Red Pepper » Asia

Azerbaijan: The pipeline that would fuel a dictator

admin — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 10:00:06 +0000

A billboard of Heydar Aliyev, ‘Father of the Nation’, by the Heydar Aliyev Park. Photo: Emma Hughes
The government’s dash for gas has not only resulted in a raft of new gas-fired power stations in the UK; it is also supporting the drilling of 26 new gas wells in the BP-operated Shah Deniz gas field off the coast of Azerbaijan. Companies and decision-makers in London and Brussels are eagerly eyeing these wells and are currently assembling the agreements and finance for a mega‑pipeline from the Caspian to central Europe.
The proposed pipeline looks something like this: from the BP terminal at Sangachal the gas would be forced westwards through the South Caucasus Pipeline Expansion across Azerbaijan and Georgia. From there the Trans-Anatolian pipeline would pump the gas across the entire length of Turkey, to the border with Greece. Here a further final part of the pipeline: the Trans Adriatic Pipeline, will run across Greece, Albania and finally end in Italy. While each segment has a different name, in reality they are all part of one mega-pipeline. And the plans don’t end there. Pressure is building to extend it to Turkmenistan, Iraq and Iran, creating a significant resource grab as central Asian and Middle Eastern gas fields would be locked directly into the European grid.
Such a pipeline could be devastating for the environment, putting an extra 1,100 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere by 2048 – the equivalent of 2.5 years of total emissions from five of the countries it will run through: Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Greece and Albania. And in the country of extraction, Azerbaijan, its construction would directly undermine the struggle to overthrow the country’s oil dictator Ilham Aliyev.
A fossil fuel dictator
[pullquote]‘BP is where the president got his power from. Where is his wealth, where are his police, without BP’s money?’[/pullquote]
The ruling family, the Aliyevs, have held onto power in Azerbaijan for the past two decades through a combination of fraudulent elections, arresting opposition candidates, beating protesters and curtailing media freedom. Ilham’s father, Heydar Aliyev, became president in 1993, following a military coup; he had previously been the head of Soviet Azerbaijan from 1969 to 1982. In 2003 he was forced to withdraw from the presidential elections due to ill health and his son stood and won instead. The elections were widely recognised as fraudulent.
The Aliyevs’ rule has been facilitated by the signing of the ‘contract of the century’ in 1994, which brought 11 corporations, including BP, Amoco, Lukoil of Russia and the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic, into a consortium to extract oil from the Caspian Sea. The money from that oil not only made these corporations huge profits, but also gave the Aliyev family vast wealth and important allies overseas. The oil revenue means the regime is not dependent on taxes, so there is little incentive to pay attention to citizens’ voices or interests.
Mirvari Gahramanli works at the Oil Workers Rights Protection Organisation union. She blames BP for the country’s autocratic president: ‘BP is where the president got his power from. What is he without the money? Where is his wealth, where are his police, without BP’s money? They [the Aliyevs] have grown rich from BP and now as a result they have much more power.’
The money from the oil industry was supposed to be controlled by the State Oil Fund for Azerbaijan (SOFAZ), which was intended to finance the transition of the Azeri economy away from oil and to ensure the wealth was kept for future generations. Instead much of it has been pumped into construction.
Permanently under construction
Arrive in Azerbaijan’s capital city, Baku, at night and it seems like one of the most opulent places on earth. The drive from the Heydar Aliyev international airport whizzes past in a blur of lights and colour. A daylight walk reveals a different side to the city. The opulence is still evident in the pristine shopping streets, filled with bright plazas and innumerable designer shops – most of which are empty. But walking down a side street is like stepping backstage on a film set. Dust and debris are everywhere; whole buildings are torn apart, spewing their dusty interiors onto the street. Baku is a city permanently under construction.Baku’s highest skyscrapers, the Flame Towers. They were built at a cost of $350 million but appear mostly unused. Photo: Emma Hughes
Just who is benefiting from Baku’s continuous state of demolition has been made clear by the work of Azeri journalists. Khadija Ismayilova has linked many of the construction projects with the president and his family. These include the building of Crystal Hall, which staged the Eurovision Song Contest in 2012, and the nearby State Flag Square, which cost $38 million and briefly held the Guinness world record for the tallest flagpole in the world until its 162-metre height was overshadowed a few months later by a rival pole in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Two-thirds of the cost of the square in Baku came from the reserve fund of the head of state and the other third from the 2011 state budget, yet it was companies connected with Aliyev that profited.
