SACW - 20 July 2014 | Nepal: Shame / Afghan Elections / Sri Lanka: Defence ministry vs NGO's / Pakistan: Civil Society vs State/ Bangladesh: History Wars/ India: Hindutva games begin; labour reforms, CNDP on Gaza / Obituary: Nadine Gordimer / Own Your Own Data

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 20 July 2014 - No. 2829 
[since 1996]
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[Special Announcement: Hindu Nationalism in the United States: A Report on Nonprofit Groups is available at http://www.sacw.net/article9057.html]
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SACW  - 20 July 2014 | 

Contents:
1. Nepal: Shame on all of us! | Kanal Mani Dixit
2. Afghan cauldron on the boil again | Bharat Bhushan
3. Sri Lanka: Defence Ministry shouldn't control functioning of civil society orgns or NGOs
4. Sri Lanka Defense Ministry orders NGOs to refrain from Press conferences etc
5. Sri Lanka: ‘Govt. Complicit In Aluthgama Anti-Muslim Attacks’ Says Women’s Collective
6. Pakistan: Civil Society versus the State | I.A. Rehman
7. India: CNDP Statement on Israel's Brutal Assault on Gaza
8. War Resisters' International statement on Ukraine
9. Bangladesh: History Wars - Kamal Hossain Interview (Part 1)
10. India: History repeats itself | Romila Thapar
11. India: Historian D.N. Jha’s Reply to Arun Shourie
12. India: Time for ‘Harvest of Bees’ at ICHR ? | Subhash Gatade
13. Meaning, Metaphor and Martyrdom in Colonial India - lecture by Prof. Mushirul Hasan
14. India: EPW editorial on the Modi government’s labour policy
15. India: No going back on MGNREGA | Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey
16. India: Mean and petty labour reforms | Coln Gonsalves
17. Zohra Segal (April 27, 1912 - July 10, 2014)
18. India: Dying kids near in Jharkhand’s Jadugora uranium mines
19. India: Wazirpur workers struggle continues, as factory owners refuse to honour agreement
20. Jawed Naqvi: Looks like the work of a thief
21. India: RSS Denigrating Freedom Struggle | Subhash Gatade
22. Recent content on Communalism Watch:
    - India: Between history and mythology | Harbans Mukhia
    - Triumphant Victimhood - Hindutva in history | Ramachandra Guha
    - Can modi rein in Hindutva hardliners | Walter Andersen
    - India: The steady ingress of the Hindu right tears into Goa’s patient fabric | Hartman de Souza
    - India: Revealing interview with Yellapragada Sudershan Rao the ICHAR chair under Modi
    - India: Hind Swaraj vs Hindu Rashtra | Ananya Vajpeyi
    - India: The importance of being Amit Shah | Rana Ayyub

:::Full Text:::
23. Solution in Afghanistan?  - Editorial, The Express Tribune
24. Afghanistan back from brink, but vote recount fraught with risk | Mirwais Harooni and Maria Golovnina
25. Afghanistan: Quantum Jump - Editorial, The Telegraph
26. From Tigers to Barbers: Tales of Sri Lanka’s Ex-Combatants | Amantha Perera
27. Bangladesh: WB scrutiny of govt audits: a tip of the iceberg? | David Bergman
28. UK: Does Gandhi really belong in Parliament Square? | Priyamvada Gopal
29. Iraq Crisis: ISIS Militants Demand Women for Marriage, Sex in Captured Town | Johnlee Varghese
30. Obituary: Nadine Gordimer, South Africa’s literary voice against apartheid, dies at 90 | Helen T. Verongos
31. Own Your Own Data  | Larry Hardesty

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1. NEPAL: SHAME ON ALL OF US!
by Kanal Mani Dixit
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A human rights debacle is unfolding, with collaboration of a democratic government, the international community and intelligentsia
http://www.sacw.net/article9159.html

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2. AFGHAN CAULDRON ON THE BOIL AGAIN 
by Bharat Bhushan
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Instead of stabilising the country, Afghanistan’s presidential election can destabilise it further. While acknowledging electoral fraud, the chairman of the Independent Election Commission, Ahmad Yousuf Nuristani, has gone ahead and announced the preliminary results of the presidential runoff.
http://www.sacw.net/article9157.html

[see also related material in Full Text section below]

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3. SRI LANKA: MINISTRY OF DEFENCE SHOULD NOT HAVE CONTROL OVER THE FUNCTIONING OF CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANISATIONS OR NGOS
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The Asian Human Rights Commission wishes to clarify its position regarding the controversy about the government's proposal for a law to force the registration of non-governmental organisations with a National Secretariat functioning under the Sri Lankan Ministry of Defence and Urban Development.
http://www.sacw.net/article9190.html

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4. SRI LANKA DEFENSE MINISTRY ORDERS NGOS TO REFRAIN FROM HOLDING PRESS CONFERENCES, WORKSHOPS AND ISSUE PRESS RELEASES
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Sri Lanka Defense Ministry Monday has sent a circular to all non-governmental organizations (NGOs) asking them to refrain from unauthorized activities such as press conferences and workshops and other such unauthorized activities. .. This has drawn a sharp response "The Ministry of Defence does not enjoy any specific legal authority under any statute whatsoever to control freedom of speech and association of citizens, who act collectively through civil society organizations," the Lawyers Collective was quoted as saying.
http://www.sacw.net/article9125.html

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5. SRI LANKA: ‘GOVT. COMPLICIT IN ALUTHGAMA ANTI-MUSLIM ATTACKS’ SAYS WOMEN’S COLLECTIVE
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Women’s Collective team that investigated and documented the anti-Muslim clashes in Southern Sri Lanka has announced in their report that survivors of the violence hold the Government complicit in the attacks against Muslims on June 15.
http://www.sacw.net/article9110.html

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6. PAKISTAN: CIVIL SOCIETY VERSUS THE STATE
by I.A. Rehman
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Civil society is once again facing the awkward question as to whether it must always support an elected civilian government, regardless of its performance, to avoid the collapse of the democratic system.
http://www.sacw.net/article9183.html

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7. INDIA: CNDP STATEMENT ON ISRAEL'S BRUTAL ASSAULT ON GAZA
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We are shocked at Israel's ongoing brutal assault on the Gaza Strip, which has caused more than 150 Palestinian civilian deaths. The kidnapping and murder of three teenage Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank was condemnable, but Israel has reacted to it by visiting indiscriminate collective punishment on the Palestinian people, without identifying the culprits.
http://www.sacw.net/article9179.html

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8. WAR RESISTERS' INTERNATIONAL STATEMENT ON UKRAINE
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War has returned to European soil, and it seems that Europeans are not capable, or not willing, to apply the lessons they try to teach in other parts of the planet. The European Union, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, put Ukraine in an impossible position when it asked it to choose between a political pact with the EU or a close economic relationship with Russia.
http://www.sacw.net/article9182.html

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9. BANGLADESH: HISTORY WARS - KAMAL HOSSAIN INTERVIEW (PART 1)
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Our history is never still, and there are always processes of rewriting Bangladesh's history. Crucial figures are erased or their roles are distorted. The best response to such history wars … 
http://www.sacw.net/article9162.html

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10. INDIA: HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF 
by Romila Thapar
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The appointment of a historian whose work is unfamiliar to most historians shows scant regard for the impressive scholarship that now characterises the study of Indian History and this disregard may stultify future academic research
http://www.sacw.net/article9167.html

