Alternatives International

Prisoners Hunger Strike in Palestine

HadfNews — 2017-05-01T14:07:07Z

Marking Palestinian Prisoners' Day, and as over 1,500 Palestinian political prisoners enter an open hunger strike for a series of demands, HadfNews published an interview with imprisoned Palestinian leader Ahmad Sa'adat, his answers received from Ramon prison, where Sa'adat, the General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is confined by the Zionist occupation.

Sa'adat has been imprisoned since 2006 in Zionist jails and since 2002 in Palestinian Authority prisons under U.S. and British guard; he was abducted from the PA's Jericho prison along with his comrades in March 2006. The translation of the interview follows below:

On Palestinian Prisoners Day, we hope to grasp the image and reality of the prisoners' movement and the horizon of struggle within the Zionist prisons. Also, what is the possibility of the unity of the movement to confront the repressive practices of the prison administration?

The issue of prisoners is one of the most important dimensions of the Palestinian national project, like the defense of the land, resistance to the settlements, the Arab identity of Jerusalem and the return of refugees.

Accordingly, the prisoners' movement is one of the pillars of the Palestinian national movement in general. It is advanced on the front lines of the conflict with the occupation, and affects the advance of the national struggle in the conflict with the enemy at all levels. Behind the prison walls, a constant state of conflict with occupation forces arose following the open hunger strike waged by the Popular Front against solitary confinement in September 2011, opening the door to many individual initiatives of struggle against administrative detention, and later the broad general strike waged by the prisoners' movement in April-May 2012. This achieved a victory in releasing prisoners from solitary confinement, ensuring the right to family visits for prisoners from the Gaza Strip, as well as many other achievements on living conditions.

This victory created favorable conditions to achieve the unity of the prisoners' movement and its mechanisms of struggle, but the organizational choices of the brothers in the Fateh movement did not help in accomplishing this. The prisoners' movement was impacted by the repercussions of the division, and the prison administration played a divisive role between prisoners of various factions.

We hope that the strike that the prisoners' movement plans to wage in April will include all factions of the national movement and will lead to unifying the Fateh movement's structures as well as transitioning to a new phase for the unity of the entire prisoners' movement at the levels of program and action.

How do you see the role of the prisoners' movement? Along with steadfastness and struggle inside Zionist prisons, can it play a pivotal role in the Palestinian overall national reality? What is the outcome of the crisis, and what are the ways out of this reality?

The Palestinian prisoners' movement plays a diverse and historic central role in nurturing and promoting the Palestinian national liberation struggle since its inception. In the last six years it has formed a focus for the struggle of our people through its activities to build the national cause, and at the regional and international level. The prisoners' movement also took the initiative to create the national reconciliation document, which was unanimously agreed upon by all the national and Islamic factions to end the division. But the process of national advancement and reconciliation cannot only be on the shoulders of the prisoners' movement. Its role is integrated with the struggles of our people in every clash with the enemy and in the forefront, breaking with the circle of illusions around the absurd negotiations and fully cutting off the approach of Oslo, and rebuilding the Palestinian national program of struggle. This program must be built upon the road of resistance and upon rebuilding the Palestinian internal house with democratic mechanisms for national leadership. Together, we can leave the state of national crisis through advancing the struggle.

What are the main national strategic points in relation to the issue of prisoners at Palestinian, regional and international levels?

At the Palestinian national level, the Palestinian prisoners' movement represents a living witness to the continuation of our people's resistance to the Zionist settler colonial project. What is needed from the Palestinian national liberation movement is to deal with this issue first and foremost as a serious commitment alongside other national issues of struggle, as part of a Palestinian program of resistance that reflects the identity and importance of the prisoners' struggle. It is important to avoid sectarian instrumentalization, individualism, or shuffling the cards [to create a distraction], in order to chase a political settlement. It is critical to escape from the political blackmail of the parties of the division and get on the road to national unity in struggle and mobilizing the resistance of the people. This needs hard work put to the task of liberating the prisoners and supporting their struggle at the forefront of the program of national struggle. Within the prisoners' movement, this means working on a daily level to invest in confrontation and rebuild the prisoners' movement with a unified body and program.

At the regional and international levels, regionalization and internationalization of the cause and the prisoners' status as freedom fighters is important, as is providing legal and political protection for their struggle, and building the pressure at the international level to compel the occupation to respect international humanitarian law, particularly the Geneva Conventions, and implement international resolutions for the Palestinian people's right to return, self-determination and national independence.

In light of the Palestinian Authority's role and reliance on the American-Zionist vision on multiple levels, including the internal political situation and continued reliance on settlement, negotiations, security coordination and the arrest and prosecution of resistance fighters while cracking down on people and violating social rights – what is your vision on how to deal with it?

The continued dependence of the Authority on the American-Zionist program, and its pursuit of useless “opportunities” for futile negotiations, while continuing security coordination and the pursuit of resistance strugglers, is a poisoned dagger in the back of the resistance, transferring the contradiction with the occupation to the internal Palestinian scene and deepening the division.

It is impossible and neither realistic nor possible to combine the “sanctity” of security coordination with adherence to a path of resistance. The continuation of this policy is not only a political framework but a choice for a class, reflecting the interests of the sectors and class of beneficiaries at the top of the hierarchy of the Authority and the PLO. The struggle against this approach requires:

First, to escalate the resistance of our people on all levels and using all methods to make the resistance a daily reality that governs our relations with the occupation. On the other hand, escalating the national struggle against the practices of the Authority, including security coordination and the violation of the political, social and democratic rights of Palestinians, first and foremost, the right to resist occupation.

In this context, the development of a national democratic pole can be built on the basis of a leftist program and a national democratic vision to confront the project of the Authority is an urgently necessary step that cannot be postponed.

The Zionist project is maintaining its objectives. Meanwhile, Iraq and Syria are subject to war and destruction while many Arab rulers are racing toward alliance with “Israel” under the pretext of the nuclear confrontation with Iran. Does the Zionist entity still function as an occupation entity associated with colonialism and imperialism or is it something else? What is necessary in terms of response?

The nature of the Zionist racist settler colonial project as a mechanism of imperialism in the region has not changed. The change is the absence of the national custodian and incubator of resistance to this project and its national program, based on confronting its nature and its objective contradiction with any resolution to the struggle in Palestine. This type of imperialist project cannot be reconciled with and its racist essence cannot be defeated without thoroughly dismantling it. The examples of this are many, in addition to its growing strength when compared to the weakness of the Palestinian resistance and the progressive Arab project, which has only added to its imperialist role as the partner of the imperial project in the region and the world, with the right to determine imperial programs and priorities in the region and increase its share of the profits.

What is required in order to mobilize resistance and achieve victory is to rebuild a strategic national program on the basis of a clear and objective understanding of this project and the nature of imperialism, and the complete rejection of all illusions that have been manifested on the basis of the Madrid-Oslo approach and its subsequent developments.

The maximum that can be accepted by the Zionist entity is to create an administrative “autonomy” under its control to serve as a bridge to extend the power of imperialism in the Arab world, a facade of a state. This is why we must reunify our national liberation project for the unity of our people, land, identity and destiny, restore the Arab dimension of the Palestinian cause and strengthen relations with the Arab national forces confronting this project. It is critical to cut the relationship with the enemy and expand political confrontation with the entity in all international spaces, building the boycott and isolation of the occupier and exposing its racist illegitimacy.

In short and urgently, we must return to the program of national liberation before the lessons of Oslo and the vocabulary of settlement, and struggle to achieve one liberated democratic Palestinian state on the entire land of Palestine. We must end the division and rebuild the PLO in a democratic way as a universal reference of the highest leadership of our people, involving all social and political colors, and examining all the options for our people in the framework of democratic institutions.

The Arab situation today is still witnessing a large amount of chaos, conflict, terror and war, and the specter of sectarian and confessional division has become a reality. How do you see the future reality of the Palestinian cause in light of the situation? What is required at the Arab level?

Indeed, the current Arab situation is indescribable, after the invasion of Iraq, the division of the land and people in Libya, and the attempts being made to dismantle the land and people of Yemen and Syria and the completion of the “Greater Middle East” project.

It is natural that this situation is alien to the Palestinian national liberation movement and the Palestinian national project in general, and it is also self-evident that the absence of advanced Arab national movements and their extensions in the region is the main cause of this dire situation.

On the Palestinian level, our people have many strengths that enable them to confront these projects aimed at the liquidation of our national cause. It is urgent to construct and promote national unity and an end to division, which can mobilize our national struggle to disrupt the imperialist programs in the region and pressure the official Arab reactionary regimes to halt their destructive projects in Syria, Yemen and Libya, and can provide a climate to end this situation of war and achieve democracy and political solutions to these crises, so as to ensure the unity of that country's land and people.

