SACW - 9 June 2015 | Afghanistan: Season of bloodshed / Sri Lanka: Call for Fresh National Elections / Pakistan: Protect Parween Rahman’s family from threats; The Pervaiz Rasheed Affair / India: Why Tax payer's money for Hindu rituals at launch of public projects / India: Eggs and Prjudice / Turkey: Sins of the Three Pashas / Meet Barcelona’s New Mayor Ada Colau

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 9 June 2015 - No. 2860 
[since 1996]

Contents:
1. Sri Lanka: Civil society call for fresh parliamentary elections | CPA press release
2. Bangladesh: Hasina stands between us and the extremists | Masuda Bhatti
3. Bangladesh: Unbelief in an age of death squads | Mahmud Rahman
4. Imagine no border fences between India and Bangladesh | Zafar Sobhan
5. Pakistan: The Pervaiz Rasheed Affair | Pervez Hoodbhoy
6. Pakistan: Concern over threats to Parween Rahman’s family; Govt must protect those facing threats - media reports on civil society press conference
7. [The Chinese Industrial Corridor in Pakistan] What's a corridor without cultural backup? | Ayaz Amir
8. India: Withdraw police case against Prof Kancha Ilaiah and roll back the ban on Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle - Press release by PADS
9. India: IITM revokes ban on Ambedkar-Periyar study circle. The lesson for us in that we should resist arbitrary and retrograde decisions at all our workplaces
10. India: Politicians and officials spend tax payers money on Hindu rituals at initiation & launch of public projects - No one bats an eyelid
11. TRIBUTE: Mujeeb Rizvi (1934-2015) - A different Kind of secularist | Mahmood Farooqui
12. India: Condolence message in memory of the veteran radical humanist Subhankar Ray
13. India: Hindutva Right Wing Turn Begins For History Writing / Activist Wants focus on Vedas
14. India: Press Statement from civil society organisations to communal violence affected Atali village, Ballabhgarh, Haryana
15. Signs of rising instability says April - May 2015 briefing by India Study Group
16. India: Accidents and Discontent in Garment Factory’s of Udyog Vihar, Gurgaon - A Joint report by PUDR and Perspective
17. Recent On Communalism Watch:
 - Ban on Ambdekar Periyar Study Circle at II madras revoked - public pressure works
 - What does it mean to indianise education? (Ramachandra Guha)
 - India: N.K. Amin the cop who had been suspended for 8 yrs for shooting Ishrat Jahan reinstated in Gujarat
 - India: RSS with one hand keeps sucking up to Ambedkar and with the other defends ban on Ambedkar Periyar Student Circle at IIT madras
 - Bombay Family court stops Muslim man from marrying second time till he settles the rights and dues of his wife
 - India: Modi’s yoga celebration is a mix of cultural nationalism, commercialisation and subtle coercion (Ajaz Ashraf)
 - India: Keeping Alive the Battle for Justice in Hashimpura Case (Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar - The Wire)
 - India - Atali village Vallabhgarh: An aged man from Atali reduces entire village to tears
 - The one year for Minorities in India (John Dayal)
 - India has no law to stop private sector from discriminating on grounds of faith (Abhishek Sudhir)
 - DNA Editorial on restriction on entry of non-Hindus in Gujarat's Somnath Temple
 - India: Imtiaz Ahmad on the transformation of Shab-e-Barat from a subdued occasion to one of pomp and show
 - India: Goa magistrate directs police to register a complaint on charges of obscenity against a naked Jain monk
 - India: Thousands of Bru tribals fled Mizoram in 1997 following ethnic violence, and lived in camps in Trupura, they are to be repatrated now 

::: Resources & Full Text :::
18. Afghanistan: Season of bloodshed - The Taliban are waging a fierce new offensive in the north (The Economist)
19. India: Eggs And Prejudice (Reetika Khera)
20. Understanding Global Indigeneity (Nicolas Rosenthal)
21. Spain: From Occupying Banks to City Hall - Meet Barcelona’s New Mayor Ada Colau
22. The South African Gandhi by Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed
23. Turkey: Sins of the Three Pashas | Edward Luttwak

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1. SRI LANKA: CIVIL SOCIETY CALL FOR FRESH PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS | CPA press release
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there is a rising perception of crisis and instability, which cannot be allowed to take root. The economy cannot afford this lack of political direction for much longer, and as importantly, the hope and aspiration created by the change of government in January demands both clarity in promises being kept and further progress in reforms, especially with regard to devolution and power-sharing. The time is ripe therefore for fresh parliamentary elections which would allow the people of Sri Lanka to have their say on reforms already enacted and to mandate the direction of the government for the next five years.
http://www.sacw.net/article11239.html

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2. BANGLADESH: HASINA STANDS BETWEEN US AND THE EXTREMISTS | Masuda Bhatti
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It is not clear what the character of the state is even after more than four decades of its birth. Bangladesh is, rather, at the crossroads of Islamism and secularism
http://www.sacw.net/article11258.html

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3. BANGLADESH: UNBELIEF IN AN AGE OF DEATH SQUADS | Mahmud Rahman
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The champions of death promise more. Two years ago, the Hefazat-e-Islam, an Islamist movement based in madrassas, delivered to the Home Ministry a list of 84 atheist bloggers they wanted punished for blasphemy. The crime of those included: they used words that offended the self-appointed guardians of Islam. Despite their belief in an all-powerful Allah, the death squads were not ready to leave judgement in his hands – what this says about their own belief in a supreme being is a contradiction they never address. . . . how can free thought, science, and humanism in Bangladesh best be defended in an age of death squads?
http://www.sacw.net/article11251.html

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4. IMAGINE NO BORDER FENCES BETWEEN INDIA AND BANGLADESH | Zafar Sobhan
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We would have open borders, with Bangladeshis and Indians both having the right to live, work, and study in the other country. There would be no border shootings because there would be no need for illegal border crossings.
http://www.sacw.net/article11241.html

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5. PAKISTAN: THE PERVAIZ RASHEED AFFAIR | Pervez Hoodbhoy
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Sad story of how a serving minister is silenced for speaking his mind. Who has the courage of dealing with the enemy within ?
http://www.sacw.net/article11249.html

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6. PAKISTAN: CONCERN OVER THREATS TO PARWEEN RAHMAN’S FAMILY; GOVT MUST PROTECT THOSE FACING THREATS - SELECT MEDIA REPORTS
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In the last two years, three prominent women, Parween Rahman, Zahra Shahid and Sabeen Mahmud have been gunned down, she pointed out, saying that the space for people is being reduced.
http://www.sacw.net/article11238.html

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7. [THE CHINESE INDUSTRIAL CORRIDOR IN PAKISTAN] WHAT'S A CORRIDOR WITHOUT CULTURAL BACKUP? | Ayaz Amir
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The British came to the Subcontinent and brought with them notions of white superiority…and whisky and convent schools, and in time a railway network, a canal system for Punjab, and the concept of rule of law. The foundations of their imperial empire were strong and survive to this day, although we have spared no effort to dig them up.
http://www.sacw.net/article11240.html

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8. INDIA: WITHDRAW POLICE CASE AGAINST PROF KANCHA ILAIAH AND ROLL BACK THE BAN ON AMBEDKAR PERIYAR STUDY CIRCLE - PRESS RELEASE BY PADS
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People's Alliance for Democracy and Secularism demands that
    1. The police case under sections 153A and 295A against Prof Kancha Ilaiah be immediately withdrawn . . .
http://www.sacw.net/article11248.html

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9. INDIA: IITM REVOKES BAN ON AMBEDKAR-PERIYAR STUDY CIRCLE. THIS VICTORY HAS LESSONS FOR US IN THAT WE SHOULD RESIST ARBITRARY AND RETROGRADE DECISIONS AT ALL OUR WORKPLACES
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IIT Madras unhappy with rationalism and Modi critique - weblinks to commentary and statements 
http://www.sacw.net/article11221.html

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10. INDIA: POLITICIANS AND OFFICIALS SPEND TAX PAYERS MONEY ON HINDU RITUALS AT INITIATION & LAUNCH OF PUBLIC PROJECTS - NO ONE BATS AN EYELID
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In 'secular' India politicians of all make and public officials regularly seek the divine blessings in advertised events such as the inaugural ceremonies of state sponsored buildings and public projects and use religious priests to supervise laying of the foundation stones and undertake bhoomi puja (Worship of Earth) for the approval of the supernatural powers with the chanting of prayer. Even Virgins, Cows and astrologers are deployed at these events and no one bats an eyelid. Was'nt the state supposed to steer clear from religion? Why do Hindu rituals get precedence in a country of multiple denominations?
http://www.sacw.net/article11250.html

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11. TRIBUTE: MUJEEB RIZVI (1934-2015) - A DIFFERENT KIND OF SECULARIST | Mahmood Farooqui
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Mujeeb Rizvi was a scholar-teacher who fought the pundits and the bigots
http://www.sacw.net/article11255.html

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12. INDIA: CONDOLENCE MESSAGE IN MEMORY OF THE VETERAN RADICAL HUMANIST SUBHANKAR RAY
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Indian Renaissance Institute is deeply grieved over the sad demise of veteran radical humanist Subhankar Ray who died on the evening of 2nd June,2015 at Kolkata. He was a dedicated radical humanist and one of the main pillars of the radical humanist movement in the country for the last more than five decades.