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11. INDIA: HISTORIAN D.N. JHA’S REPLY TO ARUN SHOURIE
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I was amused to read ‘How History Was Made Up At Nalanda’ (28 June 2014, the Indian Express) by Arun Shourie, who has dished out ignorance masquerading as knowledge – reason enough to have pity on him and sympathy for his readers! Since he has referred to me by name and has charged me with fudging evidence to distort the historical narrative of the destruction of the ancient Nalandamahavihar, I consider it necessary to rebut his allegations and set the record straight instead of ignoring his balderdash.
http://www.sacw.net/article9147.html

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12. INDIA: TIME FOR ‘HARVEST OF BEES’ AT ICHR ?
by Subhash Gatade
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It was probably late sixties or early seventies – when this pen pusher was a school student - one came across an article by a gentleman called P N Oak in a Marathi magazine called ‘Amrit’. The article made a particular case about Taj Mahal which it termed as ‘Tejo Maha Aalay’ or hindu god Shiva’s abode. It tried to establish through various ‘explanations’ that a Shiva Temple was destroyed to build Taj Mahal and if we dig deep we can find ‘remnants’ of the earlier structure.
http://www.sacw.net/article9196.html

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13. MEANING, METAPHOR AND MARTYRDOM IN COLONIAL INDIA - lecture by Prof. Mushirul Hasan
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Asghar Ali Engineer Memorial Lecture was held on14 May 2014 at the India International Centre in New Delhi. Three part video recording of the main event i.e. Public lecture by Prof. Mushirul Hasan titled 'Meaning, Metaphor and Martyrdom in Colonial India' (part 1, part 2, part 3). The Lecture was organised under the aegis of the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism and Dr Asghar Ali Memorial Committee. The recording of the lecture was made via South Asia Citizens Web Archive initiative (sacw.net).
http://www.sacw.net/article9181.html

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14. INDIA: EPW EDITORIAL ON THE MODI GOVERNMENT’S LABOUR POLICY
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The Modi government’s labour policy seeks to remove workers’ protection to increase business competitiveness.
http://www.sacw.net/article9122.html

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15. INDIA: NO GOING BACK ON MGNREGA
by Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey
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The budget will reveal whether the BJP is committed to this transformative programme.
http://www.sacw.net/article9160.html

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16. INDIA: MEAN AND PETTY LABOUR REFORMS
by Coln Gonsalves
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The National Democratic Alliance government, on June 5 and June 17, notified the proposed amendments to the Factories Act, 1948 and the Minimum Wages Act, 1948. Given that the process of amendments began in 2008 and went through a number of expert committees, one would have expected the amendments to be carefully thought-out. On the contrary, they are petty, anti-labour and poorly conceived. Given also that these are the Narendra Modi-led government's first pronouncements on labour, one can only lament the absence of a vision that a global power ought to have: that increased productivity comes from having satisfied workers, who produce quality products.
http://www.sacw.net/article9178.html

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17. ZOHRA SEGAL (April 27, 1912 - July 10, 2014)
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Celebrate actress Zohra Segal who won the hearts of millions is no more. The legend will live on in our hearts for ever.
http://www.sacw.net/article9158.html

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18. INDIA: DYING KIDS NEAR IN JHARKHAND’S JADUGORA URANIUM MINES
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The Ranchi high court noted in February after filing a petition against Uranium Corp. of India that children living near the mines are born with swollen heads, blood disorders and skeletal distortions.
http://www.sacw.net/article9150.html

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19. INDIA: WAZIRPUR WORKERS STRUGGLE CONTINUES, AS FACTORY OWNERS REFUSE TO HONOUR WRITTEN AGREEMENT - PUDR Press Release
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A month ago, on 6 June 2014, more than a thousand workers of 23 hot roller plants in Wazirpur Industrial area in Delhi had struck work. Today, more than a month later, the workers continue to struggle for basic work conditions. In complete defiance of labour department's instructions and outright violation of all norms, the factory owners have shown complete indifference to workers' demands.
http://www.sacw.net/article9189.html

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20. JAWED NAQVI: LOOKS LIKE THE WORK OF A THIEF
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Narendra Modi's instant prescriptions to cure India's chronic troubles are vacuous or easy or both.
http://www.sacw.net/article9184.html

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21. INDIA: RSS DENIGRATING FREEDOM STRUGGLE
by Subhash Gatade
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[c]ompared May 16 — the day Lok Sabha election results were declared and the BJP emerged victorious — to August 16, 1947, the day after India won its independence and the erstwhile British rulers finally left the country.
http://www.sacw.net/article9180.html
 
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22. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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Hindutva and Anti-Muslim Communal Violence in India Under the Bharatiya Janata Party (1990-2010) by Elaisha Nandrajog
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/07/hindutva-and-anti-muslim-communal.html

India: DGPs’ report blames all arms of govt for ignoring minorities
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/07/india-dgps-report-blames-all-arms-of.html

India: interview with Ashok Singhal the head of Vishwa Hindu Parishad
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/07/india-interview-with-ashok-singhal-head.html

India: Between history and mythology | Harbans Mukhia
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/07/india-between-history-and-mythology.html

Triumphant Victimhood - Hindutva in history | Ramachandra Guha
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/07/triumphant-victimhood-hindutva-in.html

Can modi rein in Hindutva hardliners | Walter Andersen
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/07/can-modi-rein-in-hindutva-hardliners.html

India: The steady ingress of the Hindu right tears into Goa’s patient fabric | Hartman de Souza
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/07/india-steady-ingress-of-hindu-right.html

India: Revealing interview with Yellapragada Sudershan Rao the ICHAR chair under Modi
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2014/07/india-revealing-interview-with.html

India: Hind Swaraj vs Hindu Rashtra | Ananya Vajpeyi
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2014/07/india-hind-swaraj-vs-hindu-rashtra.html

India: The importance of being Amit Shah | Rana Ayyub
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2014/07/india-importance-of-being-amit-shah.html

India: Bajrang Dal members arrested for vandalising a church in Bulandshahr, UP
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/07/india-bajrang-dal-members-arrested-for.html

India: Mukul Dube's letter to Editor, The Telegraph re Swapan Dasguta on ICHR
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/07/india-mukul-dubes-letter-to-editor.html

The India Exclusion Report 2013-14
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-india-exclusion-report-2013-14.html

Idea Of India Round Table Mumbai July 22, 2014 (Programme)
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/07/idea-of-india-round-table-mumbai-july.html

::: FULL TEXT :::
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23. SOLUTION IN AFGHANISTAN? 
Editorial, The Express Tribune
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(The Express Tribune, July 15, 2014)

US Secretary of State John Kerry (C) reacts as Afghan presidential candidates Ashraf Ghani (R) and Abdullah Abdullah look on during a joint press conference in Kabul on July 12, 2014. PHOTO: AFP

In a country where mistrust is deeply ingrained, it was probably the only solution that was ever going to satisfy even the most sceptical of commentators and observers, to say nothing of the politicians themselves. Every single vote, more than eight million, which was cast in the Afghan presidential run-off, is to be audited again. The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, brokered the deal that may yet avert a crisis of governance before the next government of Afghanistan is even formed. Accusations of ballot rigging had flown back and forth between the two candidates, and there did appear to be an unusual reversal of fortunes for Mr Ghani, who came far behind Abdullah Abdullah in the first round but appeared to overhaul him in round two to gain a substantial lead. After two days of intensive discussion both candidates have agreed to abide by the result of this count no matter what it is and then go forward to hopefully form a government of national unity.

