SACW - 12 Jan 2017 | Pakistan: Qadri's shrine / Bangladesh: Interview with Moyukh Mahtab / Myanmar: Rohingya persecution / India: Demonetization Disaster & Crackdown on Civil society / Europe: far-right / Russia: The Passing of Alexei Yablokov & Dr Liza

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 12 Jan 2017 - No. 2923 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Pakistan: Family of assassinated Governor Taseer continues be the target of fundamentalists on grounds of blasphemy
2. Pakistan: Land grab at QAU — again | Pervez Hoodbhoy
3. Pakistan: Trade union & labour leaders speak up in defence of arrested fishermen languishing in Indian Jails
4. India & Pakistan must complete nationality verification of their prisoners in 90 days - Statement by PIPFPD
5. India: Govt funding for to push Hindu religious scripture - Ram Puniyani / ICHR Manipulating History -  Kavita Singh
6. India: Demonetization Undermines the Right to Food and the Right to Life - text of statement by the Right to Food Campaign
7. India: WSS statement on attacks against Shalini Gera and JagLag lawyers in Chattissgarh
8. India: Text of Statement by JNU Teacher’s Association Against Administrative Threat by University Administration
9. India: Homage to Anupam Mishra
10. Recent On Communalism Watch:
  -  India: Why is Indira Jaising upset with the Supreme court verdict on the Representation of People’s Act
  -  India: Literature and the curse of communalism ( Taha Kehar)
  -  Kareena-Saif's Sone Taimur
  -  India: BJP is Using Citizenship Act Amendment to Reinforce and Spread Hindutva in Assam | Hiren Gohain
  -  India: Vandalism by the pro-Maratha Sambhaji Brigade in Maharashtra
  -  India: Hindutva goons ransacked Janchetna bookshop in Ludhiana on 2 January 2017
  -  On Counter-terrorism in Bangladesh (Rudroneel Ghosh)
  -  India: Modi govt blocks out data on communal violence
  -  India: Baseless allegations against secular activists Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand
  -  India: Seminar on Kashmir and Balochistan cancelled by Calcutta Police
  -  Bangladesh: 20 Hindu idols vandalised in Gopalganj; two held
  -  India: Editorial comments in Live Mint and Times of India Against the Supreme Court ruling against canvassing for votes on grounds of religion, caste is a sign of the dangerous times we live in

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
11. Bangladesh: The Birangona beyond her wound - Interview with Moyukh Mahtab
12. Pakistan: Mumtaz Qadri's shrine: In memory of Salmaan Taseer’s assassin
13. Bangladesh Garment Factories Sack Hundreds After Pay Protests - Michael Safi and agencies in Dhaka
14. India: Editorial - Modi Sarkar, beware of tampering with the Constitution | Neelabh Mishra
15. India: It’s permanent revolution - Law does not matter, form does not matter. There will be constant mobilisation | Pratap Bhanu Mehta
16. Narendra Modi’s Crackdown on Civil Society in India | Rohini Mohan
17. Myanmar: Is Rohingya persecution caused by business interests rather than religion? | Saskia Sassen
18. Counter-terrorism in Bangladesh | Rudroneel Ghosh
19. Demanding respect for women’s rights is not xenophobia | Mrutyuanjai Mishra
20. Why are Jews, gays, and other minorities in Europe increasingly voting far-right? | Sara Miller Llana and Tamara Micner
21. Alexei Yablokov, grandfather of Russian environmentalism, dies at 83 | Charles Digges
22. Russia: The passing of Doctor Liza
23. 1917, edited by Boris Dralyuk, review — a vivid portrait of Russia’s fateful year
24. Vollmer on Hofmann, 'The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915-1952'

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1. PAKISTAN: FAMILY OF ASSASSINATED GOVERNOR TASEER CONTINUES BE THE TARGET OF FUNDAMENTALISTS ON GROUNDS OF BLASPHEMY
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http://www.sacw.net/article13077.html

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2. PAKISTAN: LAND GRAB AT QAU — AGAIN
by Pervez Hoodbhoy
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On the campus of Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU) — Pakistan’s premier public university — stands a large, ornate palace with manicured lawns and parked SUVs, protected by menacing guards and dogs. The owner could well have been some Arab sheikh from Dubai but, in fact, this is the newly constructed residence of a former chairman of the Pakistan Senate and a member of the Pakistan People’s Party. It stands among other palatial houses now sprouting over dozens of acres of captured university land
http://www.sacw.net/article13070.html

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3. PAKISTAN: TRADE UNION & LABOUR LEADERS SPEAK UP IN DEFENCE OF ARRESTED FISHERMEN LANGUISHING IN INDIAN JAILS
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Plight of fishermen of both Pakistan and India who are often arrested for violating limits of territorial waters of the two countries was highlighted at a press conference jointly addressed by representatives of the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum (PFF), National Labour Council and Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (Piler) at the Karachi Press Club on Saturday. (24 Dec 2016]
http://sacw.net/article13069.html

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4. INDIA & PAKISTAN MUST COMPLETE NATIONALITY VERIFICATION OF THEIR PRISONERS IN 90 DAYS - STATEMENT BY PIPFPD
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Statement by Pakistan - India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy on 3 December 2017
http://www.sacw.net/article13076.html

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5. INDIA: GOVT FUNDING FOR TO PUSH HINDU RELIGIOUS SCRIPTURE - Ram Puniyani / ICHR MANIPULATING HISTORY -  Kavita Singh
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INDIA: GITA IS A NOT NATIONAL BOOK, ITS HINDU SCRIPTURE!
by Ram Puniyani
The Haryana government organized Gita Festival in Kurkshetra with a budget of Rs 100 Crores. This was to celebrate the teachings of Bhagavad Gita. This state funded festival comes in the backdrop of the Modi Sarkar coming to power at the centre. Modi, in his innumerable trips abroad has been gifting Gita to the dignitaries overseas.
http://www.sacw.net/article13080.html

o o o

INDIA: ’DANCING GIRL’ AS PARVATI IS JUST ONE OF MANY BIZARRE CLAIMS IN ICHR PAPER ON HARAPPAN CIVILISATION | Kavita Singh
A paper published in the latest issue of Itihaas, the Hindi journal of the Indian Council for Historical Research, created a minor controversy
http://www.sacw.net/article13079.html

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6. INDIA: DEMONETIZATION UNDERMINES THE RIGHT TO FOOD AND THE RIGHT TO LIFE - TEXT OF STATEMENT BY THE RIGHT TO FOOD CAMPAIGN
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 The right to food campaign is dismayed by the Indian government’s reckless attempt to renew currency notes, known as "demonetization", without any serious attention to the consequences it may have for poor people. This move serves no clear purpose and is a major attack on the right to food and the right to life.
http://www.sacw.net/article13071.html

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7. INDIA: WSS STATEMENT ON ATTACKS AGAINST SHALINI GERA AND JAGLAG LAWYERS IN CHATTISSGARH
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Bastar police continue their vendetta against women human rights defenders SP Bastar threatens Adv Shalini Gera, JagLAG lawyers with false cases Clearly rattled by the mounting body of evidence of blatant violations of the rule of law and Constitutional rights under the cover of anti-Maoist operations, the Bastar police has launched a no-holds-barred attempt to silence all those who are calling them to account.
http://www.sacw.net/article13072.html

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8. INDIA: TEXT OF STATEMENT BY JNU TEACHER’S ASSOCIATION AGAINST ADMINISTRATIVE THREAT BY UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATION
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It is painful to know that despite JNUTA’s request, JNU Administration has chosen to continue with its policy of intimidation through letters to colleagues for speaking in public to the students in their own space. In total disregard of democratic practices, the moves by the Administration are aimed at discouraging colleagues from speaking against the covert and overt attempts to alter the progressive admission policy of JNU. The forced changes are not only against the principle of social justice but also in contravention of several Supreme Court Judgments. JNUTA condemns such authoritarian moves of the JNU administration.
http://www.sacw.net/article13082.html

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9. INDIA: HOMAGE TO ANUPAM MISHRA
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Tributes to the Indian environmentalist Anupam Mishra by Ramachandra Guha and by Harsh Mander
http://www.sacw.net/article13066.html

India: Video Recordings with Prominent Environmentalist Anupam Mishra on the Politics of Water
Recordings with Anupam Mishra of Gandhi Peace Foundatiion
http://www.sacw.net/article13065.html

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10. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
  -  India: Why is Indira Jaising upset with the Supreme court verdict on the Representation of People’s Act
  -  India: Literature and the curse of communalism ( Taha Kehar)
  -  Kareena-Saif's Sone Taimur
  -  India: BJP is Using Citizenship Act Amendment to Reinforce and Spread Hindutva in Assam | Hiren Gohain
  -  India: Vandalism by the pro-Maratha Sambhaji Brigade in Maharashtra
  -  India: Hindutva goons ransacked Janchetna bookshop in Ludhiana on 2 January 2017
  -  On Counter-terrorism in Bangladesh (Rudroneel Ghosh)
  -  India: Modi govt blocks out data on communal violence
  -  India: Baseless allegations against secular activists Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand
  -  India: Seminar on Kashmir and Balochistan cancelled by Calcutta Police
  -  Hindi article-Saif Kareena's Sone Taimur
  -  India: SC’s reading of the Representation of People Act could turn a large chunk of democratic mobilisation illegal (Pratap Bhanu Mehta)
  -  Bangladesh: 20 Hindu idols vandalised in Gopalganj; two held
  -  India: Editorial comments in Live Mint and Times of India Against the Supreme Court ruling against canvassing for votes on grounds of religion, caste is a sign of the dangerous times we live in

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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11. BANGLADESH: THE BIRANGONA BEYOND HER WOUND - INTERVIEW WITH MOYUKH MAHTAB
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(The Daily Star, December 16, 2016)

Merely days after the Liberation War ended in 1971, the government of the newly formed Bangladesh, in a historically unprecedented move, termed women who were victims of sexual violence during the nine months of the war as Birangonas (war heroines). This, along with the state efforts of rehabilitating these women, has meant that unlike the conventional attitude towards wartime sexual violence, the issue is not mired in silence within Bangladesh — there exists a public discourse and memory of the Birangona. However, this memory has also resulted in a portrayal of Birangonas as a generic figure, defined by the incident of the rape and disregarding how they dealt with the incident in their subsequent lives. Interested about this radical acceptance of survivors of sexual violence in her neighbouring country, Nayanika Mookherjee, now Reader in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Durham University, decided to do her PhD research on the issue in 1996. Her work, which started in 1997, and spanning almost 20 years, has resulted in The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971 (published by Duke University Press in 2015 and the South Asian version was published by Zubaan in 2016). The book, in her own words “argues that identifying raped women only through their suffering not only creates a homogenous understanding of gendered victimhood but also suggests that wartime rape is experienced in the same way by all victims.” She suggests that this makes us unable to “see how violence is folded into the everyday lives of those who were raped during the war.” 

In an interview with Moyukh Mahtab of The Daily Star during the recently ended Dhaka Lit Fest, where she was a speaker, she elaborated on what drove her to do the research, her work and the implications of it for journalists, activists and researchers who work with the history of Birangonas.


Nayanika Mookherjee

The Daily Star: Could you give us a brief overview of your research work and your book? 

Nayanika Mookherjee: The book is an ethnography, which means it is an anthropological project looking at various kinds of peoples' point of view about what I call a public memory of wartime rape during the Bangladesh war of 1971. This involved working with survivors of rape during 1971, various state and human rights activists dealing with the issue in the 1990s, as well as an exploration of the 40 years of visual and literary representation. So it's a triangulation of these three things that constitute the project itself. 

TDS: How long have you worked on the project and what did it entail?

NM: Maybe I should start with why I did the project. For me, the reason for doing this work is linked to 1992, when I was a second year undergraduate student in Kolkata. Babri Masjid happened, and there were all these rumours of inter-community rape of Hindu women by Muslim men and Muslim women by Hindu men. From a feminist sensibility, I thought about why men are killed and women are raped — why does that happen and what does it mean? 