The mobilization of the Palestinian role is capable of providing a real climate for resistance to these projects. The most prominent, central task which can play a decisive role in this direction is to rebuild the national-democratic movement and its extensions in each country to fill the vacuum that has opened the door to all forms of international intervention in Arab internal affairs. The Progressive Arab Front, launched last year, can be an important step in that direction.

The pace of extremism, populism and racism in the European and Western countries has risen in general, including in the United States, where President Donald Trump came to the presidency on such a campaign. Trump has arrived carrying in his quiver new conditions and dictates for Palestinians and Arabs. How do you see the role of the United States of America on the international level? Will we see the emergence of a strong alternate pole confronting its monopoly in international institutions? What are the implications for the Palestinian cause?

The high pace of populist extremism in the capitalist world is a logical consequence of the crisis of this system which worsened in 2008 and whose repercussions are still felt today. At the same time, this exacerbates the contradictions between the capitalist countries, particularly with the United States.

We have already seen that the financial crisis of 1929 led to Nazism and fascism and the 1970s economic crisis gave birth to Reagan and Thatcher.

These contradictions are likely to worsen and bring an era to a close. It is natural to see the emergence of various economic and political alliances and national groupings, including the emergence of the role of the European Union, the BRICS countries. Today, the role of Russia and China is felt strongly on the world stage and highlights a hub that would help to establish an international balance on the global level and weaken the dominance of the United States at a world systems level.

The victory of Trump is an important indicator of the growing advancement of extremist and populist trends internationally, but it also opens up a wide, favorable climate for the advancement of a radical anti-imperialist left, especially in light of the inability of these prevailing trends to solve the problems of the people created by capitalism.

At the level of the Palestinian situation after the election of Trump as the president of the United States, known as he is for his support of the Zionist entity, the situation will be worse and continue on the path of all previous US administrations that have always been biased to the positions of the Zionist entity and have never taken any serious step to stop the violations of the Zionist state or its excesses. The difference between the positions of previous administrations and that of the Trump administrative is not qualitative but quantitative. The prevailing political situation impacts the direction of the Zionist – Palestinian – Arab struggle. What is needed to respond firmly to the policies of the Trump administration and not passively adopt his dictates and requirements.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is moving toward the fiftieth anniversary of its founding. How do you evaluate the situation of the Front overall and how do you view its role and functions in the next phase?

The most recent Seventh National Congress of the Front resulted in decisions that serve as a qualitative leap for the role of the Popular Front and the national democratic line in all areas of work and struggle, including strengthening and developing its political and national positions. This also means strengthening militant organizations, mass movements and popular struggle to address national and social issues and to confront and solve the everyday problems affecting our people. This is especially true in the Gaza Strip, which is still reeling from the disaster of war. However, this progress has not yet lived up to the level of the role that should be played by the front, or the size of the national tasks that must be faced by our people and our cause.

It is necessary to increase and elevate our level of work and effort in all arenas of activity, especially through the leadership bodies and cadres of the Front in general, as well as what is needed to advance the national role of the Front. Therefore, we need concrete steps to unify democratic forces and develop a leftist democratic pole and strengthen its role in Palestinian society.

In addition, building the Arab Progressive Front and expanding its ranks to activate its role on the overall level to bring about integration between the Arab and Palestinian dimensions of the struggle and to mobilize the Arab masses to counter the dissipation of the Arab national movement and rise out of the current impasse of the Arab nation. I hope that the Front's next national Congress will further develop to awaken and indeed double this role, in proportion to the size of the responsibility placed upon it as an organization and as a national leftist democratic framework.

Source: http://freeahmadsaadat.org/2017/04/19/interview-with-ahmad-saadat-prisoners-struggle-is-critically-important-for-the-palestinian-liberation-movement/

Latin America's Women-Led Movements and New Feminisms

Laura Carlsen — 2017-05-01T14:02:39Z

Less than a week before International Women's Day a year ago, Honduran military men trained by the Pentagon burst into her home and assassinated Berta Caceres. Feminist, environmentalist, and anti-imperialist, a charismatic organizer and a staunch opponent of the megaprojects that stole the land and poisoned the earth of indigenous peoples, Berta was the epitome of everything the henchmen of capitalism loathed and feared.

Berta Caceres pioneered a new generation of women leaders in Latin America. These new leaders live the ‘intersectionality' between class, race and gender not as lines that crisscross, but in each breath they take. Berta's leadership was recognized worldwide for how she emphasized uniting struggles. She passed on to her children and members of her organization COPINH the Lenca indigenous worldview and conviction that Mother Earth must be protected, an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist analysis that provides a framework to understand the attacks on her land and people by linking them to the national and global context, and a firm belief in the power of international solidarity to confront an international system. She insisted that environmental activism means standing up to patriarchal forces that destroy the planet, and that defense of territory is defense of women's rights because patriarchy claims woman's bodies as its territory.

This way of viewing feminism as an integral part of the battle for survival as a people, as a species, as women has given new life to feminism at a time when the second wave of mostly white, middle to upper-class feminists seems to have crashed on the shoals of neoliberalism. These women-led battles, not just in Latin America but throughout the Global South, provide the vitality and diversity and relevance that feminism needs to take a permanent and prominent place in every freedom movement on earth.

Lolita Chávez Ixcaquic, a Maya K'iche leader in Guatemala, refers to ‘the other feminisms that are arising among the women of indigenous peoples'. ‘We talk about the autonomy of our peoples,' she says, and also the need for autonomy within autonomy. ‘Because in my community there is a patriarchy, and sometimes it's worse than other barriers because it's so intimate.'

Being on the front line in anti-capitalist battles to defend land and rights catapults women across the region into leadership and forges new definitions. This transformation in the women themselves and in the role and practice of feminism is key to the future, and purposely overlooked by liberal feminism.

The women and their movements

There's no single way to characterize new feminisms in Latin America, but most begin with two basic elements: victims who refuse to be victims and upholding the value of life. That sounds basic, but itís the most fundamental and radical challenge to the system today, and a dangerous one that has led to assassinations and constant attacks on women leaders. Indigenous women are at the heart of this challenge because they suffer the triple discrimination of being poor, indigenous and women, but also because deep indigenous values of connection confront the individualism and consumer culture that time after time have absorbed U.S. and European feminism.

Those connections fuel Mayan women's organizing. ‘We get strength from many principles, among them reciprocity you are me and I am you. That strengthens us as women and the connection with life and the network we are all part of,' Lolita stated in an interview with Just Associates. ‘As part of that web, we have to have territories free of corporations and free of violence against women, to empower us to move toward the full significance of life.'

Garifuna leader Miriam Miranda notes that the emphasis on community means no aspect can be temporarily shelved or ignored. ‘All organized movements, peasants, workers, indigenous peoples, LGTB have to incorporate reclaiming community, communality. Especially the anti-patriarchal struggle, but also anti-racist organizing, because it's useless to fight for an anti-patriarchal system if we still have racist and discriminatory acts against people who are not like us.' As a Black indigenous feminist, she and her organization on the Atlantic coast of Honduras collectively take on all at once, every single day.

Simply defending life in a system that kills has generated new women-led movements never envisioned just a decade ago. In Mexico, thousands of women have organized to search for children and other loved ones disappeared in the nation's disastrous ‘war on drugs'. In local groups across the country, women, and to a lesser degree men, got together and began by spending countless hours in government offices pressing officials for serious investigations, prosecutions and information on their cases. They usually got nowhere. Now demands on the government continue, but many have turned to going out into the fields with sticks and shovels to search themselves, building grassroots alliances for autonomous action. From the pain of losing a child, they've learned to defend rights, file grievances, speak in public, and lead movements. Many might not call themselves feminists, but they recognize real changes in their roles.

‘I used to be a housewife, but after August 28, 2008 I was totally thrown off track, because [the disappearance of my sons] was a drastic life change,' Maria Herrera, leader of nationwide organization of family members of the disappeared, said in a recent interview.

‘It changes your life completely, but fortunately these changes that came about so tragically have also made us understand that as people, as women, we can't be defeated. The pain that I'm suffering, and not just me, but thousands of women mothers wives daughters far from scaring us away, has given us the courage and the strength to fight back and move forward.' Maria Herrera has become an internationally known critic of the drug war and the Mexican government, bringing thousands into a movement for profound social change. Women have taken on all the cases of the disappeared as their own and risked their lives going up against organized crime and corrupt government officials.

The Central American Mothers who travel through Mexico searching for missing migrants each year go through the same transformation from the private sphere to the public sphere, from individual grief to shared outrage and action. When I asked why women are more likely than men to organize, a founder of one of the groups replied that a mother will risk her own life to find a son or daughter and never gives up hope. Fathers feel they've failed to protect and tend to withdraw to shelter those who remain. So traditional patriarchal roles push women into breaking out of those same roles not the first time in the history of feminism we've seen that paradox.