The review of votes is going to take several weeks. Each will be scrutinised by official ballot counters as well as a range of observers. Ballot papers from Kabul will be checked first and the International Security and Assistance Force will be responsible for bringing in boxes of papers from all the other provinces; thus avoiding accusations that local scrutineers are in any way tainting the process. The size of the operation means that the presidential inauguration will have to be delayed, but the business of creating a government is already under way behind the scenes. It is vital that the two candidates agree on a power-sharing formula for the stability and well-being of Afghanistan, not to mention the region.

Both have strong support and both could undermine the other if they so chose. John Kerry spoke of  ‘a difficult road ahead’ for Afghanistan. He is right, as the road that is now to be travelled is one on which Afghanistan walks very much by itself, without the muscle of foreign forces for support. Democracy remains an aspiration rather than an accomplished reality for Afghanistan and we wish it well for the future.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 15th, 2014.

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24. AFGHANISTAN BACK FROM BRINK, BUT VOTE RECOUNT FRAUGHT WITH RISK
by Mirwais Harooni and Maria Golovnina
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(Reuters)
KABUL Tue Jul 15, 2014 9:21pm IST
(Reuters) - The euphoria over a U.S.-brokered deal between Afghanistan's rival presidential candidates at the weekend was a sign of how close some people believe the country came to a split along ethnic lines that could quickly turn violent.

The speed at which that relief has evaporated suggests the political crisis, playing out as foreign troops prepare to withdraw after more than a decade policing the war-torn nation, is not over yet.

And while Afghans and foreign governments fret over the fate of the election, an insurgency led by the ousted Taliban militia rages on. On Tuesday, at least 89 people were killed when a car bomb exploded in a crowded market in the eastern province of Paktika, one of the worst attacks in a year. [ID:nL4N0PQ2H2]

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry flew to Kabul last week to secure a political agreement between Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, who contested a June 14 run-off presidential vote, the results of which are still in dispute. [ID:nL4N0PO0AE]

The solution that pacified both parties, at least for now, was an ambitious, U.N.-supervised recount of all eight million votes cast - an exercise aimed at appeasing Abdullah who has alleged mass fraud and refuses to accept defeat.

It is designed both to weed out illegal votes and soften the blow for the losing candidate by introducing the idea of a unity government in which there would be both a president and a prime minister who would enjoy some powers.

But in a country where infrastructure is basic, it is a mammoth task that could take weeks, and there is no clear indication yet as to how fraudulent ballots will be identified and eliminated.

"While we all took a collective sigh of relief on Saturday night, the hard work is still before us, both on the technical process given all the logistical challenges ... as well as the other part of this ... which is the political process," said a senior U.S. official.

WILL ANYONE ACCEPT DEFEAT?

Abdullah's allies, largely drawn from the Tajik minority based in the north of the country, have said they will not necessarily accept the outcome of a recount if it goes the same way as the preliminary tally.

Mohammad Khan, Abdullah's first vice president, said if there were signs of further fraud, or if the camp was not satisfied by the findings of the Independent Election Commission, the result would be unacceptable.

"If we find any sign of fraud ... we will not accept the results. It's too early to say what our next plan is."

Preliminary results from the vote put Ghani, who comes from the Pashtun majority based in the east and south, in the lead by about a million votes - a result fiercely disputed by Abdullah and questioned by some independent observers.

Even if Abdullah accepted the recount, he may not be able to control all of his supporters.

The suave former foreign minister, who fought against the Taliban when the hardline Islamist movement ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s, opposes a violent solution to the crisis.

But at the height of the tensions earlier this month, groups of men angered by the election result cruised around Kabul shooting in the air and shouting pro-Abdullah slogans.

In Afghanistan, where ethnic divisions run deep, political disputes can quickly descend into chaos.

TENSIONS EASE, FOR NOW

The bitter standoff quashed hopes for a smooth transition of power from President Hamid Karzai, who has run Afghanistan since a U.S.-led war toppled the Taliban in 2001.

But last week's deal did succeed in reducing tensions, and, as preparations for the recount get underway, Abdullah and Ghani have visited each other's homes in Kabul this week to map out the future and cement the deal.

Sources said they were discussing a national unity government that would include representatives of the losing camp. Under the proposal, the president would appoint a chief executive, a role which can later be changed to prime minister.

Because of the huge logistical challenges, U.N. special representative for Afghanistan Jan Kubis has asked for a month's delay to the inauguration of a new president, which was to have taken place on Aug. 2, according to a statement from Karzai.

The Independent Election Commission said it would bring ballot boxes from almost 23,000 polling stations to Kabul and each of the ballots cast would be individually examined.

It said it would take three weeks to inspect the votes, but some fear it could take longer, a worry for the United States which is keen to sign a security agreement with a new leader allowing some U.S. troops to remain in the country beyond 2014.

The senior U.S. administration official said that if the schedule slipped by just a few weeks it would not be a problem.

"We're really in a fairly fluid period right now," he said.

"We don't expect it to be more than that few weeks, but we also don't want to put artificial deadlines on it. And if it only slips by a few weeks, then I don't expect that there will be much impact on the issues that you laid out."

Worryingly, U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, who are assisting in transporting the ballot boxes to Kabul from across Afghanistan's rugged terrain, said the process had yet to start.

"We do not know when the movement of the ballot boxes will begin, or how long it will take," the International Security Assistance Force said in an email to Reuters.

"The process of transferring the ballot boxes to Kabul has not started, so far as we are aware."

There are also questions about the criteria officials will apply to identify fraudulent votes. Nader Mohseni, a spokesman for the Electoral Complaints Commission, said votes marked by wrong pens or not properly signed or stamped by a station chief would be discounted.

He ruled out the possibility of a repeat election, a scenario some had feared, saying the result of the audit would have to be accepted by all sides.

"There is no possibility of a new presidential election, because in the second round...any candidate who got 50 (percent) plus one vote will be announced as the winner," he said.

(Additional reporting by Missy Ryan, Writing by Maria Golovnina; Editing by Mike Collett-White)

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25. AFGHANISTAN: QUANTUM JUMP - Editorial, The Telegraph
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(The Telegraph, 15 July 2015)

There is a tide in the affairs of Afghanistan, which taken at the flood could lead to fortune. Scarcely three months ago, the people of Afghanistan had made it clear that they preferred a political culture different from one dictated by the bullet and tribal loyalties to determine how power was transferred and shared in the country. Despite threats of violence, they came out to vote, not once, but twice — during the first round of presidential elections in April and again during the run-off in June. Then they waited for their political leaders to rise to the occasion — to play by the rules and give them a government of their choice. Habits, however, die hard. As before in 2009, Afghanistan’s politicians seemed perilously close to betraying the enormous hopes that the presidential elections had generated for peace and normalcy when they began to raise questions about the fairness of the poll process the moment the results started to deviate from expectations. Abdullah Abdullah withdrew from the poll process amid allegations that his contender, Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, had rigged the polls. He also threatened to form his own parallel government, a move that would have pitted the Tajiks against the Pashtuns and set off unending ethnic strife. When things appeared to have moved to a point of no return, a last desperate effort was made by the United States of America, which is banking on the credibility of the next president of Afghanistan to back its extended stay on Afghan soil. Perhaps the collapse of the Iraq government may have served as a warning, but the two leading candidates in Afghanistan appear to have undergone a change of heart. They are willing to look beyond their nose and the comfort of winning margins, and to consider the formation of a national unity government that could trigger Afghanistan’s transformation from a presidential to a parliamentary form of government. For now, though, the presidential candidates are only willing to concede to have agreed to an international-standard audit of the eight million votes polled.