Secondly, at a time like the 1990s, international events like those of Bosnia and Rwanda were happening. So laws about rape as a war crime were being defined; Japan was being asked for an apology. Also, a huge amount of partition literature came out in the 1990s — by the likes of Ritu Menon, Urvashi Butalia, Veena Das — which was bringing out how during the partition, there were these instances of women being subjected to what was seen as 'abductions', across communities.

The third point, which was what had happened in Bangladesh, was very notable. I had known that the government after the war had referred to these women as Birangonas, which as I have known over the years till now is an unprecedented move. Yet it is known by very few people outside Bangladesh, and even within Bangladesh, it is not particularly highlighted as something that was quite radical. This was happening as early as December 23, 1971. That's 7 days after the war that Qamaruzzaman announces that women who were raped by the Pakistani army would be called Birangonas, and when Sheikh Mujib comes back from Pakistan, on 10th January and onward, he popularises the term even more, by referring to the Birangonas as “my mothers and sisters.” It was a pretty radical position and yet I was reading constantly that 'there was complete silence about it.' To me a state declaring women as Birangonas was not silence at all, even though people might not take it well or it might have various kinds of repercussions.
"These women are carrying on with their lives. The injury of what happened is coming up in different ways, it need not be something sensational like the understanding we have of the Birangona. Otherwise we would never understand what happened to the Birangonas in terms of their experiences of the war." 

I arrived in Bangladesh in March/April 1997. The following day I came across stories of Birangonas in the newspapers having come to some felicitation ceremony. I worked out a lot of things in that one month. I was absolutely gobsmacked by the publicness of it. There was no silence, people were talking about it in different kinds of public forums. 

Then I came back in September 1997 and stayed for another year, and that was when I did my main field work. I decided that the ethical thing to do would be to follow people who had come out publicly in the newspapers. And primarily among them were four women who had come public. I stayed with them in western Bangladesh for eight months in their village. I also did a lot of work around the area, so I covered other districts in western Bangladesh. I was looking into the women, the human rights testimonies, human rights activists. During the winter and spring, I worked among the women, and when the rains started around July, I came back to Dhaka and did the archival work in Agargaon.

TDS: You use the idea of achrano (combing) as a metaphor of what these women experienced. 

NM: The metaphor of combing came to be from a comment made by an Anthropology student in Jahangirnagar University where I was giving a talk. I was looking at combing as covering, explaining a story of a woman's daughter who used to comb her mother's hair, and as a result, cover up the scar the mother had. While I was explaining that, the student pointed out how combing (achrano) also means searching. So for me combing became hiding and searching. In Bangladesh there is a public memory; so while the women are being brought out and talked about, their own personal life stories are being hidden or not put forward. 

When I started following up on women who were willing to talk about it or had come out in the public, I found that many of them wanted to talk about the process through which their testimonies had been recorded rather than about '71. Before I went to western Bangladesh, I realised that something was amiss, and these women were not very happy about how they had been reported. So I went to this place and started getting a feel for the politics and history of the area itself. I started interviewing liberation fighters to not make the women conspicuous. 

While I was doing that, one day one of the husbands of the women came over and said, “How come you are not coming and interviewing us, we are the main people for which this place is known. Why are you interviewing all these other people?” So they literally invited me over. But what is interesting is that their wives were very resistant. The husband would say "speak into the machine,” as if the machine is meant for another wider audience. But the women were definitely resistant, saying “amar kaj acche, ami korbo na, amar shomoy nai.” (I have work, I won't do it, I don't have the time.) 

And yet what the women were willing to talk about was what happened to them in the 1990s. As you know these women were being brought back and forth [to and from Dhaka to give testimonies] and they were given lots of promises which were not fulfilled, and then when they went back to their village, the villagers would be jealous, and subject them to khota (scorn). The women would say that while they were given chairs to sit in Dhaka as a sign of respect, in the village the chairs were pulled away. So they were being made more vulnerable through this honouring process. 

TDS: You make a differentiation between the words 'trauma' and 'wound'. You are more interested, not in the incident, but in their post-conflict lives. Could you explain why?

NM: I did not ask the women what happened in '71. To me what was important was what the women themselves wanted to talk about and how their lives have been after the war. As a result, what came out was how the violent experiences of these women emerged in all kinds of ways, which exist on an everyday basis, but which are not articulated in that kind of stark, 'traumatic' way. 

For example, this woman, whom I will call Shirin, is a government official. I chanced upon her. And when I said I am looking for the experiences of women in government documents she scolded me by saying: “You think you will find experiences of birangonas, that too in government documents?” Then she started to talk about her first husband: they had been childhood sweethearts. During the war, her husband came to visit her, and soon after he came, there was a banging on the door. They realise he has been followed. So he asks her to go away and hide. He gets killed, and she is a witness. But then she gets found. 

At this point Shirin is playing with the paperweight on her desk. And then she continues by saying:  because of what happened to her during the war, she had to marry her cousin, for whom she says she has no respect, as she loves her first husband. Her second husband knows she loves her first husband more, so when she is praying, she is thinking about him and her present husband gets jealous. She has to keep the photograph of the first husband locked away in her office cupboard. For Shirin, her pain lies in not being able to talk about her first husband in her everydayness. And this is a direct result of what happened to her during the war. 

So that's why it's important for us to work out post-conflict accounts, precisely to know how this violent experience had an effect on the women's subsequent lives. This is where the wound comes in. The Birangona is considered in Bangladesh as either being physically 'abnormal' or someone who has been ostracised from their family or community. I am sure these have happened, but that was not the only way Bangladeshi families dealt with these women. 
"Then there are some nice stories too. One of the social workers said that at that time, many of the women did not want to get married. They were asking the state to give them the jobs they were promised. They were making the state be the state, they were demanding it of the state. Amake chakri den, ami keno biye korbo. Amar jokhon iccha hobe, pore biye korbo. (Give me a job. Why should I marry? I will marry later, when I want to.)"

I hardly use the word trauma because it has become this transnational word, which is supposed to stand in for something, like flashbacks. These women are carrying on with their lives. The injury of what happened is coming up in different ways, it need not be something sensational like the understanding we have of the Birangona. Otherwise we would never understand what happened to the Birangonas in terms of their experiences of the war. 

TDS: The nationalist narrative of 1971 has resulted in a construct of a generic, traumatised Birangona. How does this tie up with the name of your book, The Spectral Wound?

NM: I call the book Spectral Wound because the idea links up with the idea of combing. It's a similar logic. I already explained why wound. She is either understood through her dishevelled hair, bleak look, muted sobs. Or the Birangona is assumed to be someone who is outside family structures, zones of nurturing. 

Spectral Wound links up with the idea of the hiding and the searching. I take it from Jacque Derrida's idea of the Revenant — how something is present at the very moment of being made to be absent at the same time. The Birangona is made to be present while at the same time the complexities of her life story are completely removed or taken away. I will give you an example.

There was an enactment of an oral history project. The story is that this woman goes home because her two brothers have died from cholera. The Pakistani army finds her and rapes her. Her husband comes over from another village. She is very ill for a year, and her husband looks after her, takes her to the kobirej daktar. He is a kind sensitive man, and they are still together today. When this was re-enacted, it was portrayed that the woman lives at her mother's house, that her husband did not take her back and she has no contact with him. 

And today, the problem for her — she is the second wife of the husband — is with the first wife, who would always raise the issue that her mother had to ask the husband to take her back. A khota emerges in the form of a competition between the co-wives in this instance. 

In the enactment she has been made to be present with the horrors of the war, but immediately the complexities of being the second wife, that the husband had looked after her, have been completely taken out. She has been frozen, made to be present as a figure who is steeped in the horror of the war only. 

And this has happened many times as I show in the book. Changing stories to make it horrific. I would say, why not keep the actual story so people understand the way in which people are actually living their lives and not think of her as something abnormal.
Advertisement of Agrani Bank that reads 'Violated Shyamoli and her mute sobs want to say, never again, no more genocide', Dainik Bangla, Genocide Issue, December 1972. Photo courtesy: Nayanika Mookherjee

TDS: You also talk about literary and film representations of Birangonas in the post-war period. Do you see any change today?

NM: In the past literary and film representations the Birangona is predominantly a horrific figure. All Birangonas usually commit suicide or are made to exit the scene. The liberation fighters come in and protect her and save her. But there has been a huge change in the representation from 2000 onwards. I talked about that in the last chapter of the book. There's Shaheen Akhtar's Talaash, Yasmin Kabir's Aro Ek Shadhinota, and Tareq and Catherine Masud's Women and War, which go beyond the account of the Birangona as someone who is only horrific or 'abnormal.' 

TDS: What are the ethical concerns that researchers, activists or journalists working with Birangonas should be mindful of?

NM: The main thing thing to give to this work is time. A lot of the work that happened in the 90s were very quick work. People should go properly and not be like "oh how did you feel" and in 10 minutes catch the bus back to Dhaka.

With time, there's the need to contextualise what happened locally. You need to ask other people their experiences so that you don't make the Birangona's interview conspicuous. So that others don't feel left out, and a jealousy economy arises which results in scorn for the Birangona. 

The visibility that something is happening to them is what generates problems. So not making quick visits, not making them conspicuous, talking to other people, researching the local area. It is also important to set up a relationship with them.

For me what was important was not asking them what happened, letting them talk about what they wanted to speak about. There are other ethical concerns one has. I constantly wondered if I am also doing the same thing that I am arguing against and hence constantly tried to ensure that I was being ethical.

I met this man who told me that his mother was a Birangona and that she wanted to talk to me. I went with him, and asked his mother would she want to talk about this. She gets completely angry with me, she asks me to leave. She says if she talks about her account she will be pulled onto a stage, and her younger son won't give her bhaat. So it turns out the older son is jobless, and the mother is looked after by her younger son. She is looking out for her sustenance and talking about her rape might bring out problems for her. One can say to women: you shouldn't be thinking like this, everyone should be talking about this but only if they want to. Women also need to have the right to be silent, if that is what they wish as I have shown in my book.  Overall we should do a risk analysis, before we work with birangonas.
Newspaper clippings from 22nd December reporting that Home Minister Qamaruzzaman had declared from Mujibnagar that all women subjected to 'inhumane torture' by the Pakistan forces in the nine months of the war will be given the status of Birangonas.

TDS: How do you view the post-71 efforts of rehabilitation and adoption programmes, where the new state played a controlling role over the experiences and body of the Birangonas?

NM: What needs to be understood is, in the words of a social worker I closely worked with, Maleka Khan: “What were we to do? There were so many women. We had to bring them back to the framework of society.” Yes, there was appropriation, but it was also very revolutionary. 

It was after the war, everything was chaotic. Things needed to get back on track. I am currently doing this work on the adults who were adopted out of Bangladesh. So there's a British couple I have interviewed. The mother of the child who was adopted by them wanted to see the parents. She was a young, teenage mother, who said she needed to get on with life. But she wanted to see who this couple was. So at one level, women were happy to be able to get on with their lives. At another level, they did not want to look at the child at all because of its origin. At another level, as social workers would say, 'they had to protect women from the emotions of motherhood.' It's such a stark statement. We have to protect women from their own emotions of motherhood. You have to make them detached from their children so they can let them go. 

In the newspapers in the early 70s, there was quite a lot about these children. While the state was willing to rehabilitate the women because of the sheer numbers of the women itself, it was very clear that the children had to be 'sent away', adopted away from the country. 

There's one story told by a social worker, Maleka Khan about how they changed the age of women so that they could get jobs. There was this batch of nine women who got jobs, and today they are officially approaching retirement. These women are now coming back to the social worker and saying, “Remember you changed our age. You increased it. We are not at our retirement age yet, we have a few more years to work.”

