SACW - 19 July 2016 | Pakistan: Honor Killing Sport / Bangladesh: on Dhaka Cafe Terror / India: Violence And Militarisation In Kashmir / Jan Breman: A Defiant Sociologist / Turkey: Who prevented the coup / France: The Truth About the Resistance

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 19 July 2016 - No. 2904 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Bangladesh: Aftermath of July 1 siege on the Holey Artisan Bakery Café
2. Pakistan: When honour lies in what happens between the legs of women | Minerwa Tahir
3. Pakistan: No Country for Bold Women - A public petition after the murder of Qandeel Baloch
4. India: Violence And Militarisation In Kashmir: Commentary, Citizens Statements
5. India: The Colonial Roots Of Hindutva ‘Nationalism’ | Romila Thapar
6. India: Puzzling to see progressives oppose the push for a common civil code for all citizens | Ramachandra Guha
7. India: Why is the Left Averse to a United Front to Take on the BJP
8. India: Appeal to participate in protest at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi on 20 July 2016
9. Jan Breman: A Defiant Sociologist and His Craft - An Appreciation and a Conversation | Ashwani Saith
10. Recent On Communalism Watch:
  - USA: Hindu Nationalists and California’s History Curriculum (Pepper Chongh)
  - India: 'It’s time to contemplate a Uniform Civil Code' says Margaret Alva
  - India: Vishnu Sahai Commission Report - Truth is Still Unknown (Neha Dabhade)
  - Uniform Civil Code a bad Idea, Commoness is bad; anti women personal laws are good for women suggests feminist
  - India under Modi Govt: Hindu mythology driving naming of state projects -- 'Sankat Mochan' is the name of the operation to evacuate Indians from South Sudan
  - India: In the Northeast, an uneasy new alliance the BJP-led Northeast Democratic Alliance (NEDA) | Sanjib Baruah
  - India: RSS Mukt Bharat - a political campign explained (1966 law reiterated in 1975 and 1980 required civil servants to declare that they are not affiliated to either Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or Jamaat-e-Islami - That law is under threat of repeal)
  - The doctrine of equality must be the lifeblood of any common civil code in India (Mohan Guruswamy)

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
11. In wake of cafe attack, Bangladesh fears its missing sons are being radicalized overseas | Saad Hammadi and Annie Gowen
12. The Standoff in Bangladesh | Joseph Allchin	
13. Kerala HC upholds the dismissal of Girl Student from College for living together with Classmate
14. Review: Govind Pansare Had Some Lessons For the Left, If They Would Only Pay Attention | Monobina Gupta
15. Turkey: Who prevented the coup and who hit the streets? – Ali Ergin Demirhan
16. Aleksandra Pomiecko on David R. Marples. "Our Glorious Past": Lukashenka's Belarus and the Great Patriotic War
17. Following the Brexit vote, I fear tolerant Britain is lost for ever | Gilane Tawadros
18. France: The Truth About the Resistance | Robert O. Paxton

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1. Bangladesh: Aftermath of July 1 siege on the Holey Artisan Bakery Café
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BANGLADESH: ARE WE ALL GUILTY OF THE HORRENDOUS ATTACK THAT TOOK PLACE? 
 Where is the multicultural and multi-religious Bangladesh we grew up in? | Muktasree Chakma Sathi
http://sacw.net/article12865.html

BANGLADESH: CHARGE OR RELEASE HOLEY ATTACK HOSTAGES - STATEMENT BY HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
Bangladeshi authorities should guarantee all due process rights of two detainees who had been held hostage by armed gunmen during the July 1 siege on the Holey Artisan Bakery Café in Dhaka, Human Rights Watch said today. The two men, Hasanat Karim and Tahmid Khan, were initially held for questioning by authorities but have neither been charged nor released.
http://www.sacw.net/article12871.html

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2. PAKISTAN: WHEN HONOUR LIES IN WHAT HAPPENS BETWEEN THE LEGS OF WOMEN | MINERWA TAHIR
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Qandeel Baloch is dead. Seems like the woman had earned the ire of way too many men . . . women have better talents that merely looks . . . she has been conditioned by our patriarchal society . . . Qandeel’s honesty and defiance of patriarchal norms that actually points out how dishonourable our society really is. She was alone, powerful, influential. And she told all the haters out there that she refused to be suppressed under their patriarchal standards of morality.
http://www.sacw.net/article12875.html

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3. PAKISTAN: NO COUNTRY FOR BOLD WOMEN - A PUBLIC PETITION AFTER THE MURDER OF QANDEEL BALOCH
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We, the undersigned, condemn the murder of Qandeel Baloch by her brother, Waseem, and demand that the government put the alleged killer on trial.
http://www.sacw.net/article12874.html

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4. INDIA: VIOLENCE AND MILITARISATION IN KASHMIR: COMMENTARY, CITIZENS STATEMENTS
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AZADI / REPURPOSING KASHMIR OUTREACH / AFTER BURHAN WANI’S KILLING, AN ILLUSION IS SHATTERED IN KASHMIR / LIVING IN DENIAL ON KASHMIR
How does one address words to Kashmir? What do you say in a political context where all texts are sub texts, all ends dead ends?
http://www.sacw.net/article12872.html

INDIA: CONCERNED CITIZENS STATEMENT ON THE ALARMING VIOLENCE IN KASHMIR
We write this in anguish at another alarming spiral of violence in Kashmir, when a discredited old playbook has yet again been deployed to wreak havoc with civilian life.
http://sacw.net/article12862.html

MILITARIZATION OF CIVIL SOCIETY: THEODICY, DOUBLE-STANDARDS, AND SCHIZOPHRENIA
by Sualeh Keen
In India, we have a tradition of creating pantheons in which the Preservers as well as the Destroyers are equally great, and so it is the case with the myriad freedom fighters of India (a pantheon in itself) who are conferred equal Greatness / Godship and sung songs of, portraits hung of, and saluted everywhere. This appeal to a particular Great Man that matches our extremist ideology is what has allowed people to justify anything and everything and call it Greatness. No wonder, Kashmiri and Khalistani terrorists, Sanghi terrorists, and Maoists claim the same ’greatness’.
http://sacw.net/article12864.html

INDIA: GUNS ARE A MEANS OF DISEMPOWERMENT - A PUBLIC STATEMENT FROM GANDHIANS ON THE SITUATION IN KASHMIR
The recent spate in unrest and violence in Kashmir will cause nothing but anguish and torment, and a rift that will prove very difficult to overcome.
http://www.sacw.net/article12877.html

CRACKDOWN ON MEDIA IN KASHMIR
Two of Kashmir’s leading newspapers said that Jammu and Kashmir police raided their office on Saturday night, seized their printed copies and arrested their employees – a clear act of choking and gagging media in crisis-hit Kashmir valley.
http://www.sacw.net/article12873.html

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5. INDIA: THE COLONIAL ROOTS OF HINDUTVA ‘NATIONALISM’ | Romila Thapar
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Indian nationalism’s anti-colonial, and inclusive, origins are increasingly being trampled underfoot by votaries of Hindu majoritarianism. In this essay, Romila Thapar shows how the cant of Hindutva was built on the myopic and tendentious tradition of colonial history-writing.
http://sacw.net/article12848.html

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6. INDIA: PUZZLING TO SEE PROGRESSIVES OPPOSE THE PUSH FOR A COMMON CIVIL CODE FOR ALL CITIZENS | Ramachandra Guha
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In my opinion, left-wing intellectuals who oppose a common civil code disavow the progressive heritage of socialist and feminist movements in India and across the world.
http://www.sacw.net/article12876.html

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7. INDIA: WHY IS THE LEFT AVERSE TO A UNITED FRONT TO TAKE ON THE BJP
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INDIA: ’FORM A UNITED FRONT TO RESIST BJP, GIVE UP RIGID ANTI-CONGRESSISM’ - LETTER TO COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA (MARXIST) BY IRFAN HABIB & SAYERA HABIB
Letter by veteran communists Irfan Habib and Sayera Habib to CPI(M) says " . . . The primary object of our Party should, therefore, surely be to isolate the BJP as far as possible, and form a broad united front with all other democratic forces so as to foil the BJP’s plan of gaining control over the states still outside its orbit, and finally, to secure its defeat at the parliamentary elections due in 2019."
http://sacw.net/article12863.html

INDIA: PURSUIT OF IRRELEVANCE - THE INSISTENCE ON IDEOLOGICAL PURITY COULD PROVE FATAL FOR INDIA’S LEFT
by Badri Raina
Can ideological purity fill in the setbacks suffered by the Indian Left because of its political diminution? Had the Indian Left been by now a truly united force and a major player on its own in the political life of the republic, its well-wishers should have been the last to persuade it to suffer mitigation by allying with merely democratic forces.
http://sacw.net/article12857.html

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8. INDIA: APPEAL TO PARTICIPATE IN PROTEST AT JANTAR MANTAR, NEW DELHI ON 20 JULY 2016
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Campaign for justice to demand fast investigation of the murder cases of Dhabolkar, Pansare and Kalbugi; To demand an inquiry into the terrorist activities of Sanatan Sanstha and Hindu Janajagaran Samitee and request for taking appropriate action against them ...
http://sacw.net/article12858.html