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13. INDIA: HINDUTVA RIGHT WING TURN BEGINS FOR HISTORY WRITING / ACTIVIST WANTS FOCUS ON VEDAS
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A report in Vikas Pathak in Hindustan Times about plans for History books by Hindutva activist Dina Nath Batra and a second article by Prakash Kumar in Deccan herald on the Right wing turn in History writing in India.
http://www.sacw.net/article11243.html

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14. INDIA: PRESS STATEMENT FROM CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANISATIONS TO COMMUNAL VIOLENCE AFFECTED ATALI VILLAGE, BALLABHGARH, HARYANA
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Today a team consisting of members of PUCL, NAPM, Khudai Khidmatgar and Socialist Party visited the Atali village in Ballabhgarh District (Haryana) led by Justice Rajinder Sachar (Retd). Team met the Muslim residents who were attacked on 25th May, 2015, whose houses were burnt, belongings looted or destroyed and who had to flee from the village to save their lives and had taken shelter in a police station at Ballabhgarh till 3rd June.
http://www.sacw.net/article11242.html

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15. SIGNS OF RISING INSTABILITY SAYS APRIL - MAY 2015 BRIEFING BY INDIA STUDY GROUP
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One year into the rule of the National Democratic Alliance government, Indian politics is poised at an unusual point. The forces represented by Prime Minister Narendra Modi continue to be popular, but there is also a strong perception that they have reached the limits of their influence - and hence "politics as usual" is coming back.
http://www.sacw.net/article11247.html

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16. INDIA: ACCIDENTS AND DISCONTENT IN GARMENT FACTORY’S OF UDYOG VIHAR, GURGAON - A JOINT REPORT BY PUDR AND PERSPECTIVE
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Accidents in the industry and incidents of workers’ rage are testimony to the vulnerable and precarious lives of the workers employed in a sector which makes a significant contribution to India’s economy.
http://www.sacw.net/article11237.html

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17. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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 - Ban on Ambdekar Periyar Study Circle at II madras revoked - public pressure works
 - What does it mean to indianise education? (Ramachandra Guha)
 - India: N.K. Amin the cop who had been suspended for 8 yrs for shooting Ishrat Jahan reinstated in Gujarat
 - India: RSS with one hand keeps sucking up to Ambedkar and with the other defends ban on Ambedkar Periyar Student Circle at IIT madras
 - Bombay Family court stops Muslim man from marrying second time till he settles the rights and dues of his wife
 - India: Modi’s yoga celebration is a mix of cultural nationalism, commercialisation and subtle coercion (Ajaz Ashraf)
 - India: Keeping Alive the Battle for Justice in Hashimpura Case (Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar - The Wire)
 - India - Atali village Vallabhgarh: An aged man from Atali reduces entire village to tears
 - E-Digest - Ambedkar’s Appropriation by Hindutva Ideology - A compilation by Ram Puniyani (June 2015)
 - The one year for Minorities in India (John Dayal)
 - Visit by civil society groups to Atali village in Ballabgarh, Haryana following communal violence: Press Statement 5 June 2015
 - India has no law to stop private sector from discriminating on grounds of faith (Abhishek Sudhir)
 - DNA Editorial on restriction on entry of non-Hindus in Gujarat's Somnath Temple
 - India: Imtiaz Ahmad on the transformation of Shab-e-Barat from a subdued occasion to one of pomp and show
 - India: Goa magistrate directs police to register a complaint on charges of obscenity against a naked Jain monk
 - India: Police complaint against builder after 'non-veg' Marathi man denied an apartment
 - India: Thousands of Bru tribals fled Mizoram in 1997 following ethnic violence, and lived in camps in Trupura, they are to be repatrated now 

 - available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/
 
::: RESOURCEs & FULL TEXT :::
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18. AFGHANISTAN: SEASON OF BLOODSHED
The Taliban are waging a fierce new offensive in the north
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(The Economist - May 30th 2015 | KUNDUZ | From the print edition)

ON THE edge of a dusty plateau near the northern city of Kunduz, Mohammad Khan and his family shelter in a threadbare tent. From here, he says, he can almost see his house 8km (5 miles) away across a river in Chahar Dara district. But there is a good chance it is now occupied by a Taliban fighter and his family. The area was recently overrun by insurgents who have made big advances in this part of Afghanistan, especially near the border with Tajikistan.

The Taliban, bolstered by foreign fighters, have chosen Kunduz—a city far from the traditional Taliban heartland in Pushtun-dominated areas beside the border with Pakistan—as the focus for their annual spring offensive. Fighting in May displaced perhaps 6,000 families in Kunduz province, after the city itself almost fell to the insurgents in late April. “The army can’t push them back, even with helicopters and heavy weapons,” says Mr Khan.

Because Afghan forces are fighting for the first time without much support from NATO, their casualties are unusually high. The authorities are reluctant to give figures, but a Western military official quoted by the New York Times said more than 1,800 soldiers and police officers had been killed and another 3,400 wounded between January and April—65% more than in the same period last year. On May 25th 26 government soldiers were killed during a siege of a police headquarters in southern Helmand province. 

Despite such losses, many Afghans say their government is proving slow to respond to Taliban assaults. A full eight months after his inauguration as president, Ashraf Ghani has only just nominated a defence minister, who is yet to be approved by parliament. Not even Kabul feels safe. Two weeks ago, gunmen stormed a hotel in the capital, killing 14 people, including nine foreigners. A week later, a suicide bomber got into the grounds of the justice ministry, killing at least five employees. On May 27th an upmarket part of the city was attacked again. Four gunmen were killed after trying to storm a guesthouse. 

The national government has dispatched several thousand soldiers to help in Kunduz, the scene of the worst fighting so far. It has also resorted to less savoury tactics which have been routine since at least 2009, quietly recruiting local warlords and their militias (pictured) to help confront insurgents. That should help to check the immediate threat, but by adding to already big supplies of weapons on the ground the government risks spreading instability, as rival anti-Taliban groups clash among themselves.

It is not surprising that Kunduz is a scene of such conflict. Commanders from the former Northern Alliance have long fought, often brutally, for turf in the north of the country. For unlucky residents that has meant enduring extortion, harassment and revenge killings. Gradually the authority of the government has ebbed away.

Today a powerful militia commander, Mohammad Omar, claims to control 400 armed men in Khanabad district. He uses the moniker Pakhsaparan, meaning “wall-crusher”, and says he is fighting the Taliban without help from the national army and only $1,000 a month from the local police chief. “I get the rest in taxes from farmers,” he says, without elaborating on his collection methods.

The government denies rearming militias, though it admits to “selective voluntary citizens’ participation” in the fight against the Taliban. Either way, Mr Ghani’s supposed strategy of marginalising powerful warlords while strengthening local government appears to be forgotten.

One fear is that militias, locally called arbaki, could revert to rape, murder and other abuses of civilians, as happened during the civil war in the 1990s. That, in turn, could spread sympathy for the Taliban, which at least offer some form of order. “During the day they are arbaki, during the night they are thieves,” says Mr Khan, the refugee near Kunduz city.

Another worry is that a new faction of rebels could emerge. There are rumours that fighters under the black banner of the Islamic State (IS) are growing more powerful. Displaced villagers tell of seeing armed men in IS’s trademark masks and black clothes. They are said to be well equipped, and wealthy enough not to extort money from civilians. Accounts vary as to whether they are with or against the Taliban.

There is little evidence that IS has a force to be reckoned with in Afghanistan, nor that those who use its name have formal links with IS in the Middle East, which never mentions an Afghan presence. A group describing itself as IS claimed responsibility for an attack in the eastern city of Jalalabad in April that killed 30 people. But its connection, if any, with IS elsewhere is unclear.