So there are these different ways that people are negotiating their history. So we need to think of the Birangonas not as a horrific wound and by not negating their complex life experiences. Instead we need to understand how their violence of wartime rape is folded in innumerable ways in the minutiae of their everyday life.

All photos, courtesy of Nayanika Mookherjee

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12. PAKISTAN: MUMTAZ QADRI'S SHRINE: IN MEMORY OF SALMAAN TASEER’S ASSASSIN
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(Dawn - Dec 27, 2016)

On the outskirts of Islamabad, Mumtaz Qadri’s shrine attracts visitors from far and wide
Adil Pasha

For a city of 1.6 million people, Islamabad has 827 mosques, some of which come with madrassahs and shrines of a varying degree of religious and political importance. “Islamabad the beautiful” is getting a new addition to this collection – the grave-turned-shrine of Mumtaz Qadri, the man who brutally gunned down then Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer in 2011.

In the early hours of the morning I am headed to Bhara Kahu, a small town on the outskirts of Islamabad which is Qadri’s ancestral village.

Driving up through Bhara Kahu, the road is dusty and disheveled. Approximately 25 minutes from Kohsar Market, where Taseer was tragically gunned down, there is an alarming array of pro-Qadri slogans etched onto walls of this serene locality. A sharp left turn off the main road takes you straight to the compound where the killer is buried.

Despite being under-construction, it is occupied even at 9AM on a Saturday by at least a dozen men. The attendees appear relaxed, perched next to his rose petal-covered grave. There is a shop outside the shrine that sells flowers and flaunts a meek collection of photographs of the assassin. At the counter in the shop, lies a note. It reads, “Donate tee iron, bricks, cement, grinded stone or cash and earn yourself a place in the eternal heaven.”
On the first day after his funeral, Rs80 million came in the form of donations

Qadri’s own house is not far from the shrine. “Quite often, his son makes an appearance and sings naats,” says Bilal, a by-stander at the shop. His reverence is disturbing.

Adorned in rose petals, the assassin’s grave is a step lower than the cement structure being erected around it.

“To pray at his grave is a guaranteed way to have it answered, for Qadri has earned a place at the side of the Prophet (PBUH) through his sacrifice,” he added, as we walked through the courtyard into the shrine.

Bilal’s belief is linked to the miracle of intercession granted to saints (awliya) in the popular imagination of the subcontinent. It is what makes going to their mausoleums (ziyarat) such a widespread phenomenon.

Conceived by his father and other close relatives, the 'Mumtaz Qadri Shaheed Foundation' supervises the construction of the shrine, which is still in its infancy. It is said that on the first day after his funeral, Rs80 million came in the form of donations, with a steady stream continuing since. Visitors who give donations at the desk beside the shrine, where the elders are seated, are given a coloured receipt to keep for record.
Memorabilia from the 'shrine'.

It is chilling; the sense that Qadri’s shrine is becoming more than a place of burial to some. That it is believed to be a haven for those who subscribe to the ideology that lead to the governor’s murder.

It has hardly been a year since his execution yet the process of his canonisation is utterly complete. While the outcry against his trial and execution and the subsequent construction of this shrine might bewilder some of us, in the hearts and minds of his sympathisers Qadri’s saintly status is beyond question.

Mehmood Khan, indistinguishably plain in attire, is one of dozens who had come to pay their respect. He proudly claims, “I was lucky to be standing in the first row of the [Qadri's] funeral, as cars had blocked the roads for miles around. I even have a jar of dirt from his grave, which I keep safe in my house.”
Mumtaz Qadri's grave.

“It gets much busier towards evening, when people who come from places like Faisalabad or Gujranwala arrive,” Mehmood adds.

Already, the stories circulating around the shrine are acquiring an air of myth. The legacy of Qadri, a man who was buried a convicted murderer, will survive. As things stand, it will get more deeply entrenched in the cultural kaleidoscope that is Pakistan. It is a mirror to a dark reality; a sign of the direction society can choose despite the law of the land.

Photographs by the author.

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13. BANGLADESH GARMENT FACTORIES SACK HUNDREDS AFTER PAY PROTESTS
Michael Safi and agencies in Dhaka
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(The Guardian - 27 December 2016)

Dozens have been arrested amid clashes with police as impoverished workers demand a trebling of pay

At least 1,500 workers have been sacked from Bangladesh garment factories after protests forced a week-long shutdown at dozens of sites supplying top European and American brands.
Tens of thousands of workers walked out of factories this month in the manufacturing hub of Ashulia which make clothes for top western brands such as Gap, Zara and H&M, prompting concerns over supply during the holiday season.
The protests were sparked by the sacking of 121 workers, but soon evolved into a demand for the trebling of workers’ pay from the current monthly minimum of 5,300 taka (£54).
More than 50 factories were closed last week to try to contain the protests, which escalated after police fired rubber bullets that injured 10 demonstrators, according to labour leader Taslima Akhter.
Police have branded the protests illegal and said they had arrested 30 workers including seven union leaders, as well as a television reporter covering the unrest.

On Tuesday, they said factory owners had sacked around 1,500 workers and resumed operations.
“All the factories have resumed their operations. Some 90% of the workers have joined work,” said Nur Nabi, assistant superintendent of police.
“Around 1,500 workers have been sacked [by the owners]. The owners have filed five cases against the unruly workers,” he told AFP.
Many of the sacked workers discovered their fate only after arriving at work to see a list of those affected posted on factory gates.
The monthly minimum wage for Bangladeshi textile workers was raised in 2013 after the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex which killed 1,134 people. It triggered massive protests and international scrutiny of the industry.
But it remains one of the lowest wages in the world, less than one-fifth of what some campaigners estimate to be the country’s living wage.

The Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation said the number of sacked workers was actually far higher, about 3,500, with dozens more labour organisers forced into hiding.
The head of the federation, Babul Akhter, said authorities had shut down the protests by using a controversial wartime-era law intended to deal with threats to state security.
“They used [the] Special Powers Act to detain union leaders and workers,” he said. “Up to 3,500 workers have been sacked and 50 leaders have gone into hiding.”
The Ashulia police chief said only those involved in violent protests had been arrested.
“When a worker is suspended or sacked by a factory owner, they don’t easily get a job again,” Taslima Akhter said.
“The owners make a list of those workers and distribute their names and photos close to the particular factory. They never get jobs again in that area.”

She said the 5,300 taka workers were paid each month was supposed to cover healthcare, transport, rent and food. But the wage had not increased since 2013 and was “not enough to survive on”.
“If workers need to rent a room, they have to pay between 2,500 and 4,500 taka,” she said. “And the price of daily products is very high. If they want to go to a good doctor, they also have to pay more.”
Shawkat Ali, a worker at the Rose Dresses factory in Ashulia, was among those who lost his job. He said he needed a pay increase because so much of his wage each month was spent on rent.
“I can’t buy food with 1,500 Bangladeshi taka each month,” he said. “I am ill, but I can’t buy medicine.”
He estimated around 250 workers had been sacked from his factory and another 13 were facing criminal charges.

Taslima Akhter said workers had returned to their shifts for the moment, and that labour leaders were trying to free those arrested.
“Factory owners and the government have tried to stop these protests by force, by police … and by sacking workers,” she said.
“The situation is not good, workers are living in fear, but workers’ organisations will keep protesting and demanding the unconditional release of arrested leaders and workers.”
On Friday, Nazmul Huda, a TV journalist covering the demonstrations was also arrested for allegedly “spread[ing] false and provocative news ”, Indian media reported.
The protests were the latest blow to the impoverished country’s $30bn garment industry after a series of attacks on foreigners and religious minorities in Bangladesh.
Garment manufacturing makes up 80% of Bangladesh’s exports and a prolonged interruption would have a major impact on the economy.
Bangladesh’s 4,500 garment factories have a woeful history of poor pay and conditions for their four million workers, and protests occur frequently.
The Rana Plaza tragedy triggered international outrage, forcing US and European clothing brands to improve deplorable safety conditions at their supplier factories.

Mushfique Wadud contributed to this report

o o o

SEE ALSO: 
Police and fear stalk the streets of Dhaka as clothes workers fight for more than £54 a month | Michael Safi with Mushfique Wadud and Syed Tashfin Chowdhury
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/08/bangladesh-garment-workers-factories-industrial-action

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14. INDIA: EDITORIAL - MODI SARKAR, BEWARE OF TAMPERING WITH THE CONSTITUTION
by Neelabh Mishra
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(National Herald, Dec 29th 2016)

In the din of the recently concluded winter session of Parliament caused by the ill-advised demonetisation decision, a serpent more sinister for our republic lurked hidden from the public eye

In the din and disruption of the recently concluded Winter Session of Parliament, caused by the government’s ill-advised demonetisation decision, a serpent more sinister for our republic lurked hidden from the public eye and media glare. In one of the brief interludes of business amidst the disrupted session, an insidious question was planted in the Rajya Sabha on December 2, 2016—starred question No. 185 by BJP MP Dilipbhai Pandya of Gujarat, regarding ‘Review of the Constitution’. The question addressed to the Minister of Law and Justice had three points:

    The status of the effort made so far to review the Constitution.
    Whether the constant increase in the number of bills being moved to amend the Constitution indicates the need for such a review; and
    Whether any person/group is studying this matter and advising the ministry and if so the details thereof?

Starred question No. 185 by MP Dilipbhai Pandya of Gujarat, regarding ‘Review of the Constitution’ submitted in the Rajya Sabha on December 2, 2016

The answer of the government was ominous and necessitates eternal vigilance on the part of the citizens who value our hard-won liberty, democracy, pluralism and strong republican institutions as envisioned by our Constitution—a fruit of careful deliberation and debate by nation builders imbued with the ideals of our freedom movement and the best of human civilisational values.

The government’s reply to Pandya’s question was laid as a statement on the table of the House by Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Minister for Law and Justice, and Electronics and Information Technology. In its written reply tabled in the Parliament, the Government of India, ominously finds our Constitution inadequate and subject to continuous review not by any august Constituent Assembly duly and democratically constituted by the people of India, with whom collectively the sovereignty of this democratic republic reside, but by ministries and departments that derive their validity and existence from the very Constitution that they seek to review. And they claim to do so on the recommendations of a Constitutional Review Commission—the Venkatachaliah Commission—dubiously constituted by a fiat of the previous NDA government without even the sanction of the then elected Parliament.

In response to the first point of Pandya’s question, the government statement says ‘...The Commission submitted its report on 31st March 2002. Action on the recommendations made in the report lies with the various Ministries/Departments of the Government of India which are administratively concerned with the subject matter of the recommendations….’ The government reply further says that the copies of the report had been forwarded to these ministries/departments to examine and process the recommendations.

From the government’s written reply tabled in the Parliament to Pandya’s question

In reply to the other two points in the question, the government statement says, ‘Review of the Constitution of India, with a view to bring them in harmony with the current economic, social and political situation in the country, is a continuous process normally done by Central Ministries/Departments as part of their business.’

    It’s the government of the day that derives its legitimacy in a democratic republic from the Constitution that the people of the country bring into being, rather than the other way round. It’s the government that is accountable to the Constitution and the people continuously, and not the other way round

The government’s callousness about the Constitution as a document enshrining the core of our democracy, republicanism and the collective sovereign will of the Indian people is reflected in its reply to the parliamentary question. It reduces the Constitution of India to a mere set of administrative procedures and rules that must be and are subject to constant review by administrative units and committees set up by the government of the day, rather than by the collective will of the people in exercise of their sovereignty and democratic rights. And mind you, it’s not talking about mere amendments that every Constitution of the world undergoes from time to time, but talking of a comprehensive constitutional review, a euphemism for a new Constitution.

It’s the government of the day that derives its legitimacy in a democratic republic from the Constitution that the people of the country bring into being, rather than the other way round. It’s the government that is accountable to the Constitution and the people continuously, and not the other way round. Circa 2017 should be the year when the people of this country should confront the government over its designs on India’s Constitution and democracy. Democracy is just not about getting a majority to rule and do as you like, irrespective of accountability to the core of democratic and republican values.