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9. JAN BREMAN: A DEFIANT SOCIOLOGIST AND HIS CRAFT - AN APPRECIATION AND A CONVERSATION | ASHWANI SAITH
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Jan Breman occupies a preeminent position in the top echelon of academe; but he was not born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. ‘I happened to grow up in a milieu bothered by material deprivation and as a young boy, I came to know what it meant to belong to a social class having to cope with indigence’ (Breman, 2010a: 79).
http://www.sacw.net/article12866.html

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10. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
USA: Hindu Nationalists and California’s History Curriculum (Pepper Chongh)
India: 'It’s time to contemplate a Uniform Civil Code' says Margaret Alva
India: Vishnu Sahai Commission Report - Truth is Still Unknown (Neha Dabhade)
Uniform Civil Code a bad Idea, Commoness is bad; anti women personal laws are good for women suggests feminist
India under Modi Govt: Hindu mythology driving naming of state projects -- 'Sankat Mochan' is the name of the operation to evacuate Indians from South Sudan
India: In the Northeast, an uneasy new alliance the BJP-led Northeast Democratic Alliance (NEDA) | Sanjib Baruah
India: RSS Mukt Bharat - a political campign explained (1966 law reiterated in 1975 and 1980 required civil servants to declare that they are not affiliated to either Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or Jamaat-e-Islami - That law is under threat of repeal)
The doctrine of equality must be the lifeblood of any common civil code in India (Mohan Guruswamy)

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::

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11. IN WAKE OF CAFE ATTACK, BANGLADESH FEARS ITS MISSING SONS ARE BEING RADICALIZED OVERSEAS
by Saad Hammadi and Annie Gowen
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(The Washington Post - July 9, 2016)

A Bangladeshi woman shows a photo of her missing son, who worked at a cafe that was the scene of an attack and seige in Dhaka, Bangladesh. (AFP/Getty Images)

DHAKA, Bangladesh — One by one, the young men went missing.

The son of a prominent local leader disappeared from Dhaka on Dec. 30. A college student was last seen Feb. 3. A high school student never made it to his tutoring session Feb. 29. Ultimately, five young men vanished.

The men — some from Bangladesh’s privileged elite — resurfaced July 2, when the news agency of the Islamic State released photographs of the Dhaka terrorists wearing head scarves, toting automatic weapons — and grinning.

In the days after the devastating siege of a popular cafe in Dhaka that left 23 dead, including two police officers, Bangladesh has begun looking for its lost sons.

Worried family members have posted pictures of missing youths on social media, in local newspapers, in a private Facebook group called “Desperately Seeking Missing Persons (Bangladesh).”
A desk in Meer Saameh Mubasheer’s room at his family’s home in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Mubasheer, 18, was one of the cafe attackers. (Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters)

“No family with children between 13 and 25 should feel secure, because people of these ages are vulnerable,” said Meer Hayet Kabir, the father of one of the attackers, who had spent frantic weeks searching for his son.

Police said this week that at least 10 young men — many from well-connected families — were missing and suspected of being caught up in militant groups. Another 18-year-old man, a kitchen assistant at the cafe bakery who had been detained after the siege as a possible suspect, died at a hospital late Friday. His family has alleged he was tortured in police custody.

The government asked YouTube to purge clips from radical preachers and issued warnings about sharing jihadist messages on social media. Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, gave an emotional appeal Thursday for parents to inform the police about their missing boys. Investigators launched a nationwide effort to learn more about the missing and whether any had been recruited for militant groups.

Meanwhile, investigators are examining airline and port records to see whether the cafe attackers left the country — possibly under false names — for training overseas.

“They belong to one of the local groups of radical Islamists who have been engaged in violent activities for some time, and it is also now increasingly evident that they had forged some links or connections with some international terrorist groups as well, including the Islamic State,” said Gowher Rizvi, a senior adviser to Hasina. “The forensic investigation will throw more light.”

Although secular bloggers, religious minorities and foreigners have been killed in a series of attacks that worsened in the past year, Rizvi’s comments are a shift from the government’s long-held position that the attacks are the work of local militants acting alone, or of Hasina’s political opponents.

Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority country of about 160 million, has grappled with Islamic extremism since its independence from Pakistan after a war in 1971.

Hasina, who has maintained her grip on power after a flawed 2014 election in which the opposition did not participate, has pursued extremists — especially those connected to her rivals — with zeal. Five opposition politicians have been executed for war crimes by a controversial tribunal since 2013. Some analysts believe political instability and repression in Bangladesh is fomenting radicalism.

In 2013, a group of progressive youths demanding capital punishment for the war criminals provoked militants to hack a blogger to death with a cleaver. More than a dozen bloggers, secularists and minorities have suffered the same fate, with an al-Qaeda-inspired militant group claiming responsibility for the killings.

Last year, the Islamic State asserted responsibility for several acts of violence, including the killing of a Japanese agricultural worker and an Italian aid worker, stoking fears among the expatriate community.

“It’s almost like this is ground zero for a jihadist showdown in South Asia,” said Lisa Curtis, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “This latest attack has to jolt the Bangladesh government out of their complacency.”

But little official evidence has emerged that these global terror groups had operational linkages — transfers of resources, technology or training — with local groups, according to Ajai Sahni, a terrorism expert and executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi. The terrorists at the Dhaka cafe did send photos of bloodied bodies to a private Islamic State-linked email account during their operation, and the pictures were immediately uploaded, he said.

Sahni said that groups such as the Islamic State do most of their recruiting online, so it is no surprise that well-educated youth like the cafe attackers would be swept up that way. Investigators are poring over their social-media accounts for clues. A controversial Islamist preacher is under fire in India after reports that one of the attackers, Rohan Imtiaz, the son of a politician from Hasina’s Awami League party, quoted him on his Facebook page.

Another attacker, Meer Saameh Mubasheer, 18, was last seen Feb. 29 after he left his elite English-immersion school, Scholastica, to go to a tutoring center. Police said closed-circuit camera footage showed him getting out of his car before he reached the center and hopping into a rickshaw.

His father, a telecom executive, said in an interview that his quiet son was interested in religion but was not rigorous, sometimes skipping prayer. He rarely had friends over and lived a protected life, driven around town by a chauffeur.

Mubasheer was an average student who loved sketching and playing guitar, but he stopped doing both a couple of months before he went missing. He also deactivated his Facebook account.

“ ‘Are you happy that I will not be wasting my time?’ ” Kabir recalled his son telling him, a bit mockingly, when the father quizzed him about it. The parents were relieved, thinking he might have more time to study for his June exams.

Looking back, Kabir could not detect overt warning signs, but he remains haunted by an eerie phone call that the boy received on the day he left, believing he was summoned somewhere.

Over the past two years, a substantial number of young men have gone missing in Bangladesh, said Sakhawat Hussain, a retired brigadier general and security analyst.

Some have traveled to Syria, police say, while others have returned to recruit locally. Tuesday, the Islamic State released a video featuring three Bangladeshi men, based in Raqqa, Syria, who vowed more attacks, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, a monitoring service.

Police say they have identified medical representatives of pharmaceutical companies, Islamic teachers and traders who have recruited followers through social-networking sites and blogs, as well as face-to-face contact. Initially, they may read the teachings of the prophet Muhammad together or chat, but “once they see interest, they devote more time nursing them,” said Sanwar Hossain, a counterterrorism official.

Investigators said that those they have arrested in the past — including an engineer and a former teacher at an English-language school — rented apartments in Dhaka to provide recruits with both theoretical and practical training.

Gowen reported from New Delhi. Rama Lakshmi in New Delhi contributed to this report.

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12. THE STANDOFF IN BANGLADESH
Joseph Allchin	
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(NYR Daily - The New York Review of Books, July 8, 2016)

The first time I walked into the Holey Bakery, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, one of its owners was on the verdant front lawn, a rare holdover of old-world extravagance in the country’s densely inhabited capital. Situated next to a lake in the upscale Gulshan neighborhood, the bakery and its sister restaurant, the O’Kitchen, occupied the house in which, he said, he had fallen in love with his wife. A rare venue for European food, it catered to affluent foreigners and the country’s elite; less than a dozen dimly-lit marble-topped tables stretched around impressive imported ovens inside, with a few on a terrace for use when weather allowed. 

On the evening of Friday, July 1, bone marrow was on the menu, and the diners included nine Italians, most of whom were employed in the country’s garments sector, as well as a group of recent graduates of the exclusive American International School, which is just across the lake that Holey’s garden overlooks. Cristian Rossi, forty-seven, and Nadia Benedetti, fifty-two, were Italian apparel entrepreneurs saying farewell to the country. The young students enrolled in college in the United States—Tarishi Jain, nineteen, at Berkeley, and Faraaz Hossain, twenty, and Abinta Kabir, eighteen, a US citizen, both at Emory—were back for the summer holidays and celebrating a reunion of sorts.

