education Minister whom my father had described as “one of the most dedicated educators of his generation,” the knifing of doctor turned novelist Laadi Flici, and the murder of political scientist Hafid Senhadri. After the June slaughter of Djaout and the others, a lengthy wave of killings of journalists and press workers commenced in August 1993 with the slaying of Arabophone television reporter Rabah Zenati. Over the next few years, editors-in-chief like Omar Ouartilane who directed the Arabic-language paper El Khabar, prominent columnists like the inimitable Saïd Mekbel, journalists like Naima Hamaouda of Révolution Normal 0 Africaine, and even technical staff like Le Soir d’Algérie’s copy editor Yasmine Drissi were all “eliminated.” 

FIS spokesman Anouar Haddam openly told the French newspaper Libération that they had suggested to their “brother jihadists” to target journalists amongst others. When assassinations were not deemed sufficient to root out the journo-menace, the Islamists blew up newspaper offices repeatedly, killing people like poetry-loving Le Soir culture editor Allaoua Aït Mebarek, and columnist Mohamed Dorbane who had just finished his grocery shopping for Ramadan supper. A total of 100 press workers, including 60 journalists, were killed by the fundamentalist armed groups between 1993 and 1997, according to El Watan scribe Ahmed Ancer’s appropriately titled book, Red Ink.

Many journalists had to leave their homes as a result. Rachida Hammadi, 32, a serious TV correspondent I had met at a Ramadan dinner in her safe-house went home to be with her family for one night. As she departed at dawn on March 20, 1995, a car full of armed fundamentalists waited. One opened fire with an automatic weapon. His bullets hit Rachida and her sister Meriem who tried to protect her. Both died in the hospital.

Portrait photo of woman Lawyer Leila Kheddar, known for
her modernist views and opposition
to terrorism, shot and killed on
June 24, 1996The fundamentalist armed groups’ assault on knowledge and the learned hit many professional categories. They killed lawyers like Leila Kheddar who was shot at home in front of her family, and Human Rights League President Youssef Fathallah who was gunned down in his office. They killed judges like Lakhdar Rouaz, and even law students who refused to give up their studies like 22 year-old Amel Zenoune-Zouani. They killed economists like Abderrahmane Fardeheb, teachers (often in front of their classes) like 33 year-old Abdelaziz Chelighem, and women school principals like Meziane Zhor, 54. They slaughtered female students like Naima Kar Ali, 19, and Raziqa Meloudjemi, 18, who dared to bare their heads.

They took out Algeria’s leading sign language specialist Nacer Ouari who had recently returned from the pilgrimage to Mecca, and the country’s foremost pediatrician, anti-torture activist Dr. Djilali Belkhenchir.  They were interdisciplinary, killing both the dean of the School of Fine Arts Ahmed Asselah, and Salah Djebaïli, the rector of the Faculty of Science, during the spring of 1994. Not long before his death, Djabaïli said, “It is exactly the time to diagnose the problems and do things differently. It’s now or never, while there are no taboos.” As Professor Fardeheb’s daughter Amel wrote about her slain father in a plea for these murders not to be forgotten, “Do they know how much you loved your country? Do they know that you wanted the best for the youth of Algeria?” To kill people of this level of education, skill, promise and commitment in a developing country that had only been independent for thirty years – and so many more of them than can be mentioned in this article - was tantamount to trying to kill the country itself. 

Some 71,500 university graduates reportedly fled the fundamentalist onslaught between 1992 and 1996 alone, a brain drain whose consequences continue to be felt today. While the much larger number of killings of ordinary people in Algeria must also be commemorated, and all are equally important in human terms, these killings aimed a knife at the throat of the entire society. Each murder had many, many victims.

To honour those intellectuals who fell to fundamentalism in Algeria two decades ago, we have to listen to and support – or at least notice - the Boualem Yekkers of today. They are still out there, from Afghanistan to Mali to Turkey’s Taksim Square, peacefully standing up to extremism, often alone and without international support or publicity. They continue to speak their minds, sometimes on pain of death. In north-west Pakistan, thousands of intellectuals and political activists have been slaughtered by militants over the last decade, a pattern of devastation that provokes nowhere near the outcry from progressives in the West as that caused by drone attacks. I think of Zarteef Afridi, a teacher in Jamrud, Kyber Agency who campaigned for the franchise of tribal women and organized elders against terrorism, and was gunned down walking to his school on December 8, 2011. As his friend Salman Rashid wrote of him “He stood for the liberation of the human soul through education and enlightenment.” 