Throughout the region, millions of women worldwide took part in the 2017 March 8 Women's Strike against macho violence, by either refusing to work, to buy, to engage in sexual relations, to attend school or by going to demonstrations. The idea for the global mobilization began in Argentina with the ‘Ni Una Menos' (not one less) marches following the brutal rape and murder of a young woman, and with the Ni Una Más (not one more) demonstrations against femicide in Mexico. Young women outraged by the lack of security and the sexist aggression in their societies turned out in events that bypassed traditional feminist organizations and marked a new generation of feminist activism.

Argentineans marched with a slogan that translates roughly as ‘For the Missing'. The communiqué states: We're missing the women political prisoners, the persecuted, the assassinated in Latin America for defending our land and resources. We're missing women in prison for minor offenses that criminalize forms of surviving, while corporate crimes and drug trafficking go unpunished because they benefit capital. We're missing the dead and those imprisoned for unsafe abortions. We're missing the disappeared.'

This isn't just a laundry list of victims; it's the new constellation of feminist issues.

Feminism lost, feminism gained

Shortly after Trump's election, the New York Times ran an op-ed entitled: ‘Feminism Lost: Now What?' The article argued that when Hillary Clinton's campaign went down in flames it marked a major defeat for feminism the destruction of the dream of inaugurating the nation's first woman president and shattering the glass ceiling. Not only that, anti-feminism in its rudest and most blatant expression in decades won, helped not in small part by white women's vote.

There's been some soul-searching, beyond the post-electoral post-mortems, on what went wrong, but the real question is: What feminism are they talking about? Hillary Clinton popularized the phrase ‘Women's rights are human rights', ushering in a paradigm shift toward mainstreaming women's issues. That's exactly the problem. Latin American feminisms are very clear that they'll never get where they want to be by giving the current system a gender makeover.

Clinton stood for the kind of patriarchal militarism, intervention and corporate privilege that sustains the same system other feminisms are determined to defeat. In her autobiography, she wrote openly about maneuvering with Mexican Foreign Relations Secretary Patricia Espinosa to keep the Honduran coup regime in charge. As she worked behind the scenes to institutionalize the coup without bringing back the elected president, Mel Zelaya, Honduran ‘Feminists in resistance' marched in the streets daily as a pillar of the pro-democracy movement. Cáceres cited Clinton's statement often to show the central role of the U.S. government in perpetuating the coup d'état in Honduras. She later became a victim of the coup legacy.

The NYT op-ed concludes, ‘The challenge for the women's movement is to persuade more of the electorate that feminism is not merely a luxury for the privileged or the province only of liberals.' Even the phrasing is condescending. It's not about persuading people to vote feminist. And it's high time to examine the implicit concepts of who does the persuading and who are the potential persuaded.

For feminism to become the emancipative movement it was meant to be, the roles have to be reversed. It's not about consciousness-raising any more, as if the veil must just be stripped from the eyes of those who fail to see things the way we see them. It's about creating the spaces for dialogue without imposition that recognize class and other differences and allow for new understandings and new models to emerge. That doesn't mean accommodating or justifying the virulent sexism and racism that became acceptable in US political discourse with this election, but it does mean forging new paths that provide a way out that isn't based on hatred and division, or privilege and repression.

It's about giving the lead to the new feminisms that are developing out of head-on opposition to the global system from the women whose very lives are a testimony to how oppressions fit together and resistance is emancipation. U.S. feminism's bad rap exists because a phony feminism has comfortably installed itself within the system and seeks to hold back the new feminisms that challenge its privilege.

Feminism will never defeat the Trump patriarchal revival in the U.S. or the resurgence in the rest of the world unless it embraces its nature as profoundly anti-systemic. As the system becomes more deadly and alienating, women's defense of life and their stands against impunity present a radical challenge. Whether the new feminisms call themselves feminist or not, their anti-systemic actions directly confront patriarchal violence institutionalized in the state and expressed in society on every level from the homes, to the streets, to the legislatures.

Feminists everywhere should be joining these challenges.

This article was originally posted on CounterPunch

Resistance Highways; Finding a Place for Protest in the U.S.A.

Katherine Cashman — 2017-05-01T14:00:32Z

“There is nothing more powerful than the sound of marching feet”
– Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Public protests arise out of the unique form of each city: the systems of governance, the character of the urban landscape, and the residents that shape society. Public resistance to injustice and political corruption most often takes place in large plazas in the center of each nation's biggest city. Contemporary examples include the famous Gezi park protests in Istanbul, Turkey; Arab Spring uprisings in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt; protests for freedom of speech in Place a la Republique in Paris, France; and the authoritarian take down of resistance in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China. These locations were designed for large public gatherings and, therein, the people's right to the city takes form.

The urban development of the U.S.A., however, lacks such a people-oriented definition of public space, due to the economic power of big corporations and their role in shaping the urban environment. Twentieth century urban renewal projects, nationwide, manifested how planners were commissioned by companies like General Motors to cut through centralized urban areas to build large-scale highway transportation systems for cars and commerce, rather than for people and community. The most famous example of a top-down corporatist planner whose urban renewal agenda prioritized the economy over the rights of residents is Robert Moses, who used highways to clear the poor Black neighborhoods of New York City in the 1950s; he was met with fierce grassroots resistance led by legendary urban activist Jane Jacobs. Jacobs' literary works and activism laments the authoritarian design of urban cities and society: “for Jacobs, cities and neighborhoods are much more than walkable, mixed-use places, and much more than engines of innovation and economic growth. They are also bulwarks against the forces of darkness—the fonts of social progress, of human civilization, and of democracy itself.” One could argue that the contemporary political administration in the United States (the Trump era) is a culmination of the prioritization of corporate elites and white power in America, a dark age which Jacobs predicted.

Highway development across the United States not only exhibits the prioritization of corporate power, but also the continued segregation and racial divide between Black and white America. Highway construction in the 1950s specifically cut through Black inner-city neighborhoods, as planners deemed those areas and communities less valuable while bettering the cities for the white population. In Minneapolis, for example, the Black Rondo neighborhood was demolished to build Interstate 94, which runs directly through Minneapolis and St. Paul, without on and off ramps for the inner-city communities of color.

Not incidentally, the American civil rights movement was born out of that same era of racialized urban renewal, and some of their most impactful protests took place on highways. The first highway protest was led by John Lewis and Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery, along U.S. Route 80, which culminated at Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965; the police attacked the marchers for expressing their constitutional right to protest, and over 50 were sent to the hospital.

In congruity with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was born in 2013 after young Black teenager named Trayvon Martin was murdered by a white police officer, who was then acquitted for his crime. BLM represents the continuation of white supremacy and racial inequalities in the U.S., especially in the criminal justice system.

The murder of African-American school cafeteria supervisor Philando Castile by white police officers in St. Paul, Minnesota in 2016 led to powerful highway protests on Interstate Highway 94. BLM protesters and teachers unions united to cry out for justice, but police arrested 30 of the highway protesters for their disruption of the economic life of the city.

Protesting the U.S. government, military, capitalism, development, and law enforcement is not uncommon. However, the fight against racial segregation has been the only movement to block highways specifically, which are the most dangerous and radical landscape for protest; protesters literally put their body on the line for the cause. Their bravery demonstrates the insurgency of efforts to remedy the spatial manifestation of unjust power dynamics between the white people governing and developing urban areas at the expense of communities of color.

Highway development in the U.S. is a clear case of ethics in urban planning; their construction does not unite the city or offer the “right to the city” for the communities who lose access to those landscapes. Highways are a “no man's land”, which are built only for fast vehicles and certainly not for people on foot. They are environmentally and socially destructive pathways used to spatially divide Americans of different races and income groups and uphold the equally divisive and destructive economy.

Countries like the U.S.A., which purport to uplift democracy and personal freedom, must reflect and demonstrate those values through urban planning, as urban areas create environments to catalyze social progress. The power of political resistance cannot and will not be stopped by space, whether city officials plan for it or not. So the question is: will planners design public spaces for people, freedom, and progress, or will they plan for faith in capitalism, which so few have? It is the planner's role in the fight for freedom and justice to design powerful spaces for people to come together, resist corrupted authorities, and progress.

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Kashmir: Pellet Guns, Stone Pelting and the Supreme Court

Tapan Bose — 2017-05-01T13:58:08Z

On March 28, during the fourth hearing of the J & K Bar Association's appeal for banning the use of pellet guns in the valley, the Supreme Court apparently told the Bar Association that it would ask the Central government to stop using pellet guns if the Bar Association was able to persuade the Kashmiri youth to stop pelting stone and return to schools and colleges. "We can direct them (the government) to suspend use of pellet guns for two weeks, but you must assure that violence and stone pelting will stop," Chief Justice of India J.S. Khehar. Earlier the Attorney general had insisted that the Bar Association must first come up with a solution that would get the youth off the streets.