At around 8:45 PM, however, the restaurant turned into a place of devastation and utter horror, when a siege by five—or possible six—young Islamist militants (the presence of a sixth attacker has not been ruled out), apparently affiliated with ISIS, executed these and other patrons, eighteen of them foreign nationals. Strikingly, several of the attackers, who were all Bangladeshi, appear to have come from the same well-heeled, educated backgrounds as the restaurant’s patrons. In recent years, Bangladesh has experienced growing incidents of violence and killings by Islamists, but until now the elite, whether politicians or the wealthy, have not generally come under attack. This time was different. Not only had an exceptionally brutal form of international terrorism arrived in this supposedly tolerant Muslim democracy at the height of Ramadan; its cold hand had now reached the heart of the Bangladeshi establishment.

The massacre was quickly claimed by ISIS, and in the days since, the nominally secular Bangladeshi government has come under intense international pressure to address the group’s apparently growing activity in the country, which the government denies. But viewed from up close, the recent history of Islamist extremism in Bangladesh suggests that both the government and its critics may be missing the underlying story, in which both ISIS and local groups have a part.  

The attackers in the July 1 massacre would not have looked out of place as they approached the restaurant, dressed in Western clothing and carrying backpacks. (Restaurant staff later noted that the men were “were smart, handsome, and educated.”) They stormed past the gates and limited security, carrying dozens of rounds of ammunition, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), semi automatic AK-22s, and machetes. Running through the glass front doors they cried, “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is great,” in Arabic), with guns drawn. 

Those who could, tried to escape. Diego Rossini, the restaurant’s Argentine chef, ran up to the roof, from which he was able to later jump to safety, while others ran to the washrooms, locking themselves in. Most of the patrons remained pinned to their seats in front of their expensive meals. The attackers quickly divided the patrons into locals and foreigners. Then, according to some eyewitnesses, they began demanding that all quote a verse of the Koran. Those who could were spared; the others had their throats slit one by one.

Soon after the shooting began, police arrived and attempted to storm the restaurant, but the attackers pushed them back with gunfire and IEDs hurled from the roof. Two senior police were killed as the police retreated. At that point a standoff ensued. Government reports suggest that the hostage takers wasted little time. But one survivor, Shishir Sarkar, suggested the killing lasted much longer. Sarkar had hid in the ice room until he was found by the attackers after several hours, but was spared when he claimed to be Muslim. In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, he said that at that point he saw victims who were still alive and being tortured. To boast of their savagery the killers took photos on phones looted from hostages and sent them to allies online; ISIS was soon circulating them.

There has been much debate about who the Bangladeshi terrorists are. Since September 2015, Western diplomats have insisted that ISIS has a presence in the country, and over the past eighteen months there have been a series of attacks and killings claimed by ISIS. But the Holey Bakery attack is the first that seems to resemble—in its high degree of organization, brutality, and group choreography and determination—ISIS attacks elsewhere. (Including the recent attacks in Istanbul and Baghdad with which it closely coincided.) 

Most of the earlier attacks in Bangladesh have been described as “targeted killings” and the range of targets has been frighteningly broad. Rezaul Karim Siddique, fifty-eight, who was killed by machete-wielding youths in April 2016, for instance, was a Muslim who taught at the Rajshahi University in the northwest of the country. He celebrated Bengali culture, which Islamic zealots view as antithetical to the Salafi Islam espoused by hard-line groups. In May police said they had arrested a member of the local Islamist group Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) who had confessed to involvement in the killing.

A poor, overwhelmingly Muslim nation of 160 million people, Bangladesh has a long history of both Islamist militancy and leftist insurrection. The JMB was founded by veterans of the Afghan war against the Soviets, and while its fortunes have waxed and waned, it’s been the most persistent Islamist militant group in the country. According to leaked diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks, in the early- to mid-2000s the previous government, led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), used the JMB to assassinate leftist rebels who, as in neighboring India, have gained a following among desperately poor rural farmers since the Naxalbari uprising in the 1960s.

The JMB was chiefly known for its attacks in 2005, when the group, apparently emboldened by political patronage, decided to push for their goal of establishing a Sharia state by detonating hundreds of bombs around the country. It was at that point that American diplomats started haranguing the Bangladeshi government to deal with the country’s growing terrorism problem. They were dismayed to learn that the government had released JMB members because party leaders had demanded it. At the time US embassy officials feared that it was “unclear if this embarrassment [over BNP connections to JMB] is enough to bring to heel the politically-connected mystery man,” JMB leader Bangla Bhai.

But since those 2005 attacks, the group was mostly quiet until the aftermath of the most recent election. The BNP chose to boycott the last election in January 2014, because they wanted a neutral “caretaker government” to oversee the process. The current government, led by the country’s other main party, the nominally secular Bangladesh Awami League, had a sufficient electoral mandate to remove this provision in parliament and went ahead with the elections uncontested. The political impasse between the two main parties led to months of deadly protests and arson attacks on transport infrastructure by opposition activists, which were met in turn by mass arrests of opposition leaders and supporters and “encounter” killings of suspected activists by security forces . Many of the arson attacks were seemingly outsourced to petty criminals or even street children.  

The situation became particularly violent around the anniversary of the election, in the winter of 2014-2015, when dozens were killed and the economy ground to a halt. As the hot season came again last summer, the government crackdown, along with the heat and rain, stymied opposition activities. Then, the Islamist JMB suddenly reemerged, with the unprecedented killing of a foreigner, an Italian seemingly picked at random as he walked out of the American School, just over the lake from Holey. The shooting of foreigners now seemed aimed at vaguely defined “crusaders”—a Japanese-Muslim convert in northwest Bangladesh, for instance. These new killings, which spooked foreign embassies and discouraged international sports teams from visiting the country, seemed to have much the same effect as the arson and the sabotage of the previous winter, except that this time JMB itself had now pledged allegiance to ISIS. 

The JMB is not the only group involved in terrorism in Bangladesh. In 2013, a court started handing down sentences to Islamist politicians who were alleged to have been part of the genocide committed against Hindus, and many of the same minorities now targeted, that accompanied the country’s independence struggle in 1971. When one of those sentenced—Abdul Quader Molla, a politician from Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, the Jamaat-e-Islami (a political ally of the BNP)—was spared the death penalty, secularists came out in mass protests. The protesters who were demanding more stringent punishments were quickly labeled atheists and those who rallied the protests online, especially young bloggers, started getting killed in machete attacks. These attacks were claimed by a group calling itself Ansarullah Bangla Team. 

Around the same time as the attacks on bloggers, another Islamist group, the madrassa-based Hefazat-e-Islam, started its own counter protests to demand sharia laws and death sentences for atheists. The BNP quickly gave support to this movement, with one politician from the party telling me at the time that the party was “using” the movement to attempt to bring down the government.

Since then, more and more liberal secularists and non-orthodox religious groups have been attacked, with more than fifty killings in the last two years. The Awami League government itself, anxious not to be associated with the liberals now being attacked, has tried to avoid being portrayed as atheist, arresting bloggers and warning people not to offend religious sentiments. Until now, this approach of appeasement and distancing seems only to have encouraged more killings. In June a policeman’s wife was knifed and shot to death as she put her son on the school bus. This provoked a roundup of some 14,000 suspected Islamist militants. A lull occurred as the holy month of Ramadan neared its end—until the beginning of July when authorities seemed to increase security, with reports in the Indian media that the Indian government had warned Bangladesh of imminent attacks.

And so it was that on Friday night, the restaurant attacks unfolded. “They were normal upper-middle-class kids, I used to play football with one of them,” says an alumnus of Scholastica, an elite school some of the attackers attended. On Facebook they appeared to have been into partying like “regular teenagers.” That was until the end of last year, when one attacker’s father said the young man had stopped playing the guitar. At the beginning of the year most of them left home, around a time when rumors were spreading about kids from “influential families” disappearing. “I know multiple British-Bangladeshi people who have complained to the British High Commission that their sons and daughters have disappeared. Authorities told the British High Commission that they may have joined ISIS,” said a lawyer who has advised several families with sons and daughters missing. But none of them were involved in the restaurant attack.  

A Dhaka-based analyst, former army general Abdur Rashid, told me that there are reports of training camps in the Chittagong Hill Tracts on the border with Burma, in the south east of Bangladesh; it is unclear whether these young people have, like so many peers from Europe and elsewhere, also traveled to Syria to ISIS’s diminishing “caliphate.” The existence of a new terror base in Bangladesh could suggest more attacks are on the way and indeed following the hostage attack there was a bombing at a shopping center Thursday morning, in which at least three were killed.

Until now, the Bangladeshi government has denied the possibility that ISIS has established a base in the country. Government ministers “don’t have solid information about organizational links to international groups,” Information Minister Hasanul Haq Inu told me. Such statements may well be intended to assuage fears that, as is now coming to pass, international businesses and donors that supply crucial foreign capital and investment, such as the Japanese development organization JICA, may leave Bangladesh.