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15. INDIA: IT’S PERMANENT REVOLUTION - LAW DOES NOT MATTER, FORM DOES NOT MATTER. THERE WILL BE CONSTANT MOBILISATION
by Pratap Bhanu Mehta
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(The Indian Express, November 26, 2016)

The government has stepped on the escalator of seemingly radical disruption; it can only now continue on that path. (File Photo)

Just as a matter of pure political analysis, it has to be said that we are now entering the politics of “permanent revolution.” Gambling on demonetisation commits the government, one way or the other, to come up with new and radical moves with increasing frequency. If demonetisation fails, the government will have to come up with something equally radical to make up for this loss. If by some chance demonetisation is considered a partial success, it will whet the appetite for more gambling. Either way, expect new googlies from the government with increasing frequency, whether it is on expenditure or the taxation side or institutional reform proposals. The government has stepped on the escalator of seemingly radical disruption; it can only now continue on that path. Whether it is for good or for ill, we shall see.

These disruptions will have more than passing association with the language of permanent revolution. For Marx, permanent revolution was the thought that the working class pursues its interest without compromise. Except now the state will wear the mantle of a discourse where it will present itself above compromise. And the only way to establish this is disruption, often for the sake of it. This permanent revolution of the state will also have a Trotskyist feel to it. For Trotsky, permanent revolution was about force feeding history. It was about how one could create a socialist revolution where conditions for it did not pre-exist. Similarly, the nature of proposals: Cashless economy, for instance, will be about force feeding the march of history. The whole point of this form of politics is to immobilise those pedantic social questions about whether the preconditions exist for success.

Like all revolutionary talk, this doctrine will have nothing but contempt for all bourgeois institutional forms. The fact that there is no governing legislative or statutory provision for rationing money (as opposed to demonetisation of particular series), will not give anyone pause. There is no ordinance, no declaration of a financial emergency. That the RBI’s credibility has been severely decimated will not matter much. It should be truly alarming that a secretary to the government of India, by fiat, can stand up every morning and issue more than a hundred and fifty directives regarding your own money. In the history of independent India, we have not seen this arbitrary a use of state power when it comes to the sanctity of money. The promise on your note “I promise to pay the bearer a sum of X rupees” did not say “only if you keep it in a bank account or only if you withdraw a certain amount a day or spend it in a certain way or in the case of marriage withdrawals give it only to people who you can prove do not have a bank account.” Whatever your substantive moves on demonetisation, the fact that you have rationing without accountability, seems not to bother us. It is not an infringement of liberty or exercise of mad discretion. In the age of permanent revolution, law does not matter, form does not matter. Even the sovereign’s breaking of a promise does not matter; after all, if a sovereign promises, he can also withdraw the promise.

Like permanent revolution, there will be constant switch and bait. So, very subtly, the discourse from government is now shifting from unearthing black money to the fantasy of a cashless economy. The language of permanent revolution works by a constant mobilisation. First, it is mobilisation against anti-nationals. Then we had a new move: A seeming revolution in our Pakistan policy, a claim to a new form of surgical strikes. Never mind the fact that it has done nothing to diminish cross-border shelling and killing of both military personnel and civilians. But the revolution moves on to the next big act of total mobilisation. And there will be more to come. The opposition will be foolish to assume that we are now in an era of conventional politics, whether in form or substance. In fact, one of the challenges of permanent revolution is that combating it by the standard repertoire of arguments — the preconditions do not exist, the law might not permit it — comes across as nothing but an apology for the status quo. That is the magical alchemy that permanent revolution produces.

There will be a new moral language: Permanent revolution is always Janus-faced about the virtues of the people. On the one hand, the people can overcome the absence of initial conditions for a revolution. On the other hand, those who don’t will be enemies of the revolution, and therefore inherently suspect. We cannot decide whether the act of lining up in queues is an act of civic commitment on the part of citizens, or does it reflect widespread complicity and cheating. The revolution started out by declaring the people as virtuous; government directives then ended up declaring them cheats. Permanent revolution begins by appealing to virtue, it ends up using state power.

You hope to god some of this succeeds. For, permanent revolution, as it fails, is usually followed by war of some kind, the last switch and bait. We are a long way from that. But Marx’s warning may not be inappropriate. In the Holy Family he wrote of Napoleon, “Yet at the same time he still regarded the state as an end in itself and civil life only as a treasurer and his subordinate which must have no will of its own. He perfected the terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution. He fed the egoism of the French nation to complete satiety but demanded also the sacrifice of bourgeois business, enjoyments, wealth, etc whenever this was required by the political aim of conquest. If he despotically suppressed the liberalism of bourgeois society — the political idealism of its daily practice — he showed no more consideration for its essential material interests, trade and industry, whenever they conflicted with his political interests. His scorn of industrial hommes d’affaires was the complement to his scorn of ideologists. In his home policy, too, he combated bourgeois society as the opponent of the state which in his own person he still held to be an absolute aim in itself.”

So far we have only gone as far as declaring that the prime minister can even pronounce on what public opinion is, on his own app, by his own methodology. But soon the drumbeat of mobilisation will demand more. Uma Bharti is quoted as saying that Modi is fulfilling Marx’s ideas. Perhaps there’s more truth in that characterisation than we realised.

The writer is president, CPR Delhi and contributing editor, ‘The Indian Express’

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16. NARENDRA MODI’S CRACKDOWN ON CIVIL SOCIETY IN INDIA
by Rohini Mohan
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The New York Times - January 9, 2017

In August, supporters taking a pledge not to move or skin dead cattle during the Dalit Asmita Yatra, a march from Ahmedabad to the town of Una to protest an attack on members of the Dalit community there. Credit Sam Panthaky/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

BANGALORE, India — Among their common traits, illiberal strongmen share a virulent mistrust of civil society. From Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, illiberal governments regularly use imprisonment, threats and nationalist language to repress nongovernmental organizations. Here in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is going after their money.

The Lawyers Collective, an advocacy group in New Delhi run by the prominent lawyers Indira Jaising and Anand Grover, has for three decades provided legal assistance to women, nonunion workers, activists and other marginalized groups, often without charge. In December, the Modi government barred it from receiving foreign grants. The political reasons were obvious: The Collective had represented critics of Mr. Modi’s sectarian record and environmental vision.

Under Indian law, nongovernmental groups that seek foreign donations have to register under the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act, which prohibits the use of overseas funds for “activities detrimental to the national interest.” Although accountability in the nongovernmental sector is necessary to control malpractice, the foreign funding law is better known as a tool of political retribution than transparent auditing.

It’s not just the Collective that has been punished. The Home Affairs Ministry recently revoked the licenses of around 10,000 other nongovernmental organizations. Even groups whose funding licenses were renewed are worried about the future. “It is activism on thinning ice from now on,” an education activist told me.

The funding law is rooted in Cold War fears about foreign interference in domestic politics. In 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi raised the specter of the “foreign hand,” suspended civil liberties, arrested political opponents, and censored the press for an almost two-year dictatorial stretch known as the Emergency.

Mrs. Gandhi, a socialist who leaned toward the Soviet Union, proposed the foreign funding law as a deterrent to political meddling. During a 1976 debate in the Indian Parliament on the law, the C.I.A. was mentioned dozens of times as lawmakers expressed outrage over “American bossism” and the United States’ role in the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government in Chile.

The new law prohibited political parties, the news media and organizations “of a political nature” from receiving foreign contributions. Social, religious and educational organizations with foreign donors were required to obtain a permit.

India has moved away from the paranoid 1970s to a liberalized economy and is embracing the United States and global financial institutions. But the foreign funding law remains a handy weapon whose vague vocabulary (“public interest” and “national interest”) gives the state immense discretionary powers against critics.

In 2010, the Congress Party government made the law more stringent: it now requires licenses to be renewed every five years, and allows the state to suspend permits and freeze groups’ accounts for 180 days during any investigation. The Congress government used the law to pressure civil society groups protesting corruption and a nuclear power plant .
Photo
Human rights activist Teesta Setalvad, center, talks with survivors of the 2002 Gujarat riots for which she has campaigned to hold Mr. Modi criminally responsible. Credit Manpreet Romana for The New York Times

Mr. Modi’s government has been even more openly hostile to civil society groups. It repeatedly denounces human rights and environmental activism as “anti-national” — a phrase that carries connotations of treason. The patriotic rage is a mask for a more pedestrian motive: punishing pesky critics. In 2016, what is normally a routine license renewal process was used to punish groups that have been critical of Mr. Modi or his policies.

The Lawyers Collective has been prominent among such groups. In 2015, Priya Pillai, a campaigner from Greenpeace India, was traveling to London to testify in the British Parliament about coal mining in central Indian forests by Essar Energy, a corporation registered in Britain. Federal officers pulled Ms. Pillai off her flight, arguing that her deposition would have hurt India’s “national interest.” Ms. Pillai went to court; the Lawyers Collective represented her.

The Collective also represented Teesta Setalvad, who has been campaigning for justice for the victims of sectarian riots in Gujarat in 2002, when Mr. Modi was the chief minister of the state. Ms. Setalvad has sought to put Mr. Modi and other Hindu nationalist politicians on trial for allegedly overseeing or participating in the violence. After Mr. Modi’s elevation to national office, Ms. Setalvad was accused of stealing donations meant for riot victims. In July, her home in Mumbai was raided by federal agents, and a few months later, Ms. Setalvad’s organizations lost their foreign funding licenses.

Since Mr. Modi rose to power, emboldened hard-line Hindu activists have assaulted cow traders and people suspected of eating beef, claiming to defend Hindu beliefs. In July, vigilantes stripped and flogged four Dalit, or lower-caste, men in Gujarat for skinning a cow. Many Dalits earn their livelihood from skinning dead animals and selling their hides to leather traders.

The assault prompted protests by Dalits and damaged Mr. Modi’s image among the group, about a sixth of the country’s population. A Dalit rights organization, Navsarjan Trust, played a leading role in the protests. On Dec. 15, the federal government canceled the foreign funding license of the Trust. Indian newspapers quoted unnamed officials claiming that intelligence agencies have described seven civil society groups, including the Trust, as “working against public interest” and painting the Modi government as anti-Dalit abroad.

Some of these groups are seeking redress in Indian courts, which have largely been fair. But legal battles exact a cost: With bank accounts frozen for months during investigations, bills for rent, electricity and lawyers mount. People’s Watch, a human rights group, was unable to pay salaries for 23 months. Many Greenpeace India employees took pay cuts in 2014. As court duels drag on, campaigns lag, research comes to a standstill and years of community mobilization dissipate.

Yet neither Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party nor the Congress Party has had any qualms about accepting campaign funding from foreign businesses. In May 2014, a New Delhi court held both the B.J.P. and the Congress Party guilty of receiving donations from a London-listed company in violation of the foreign funding law.

Mr. Modi’s government found a way of legally transforming its donors from foreign companies to Indian ones. It amended the law to change the definition of a foreign business, retroactively making a wider range of companies permissible campaign donors. While the civil society groups working with the poorest Indians are being choked, India’s political parties found many more avenues to receive more money.

Civil society groups do try hard to raise funds within the country, but Indian philanthropists remain tightfisted when it comes to issues like land or labor rights, health care access, quality of education, or resource exploitation by corporations.

“Our rich guys will feed poor kids but won’t question governments,” a fund-raising manager in New Delhi explained.

By yanking foreign funding licenses, the Indian government is doing just what it accuses civil society organizations of: working against public interest.

Rohini Mohan is the author of “The Seasons of Trouble: Life Amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War.”