The list of enterprises the Aliyevs are linked to is extensive. It includes phone companies, gold mining and an energy infrastructure company. It is common for big infrastructure projects, financed by public money from oil revenues, to be distributed to companies that belong to high-ranking officials, including the president himself. New laws mean that ownership remains secret, and they are often registered offshore anyway, so that public accountability is impossible.
Khadija Ismayilova’s part in exposing the personal profits made by the Aliyev family has led to her being blackmailed. In the middle of her investigation into the companies profiting from the flagpole square she was sent a tape of her and her boyfriend having sex that had been filmed from a camera hidden in her flat. The accompanying letter threatened to publish the tape if she didn’t stop her investigation. She continued and the tape was published on the internet. It was followed by a smear campaign and harassment by government officials at public events.
While the authorities attempted to label her a ‘loose woman’ for having sex outside of marriage, she says the plan backfired. ‘Society turned out to be more liberal than the government and I got support messages not just from the liberal parts of society but also from the Islamic parties because they are also in a struggle against the government, so they urged me to keep going,’ she says.
In Azerbaijan there are almost no independent media; most newspapers and nearly all TV channels are controlled by the government. Khadija Ismayilova’s experience is unusual only in that she didn’t find herself in prison or hospital – or the morgue. In 2005 the founder and editor of the critical opposition weekly news magazine Monitor, Elmar Huseynov, was gunned down in his apartment building. He had received threats because of his writing and many in Azerbaijan believe he was murdered because of it.
Expectant protesters
Azerbaijanis are furious at how their money has been squandered. Despite the opulence in the centre of Baku, citizens have to pay large sums to use basic services, including healthcare. Much of the county’s infrastructure is in need of repair.
Housing near Tibilisi Avenue in Baku. Photo: Emma Hughes
A new generation is finding new ways to organise through Facebook, blogs and flashmobs. The mood in Baku is expectant; people are talking about when Aliyev will go rather than if. With Baku hosting the Eurovision Song Contest in 2012, the rising protest movements had an opportunity to generate international attention, although it didn’t stop the government responding with continued repression. In October, 200 Muslim activists protesting against a ban on hijabs in secondary schools clashed with the police outside the education ministry. Seventy-two were arrested – the majority of whom were still being detained six months later.
In January, in the town of Ismayilli, west of Baku, the drunk son of the labour minister crashed his SUV into a taxi and then beat up the driver. In response, local residents set fire to his truck, as well as other vehicles and hotels belonging to the same family. Volleys of tear gas filled the streets as a militarised police force marched in. A state of emergency was declared in the town and neighbouring regions, cafes were closed down and the internet censored. The troops stayed for over a month in a show of force. With the regime afraid of change, it is resorting to ever-greater violence and repression. In the run up to presidential elections set for October there are increasing numbers of arrests.
Democracy will not be won easily. Pushing the Aliyev family out of power will be a difficult process. It is made even harder by the actions of the government’s allies in the west. On a recent trip to Brussels, Aliyev promised two trillion cubic metres of Azerbaijani gas for Europe. At the same meeting European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso spoke about the ‘very good exchange’ he had with Aliyev and praised the country for the progress it had made on democracy and human rights.
It was recently announced that the formal signing of the final part of the mega-pipeline agreement between the Shah Deniz consortium and the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) looks likely to happen in mid-October. This means it will coincide with the Azerbaijan presidential elections and will effectively silence those in the EU Commission who wish to speak out about Azerbaijan’s political prisoners and fraudulent elections. Azerbaijani democracy activists accuse the country’s dictator, Ilham Aliyev, of manipulating the timing to ensure the EU is not critical of his regime’s appalling record on human rights and democracy.