More likely, disaffected members of the Taliban are adopting the IS brand because it is well-known and helps attract recruits and funding. Some younger fighters are said to complain that the Taliban lack strong leaders. The group’s spiritual head, Mullah Omar, has not been seen in public since 2001. A former Taliban commander, Mullah Abdul Rauf Khadim, who had been detained in Guantánamo Bay, began recruiting fighters in the name of IS this year in Helmand Province. He was killed by a drone strike in February. The Americans all but admitted they did it.

The Taliban would be unlikely bedfellows of IS. The Pushtun-nationalist Taliban have little interest in IS’s dream of a transcontinental caliphate. They seem ready to countenance political negotiations one day with authorities in Kabul, which IS would not. America’s most senior officer in Afghanistan, General John Campbell, talks up the idea that IS adherents have been clashing with the Taliban. But a proliferation of factions among the insurgents is hardly a reason to celebrate. On the government side, too, power is also being shared, with militias. That is a recipe for more uncertainty—and, presumably, for more bloodshed.

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19. INDIA: EGGS AND PREJUDICE
by Reetika Khera
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(Indian Express - 6 June 2015)

Child nutrition is being held hostage to spurious, largely upper caste, arguments.

Child nutrition, Child undernutrition, MP egg ban, egg ban mp, children egg ban, child malnutrition, child nutrition programmes, mp school egg ban, MP Child nutrition, school egg ban, indian express column, Reetika Khera column It is unfair to sacrifice children’s right to nutrition to spurious anti-egg arguments from a small minority among the upper castes.

Child nutrition is prime-time news only when a tragedy occurs. Child undernutrition is no less a tragedy but rarely recognised as such.

Attention to it, following the Madhya Pradesh chief minister’s rejection of a proposal to introduce eggs in anganwadis is significant and welcome.

Few people realise food intake in India is very poor. According to the 2005-06 National Family Health Survey, around 10 per cent of breastfed children aged six to 23 months had meat, fish, poultry, egg or milk products the day before the survey. Among children who are not breastfed, the figures are equally bad.

In a TV debate, a BJP spokesperson praised milk as the best source of protein, failing to mention that MP does not provide that either at anganwadis or schools. The urgent need to improve the quality of food provided in the mid-day meal (MDM) and Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) schemes has not been adequately recognised.

Cost is a major constraint. Allocations for child nutrition programmes are quite small (Rs 5-7 per child per day). Only states where the government is committed to the issues make additional allocations required to provide nutritious foods such as eggs. This year’s cuts in Central allocations for ICDS and MDM are likely to strain state budgets further.

Perishability and fear of adulteration impede improvements in food quality. Though milk and dal are protein-rich, both can easily be diluted and milk is perishable. Creative thinking can lead to solutions. In Karnataka, milk powder is supplied.

Eggs provide a nutritious and affordable solution. They contain all the nutrients (except vitamin C) required by small children and are generally more nutrient-rich than vegetarian options — without the problems of perishability and adulteration). People can easily monitor whether they have got their full entitlement, whereas that’s quite difficult with milk or dal. Further, eggs are important for infants, as they are nutrition-dense. In Odisha, eggs have emerged as the perfect “take-home ration” for children under three. Children also seem to love eggs.

At a mixed-caste government school in Shimoga, Karnataka, when asked to raise their hand if they would like an egg, almost all hands went up.

Recent arguments for denying eggs to children and forcing vegetarianism on them include: the strongest animals, horses and elephants, are vegetarian; Sant Ravidas was vegetarian, so all Dalits should be like him; as Dalits cannot afford non-vegetarian food anyway, schools and anganwadis need not provide eggs; separate seating arrangements might be difficult to manage. Without saying it explicitly, the message has been clear: rather than hurt the sentiments of a few among the so-called upper castes, it is better to keep eggs out.

Caste resistance is an important part of why northern and western states do not provide eggs. Often, these arguments are disguised as “rational”. First, create an impression that if eggs are on the menu, vegetarians will be forced to eat them (ignoring that vegetarians can be given fruit instead). Then, dress it up as a “freedom to choose” issue. Ironically, those who deny free choice to non-vegetarians are the ones levelling this allegation.

Karnataka provides eggs in anganwadis, but not in school meals. Why? Quite likely, this is because the Akshaya Patra Foundation is a big player in the MDM programme but not in the ICDS. Since 2007, the BJP has resisted eggs. That year, two BJP leaders disagreed on the issue. When religious leaders opposed eggs, the government caved in. The Congress is not very different. It announced eggs in the MDM scheme only for the northern nutritionally deprived districts, but even that has not taken off.

Instead of surrendering to the egg-resisters, states like MP and Karnataka should learn from others where opposition, if any, was overcome. It is unfair to sacrifice children’s right to nutrition to spurious anti-egg arguments from a small minority among the upper castes.

The writer is associate professor, economics, IIT Delhi

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20. UNDERSTANDING GLOBAL INDIGENEITY
by Nicolas Rosenthal
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(H-Net)
James Clifford. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. 366 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-72492-1.

Reviewed by Nicolas Rosenthal (Loyola Marymount University)
Published on H-AmIndian (June, 2015)
Commissioned by F. Evan Nooe

Understanding Global Indigeneity

This third volume in a series of works by the prominent theorist, historian, and cultural anthropologist James Clifford holds tremendous potential for both directing scholarship and more widely reshaping the conversation on indigenous peoples throughout the world today. Following the influential The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (1988) and Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth-Century (1997), Returns addresses the more recent past and the resurgence of “global indigeneity.” It begins with the breakdown of old colonial narratives of progress that presented indigenous people the choice between physical and cultural genocide, but always guaranteed their disappearance. By the early twenty-first century, the supremacy of the West has come into question and the “signs of systemic crisis and transition are everywhere” (p. 5). Against this backdrop, indigenous people have emerged through generations of survival, struggle, and renewal, adapted to modernity and increasingly visible as they move through local, regional, and global networks. To understand these recent changes, Clifford calls for an “ethnographic and historical realism” that eschews both Western triumphalism and savage romanticism in favor of close readings of indigenous experience embedded within shifting global conditions (p. 7). Specifically, Clifford tracks processes of “decolonization, globalization, and indigenous becoming” as they “construct, reinforce, and trouble each other,” focusing on the past few decades (p. 8). At the center of Returns is a willingness to understand history as contingent and open-ended, not only as a refutation of past meta-narratives but also as a way to take seriously an “indigenous longue durée,” or the idea that disruptions of colonization, settler-colonialism, and modernity can be seen as brief moments in much longer histories that are passing on the way to more hopeful futures (p. 42).

Returns is composed of a series of essays that can be read separately or together as a single volume. Part 1 is general and theoretical in scope, introducing the author’s concerns and establishing the book’s analytical framework. Its first essay argues that “indigenous people have emerged from history’s blind spot” and need to be taken seriously as “visible actors in local, national, and global arenas” (p. 13). Indeed, throughout the world, indigenous people have come to challenge the hegemony of both the nation-state and transnational capitalist networks by asserting their presence in global culture and politics, through a diverse set of forums that range from local arts and cultural festivals to the United Nations. The old narratives make no sense when viewing the Zapatista movement in Mexico, Native Hawaiian struggles for sovereignty, or the success of Indian gaming in the United States. Calling for a “historically and politically attuned ethnographic realism” as a model of scholarship, Clifford primarily uses three analytical tools (p. 36). “Articulation” refers to how indigenous peoples assemble an identity made up of a broad range of elements grounded in their influences, encounters, and experiences over time, such as Native Alaskan communities incorporating the trappings and worldview of Russian Orthodoxy. Closely related is “translation,” where indigenous peoples remake their social, cultural, and political influences into something new, like the Zapatistas adapting Marxism to their claims for autonomy. Indigenous identities are put on display through “performance,” or staged heritage displays, cultural tourism, and other forums where indigenous peoples make themselves understandable to their audiences, often with political, economic, or cultural goals in mind. Clifford illustrates these concepts to various degrees in two essays adapted from talks on Native studies in the Pacific World and the limits and possibilities of diaspora studies for indigenous people.