Even Tunisia, birthplace of the Arab Spring, has now seen the first fundamentalist assassination of an intellectual, the leftist lawyer Chokri Belaid who was mowed down in February of this year, a man who like the early martyred Algerians, could see the danger rising Islamism poses to his country and appealed to his fellow citizens to confront it. Sacrifices like these must be remembered.

I write this article to pay tribute to those who fell in the Algerian jihadists war on culture twenty years ago, and to say to their families, and their colleagues who continue their work, that progressives elsewhere will not forget them. Though men and women may be gunned down, words do not die, and I continue to learn from their words every day. They taught that one must be entirely lucid and unwavering in one’s critique of the extreme right, wherever one lives, and that those who battle it armed only with a pen or a voice need support.

 “Those who fight us with a pen should die by the sword,” ordered Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group in 1992, according to Ancer’s Red Ink. “Pen against Kalashnikov. Is there a more unequal struggle?,” Ghania Oukazi had asked on the night her newspaper’s offices were bombed by the GIA in Algiers, back in 1996. She and her fellow journalists had huddled in the ruins of their building to get out the next day’s papers no matter what.  As her signed piece in that heroic February 12, 1996 edition concluded:  “What is certain is that the pen will not stop…” 

Courage like this demands solidarity and deserves to be recorded. “We will not be deserving of your sacrifice,” Cherifa Kheddar wrote last week in an open letter to her lawyer sister Leila who was killed by the GIA seventeen years ago today, on June 24, 1996, “if we do not take a moment to honor your memory, and by doing so to also remember your sacrifice for a modern Algeria that moves forward and does not regress.”

City-scape with tall, graceful monument in the background. The Monument to the Martyrs of the war of independence,
or maqam e-shahid. A constant reminder of loss and hope

Today, twenty years later, there is an urgent need to remember – and learn from – what happened in Algeria’s dark decade. First and foremost, these events should remind us that people of Muslim heritage – especially those on the left - have always been the most frequent targets of Muslim fundamentalists – and their most important opponents. 

Fundamentalism is on the rise now from Yemen to Tunisia and beyond. An outspoken Tunisian college professor recently told me how terrified she is since Belaid’s assassination, and how she has changed her daily movements to protect herself. Algeria’s experience should serve as a warning today about how dangerous such developments are, and help identify the best way to combat that danger. In an article entitled “Compromise with Political Islam is Impossible”-   which is as relevant today as when it was penned in 1993, a year before its author’s assassination - Salah Chouaki explained that “[t]he best way to defend Islam is to put it out of the reach of all political manipulation…. The best way to defend the modern state is to put it out of the reach of all exploitation of religion for political ends.”  

What happened in Algeria twenty years ago shows that the challenge to local cultures and ways of life posed by fundamentalism is actually existential. It is no accident that the last words of Tahar Djaout’s last work ask a question. “Will there be another spring?”

An interview with the author, conducted by Deniz Kandiyoti, about her forthcoming book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism, will be published on 5050 in August.
About the author

Karima Bennoune is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis School of Law, former Amnesty International Legal Advisor, and author of the forthcoming book, Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism, published by W W Norton & Co, 2013.  

Creative Commons License
This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence. 

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18. JUNE DAYS OF THE MOBILIZATION OF THE SOCIETY IN TURKEY
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[It is estimated by Taksim Solidarity that almost 10 million people participated to the protests. Yesterday Ministry of Interior stated that in 79 cities (there are 81 cities in Turkey), 2.5 million people joined demonstrations. However it is clear that in Istanbul over 2 million gathered in Taksim Square. However if it was even 2.5 million, this also demonstrates the fact that this is the biggest challange to the authoritarian-one man rule of the AKP Government.
The June Days of the mobilization of the society in Turkey also provided inspiration to the art and many artictic groups showed their creativity to support democratic and peaceful uprising of people. Below are urls pointing at most known musical products of the June Days.]