Khadija Ismayilova is familiar with Aliyev’s tactics. ‘The TAP signing is perfect timing for Aliyev,’ she says. ‘We will hear hardly anything from the EU about human rights and election rigging until after that moment.’
Emma Hughes is a Red Pepper co-editor and a campaigner with Platform. She spent April in Baku meeting democracy activists. More on the planned mega-pipeline: www.platformlondon.org

India rising

admin — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 14:00:08 +0000

A mobilisation by Ekta Parishad, a land rights movement originating in Madhya Pradesh
The maxim that India is ‘a land of contrasts’ has become increasingly evident as the global economic slowdown snakes its way through Asia. It’s 20 years since global capital travelled over the Hindu Kush, entering India and overtaking labour, the state and the commons like a conquering horde. And it is not just the already-rich who have benefited from economic liberalisation – many more no longer live in abject poverty as a result of the growing economy. But far from all have seen improvements and class divisions, intensified by the still-present caste system, have deepened.
Yet, the dominant narrative of modern India played out in the daily news obscures these growing inequalities, opting instead for Manichaean melodramas more befitting of a Bollywood plot — a conflict between a villainous, corrupt state and the bold capitalist saviours. This pantomime is occasionally punctuated with chatter of ‘terror plots’, or ‘trade union disturbances’ and ‘the Maoist menace’ as the background music, like crickets in the wilderness.
But there is another story of India, one that is welling up from below. For instance, on 28 February 2012, organised labour mobilised the largest one-day strike in history – 100 million workers from every union federation – only to be surpassed in February this year by the largest two-day strike in history. The strikes were a direct challenge to the core neoliberal reforms of the 1990s: against flexible labour contracts, against contracted employees and for a liveable income. Importantly, these movements constitute a break from the once powerful Indian communist parties, which, through electoral defeats and institutionalisation, have diminished in relevance to the working classes.
Class chasm
In the sprawling metropolises the class divide is unavoidable, bursting from every corner. New malls are paved where militant workers once toiled in textile mills; modern apartment buildings tower over slums whose dwellers eke out an existence on less and less land; glossy billboards hang over polluted dusty streets next to beggars and street urchins. The cities now belong to what Gandhi called ‘the monster-god of materialism’. Even the much-touted ‘burgeoning middle-class’ is not wholly included in this new materialism, even though it is defined far less restrictedly in India than in Britain, as a city-dweller with a solid roof over their head.
The urban middle class of India has generated high-profile movements in recent years. The anti-corruption movement represented by Anna Hazare was called a watershed moment for India. Scratch beneath the surface, though, and it is clear that it fitted quite snugly into the logic of capital accumulation. It opened up a space for private capital to continue to pilfer from the public trough, to dispossess, to depress wages, to put blame squarely on a corrupt state. It was an escape-hatch for the creamiest corporate layers of Indian society to go on profiting –the legal form of corruption – that not only reinforced and fuelled state corruption but dwarfed it in both scale and size.
Similarly, the anti-rape movements led by the youth in the universities were inspirational but also exposed the class chasm. The violent rape and subsequent murder of a well-off woman by poor migrant workers that provoked the protests was particularly horrific, but took place in the context of thousands of reported rapes in Delhi alone. Rapes by the rich against the poor, the powerful against the powerless, the high caste against the low caste, the military against ‘insurgents’, received no such attention.
A common saying in India is that you can go to a city and get the best medical treatment in the world, but go an hour outside the city and you’ll be lucky to find an aspirin. The struggles of those outside the bustling urban centres are of a forgotten India. Yet protests here, as elsewhere in India, happen on a colossal scale. Gandhian socialist organisations of landless peasants and small farmers include the Karnataka Raitha Rangha Sangha (KRRS). One of the largest such groups, founded in 1980 in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, it uses militant nonviolent tactics and broad-based organisational methods.