A single chapter makes up part 2, focusing on the case of Ishi, the California Native man whose life and various ways that he has been understood over time illustrate the tensions between contrasting historical narratives, legacies of colonial violence, the relationship of anthropology to both settler-colonialism and indigenous resurgence, and the possibilities for healing and reconciliation. Originally Ishi was framed as “the last California Indian” by University of California, Berkeley, anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, employing a literary and historical trope common throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ishi’s story was reshaped to fit changing historical circumstances as early as the 1960s, when Kroeber’s widow, Theodora, wrote, Ishi in Two Worlds (1961), which invoked ideas about genocide and romanticized indigenous worldviews for a liberal audience, even as it accepted the “inevitability” of indigenous disappearance. In the 1990s, revelations emerged over the preservation of Ishi’s brain in the Smithsonian Institute, leading to a repatriation movement, intertribal conflicts, re-internment, and some level of healing, as Ishi’s life and legacy were revisited by Native Californians. Ishi’s new visibility coincided uncomfortably with the centennial anniversary of Berkeley’s Anthropology Department, forcing it to reassess the legacies of “salvage anthropology” and the department’s influence on both Ishi’s life and the larger experiences of California’s Native peoples. Most recently Ishi’s story gained worldwide exposure (though significantly veiled and adapted to the genre of science fiction) in the form of the blockbuster film Avatar, based on a novella by Ursula K. Le Guin, a best-selling author and the Kroebers’ daughter. For Clifford, “The different retellings of Ishi’s story question all-or-nothing outcomes, the inevitabilities that govern so much thinking about Westernization, or modernization, or a triumphant American history” (p. 189). It speaks to contingency, multiplicity, and the “open-endedness” of historical narratives, all of which have been highlighted more broadly by the resurgence of Native people around the world.

The final section of the book applies many of the author’s concerns to his fieldwork on Native cultural renewal in Alaska. A first essay, again adapted from a symposium presentation, thinks about whether Alaska can fit into an indigenous “reimagining” of the Pacific Ocean that centers its many Native communities rather than relegating them to the margins of empire. The next chapter more closely examines a Native heritage exhibition and heritage activity in southwestern Alaska that came about through collaborations between diverse interests that included academics and Native people. It concludes that such projects are important yet do not erase longstanding inequalities and that struggles by indigenous people for cultural authority continue. A last essay centers on the revival of mask making among Alutiiq people on Kodiak Island and its role in a broader heritage renewal and identity making throughout Alaska that responds to the violent histories of colonization and capitalist expansion. Once considered a lost or dying art, Alutiiq masks made in heritage workshops and exhibited at the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository are now an example of a “rearticulated tradition,” in that they have come to serve different purposes in the contemporary era as part of the project of cultural renewal.

Throughout the book, Clifford is hesitant to subscribe to either utopian or dystopian visions and generally is suspicious of polarities, whether he is analyzing indigenous experience or projecting conditions into the future. Yet the tone of the book remains optimistic and full of possibilities for indigenous people who now live in “a world system that can no longer be spatialized into stable cores and peripheries, that is susceptible to deep crises and profound reconfigurations,” so as to open up new spaces for those once thought destined to disappear (p. 211). Referring to an indigenous formulation of the recent past as a “bad storm,” Clifford writes that he has “tried to take seriously [this] view of historical possibility, not just as a story of indigenous survival, but as a way of living in modernity, and a way through to something else.” He continues, “How could such a vision be realistic, in a world of industrializing nation-states and global capitalism? Returns has offered not so much an answer as a deepening of the question” (p. 315). Indeed, Clifford’s remarkable ability to make larger sense of the world around him without being reductive gives scholars language and ways of thinking about the sweeping changes in indigeneity over the past few decades, laying the foundation for new narratives that elevate indigenous people to prominent roles in modern, global affairs.

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21. FROM OCCUPYING BANKS TO CITY HALL: MEET BARCELONA’S NEW MAYOR ADA COLAU
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(Democracy Now, 5 June 2015)

A longtime anti-eviction activist has just been elected mayor of Barcelona, becoming the city’s first female mayor. Ada Colau co-founded the anti-eviction group Platform for People Affected by Mortgages and was an active member of the Indignados, or 15-M Movement. Colau has vowed to fine banks with empty homes on their books, stop evictions, expand public housing, set a minimum monthly wage of $670, force utility companies to lower prices, and slash the mayoral salary. Colau enjoyed support from the Podemos party, which grew out of the indignados movement that began occupying squares in Spain four years ago. Ada Colau joins us to discuss her victory.

AMY GOODMAN: We are broadcasting from Stanford University in California. But we end today’s show in Spain, where a longtime anti-eviction activist has just been elected mayor of Barcelona, becoming the city’s first female mayor. Ada Colau co-founded the anti-eviction group, Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, and was an active member of the Indignados, or 15-M Movement, the protest movement that inspired Occupy Wall Street. Ada Colau has vowed to fine banks with empty homes on their books, stop evictions, expand public housing, set a minimum monthly wage of $670 per month, force utility companies to lower prices, and slash the mayoral salary.Colau enjoyed support from the Podemos Party, which grew out of the Indignados movement that began occupying squares in Spain four years ago. She’s been arrested repeatedly for her protests. I spoke to Ada Colau last week. I began by asking if she was surprised by her victory.

ADA COLAU: [translated] Thank you very much, it’s a pleasure.

AMY GOODMAN: Were you surprised by your victory?

ADA COLAU: [translated] In reality, partly yes, and partly no. It was a victory that was accomplished in a very short amount of time, it was a candidacy that was supported and driven by the citizens, with very scarce resources, and with very little money we achieved victory in the elections of such an important city, as Barcelona. But partly it was not surprising because there is a strong citizen movement, and a strong desire for change. We have serious political problems here in Barcelona, and in the entire country, and so there was a need for change which you could see in the streets.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what those problems are?

ADA COLAU: [translated] There are problems related to the economic crisis, but this economic crisis is a consequence of a political crisis, of a profound democratic crisis. We have had a form of government where the political elites had a cozy relationship with the economic elites who have ruined the economy of the country, and the ultimate representation of this was the behavior of the financial institutions, of the banks. They have defrauded thousands and thousands of citizens, with abusive mortgages. They have evicted thousands of families and they have ruined the country’s economy. And this has happened because of the cozy relationship between the political and economical elites. In the face of this situation, where there have been losses of billions of Euros, that have caused social cutbacks in as basic as health care and education, it’s caused, for example, in a city that’s rich like Barcelona, a city where there is a lot of money and a lot of resources, the inequality has shot up. That means that there are people that are getting more and more rich, at the same time that there are more poor people than ever. So the middle class is disappearing.

AMY GOODMAN: Ada Colau, two years ago you testified at a Spanish parliamentary hearing on Spain’s foreclosure crisis. On the panel, you spoke right after a representative of Spain’s banking industry. You famously turned to the banker and said, "This man is a criminal and should be treated like one."

ADA COLAU: [translated] We’ve been negotiating with banks, with the public administration, with the courts and therefore we know exactly what we’re talking about. And this leads me to question the voices of supposed experts who precisely are the ones being given too much credit, pardon the pun, such as the representatives of financial institutions. We just had an example, I would say at the very least it was paradoxical, to use an understatement, if not outright cynical, for the representative of financial institutions who just spoke telling us that the Spanish legislation was great. To say that, when people are taking their own lives because of this criminal law, I assure you, I assure you that I did not thrown my shoe at this man because I believed it was important to be here now to tell you what I’m telling you. But this man is a criminal! And you should treat him as such! He is not an expert. The representatives of financial institutions have caused this problem. They are the very same people who caused the problem which has ruined the whole economy of this country and you are treating these people as experts

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Ada Colau. Who is now the Mayor-elect of Barcelona, Spain. The speech made lawmakers’ jaws drop. And you got a reprimand from the Parliament, but your speech endeared you to millions of Spaniards. Can you talk about that moment that you decided to speak out and did you have any regrets?

ADA COLAU: [translated] The reality is that I went to speak in front of the parliament after many years of housing rights activism, and working closely with the thousands of families that were affected by the mortgage fraud which the banks had committed and by the evictions that came after that. The evictions and the interest rates have literally destroyed the lives of thousands of families. To destroy their lives means they’ve caused depression, diseases, even suicides.

The only thing I did was describe what I knew, and what I had been living on the front lines for many years. When I encountered this banker who denied the reality and said that there were no problems in Spain, when there were thousands of families in a dire situation, the least I could do was to denounce these lies and talk to them about what the reality was. I think what surprised people more and what generated a media phenomenon after this appearance in the parliament was that someone was telling the truth at the Parliament because, sadly, this was something that hadn’t happened in a long time.