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17. MYANMAR: IS ROHINGYA PERSECUTION CAUSED BY BUSINESS INTERESTS RATHER THAN RELIGION?
BY SASKIA SASSEN
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(The Guardian - 4 January 2017)

Both Buddhist and Muslim smallholders have been victims of corporate land grabs in Myanmar. Is the focus on religion just a distraction?

In the last four years Myanmar’s Rohingya, a centuries-old Muslim minority group, have been subjected to sharply escalating persecution by the Myanmar army, and by a particular sector of extreme nationalist Buddhist monks.
Myanmar to investigate video of police beating Rohingya villagers

A brutal attack marking a new level of violence (pdf) against the Rohingya occurred in 2012 and led to the flight of thousands to other countries. More recently, military forces entered one of the rural areas occupied by the Rohingya. They destroyed at least 1,500 buildings and shot unarmed men, women and children dead. Earlier this week a video emerged showing villagers sitting on the ground with their arms over their heads, as soldiers appear to beat one of the men.

The world’s coverage of these events has focused entirely on the religious/ethnic aspect, characterising them as religious persecution. Human Rights Watch described the anti-Rohingya violence as amounting to “crimes against humanity,” carried out as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Malaysia’s foreign minister described the Myanmar government’s actions as ethnic cleansing and called on them to stop the practice, leading in turn to a strong response from Myanmar’s government. John McKissick, head of the UN refugee agency, said the Myanmar government was carrying out ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people.

But my research leads me to argue that religion and ethnicity might be only part of what explains this forced displacement.

The past two decades have seen a massive worldwide rise of corporate acquisitions of land for mining, timber, agriculture and water. In the case of Myanmar, the military have been grabbing vast stretches of land (pdf) from smallholders since the 1990s, without compensation, but with threats if they try to fight back. This land grabbing has continued across the decades but has expanded enormously in the last few years. At the time of the 2012 attacks, the land allocated to large projects had increased by 170% between 2010 and 2013. By 2012 the law governing land (pdf) was changed to favour large corporate acquisitions.

We must ask whether the sharpened persecution of the Rohingya (and other minority groups) might be partly generated by military-economic interests, rather than by mostly religious/ethnic issues. Expelling Rohingya from their land might well be good for future business. In fact, quite recently the government allocated 1,268,077 hectares (3,100,000 acres) in the Rohingya’s area of Myanmar for corporate rural development; this is quite a jump compared to the first such formal allocation which was in 2012, for just 7,000 hectares (17,000 acres). To some extent the international focus on religion has overshadowed the vast land grabs that have affected millions, including the Rohingya.
Who are the Rohingya?

Rohingya are an old Muslim minority that has long been part of Myanmar, going back to the 15th century when thousands of Muslims came to the former Arakan Kingdom. Rohingya is a self-identifying term that surfaced in the 1950s and that experts say provides the group with a collective, political identity.

Over one-third of the Rohingya are concentrated in the western state of Rakhine – one of Myanmar’s least developed states, with plentiful land. The Rohingya are poor, with more than 78% of households living below the poverty line, according to World Bank estimates. Their poverty might further enable their evictions to make room for development projects.

Co-existence was never exactly peaceful, but from the 1990s until 2012 there were no major killings (pdf). But in 2012 Arakanese Buddhists called for their persecution after three Muslim men were accused of raping an Arakanese woman. That year, Arakanese political parties, local monks’ associations, and civic groups publicly urged the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya. A particular sect of Buddhists went so far as to re-interpret sections of Buddhist texts to urge people to kill Rohingya. The vast majority of Buddhists did not join in.

After 2012 the Rohingya begin to leave Myanmar in large numbers: it had become clear that they were now an actively persecuted people. The 2012 violence against the Rohingya civilian population “resulted in approximately 200 deaths and over 140,000 displaced” according to the US state department. The UN high commissioner for refugees estimates that since 2012, 160,000 Rohingya left by sea to neighbouring countries – mostly to Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. More than 120,000 Rohingya are still housed in over 40 internment camps in Myanmar according to the regional rights organisation Fortify Rights.
But is it about religion?

The treatment of the Rohingya is sometimes described as a crime against humanity. But we need to interrogate its sources. If we bring in some of the larger trends affecting modest rural communities, two major facts stand out. One is the far larger numbers of Buddhist smallholders who have also been expelled from their land in the last few years. And the other is the fact that large-scale timber extraction, mining, and water projects are replacing the expelled.

This combination of conditions have until recently rarely been mentioned in the media, and are absent from the religion discussion. The focus of the global media, and to a large extent inside Myanmar, has been on religious hatred.

There were high expectations that Aung San Suu Kyi party’s electoral victory in November 2015 would bring justice. But she has made a point of not addressing these developments in her public statements. Indeed as recently as May 2016, she requested that the US not use the word Rohingya because, according to one of her spokesmen, the term is not useful as part of the national reconciliation process.

But the land grabs have been silently ignored. In fact, the military were already taking land from Buddhist smallholders and other groups in the 1990s. But in 2012 a change in the law escalated matters and (formally) opened the country to foreign investors. On 30 March 2012, the joint lower and upper houses of parliament approved the revision of two land laws: the Farmland Law and the Vacant Land Law. This amounted to a new Foreign Investment Law that allowed 100% foreign capital, and lease periods of up to 70 years. Compared to mining, the agriculture sector still has some restrictions on foreign investment in that the government promotes joint ventures with local entrepreneurs. However, foreign firms often use local companies as proxies (pdf) for investments.

The 1963 Peasant Law was also annulled in 2012, this piece of statute, which protected smallholders and the “tiller’s rights to the land”, had been in place since the country’s socialist era.

Protest in Bangladesh against attacks on the Rohingya

Against this background, the escalating displacement of millions of smallholders (mostly Buddhists) from the land was a major change as to who was to manage the land. Smallholders became refugees of a new economic ordering. Myanmar is not unique in this. Similar brutal expulsions of smallholders have been happening across the world as large corporations take over because they “establish” that the smallholders have no contracts showing the land is theirs, no matter how long they and their ancestors worked that land. What is different in Myanmar is the almost absolute control the military have long had over much of the country’s land, and hence their key role in the expulsion of smallholders (pdf).

Today there are whole new economies – mining, timber, geothermal projects – where before there were smallholders. Economic development may require this: but it should also work for the millions of displaced and never compensated smallholders. Foreign direct investment is now concentrated in extractive sectors and power generation. Not much of the new investment has gone to sectors such as manufacturing that can generate a strong working class and a modest middle class. For example, Myanmar’s Yadana pipeline project, “required investment of over $1bn (£0.8bn), yet employs only 800 workers”.

Furthermore, the 2012 law empowered foreign investors. It offered government loans – but no help for the smallholders who lost their land. Land properties can range from 2,000 hectares up to 20,000 hectares (5,000 acres to 50,000 acres) for an initial period of 30 years. The extent of land grabs is such that Myanmar is losing more than a million acres of forest a year (pdf).

Many, perhaps most, of the contracts signed for major land deals have their own conditions and effects. For instance, regional military commanders and non-state armed groups have de facto control over most land development in northern Myanmar.
Two parallel worlds

The Myanmar of brutal religious persecutions that has led to huge worldwide concern is only getting worse. But then there is the Myanmar of evictions of smallholders to make room for massive land grabs.

    Since the first set of foreign investors entered the country, demand for land has become a major factor in conflict

Myanmar has become a last Asian frontier for our current modes of development – plantation agriculture, mining, and water extraction. Its location makes it even more strategic. Besides being the largest country of south-east Asia, Myanmar is between the two most populous countries in the world, China and India, both hungry for natural resources.

Since that first set of major foreign investors entered the country under the new legal regime, demand for land has become a major factor in conflict. Foreign firms have moved in, land grabs have risen, smallholders keep losing ground. Farmers have become poorer or lost their land. But the land market is booming.

Seen from this angle, persecution of the Rohingya has at least two functions, even if unplanned. Expelling them from their land is a way of freeing up land and water. Burning their homes makes this irreversible: the Rohingya are forced to flee and leave their lands behind. Secondly, a focus on religious difference mobilises passions around religion, rather than aiming, let’s say, at creating pressure on the government to stop evictions of all smallholders, no matter their religion.

Against the background of millions of expelled smallholders, it is remarkable how much religion has captured the attention of observers and commentators. In the meantime, a third of Myanmar’s vast forests are gone, and the government has allocated million of hectares, including a significant allotment in Rakhine state, for further development.

Saskia Sassen is Robert S. Lind professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and the author of several books including Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. 

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18. COUNTER-TERRORISM IN BANGLADESH: RELIGIOUS STUDIES SHOULD HAVE MINIMAL SPACE IN BANGLADESHI EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS
by Rudroneel Ghosh
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(The Times of India - January 6, 2017)

Recent developments in Bangladesh cry out for commentary. First, a militant named Nurul Islam Marzan – believed to have been the operational commander of the July 1 Dhaka café attack last year – was killed in a shootout with the police in the Bangladeshi capital today. It will be recalled that after the café attack the Bangladeshi government had launched a substantial crackdown against extremists in that country. Marzan’s killing is in keeping with that security effort. In fact, so far Bangladeshi security forces have eliminated around 40 militants linked to the café attack, including the mastermind Tamim Chowdhury. Most of these terrorists were part of a neo-Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh module that was inspired by the Islamic State terror group.

It’s interesting to note Marzan’s educational background. Marzan passed Dakhil (equivalent to SSC) from Darul Ulum Markazia Madrasa in 2010 and Alim (equivalent to HSC) from Arifpur Fazil Madrasa in Pabna in 2012. However, he was actually a student of Darul Hadis Quomi Madrasa at Banshbazar in Pabna town. The reason this information is pertinent is because the former two madrasas are government-recognised aliyah madrasas. While the latter is an unrecognised quomi madrasa. Aliyah madrasas offer secular subjects such as maths and science in addition to religious teaching, while quomi madrasas wholly impart religious pedagogy.

Together aliyah and quomi madrasas account for 10.3% of primary and 21.2% of secondary enrolment in Bangladesh. And given the emphasis on religion in these madrasas, they have managed to create fertile grounds for Islamic radicalism in Bangladesh. The problem isn’t restricted to madrasas alone. I have written in these blogs before that even in general schools in Bangladesh the emphasis on religious studies is far too great for comfort. Students here are pressured to excel at religious studies and vehemently ridiculed for not being able to do so – the humiliation is far greater than underperforming in secular subjects.

Unless and until this changes and religious studies in schools are diluted in favour of secular subjects, Islamic radicalism will continue to be a problem in Bangladesh. The government should heavily crack down on quomi madrasas, get aliyah madrasas to expand the teaching of modern, secular subjects, and compel general public schools to treat religious studies as an elective subject. Given that recent terrorist attacks in Bangladesh – including the Dhaka café attack – have highlighted the involvement of students from both general and madrasa backgrounds, reforming the education system is something that the Bangladeshi government can’t afford to delay. In fact, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina recently called upon everyone to stay vigilant for signs of militant activities in educational institutions. But unless and until religious studies are diluted in these educational institutions, things won’t change. Religion is a private matter. It should have minimal space in Bangladesh’s educational institutions.

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19. DEMANDING RESPECT FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS IS NOT XENOPHOBIA
by Mrutyuanjai Mishra
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(The Times of India - January 6, 2017)

It is fashionable in Europe these days to explain the tsunami of political change by referring to it as nothing but xenophobia. Elections are due in 2017 in Netherlands, France and Germany, and voters are demanding the pressing issues of globalization to be brought for debate and discussion. In Denmark, a left-leaning newspaper, Information, published an interview with British sociologist Colin Crouch on January 4, where he explained that last year’s British referendum had seen an increase of xenophobia, which had always been there, and now there was a growing dichotomy among the British voters from the Labour Party, which seems to have been divided into those living in small provincial towns and those living in cosmopolitan cities.
So for Colin Crouch, a former lecturer in sociology at the London School of Economics, who became renowned for framing the concept of post-democracy, the present European politics can be explained by this dichotomy of voters who are ignorant and xenophobic, and those who are cosmopolitan, enlightened and tolerant.