Irrespective of whether this bonhomie lasts, the willingness to compromise shows that Afghanistan’s top leaders realize that, shorn of inclusive governance, there is no way a government can survive the threat of being overrun by the Taliban or any other hostile ethnic formation. Even a grudging admission of this, amid all the self-seeking, is a movement forward for Afghanistan.

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26. FROM TIGERS TO BARBERS: TALES OF SRI LANKA’S EX-COMBATANTS
by Amantha Perera
=========================================
(Inter Press Service)
Aloysius Patrickeil, once a member of the feared Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), now spends his time giving his loyal customers haircuts in a small town in Sri Lanka's Northern Province. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

KILINOCHCHI, Sri Lanka, Jul 14 2014 (IPS) - People are willing to wait a long time for a few minutes in the hands of Aloysius Patrickeil, a 32-year-old barber who is part-owner of a small shop close to the northern town of Kilinochchi, 320 km from Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo.

Old men with bushy moustaches sit on chairs alongside youngsters sporting trendy haircuts and beards in the latest styles from Tamil movies, while mothers drag their kids into the long line for the barber’s coveted chair.

“He is the best in town,” Kalliman Mariyadas, a young man waiting his turn, says confidently.

“They want a better life, they want to live like ordinary people.” -- Murugesu Kayodaran, rehabilitation officer for the Kilinochchi District Divisional Secretariat
A few years ago, Patrickeil wasn’t such a famous man, nor did he wish to be one. Till 2009 he was a member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the armed separatist group that fought a 26-year-long civil war with successive Sri Lankan governments for independence for the country’s minority Tamil population.

Patrickeil, now the father of a one-and-a-half year-old infant, was part of the LTTE’s naval arm known as the Sea Tigers until a military offensive decimated the rebel group in 2009.

Today, he is wary of divulging details of his past career.

“There is no point – what happened, happened. I don’t want to go back there,” he tells IPS, while massaging the head of one of his middle-aged clients.

His main aim now is to make sure his enterprise keeps making money. “People will always want to get haircuts, so it is a good job selection,” he says with a smile.

A beloved member of the community, he loves to talk of his shop and his future plans, but not so much about his violent past and involvement in a conflict that claimed some 100,000 lives on both sides.
A man transports bananas in the northern town of Jaffna, the political and cultural hub of Sri Lanka's Northern Province, which has reaped at least some of the peace dividends. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

A man transports bananas in the northern town of Jaffna, the political and cultural hub of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, which has reaped at least some of the peace dividends. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

When the Sri Lankan government declared victory over the Tigers in May 2009, after a bloody battle in the former rebel-held areas in the north and east of the country, close to 12,000 LTTE cadres either surrendered or were apprehended by military forces, according to government data.

By June this year over 11,800 were released following rehabilitation programmes of varying length, leaving 132 in detention.

Patrickeil himself was in detention, and then underwent rehabilitation (including vocational training) until February 2013; like thousands of other former militants, he must now navigate the former war zone as a civilian.

“They want a better life, they want to live like ordinary people,” says Murugesu Kayodaran, rehabilitation officer for the Kilinochchi District Divisional Secretariat.

But after years of war, violence and no sense of what “ordinary” life means, he tells IPS, this seemingly simple task is harder than it first appears.

Of the released ex-Tigers, most are engaged in manual labour in the north, according to data provided by the Bureau of the Commissioner General of Rehabilitation. Other popular areas of employment include the fishing industry, the farming sector or the government’s civil defence department.

14652000325_ab5f725cb4_zCurrently, 11 percent of rehabilitated former LTTE fighters are listed as unemployed, more than two-and-a-half times the national unemployment rate.

Very few official programmes offer assistance. One government loan scheme provides individuals with up to 25,000 rupees (192 dollars), but so far only 1,773 who qualify for the programme have received the money, according to existing records.

An initiative undertaken by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) offers grants of 50,000 rupees (roughly 380 dollars), but since 2013 only 523 have received the modest sum.

“We try to help the most deserving cases after careful evaluation,” M S M Kamil, head of ICRC’s Economic Security Department, tells IPS. The lack of complimentary schemes, however, means that thousands are floundering without a steady income.

Kayodaran says that sustained long-term assistance is needed to foster careful reintegration of thousands of ex-combatants, many of whom still feel stigmatised.

“They feel they need financial independence to be able to feel normal like the others, but there are other underlying issues like depression, trauma and lack of family support that remain unaddressed,” he says.

A little help goes a long way

Just a few miles west of Patrickeil’s popular salon, 37-year-old Selliah Bavanan works alone in his tire repair shop in the small town of Mallavi. Also a former Tiger, he is evasive about his role in the group.

All he confides to IPS is that “the situation at the time demanded that we make the decision to join the group.”
Selliah Bavanan, an ex-LTTE cadre, now runs a tire repair shop in the Northern Province, and avoids talking about his past. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Selliah Bavanan, an ex-LTTE cadre, now runs a tire repair shop in the Northern Province, and avoids talking about his past. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Now he keeps a close eye on the road that links Kilinochchi, the main financial hub in the region, with the western parts of the district.

“My primary customers are the big vehicles,” he states, adding that there are many that take the route these days, ferrying material for the large-scale development work taking place in areas that were held by the Tigers until early 2009.

When he received the ICRC grant earlier this year, Bavanan made an astute decision – he invested the money in equipment for his humble enterprise and has seen a sharp spike in customers ever since.

“I make between 1,500 and 3,000 rupees (about 11-21 dollars) daily; it is good money,” he insists, while repairing a large, punctured tire.

Patrickeil received a similar grant and invested the money in mirrors, scissors and other accessories for the shop that was owned by a friend. “I pay half my daily income to the owner,” says Patrickeil who also makes about 3,000 rupees per day in a region where the monthly cost of living is some 25,000-30,000 rupees (190-230 dollars).

Life on this small income is not easy, with many ex-combatants in the region supporting extended families. One injured former LTTE cadre that IPS spoke with was supporting a family of three, plus a younger brother and two ageing parents.
Those left disabled by the war, both civilians and ex-combatants, make up over 10 percent of the population of Sri Lanka's Northern Province, but very little official assistance is directed at them. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Those left disabled by the war, both civilians and ex-combatants, make up over 10 percent of the population of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, but very little official assistance is directed at them. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Officials like ICRC’s Kamil say that rehabilitated former female combatants find job options even more restrictive than their male counterparts.

Psychological assistance programmes for those traumatised by years of war are just getting off the ground in the former conflict areas, but none of them are designed specifically for ex-combatants.

There is also no official data on how many former LTTE members were wounded, but government records suggest that at least 10 to 20 percent of the Northern Province’s population of some 1.1 million people are war-injured, a large number of which were combatants during the conflict.

They say their biggest challenge now is social acceptance and financial independence. While the immediate outlook is bleak, many harbour aspirations of improved circumstances in the years to come.