In Spain you have the paradox that while the corrupt politicians see the statute of limitations for their crimes lapse and they make off without going to jail, the families who got into debt for something as basic as accessing housing become indebted forever, because it is impossible to forgive this debt. So, in the face of this barbarity what happened is that hundred of thousands of hard-working families that just wanted was to have a normal life, suddenly lose their jobs, they lose their house, and they become indebted for life, and becoming indebted means economic and civil death. This leads to people committing suicide, to diseases, to broken families, and the positive aspect of this was the birth of an exemplary citizen movement, which has succeeded in stopping thousands of evictions. That forced the banks to negotiate. And it showed that if our institutions did not resolve this problem it was because our institutions were accomplices in this fraud.

AMY GOODMAN: Ada Colau, you have broken through so many ceilings as the first woman Mayor of Barcelona, together with the new Mayor of Madrid. In your victory speech, you talked about a democratic revolution all over the south of Europe. Can you start there? What do you mean?

ADA COLAU: [translated] What is happening in Spain and in Barcelona is not an isolated event, rather there is a crisis in the way we do politics, there is a political elites which has become corrupt and have ended up as accomplices of a financial power which only thinks to speculate and to make money even at the expense of rising inequality and the impoverishment of the majority of the citizenship. Fortunately, there has been a citizen reaction, here and in other parts of the Mediterranean, for example in Greece, to confront the neoliberal economic policies, which are not only a problem in Spain but in Europe and around the world. We see very clearly that the city councils are key to confronting this way of making policy, meaning, that is where the everyday policies are made and where we can prove there is another way to govern, more inclusive, working together with the citizens, more than just asking them to vote every four years, and that you can fight against corruption, and you can have transparent institutions. So we think the city governments are key for democratic revolution, to begin governing, with the people, in a new way, but on the other hand we are very aware that the real change must be global, that one city alone cannot solve all the problems we are facing, many of which are global because today the economy does not have borders, that big capital, and the markets move freely around the world, unlike people.

AMY GOODMAN: Ada Colau, what would a public banking system look like?

ADA COLAU: [translated] I think, in the financial world there has been a problem of absolute misrule. You cannot leave something as important as economic policy and money which has a social function, in the hands of speculation and private interests. Here there has been a democratic deficit and a lack of global, collective and democratic control over money and the economic system in general. So, we have to take back that democratic control, and that doesn’t meant that all the banks have to be public, it can be implemented in different ways. What we need are laws that make private banks comply with the law, because now in Spain we have a banking system that breaks the law systematically and nothing happens.

For us, the citizens, they don’t forgive anything, they make us pay all our debts, they make us pay all our taxes, they make us pay each small traffic ticket, they don’t forgive anything. But the big banks on the other hand, which have lied, defrauded and destroyed thousands of families are forgiven for, for example, breaking the European consumer protection regulations. So, this is unacceptable. The first thing we need is governments that serve their citizens, not the private interests, and that enforce the law. We are talking about something as basic as enforcing the existing law. The first thing we need is to force the financial power to comply with the law and to obey the democratic powers, something that is not happening now. It’s also true that it would definitely be good if this private, financial power, is complemented by some form form of public bank that offsets and guarantees that there is financing for what is in the public interest, because if not, what happens is the private financial system has the power to decide what is funded and what is not funded.

AMY GOODMAN: Ada Colau, one of the most tweeted photos in Spain these days shows riot police hauling you away. The image is from July 2013 when you are trying to occupy a Barcelona bank that was foreclosing on homes. The caption added by Twitter users reads, "Welcome new mayor." Can you talk about that moment that you were being dragged away?

ADA COLAU: [translated] There were many similar moments in past years, because when we have unjust laws, like the ones we have now in Spain, one has to massively disobey these unjust laws to protect human rights. Here the right to housing is being infringed upon and that’s why thousands of citizens, in a peaceful manner, we have had to practice civil disobedience to defend human rights. In this sense, this action was one of the many that have been performed in this country, and not by me, but by many other people who have been defending the human rights of all of the others. Throughout human history, it has happened this way. In order to defend rights and to win rights, many times it has been necessary to disobey unjust laws. Of course, now, as future mayor of Barcelona, I hope the police are going to be at the service of human rights, and not of the banks.

AMY GOODMAN: In the United States there’s Occupy. You were part of the Indignados. Talk about the different protests, from anti-war to anti-corporate globalization, that have shaped you.

ADA COLAU: [translated] In reality there has been a continuity in the past 15 years at least. In the early 2000s, late 1990s when they began the anti-globalization movement, Seattle, there a wide cycle of protests began, that continues to the present day. During this time there has been the anti-globalization movement, the international anti-war movement, there’s been the Indignados, there’s been many fights for housing rights, for peace. And all these mobilizations, not only here but also on the global level, have had many things in common. First, the global dimension, the awareness that there are political and economic problems that have a global dimension, so we need to work as a network. Because there is a single global and economic reality and it’s essential to work in alliances.

Also, the necessity for a real democracy, the awareness that even if we have formally democratic institutions, we have the sense that the decisions are not being made in parliament, but by the boards of directors or by international institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, which are profoundly anti-democratic, and which the citizens do not control, and that they also make decisions against their own people, generating misery around the world.

This awareness that we have a kidnapped democracy has lead to the rise of many grassroots mobilizations, propel from the bottom, from the citizens, that saw the formal democracy is not enough, that we need to find new ways of democratic participation where everyone can have a place, and contribute what every person has to contribute.

So, I think all the mobilizations that have happened in the past 15 years, that have also increasingly used the new technologies, Internet, the social medias, that has find new forms of direct communication, innovative. In some way we are seeing an update of the democracy, an update of the forms of political participation that have had many different expressions in different global movements but there is maybe a nexus that unite them all.

AMY GOODMAN: Ada Colau, you are the first woman Mayor of Barcelona, Spain, you’re a woman, you’re activist. Also a female activist is now going to be the Madrid Mayor. Talk about the significance of this.

ADA COLAU: [translated] Without a doubt it is important because half of the population are women, is completely illogical that after 40 years of formal democracy I should be the first woman mayor. This is not normal because we, the women, built this city and we are crucial actors of it, but it is not reflected in the political representation, in the places where the political decisions are made. Clearly, we live in a sexist society, this in not an exclusive problem of Barcelona or Spain, it is a global problem, but we are seeing now are signs of a change, as a result of many fight to conquer our rights, from many women who went before us, and now we take this testimony, and we keep moving forward.

It is clear that women are overrepresented in the care sector and household environment, and the time has come for women to achieve more representation in the decisions places of the political and economic power. But, in addition, I think we have much to contribute and that we can learn a lot from the feminist struggle, and that in this moment of change we can contribute by feminising politics, and for this we need not only to put more women in the decision-making places, but also transform the values in politics and to prove that cooperation is more efficient and more satisfactory than competitiveness, and that collective social policy making is better that individualism. I think this are the collective values we can contribute to feminize politics, and with this no only women will win, men and women will win.

AMY GOODMAN: What do think your victory means for Podemos possibly winning and in the national level later this year?

ADA COLAU: [translated] I think a political change is happening, a change in the ways of making politics, again, not only in Spain, across the south of Europe, and we hope in all Europe. What happened in Spain is a democratic revolution. The citizens have been empowered, and have taken the floor. That’s why I think the main actor here is not any political name, it is not “Barcelona en Comú”, it is not “Podemos”, it is not Ada Colau, it is not Pablo Iglesias, the main actors here are the citizens, the people who have decided to take back the institutions to recover the control of policy making, to give to the people the power to make the decisions, in this grassroot movement of democratic revolution there are differents political parties, differing names which must be a tool in this process of empowerment and democratic revolution. This is why Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, Ada Colau, and some other parties that are emerging are just tools at the service of this broad citizen’s process that has decided to take back the institutions for the people.

AMY GOODMAN: Ada Colau, finally, what will be your first act in office as the new Mayor of Barcelona?

ADA COLAU: [translated] Well, we already elaborate an emergency action plan that have 30 measures perfectly viable, ambitious but perfectly viable, for the first months in office. This emergency action plan consist of three main measures: first to create jobs and fight against job insecurity, another is to guarantee the basic rights, and the other is to fight against corruption, make a city council more transparent and end with the privileges, for example: low the salaries of the public officers, of the elected officers, eliminate the expenses and the official cars, things that can seem simples, but are very symbolic because they send a message of an end of impunity, of an end of a political class distant to the reality of the citizens. So, end with this privileges is something that we can do immediately, is only a matter of political will. Without a doubt one of the first decisions as mayor will be to convene publicly to all the banks who works in the city to sit them around a table of dialogue in order to stop the evictions, and to demand that the empty dwellings they have in the city to be available for rent, as social rental (social housing) for the families that need it.

AMY GOODMAN: Ada Colau, thank you very much for joining us, and congratulations as the first woman Mayor of Barcelona, Spain. Thank you.