But the debate about ISIS’s involvement may miss the point. Jason Burke, an expert on Islamist militancy, said that we are

    always looking to see which militant belongs to which organization. But contemporary Islamic militancy is not about groups as much as about people, and personal relations. A Bay’at, or oath of allegiance, for example, is not sworn to a group but to an individual. And recruitment depends primarily on personal interaction and small group dynamics. Terrorism is a social activity —a messy complex one—that can’t be reduced to neat lines of command or membership.

It seems likely that ISIS has not set up a fully-fledged operation of its own in Bangladesh. Rather, local groups, some of whom have previous deep ties to Bangladeshi politics, have been inspired by ISIS and declared allegiance to it. These groups have then, perhaps in communication with other groups in Bangladesh or abroad, transformed themselves with the help of non-violent networks of Islamists who are primarily active in mosques, universities, and elsewhere, turning anxious teens into terrorists who are prepared to commit unthinkable acts of brutality in the name of extremist doctrine.

But the ruling party’s clumsy and authoritarian response to recent violence and opposition protests may also be encouraging radicalization. The government has tried to highlight links between local terrorists and Pakistan, which has been much closer to the opposition parties, and under the last BNP government reportedly assisted with extensive arms smuggling. It’s hard to evaluate these reports, but credible sources suggest that the JMB has had connections to Pakistani groups that are close to the Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, which has been known in the past for its ties to various militant groups.

Faraaz, one of the victims at the Holey Bakery on July 1, was “definitely able to recite the Koran,” his brother told the press. As a result, eyewitnesses say, he was told he could leave the restaurant alive. Survivors note that he refused to leave without his two classmates, one American and one Indian, whose bodies were later found in the morgue, with wounds suggesting they had been tortured. Faraaz died protecting his friends. Around 8:00 AM Saturday morning elite commandos in armored personnel carriers finally stormed the premises and the terrorists, unlike Faraaz, tried to flee. All were killed except one, who was captured. 

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13. KERALA HC UPHOLDS THE DISMISSAL OF GIRL STUDENT FROM COLLEGE FOR LIVING TOGETHER WITH CLASSMATE [Read Order] By: LiveLaw News Network | July 16, 2016
http://www.livelaw.in/kerala-hc-upholds-dismissal-girl-student-college-living-together-classmate/

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14. REVIEW: GOVIND PANSARE HAD SOME LESSONS FOR THE LEFT, IF THEY WOULD ONLY PAY ATTENTION
by Monobina Gupta
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(The Wire - 11 July 2016)

The relative marginalisation of Pansare’s work is likely a consequence of the larger unquestioned practices that have become normal fare in communist parties today.

Govind Pansare was not among the nationally well known faces of the Communist Party of India (CPI), even though it was his political home for over six decades. Tragically, it was Pansare’s assassination in February 2015 that catapulted the CPI leader to the centre of national discourse. Prior to his murder, not many beyond Maharashtra, where he was based all his life, knew about the richness of his innovative work, his scholarship, and his organic links with the people he spent most of his time with.

Reading Pansare’s writings in the recently published book Words Matter: Writings against Silence, I wondered why his work did not get the attention it deserves during his life time, even within his own party. These diverse writings – he authored 21 books – clearly distinguish Pansare from run-of-the-mill communist leaders, many of whom despite their ordinariness, have become well known faces representing the party. His relative marginalisation seems to be a consequence of the larger unquestioned practices that have become normal fare in communist parties today.

K. Satchidanandan
Words Matter: Writings against Silence
Penguin Books, 2016

Pansare, along with M.M. Kalburgi and Narendra Dhabolkar, whose murders captured national headlines, were all rationalists. Given this, it is perhaps not surprising that religion is one arena where his distinctive mode of intellectual inquiry is on full display. In his work, the communist leader reckoned with questions like: how can communist parties – which believe in and practise atheism – reach out to vast numbers of deeply religious people? What kind of popular cultural idioms do they need to evolve that move beyond a ‘class only’ approach? These are questions that have a direct bearing on contemporary politics in India where aggressive forms of religious fundamentalism have rendered Left-Liberals quite helpless in the political sphere.

While Pansare reflected at length on the complexities of religious and political mobilisation for Left forces in the country, Left parties as a whole shunned deeper intellectual exercises to understand the politics of religion. Instead, the Left parties clung to unchanging formulations year after year, decade after decade. Consider for instance the deadening language of the section on communalism in the CPI-M’s organisation report presented at the party’s Kolkata plenum in December 2015. Para 1.187 of the document states: “Utilising the intellectuals with us and our contacts with democratic intellectuals and prominent personalities, we should set up joint platforms against communalism. We should use the intellectual resources and the research centres that we have to produce political and ideological material for the campaign against communalism.”

These words are typical of the Left’s general tendency to reduce its fight against communalism to a string of (failed) electoral strategies. The latest example of this comes from the politically bankrupt and disastrous Left-Congress alliance in the recent elections in Bengal. The language deployed by the Left to wean people away from communalism has been no different from that used by so-called secular parties like the Congress or Samajwadi Party. However, while the latter of these parties has successfully leveraged caste arithmetic in its favour, Left parties have, for too long, been slow to react on that front as well.

In his writings on religion, Pansare seems to ask more interesting questions and spell out potentially more fruitful strategies. For example, he writes: “On the one hand, we should not hesitate to explain religion in a straightforward language. We should note the historical role played by religion, and at the same time explain how the established system has used the miserable and helpless in their place.” He goes on to explain how communist parties should deconstruct religion and how it has been used by vested interest groups to acquire power and wealth. “We should not spare any effort in showing how religion has been used by the rulers to further their vested interests and explain this to the exploiters. But we should be sympathetic to those who have fallen victim to religious bigotry.”

Delving deeper into the question of communist parties’ engagement with people who are religious, Pansare cites Lenin’s response to the question of whether believers can be admitted into the party. Lenin was of the opinion that millions of workers, peasants and the poor would stand to be excluded from membership if the party shut its doors on believers. He maintained that his “party is not a debating society between believers and non-believers.” It is this deep attention to local conditions, to the intricate histories of caste and religion that appear to set Pansare apart from the most prominent faces of the Left movement today.

In contrast to what is often the Left’s dismissive attitude of religion, Pansare emphasises that “revolutionaries” need to intellectually engage with religion: “All the revolutionaries in the world have had to think about religion. They did so by putting in front of them two sections of society. One section is that of oppressors using religion to exploit. The other is that of the exploited and the poor who have taken shelter under religion with false hope.”

However, Pansare also argued that to liberate the masses from the clutches of religion, one has to analyse it in specific social contexts. The views revolutionaries have of religion, he writes, “must be based on the social conditions of the time. It may be convenient for those who wish to interpret the world to go on repeating the same views irrespective of time and space. Such a position does not help those who wish to ‘change the world.’”

In observing that “religion thus occupies a singular space as far as the scope, depth and continuity of its impact on society is concerned”, Pansare seems to suggest that mere sloganeering will not effectively challenge the increasing politicisation of religion, or wean people away from such a process. The pull of religion is perhaps stronger than most identities. It is not enough to understand religious mobilisation either in purely electoral terms or simply as a subset of questions related to class. The matter is far more complex.

Pansare therefore asks: “What are the reasons for it? No system in society survives without reason. It does not become universal unnecessarily. It does not create hegemony for no reason. There is something in religion that fulfils a social need.”

In the chapter introducing him, author and translator Uday Narkar writes that Pansare “was perhaps the only Left leader in Maharashtra who was struggling to engage with the people’s imagination.” At a time when the masses at large seem disillusioned with dogmatic party line and staid politics, getting back in touch with “the people’s imagination” – even if to critically interrogate it – could be well worth the effort.

What Left parties need right now is to revive a culture of intellectual debate – one in which grassroots leaders like Pansare (there surely are many more such invisible and restless party intellectuals away from the glare of publicity) can make a worthy contribution.  It is equally necessary for communist parties to make space for dissident opinions on critical subjects like religion and caste rather than penalise them, for the debate to lead to a genuinely different conversation.


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15. TURKEY: WHO PREVENTED THE COUP AND WHO HIT THE STREETS? – ALI ERGIN DEMIRHAN
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(sendika.org - Tarih: 17 Temmuz 2016)

The crowds in Harbiye, Taksim, Saraçhane and in front of the Istanbul Police Station on Vatan Avenue on the night of 15 July were neither the force that stopped the coup nor interested in protecting democracy

cubbeliler

There has been a claim making the rounds among government supporters and some sections of the opposition since the momentous events of 15 July: “The attempted coup of 15 July was stopped by the people exercising their right to resistance for democracy.”

This is wrong on two fronts. First, the factor that stopped the coup was not the resistance from civilians pouring onto the streets; second, the resistance of the civilians hitting the streets was not in the name of democracy.

This coup attempt was destined to failure because it failed to secure support from the United States and the European Union, proceeded without support from the General Staff and was conducted with such poor planning that it failed to exercise even a minimum amount of control over the tools of communication.

Given that Turkey’s is a NATO army, it is well-nigh impossible for the army to conduct a successful coup against the wishes of the US and EU (that is, NATO) and the top military brass.