“First there was war, then there was peace; now we have poverty, and hopefully the next stop will be prosperity,” says Patrickeil’s customer Mariyadas, standing up for his turn with the Sea Tiger-turned-barber.

(END)

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27. BANGLADESH: WB SCRUTINY OF GOVT AUDITS: A TIP OF THE ICEBERG?
by David Bergman
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(New Age - July 8, 2014)
Whilst the World Bank can certainly be applauded for making public the government audits on donor-supported health programmes (‘Donors and audit transparency,’ New Age, 5 July), a more pressing question is how well it, and, indeed, other donors, responded to the reports themselves.
The audit reports would not have made easy reading for donors, suggesting as they do, that millions of dollars were stolen or misused on these two  programmes.
So what did the World Bank, which is not only responsible for its own money but also that of other donors, do when it received these reports?
The World Bank says, ‘When the final audit report is shared with the World Bank each year, the bank fiduciary team does a detailed review and flags those observations which are considered “material” to the [ministry] for clarification and resolution. Based on clarifications received and supporting documents, further scrutiny may be considered necessary. The audit review carried out by the Bank fiduciary team may lead to a withholding of disbursements and/or declaration of ineligible expenditures.’
In relation to the 2006-2011 programme, the audit reports identified 266 audit observations involving $308 million in irregularities.
The World Bank subsequently stated that in these five years, it had ‘identified 36 audit observations (worth $68.14 million) as material and substantive from the observations raised by the Foreign Aided Projects Audit Directorate (FAPAD) auditors.’
The most recent audit of the current programme identified 97 observations involving $70 million of expenditure irregularities. The World Bank has stated that 22 of these observations amounting to $10 million were considered to be ‘material.’
So in relation to 2006-2011 and 2012-13 respectively, the World Bank considered that 230 observations amounting to $240 million of irregularities, and 71 observations amounting to $60 million were not ‘material.’
That is a lot of irregularities that the World Bank has put aside. Is that justified?
It is difficult to answer this question as the World Bank has not been willing to provide any information on which of the audit observations it considers ‘material’ and why it considers other observations not to be significant. The lack of openness is troubling. It is not sufficient for the World Bank to make the audits public, it needs to be open about its process in dealing with these alleged irregularities.
One issue that remains unclear is whether in assessing which audit observations to take up with the Bangladesh government, the World Bank is only concerned with those involving donor money or whether it also raises with the government those observations that relate to government money as well.
The World Bank has not yet responded to a query about whether, for example, the 22 audit observations it has taken up with the government in relation to the 2012–2013 audit only involves donor money
It is, of course, also possible that some or, indeed, many of the audit observations may not be up to scratch — that is to say that the World Bank does not view the CAG reports to be wholly reliable so that although the observations appear serious, when looked into, they are not. If this is the case, this then raises questions about whether the World Bank and donors should be relying on the CAG to undertake the audit in the first place.
Apart from the way it deals with the audit observations, there are other issues about the World Bank’s response to the overall scope of the audit.
The 2012–2013 audit report stated that its financial review did not cover 30 per cent of the expenditure, which amounts to about $101 million. Even if this in part comprises $60 million of the money given by what is known as direct project aid (which will usually be audited by the donors themselves), this still means that $40 million of programme expenditure has not been audited.
In light of the widespread financial irregularities identified by the audit, why has the World Bank not required that this additional expenditure be scrutinised?
Also, the audit report makes clear that the auditors only scrutinised a sample of the vouchers, which means only about 10 to 20 per cent of the total. This is apparently standard practice and, no doubt, is sufficient when an audit finds in the sample that there are no or very few irregularities. But when such serious irregularities are identified following the scrutiny of only a small percentage of the vouchers, should not the World Bank then seek a more rigorous audit involving a much greater number of vouchers?
And this raises the question as to whether six months, which is the time which the World Bank gives the CAG to undertake the audit and complete its report, is sufficient. Understandably, the World Bank  wants the audit done quickly. However, auditors at the office of the comptroller and auditor general say that it is very difficult for them to do a proper audit of such a huge programme in this short period of time.
Apparently the CAG has asked the World Bank for more time but it has not been allowed.
And there is one further important point. The audit given to the World Bank only involves the government’s development budget and does not include the normal health ministry expenditure which amounts to around an additional $4 billion, and which is technically part of the programme. Are the World Bank and donors not interested in whether this $4 billion, which amounts to more than the total expenditure that is audited annually over the five years of the programme, is expended correctly?
Altogether, the points above raise the question of whether the World Bank is really interested in getting to the bottom of financial irregularities in its programme.
World Bank officials, no doubt, would throw their hands up aghast at such a suggestion.
But they only have themselves to blame for people wondering whether this might be the case.
First, there is the lack of transparency in how the bank has come to its conclusion that so few of the audit observations are considered significant.
Second, there is the failure of the World Bank to ensure that all of the programme development budget expenditure is audited.
Third, in light of the significant irregularities identified in the programme, there is the failure, to require that more than just a sample of vouchers were scrutinised in the audit.
Fourth, there is the issue of whether the World Bank has given the government’s audit team enough time to do a proper job.
And then finally, there is the matter that the audit received by the World Bank and donors does not include scrutiny of the government’s non-development budget contribution to the programme which will amount to about $4 billion.
It may seem unlikely that an organisation like the World Bank, wiling to rescind the Padma bridge loan because of corruption allegations, would be willing to go light on financial irregularities, but at the same time one needs to appreciate that the organisation is a conflicted one.
Yes, there is a genuine commitment within the bank against corruption and irregularities but there are reasons to believe that its governance concerns can get overshadowed by those in the bank who want to make loans and those who want to keep the projects going without interruption, particularly those programmes that seem to be having a positive impact.
In the first New Age report, an audit official is quoted as saying that the audit is ‘the tip of an iceberg.’ (‘Audit finds $70m spending irregularities,’ New Age, June 29).
One must wonder whether the World Bank really wants to see the full iceberg?

- See more at: http://newagebd.net/28719/wb-scrutiny-of-govt-audits-a-tip-of-the-iceberg/

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28. UK: DOES GANDHI REALLY BELONG IN PARLIAMENT SQUARE?
by Priyamvada Gopal
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(The Guardian, 11 July 2014)
We shouldn't allow a statue of the 'father of Indian democracy in front of the mother of parliaments' to entrench historical amnesia

Gandhi at 10 Downing Street
‘In Britain as in India, his canonisation has become the vehicle for official rhetoric that obscures the links between capitalism's military-industrial complex, social hierarchies and state violence.' Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images

Mahatma Gandhi's words have long provided grist for instant inspiration. Either via bumper stickers or nuggets of internet wisdom, you're likely to have had "An eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind" or "Be the change you wish to see in the world" thrust upon you at some point. So it's no surprise that Britain announced this week that this "inspiring" signifier of austere piety will be honoured through a statue of his own on Parliament Square next year. Some might argue this is long overdue.

Except that the announcement came as coalition ministers George Osborne and William Hague visited India to hustle for lucrative arms contracts, emerging triumphantly with a £250m deal to supply missiles to the Indian air force and hoping to persuade the former jewel in the imperial crown to buy the partly British-made Eurofighter Typhoon jet.