The KRRS is in the frontline of resistance to the ‘green revolution’ that saw a shift towards high-yield farming practices and the proliferation of chemical pesticides and fertilisers. At its height in the late 1990s, the organisation had 10 million members in a state of 60 million people and led a campaign called Operation Cremate Monsanto against the biotechnology giant. Though the KRRS has weakened in recent years both in numbers and political power, it remains a powerful force and some GM crops remain restricted in India.
Maoist resurgence
Meanwhile, the corporate and military encroachment of land in recent years has led to the resurgence of the Naxalites, a Maoist-influenced fusion of different armed struggles. The army makes almost daily announcements of more insurgents killed, with 2,000-plus deaths a year in the past decade. The overwhelming majority of these deaths are of villagers who may be sympathetic to the Naxalites, their bloated and visibly tortured bodies dumped near their villages by the military as a warning to others.
Support for the Naxalites should not be underestimated. Numbering maybe 120,000, they are active in a ‘red corridor’ that bifurcates India from the top of West Bengal in the north east to Kerala in the south west. Some reports claim that they control up to a third of India’s territory at a given time. These areas are the poorest, most neglected areas, with the most oppressed communities atop the richest mineral lands in the country.
This is where the nexus between corporate India and the state becomes clear. It is the land that capital covets. The mining industry giants Tata and Essar Steel went as far as to create their own armed militia, known as the Salwa Judum or ‘Purification Hunt’, in the state of Chhattisgarh in 2006. The counter-insurgency militia went settlement-by-settlement, killing, raping and burning 644 villages, internally displacing more than 150,000 people. The purpose was clear: the land had prime resources to be exploited. It was not until 2011 that the Supreme Court finally disbanded the Salwa Judum, declaring it illegal and unconstitutional.
‘Disturbed areas’
Due north and east of where the Naxalites first began their struggle are the states of Manipur, Assam, and Nagaland, where a different militant separatist movement has been brutally suppressed by the Indian state. Born out of geographic, cultural, and economic marginalisation in the early days of independence, the conflict was exacerbated by the introduction of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act of 1958.
This applies to specially designated ‘disturbed areas’ such as the northeast and Kashmir, giving the military the right to shoot and kill anyone without fear of prosecution and arrest without warrant. The Act has led to a military occupation of the northeast, in which systematic state torture, murder and rape are part of people’s everyday experiences. Most notably, the Act has received wide attention because of the 12-year hunger strike by Manipur activist ‘Iron Sharmila’, who has been detained and forcibly fed through a tube by the Indian state throughout.
In the northwest there is a higher profile insurgency. The struggle for Kashmiri self-determination can trace its roots to 1947, to independence, a Kashmiri people and nation torn into three parts and gobbled up by Pakistan, India and to a lesser extent China. The right of a people to decide its own destiny was sidelined to placate competing newly independent states. The year 1989 marked the beginning of the armed struggle for independence against Indian colonial rule, which has claimed 70,000 lives, 10,000 disappearances, and another 100,000 tortured. Today, despite Indian Kashmir being the most densely militarised zone in the world, the struggle for Kashmiri self-determination continues.
All of these struggles remain largely atomised. As the euphoria of ‘India Shining’ is dampened, it remains to be seen whether any of them will find common ground to open up space for confluence and solidarity against the common enemies of capital and the state that bolsters it.

India: Slums, students and resistance

admin — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 22:45:24 +0000

Mumbai’s slums are increasingly overshadowed by skyscrapers. Photo: JonoHub
Slumbai
As your flight begins its descent into Chhatrapati Shivaji international airport, Mumbai, you fly over endless homes with endless squares of blue, little swimming pools attached to each house. These are some of Mumbai’s slums, Jamblipada and Kuchi Kurve Nagar, and these blue pools are actually blue strips of recycled polypropylene tarpaulin, the cheapest shelter on the market. There are more than eight million slum dwellers in Mumbai alone, but everyone recognises that this is a convenient – not accurate – number.