This was an odd response to the plea of a people who are being blinded and killed by a weapon which is not used anywhere else in the country for mob control. The Bar is asking the Supreme Court to look at the disproportionate use of force by the government and the massive damage that this so-called non-lethal weapon has caused to the people of Kashmir. The plea is also pointing out that the security forces are using a weapon of which it has very little information. In the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir, the CRPF admitted that it had fired nearly 1.3 million pellets on protesters in Kashmir within a period of 32 days. It also admitted that there was no way to predict how the pellets would spread once it was fired. The CRPF accepted that the pellets could also hit bystanders. Though the government has been talking about replacing the metal pellets with less lethal munitions, there has been little progress on that front. In fact the government seems to be inclined to continue to use these weapons. In the month of March, the government increased the number of pellet guns in the valley to 5,000. These guns are capable of firing more than 3 million pellets at one go. According doctors the type of pellets that have been recovered in Kashmir indicate that the CRPF are using bare metal pellets.

The question is whether the government forces should use pellet guns? Is this weapon legal? Has its use in crowd control been approved by the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPRD). What are the Standard Operating Procedures for using pellet guns in crowd control? And more importantly, how and when was the use of pellet guns by the CRPF was approved, particularly as this is not included in the list of “non-lethal” weapons for the police force of the states?

The other critical questions are whether the use of pellet guns conform to the Principle 4 of the Code of Conduct of Police in India, which says that as far as practicable, the methods of persuasion, advice and warning should be used. Section 130 Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 (CrPC) clearly states that if the use of force becomes unavoidable then only the irreducible minimum force required in the circumstances should be used.

It is strange that the Supreme Court instead of going into the issues of the law, rules and regulations regarding use of force during crowd control seemed to suggest that it might order the government to stop using pellet guns if the Bar Association could get the youth to stop throwing stones at the security forces.

This response of the Supreme Court to the plea of the J & K Bar Association is radically different from the manner it treated the plea of the Extra Judicial Execution Victims' Families Association of Manipur (EEVFAM). In its order the court had noted that if members of the armed forces are deployed and employed to kill citizens of the country on the mere allegation or suspicion that they are ‘enemy,' then not only the rule of law but also democracy would be in grave danger. It said that the use of excessive force or retaliatory force by the Manipur police or the armed forces of the Union is not permissible. In its order the court had directed that the Indian army and other paramilitary forces cannot use “excessive and retaliatory force” in Manipur and that all allegations of such excessive use of force must be probed.

One wonders why this difference in dealing with the issue of use of excessive force by the state in Manipur and Kashmir. While the Supreme Court has sent J & K Bar Association back to Kashmir to talk to the leaders of the agitating people of Kashmir, the government has also told the court that it was not interested in talking to the agitators and their leaders. The Attorney General said “the court cannot direct the government to meet separatist leaders”.

The government says that it would talk with only “legitimate” political parties. The point is that the so-called “legitimate” political parties are not a part of the protest movement. They are a part of Indian “main stream”. They contest elections, form governments and rule over the people of Kashmir. Talking to them is talking to your own side.

I would say that the government is dialoguing with the opposition groups in Kashmir. It is not conducting the dialogue through words. It is conducting this dialogue through guns. As we know War is also a form of dialogue. This is the reality of the government's attitude towards the agitation people of Kashmir. The choice of the pellet gun fits into this.

Kashmir: The Possibilities

Pervez Hoodbhoy — 2017-05-01T13:54:36Z

Kashmir needs people's struggle, not terrorism

In 2003 I interviewed the late Amanullah Khan, founder of the nationalist organization Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, for our documentary “Crossing the Lines – Kashmir, Pakistan, India”. It remains the only one made in Pakistan that looks at the problem objectively. When asked what path Kashmiris should take, Khan's reply – captured on video – was unhesitating: Kashmir needs people's struggle, not terrorism. “The so-called mujahideen have damaged our cause immensely”.

Khan had concluded after a long history of struggle that the linkage of terrorism with Kashmiri nationalism had both hardened Delhi's attitude and reduced international sympathy. He now advocated “people's struggle”. But what does people's struggle mean in an epoch of retina destroying pellet guns, fierce religious radicalization of both Hindus and Muslims, and soaring India-Pakistan hostility under a nuclear overhang? Is any solution to Kashmir possible in these circumstances?

Let's take a short retreat into mathematics. Some equations have solutions, achievable after some finite amount of effort. Others, with the help of rigorous logic and provable theorems, can be shown to have no solution and so no amount of trying will ever work in this case. There is still a third type: that where solutions are possible but only under specific conditions.

Kashmir can be excluded from the first category. Everything has been tried by those jockeying to control it. Resistance and repression have varied from moderate to severe, Kashmiri political parties have been infiltrated by agents of Delhi or Islamabad, and subversion and terrorism – within and outside borders – are used with impunity. Elections and inducements have also failed to produce a decisive outcome, as have three Pakistan-India wars.

Depending upon one's personal outlook, the blame for today's situation – around a hundred thousand lives lost over three decades with no sign of a better morrow – is easily put upon the other side. Guilt can be apportioned all around, even if precise amounts are undeterminable.

India is the status quo power. The roots of the 1989 popular uprising against it lie in Delhi's unconscionable manipulation of Kashmiri politics. A political issue was treated as a mere law-and-order problem, to be dealt with by an iron fist. India's massive over-reaction sparked off an insurgency that lasted into the early 2000's and resulted in the deaths of nearly 90,000 civilians, militants, police, and soldiers. Delhi's favourite despot, Governor Jagmohan, sought to crush the secular JKLF and ordered the imprisonment and torture of its leader, Maqbool Bhat. Islamic groups eventually filled the resulting vacuum.

Under various Congress governments India projected itself as a secularist democracy, distinct from an Islamic, military-dominated Pakistan. It appeared for that reason to be a better choice. But now secularism is losing out to Hindutva, and democracy to majoritarian rule. Modi's India offers nothing but the iron fist to Kashmiris. The BJP and PDP alliance – shaky to start with – is almost over as each furiously blames the other for a miserable 2% voter turnout, massive mob violence, and rising militancy. Much of India doesn't care.

As Sushil Aaron notes in the Hindustan Times, the up and down cycles of civilian uprisings in Kashmir now merely infuse nationalist sentiment into India's body politic. As a major economic player and buyer of weapon systems, India is unconcerned by international reactions at the killing of unarmed demonstrators. Significantly, King Salman bin Abdul Aziz bestowed Saudi Arabia's highest civilian award upon PM Modi.

Pakistan: for decades it tried to translate India's losses into its gains but failed. It hijacked the indigenous uprising of 1987 but the excesses committed by Indian security forces were soon eclipsed by those committed by Pakistan based mujahideen severely undermined the legitimacy of the Kashmiri freedom movement and deprived it of its most potent weapon – the moral high ground.

Today Pakistan's “bleed India with a thousand cuts” policy – the existence of which it formally denies – is in shambles. India sustained losses but showed no perceptible weakening of resolve or strength. Instead jihad has become an ugly word in the world's political lexicon. Waging covert war has led to the disappearance of international support for Pakistan on Kashmir. This fact is well known to Pakistani diplomats who represent Pakistan's position in the world's capitals, including those of Muslim countries.

Kashmiris: whatever losses India and Pakistan may have sustained, Kashmiris have suffered immensely more. This is certainly true in terms of lives lost and people maimed, but also in other essential ways. Video clips show Kashmir's youth waving ISIS and Pakistani flags as they emerge from Friday prayers in Srinagar. “Azadi” demonstrations resound with Islamic slogans and with calls for an Islamic state in Kashmir. Significantly, Burhan Wani was laid to the grave by a crowd of thousands, wrapped in a Pakistani flag, and celebrated as a martyr rather than a nationalist.

That religious fervor is supplanting nationalist fervor is a sign of terrible times to come. As Pakistan is discovering to its dismay, religiously charged crowds are lethal to civilized behavior. Last week's pre-planned and video-recorded lynching of Mardan University student Mashaal Khan by his colleagues on blasphemy charges was but the latest of countless such episodes. A religious state makes mockery of the very idea of freedom, but those who chant azadi in the streets of Srinagar seem unworried.

If Kashmir is to have a solution – i.e. belong to the third type of math problem – then what conditions are necessary? This requires convincing the three contenders to act in a way that, in the long run, is in their best interest.

India must understand that the key to cooling Kashmir lies in its own possession, not Pakistan's. By formally acknowledging Kashmir as a problem that needs a solution, using humane methods of crowd control, and releasing political prisoners from Kashmiri jails, India could move sensibly towards a lessening of internal tensions.

Thoughtful Indians must ask why their country should care about peace in Kashmir. Surely, if India considers Kashmiris to be its citizens then it must treat them as such, not as traitors deserving bullets or to be punched down. Else it should hand Kashmir over to Kashmiris – or Pakistan. Indeed, its efforts to create a secular state and have religious harmony – and to become the third biggest economy in the world by 2050 – could all come to naught if Pakistan and India relations boil over.