It is interesting that Colin Crouch expresses his reservation even with politicians like Angela Merkel, a champion of liberal values in Europe, who recently said that the full-face veil should be banned wherever it is legally possible. Angela Merkel not only endorsed the burqa ban, she even went further than Barack Obama and nailed the issue confronting EU countries as “Islamic terrorism” in her New Year address to the nation.

Are Europeans becoming xenophobic in demanding cultural integration of immigrants, whose numbers have soared in the last couple of decades? From Bradford to Brussels, Copenhagen to Cambridge and from Malmö in Sweden to Marseilles in France, there are pockets of major cities that have not even a semblance of European traits left. European, not in the sense of just dress, food and language, but, as I saw in both Malmö and Marseilles, there are areas where you find only men in cafes in huge numbers and total absence of women. It is not seen as acceptable for a woman to come and occupy a seat at those cafes. Women wearing short dresses are frowned upon, spat at, and dirty comments are passed to admonish them that such skirts are not welcome. When I lived in Malmö before moving to Copenhagen, an Arabic-speaking girl sat next to me on a train, changing her shoes. She explained that she has to change her attire as there is social control where she lives, and girls who expose their body parts are noticed and harassed. “So while at work in Copenhagen I dress in short sleeves and wear high heels, but when I go home, I change into a dress that covers my whole body”, she said.

Only recently have Europeans started making political demands to counter this unhealthy change. At its worst, it spurs radicalization of young people. As recently as today, while I am writing this blog, a programme is being sent on Danmarks Radio (DR), the largest Danish radio channel, titled “De Skandinaviske Krigere”. Translated from Danish it means “The Scandianvian Warriors”, a programme about parents in Denmark, Sweden and Norway who have all lost one or more children, as their children have been radicalized in these liberal countries, without the parents being able to do much about it. Now they are getting organized and warn other parents of how to avoid such tragedies. Sad to hear a Norwegian father with immigrant background utter that his life is meaningless now since one of his sons is dead in a war zone and another two are in jail. Worse, you hear stories of how mothers saw their sons growing beards and starting to wear long gowns, symbolizing their submission to some radical groups. The Europeans are just taking baby steps in countering this major change in their societies, where the freedom of movement for girls is no longer guaranteed.

Mass molestation, as India, too, witnessed in the city of Bengaluru on New Year’s eve by “Roadside Romeos”, have also been seen in cities like Cologne last year. Therefore, an excessive number of security personnel were deployed in major cities this year to avoid such incidents from recurring.

Blaming the victim instead of the perpetrator is still not an acceptable trend among European politicians. But people fear that those tendencies are creeping into the liberal societies here. So when Indian officials and politicians make haphazard, undue and disrespectful statements blaming women, then it makes headlines here as well. When Abu Azmi of the Samajwadi Party blames the women in Bengaluru for the mass molestation by stating that, “In these modern times, the more skin women show, the more they are considered fashionable. If my sister or daughter stays out beyond sunset celebrating December 31 with a man who isn´t their husband or brother, that´s not right”, then in other words, the liberty of women, their freedom of movement has to approved by the personal whims of politicians who are still practicing an outdated mode of moral coding of women´s behavior. It is not for these men, who have no relation to those women, to decide what those women wear and with whom they go out.

And this is exactly what Europeans have started demanding from their new incoming immigrants. If you are coming to Europe with such attitudes towards women, then you are not welcome. You’d better stay back home. And I, as a recent immigrant, support this position. I would rather see people who uphold women´s rights, regarding them as human rights, coming to this part of the world, and therefore politicians have all the right to demand adherence to liberty and liberal values, where a woman can dress in whatever dress she prefers, and it is no one else´s business to interfere in the individual decision of grown-up adults.

This is common sense and a very legitimate moral issue. So when the Queen of Denmark in her New Year address to the nation says that immigrants should try not only to adjust to the cold climate but also to the Danish liberal values, I am totally in favor of such demands. This is not xenophobia. Demanding Brexit, and regarding every other European and non-European as a threat is xenophobic, but in order to avoid such xenophobic tendencies it is important that we take the necessary debate to liberate half of humanity from the chains of social control. Mass molestations of women ought to be stopped, whether they occur in Bengaluru , Bradford, Brussels or Bonn.

If Denmark wants to retain its position as the best country in the world for women to live in, as it did last year, than it needs to make sure that both those who have immigrated to the country, its domestic population and those wanting to immigrate, respect women’s rights and their full freedom to be in the public sphere, even in the late night, in whatever dress they prefer to wear. Whether it is Copenhagen or Kolkata, the demand for equal rights of women should be considered one of the most important human rights issues in 2017.

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20. WHY ARE JEWS, GAYS, AND OTHER MINORITIES IN EUROPE INCREASINGLY VOTING FAR-RIGHT?
by Sara Miller Llana and Tamara Micner
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(The Christian Science Monitor - 11 January 2017)

how others see it
Historically enemies, minorities and parties like France's National Front are increasingly in sync as the former seek insurance against radical Islam and the latter tries to gain mainstream credibility.	

January 11, 2017 Paris and Amsterdam — Leon de Winter, a Jewish bestselling novelist in Amsterdam, says supporting the Dutch political figure Geert Wilders, who seeks to “de-Islamify” the Netherlands, is “politically incorrect” and “not civilized.” But he defends the controversial leader anyway, calling him “a necessity in today’s political landscape.”

Bruno Clavet is well aware of the homophobic origins of the National Front, but today the gay Frenchman sees his country’s far-right party as the only one defending what he cares most about: reducing immigration, taking back control from the European Union, and promoting a tough stance against Islamic fundamentalism.

Even Poles, a target of British frustration over immigration that drove the vote to leave the EU, have supported the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the political face of last summer’s Brexit referendum. The party even at one point boasted a Polish fan club.

The minority vote for populist parties is not alone going to tip European politics. The votes of gays, or Jews, or immigrants for anti-establishment parties have grown alongside the population at large on questions of sovereignty, economy, or immigration, especially of Muslims, but remains a minority.

Yet their support serves an important purpose for the populist right in France, the Netherlands, Austria, and beyond, who are attempting to scrub away claims of racism, and often their anti-Semitic, homophobic histories. Even as they feed on the fear of the “other,” attracting minority voters helps them rebrand and move deeper into the mainstream.
How much do you know about gay rights in America? Take the quiz!

“Populist parties are trying to make it clear that they are not racist in the traditional sense, not concerned about a person’s ethnic background but their cultural and social behavior,” says Eric Frey, managing editor of the Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard.

He says that the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) in Austria, for example, founded by former Nazi party officials in the 1950s, has been courting minorities, including Jews, not so much because they need the Jewish vote in the country. “It is minuscule, it doesn’t bring you any votes. But it does protect you against accusations that you are too close to old Nazi ideology. It makes you more acceptable, both nationally and internationally.”

Jews and the far right

The rise of the self-declared Islamic State and other radical terrorist groups has made these parties powerfully attractive to segments of society that in another era might have turned their backs on them.

Mr. Wilders, who founded the Party for Freedom (PVV) in 2006, has been unabashed in his critique of Islam, calling for banning mosques and the Koran, and staking the hardest anti-Muslim stance in Europe. He was recently found guilty (though given no sentence) of inciting discrimination for leading a chant against Moroccans at a rally in 2014. Still, he is projected to win the largest share of seats – not enough to govern alone – in the national elections this March.

Jewish leaders like Ron van der Wieken, president of the Central Jewish Council, says only a fraction of Jews will be drawn to his ranks, given worries about the party's fascist overtones. In the 2012 Dutch elections, 2 percent of citizens who identify as Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, or Buddhist voted for the PVV, compared to 8-9 percent of Protestants, Catholics, and those with no religious affiliation, according to Dutch national statistics.

Yet fear over terrorism – and a way of life changed – has opened up new space. The Dutch novelist Mr. de Winter, who divides his time between the Netherlands and Israel, chose to base a fictional character on the platinum-blonde Wilders in his novel "VSV," based on the killing of Theo van Gogh, who directed the film "Submission," about Muslim women. The film angered many Muslims, and is cited as part of the motivation for his murder by a Dutch-Moroccan extremist in 2004. It shocked the Dutch, and feelings of uncertainty have only grown, with terrorist attacks by Islamist radicals in Paris, Nice, Brussels, and Berlin in just over a year.

“These feelings of discomfort, of desperation, about very lax migration, that’s felt in the general public here in Holland, and I think a bit more intense among the Dutch Jews,” de Winter says. 

In the Netherlands, Jewish schools and synagogue services are guarded by the military police. De Winter describes Amsterdam’s Jewish schools as “bunkers.”

“I think people feel that this society is not recognizing the special status of Jews, this feeling of being vulnerable, as this tiny group,” he says. “And of course, at the same time, you get used to it – to this scandal, to this total insanity that this is happening, that Jewish kids have to be protected like this in our age.” 

Mr. Frey, the newspaper editor in Vienna, says that the FPO has courted Jews in a message of alliance and protection. The party has been friendly with Israel at the same time that many mainstream European parties have taken a tougher stance on Israeli settlement expansion. And Jews are legitimately concerned by a new form of anti-Semitism that brews in pockets of Muslim communities. 

That any Jews are voting for the FPO shows that the party has occupied more ground in the center. But Frey also sees in it the complexity and weakness of the message emanating from “liberal elites" defending openness, tolerance, and diversity," he says. “It is hard to defend diversity if [the radical Muslim] part of this diversity is so highly intolerant.”
French nationalism ascendant

Perhaps that is why France's Marine Le Pen, leader of the FN, exudes confidence these days. Ms. Le Pen strides into a meeting with foreign journalists from the Anglo-American Press Association at her Paris campaign headquarters on a recent day, with warm New Year’s greetings, and settles in front of a poster of her campaign slogan: “In the name of the people.”

“The people” for the FN used to be more exclusive – certainly not Jews or gays, who were cast off as an “anomaly” by Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, the founder of the party. But since taking over the party in 2011, she has been on a clean-up mission, even breaking off relations with her father in 2015 over his reiteration that the Holocaust was a mere “detail” in history.

In fact, on this day she saves most of her vitriol for the EU, saying that during bailout negotiations it wielded the euro currency like “a knife stuck in a country’s ribs.”

She is careful about cultivating a more tolerant message, distinguishing radical Islam from the faith. “There are two Islams,” she told foreign journalists. “One is a religion that is perfectly compatible with French values, and practicing Muslims, like Christians and Jews, have never posed a problem. But there is another political, fundamentalist, totalitarian Islam that wants Sharia law over French law.”

To an extent, it has worked. Just as she has made interesting bedfellows with Socialist supporters in “rustbelt” France, her minority vote is growing. In 2012, 13 percent of Jews voted for her in presidential elections, compared with 6 percent for her father in 2002. The FN has even attracted some Muslims.

Gays for Le Pen

She’s been even more successful in gay quarters.

Polls by Ifop have shown support among gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals growing faster than among heterosexuals. Between Le Pen’s takeover of the party in 2011 and 2013, about 16 percent (a 7-point jump) of the former favored the FN, compared with 13 percent (a 4-point jump) of the latter. More recently, the research institute CEVIPOF found 32.5 percent of those in same-sex couples supporting the FN in the first round of regional elections in 2015.

The far right is far from monolithic in Europe. In the East, many parties spout unapologetic racism or hold deeply conservative family values.  In the West, especially on the culture wars, the far right has in some ways tried to refashion itself as a bastion of “European values,” which include things like sexual tolerance and gender equality. In France, on the gay issue, the mainstream right candidate François Fillon is far more conservative on family issues than Le Pen, appearing “a little like an American evangelical,” says Frederic Martel, the author of the French book "Global Gay," to be published in the US this spring.