The civilians that hit the streets against the stillborn coup were not engaged in resistance against putschists but fought as reinforcements for the police in a battle between two elements of the government, while being deployed to the front as a shield or a canary in the mines – taking their share of the bullets in the process in certain areas.

It is also important to note that a portion of these “civilians” drawn from the ranks of the supporters of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) were members of Islamist organizations close to the government that have sprouted with the wars in Syria and Iraq, as well as members of religious brotherhoods (tariqat).

Moreover, despite the direct calls of the government, the religious exploitation of mosques by the Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet) in mobilizing for the government, and the armed protection of the police, the crowds that hit the street were negligible in terms of their numbers and ability to resist. In comparison to the participants in the Gezi Park uprising, a barometer as far as the AKP is concerned, it wasn’t even in the same league.

According to the state’s own estimates, millions of people poured onto the streets during the Gezi Resistance – drawing merely on the people’s own resources in spite of oppressive state terror. Even with the most generous estimate, no more than several hundred thousand people hit the streets on the night of 15 July, even though the government, police services, Diyanet and municipalities offered all manners of encouragement, protection and support to the mobilization.

Who was on the streets of Istanbul?

We had a chance to observe the crowds on the streets from Harbiye to Taksim and from Saraçhane to the Istanbul Police Station on Vatan Avenue on the night of 15 July. On display were crowds marked by religious attire that displayed a discipline that was evident from their marching to their slogans but who were limited in number. Many in the crowds conspicuously lacked experience in mass resistance, and many appeared uncomfortable, timid and awkward in the situation.

The crowds dispersed when the clashes intensified and could only reassemble when security was re-established. The “militancy” of such crowds was confined to places in which soldiers surrendered, weapons were not fired and tanks did not roll. Such “militancy” also showcased itself in the form of lynching conscripts who had surrendered, slitting their throats and posing for pictures on the top of tanks after the danger had passed.

This crowd, which was carelessly described as “resistors for democracy” by the ruling and opposition parties during a General Assembly in parliament on 16 July, consisted of a fascist mass that sees no problem in the anti-democratic nature of the government even as it defended it against an anti-democratic coup attempt, featured not anti-coup protesters but fanatical AKP supporters and shouted slogans in favor of sharia and the return of capital punishment instead of democracy.

This crowd was one that would not insist on fighting a fight it knew it would lose, but easily descended into barbarism when victory was assured, holding a knife to the throat of those surrendering.

Who defended the Istanbul Police Station?

When we approached the Istanbul Police Station on Vatan toward 02.30 in the night, we observed that it was not police cars that had blocked the way but municipal vehicles. In a number of areas, municipalities were sending more work vehicles to form barricades than the police.

Men with religious attire were very prominent amid the crowd waiting in front of the station. Agitators continually sought to convince the crowd to stay, saying, “Our only armed force is the police; don’t leave – this is where we are for today.” Accompanying the calls of the agitators were shouts of “death to the putschist officers.” In tandem with unceasing calls from the mosques, the crowds in religious attire marched in a disciplined cortege toward the police station. The extent of the AKP’s celebration of democracy was to shout slogans in favor of shariah law against a coup that had already been doomed to failure!

Until it became clear that the coup attempt would not succeed, the civilians on the street displayed hesitation, while the police presence was below expectations. The putschist soldiers were demobilized and forced to surrender not so much because of determined resistance but because potential supporters, especially the military brass of the Turkish Armed Forces, left the insurgents isolated.

It is of critical importance to note the hesitant reaction of the police and the crowd in the face of the coup attempt from the AKP’s perspective. It should come as a surprise to no one if the police are targeted in operations in the near future. As for the crowds, they are gaining courage from stories of cheap heroism that were made possible by the defeat of the enemy.

Democratic resistance

The Erdoğan-AKP supporters that hit the street on 15 July are being held up as role models for the entire AKP grassroots with exaggerated suggestions that they displayed resistance for democracy. Leaving aside the overt images of barbarism and lynchings, most of the images published in the media purporting to show “massive resistance for democracy” were staged. We witnessed one of these staged scenes during the night in an almost empty Taksim Square.

“Soldiers shot at the ground, and one bullet ricocheted and hit us. Come and look,” one person wounded by a soldier’s bullet said. A correspondent for Habertürk immediately arrived on the scene and began to herald the ostensible massive resistance for democracy against the coup. The reporter’s first attempt was unsuccessful when a woman waving a flag behind the injured protester failed to control herself and started smiling. A second attempt failed when the injured man failed to say what the reporter wanted. On the third attempt, even though the injured man said, “The soldiers shot into the ground and then it hit us,” a number of times, the reporter continued to say, “The soldiers shot directly at you, no?” Exhausted, the injured man finally gave up and said “yes.”

We have no desire to make the violence or the coup attempt appear innocent, caricaturize the battles or trivialize the deaths. But what we witnessed was an anti-democratic coup attempt doomed to failure being faced by a government and its grassroots acting with equally anti-democratic impulses. The AKP, which called its grassroots onto the street “until the problem is solved,” is now looking to turn the incident to its advantage and force its own dictatorial project on society by presenting it as “a democratic movement that comes from the people below.”

It is necessary to expose the lie that the “15 July coup attempt was stopped by the people using their democratic right to resistance,” as well as the fascist nature of the crowds that sprang into action, to defeat the AKP’s attempts to impose a dictatorship.

Ultimately, it behoves everyone who says no to both a coup and an Islamist dictatorship to remember the third option presented at Gezi as a model for resisting for democracy.

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16. ALEKSANDRA POMIECKO ON DAVID R. MARPLES. "OUR GLORIOUS PAST": LUKASHENKA'S BELARUS AND THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR
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 David R. Marples. "Our Glorious Past": Lukashenka's Belarus and the Great Patriotic War. Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society Series. Stuttgart: ibidem Press, 2014. 400 pp. $79.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-8382-0675-2; $54.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-8382-0674-5.

Reviewed by Aleksandra Pomiecko (University of Toronto)
Published on H-War (July, 2016)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

In “Our Glorious Past”: Lukashenka’s Belarus and the Great Patriotic War, David R. Marples investigates president Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s utilization of the war for the construction of the Belarusian state and identity. Marples examines the leader’s control of the media and the proliferation of war narratives. He specifically focuses on the 1941 defensive operations, role of partisans, immortalization of Belarusian heroes, and circumstances of “victory.” The later chapters evaluate the effectiveness of the state’s molding of historical memory in relation to the public and the international community. Additionally, the work also addresses the ways in which state officials interpret and deal with alternative historical interpretations, or “historical revisionism.” Marples focuses specifically on topics promoted and addressed by the state (the Holocaust, for example, not being one of them). To illustrate these issues, he analyzes state-approved school textbooks, media articles from both regional and national outlets, and domestic and non-Belarusian scholarly work published between 2008 and 2011. Marples argues that this process of Belarusian state creation was carried out and propagated by a “paternalistic monarch,” or Lukashenka (p. 7). The state’s goal, both during the time period of study and potentially beyond, was to elevate the war years, and Belarus’s participation in the war, as a formative experience, which directly relates and contributes to contemporary Belarusian society’s identity.

Preceding the analytical portion of the work is an informative introductory chapter, which briefly outlines Lukashenka’s rise to power and the continuity of his leadership position, through the control of state institutions and constitutional alterations. According to Marples, Lukashenka has tried to sustain a particular narrative of the war to legitimize his position. To do this, he has recreated a new identity that is a direct continuation of the war and that permeates current society. The war, as Marples highlights, is used to legitimatize Lukashenka’s position as a bats’ka, or father figure, who guides the population toward a new or recreated Soviet identity. In return, the public cedes power to the president. This authority given to Lukashenka, balanced between a relationship with the public and an international body, remains sustainable through control of the constitution, media, referenda, and security forces. While the Great Patriotic War is part of this rhetoric, Marples accurately notes that the process of war commemoration preceded Lukashenka, beginning with Kirill Mazurov (1956-65) and Piotr Masherov (1965-80). The continuation of the war narrative following the collapse of the Soviet Union and into contemporary times comes with certain difficulties, one being Joseph Stalin or the Stalin years in the 1920s and 1930s, during which Belarusians were victims of mass deportations, executions, and repression. Official rhetoric omits a discussion of the Stalin years; it neither elevates nor vilifies Stalin. This intentional ambiguity demonstrates a nuanced and important delineation from previous leaders, who were either sympathetic or critical of Stalin. The introductory chapter concludes with a discussion of the state’s selective manipulation and inflation of victim casualties during the war, which it does by including Jewish victims as part of the larger Belarusian loss, yet avoiding a discussion of the Holocaust separately from Belarus’s involvement in the war.