In these slums, the residents are not idle. These areas are a hive of activity oscillating between the very difficult work of managing everyday life (cooking, cleaning, washing, sleeping) and the equally hard work of earning a daily living. Here you will find a group of people, including children, in a small shop that spills onto the street breaking down various electronic goods for their constituent parts (e-recycling) and there you will find women on the way to work as cleaners and cooks in the nearby middle-class colonies, and men on the way to work as day labourers. A few elderly people are at rest, but among them too there is activity – the women prepare meals and the men tell stories. There are no swimming pools nearby.
No one in India ignores the slums. They are a fact of life. The Committee on Unorganised Sector Statistics (Government of India, 2012) acknowledges that more than 90 per cent of the workforce is in the informal sector – defined now not based on the regulation of the workplace but much more progressively to exclude ‘regular workers with social security benefits provided by employers’. If a worker gets no such benefit, then that worker is in the informal sector.
Yet when the writer Katherine Boo studied one slum near the airport, Annawadi, she found that ‘almost no one in this slum was considered poor by official Indian benchmarks’ (Behind the Beautiful Forevers: life, death and hope in a Mumbai undercity, 2012). The government has been playing around with poverty statistics. Last year it reported that 29.8 per cent of the population – 360 million of the 1.21 billion – lives under the poverty line. That’s a drop from 37.2 per cent in 2004/05 – a result of its policies, the government suggests, while others note that it might have a great deal to do with the benchmarks chosen. In 2012, the government’s Planning Commission fixed the urban poverty line at Rs28.65 (about 34p) per day, Rs22.42 (27p) in rural areas, even lower than the Rs32 (38p) and Rs28 (33p) it had originally proposed. Other indices contained in the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report 2010, The Real Wealth of Nations, suggest that 55 per cent of the Indian population lives in poverty, while an official government commission has claimed that a more accurate figure would be 77 per cent living below the poverty line.
The UNDP study offered a new measurement to study poverty. It developed a new ‘multidimensional poverty index’, which took into consideration not just earning power but ‘poor health and nutrition, low education and skills, inadequate livelihoods, bad housing conditions, social exclusion and lack of participation’.
Based on this much more accurate assessment of deprivation, the UNDP found that eight of India’s 28 states house 421 million multi-dimensionally poor people, more than the 410 million equally poor people who live in the 26 poorest countries in Africa.
Books by Katherine Boo, Aman Sethi (A Free Man: a true story of life and death in Delhi, 2012) and Sonia Falerio (Beautiful Thing: inside the secret world of Bombay’s dance bars, 2012) introduce us to the people who live on that side of the barrier of multidimensional poverty. Resilient certainly, but they are also buffeted by the insecurity of their lives – caught in the fragile membrane between legality and illegality, security and insecurity. Work is contingent and sometimes dangerous. Their neighbourhoods are often illegal settlements that rely upon political patronage and so welcome the kind of political mafia that mimics the other mafia whose purpose is to traffic in illicit commodities such as drugs, sex and weapons.
Katherine Boo finds that for those she encountered ‘the crucial thing was the act of casting a ballot’. Aman Sethi’s lead character would scoff at such elementary civics. Mohammed Ashraf tells him: ‘Today I can be in Delhi. Tomorrow I could well be in a train halfway across the country; the day after, I can return. This is a freedom that comes only from solitude.’
Romance does not govern Ashraf’s life: ‘When you first come here, there is a lot of hope, abhilasha. You think anything is possible, but slowly you realise, nothing will happen, and you can live the next five years just like the last three years, and everything will be the same. Wake up, work, eat, drink, sleep, and tomorrow it’s the same thing again.’
The anomie that seems to have settled into Ashraf’s difficult life is unsettling. His is the consciousness of the vagabond. It must have been conversations with people such as him that led Boo to her equally unsettling conclusion about the ethics and politics of the poor: ‘Powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another.’ But this is only one part of the story.