the song written and composed by turkish artists living in ew york
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULzMpMX_MLk

the song composed by the well known Turkish classical music composer Fazil Say:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqPSZ8uqBZM

people chanting: "pepper gas, oleyy":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agOChqonkzM

music group "karde? t?rk?ler" with english sub title
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-kbuS-anD4

turkish famous rock group "Duman" composed a song for the resistance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHnv6tGmIGI

Bo?azi?i University Jaz Group singing at the Gezi Park
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY5dYJijMD8

"everyday i am chapulling- remix" Chapul:looter)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCFCqBJ27cY

Middle east technical university classical music group
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQplOIJnwuE

spanish song "la chapullita" (Pm told us chapulcu (looter)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrKYvlvk3o4  and turkish version
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV6jCsZtu4Y

famous turkish pop singer nazzan oncel's resistance song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhuf050QZqY

istanbul gas festival
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMN7wKcqEkA

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19. Ordinary Brazilians Foot the Bill for Sepp Blatter to Foot the FIFA Ball
LESSONS FOR BRAZIL FROM SOUTH AFRICA
by Patrick Bond
=========================================
June 24, 2013
Durban.

Over the last fortnight, Brazil’s two million street protesters in 80 cities supporting the Free Fare Movement have declared how fed up they are with making multiple sacrifices to Brazilian neoliberalism as revitalized by one Sepp Blatter, the Swiss emperor of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (Fifa). While right-wing opportunists have been involved in some of the recent protests, the core grievances are apparently those of the left and of the disaffected youth.

Writing from South Africa, my compatriots and I should not merely offer Brazilians our admiration, since a “Grand Pact” is apparently now being crafted by President Dilma Rousseff. Having failed to repress the rebellion with brute police force, she now appears ready to make large-scale concessions. As she put it on Friday, “We need to oxygenate our political system, to find ways to return to our institutions to be more transparent, more resistant to bad practices and more open to the influence of society.”

We should also take the opportunity to prod our own three-year-old memories here. After the giddy month of June-July 2010, our own World Cup hangover still requires maxi-strength aspirins for the crushing pain so many South Africans suffer, underfoot Blatter’s white elephant stadiums and elites-only infrastructure.

The memory may have faded, but there were also thousands of South Africans rioting in the streets in the period just before the World Cup began, in a manner so threatening that the Pretoria regime of Jacob Zuma appeared ready to implement the corporate-Swiss version of fascist rule.

Today, our main cities’ municipal budgets are still bleeding red accountant blood, with millions of dollars annually diverted to subsidise stadium operating costs, for which Fifa Local Operating Committee Danny Jordaan humbly apologised last year. In the Fifa tradition of endless crony-corruption, the big construction cartels illegally colluded to massively overprice those near-empty sports monuments, it was revealed a few months ago.

And although Johannesburg’s $2.5 billion elite fast-train built for the World Cup – conspicuously disconnected from working-class transport – was meant to break even with 110,000 riders a day, it still needs an $80 million annual subsidy because its Fifa-dazed planners overestimated ridership by two-thirds. Durban’s unnecessary new $1 billion King Shaka Airport is a mostly desolate “aerotropolis” fantasyland, as none of the anticipated international hub traffic materialized.

After egging us on to build hedonistic palaces, bullet-trains and airports while the vast majority here suffer so much, Blatter’s crimes against SA society and economy continue unpunished. His mafia took more than $3 billion in revenues back to Zurich without paying taxes or heeding exchange controls, and meanwhile the SA foreign debt soared from $70 billion just before the World Cup to $135 billion today.

Brazil is already suffering an identical hangover and the pain is reportedly unbearable. Most observers of the lauded emerging markets – including superficially-strong Turkey – were surprised by the recent upsurge of popular fury. When Dilma visited Durban three months ago for the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) leadership summit, her confidence and political momentum were evident.

After all, she and predecessor Lula da Silva – a popular former metalworker – had treated her society and environment far better than the other four, it appeared. Unique amongst the BRICS, inequality had dropped substantially thanks to the doubling of the minimum wage and a family grant. And in contrast to her much filthier summit partners, Brazil was rated in 2012 by the Yale-Columbia Environmental Performance Index as improving on many fronts – which allowed Dilma to victoriously host last year’s Rio+20 United Nations Earth Summit.