Each chapter roughly begins with a historical background of the topic, followed by a description and assessment of school textbooks and official statements pertaining to the subject at hand. Marples’s first point of discussion centers on two specific moments during the war: September 1939 and June 1941. After providing a brief narrative of the significance of these dates in Belarusian history, the first marking the official unification of the eastern and western territories of Belarus and the second marking Belarus’s official entrance into the Great Patriotic War, he goes through some textbook interpretations of these dates. This summary is complemented by individuals’ narratives published and presented to the public by the state. Although not identical in their rhetoric over the last few years, in general, these sources propagate a story of both a heroic and a tragic beginning for Belarusian involvement in the war, one marked by bravery of its men who fought to stall invading German forces and also by heavy losses. Some regional media, as Marples acknowledges, covers the Soviet occupation or reunification of Belarus between 1939 and 1941. Although regional media is not outwardly critical of Soviet rule, it does differentiate the Belarusian and Soviet narratives. The Soviet regime does not acknowledge this period as an instrumental part of the war. Central state organs tend to praise this earlier period as one in which Belarusians were liberated from harsh Polish rule (the western territories were part of the Polish Second Republic during the interwar period). Here we can see the difference of interpretation between the peripheral and central news sources.

The second chapter focuses on the German occupational regime and looks at the way authorities, historians, and the media have treated the period between 1941 and 1944. This section covers a brief history of German rule, concentration camps on Belarusian territory, collaboration between locals and occupiers, and the Holocaust. The textbook representation of this period, as Marples notes, has been relatively consistent in the last fifteen years and has presented a narrative that demonstrates harsh rule by the occupiers and victimization of Belarusians. One of the points that, again, shows the nuance between the Belarusian and Soviet narratives of the war is that while the former acknowledges some anti-Soviet resistance on Belarusian territory, the latter perspective does not. Marples also describes some of the concentration camps in existence during the war, namely, Maly Traścianec, the 5th Regiment KL-313-SD, Azaryčy, and Kaldyčava. However, commemorative and memorial remembrance of the Holocaust exists in Belarus largely because of donations by foreign organizations and states.

The issue most visibly memorialized and popularized in Belarus is the role of the partisans, which Marples discusses in his third chapter. Although state-sanctioned historical writing and official rhetoric are ridden with praise and accolades for the partisans, the issue is not as uniform as the state portrays it to be. There are several points of contention regarding this topic, including control over the partisans; the roles of the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), NKGB (People’s Commissariat for State Security), and Communist Party; and the relationship between the partisans and local communities. Marples also appropriately separates the underground from the partisans; both groups were viewed with suspicion by the Soviets for fear that they would defect or were actually German agents. The official Belarusian perspective differentiates these two groups, elevating the partisans to a hero status, while carefully avoiding a discussion of the underground. The official line generally sees Soviet institutions and politics as having had a positive influence on partisans.

After the discussion on the partisans, Marples examines the current government’s exaltation of veteran heroes. This part of his work, as well as large parts of other sections, is filled with anecdotes, both official and unofficial, of individuals’ experiences during the war. While these personal stories are interesting, they are sometimes repetitive and take away from his analysis. The pattern seems to be the same: the state stretches the label of “hero” to incorporate both Belarusians and non-Belarusians, as long as they played some role in the “victory” or fight for Belarus. Marples also includes a brief discussion on female veterans and their role during the war and subsequent commemoration. Furthermore, education plays an instrumental role in the propagation of the state narrative, not only through its use of sanctioned textbooks but also by establishing links between youth and the partisans still living today. This pedagogical process involves both remembering the war through written history and creating dialogue between current and past generations.

Marples interprets the official narrative around liberation and victory as one that includes and omits certain historical issues that might counter the official state perspective. The latter stage of the war—the participation of Belarusians in Operation Bagration or the Red Army push westward toward Berlin in 1944—is elevated in importance. The role of Belarus in this operation is manifested through the partisans that, according to official doctrine, cleared the way for the Red Army to advance to Berlin. In official textbooks, Operation Bagration is equated with Stalingrad. Furthermore, according to such texts, Belarusians played a significant role in the taking of the German Reichstag as well as in the liberation of Poland.

The later parts of the work focus on specific historical sites and memorials, including Khatyn, the Brest Hero Fortress, and the Liniya Stalina (Stalin Line). Marples provides information on the composition and official discourse surrounding these sites and critically looks at the myths in order to deconstruct the inflated importance that the state gives them. He also exposes the lack of archival evidence incorporated in the narratives and memorialization. With each site come official commemorations and displays that climax during particular anniversary celebrations. Marples focuses on two such dates: the sixty-fifth anniversary of liberation (July 3, 1944) and the sixty-fifth anniversary of victory (May 9, 1945). Commemorative patterns and performances include books, memoirs, films, and documentaries, all of which attempt to reemphasize Belarus’s significant role in the war.

The work concludes with a discussion of what the state perceives to be “historical revisionism” and the dangers it evokes. Marples discusses some of the previously mentioned contentious topics, including the role of the NKVD and the relationship between partisans and locals. He stresses the lack and repression of scholarship that attempts to counter the official state narrative. One particular document, the 2009 Vilnius Declaration, which views the Soviet Union and Germany as equally responsible for the outbreak of the war, has been heavily criticized by the state.

One of the most important parts of the work is Marples’s incorporation of a study that assesses the reception of the state’s narrative by the public. A June 2008 survey by the Independent Institute of Social-Economic and Political Research, titled “Echo of War,” suggests that the public, youth specifically, does not particularly absorb or believe much of the exalted Belarusian narrative that the state presents. For such a state-driven narrative to be successfully propagated, there needs to be an audience that engages with it. If not enthusiastically supportive, then at the very least the audience or public may be indifferent or willing to put up with it. Because his work is essentially a study of performance and representation, ideally an analysis into the audience or reception of state doctrine would have contributed to his discussion. Unfortunately, verifiable information regarding public support and realistic views of state efforts are difficult to acquire in an official and scientific capacity. 

While Marples uses an extensive amount of source material, the work tends to focus mainly on one regional paper, Vechernyi Brest, to illustrate alternative interpretations of the war. Inclusion of other regional papers would have served to further bolster Marples’s point and, more importantly, to shed some light into regional differences in perspective within Belarus. Is there only a central versus peripheral difference or is there also a geographical divide in interpretation? Do the eastern Belarusian territories, such as Mahileŭ and Vitebsk, demonstrate differences or similarities in media and interpretation with such regions as Hrodno or Brest?

Overall, Marples is closely engaged in the investigation through his analysis of large amounts of material, as well as his personal visits to historical sites. The most constructive contribution is his careful, but appropriate, delineation of the Belarusian official state narrative from the Soviet one, or essentially how the state “belarussifies” the war narrative. As Marples explains, there is a need for a Belarusian narrative that separates itself from both the West and Russia, which at times have been both supportive and disapproving of Lukashenka. He succinctly notes that “the first, partial casualty in Lukashenka’s myth creation was the Soviet version of the war” (p. 23). The disassociation with the Soviet past is a delicate and complicated process, and as Marples demonstrates, this comes with the selection and omission of certain historical events, or murky statistical and archival sources. More interestingly, it leads to more questions about the development of Belarusian identity in the post-Soviet period, which is often superficially seen as a mere continuation of its Soviet past. As the number of partisans and participants of the Great Patriotic War dwindles, the fate of such a narrative continuing and being utilized in the future is unknown.

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17. FOLLOWING THE BREXIT VOTE, I FEAR TOLERANT BRITAIN IS LOST FOR EVER
by Gilane Tawadros
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(The Guardian - 4 July 2016)

As instances of race hate crimes increase, I wonder what happened to the open, tolerant nation that offered refuge to my family 46 years ago

As I posted my vote to remain in the EU into the ballot box, I had an overwhelming sense of teetering on the edge of a precipice. My parents were political exiles, compelled to leave President Nasser’s Egypt in 1970 when friends and neighbours were too scared to air their views in public and knocks on the door in the early hours meant imprisonment and possibly torture. My parents weighed up their options: stay in their own country surrounded by everything that was warmly familiar; or uproot their family so that their children could be free to speak their minds and determine their future?

They chose the latter. After some deliberation about where to go – the United States, Australia, Canada or Britain – they chose Britain. They loved the BBC World Service, which they considered a beacon of free speech, and were connected to Britain, as so many millions of people are, through the legacy of empire and colonialism, through language and education, and above all through a deeply held belief in the British values of tolerance, inclusion and openness.

Related: After a campaign scarred by bigotry, it’s become OK to be racist in Britain | Aditya Chakrabortty

And so, in middle age, they left behind everything they knew to embark upon a risky venture. My father, who had been an engineer and senior officer in the Egyptian air force, studied computer science and took menial jobs to support his young family. In spite of the financial struggles and the petty, mundane humiliations, my parents were convinced they had made the right decision.

After I had cast my ballot, I took the bus to Shepherd’s Bush tube station. A campaigner was distributing “vote remain” stickers to passers-by. I photographed him. A young woman standing behind me on the bus smiled: “This feels very emotional,” she said. “I’m Polish and I feel like no one wants me to be here. But who would be willing to accept the minimum wage as we do? My sister lives in Germany and is training to be a lawyer. It’s different there.”

France and Germany, I once thought, were less tolerant than the accommodating Britain. In France – where I lived for a time – you were either French or “other”; there was no middle ground, no hyphenated identity. But Britain was different. You could never belong completely but you could embrace Britishness and enjoy a hybrid, contingent form of belonging: black British, British-Egyptian, British-Asian and so on.