Pakistan must realize that its Kashmir policy has brought nothing but misery all around. As the late Eqbal Ahmad passionately argued, although India's leaders bear much responsibility for Kashmir's tragedy, Pakistan's defective Kashmir policy had repeatedly “managed to rescue defeat from the jaws of victory”. Its obsessive insistence on Kashmir-first must change into Pakistan-first.

A new path for Pakistan must factor in the increased difficulty of penetrating border fencing, and the grave domestic and international political costs of using proxies. Pakistan's army needs to be persuaded that staying the course is a prescription for disaster. Its institutional interest must give way to Pakistan's national interest. It can make a virtue out of necessity by cracking down upon Kashmir oriented militant groups still operating from its soil. Such groups have turned out to be a menace to Pakistan's society and armed forces, apart from taking legitimacy away from those fighting Indian rule.

Kashmiri nationalists are, of course, key to determining whether the level of violence goes down or spirals up once again. All will be lost if its youthful majority succumbs to some ISIS-like ideology, the cancer destroying Pakistan and other Muslim countries. Far from creating a utopia in Kashmir, the ascendancy of radical Islam will pave the way for Kashmir's descent into hell.

The road to peace has narrowed but remains open. Every conflict in history, no matter how bitter, has ultimately been resolved. In Kashmir's case whether this happens peacefully, or after some apocalypse, cannot be predicted.

Pervez Hoodbhoy is a Pakistani nuclear physicist, mathematician, author and activist who teaches in Lahore and Islamabad

Source: http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/editorial-page/kashmir-the-possibilities/247543.html

Why the U.S. Is a Bigger Threat Than North Korea

Vijay Prashad — 2017-05-01T13:52:32Z

A few years ago, I asked a retired Iraqi Air Force officer what it felt like to be bombed periodically by the United States in the 1990s. Whenever U.S. President Bill Clinton felt irritated, I joked, he seemed to bomb Iraq. The officer, a distinguished man with a long career serving a military whose political leadership he despised, smiled. He said with great lightness—“When our leadership said something threatening those words itself were taken to be terrorism; when the United States bombs, the world does not even blush.”

To me this is an intuitive statement.

I was thinking about it as I watched the parade in Pyongyang (North Korea) to celebrate the birth of Kim Il-sung. The imagery from North Korean television was grand—the vast Kim Il-sung Square packed with soldiers as the massive arsenal of North Korea was paraded past its leadership. On Twitter, amateur arms experts gave a run-down of this undersea missile and that trans-continental one. It was breathtaking to watch the performance and feel the anxiety in the Western media that North Korean would launch an attack on someone, somewhere. North Korea watchers poured over the sights, building fanciful theories based on what was being presented. Belligerence, it seemed, was on display here.

It is always the “rogue state” that is the threat to the world order—Iraq here, North Korea there. And in that “rogue state” it is always the dictator who commands the entire monstrosity. Mockery is the guise with Kim Jong-Un as it was with Saddam Hussein. These men have no taste: Saddam with his garish disco mustache and anachronistic military uniform and Kim with his New Wave haircut and his strangely out of proportion laughter. Threats are made to emanate from them—they itch to attack and are only held back by the democratic role of the United States, who sanctions the countries till they starve or patrols their waters with massive war ships to intimidate them into surrender. But the United States is not a threat. It is merely there to ensure that the real threats—Iraq then, North Korea now—are kept in check.

The author, in other words, is always the Eastern Despot.

Amnesia is the mode of thought in the United States. Cluelessness about its belligerent history is now general. It would sound strange to ask why the North Koreans feel such palpable threat from the United States. Odd to raise the fact that it was the United States that brutally bombed North Korea in the 1950s, targeting its towns and cities as well as farms and dams. The data is inescapable. The United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on North Korea. This includes 32,557 tons of napalm—essentially a chemical weapon. As a comparison, it is fitting to see that in all of the Pacific sector of World War II, the United States dropped a mere 503,000 tons of bombs. The United States, in other words, dropped more bombs on North Korea during the ill-named “limited war” than it dropped during the entire engagement against Japan during World War II. Three million Koreans died in that war, the majority in the North.

North Korea has never attacked the United States.

Professor Charles Armstrong of Columbia University, one of the leading experts on the Korean War and on North Korea, writes that the U.S. bombing campaign against North Korea “more than any other single factor, gave North Koreans a collective sense of anxiety and fear of outside threats, that would continue long after the war's end.” In fact, this anxiety and fear lasts into the present. It is easy to dismiss the North Korean attitude as one of brainwashing by the government. But if one looks seriously at the contemporary history of the North and the devastation caused by the U.S. bombing of the 1950s, then one would ask not of the brainwashing inside North Korea but of the brainwashing inside the United States.

Imagine what it must have been like in North Korea to hear that another U.S. battle group—the USS Carl Vinson and its allied ships – was moving to rendezvous in the Sea of Japan with Japanese naval vessels? It must have been chilling to hear U.S. President Donald Trump saying that Kim Jong-un “gotta behave,” the full meaning of the vernacular only available in the audio where Trump's special menace is reserved for the word “gotta.” If they don't behave, he suggests with the snarl, then the cruise missiles on the USS Carl Vinson and the MOAB bombs are ready.

Little wonder that North Korea's Vice-Foreign Minister Han Song-ryol told the BBC that if the U.S. violated North Korean sovereignty, then “all-out war” would result. More chillingly, he said, “If the U.S. is planning a military attack against us, we will react with a nuclear pre-emptive strike by our own style and method.” These statements—in light of North Korea's history—sound less like threats of war and more like threats of preservation. The North Koreans are not foolish. They look towards North Africa and see Libya, which had given up its nuclear program to its peril. It is the nuclear shield that protects them and it is one that they will hold up to the light as often as possible. In any actual military exchange, North Korea would be pulverized. This they know. But they also know that this is their only armor.

The idea that the Bad is always bad and that the Good is always good resurfaces with predictable regularity. The “rogue states” are always bad. That is self-evident. When they “kill their own people,” then it is worse. That has been the standard with Syria's Bashar al-Assad. What makes him worse, say the pundits in the U.S. media and political class, is that he “kills his own people.” The chemical attack south of Idlib is the latest example of his mendacity. Investigations are irrelevant. It was evident to the media and to the political class in the West that only Assad could have authorized such an attack. This was a scenario that did not need explanations. A chain of associations was enough: chemical attack, children and Assad. No more detail was necessary.

It was more complex when the “rebels” bombed a convoy leaving the besieged towns of al-Foua and Kfraya, outside Aleppo, killing at least 126 people—including about 80 children. It was not Assad who did this attack, but the “rebels” which makes outrage suddenly unavailable. There was no outrage, indeed, when U.S. aircraft killed 30 civilians on Monday in a bombing run on the village of al-Bukamal near Deir az-Zor in eastern Syria. Three homes were flattened by the U.S. aircraft and civilians—including children—from six families were killed. There was no hue and cry, no denunciations in the United Nations Security Council, no hashtag, no media campaign for the United States to take action against the perpetrators. Ivanka Trump did not rush to her father with pictures of the dead children, awakening in him a conscience few knew existed. In at least one of the cases, the United States was the one that did the killing. Silence met these tragedies.

I have been traveling around the United States these past few weeks, talking about my book—The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution. At each event, someone asks the honest and heartfelt question, “What can we do about Syria?” What this question implies, it seems to me, is that the United States is not doing anything about Syria and that the United States is capable of acting in a helpful way in these conflicts. There is no sense in this question that the United States is already an actor here, and is often the author of these tragedies with threats from Washington producing anxiety from North Korea to Iran. There is little sense here that it is the United States that has been selling—to great profit—arms to all sides of these conflicts, inflaming animosities with greater weaponry. There is even less concern here that the United States has bombed Syria almost eight thousand times, with numerous of civilian casualties in its ledger. Innocence is the mode of self-regard. To change that attitude is perhaps the greatest step forward towards world peace. A little more outrage at U.S. actions, not U.S. inactivity, might help push an anti-war movement forward.

The Iraqi officers statement should say a lot to an American national. Or at least it begs the question of who is the real threat and why its belligerent actions are not considered to be the most dangerous problem facing the planet. It is easy to see “them” as the problem—the “rogue states” that are almost seen to be genetically predisposed to be erratic and dangerous. Far more difficult to accept that the history of U.S. violence against North Korea or the malice unfolding in West Asia is not the source of the great devastation that tears across the planet.

Source: http://inthesetimes.com/article/20076/why-the-us-is-a-bigger-threat-than-north-korea

‘Holy Shiver'

Pervez Hoodbhoy — 2017-05-01T13:50:14Z

Much of the Pakistani public, tacitly or openly, endorses violent punishment of suspected blasphemers.

THE mental state of men ready and poised to kill has long fascinated scientists. The Nobel Prize winning ethologist, Konrad Lorenz, says such persons experience the ‘Holy Shiver' (called heiliger Schauer in German) just moments before performing the deed. In his famous book On Aggression, Lorenz describes it as a tingling of the spine prior to performing a heroic act in defence of their communities.