With her Workers Party having largely defanged the CUT union movement as well as a large chunk of the left intelligentsia and NGOs, Brazil likewise provided grounds for South African progressives’ misimpressions, as we desperately search for (at minimum) social-democratic, green and gender-civilized examples to emulate.

Last September, in the wake of the Marikana Massacre, Congress of SA Trade Union pragmatists argued passionately that we need a “Lula Moment” so as to apply similar policies here. I doubt we’ll hear that untenable phrase again.

In Brasilia, hubris soon set in. You could just hear that elite back-slapping, what with hosting this month’s Fifa Confederations Cup soccer, the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games, and the victorious campaigns by Brazilians to lead the World Trade Organisation and UN Food and Agricultural Organisation. Looking outward at great expense, Dilma and her Workers Pary put their society through a slow-motion wringer, which I witnessed during a month’s stay in Rio a year ago, culminating in a march of 80,000 against Rio+20’s pro-corporate “Green Economy” spin.

That demo featured hundreds of huge cardboard cut-outs of a sinister-looking Dilma bearing a chainsaw, clearing the Amazon for the country’s largest corporations, Vale and Petrobras, helped by the gigantic BNDES national development bank. Conflict last month arose again after Vale and BNDES wrecked indigenous people’s habitat with the Belo Monte mega-dam’s construction. Next door to us in Mozambique, similar anger at Vale’s coal land-grabbing is also now motivating protests by thousands of peasants.

Then came Blatter, with his preposterous demands and, last week, his arrogant red-flag remark to the Brazilian street-bulls: “they should not use football to make their demands heard.”

Eish, we know that ruffian far too well: his reign here provided so many justifications for similar revolt. In the run-up to June 2010, there were several dozen protests each day, most over service-delivery shortcomings as government diverted funding from basic needs to pleasing the Swiss. Many protests were aimed explicitly at the way the World Cup was being implemented, including 1500 community and labour activists in Durban on June 16 demanding a “World Cup for All” (not just for profiteers and the country’s wealthier spectators).

In the east of the country, more than a thousand pupils demonstrated against Nelspruit’s Mbombela stadium, when schools displaced by construction were not rebuilt. That little city was littered with Fifa-fingerprinted corpses thanks to corruption-related hit jobs on whistle-blowing politicians and factional rivals.

Other Fifa-related protests were held by informal traders in Durban and Cape Town who were iced out of World Cup commercial opportunities; against Johannesburg officials by Soccer City’s neighbours in impoverished Riverlea township; against construction companies by workers; against the stadium’s wheelchair access design by disabled people; and against national bureaucrats by four towns’ activists attempting to relocate provincial borders so as to shift their municipalities to a wealthier province.

Labour movement strikes were threatened, raging or had just been settled over national electricity price increases, Eskom and transport sector wages and municipal worker grievances. Using their power to keep hundreds of ships out of Durban’s harbor – some of which transported the 2.3 million “Zakumi” mascot leopard dolls sewn in Shanghai by workers earning just $3/day – the SA Transport and Allied Workers Union won a wage increase double the inflation rate.

During the games, however, Blatter insisted on a protest-free zone, with regular police bannings of attempted marches – such as an innocuous “education-for-all” rally in Pretoria, even though Fifa had co-sponsored the group (One Goal) requesting permission to march – until sufficient resistance emerged to overcome the harassment. The two national tv networks self-censored the movie “Fahrenheit 2010” about Fifa exploitation.

With this sort of official paranoia at a record high, not only were the SA National Defense Force’s troops and air defense system mobilized against terror attacks. More trivially, two other activists and I were arrested at Durban’s Beach FanFest for simply handing out anti-xenophobia fliers at half-time during the Ghana-Uruguay quarter-final match: the charge was “ambush marketing”. Fifa’s copyright mania even prevented use of the phrase “World Cup 2010” when township artisans produced small crafts.

Nevertheless, a few other victories were recorded along the way – not just the right to blow the awful vuvuzelas to the point of hearing loss. Thousands of stadium construction workers had fought for higher wages and often won. And AIDS educators who were initially prevented from distributing condoms at stadiums objected and reversed Fifa’s puritanical streak.

On the evening of June 13 in Durban, several hundred security workers at the new stadium revolted after the Germany-Australia game, demanding payment of a promised bonus. They had received $20 for 12 hours’ work, as outsourcing and superexploitation soured employee relations in the often dangerous security sector. Police tear-gassed and stun-grenaded 300 to break up the protest.