It wasn’t 100% British in a pure, cricket-white, cricket test sort of way, but it was British enough, and left room for the well of other cultural experiences and influences that shaped your identity. In turn, this hybrid, contingent identity enabled Britain to grow into a 21st-century nation infused with the intellectual, artistic and social influences of countless other cultures, making it richer and more interesting.

Related: Racism is spreading like arsenic in the water supply | Randeep Ramesh

When did that change? That is the question that has haunted me for the past week, since I woke last Friday morning and reached for my phone to learn the result of the EU referendum. The change did not happen overnight. It happened slowly.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the change started but it has come in small steps rather than substantial leaps. The slow souring as multiculturalism stopped being something to be celebrated, becoming instead a watchword for an ill-advised dalliance with something dangerous; the spreading view that racism and prejudice were issues for individuals after all, and not institutional and systemic as the inquiry into the botched investigation of Stephen Lawrence’s brutal murder had established. the increasing hostility towards British Muslims in all parts of British society; and the heightened fear of migrants and refugees, which reached fever pitch during the campaign. Now that reports of race hate crime are soaring, it seems undeniable that the vicious and irresponsible rhetoric of politicians and media in the days and weeks leading up to the referendum has fostered toxic sentiments.

I feel bereaved, as though I may have lost something very dear, and I’m terrified that what I have lost may be irrecoverable. Strange as it may seem, I am in mourning for St George. Born in what is now Israel to a Greek family, he was a soldier in the Roman army in Italy and he died in what would become Turkey. This is the version of Englishness I think is worth fighting for: embedded in Europe, connected to the world, not frozen and immutable. If we can’t be Europeans in a constitutional sense then now is the time to reclaim and redefine Englishness as an identity, culture and politics that is intrinsically diverse, worldly and constantly evolving.

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18. FRANCE: THE TRUTH ABOUT THE RESISTANCE
Robert O. Paxton
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(The New York Review of Books, February 25, 2016 Issue)

Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance	
by Robert Gildea
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 593 pp., $35.00

Histoire de la Résistance, 1940–1945	
by Olivier Wieviorka
Paris: Perrin, 575 pp., €25.00 (paper) (A translation by Jane Marie Todd, The French Resistance, will be published by Harvard University Press in April 2016.)

The French Resistance cuts a wide swath in the public imagination, and not only in France. Books and films have planted indelible images of derailed trains and makeshift airstrips at midnight.
Women of the National Front, a resistance organization started by members of the Communist Party in 1941, celebrating the liberation of Toulouse, August 21, 1944
Rue des Archives/Granger Collection
Women of the National Front, a resistance organization started by members of the Communist Party in 1941, celebrating the liberation of Toulouse, August 21, 1944

These images reveal only a tiny part of the fluctuating, diverse, squabbling world of the French Resistance. Encompassing its whole range of activities is a challenge. In addition to sabotage, these activities included carrying two bamboo fishing poles (deux gaules—a visual pun signifying support for Charles de Gaulle), scratching V for victory on walls, radioing intelligence to London before the Gestapo detection team could locate the signal, passing downed Allied airmen along a chain of safe houses to the Spanish frontier, printing and distributing clandestine newssheets, even organizing a “secret army.” No single structure ever brought it all together into one capitalized entity that we could call “The Resistance.” The resisters themselves had widely divergent goals. The boundaries of what constituted authentic resistance were always open to debate.

First of all, who or what was being resisted? De Gaulle and his Free French movement in London adamantly rejected the Franco-German armistice of June 1940, along with the man who negotiated it, the World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain, and his new authoritarian French state with its temporary capital at Vichy. By contrast, some of the autonomous resistance groups that sprang up inside France opposed only the Germans. The conservative army officer Henri Frenay, head of the powerful movement Combat, kept contacts within the Vichy government until April 1942. He eventually aligned himself (though fractiously) with de Gaulle. It was not rare to begin working for Vichy and then to switch sides at some point in 1942 or 1943, as did the later French president François Mitterrand. Another contingent secretly performed anti-German actions from within the regime, without ever breaking with Pétain’s authoritarian formula for remaking France. Robert Gildea leaves these Vichysto-résistants out of his Fighters in the Shadows while Olivier Wieviorka features them prominently in Histoire de la Résistance, 1940–1945.

One needs also to ask what the main purpose of resistance was. De Gaulle took a predominantly military view of it. He wanted the movements to prepare a secret underground force within France whose aid to an eventual Allied landing would be so important that France would emerge from the war as a significant power, with Free France as its undisputed ruling force. The general, who always looked ahead, was determined to prevent the German occupation from being replaced by either an American or a Soviet protectorate. But this strategy, in the judgment both of de Gaulle and of the Allies, required the “secret army” to lay low until the Allies arrived.

The Communist Party, by contrast, favored immediate action, to prepare a national revolutionary insurrection at the moment of liberation. But the Party did not come to this position right away. Between the outbreak of the war in September 1939 and the German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941, the French Communist Party was, as a result of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, a de facto ally of the Germans. Communist propaganda called for fraternization with German soldiers and for immediate peace, since it should not matter to workers whether the Germany of Hitler and the Krupps or the Britain of Churchill and the City won the capitalist duel.

This policy was immensely unpopular with the Communist rank and file, whom Vichy pursued even more vigorously than did the Nazis. The Party could later claim to have resisted Vichy from the beginning, but only some individual Communists engaged in anti-German activity in these early days; their high point was a great strike in the northern coal fields in May 1941. The Communist leaders expected in 1940 to be tolerated by the Germans, and notoriously tried to publish their newspaper L’Humanité in occupied Paris. Wieviorka, always more interested in the political story than Gildea, treats this complicated and controversial matter with authority.

The Communist Party (as distinct from some of its militants) began armed resistance on August 21, 1941, when Pierre Georges (later known as “Colonel Fabien”) assassinated the German naval cadet Alfons Moser in the Barbès-Rochechouart metro station in Paris. Other Communist activists killed senior officers in Nantes and Bordeaux soon after. The Party worked very effectively underground. It had already been declared illegal by the Third Republic after the conclusion of the Nazi–Soviet Pact in August 1939, and its militants were accustomed to operating outside the law. The Communist resistance exerted a powerful attraction on the non-Communist movements, who also wanted the gratification of tangible results. The non-Communist movements thus acquiesced in an outsized Communist role within the coordinating bodies eventually formed by the Resistance, despite the hostility of those groups to the Communists’ ultimate aims.

The main drawback to immediate action was its high cost. The Germans reacted savagely to their soldiers’ assassination. Hitler ordered the execution of fifty French hostages for every German victim. The Vichy authorities, substituting themselves for the conqueror in an effort to make their state appear more fully sovereign, chose to designate the hostages themselves. They handed over prisoners for this purpose, mostly Communists or Jews who had been sentenced for black market or other noncapital offenses. Vichy, the Resistance, and the Germans all suffered moral damage in this episode: Vichy for doing the conqueror’s dirty work, the Resistance for making attacks that brought down reprisals on innocent heads.

The German supreme commander in France, General Otto von Stülpnagel, recognizing that executing hostages only inflamed matters, shifted to the deportation of Communists and Jews, which he thought would arouse less anger in France. In February 1942 he chose to retire from military service. De Gaulle denounced the assassination of German soldiers, and it can be doubted that such killings really helped the Allied cause. But after the war the Communist Party staked out a major position in postwar commemoration by portraying itself as the “party of the 75,000 martyrs [fusillés].”

A third major issue is who the resisters were. Both authors agree that they came from every segment of French society. None of the classic criteria of age, class, opinion, or faith apply conclusively. During the year of Communist neutrality, the Resistance had a conservative nationalist tinge, starting with General de Gaulle himself. The Communist Party’s activation in summer 1941 shifted the social profile of the Resistance toward workers and intellectuals.

The next major influx came in February 1943 when Vichy instituted an obligatory labor service that sent French workers to factories in Germany. Thousands of réfractaires took refuge with resistance camps in remote forests and mountains. Wieviorka treats this familiar tale with admirably fresh scholarship. He shows that only a minority of the young men threatened by labor conscription actually joined a maquis (the word referred to the brushy vegetation of Mediterranean slopes). Further, the resistance movements never really managed to feed and shelter their new recruits, let alone shape them into a potential fighting force.

The Vichy government helped drive people into resistance by taking hostile measures against them, whether as Communists, Jews, Freemasons, or partisans of the Popular Front of 1936. So there was a push as well as a pull in resistance recruitment. Even contingency could play a role, as in Louis Malle’s disturbing film Lacombe Lucien (1974). Nevertheless the great majority of French people remained unengaged, as they coped with hunger, cold, and the absence of loved ones. So we lack any workable general theory of just what caused people to resist. We are left with personal character traits, such as force of conviction, inner-directedness, or impetuousness. According to a famous offhand remark by the Resistance leader Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, one had to be a misfit, but neither author accepts this theory. It may have helped to be independent of family or professional responsibilities, but Wieviorka shows that the proportion of married men among resisters was about average.