This feeling, he says, is akin to the pre-human reflex that raises hair on an animal's back as it zeroes in for the kill. He writes: “A shiver runs down the back and along the outside of both arms. All obstacles become unimportant … instinctive inhibitions against hurting or killing disappear … Men enjoy the feeling of absolute righteousness even as they commit atrocities.”

While they stripped naked and beat their colleague Mashal Khan with sticks and bricks, the 20-25 students of the Mardan university enjoyed precisely this feeling of righteousness. They said Khan had posted content disrespectful of Islam on his Facebook page and so they took it upon themselves to punish him. Finally, one student took out his pistol and shot him dead. Hundreds of others watched approvingly and, with their smartphone cameras, video-recorded the killing for distribution on their Facebook pages. A meeting of this self-congratulatory group resolved to hide the identity of the shooter.

Khan had blasphemed! Until this was finally shown to be false, no proper funeral was possible in his home village. Sympathy messages from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and opposition leaders such as Bilawal Bhutto came only after it had been established that Khan performed namaz fairly regularly.

Significantly, no protests of significance followed. University campuses were silent and meetings discussing the murder were disallowed. A demonstration at the Islamabad Press Club drew about 450, a miniscule figure against the estimated 200,000 who attended Mumtaz Qadri's last rites.

This suggests that much of the Pakistani public, whether tacitly or openly, endorses violent punishment of suspected blasphemers. Why? How did so many Pakistanis become bloodthirsty vigilantes? Evening TV talk shows — at least those I have either seen or participated in — circle around two basic explanations.

One, favoured by the liberal-minded, blames the blasphemy law and implicitly demands its repeal (an explicit call would endanger one's life). The other, voiced by the religiously orthodox, says vigilantism occurs only because our courts act too slowly against accused blasphemers.

Both claims are not just wrong, they are farcical. Subsequent to Khan's killing, at least two other incidents show that gut reactions — not what some law says — is really what counts. In one, three armed burqa-clad sisters shot dead a man near Sialkot who had been accused of committing blasphemy 13 years ago. In the other, a visibly mentally ill man in Chitral uttered remarks inside a mosque and escaped lynching only upon the imam's intervention. The mob subsequently burned the imam's car. Heiliger Schauer!

While searching for a real explanation, let's first note that religiously charged mobs are also in motion across the border. As more people flock to mandirs or masjids, the outcomes are strikingly similar. In an India that is now rapidly Hinduising, crowds are cheering enraged gau rakshaks who smash the skulls of Muslims suspected of consuming or transporting cows. In fact India has its own Khan — Pehlu Khan.

Accused of cattle-smuggling, Pehlu Khan was lynched and killed by cow vigilantes earlier this month before a cheering crowd in Alwar, with the episode also video-recorded. Minister Gulab Chand Kataria declared that Khan belonged to a family of cow smugglers and he had no reason to feel sorry. Now that cow slaughter has been hyped as the most heinous of crimes, no law passed in India can reverse vigilantism.

Vigilantism is best explained by evolutionary biology and sociology. A fundamental principle there says only actions and thoughts that help strengthen group identity are well received, others are not. In common with our ape ancestors, we humans instinctively band together in groups because strength lies in unity. The benefits of group membership are immense — access to social networks, enhanced trust, recognition, etc. Of course, as in a club, membership carries a price tag. Punishing cow-eaters or blasphemers (even alleged ones will do) can be part payment. You become a real hero by slaying a villain — ie someone who challenges your group's ethos. Your membership dues are also payable by defending or eulogising heroes.

Celebration of such ‘heroes' precedes Qadri. The 19-year old illiterate who killed Raj Pal, the Hindu publisher of a controversial book on the Prophet (PBUH), was subsequently executed by the British but the youth was held in the highest esteem. Ghazi Ilm Din is venerated by a mausoleum over his grave in Lahore. An 8th grade KP textbook chapter eulogising him tells us that Ilm Din's body remained fresh days after the execution.

In recent times, backed by the formidable power of the state, Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan have vigorously injected religion into both politics and society. The result is their rapid re-tribalisation through ‘meme transmission' of primal values. A concept invented by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the meme is a ‘piece of thought' transferrable from person to person by imitation. Like computer viruses, memes can jump from mind to mind.

Memes containing notions of religious or cultural superiority have been ‘cut-and-pasted' into millions of young minds. Consequently, more than ever before, today's youth uncritically accepts the inherent morality of their particular group, engages in self-censorship, rationalises the group's decisions, and engages in moral policing.

Groupthink and deadly memes caused the lynching and murder of the two Khans. Is a defence against such viral afflictions ever possible? Can the subcontinent move away from its barbaric present to a civilised future? One can so hope. After all, like fleas, memes and thought packages can jump from person to person. But they don't bite everybody! A robust defence can be built by educating people into the spirit of critical inquiry, helping them become individuals rather than groupies, and encouraging them to introspect. A sense of humour, and maybe poetry, would also help.

The writer teaches physics in Lahore and Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, April 29th, 2017

Giving a Voice to Local NGOs in a Flawed Global Aid Environment

Jeremy Wildeman & Matteo Mazzoleni — 2017-05-01T13:45:33Z

In a foreign aid environment dominated top-down by donors, what can we do to facilitate local ownership over the aid process? Is it possible, or is the system just too flawed?

Local Leadership in Aid is Ideal, but rarely Realised

There is broad agreement at even the highest levels of the international donor community that the key to successful development lies with local ownership over aid projects, where people in affected regions play a leading role in setting the agenda and developing strategies to alleviate local poverty with external assistance. For some time now that consensus has been matched with the lofty rhetoric of “partnership” used to describe the relationship between donor and recipient. Ideally those partners work as equals with donors, together designing aid projects that effectively challenge poverty and enhance local capacities through institutional development.

In reality these are not true partnerships. Regardless of even the best intentions of some donors, the language of partnership clouds a highly asymmetrical, imbalanced relationship. In truth, those with funding exercise incredible power over those who are dependent on those funds, allowing the donor to drive the aid agenda to match their own priorities and interests. That imbalance is so great that research by Dr Moira Faul found that behind the formal networks of the policy making process, recipient “partner” input is completely absent from the informal networks that shape aid.

Meanwhile, there is evidence to suggest at the macroeconomic level that there are incredible problems with this asymmetrical development aid environment that is driven by wealthy donor countries, because they may actually be taking advantage of the same regions they are supposed to be helping. For example, a recent report by US-based Global Financial Integrity and the Centre for Applied Research at the Norwegian School of Economics, looked into unrecorded capital flight and found that developing countries are actually net-creditors to the rest of the world. This capital flight is facilitated by banks scattered across the EU that are assisting in high-level corruption and the illicit trade in natural resources. Further, a very significant proportion of donor country aid funding actually returns home, because they are funding their own nationals as consultants, trainers and project managers in this top-down aid environment; or due to tied aid that requires funding be spent on goods and services from the donor country. Evidence such as these has led to accusations by NGOs that richer EU and Western states are actually using aid as a smokescreen to hide a "sustained looting" of poorer states.

While it is of utmost importance to research, highlight and challenge inequalities caused by the way the global economy is structured, and with development aid practices, people in poorer and conflicted regions of the world still need funding in the meantime. In fact, they may need help accessing that funding more than ever, since their region may be a net-creditor to richer countries, meaning money they need to invest in their community may lie not at home but elsewhere in places like the EU, Canada and the United States. Below is what we have been doing to help local NGOs navigate this environment

Helping Local NGOs with Local Ownership & to Access Funding

Many of us with experience in the sector will be able to anecdotally pinpoint friends and colleagues who we feel genuinely aspire towards altruistic aims of empowerment and partnership in poverty reduction. Even where such people exist, though, it is very difficult for local NGOs in poor and conflicted regions to reach out to them. There are incredible barriers that deny local NGOs agency over their own projects, including language (especially proficiency in English), networking opportunities, knowledge of granting and tendering processes, organisational culture, digital media strategies, registration, charitable regulations, administrative expectations and project management. Those same barriers offer incredible advantages to aid actors operating out of donor regions, making it immensely easier for them to access funding than their contemporaries in afflicted regions, regardless of levels of local expertise. Those barriers stifle the voice of local actors with the knowledge and ability to address their community problems, undermining local ownership and effectiveness in the aid process.

Navigating a flawed and complicated aid environment, we are doing our utmost to help small, effective, local NGOs to access funding and resources to provide services needed in their communities. We have been doing this with colleagues at the UK-based charity Firefly International providing assistance to local NGOs engaged in youth development work in conflict and post-conflict regions of the Balkans and Middle East. In this way we are assisting people at these local NGOs to play a leading role in setting their own development agenda and strategies to alleviate local poverty, while accessing external assistance.