This plainly opportunistic move has elicited accusations of "false worship" from Gandhi's descendants. Hague's glutinous praise for Gandhi's commitment to non-violence as "a legacy that is as relevant today as it was during his life", while selling killing machines to his countrymen, is certainly specious. Yet the hawkish rightwing Indian regime these ministers are cosying up to is, with even greater irony, appropriating Gandhi to sanitise its own sectarian past. In Britain as in India, the canonisation of Gandhi has become the perfect vehicle for sanctimonious official rhetoric that obscures the links between capitalism's military-industrial complex, social hierarchies and state violence.

Further, Britain has also obstinately refused to fully acknowledge its bloodied history of colonial violence. Gandhi, loathed by the more hardline British imperialists, was contemptuously described by Winston Churchill as "a seditious fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up …to negotiate and parley on equal terms with the representative of the King". Other colonial leaders liked Gandhi precisely because he was willing to negotiate, prevent violent rebellion, and make large concessions where Indian radicals would have preferred to stand firm.

Osborne's self-congratulatory suggestion that the "father of democratic India" belongs in front of the "mother of parliaments" rather skips over Gandhi's dislike for the latter, dismissing it with his distinctive brand of misogyny as a "prostitute" and a "barren woman". Gandhi was hostile to imitating western political institutions, emphasising the need to draw on indigenous resources which, of course, came with their own embedded flaws. For Britain to simply consecrate Gandhi without discussing his – and our – fraught relationship with the British empire is not so much magnanimous as dishonest.

Friend to prominent Indian industrialists, Gandhi was far from hostile to capitalism, insisting to leftwing critics that there was no antagonism between the interests of labour and capital. Yet it is extremely unlikely that he would wish to be associated with the untrammelled, corporate-driven neoliberalism of the Indian governing classes, and the dismantling of the few provisions for the poor. In the Indian context, his paternalist approach to caste exploitation – calling on the privileged castes to "uplift" the downtrodden – served to marginalise radical voices, such as that of the Dalit leader Bhimrao Ambedkar, who wanted more profound changes. Similarly, at the behest of caste Hindu organisations Conservative politicians have also resisted anti-caste-discrimination legislation in Britain.

For all that Gandhi was a fervent Hindu with the accompanying blind spots around caste and gender oppression, he was not cut from the same cloth as today's dominant religious nationalists. He opposed vicious religious sectarianism while his vision of a multi-religious India was bitterly resisted by Hindu extremists.

For the likes of Hague to pay cloying lip service to Gandhi's "view of communal peace and resistance to division" while parlaying for lucrative deals within Hindu extremist circles, to which Gandhi's assassin was linked, is to at once whitewash the history of Britain's divide-and-rule colonialism and the dangerous sectarianism it gave rise to.

Gandhi remains a deeply ambiguous figure: a fervent Hindu who advocated religious harmony; a believer in the caste system who deplored "untouchability"; and an anti-colonialist who was willing to compromise with the British empire. This renders him open to appropriation by different interests, some progressive, some retrograde. But we should not allow a statue in Parliament Square to blandly entrench a historical amnesia and diminish a venal and violent present.

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29. IRAQ CRISIS: ISIS MILITANTS DEMAND WOMEN FOR MARRIAGE, SEX IN CAPTURED TOWN
by Johnlee Varghese
=========================================
(International Business Times, June 23, 2014)

An Iraqi woman
ISIS militants have started targeting women in towns captured by the group.Reuters File

With the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fast moving towards Baghdad after its most recent victory over the strategic Shiite town of Tal Afar, the terrorist group has started targeting woman, forcing them to marry or sleep with the militants.

ISIS, which wants to establish a strict Islamic country, has already started its reign in the captured towns.

ISIS has now taken over the cities of Mosul and Tikrit and has reportedly ordered the families to hand over their daughters to the militants. Mirror reported that in the captured towns, the militants have been distributing leaflets which state: "Women virgin or not must join jihad and cleanse themselves by sleeping with militants."

ISIS fighters now have the religious right to rape woman as a Saudi-based cleric has issued a fatwa - a religious order that allows the militants to rape women in captive towns.

The invading militants warned that those who disobey the dictate are violating God's will, and hence will receive beatings or can even be killed.

Reports from Baiji - another town fully under ISIS control - state that the residents are living in fear as the militants are conducting door-to-door checks for unmarried women.

"They said that many of their mujahedin were unmarried and wanted a wife. They insisted on coming into my house to look at the women's ID cards [which in Iraq show marital status]" local resident Abu Lahid told The Independent.

Though ISIS claims its members have been asked specifically not to bother anyone in captured towns especially if they are Sunnis, the ground reality is entirely different.

The group has already started imposing its puritanical social norms in the towns they captured. In some of the captured towns, fanatical ISIS militants have ordered restrictions on women, with rules being set on their clothing, watching TV in coffee shops and smoking.

In Mosul, a woman was reportedly whipped, along with her husband, because she was only wearing a headscarf rather than the niqab covering the whole body.

Similarly Twitter is awash with reports of ISIS killing a woman, who denounced the ISIS rule in the country. It is reported that the woman's body was hanged on an electric pole in Kirkuk for three days, before her body was allowed to be taken down for burial.

Alarmed by the radical rise of Sunni militants, who have conquered one city after another and is now swiftly moving towards Baghdad, US Secretary of State John Kerry rushed down to Iraq on Monday to meet Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who the rebels want to be ousted. Kerry also met with other key Iraqi ministers, suggesting a possible move to form a new government in the country.

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30. OBITUARY: NADINE GORDIMER, SOUTH AFRICA’S LITERARY VOICE AGAINST APARTHEID, DIES AT 90
by Helen T. Verongos
=========================================
(The New York Times News Service, July 14, 2014)

Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer whose literary ambitions led her into the heart of apartheid to create a body of fiction that brought her a Nobel Prize in 1991, died Monday in Johannesburg. She was 90.

Her family announced her death in a statement.

Ms. Gordimer did not originally choose apartheid as her subject as a young writer, she said, but she found it impossible to dig deeply into South African life without striking repression. And once the Afrikaner nationalists came to power in 1948, the scaffolds of the apartheid system began to rise around her and could not be ignored.

“I am not a political person by nature,” Ms. Gordimer said years later. “I don’t suppose if I had lived elsewhere, my writing would have reflected politics much, if at all.”

But whether by accident of geography or literary searching, she found her themes in the injustices and cruelties of her country’s policies of racial division, and she left no quarter of South African society unexplored – from a hot, crowded cinder-block neighbourhood in a black township to the white colonial world of sundowner cocktails, poolside barbecues and hunting parties.

Critics have described the whole of her work as constituting a social history as told through finely drawn portraits of the characters who peopled it.

About her own life Ms. Gordimer told little, preferring to explore the intricacies of the mind and heart in those of her protagonists. “It is the significance of detail wherein the truth lies,” she once said.

But some critics saw in her fiction a theme of personal as well as political liberation, reflecting her struggles growing up under the possessive, controlling watch of a mother trapped in an unhappy marriage.

Ms. Gordimer was the author of more than two dozen works of fiction, including novels and collections of short stories in addition to personal and political essays and literary criticism. Her first book of stories, Face to Face, appeared in 1949, and her first novel, The Lying Days, in 1953. In 2010, she published Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954-2008, a weighty volume of her collected non-fiction.