A train passes through slums in Mumbai
Street corners
I am sitting on the street in Delhi, talking to a group of men and women; they are drivers, guards and household servants. We wait each day for the school bus – my children ride it and so do the children of their employers. Each day, as one of the women puts it, our ‘parliament’ goes into session. This day I report that I had just found out that Adi Godrej, the head of the Godrej Group, is worth $9 billion. I ask what each of them would do with $1 billion – let alone nine of them. Everyone laughs.
One man, Chaman Lal, a guard who has just had a son and beams with the confidence of new fatherhood, says that he would use the money to ‘remove’ the prime minister. All the implications of an execution are on his face and in his biting tone. The others rush in. Rubbish, they say. Anyway, if you get rid of one person, there will be others in the wings. The point is conceded, but he insists that something must be done.
Another, a household servant, Geeta, smiles and says that she would use her money to erase the slum areas of Chirag Delhi, where she lives. Once the old houses are bulldozed, Geeta would build a new neighbourhood with more rational streets, better sewers, good electricity networks and – she nods as she says it – free wi-fi. Everyone applauds. Hers is the best idea.
On another day we are talking politics. One of the drivers, Dadu, is the very well-read intellectual of the group. He goes for a morning walk for an hour each day before he makes his half-hour bicycle ride to his employers’ house. The walk, he often says, allows him to meditate on the news of the day. We all agree that the current government, led by the Congress Party, is corrupt and feckless. Each day’s paper brings news of a new corruption scandal, and recently The Hindu, I tell them, is reporting news of corrupt tendencies from the 1970s. ‘Is corruption the destiny of India?’ one man asks.
What he refers to is the prevalence of small bribes. One of the women, Premlata, laughs and says that the bribes she has to pay do not seem to be much compared to the kind of stories Dadu has been feeding us with. No one can disagree with her. They all live in slums of one kind or another, and all of them see their small bribes as forms of non-municipal taxation to settle matters of energy, water, security of tenure and education. They see their local politicians come and mingle with the gangsters who collect the small bribes. This is a parallel economy – the small bribes do not go through the state but the state’s elected officials pocket them.
At the other end of the city is a slum where I have come to meet friends who had worked with me during my dissertation research more than 20 years ago (Untouchable Freedom: a social history of the Balmiki community, 2000). It is as you would imagine a slum except for one thing. As you go through the congested lanes, threatened at all times by the sewage brimming in open drains, you will pass onto an open field – a park that anchors the slums and has not been encroached upon as a result of the vigilance of the residents themselves. It is where the boys and girls play, where there is a small temple dating from the 1930s, and where the elders absorb the sunlight and the fresh air. It is where there is some respite from the struggles of everyday life, and so this is where I often like to go.
Nothing has changed over these two decades. Our same group is in place, and we are talking politics once more. Previously, in the early 1990s, two threats convulsed India – the breaking down of the dirigiste economy in the name of liberalisation and the rise of Hindutva fascism. The colony where I worked was threatened on both counts. The people here worked as sweepers and sewage workers in the municipality, and there was fear that their jobs might be outsourced to the private sector, something that had already happened to their colleagues in the airports). The people here had also begun a long march from the 1930s into the political wing of the fascist ensemble, the Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP.
Today, things are different. The lure of commodities determines the horizon of the young people – they are not talking about the Hindutva and the threat of Muslims or about the security of their sweeping and sewage jobs. Many of them want a new destiny – something that allows them to roam the malls as more than mere tourists in the world of commodities. I meet some young people who no longer want to pursue the professions of their families – at least of the past two generations – to work as municipal workers. Some want to rise up the government ladder, others want to be politicians; some want to migrate to another country, others want to be teachers; some want to be musicians, others want to be scientists.
Such dreams were also there 20 years ago. Mahesh wanted to go to Russia but he found that the upfront fees to the labour contractors were forbidding, so he remained behind. Now the dreams are thrust upon the youth by the commodities that enfold their lives – on television, on billboards and of course in the shops. But I don’t see too many of these commodities in their homes, which bear the marks of an earlier era. It is on their bodies that one sees the change – jeans and t-shirts, not purchased from the Ambience Mall but at the street markets instead.