It’s not that Le Pen is an advocate for the gay community. Inside her party remains a strong, traditionalist wing, whose public face is her own niece, Marion Marechal-Le Pen. But she herself, twice divorced and with a top deputy who is gay, has sought to show a modern face, part of a larger effort to rid herself of the “anti” label, says Mr. Martel.

And that has opened space for more pressing issues, says Mr. Clavet, a former underwear model who ran for municipal elections in Paris in 2014 on the FN ticket. He says the gay issue, like gay marriage, is secondary to him. What he cares more about is the economy and security. “The [FN] is the party that responds to and understands the aspirations of the French,” he says.

In part, this simply shows that minorities are not voting on single identity issues. In the Netherlands, Jews who support the PVV mirror the rest of society, says David Wertheim, head of the Menasseh ben Israel Institute of Jewish studies in Amsterdam. “Because they fear Islam, because they hate elites, because they think there’s not good care for the elderly, for all these populist issues,” he says.

In Britain, UKIP found a small following among Poles, who at 800,000 comprise the UK’s largest immigrant community. A 2014 survey by Ipsos and the Polish City Club found that 5 percent of Poles planned to vote for UKIP in the 2015 local and European elections.

Eva Lis, a visual artist and Polish-Russian-English interpreter in east London who emigrated from Poland 20 years ago, says she herself does not support UKIP, but knows people aligning with their message on stricter immigration.

“I know some people, they’re middle-class people, that came here, and they buy into this idea of controlled immigration, because they’re already here,” she says. “They have their safe corner, and their insecurity – and snobbery – makes them protect their little corner, and they don’t want to be identified with this mass immigration of builders and cleaners from Poland, because they see themselves as a better Polish.”

In some ways it parallels a dynamic that plays out in the US, with Mexican-Americans, some of whom immigrated illegally at one point, calling for tougher immigration policies.

Inclusive populism?

The issue of minorities voting for the far right is fraught with moral questions. And many wonder how authentic populist parties are in the message of inclusion.

Clavet, for one, has no doubt that the FN is no longer homophobic. “I don’t condone the words from the '80s or '90s about homosexuals,” he says in a phone interview from Montreal, where he moved last November after losing his political bid. “But you have to put them in the context with the mentality of the era, when homosexuality was taboo.”

“If you look at the platform, there is not one line that is racist, not one line about Jews, or homosexuals,” he adds.

Frey says to a certain extent clean-up is authentic, especially on the Jewish question, which has been displaced by the Muslim one. And yet, old strains of anti-Semitism are hard to stamp out. He also sees a lot of hypocrisy.

“The parties are trying to present themselves as defenders of Western values, but it doesn’t fit their social profile as so many of their supporters are anti-gay or anti-woman.” As a Jewish Austrian, he can’t imagine ever voting for the FPO. “As a gay person, or a woman, I would not trust any of [these parties] either. I would think they could stab me in the back the next day,” he says.

"They will rail against Muslim attitudes towards women, but then they will also call for women to stay home."

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21. ALEXEI YABLOKOV, GRANDFATHER OF RUSSIAN ENVIRONMENTALISM, DIES AT 83
by Charles Digges
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Source : Bellona

Published on January 10, 2017 

Alexei Yablokov, the towering grandfather of Russian ecology who worked with Bellona to unmask Cold War nuclear dumping practices in the Arctic, has died in Moscow after a long illness. He was 83.

As a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he was also the lead author of the seminal 2007 book, “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment.”

The book presented the conclusion that the 1986 Chernobyl disaster was responsible for 985,000 premature deaths – the boldest mortality tally to date – by analyzing 6,000 source materials on the accident.

Bellona President Frederic Hauge Tuesday remembered Yablokov as a friend of three decades standing.

“He was an inspiration, a great friend and a great scientist, one of the world’s most significant environmental heroes,” said Hauge. “To know him and to work with him, someone of such cool and keen intellect is a memory we should all take care of and treasure.”

Yablokov commanded a broad environmental and political mandate in Russia, and published over 500 papers on biology, ecology, natural conservation and numerous textbooks on each of these subjects. He founded Russia’s branch of Greenpeace and was the leader of the Green Russia faction of the Yabloko opposition party.

While serving as environmental advisor to President Boris Yeltsin’s from 1989 to 1992, Yablokov published a searing white paper that detailed the gravity of the radiological threat posed by dumped military reactors and scuttled nuclear submarines in the Arctic.

The catalogue of waste dumped at sea by the Soviets, includes some 17,000 containers of radioactive waste, 19 ships containing radioactive waste, 14 nuclear reactors, including five that still contain spent nuclear fuel; 735 other pieces of radioactively contaminated heavy machinery, and the K-27 nuclear submarine with its two reactors loaded with nuclear fuel.

Yablokov’s white paper spearheaded an epoch of environmental openness that led to more than $3 billion in international aid to Russia to clean up 200 decommissioned submarines and to secure decades of military nuclear waste.

The paper’s findings dovetailed an early Bellona report in 1992 on radioactive waste dumped by the Russian Navy in the Kara Sea.

Hauge said that Yablokov was “the first person in a position of power in Russia who was brave enough to step forward and support our conclusions.”

“He helped open serious discussion about what was a Chernobyl in slow motion,” said Hauge.

The partnership became critical. In 1995, Bellona’s Alexander Nikitin was charged with treason for his contribution to a report expanding on Bellona’s conclusions about nuclear dangers in the Arctic. The report was called “The Russian Northern Fleet: Source of Radioactive Contamination.”

Throughout the endless hearings leading up to Nikitin’s eventual acquittal, Hauge said Yablokov’s “calm, collected” knowledge of the Russian constitution helped guide the defense.

“His coolness during the Nikitin case was remarkable,” said Hauge on Tuesday. “He really emphasized that the constitution was the way to Nikitin’s acquittal.”

In 2000, Russia’s Supreme Court agreed, and acquitted Nikitin on all counts, making him the first person to ever fight a treason charge in Russia and win.

Yablokov was a constant luminary at Bellona presentations in Russia, the European Union, the United States and Norway, most recently presenting his 2007 book in Oslo on the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.

He was also a tireless defender of environmental activists in Russia, suggesting at a 2014 Bellona conference in St. Petersburg that ecological groups should publish a list of those government officials who harass them.

“We must constantly support our comrades who have been forced to leave the country or who have ended up in jail on account of their environmental activism,” he told the conference.

That same year, Yablokov championed the presentation of a report on environmental violations that took place at Russia’s showcase Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Yablokov arranged for activists from the Environmental Watch on the Northern Caucasus – many of whom were jailed, exiled or otherwise harassed into silence – to present their shocking report on Olympic environmental corruption in Moscow when every other venue had turned them away.

“He was a friend and advisor to us from the beginning and in a large part we owe the success of our Russian work to his steady advice and guidance,” said Hauge.

Yablokov’s death was mourned across the spectrum in Moscow. Igor Chestin, head of the WWF called Yablokov Russia’s “environmental knight.”

Valery Borschsev, Yablokov’s colleague in the human rights faction of the Yabloko party said of him that “he was a person on whom the authorities had no influence.”

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22. RUSSIA: THE PASSING OF DOCTOR LIZA
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(The Moscow Times - Dec 26, 2016)

The Time She Didn’t Come Back Alive
Russia mourns the loss of its most prominent humanitarian, Elizaveta Glinka, known to millions of Russians more simply — Doctor Liza.

by Daria Litvinova

In the first hours after Sunday's Tu-154 plane crash, there was still hope. The earliest news had reported Elizaveta Glinka dead, but others expressed caution. It was, after all, not immeditely clear that Glinka, founder of the Spravedlivaya Pomoshch (“Fair Aid”) foundation and a famed humanitarian, was actually on board the plane that had just crashed into the Black Sea.

“Dr. Liza didn’t board the plane, even though she had checked in,” Anna Federmesser, president of the Vera hospice foundation, wrote on Facebook on Dec. 25.

By the afternoon, all that hope was gone. Glinka’s husband, Gleb, confirmed to the media that Dr. Liza – that’s what everyone called her – was on the plane, and had most probably died in the crash.

Russia had lost its most prominent human rights activist, a woman who made it her business to help people others considered to be unhelpable.

Feeding the Homeless

Dr. Liza became widely known in the early 2010s, when she began to help Moscow's homeless, a social group few cared about. Glinka’s involvement started out as a coincidence. At the time, the illustrious United States-educated doctor was more interested in palliative and hospice care for terminal cancer patients.

Glinka recalled her first work with the homeless in an interview with the Snob magazine in November 2012:

“I was once asked to examine a homeless guy with cancer. I set off looking for him, but couldn’t find him. Instead I found a whole town near [Moscow’s] Paveletsky train station where these desperate people lay in cardboard boxes and tried to keep warm. Some were missing arms or legs, some ill, some frozen," she recalled. "It was horrifying. I told them: I’ll come back next week, I don’t have that many meds for you right now."

Glinka and her colleagues started coming to the Paveletsky train station every day with food, medications, and clothes for the homeless. The authorities, Dr. Liza complained, weren’t happy about it: The neighborhood was quite central, and Glinka’s food truck attracted more and more homeless people. Facing official opposition, she refused to give up, and moved the improvised kitchen to her office.

Coming from a wealthy family, Dr. Liza was often accused of self-promotion and hypocrisy. Critics pointed out that she was always well-dressed and drove a Mercedes. “But does working with the homeless necessarily warrant wearing rags?” she said in the same Snob interview.

Those who knew her insist she genuinely cared about everyone she tried to help.
Elizaveta Glinka with a sick child on a train at Kursky Railway Station. Glinka brought nine sick children from Donetsk to Moscow for treatment.
Elizaveta Glinka with a sick child on a train at Kursky Railway Station. Glinka brought nine sick children from Donetsk to Moscow for treatment. Valery Sharifulin / TASS
Children vs. Politics

Dr. Liza was there when Russians needed help. She fundraised for people who lost their homes in the unprecedented 2010 wildfires and during the notorious 2012 flooding in the southern Russian town of Krymsk. In 2014-2015, as conflict dragged on interminably in eastern Ukraine, she went there too, returning to Moscow with sick, wounded, and scared children.

Her actions sparked controversy in Russia and beyond. Glinka was supporting Putin’s regime and his undeclared war with Ukraine, her critics alleged. Glinka was using children for PR, patching them up in Moscow, and sending back to Donbass, they roared. The same outrage accompanied her trips to war-torn Syria, where she also tried to help children.

Dr. Liza was not deterred by the criticism. In an authoritarian regime like Russia’s, any genuine social activity tends to turn political. But she was a sophisticated kind of an activist who avoided politics. Dr. Liza worked without prejudice, separating social ills from political decision making, and doing her best to help those who were, indeed, suffering. 

“We human rights advocates have nothing to do with politics,” she said on Dec. 8, while accepting an award from the president. “It is very hard for me to see the dead and wounded children of the Donbass, the sick and dying children of Syria." 

She said her upcoming work would take her to Donetsk and then to Syria with a team of volunteers. 

Her next words proved prophetic:

"We are never sure that we are going to come back alive – because war is hell.”
She Made Miracles Possible

That same apolitical, non-partisan approach led her to board a Russian military plane heading to Syria on Sunday. She was on the Tu-154 aircraft because she was transporting medications for a children’s hospital in Syria.

“A successful doctor, a beloved and loving wife, a happy mother of three, Liza didn’t have to fly to Syria a week before the New Year,” Katerina Gordeyeva, Glinka’s friend and a journalist for the Meduza news site, wrote in an obituary. “She could have just organized the transfer of these medications. […] Her personal presence on the plane wasn’t necessary.”

Journalist and philanthropist Natalya Loseva told Meduza that Glinka acted independently of external circumstances. “Her actions only depended on whether there were people in need of help," she said, describing Glinka as "a radar for pain that always worked.”