ADA COLAU: [translated] Thank you very much.

AMY GOODMAN: Barcelona Mayor-elect, Ada Colau. We will be posting the original interview in Spanish on our website, democracynow.org. 

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22. PUBLICATION ANNOUNCEMENT: THE SOUTH AFRICAN GANDHI BY ASHWIN DESAI AND GOOLAM VAHED
=========================================
The South African Gandhi
Stretcher-Bearer of Empire
Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed
SERIES: South Asia in Motion

Stanford University Press
Available in September
352 pp. from $24.95

Cloth ISBN: 9780804796088
Paper ISBN: 9780804797177

In the pantheon of freedom fighters, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has pride of place. His fame and influence extend far beyond India and are nowhere more significant than in South Africa. "India gave us a Mohandas, we gave them a Mahatma," goes a popular South African refrain. Contemporary South African leaders, including Mandela, have consistently lauded him as being part of the epic battle to defeat the racist white regime.

The South African Gandhi focuses on Gandhi's first leadership experiences and the complicated man they reveal—a man who actually supported the British Empire. Ashwin Desai and Goolem Vahed unveil a man who, throughout his stay on African soil, stayed true to Empire while showing a disdain for Africans. For Gandhi, whites and Indians were bonded by an Aryan bloodline that had no place for the African. Gandhi's racism was matched by his class prejudice towards the Indian indentured. He persistently claimed that they were ignorant and needed his leadership, and he wrote their resistances and compromises in surviving a brutal labor regime out of history. The South African Gandhi writes the indentured and working class back into history.

The authors show that Gandhi never missed an opportunity to show his loyalty to Empire, with a particular penchant for war as a means to do so. He served as an Empire stretcher-bearer in the Boer War while the British occupied South Africa, he demanded guns in the aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion, and he toured the villages of India during the First World War as recruiter for the Imperial army. This meticulously researched book punctures the dominant narrative of Gandhi and uncovers an ambiguous figure whose time on African soil was marked by a desire to seek the integration of Indians, minus many basic rights, into the white body politic while simultaneously excluding Africans from his moral compass and political ideals.

About the author

Ashwin Desai is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg.

Goolam Vahed is Associate Professor in the History, Society, and Social Change Cluster of the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

"The South African Gandhi finally offers a real and convincing account of Indian life and politics in South Africa, and Gandhi's changing place within it. Its critique of the sanctimonious and nationalistic historiography around Gandhi allows the authors to recover a Gandhi beyond moralism."
—Faisal Devji, University of Oxford

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23. Sins of the Three Pashas
Edward Luttwak
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(London Review of Books - Vol. 37 No. 11 · 4 June 2015
pages 6-8) 

‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’: A History of the Armenian Genocide by Ronald Grigor Suny
    Princeton, 520 pp, £24.95, March, ISBN 978 0 691 14730 7

You are invited to read this free book review from the London Review of Books. Subscribe now to access every article from every fortnightly issue of the London Review of Books, including the entire LRB archive of over 13,500 essays and reviews.

Turkey is a country small in neither size nor population, yet its rulers have the privilege of being ignored most of the time, no doubt because its language is remarkably little known, considering that for all its Arabic and Persian accretions it’s a most useful entry to the Oghuz Turkic tongues spoken from Moldova to China. This privilege was in evidence when Pope Francis chose in April to define the Armenian deportations, kidnappings, rapes and massacres that started in 1915 as a genocide. The Turkish government prefers fine terminological distinctions: what the pope, every Armenian and a great many others call a genocide should more properly be described as a First World War event involving mass killings (one of many such, down to the present day) and deportations (a wartime necessity given Armenian complicity in Russia’s invasion of North-east Anatolia); but in any case it was an unfortunate event that happened a long time ago, and an exception in Turkey’s fine tradition of tolerance. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu went on the offensive in the Washington Post: ‘I am addressing the pope: those who escaped from the Catholic inquisition in Spain [Sephardic Jews] found peace in our just order in Istanbul and İzmir. We are ready to discuss historical issues, but we will not let people insult our nation through history.’

To pause on the effrontery of citing benevolence to 15th-century Jews at a time when his party and its leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, continually denigrate today’s Jews (he blames ‘the Saturday People’ for Turkey’s high interest rates, and explains modern history as the product of the Üst Akil, the global conspiracy of you-know-who) would be to miss the point entirely: the persecution of the Armenians didn’t start in 1915, and wasn’t a First World War event as per the official Turkish line – there had been massacres of Armenians before then, notably in 1894-96, leaving some fifty thousand orphans. And, more important, the persecution didn’t end with the First World War, but continues to this day. Its current form, aside from occasional non-state violence such as the 2007 murder of Hrant Dink, founding editor of the bilingual magazine Agos (dedicated to reconciliation), is Turkey’s artfully drafted legislation on non-profit trusts and foundations. The lack of a good law on foundations wasn’t one of the Ottoman Empire’s shortcomings; its simple and efficacious Vakf law long persisted unchanged in the successor states including decidedly non-Muslim Greece and Israel (Agudat Ottomani). But the new Turkish state needed something more modern – the text after all was in an Ottoman Turkish that was both Persianised and written in Arabic script – and laws were duly enacted. One such law of 1967 (number 743, or 4721 in the current code), which amended Article 101 of the Turkish civil code, defines foundations in the usual way: charity groups that have the status of a legal entity formed by real persons or legal entities dedicating their private property and rights for public use etc. But then it adds: ‘Formation of a foundation contrary to the characteristics of the republic defined by the constitution, constitutional rules, laws, ethics, national integrity and national interest, or with the aim of supporting a distinctive race or community, is restricted’ [emphasis added] – which actually means that it is forbidden, because there are no provisions for exceptions.

That still left in place pre-existing foundations, allowing a dwindling number of Armenian and Greek churches as well as synagogues and schools to keep going, but in 1974 new legislation determined that non-Muslim trusts couldn’t own property that hadn’t been registered under their name in 1936. With that, some 1400 churches, schools, residential buildings, hospitals, summer camps, cemeteries and orphanages were deemed illegal and seized by the state, unless a ‘former owner’ could claim them. In 1986, under European pressure (at a time when Turkey’s accession to the EU was still treated as a realistic if long-term possibility), the laws that denied Armenian rights over ‘abandoned’ properties were abrogated. But any possibility of recovery was circumvented by a 29 June 2001 order by the land registry authority which effectively transferred all remaining ‘abandoned’ properties to the government. What’s more, no information regarding property titles may be disclosed, so claimants can’t even begin to avail themselves of the nominal restoration of 1986. Such seemingly technical administrative measures have sufficed to prevent the opening of any new church (Armenian or otherwise), synagogue or non-Muslim school since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923.

Today’s Islamist rulers are doing everything possible to obliterate Mustafa Kemal’s firmly secular Turkey – they are building mosques in universities where even headscarves were disallowed until very recently, and the official centennial documentary of his victorious Gallipoli campaign featured a fervently praying Erdoğan as well as re-enactors mouthing Islamic invocations while Kemal himself only flashed by as a silent image – but there’s one aspect of Kemalist Turkey that meets with their fullest approval: its uncompromising nationalism, which, though secular per se happens to define a ‘Turk’ as a Muslim Turk, treating all non-Muslim Turks as half citizens, with full obligations but few rights, and no chance of achieving political office. Kemal’s secularism, though commendable in its focus on the emancipation of women (Istanbul’s Sabiha Gökçen airport is named for his adopted daughter, who became a combat pilot in 1936) was not transitive: serenely non-believing himself, he strove to liberate the Turks from the lethargy of Islam, but didn’t proceed logically to accept non-Muslims as equals.

Turkey’s current leaders often abrogate or subvert remnants of Kemalist rule with the aim of fully Islamising the country, but carefully preserve others to pursue the same aim. So in spite of repeated promises to Obama and all and sundry, they refuse to allow the reopening of the country’s only Greek Orthodox seminary at Halki (closed in 1971 when the Turkish constitution of 1961 was properly interpreted: Article 132 specified that only the Turkish Armed Forces and police are allowed to open private colleges). With this, the Orthodox Church established in Constantinople in 330, whose patriarch is still the primus inter pares of all Greek Orthodox patriarchs, can survive only precariously, because another Kemalist survival prohibits the importation of foreign priests.
NYU Press - Plucked - Rebecca M. Herzig

Turkey was still fully Kemalist when the Armenians fell victim in a catastrophic way to its non-transitive secularism 27 years after the ‘First World War events’ began, and two decades after the widespread if merely incidental killings of surviving Armenians in the course of the 1919-22 Turkish war against the invading Greeks: on 11 November 1942 the Turkish parliament enacted a one-off wealth tax (Law 4305 in its admirably systematic civil code) on all fixed assets, land, buildings, commercial establishments and industrial enterprises. That tax was by no means unreasonable in itself: it was conceived when money was urgently needed to fund Turkey’s military forces in a dangerous phase of the Second World War, when the implicit British guarantee of its security had seemingly been invalidated by Germany’s spectacular advances across Russia and North Africa, which left Turkey as the potential prey of closing pincers. (As it happened, by the time the tax was enacted, El Alamein and Stalingrad had intervened.)