Not long after I finished my dissertation, Om Prakash Valmiki published his remarkable memoir (Jhootan, 1997) where he reflected on the intolerance of the Savarna caste Hindu who worships ‘trees and plants, beasts and birds’ but hates Dalits, oppressed castes. All is well if your caste is unknown but ‘the moment they find out your caste, everything changes,’ wrote Valmiki. ‘The whispers slash your veins like knives. Poverty, illiteracy, broken lives, the pain of standing outside the door, how would the civilised Savarna Hindus know it?’
The young people in the Balmiki colony have a wide range of caste consciousness. Some are militantly aware that they will get nothing unless they organise around their caste oppression and perhaps join forces with the Dalit political organisations, while others want to go into the world as Indian citizens and claim their rights on that basis.
Valmiki’s negative prognosis is close to the facts. Dalits in the city of Delhi are much more confident about what they want of the world, and yet the world around them is a shadow of their desires. A government survey found that 90 per cent of Delhi’s Dalits live in slums. When the Commonwealth Games construction began in the city, the government provided funds for rehabilitation through the special component plans (SCPs). Delhi’s Dalits were to receive almost 17 per cent of the SCP funding but between 2008-9 and 2010-11, where data is available, the government only spent 1.6 per cent of the SCP on Dalit areas (about £1 million over three years).
I ask the young people what they think of this. They shrug. The nonchalance reflects a long history of being confronted with oppression and corruption. But then, in the interstices, come these outbursts: ‘What were those numbers again?’ ‘Who can we go and see?’ ‘What was that money for?’
Farmers’ movements are fighting to ban GM crops. Photo: La Via Campesina South Asia
Politics
On 2 April 2013, the student unions of West Bengal came out on the streets to protest against the withholding of elections for student government in their colleges. A tsunami of neoliberal reforms in higher education had made the students restive. It was not just a matter of higher fees that exercised them. They were also furious at changes in the character of the education – with a tendency to yoke education to careers and to measure learning with fealty to rules developed in the North Atlantic.
Thousands of students chanted their way down the storied College Street in Kolkata and assembled in Rani Rashmoni Road. They faced a police line, which advanced with unpleasant motives. The police arrested hundreds of students and threw them into private buses to be transported to Alipore Jail. On the buses, the police beat the students affiliated with the Communists’ Student Federation of India (SFI). One SFI leader, Sudipta Gupta, age 23 and a recent political science MA from Rabindra Bharati University, was beaten, thrown from the bus, retrieved and beaten again. He died within hours of being admitted to hospital.
The chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, said that Gupta’s death was ‘an accident’. She was at that point opening the new season of the Indian Premier League cricket tournament. Despite hearing of his death, she remained at the celebrations.
Anger on the left has been growing steadily. Gupta is the 93rd left cadre killed by the state forces or supporters of the chief minister’s party over the past few years. It is in this context that the Communist leader Mohammed Salim asked, ‘What kind of fascism is this?’ The SFI held demonstrations across the country and on 9 April, when Banerjee was in Delhi, the left militantly confronted her – including tearing the shirt off her finance minister. In retaliation her supporters went on a rampage, attacking the offices of the SFI and the Communists in West Bengal.
The Communists remain a weak force in India. The two main political formations are the Congress-led government and the BJP bloc. Congress speaks from both sides of its mouth – the language of social democracy helps to draw in sections of its electoral base and the language of neoliberalism allows it to please the financial sector and the ratings agencies. The BJP is keen to promote its own ‘honesty’ against Congress’s corruption, and to hide its commitment to the same neoliberal ideas along with a harsh, even fascistic, hatred of social minorities.
But neither of these parties is capable of governing on its own. In a country the size of a continent, regional political parties are essential, which is what opens the most modest space for some kind of democratic intrusion into the system. Parties asserting regional or caste interests, with a specific programmatic commitment or pragmatic populism offer themselves up to the main blocs to form a majority in the 543-seat Indian parliament.