Foreigners had a larger part in the French Resistance than native-born resisters ever wanted to admit, an omission that both authors repair generously. Foreign resisters were often those whose bridges had all been burned. Veterans of the International Brigades who had fled from Spain in 1939 were more important than their number because of their guerrilla experience, their ideological commitment (they hoped to tackle Franco after finishing off Hitler), and the unpleasant options that Vichy France offered them—either forced repatriation or enrollment in labor battalions.

The tanks bearing Spanish names that follow immediately behind General de Gaulle in the film of his march down the Champs-Élysées on August 26, 1944, have puzzled many. They belonged to the Spanish volunteers of La Nueve, the ninth battalion of the Second French Armored Division. According to a persistent legend, they were there partly because the other battalions of the Second French Armored Division contained large numbers of African troops, and someone on Eisenhower’s staff didn’t want the victory parade to look so black. Which brings us to another category of liberation fighters—if not of classical resisters: between 50 and 60 percent of the soldiers of the new French units formed in North Africa and armed by the United States during 1943 for later action in France came from French colonies in the Maghreb and in sub-Saharan Africa.

Foreign Jewish immigrants formed an important part of the Resistance. Many young men among them, eager to fight Hitler, had joined the Foreign Legion in 1939. In 1940, however, Vichy offered only harsh options to demobilized Jewish veterans without other resources: service in labor battalions or internment. Communists among them went underground with the Main-d’Oeuvre immigrée (MOI), one of the Party’s most aggressive paramilitary groups. Most MOI fighters were caught and executed, and the Communist leadership seems not to have helped them much at the time, or recognized their contribution later. Zionists had their own organizations, such as the Armée Juive, that started with relief work and education and became radicalized as loved ones were taken away (a process repeated within many resistance movements).

Female resisters were underestimated in the first postwar summings up, but their contribution is a staple of the new Resistance scholarship. They protested at empty markets, transported messages, radios, and even weapons in the bottom of baby carriages, distributed clandestine newspapers, and sometimes participated in combat. A few (Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, Berty Albrecht) filled leadership roles. Gildea devotes a whole chapter to the accomplishments of women who resisted, while Wieviorka, always more analytical, provides some numbers and relates their engagement to wider trends toward female entry into the professions and public life.

How many authentic resisters were there? The most official number, those awarded the coveted postwar Carte de combattant volontaire de la Résistance that entitled one to veterans’ benefits (262,730 as of 2008), is too low: it includes few civil resisters and almost no women. At the other extreme, if we count those who read the approximately 1,200 clandestine newspapers, we find a broader circle of several million sympathizers willing to take some risks. If one defines authentic resistance as including some degree of illegal action, as one must, the best estimates lie between 300,000 and 500,000 active resisters. The numbers started small, of course, and grew as hope returned and as the occupation grew harsher.
An anti-German poster by P. Sainturat saying ‘Out with this Swabian Junk’ and showing a French broom, with a tricolored handle, sweeping away Nazism after the liberation of France, 1945
Rue des Archives/Granger Collection

General de Gaulle made a long and arduous effort to unify all resisters under his leadership. The movements in France, however, having arisen spontaneously, resented the pretensions of this “émigré” in London (referring to the French aristocrats who idled in Germany or England during the Terror of 1793–1794). De Gaulle needed their support in order to be able to demonstrate to the Allies—particularly the doubtful Americans—that he had sufficient popular backing in France to be the country’s legitimate postwar leader. (Roosevelt wanted to wait until the French could elect their leader.) The internal resistance movements, in turn, needed weapons and money from Free France. So they grudgingly entered a National Council of the Resistance under de Gaulle’s delegate Jean Moulin.

When the Germans captured Moulin on June 21, 1943, however, and tortured him to death, the movements reasserted themselves. De Gaulle’s authority emerged clearly only in summer 1944, when power changed hands upon the arrival of the Allied armies. Local Vichy officials yielded their posts quietly to de Gaulle’s handpicked replacements, who were well received by a public won over to the general by four years of BBC broadcasts. The Communists, surely with Stalin’s acquiescence, turned in their arms without a peep. Wieviorka gives a fuller account of these political maneuvers than Gildea.

The Allies, and especially the Americans, never come off very well in Resistance historiography. The British operated their own intelligence and sabotage networks in France in competition with the Gaullist ones. The Allied commanders had little faith in the resisters’ military potential, and never supplied as many weapons as the movements wanted. The question remains whether the Resistance might have contributed more to the liberation of France if the Allies had given them more equipment.

Roosevelt notoriously refused to recognize de Gaulle’s Free French as the legitimate government of France until after D-Day, and actively backed other French leaders such as the supreme commander of Vichy forces, Admiral François Darlan, who happened to be in North Africa when the Allies landed in November 1942; after Darlan’s assassination, Roosevelt turned to the reactionary General Henri Giraud. Gildea suggests, without evidence, that Roosevelt still wanted to deal with the Vichy leaders as late as 1944, while Wieviorka attributes Roosevelt’s actions more plausibly to realpolitik. In November 1942, notably, he needed Admiral Darlan to order Vichy armed forces to stop firing at Allied soldiers coming ashore in North Africa.

Writing the history of the Resistance poses particular problems. For a long time the survivors controlled the story, aided by the relative scarcity of documentary evidence: resisters wrote down as little as possible, and swallowed papers if apprehended. Now most of the veterans are dead, and the time of the historians has come. Monographs on individual movements and leaders have recently put the subject firmly into the hands of scholars and their sources.

These two books, the work of seasoned scholars and energetic researchers, give us at last authoritative general surveys. They approach the subject differently. Gildea has chosen, somewhat against current trends, to center his narrative upon numerous personal recollections and interviews recorded after the liberation. Despite the evident problems of memory, particularly where emotionally charged subjects are concerned, he has wanted to recapture authentic feelings. His narrative is vivid and powerful, and he has not neglected current scholarly findings. Wieviorka has included more quantitative data, more political and social analysis, and gives us generally a more comprehensive work. The two could very usefully be read together.

The ultimate question is what difference the French Resistance really made. Wieviorka considers this matter most fully. It is inescapable that most resistance actions within France failed. They resulted in the capture or death of those responsible and, even more regrettably, in harsh reprisals against nearby villagers who not infrequently took a dim view of resisters. Every attempt by the Resistance to establish control over some French territory in advance of the Allied landing was crushed by German forces, aided by the French supplementary police, the notorious Milice: the Glières plateau in the Alps and Mont Mouchet in the Massif Central, for example. The most substantial such base set up after D-Day, in the Alpine redoubt of the Vercors, was overrun by German troops and the Milice after both the Allies and de Gaulle declined to send serious reinforcements.

Some Resistance units, excited by the news of D-Day, took control of some French towns prematurely, at heavy cost. The main street of Tulle, for example, was lined with the bodies of ninety-nine resisters hanged from lampposts by returning German forces. The Resistance was never able to liberate definitively any French territory on its own except in association with Allied armies, as in Brittany in July 1944, and in the Rhône Valley after Allied forces landed on the Mediterranean coast on August 15, 1944.

Other Resistance contributions affected military outcomes more tangibly. Information supplied by resisters about the location and strength of German military units was invaluable. Sabotage could sometimes achieve better results than Allied bombing, and without civilian casualties. Resistance advocates claim that the Allies used them too little. But in some cases, as with the heavily reinforced German submarine pens on the Atlantic coast, they lacked sufficiently heavy explosives. Rescuing downed Allied airmen clearly helped. A major contribution of resisters was sabotaging roads and railroads so successfully during the Normandy landings that German reinforcements were delayed for days and sometimes weeks. The bottom line is that the Resistance did not change the war’s outcome. The Allies were going to win, whether the French Resistance helped them or not.

Comparison helps weigh the achievements of the French Resistance. Resistance movements had less military impact in France than in Yugoslavia or behind the lines in the Soviet Union, though probably more than in Italy. On a more positive note, power was transferred smoothly in France at the liberation, without the bitter conflicts that occurred in Yugoslavia, Belgium, and especially Greece. The feared civil war never took place.

Wieviorka shows that Resistance leaders had a curiously small part in postwar French political life. They adapted poorly to electoral politics. Unlike the immovable Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia, de Gaulle withdrew early from public life (temporarily, as it turned out) in January 1946. The memory of the Resistance, by contrast, continues to be reworked. On May 27, 2015, the ethnographer Germaine Tillion and de Gaulle’s niece Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz were reburied with great pomp in the Panthéon, along with Pierre Brossolette, Jean Moulin’s rival as de Gaulle’s main agent in France, and Jean Zay, a former Popular Front minister murdered by the Milice in 1944. The two doubled the number of women in that very masculine national shrine.

Quite possibly the Resistance’s principal legacy was emotional recovery from the humiliation of 1940. It “allowed us to look at a Russian, British or American soldier without blushing,” recalled the journalist and resister Roger Stéphane in the 1950s. “Never had so many men consciously run so many risks for such a small thing: a desire to bear witness. Perhaps it is absurd, but it was by such absurdities that we restored our dignity as men.”

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