But the way the tax was actually levied was savagely, destructively discriminatory. Wealthy Muslims were to pay a rate of 4.94 per cent of assessed value, which was nominally the agricultural rate (poorer Muslims paid nothing); Greeks were to pay a 156 per cent rate, which was evidently meant to immiserate them; Jews were levied a 179 per cent rate; but to make it perfectly clear that they were at the very bottom of the pile, the Armenian rate was set at 232 per cent. In the event of underpayment or non-payment, the law prescribed the confiscation of all related and non-related wealth attributable to any and all family members, and detention for forced labour. The ensuing events were best described by one of the officials in charge, Mehmet Faik Ökte, whose unvarnished and sincerely contrite account, Varlık Vergisi Faciası, was published in 1951: a mere 15 days were allowed for payment once the notice had been issued to a taxpayer; those who had marketable valuables tried to auction them, or sell them to Muslim shopkeepers; they offered them in street markets, or simply laid them out on their front steps; private homes and any other buildings were sold to anyone who would buy them for whatever they would offer before the deadline of the 15th day (many a Dutch auction was conducted as the days went by); entire businesses or inventories were sold to Muslim competitors for whatever they were willing to pay, thereby largely destroying the remaining non-Muslim merchant class (the wealth of today’s few rich non-Muslims postdates the tax).

Poor non-Muslims, servants, craftsmen and even beggars were also taxed on mostly imaginary wealth, and thus sent straight to work camps. The then immense sum of 324 million liras (equivalent to more than $4 billion in 2015) was collected in 15 days of frantic discounting of bonds, loans and deposits, panicked selling and rapacious buying, followed by the removal of those who hadn’t paid enough, including the old and the sick, to forced labour in open fields, where there were uncounted deaths of Armenians, Greeks and Jews – no Muslim is known to have been detained. Non-Muslim youths whose families could no longer afford to feed them left their confessional or private schools to seek any work that paid them enough to survive; women and girls became servants in Muslim households, waitresses or inmates of Istanbul’s brothels. There were of course many suicides. When emigration became possible with the end of the war, many of the newly impoverished Greeks went to Greece, many Jews left for Israel after 14 May 1948, and the Armenians started on long quests for immigration visas. The wealth tax irreversibly changed Istanbul’s demography and society, though the diminished Greek community was attacked once more, in the 6-7 September 1955 pogrom in which mobs destroyed 73 churches, two monasteries and 26 schools, along with some five thousand homes and shops, 17 per cent of which were actually Armenian-owned (a synagogue was destroyed too), in accordance with the hadith that all unbelievers are one nation.

*

I have long believed that the very best introduction to the genocide question is Franz Werfel’s novel Die Vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh (‘The Forty Days of Musa Dagh’), that being the coastal mountain on which some 4500 Armenians successfully resisted vast numbers of soldiers, gendarmes and would-be looters until they were evacuated by French warships. Musa Dagh is also the site of Turkey’s single remaining Armenian village, Vak’if, resettled in 1918 when the area was under French rule. Werfel’s characters are his own, but the book starts with very well-documented accounts of the motives and methods of the three protagonists, the ‘Three Pashas’: Enver Pasha, the Ottoman war minister and ‘god of war’ who called for extermination and who would die in 1922 fighting the Russians for pan-Turkism; Talaat Pasha, the minister of the interior after whom many Turkish streets are now named, whose telegrams triggered the deportations in place after place and who was assassinated by an Armenian in Berlin in 1921; and Djemal Pasha, high military commander and mayor of Istanbul, where it all began with the mass arrests and executions of Armenian leaders on 23-24 April 1915. I realise, however, that an author whom I greatly admired at the age of 12, and whose final play became Me and the Colonel starring Danny Kaye, may not appear entirely authoritative to everyone, even though he had full access to the best diplomatic documentation (Germany’s), and was meticulous enough in his research to satisfy that insatiable perfectionist Alma Mahler.

Werfel’s novel provides a vital clue to the reason there was such especial vehemence against the Armenians. Its wealthy hero, Gabriel Bragadian, has returned from Paris to his native village of Yoghonoluk and slides into his dead father’s role as informal leader of his own and the neighbouring Armenian villages; he isn’t a separatist or sectarian but a loyal, indeed patriotic citizen of the Ottoman Empire, which has recently been reformed by the Young Turks. In 1908 their revolution allowed the emergence of political parties, instituted elections and ordained a new pluralist order whereby non-Muslim subjects were elevated into full citizens, who might serve in the armed forces as officers of any rank, and aim for high political office. Werfel’s Bagradian joins the army and serves bravely as an artillery officer in the 1912 Balkan War, as many Armenians may have done in reality: quite a few young non-Muslims believed in the Young Turks promise, including David Ben-Gurion, who went to Istanbul University to study law in 1912, envisaging a future as a community leader-cum-loyal official; in 1914 he personally raised a militia of forty Jews to serve the empire. For many in the Young Turks movement the response of the fictional Bragadian and the real Ben-Gurion was gratifying evidence that the best and brightest non-Muslims would pull their weight in the much needed modernisation of the newly constitutional empire.

But for others, especially for the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress, which started out as a secret society, became a political party and ended up as the empire’s ruling junta, the Bragadians and Ben-Gurions were a sinister threat precisely because of their patriotism. The non-Muslims were minorities but not insignificant ones, with Armenians and Greeks numbering in the millions; they loomed large in towns and cities, even outnumbering Muslims in a few places, such as Edirne (Adrianople). More important, their exemption from the lethargy of madrassa and mosque gave them advantages over the Muslims in both energy levels and skills. Having long dominated commerce, they might – once emancipated by the Young Turks – come to dominate army and state.
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The Three Pashas cited the danger that Armenian revolutionaries and separatists would assist a Russian invasion of eastern Anatolia, but it was the patriots they really feared, just as after 1492 it was not the crypto Jews in hiding that the Spanish elites feared but the ‘new Christians’, who were quickly rising in society and even in the church. The Greeks had their own state in which to pursue their political ambitions, the Assyrians were too few to matter and the Jews were even fewer, so it was the Bragadians alone who were a political threat. Kemal’s eventual remedy would be to try to take the Islam out of the Turk to make him more competitive, but by then the Three Pashas had done their best to eliminate the Armenian competitors.

In Werfel’s novel, Bagradian is concerned when he isn’t mobilised, given that the empire had joined the Central Powers in war in November 1914. He goes to the district capital to find out why, overhears officials, including the provincial governor, discussing Armenians in sinister fashion, and is finally warned of the imminent danger by an old Muslim family friend. It’s the sort of conversation that many had, as Ronald Grigor Suny’s carefully researched history of the massacres shows. He quotes a credible third-party account of what ensued when an elected Armenian member of parliament, Vartkes Serengülian, went to see his erstwhile friend Talaat Pasha to ask about the rumours that Armenian leaders would soon be arrested. The reply was a tirade: ‘Now it is our turn … This is politics … This is our turn, and, now it is we who are strong. We are going to do what is necessary in the interests of Türklük [Turkishness].’

When the Young Turks summoned both Muslims and non-Muslims, both Turks and non-Turks to serve and strengthen the empire that was to be their common home, nothing had been said about Türklük. But in its name, Greeks, Assyrians, Jews and any other non-Turks would soon revert to subject status in a secular version of Islamic dhimmitude that did not exempt Arab Muslims or Kurds (at that point the empire still had vast Arabian, Levantine and Mesopotamian territories). The Armenians, who had their own villages and some towns, as well as their own nationalist organisations, and also potential allies in the invading Russians in north-east Anatolia, were marked for deportation along with Zionist colonists. But there was a vast difference: the Zionist colonists were allowed to prepare themselves before being sent by train to Syrian cities without immediate harm; the Armenians expelled from Bitlis, Iskenderun-Alexandretta, Adana, Aleppo, Diyarbakir, Hadjin, Sis, Sivas, Urfa, Van, Zeytun and elsewhere even before 24 April, were marched out without supplies or any provision for shelter, suffering extreme hardship and deadly violence from the start. Evidently Talaat’s feelings of friendship towards Vartkes weren’t extinguished: he reportedly told him to ‘Go. Leave now, don’t wait even a minute.’ By then Talaat had already sent out orders to decapitate the Armenian secular leadership in Istanbul by arresting some 250 doctors, lawyers, journalists, writers and assorted others, including members of Armenian nationalist organisations as well as of the entirely legal, indeed quasi-official, Armenian National Assembly, headed by Boghos Nubar, son of a three-time prime minister of Egypt. Of those arrested, almost all were soon executed.