“She made miracles possible,” Boris Altshuler, a member of the Helsinki human rights group, told the Pravoslavie i Mir charity website. “She’s one of those rare people, immune to political discussions and arguments. She just goes about her business of helping people.”

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23. 1917, EDITED BY BORIS DRALYUK, REVIEW — A VIVID PORTRAIT OF RUSSIA’S FATEFUL YEAR
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(Financial Times - 25 November 2016)

A broad and erudite collection of stories and poems from the Russian Revolution

by: Anna Aslanyan

Don’t you find that too much poetry is being written?” Vladimir Lenin once asked Maxim Gorky, referring to the literary scene of the young Soviet state. The writer replied that it was natural to turn to poetry in times of great upheaval. 1917, an anthology published to commemorate the forthcoming centenary of the Russian Revolution, is proof of that; a third of it is devoted to poetry and, compared to the rest, it is the poems that paint the more vivid portrait of their era.

Written between early 1917 and late 1919, these pieces are immediate reactions to the cataclysmic period that saw the overthrow of the Russian monarchy, the October Revolution and the devastating civil war. The range of authors brought together in this slim volume is deliberately broad: proletarians and aristocrats, traditionalists and experimentalists, those who welcomed the revolution and those who dreaded it. Those who fought for it, though, are in the minority, as their voices would not be heard until the 1920s.

Boris Dralyuk thematically organises the 28 pieces he has selected (mostly translated from Russian) into sections, introducing each in his erudite notes, a source of historical and biographical information, complete with suggestions for further reading. The breadth of the collection is also manifest in the inclusion of both famous names, such as Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, and lesser-known authors. One such figure certainly deserving a wider anglophone readership is Mikhail Kuzmin, whose poem “Russian Revolution”, while hardly his finest, is an unflinching response to the trials of 1917: “Will there be space for all of us?/ We’ll think of that later.” There turned out to be little space for Kuzmin, an aesthete and homosexual, the “northern Wilde”; his works lay forgotten for decades, and some never resurfaced.

The centrepiece of the anthology is Alexander Blok’s “The Twelve”, a great Symbolist vision of the end of the old world and the advent of the new order. This translation by Dralyuk and Robert Chandler, brilliantly capturing the poem’s language while remaining as true as possible to its rhythm, ends, unlike the original, with a question mark: “up ahead — is Jesus Christ?”, as if echoing the poet’s doubts about making none other than Christ the “blizzard-invisible, bullet-untouchable” bearer of the revolution’s “blood-stained banner”. Equally skilful and inventive are James Womack’s recent translations of two poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky: “Our March”, a romantic paean to the revolution, and “To Russia”, a narcissistic self-portrait against its background.

The prose sections include short stories and non-fiction pieces, among them excerpts from The Apocalypse of Our Time, in which the religious philosopher Vasily Rozanov analyses the revolution as a catastrophe sweeping “thrones, classes, ranks, labour, wealth” into a great void left by Christianity. The ills of Russian life are seen differently by Alexander Serafimovich, a staunch Bolshevik, whose story “How He Died”, a soldier’s tale tragic in its banality, is told in a language that is simple yet powerful.

“The Dragon”, a miniature piece by Yevgeny Zamyatin, pictures revolutionary Petersburg as a “delirium-born” hell where “trolleys [are] screeching out of the earthly world into the unknown”. Zamyatin was to continue the dystopian theme in his novel We, a forerunner of Brave New World and 1984. Unable to fit into Soviet literature, he left for France in the early 1930s; Mikhail Zoshchenko, once his literary comrade, stayed and made a name as a satirist before being denounced in 1946. In his 1918 article “A Wonderful Audacity” Zoshchenko compares Russia to a woman whose desire to be dominated by a strong master has finally come true, concluding in a Nietzschean spirit: “There is a lot of blood, you say? [ … ] But then again, not so much that we shall drown in it … ”

The works and fates of these authors create an image of hope and despair, struggle and exile, triumph and death. Even as the revolution devoured its own writers, they remained its chroniclers. A century on, their writings — some revisited, some resurrected in this collection — can be read as historical documents, but also for their sheer literary value. The best of them bear a mark of the process described by Kuzmin: “Tough sandpaper has polished all our words.”

1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution, edited by Boris Dralyuk, Pushkin Press, RRP£8.99/$14.95, 224 pages

Anna Aslanyan is a critic and translator

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24.  VOLLMER ON HOFMANN, 'THE FASCIST EFFECT: JAPAN AND ITALY, 1915-1952'
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(H-Net)

 Reto Hofmann. The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915-1952. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. 224 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8014-5341-0.

Reviewed by Klaus Vollmer (Ludwig Maximilian University)
Published on H-Nationalism (December, 2016)
Commissioned by Cristian Cercel

Reto Hofmann has written an illuminating volume which is an original contribution not only to the study of the reception of Italian fascism in a non-Western context, but also to global intellectual history and the history of Japanese thought and culture in the prewar era. "Fascism needs to be examined through its relations" (p. 2), Hofmann claims in his introduction. While in previous research this has most often meant looking at fascism's relation to other ideologies (e.g., Marxism, liberalism, etc.), Hofmann intends to examine the relationship between fascisms in different national contexts, taking Italy and Japan as examples. This approach is significant because it "expose(s) a fundamental contradiction at the heart of this ideology" (p. 2), namely the contradiction between particularism (fascism as an ideology in a specific country, i.e., Italy) and a universalist claim, as fascism aimed to overcome the crisis brought about by capitalist modernity and which had global effects in the first decades of the twentiethth century. Hofmann's study convincingly demonstrates that the discourse on fascism in Japan "simultaneously emanated from Italy and emerged domestically" (p. 3) and that Japanese intellectuals, politicians, and right-wing activists were very much aware of the problems that emerged from the contradiction mentioned above. How to strictly insist on the cultural uniqueness of Japan while at the same time acknowledging the power of fascist ideology to address and possibly solve the problems of modernity and capitalism that had affected Japanese society was an issue occupying the minds of many intellectuals of almost all political orientations. In fact, Hofmann's detailed narrative drawing on a wide variety of sources--books, academic and popular journals, newspapers, and visual materials--reminds us to what extent fascism was at the center of debate in the 1920s and 1930s. 

In reevaluating fascism as a global ideology discussed in Japan during these decades, it is thus more adequate to conceive fascism as a process rather than a clear-cut model with fixed elements. In this way it becomes possible to view the assertions of Japanese uniqueness and its vocabulary ("national polity," kokutai; "imperial way," ôdô) and even the nominal rejection of (Italian) fascism as "part of the fascist logic itself, its drive to generate a politics of cultural authenticity" (p. 3). So when, for example, Japanese intellectuals questioned the need for a leader like Mussolini or Hitler because according to their view the emperor system provided the basis for politics more adequately in Japan, this should not be taken as a rejection of fascism in general: "they regarded fascism as open-ended, as a new politics of the right that began with Mussolini but that would find different, and possibly more sophisticated, expressions in Japan" (p. 3).

The slim but densely written volume contains five chapters. After the introduction in which the author explains his approach and assumptions, some of which were summarized above, the first chapter introduces the reader to Shimoi Harukichi (1883-1954), today a little-known Japanese poet and writer. As a long-term resident of Italy, where he moved in 1915, he later became an admirer of Italian fascism and an acquaintance of Mussolini. In 1917 he toured the front and even took part in the occupation of Fiume in 1919, where he worked as liaison for Gabriele D'Annunzio. In Hofmann's narrative, which revisits Shimoi’s later activities frequently in other chapters, he acts as the "mediator of fascism" to Japan. On many occasions, Shimoi subsequently served as tour guide and interpreter in both countries. Chapters 2 and 3 ("The Mussolini Boom, 1928-1931" and "The Clash of Fascisms, 1931-1937"), covering the first decade of the turbulent Shôwa (1926-89) era, outline in detail the intellectual debates centering on the interpretation of Italian fascism and the possibilities of adapting fascism to Japanese society. Chapter 4 ("Imperial Convergence: The Italo-Ethopian War and Japanese World-Order-Thinking, 1935-1936"), which is a revised version of an article published by Hofmann recently in the Journal of Contemporary History, presents a close reading of the complexities involved in the Italo-Ethopian war, which highlighted the expansionist ambitions of Italian fascism. In Japan, not only the camp of right-wing Pan-Asianists but also the general public condemned the brutal military attack on Ethopia that smacked of old-fashioned European colonialism and imperialism and temporarily even disrupted diplomatic relations between the countries. On the other hand, this was a moment when the debate on fascism became linked more closely to broader questions of international relations. For some right-wing intellectuals and bureaucrats, Mussolini's war in Africa dealt a welcome blow to the world order of international liberalism dominated by Anglo-American rule and foreshadowed the fascist Axis and its policies that formed later in the 1930s. This is the topic of chapter 5 ("Fascism in World History, 1937-1943"), which discusses the Japanese discourse on the alliance with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, again employing a wide variety of sources ranging from philosophical debate to propaganda materials which introduced Italian culture and history to broader Japanese audiences. The short epilogue ("Fascism after the New World Order, 1943-1952") traces the fate of the concept during the occupation era and argues "that the long-standing Japanese association with fascism became an inconvenient truth for the Allies after the war, when Americans decided to rehabilitate Japan as their best friend in Asia in the fight against communism" (p. 7). While the concept of fascism as a solution to the problems of global capitalist modernity had carried a sense of open-endedness and the potential to adapt to specific cultural and historical contexts from the late 1920s to the wartime era, it was now largely relegated to the politics of interwar Italy. In regard to Japan the term "ultranationalism" gained universal acceptance although Marxist and left-wing circles continued to discuss prewar and wartime Japan as "emperor system fascism." 

Hofmann has drawn on a large number of primary sources from Italian and Japanese archives and secondary sources in English. Given his multilingual background and his linguistic competence, it is surprising and at times even disturbing, however, that Hofmann hardly mentions any German-language scholarship, naturally abundant when it comes to studies on Axis politics, but also on Japanese relations to Nazi Germany and fascist Italy or, to give one more specific example, on Japanese debates regarding the issue of Grossraumpolitik and the thought of Carl Schmitt that Hofmann discusses in chapter 5 (pp. 133-134). From the perspective of this reviewer, who specializes in Japanese history, it would have been mandatory to refer to, for example, the seminal work of Urs Matthias Zachmann on the discourse on international law and its reappropriation and application in interwar and early postwar Japan or the volume on Karl Haushofer and the reception of his ideas of geopolitics in Japan by Christian Spang.[1] Both monographs were published in 2013 (the bibliography mentions an English-language paper by Spang published in 2006). It is unfortunate that the author has not consulted or even mentioned these and other recent scholarly works in German extensively treating issues that Hofmann elaborates on in his volume. Besides Max Weber's venerable Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1922) and Wolfgang Schieder's recent book on German visitors to Mussolini, the bibliography contains only two, rather dated, works in German, by Bernd Martin and Theo Sommer.[2] These shortcomings notwithstanding, this book is a timely contribution to the ongoing reevaluation and contextualization of fascist discourse in the first half of the twentieth century and also a welcome addition to the study of the Axis from the point of view of global history.

Notes

[1]. Urs Matthias Zachmann, Völkerrechtsdenken und Außenpolitik in Japan, 1919-1960 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2013); Christian W. Spang, Karl Haushofer und Japan. Die Rezeption seiner geopolitischen Theorien in Deutschland und Japan (Munich: Iudicium, 2013).

[2]. Wolfgang Schieder, Mythos Mussolini. Deutsche in Audienz beim Duce (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsberlag, 2013); Bernd Martin, Deutschland und Japan im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Vom Angriff auf Pearl Harbor bis zur deutschen Kapitulation (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1969); Theo Sommer, Deutschland und Japan zwischen den Mächten, 1935-1940. Vom Antikominternpakt zum Dreimächtepakt. Eine Studie zur diplomatischen Vorgeschichte des Zweiten Weltkriegs (Tübingen: Mohr, 1962).

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