Working from the geographical and knowledge advantages of a rich donor country, the UK, we have been doing our best to advise and to represent our colleagues from the local NGOs we work with, extending forward their voice into the richer West and granting them a greater degree of ownership over their own aid. As such, we are very much working in the spirit of Ernesto Sirolli's call “to become a servant of these people”, who are seeking support in their efforts to be better persons and to make their communities better places to live in. We are facilitating them to solve their own problems, while also developing into better persons ourselves.

Applying this Method in the Balkans & Middle East

Firefly currently supports and cooperates with three local NGOs based in Bosnia, Palestine and one run by Syrian refugees in Turkey. In each case we have provided support for community actors to establish their own registered organisations, providing them with support first through a difficult incubator stage turning their aspirations into operations, before detaching to provide lighter but long-term structural support. We consciously aim to provide long-term support to the organisations we work with, including some core funding, because transformational change is generational and does not run on the 2-3 year funding cycles that typify global grant funding (and media attention).

(1) The organisation we support in Bosnia is called Svitac. Established in 1998 in the city of Br?ko, it promotes educational and cultural activities with the goal of building a common ground where young Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks can grow together and challenge narratives of conflict. To do this Svitac organises activities such as summer camps for children, as well as music, arts and drama workshops. These activities have been supported historically by an international volunteer programme recruiting instructors from EU countries.

Our Approach: Svitac was established with help at the incubator stage by Firefly's late founder, Ellie Maxwell. Now managed extremely well at an administrative level, we have focused in recent years on providing support for Svitac that allows it to exercise greater ownership over critical aspects of their operations, such as digital media and volunteer management. For instance, we have helped them to develop a digital media strategy and taught them to manage their own English language website, which are crucial to international volunteer recruitment and fundraising. We have also invested a great deal of time into helping Svitac transition away from an EU funded European Voluntary Service programme as its primary source of international volunteer instructors. The EVS programme required a great deal of Firefly involvement in the recruitment and management of volunteers, in a system we found favoured the voice of youth EU volunteers over local expertise, and where Svitac's Director Gordana Varcakovic has nearly two decades years of experience in volunteer and project management. It was also a programme that subsidised European volunteers, rather than contributing funding to Svitac, and in fact cost Svitac funding, because the EVS programme runs at a deficit — drawing funds away from a local NGO in a process described in this first section of this article. The new volunteer programme will be completely locally owned, open to volunteers from across the world and meant to be financially self sufficient. It is modelled on a programme we helped develop Project Hope.

(2) In Palestine, Firefly's partner Project Hope has been running similar projects in the city of Nablus since 2003. Project Hope language programmes allow local Palestinians to improve their language skills with mother tongue teachers who in return are put in touch with the reality of daily life in the Occupied Territories. Digital literacy and a large number of creative arts classes round out a rich array of remedial education activities carried out typically in tandem with one of over 60 other Nabulsi community organisations supported by Project Hope. Engagement with the creative arts has even developed into a large annual arts and culture festival pioneered by Project Hope's Director Hakim Sabbah.

Our Approach: Founded at an incubator level by one of the author's of this piece, Jeremy Wildeman, Project Hope is the largest local NGO partner supported by Firefly operating on a large scale inviting in over a 100 international volunteer instructors per year to work with hundreds of youth per month. Tailoring our support to the specific needs of our partners, Firefly has primarily been supporting Project Hope with the tricky work of building networks abroad that help with volunteer recruitment and funding. This has included a particular focus on organising speaking tours and donor meetings abroad for its Director Hakim. However, our support has also included vital grantwriting work. Our medium-term aim is to transition away from such deep involvement in the granting process, as well as any connection to the reporting process, granting Project Hope greater ownership over the project management process — an area of historical weakness for Nabulsi community organisations.

(3) Most recently we have been providing support for a Syrian local NGO in Turkey, in this case being set up by a Syrian refugee, Fadia Shaker, as an education centre for the countless refugee children living in the southwestern Turkish city of Antakya. Their work is geared towards the many children who are not accessing services offered in the refugee camps, and especially those who have been forced to neglect their education for years because they have needed to work to support their families. With our support, in particular Firefly's Projects Coordinator Maria Chambers, Fadia has established an organisation that is providing dynamic education and creative thinking activities in science, literacy and maths for about 250 young learners per year. Innovative classes include 3D Paper Engineering, Electricity, DNA biology, Mechanics (creating moving models), Geometry and Interactive Maths.

Our Approach: Maria has followed in the footsteps of Ellie and Jeremy investing a great deal of time in identifying key personnel who want to help their community locally — in this case Syrian refugees moving across the region. Still in the incubator stage, we have been offering fairly intensive support to Fadia, including regular visits by Maria, startup funding, support with local registration, blogging their activities directly on our website, direction in organisational development, and running funding and networks for Fadia directly through Firefly. Further, unlike Gordana and Hakim, Fadia is not yet fluent in English, so we have been managing all of their foreign language correspondence. Drawing on the expertise of Project Hope, its Treasurer Salem Hantoli has provided advice to Fadia on receipting and financial record management, which is vital to charity administration and fundraising. Over time, as the local staff are trained to carry out all the organisational duties on their own, we look forward to seeing full refugee ownership over their own work, while continuing to offer long-term support tailored to their specific needs.

An Act in Reflexivity

Although we have entered this work with high aspirations, we have nonetheless been somewhat and pleasantly surprised by the longevity of the local NGOs we have supported from inception. Svitac has now been in operation since 1998 and Project Hope 2003. For us, this is an indication that our approach may be working. We also take great pride in having offered opportunities to such skilled and passionate people to do something for their respective communities. As individuals whose lives had been turned upside down by conflict — Fadia by the Syrian civil war, Gordana by the Bosnian civil war, and Hakim the Second Intifada/occupation — they are now community leaders making their societies better places to live in. We are very happy to have been able to support our colleagues (and friends) in their efforts to be better persons, just as they are enabling others to do the same, and we are becoming better persons ourselves.

The one area of concern we may never be able to change is with the granting/fundraising process. While we aim for these partners to have full ownership over the project management cycle, we do acknowledge the incredible structural challenges running against their accessing funds from the richer donor countries that can pay. This is especially challenging for places that no longer receive much media attention, or funding, such as contemporary Bosnia, putting pressure on us to come up with core funding. One philosophical question we are concerned about is to what extent then this level of involvement in the project management cycle subverts the concept of local ownership, or if there is simply no alternative in our flawed global macroeconomic and aid environment?

We plan to return this piece a few years in the future to reflect on what we have accomplished, failed at and learned. We would be keen to have your thoughts on what we have described, either as comments or even an article of your own.

Jeremy Wildeman, PhD, is a Research Associate at the University of Bath Department for Social and Policy Sciences, where he carries out analysis in international relations and development aid.

Matteo Mazzoleni, MA, is a monitoring and evaluation specialist, migration policy analyst and international relations specialist.

OXFAM Novib and Human Rights Organization in Niger

A.T. Moussa Tchangari — 2017-05-01T13:41:46Z

After eleven years of partnership, the Dutch NGO OXFAM Novib decided, on March 22, 2017 to cut off all partnership relationship with the Nigerien Association Alternative Citizens' Spaces (Alternative Espaces Citoyens). This decision was taken by the Executive Director of OXFAM Novib, Mrs. Farah Karimi, to sanction a call to chase from his office the President of the Republic of Niger that was allegedly made by the Secretary General of Alternative Citizens Spaces during a citizen demonstration held in Niamey on December 21, 2016. In perfect English, the head of OXFAM Novib in The Hague writes: “it is my understanding that during the gathering of Niger citizens you made a call for chasing the President of the Republic of Niger away from his office “.

According to Mrs. Karimi, who holds this information from a source she did not find useful to reveal in her letter, such a call is not a simple opinion; it is a deviant behavior that she must absolutely sanction in the most energetic way to show that the organization she runs clearly stands out. “Such a call is not acceptable to Oxfam Novib, which stands for democratic values as the only viable way of solving societal issues and meaningful solutions”, she argues; not without expressing her deepest indignation by this beautiful formula: “A call for overthrowing the government or the President is deemed irreconcilable with Oxfam's mandate and not to be expected from a partner with whom we have maintained a cordial relationship for over 8 years''.

In this way, while completely severing the partnership with Alternative Espaces Citoyens, the Executive Director of OXFAM Novib poses as a defender of democracy in Niger; totally sure it can never come to the mind of any democrat in Niger, as in the Netherlands and elsewhere, to condemn her stand against the deviance of a partner whom she also believed acquired to the cause of democracy. The only problem is that Mrs. Farah Karimi did not confirm the veracity of this accusation which was probably whispered to her during her visit to Niamey last February by the Minister of the Interior, Mohamed Bazoum. It is not the first time that such accusations against Alternative Espaces Citoyens and other civil society organizations, whose involvement and activism particularly disturbs him, were made by the Minister of the Interior, who had already complained to the Director of OXFAM in Niger on the very day of the demonstration of December 21, 2016.