Those first arrests started on the night of 23 April 1915 and were completed the next day, when Talaat sent out his deadliest telegrams: one instructed the Ottoman Army High Command to disarm any Armenians in uniform anywhere in the empire, and send them to forced labour; and to arrest any local members of any Armenian organisation, and seize their institutions. Another was the warrant for a much vaster catastrophe: Talaat changed the destination of the mass deportations from central Anatolia, where survival was possible, to the far deserts of Syria, notably Der Zor, to give it its dreaded Armenian name (Deir ez-Zor in Arabic), some 1500 kilometres from Istanbul, and the site of a fine memorial church blown up last September by Islamic State. It was by a series of individual miracles that after many if not most of the able-bodied men were separated early on for deadly forced labour or simply execution, tens of thousands of women, children and elderly survivors arrived at Deir ez-Zor. There, they were killed en masse along the banks of the Euphrates; many times their number had already been murdered or died of thirst, hunger, cold and sickness at the hands of their escorting soldiers and gendarmes, the miserably paid, miserably clothed Zaptiehs. The Zaptiehs scarcely tried to protect the endless processions from the Turks, Kurds and Arabs who came in improvised hunting parties to rob, kill, rape and abduct boys and girls for a day, night, week or for ever. Even now, a century later, Armenian descendants emerge here and there to reclaim their identity in such places as Diyarbakir, the ancient city of Amida on the Tigris river, and in Dersim, now Tunceli province, where the population, mostly identified as Kurdish or Zazaki, may be of Armenian origin in large part; not coincidentally, the inhabitants are mostly of the Alevi Bektashi faith, the world’s largest ignored religion (it has at least ten million adherents), nominally a version of Shia Islam that strongly enjoins toleration, so that they were more likely to save deportees than to kill them.

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Pope Francis’s condemnation of the events of April 1915 was only the first of many in this centenary year. On a visit to Yerevan, Vladimir Putin made a speech deploring the Armenian genocide. The Turkish Foreign Ministry went on the offensive: ‘Taking into account the mass atrocities and exiles in Caucasus, in Central Asia and Eastern Europe committed by Russia for a century; collective punishment methods such as Holodomor [the Ukraine famine of 1932-33] as well as inhumane practices especially against Turkish and Muslim people in Russia’s own history, we consider that Russia is best suited to know what exactly “genocide” and its legal dimension are.’ Coming from a once smoothly professional Foreign Ministry, this wildly aggressive and entirely pointless reaction reflects the influence of Erdoğan on Turkish officialdom. In Austria, six parliamentary parties recognised the massacre as a genocide though the country’s official stance hasn’t changed; Turkey’s response was to withdraw its ambassador with the warning that relations between Austria and Turkey had been damaged permanently. Given that the Turks have traditionally held Germany and the Germans in high regard, it’s remarkable that President Joachim Gauck’s use of the word genocide triggered another unrestrained response by the Foreign Ministry: it called his remarks ‘baseless allegations directed towards Turkish identity, history and society … President Gauck does not have the right to attribute to the Turkish people a crime which they have not committed.’ The anger of Turkish officials has even spilled over against the European Parliament, notwithstanding Turkey’s quest for accession. ‘Turkey ignores all such resolutions as null and void,’ Erdoğan said. ‘Whatever decision the European Parliament takes on the Armenian genocide claims, it will go in one ear and out the other.’ Davutoğlu called the resolution ‘a reflection of Europe’s racism … where are those aboriginal people? Where are the Native Americans? Where are the tribes of Africa? How were they wiped out from history?’
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But the most telling response to the international denunciations was the threatened conversion into a mosque of Justinian’s massive and majestic former cathedral, Hagia Sophia, now the country’s most visited museum, thereby punishing the Orthodox worldwide for the pope’s statement on the Armenians, most of whom are neither Catholic nor Greek Orthodox (their church is miaphysite rather than Chalcedonian). The threats came not from wild-eyed imams preaching in back streets but from authoritative voices, including Mefail Hızlı, mufti of Ankara: ‘Frankly, I believe that the pope’s remarks will only accelerate the process for Hagia Sophia to be reopened for [Muslim] worship.’ Politicians, including Bülent Arınç, a deputy prime minister, have been pressing for the conversion for some time: ‘We look at this forlorn Hagia Sophia and pray to Allah that the days when it smiles on us are near.’

One small irony in Erdoğan’s sensitivity about the term ‘genocide’ being deployed against the Turks is that he himself has used the word lightly, accusing the Chinese of genocide for their repression of the Muslim Uighurs and the Israelis of systematic genocide of the Palestinians. (He rejects International Criminal Court charges against Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir because ‘no Muslim could perpetrate a genocide.’) But a larger irony about the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide is that it is possible to justify it. Their denial is tainted by gross underestimates of the numbers killed – there is no valid reason to dispute the canonical numbering of the dead at a million and a half – but the genocide accusation is nonetheless legitimately disputable. The list of highly distinguished scholars who deny that what took place was a genocide as legally defined include Bernard Lewis, Stanford Shaw, David Fromkin, Justin McCarthy, Guenther Lewy, Norman Stone, Michael Gunter, Andrew Mango, Roderic Davison, Edward Erickson and Steven Katz, and although all of them have had dealings with Turkish academic institutions, none is likely to have bent his opinion to suit material interests. They are joined in their denial by the British and US governments, each of which has presented its arguments in full legal detail within the terms of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, based on the reasoning and advocacy of Rafael Lemkin, a Lithuanian-born Jewish lawyer who practised in Poland before reaching the United States, where he introduced the word ‘genocide’ in his seminal work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress, published in 1944. Formally adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, the Genocide Convention came into effect in 1951, forming the basis for a new criterion in the law of nations. Lemkin cited the Armenian case as central in his book; at that point the full scope of the Shoah was not yet fully manifest.

The argument of Lewis and the rest, as of the governments that hold out (Obama’s way out is to use the untranslated Armenian term Meds Yeghern, ‘great calamity’), is best parsed by lawyers, but its essence is that the Turkish authorities wanted to kill a great many Armenians but were not fully exterminationist. For Hitler’s Germany, by contrast, the killing of all Jews everywhere was an overriding priority: it devoted scarce manpower and scarcer resources to the task (every rail wagon that carried Jews to the camps had an opportunity cost); it used much political capital in failed attempts to extract the thousand or so Finnish Jews, and the remaining Jews of Romania after its formerly mass-murdering government changed its mind; and it even engaged in high-risk military operations to get just a few more, for example sending very scarce shipping to Rhodes, a long voyage exposed to British air attack, in order to collect its 1600 Jews on 31 July 1944, just weeks before the final German evacuation of Greece.

Evidently the aim was to kill all Jews everywhere at almost any cost. The Turks, by contrast, had no interest in killing Armenians outside their empire, and didn’t try to kill them all even within it, not deporting all Armenians from all towns (a hundred thousand were left in Bolis, their name for Istanbul), and not trying to kill all those they deported; Patriarch Zaven I Der Yeghiayan of Constantinople, for example, was allowed to plead for his congregants on repeated occasions before being deported to Mosul in 1916 without injury, whence he returned to his native Baghdad. In other words, the Turkish authorities under the Three Pashas certainly engaged in mass murder on a colossal scale, they certainly wanted to destroy the Armenians politically and they certainly destroyed many communities, whose survivors became exiles worldwide, but because they didn’t try to exterminate all Armenians, it wasn’t genocide.

Personally, I enlisted long ago with Gabriel Bragadian, and considering subsequent facts up to the present, notably the cruelty with which the wealth taxation law was imposed on surviving Armenians, I find today’s official Turkish position (‘there were killings on both sides’) downright absurd, though too sinister to be laughable. As for the Genocide Convention, I spit on it, given all the difference it has made to the fate of the Cambodians, Rwandan Tutsis, Sarajevo Bosnians and indeed every beleaguered ex-Yugoslav population.


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