In four other stadiums, workers downed tools against the security-sector labour brokers, leading to mass firings and compelling more expensive national police to come to Fifa’s aid as internal security.

In addition to labour’s upsurge, some of the most impressive mobilisations were on the hardest front: pop culture. To illustrate the challenge, Somali-born musician K’naan had used his hit, “Wavin’ Flags”, to advance the notion that a young boy on a dusty soccer field could simply drink a Coca Cola and become a world-class player, as a ubiquitous video insisted. K’naan’s remixed tune for Fifa self-censored all his earlier version’s harder, anti-war lyrics.

So from Cape Town’s naughty Playing Fields Collective culture jammers came delightful new lyrics by the name of “Wavering Flag”:

     
When they are older

    Our children might wonder

    Why we sold out

    In the name of the Fifa flag…

    When I get sober

    From all the soccer

    There will go Fifa, and

    guess who’ll be making cash?

    They don’t put back?

    They never put back?

    They don’t put back? Nooo

Yet more ripping protest music was released by Nomadic Wax, Dj Magee and Dj Nio; by the Chomsky AllStars (“Beautiful Gain”); and by a network of artists who came together to publicise Khulumani Support Group, the anti-apartheid victims’ network which is suing corporations in the United States courts for taking away profits and interest when they should have been observing sanctions. Durban’s Iain Robinson (Ewok) contributed the excellent “Shame on the Beautiful Game,” which soon joined a whole CD of hip-hop protest tunes produced by Defboyz. They gathered musicians from “all over the world and in a variety of languages to put one message across: that the powers that be must be held accountable for their actions!”

Also in defense of popular culture, perhaps the most successful protest explicitly against Fifa’s influence was by hundreds of Durban informal traders facing displacement from the century-old Early Morning Market. Were it not for sustained resistance over a year-long period, including a pitched battle with police in mid-2009, they would have been displaced by the then City Manager Mike Sutcliffe so that ANC cronies could build a shopping mall with no space for affordable fruit and vegetables – but the small traders prevailed and remain at Warwick Junction today.

Low-income black fisherfolk who for generations plied Durban’s famous beachfront piers were banned by the highly class-conscious Sutcliffe just before the games began, and still have not yet regained that right.

The same battle to save public space against increasing crony-privatisation is what motivates hundreds of thousands of protesters to defend Istanbul’s Taksim Square against the Erdogan regime’s shopping mall builders.

Likewise in Brazil, according to political scientist Ana Garcia, “The movement for free transport is an old part of the students’ movement. They’ve started the street protests in Sao Paulo against the tariff increase, and this quickly became a spontaneous protest against the privatization of public services, against the huge amount of public money given to private consortia for the World Cup, against extremely bad quality public health, schools and public urban transport.”

Brazil’s Movement of Landless Workers is one of the world’s greatest social movements, and its national secretariat explained the public’s exasperation: “Protests are a consequence of the grave structural urban crises, caused by speculative financial capital, resulting in rising rents, massive car sales financed by the banks and chaotic traffic without public transport, where people spend two hours to go to work and school.”

What Blatter does not want is to see more protest this week directed against his warm-up soccer games, the Confederations Cup, whose posters are being torn down in most cities. Even worse for him is when the society connects-the-dots between their grievances and his greed.

And if Blatter fibs about his time three years ago – “The World Cup in South Africa was a huge, huge financial success for Africa, for South Africa and for FIFA” – Brazilians should remember that this hutzpah is possible because our society failed to link up all those genuine grievances back in 2010.

Having not learned much since then, our most discontented citizens continue to engage in localistic, fragmented “popcorn protests” at amongst the highest per capita rates in the world – yet without the capacity to unite across communities, partly because the main trade unions remain stymied by their alliance to the ruling party, as is Brazil’s.

If in coming days, Dilma cannot keep the lid on the boiling pot and if protests against anti-poor mega-events set a new global trend, then the ratio of bread to circuses in all our societies will have to increase. For the Brazilian people will have won a different World Cup competition – for serious social progress.

Patrick Bond directs the UKZN Centre for Civil Society and – with Ashwin Desai and Brij Maharaj – co-edited Zuma’s Own Goal, which reviewed the 2010 World Cup.


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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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