Three of Ms. Gordimer’s books were banned in her own country at some point during the apartheid era – 1948 to 1994 – starting with her second novel, A World of Strangers, published in 1958. It concerns a young British man, newly arrived in South Africa, who discovers two distinct social planes that he cannot bridge: one in the black townships, to which one group of friends is relegated; the other in the white world of privilege, enjoyed by a handful of others he knows.

A World of Strangers was banned for 12 years and another novel, The Late Bourgeois World (1966), for 10 – long enough to be fatal to most books, Ms. Gordimer noted. The Late Bourgeois World deals with a woman who faces a difficult choice when her ex-husband, a traitor to the anti-apartheid resistance, commits suicide.

The third banned novel was one of her best-known, Burger’s Daughter, the story of the child of a family of revolutionaries who seeks her own way after her father becomes a martyr to the cause. It was unavailable in South Africa for only months rather than years after it was published in 1979, in part because by then its author was internationally known.

Ms. Gordimer was never detained or persecuted for her work, though there were always risks to writing openly about the ruling repressive regime. One reason may have been her ability to give voice to perspectives far from her own, such as those of colonial nationalists who had created and thrived on the system of institutionalized oppression that was named the “grand apartheid” (from the Afrikaans word for “apartness”) when it became law.

Her ability to slip inside a life completely different from her own took her beyond the borders of white and black to explore other cultures under the boot of apartheid. In the 1983 short story A Chip of Glass Ruby, she entered an Indian Muslim household, and in the novel My Son’s Story (1990), she wrote of a mixed-race character.

She won the Booker Prize in 1974 for The Conservationist, which had a white male protagonist. Long before the struggle against apartheid was won, some of her books looked ahead to its overthrow and a painful national rebirth. In July’s People (1981), a violent war for equality has come to the white suburbs, driving out the ruling minority. In a reversal of roles, July, a black servant, brings his employers, a white family, to the black township of Soweto, where he can protect them. In A Sport of Nature (1987), the white wife of an assassinated black leader becomes, with a new husband, the triumphant first lady of a country rising from the rubble of the old order.

Perhaps surprisingly, Ms. Gordimer’s books were not the product of someone who had grown up in a household where the politics of race were discussed. Rather, Ms. Gordimer said, in her world, the minority whites lived among blacks “as people live in a forest among trees.”

It was not her country’s problems that set her to writing, she said. “On the contrary,” she wrote in an essay, “it was learning to write that sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.”

Nadine Gordimer was born to Jewish immigrant parents on Nov. 20, 1923, in Springs, a mining town in Transvaal, the vast, largely rural area in the northeast settled by Afrikaner farmers. Her father, Isidore Gordimer, a watch maker who had been driven by poverty to emigrate from Lithuania, eventually established his own jewellery store. Her mother, the former Nan Myers, had come with her family from Britain and never stopped thinking of it as home.

Theirs was an unhappy marriage.

“I suspect she was sometimes in love with other men,” Ms. Gordimer said in an interview in 1983 with The Paris Review, “but my mother would never have dreamt of having an affair.” Instead she poured her energy, sometimes to a smothering degree, into raising Nadine and her older sister, Betty.

As a child, Ms. Gordimer recalled, she was a brash show-off who loved to dance and dreamed of becoming a ballerina. But her mother insisted that she stop dancing because she had a rapid heartbeat. When she was 10, her mother pulled her out of the convent school she attended, telling her daughter that participating in running and swimming could harm her.

Years later, Ms. Gordimer said she learned that the rapid heartbeat was a result of an enlarged thyroid and that it did not pose the danger her mother had implied. She came to believe that her supposed ill health had dovetailed with her mother’s hunger for romance.

“The chief person she was attracted to was our family doctor,” she told The Paris Review. “There’s no question. I’m sure it was quite unconscious, but the fact that she had this delicate daughter, about whom she could be constantly calling the doctor – in those days doctors made house calls, and there would be tea and cookies and long chats – made her keep my ‘illness’ going in this way.”

Scholars and critics have found threads from Ms. Gordimer’s childhood running through her fiction. John Cooke, in his book The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: Private Lives/Public Landscapes, saw “the liberation of children from unusually possessive mothers” as a central theme in Ms. Gordimer’s work. In novel after novel, he wrote, “daughters learn that truly leaving ‘the mother’s house’ requires leaving ‘the house of the white race.’<TH>”

It took Ms. Gordimer years to tear herself from her mother’s house.

Removed from school, Ms. Gordimer said, she became a “little old woman,” studying with a tutor and accompanying her mother to social engagements. The antidote to her isolation was reading, she said.

In 1945, she enrolled in the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and thrived in what she called the “nursery bohemia” of university life, studying literature and deciding to pursue a writing life.

With the exception of a trip to what is now known as Zimbabwe, it was not until she was 30 that she ventured outside South Africa.

In 1949, Ms. Gordimer married a dentist, Gerald Gavron, and they had a daughter, Oriane. The marriage ended in divorce in 1952. Two years later, she married Reinhold H. Cassirer, an art dealer who had fled Nazi Germany and was a nephew of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Their son, Hugo, was born in 1955. Reinhold Cassirer died in 2001. She leaves her son and her daughter.

Ms. Gordimer said little about her personal life in interviews. Journalists commonly noted her impatience with certain personal questions, sometimes describing her response as disdainful and irritable.

She did mention flirtations on occasion. “My one preoccupation outside the world of ideas was men,” she once said, without providing details.

She never wrote an autobiography. “Autobiography,” she said in 1963, “can’t be written until one is old, can’t hurt anyone’s feelings, can’t be sued for libel, or, worse, contradicted.”

She was, however, the subject of a 2005 biography, No Cold Kitchen, which drew wide attention not least for the bitter fallout she had with its young author, Ronald Suresh Roberts, a former Wall Street lawyer who had grown up in Trinidad. She had originally authorized the biography and granted him access, but she later withdrew the authorization, objecting to the manuscript and accusing the author of breach of trust. The publishers under contract for the book – Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the United States and Bloomsbury in Britain – declined to publish it. (Both also were publishers of Ms. Gordimer’s work.)

The biography was eventually published by a small South African house and was the talk of literary South Africa for its accusation that Ms. Gordimer had admitted to fabricating key elements in an autobiographical essay in The New Yorker in 1954. It also paints Ms. Gordimer as a hypocritical white liberal whose words masked a paternalistic attitude toward black South Africa.

When the Nobel committee awarded Ms. Gordimer the literature prize in 1991, it took note of her political activism but observed, “she does not permit this to encroach on her writings.”

That sentiment was one she said she clung to throughout her career. In 1975, she wrote in the introduction to her Selected Stories: “The tension between standing apart and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer. That is where we begin.”

In later interviews she said that no one could live in a society like South Africa’s and stay isolated from politics. Looking back, she told an interviewer in 1995, “The fact that my books were perceived as being so political was because I lived my life in this society that was so much changed by conflict, by political conflict, which of course in practical terms is human conflict.”

She never stopped grappling with politics, despite her disdain for the polemical. And book by book, she crept closer to reconciling her writing with her political self. What she did not want to do, she said, was to write in the service of the anti-apartheid movement, despite her deep contempt for the government system. Over time she revealed that she had been far from passive when politics touched her personally. She passed messages; hid friends, including high-ranking figures, who were trying to elude the police; and secretly drove others to the border. All these actions appear in her fiction, carried out by characters much braver than she portrayed herself to be.