Convinced that a Minister of the Republic cannot tell stories to a great lady like her, who heads one of the most powerful NGOs in the world, Mrs. Karimi did not seek to know the version of Alternative, neither during her stay In Niger, nor after her return to The Hague. She therefore considered that what she heard from such an official source did not need to be verified with the partner in question; because trying to verify these allegations amounts in a way to committing a real lèse-majesté crime against the “democratic authorities” of Niger. In any case, it should be noted that the Executive Director of OXFAM Novib preferred to leave Niamey without saying anything about this story to the partner of eleven (11) years, probably not to have to hear a formal denial likely to embarrass her.

Indeed, it was only on March 22 that the patroness of OXFAM Novib emerged with her wizardly argument to justify a break off that she had probably already shaped the idea in the office of the Minister of the Interior of Niger; so for almost three (3) weeks she must have hesitated, trying to see if it is not possible to find another more wizardly argument to move towards this “liberating break off.” That day, it is a letter of complaint from the Association Alternative Espaces Citoyens that will provide her with a good reason to put an end to her hesitations and procrastination. This letter is an additional irreverence on the part of this subversive organization, which believed to be entitled to protest against the wishes of OXFAM to deny its rights in the framework of two joint projects, one financed by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the other by an organization linked to the World Bank called GPSA.

Thus, the break off with the Association Alternative Espaces Citoyens has become, from this day onwards, a particularly interesting case in the eyes of Farah Karimi; because besides satisfying the Nigerien Minister of the Interior, it also allows her to find a clever way out of two important joint projects: first, to exclude Alternative from the implementation of a program called Strategic Partnership-Conflict and Fragility, financed by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and to which Alternative has contributed widely since the beginning of the process of its elaboration until its revision just a few days before the announcement of the break off; and then, not to give a follow up to the prospect of signing a contract for the implementation of the project “Strengthening the social contract in Niger, Budgets are more than money in money out'' , an important project for the association in the framework of its work of critical analysis and citizen mobilization around the allocation of public resources to Niger.

However, the Executive Director of OXFAM Novib has not, probably as a precautionary measure, put an end to the project called “Culture for Change, Citizen Participation of Women and Young People”, which is the only joint initiative being in implementation; because this is a project that has almost come to an end and which is financed mainly by the European Union, a donor against whom even the all powerful OXFAM Novib cannot afford to break a contract on such fallacious basis. The fallacious character of the reason invoked by the Executive Director of OXFAM Novib cannot obviously be missed by anyone; but it is important to stress that at no time during the demonstration on December 21, 2016 or during any other public or private event, a call to overthrow the President was made by an official of Alternative Espaces Citoyens, or even by any member of the organization.

Of course, it is not necessary to stress here that Alternative Espaces Citoyens, like OXFAM Novib or other civil society organizations, is committed to the principles and values ??of democracy and democratic State. The struggle of this association has always been within the framework of legality; and never, even when it was the victim of various injustices because of its fight for a more just Niger, it has given in to the temptation to break out of the democratic path and embrace other options. OXFAM Novib should not fail to recognize Alternative's commitment to democracy; even though the Executive Director, Mrs. Farah Karimi, seriously questioned the spirit of responsibility of the association in its letter of break off. It was the commitment, the critical spirit and combativeness of Alternative that had guided OXFAM Novib to have a partnership with this organization.

The document ‘'Analysis of opportunities and risks Analysis,'' developed in October 2006 by OXFAM, describes in detail the qualities of Alternative Espaces Citoyens, as well as the risks associated with a partnership with a activist organization that was not appreciated by the government authorities of that time; but at that time, Novib was far from what Farah Karimi wants to do today, that is, an organization more attentive to the solicitations of the authorities than to legitimate struggles led by its partners. In other times, OXFAM Novib would certainly have sought to understand why thousands of people took to the streets of Niamey, one day in December 2016, at the call of the civil society organizations; and in regard to the points contained in the platform of these organizations, she would at least have expressed her surprise to hear an authority to present this citizen demonstration as an anti-democratic action.

In any case, Alternative Espaces Citoyens knows how to do, even under these sad circumstances, to decipher things; the association knows that the positions defended by Mrs. Karimi are not necessarily those of the organization she runs and has always been at its side. It is time to mention here that several people within OXFAM Novib were surprised by the decision of break off taken by the patroness; some were even deeply indignant at the fallacious nature of the reasons she invoked. “How can OXFAM Novib index and endanger its own partners in the context of a country where only a few days ago several civilians who languished for more than a year in prisons on charges of conspiracy against the President of the Republic, were able to recover their freedom only through a dismissal of their case by a judge for lack of tangible proof?'', wondered a former official of the organization.

This is a question that deserves to be asked, considering that such accusations have often served as an alibi for imprisoning civil society actors; as it was the case in March 2005 in the aftermath of the demonstrations against the high cost of living and in May 2015 following the publication by Alternative of a report denouncing the forced evacuation of the populations bordering the Lake Chad. Between 2001 and today, it is important to recall that the Secretary General of the Association Alternative Espaces Citoyens has made several stays in prison and other places of detention under various charges; but he has never been the subject of any condemnation by the Nigerien justice which, on each occasion, has released him to allow him to continue his activities. In May 2015, accused by the Ministry of the Interior of criminal association in connection with a terrorist enterprise, in this case Boko Haram, he was provisionally released after ten (10) days' detention at the Anti-Terrorist Unit in Niamey; even if the prosecutor has retained against him, without any solid element, the charge of attacking the national defense, a crime punishable by death penalty according to the Nigerien penal code.

It is important to note that this plot followed the publication by the association Alternative Espaces Citoyens of a critical report on the forced evacuation of thousands of people living in the bed of the Lake Chad in Niger. This monitoring report, which denounced this evacuation as a major violation of human rights, had irritated some Nigerien government circles; but no one in the government or any other institution has indicated that the information contained in this report was false or truncated. The unfair treatment of Alternative Espaces Citoyens in this case was strongly condemned both in Niger and outside the country; and in Niamey, several thousands of people demonstrated on June 6, 2015 to support Alternative Espaces Citoyens, but also the Movement for Responsible Citizenship (MPCR), whose leader had also been arrested following a statement on the same subject. It is an occasion to remember that at that time OXFAM in Niger did not fail in its duty of solidarity with the Alternative Espaces Citoyens; because the report for which the association was harassed was part of a citizen watch in a time of conflict that it supported in the Diffa region.

Be that as it may, it is important to note that if the Executive Director of OXFAM Novib, Ms. Farah Karimi, could act in this way; it is undoubtedly because she is very sure that there is no risk for herself or for her organization. The power balance is clearly in her favor, since Alternative Spaces Citoyens has very little chance to make its voice heard. Certainly, Alternative can always deplore, on all the roofs and in all the authorities, an iniquitous and unjust decision; but, it does not certainly have the means of treating to the services of a lawyer in Europe, of going to the Netherlands and of seizing the court of the Hague, only qualified to arbitrate the conflicts between OXFAM Novib and its partners. The only means in possession of Alternative is the favorable reputation of the association amongst many people in Niger and elsewhere who know that its work, which has been supported for eleven (11) years by OXFAM, and wich has enabled progress in many domains.

Mrs.Farah Karimi is perfectly conscientious of this unbalanced enough power struggle in certain regards; it is also very well known that there is only one small chance out of one thousand that the Dutch people be informed about her machinations. The only thing which she is unaware of, is that the Association Alternative Espaces Citoyens can judiciously use this single small chance out of one thousand to sound the alarm towards all those who, within and outside OXFAM Novib, are concerned with the reputation of this beautiful organization and who are animated by the sense of justice. This is the aim of this article which, we hope, will be considered and treated by the Dutch colleagues; but, we also have to point out that this article is addressed especially to all those who, even in Niger fight so that their country does not sink into injustice. That is the thousands of people who, on December 21st, 2016, demonstrated peacefully in Niamey against bad governance, corruption and the violations of human rights; the thousands of people who want anything else, but only to see their country leaving the last world rank as regards human development, and their State to assume its obligations as regards education, health, food and employment.

In conclusion, and for those who will not have seized all the gravity of this decision against which Alternative Espaces Citoyens will give itself the means of fighting until the end, it is not superfluous to make the comparison with a very current situation in Niger, namely repudiation, which makes unhappy many women. Repudiation in a life of a couple is a unilateral and irrevocable decision of a husband consisting in separating from a woman with whom he lived sometimes for long years and with which he may have even had many children. The break off decided by Farah Karimi merely amounts to a repudiation, in its form as well as in its content; because, it is about a unilateral and irrevocable decision made by only one party for reasons which were not preliminarily discussed with the other party. The partner, unilaterally repudiated, loses all his rights on all the joint projects; but, we thank God, OXFAM Novib does not have in Niger, the authority and capacity to throw into prison or to dissolve unorthodox partners.

A.T. Moussa Tchangari is Secretary General of Alternative Espaces Citoyens