Through Ms. Gordimer’s work, international readers learned the human effects of the “colour bar” and the punishing laws that systematically sealed off each avenue of contact among races. Her books are rich with terror. In her stories the fear of the security forces pounding on the door in the middle of the night is real. Freedom is impossible; even the liberated political prisoner is immediately rearrested after experiencing the briefest illusion of returning to the world.

The great victory, the end of apartheid, is not the end of the knotty moral problems her characters confront. In None to Accompany Me, published in 1994, the year Nelson Mandela was elected president in the country’s first fully democratic vote, one subplot concerns a black political exile, Didymus Maqoma, who comes home only to find that he has no place in the current struggle. Despite his sacrifices, he is overlooked by the postrevolutionary leaders in favour of his wife.

Reading Ms. Gordimer’s work is a reminder that the noose around South Africans tightened by increments, with ever stricter laws followed by correspondingly dimmer expectations. Critics have said that the tone of Ms. Gordimer’s writing fluctuated with the political climate, with an air of hope giving way to a sense of bleakness as racial violence gathered force.

Some of her most difficult moments came in the 1970s, when the black consciousness movement sought to exclude whites from the fight for majority rule. That period cut her off from many intellectuals and artists and left her work vulnerable to criticism from many black Africans, who contended that a white author could never authentically tell a story through the eyes of a black character.

Ms. Gordimer fought off that accusation, saying, “There are things that blacks know about whites that we don’t know about ourselves, that we conceal and don’t reveal in our relationships – and the other way about.”

In the end, the government was too weak to enforce its laws while contending with armed opposition within and economic and political pressure from outside. In 1990, Mr. Mandela was released from prison; in 1991 apartheid laws were repealed, in 1993 a new constitution was approved, and in 1994, the walls came tumbling down with the election.

During that exhilarating period, when Mr. Mandela’s African National Congress party regained legal standing, Ms. Gordimer, who had been a secret member, paid her dues in person and got a party card.

It was then, after the release of the man who would be president within a few years, that Ms. Gordimer won the Nobel Prize. “Mandela still doesn’t have a vote,” she said at the time.

Ms. Gordimer went on writing after apartheid, resisting the idea that its demise had deprived her of her great literary subject. It “makes a big difference in my life as a human being,” she said, “but it doesn’t really affect me in terms of my work, because it wasn’t apartheid that made me a writer, and it isn’t the end of apartheid that’s going to stop me.”

But there were critics who thought she had lost her bearings. In a review of her 1998 novel, The House Gun, in which a white South African husband and wife see their only son go on trial for the murder of a friend, Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times that the book suggested that the author “has yet to come to terms, artistically, with the dismantling of apartheid and her country’s drastically altered social landscape.”

She ventured into an Arab country in her 2001 novel, The Pickup, and continued to write prolifically for years after apartheid became history. Politically, she eventually embraced other causes, among them the fight against the spread of HIV and AIDS in South Africa and a writers’ campaign against the country’s punishing secrecy law.

In the end, one of her greatest fears proved hollow. Although Ms. Gordimer was immensely gratified to receive the Nobel, its valedictory connotations led her to worry about what it said to the world about her future.

“When I won the Nobel Prize,” she said, “I didn’t want it to be seen as a wreath on my grave.”

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31. OWN YOUR OWN DATA 
by Larry Hardesty
=========================================
(MIT News Office, July 9, 2014)
 
A new system would allow individuals to pick and choose what data to share with websites and mobile apps.
	 
Cellphone metadata has been in the news quite a bit lately, but the National Security Agency isn’t the only organization that collects information about people’s online behavior. Newly downloaded cellphone apps routinely ask to access your location information, your address book, or other apps, and of course, websites like Amazon or Netflix track your browsing history in the interest of making personalized recommendations.
 
At the same time, a host of recent studies have demonstrated that it’s shockingly easy to identify unnamed individuals in supposedly “anonymized” data sets, even ones containing millions of records. So, if we want the benefits of data mining — like personalized recommendations or localized services — how can we protect our privacy?
 
In the latest issue of PLOS One, MIT researchers offer one possible answer. Their prototype system, openPDS — short for personal data store — stores data from your digital devices in a single location that you specify: It could be an encrypted server in the cloud, but it could also be a computer in a locked box under your desk. Any cellphone app, online service, or big-data research team that wants to use your data has to query your data store, which returns only as much information as is required.
 
Sharing code, not data
 
“The example I like to use is personalized music,” says Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, a graduate student in media arts and sciences and first author on the new paper. “Pandora, for example, comes down to this thing that they call the music genome, which contains a summary of your musical tastes. To recommend a song, all you need is the last 10 songs you listened to — just to make sure you don’t keep recommending the same one again — and this music genome. You don’t need the list of all the songs you’ve been listening to.”
 
With openPDS, de Montjoye says, “You share code; you don’t share data. Instead of you sending data to Pandora, for Pandora to define what your musical preferences are, it’s Pandora sending a piece of code to you for you to define your musical preferences and send it back to them.”
 
De Montjoye is joined on the paper by his thesis advisor, Alex “Sandy” Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences; Erez Shmueli, a postdoc in Pentland’s group; and Samuel Wang, a software engineer at Foursquare who was a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science when the research was done.
 
After an initial deployment involving 21 people who used openPDS to regulate access to their medical records, the researchers are now testing the system with several telecommunications companies in Italy and Denmark. Although openPDS can, in principle, run on any machine of the user’s choosing, in the trials, data is being stored in the cloud.
 
Meaningful permissions
 
One of the benefits of openPDS, de Montjoye says, is that it requires applications to specify what information they need and how it will be used. Today, he says, “when you install an application, it tells you ‘this application has access to your fine-grained GPS location,’ or it ‘has access to your SD card.’ You as a user have absolutely no way of knowing what that means. The permissions don’t tell you anything.”
 
In fact, applications frequently collect much more data than they really need. Service providers and application developers don’t always know in advance what data will prove most useful, so they store as much as they can against the possibility that they may want it later. It could, for instance, turn out that for some music listeners, album cover art turns out to be a better predictor of what songs they’ll like than anything captured by Pandora’s music genome.
 
OpenPDS preserves all that potentially useful data, but in a repository controlled by the end user, not the application developer or service provider. A developer who discovers that a previously unused bit of information is useful must request access to it from the user. If the request seems unnecessarily invasive, the user can simply deny it.
 
Of course, a nefarious developer could try to game the system, constructing requests that elicit more information than the user intends to disclose. A navigation application might, for instance, be authorized to identify the subway stop or parking garage nearest the user. But it shouldn’t need both pieces of information at once, and by requesting them, it could infer more detailed location information than the user wishes to reveal.
 
Creating safeguards against such information leaks will have to be done on a case-by-case, application-by-application basis, de Montjoye acknowledges, and at least initially, the full implications of some query combinations may not be obvious. But “even if it’s not 100 percent safe, it’s still a huge improvement over the current state,” he says. “If we manage to get people to have access to most of their data, and if we can get the overall state of the art to move from anonymization to interactive systems, that would be such a huge win.”
 
“OpenPDS is one of the key enabling technologies for the digital society, because it allows users to control their data and at the same time open up its potential both at the economic level and at the level of society,” says Dirk Helbing, a professor of sociology at ETH Zurich. “I don’t see another way of making big data compatible with constitutional rights and human rights.”
 


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