Apart from the Communists, whose space in the parliamentary sphere is not what it was even a decade ago, the rest of the political forces are committed in different degrees to the general policy posture of ‘neoliberalism with Southern characteristics’ – government expenditure to build infrastructure, private development of real estate and entertainment, publicly-financed but privately-owned extraction of raw materials and of heavy industry. A few holdouts still believe in a robust public higher education system with students allowed full democratic rights and participation; others approve of the private sector dominance and believe that the only place for politics should be the anaemic ballot box. Anything else might be a threat to the system.
Vijay Prashad’s new book, The Poorer Nations: a possible history of the global South, is published by Verso

North Korea: War games gone wrong

admin — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:16:00 +0000

Every year for decades the US has been running huge joint military exercises with South Korea. These have various functions – keeping the military in trim, tension-building, forcing North Korea to go onto alert to drain its meagre resources, and so on. Every year, North Korea (and China in the background) protests.
This year things were different. The US ostentatiously introduced various weapons systems – including B-52s and B-2s – in an unprecedented display of military might, conveying messages not merely for North Korea but for South Korea and China. North Korea reacted with unusual vehemence, reflecting both the youth of its leader, Kim Jong Un, and increased confidence in its nuclear deterrent, or at least the threat of it. Although the US portrays its military exercises as defensive, a protection against the North Korean threat, the evidence points in the other direction.
Despite having a large army – it is in effect a people under arms – North Korea is much weaker than its southern neighbour. It is not just that South Korea has twice the population; its military has nearly all the up-to-date weaponry that the US can provide. Between 2000 and 2008, according to data from the Stockholm Peace Research Institute, it was the world’s third largest arms importer, behind China and India, while North Korea was 90th. The South imported a hundred times as much as the North.
Any war between the two Koreas would automatically involve the US because it has ‘wartime control’ of South Korea’s military. The outcome would be inevitable. A recent article in the influential Foreign Affairs magazine spelt it out:
‘Ironically, the risk of North Korean nuclear war stems not from weakness on the part of the United States and South Korea but from their strength. If war erupted, the North Korean army, short on training and armed with decrepit equipment, would prove no match for the US-South Korean combined forces command. Make no mistake, Seoul would suffer some damage, but a conventional war would be a rout, and CFC forces would quickly cross the border and head north . . .
‘At that point, North Korea’s inner circle would face a grave decision: how to avoid the terrible fates of such defeated leaders as Saddam Hussein and Muammar al-Qaddafi . . . [Other than fleeing to China] Pyongyang’s only other option would be to try to force a ceasefire by playing its only trump card: nuclear escalation.’
The authors got it a bit wrong. North Korea has made it clear that it will not wait until the Americans are at the gates of Pyongyang before resorting to nuclear weapons. A foreign ministry statement at the beginning of March declared that ‘if the Americans light the fuse of a nuclear war, the revolutionary forces will exercise the right to execute a pre-emptive nuclear attack against the headquarters of the invaders’.
What is the US up to?
This is not, as was widely reported, a threat to attack first, but rather to use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional attack. So what is going on? Given that North Korea is so much weaker than its opponents and hence the chances of it deliberately starting a war are miniscule, it is clear that the US military exercises were designed to raise tension, rather than preserve peace. But why have the Americans done this?
Part of the US strategy was revealed in a Wall Street Journal article on 3 April, which described what officials called a ‘playbook’ to escalate tension in a planned manner. What was the purpose of the playbook? Obviously the message is partly aimed at North Korea (and China) but the main intended recipient is Park Geun-hye, the new South Korean president. She promised during her election campaign to reverse the policy of her predecessor and engage with North Korea, a latterday ‘Sunshine Policy’ that causes alarm in the US security establishment and the South Korean right. Donald Gregg, Bush senior’s ambassador to South Korea, has suggested that the US-initiated UN resolution condemning North Korea’s satellite launch was intended to derail Park’s approach.
The US has taken various steps to retain control of the situation. A new agreement with the South Korea military will bring in the US at an earlier stage of an ‘incident’, thus shifting power from the South Korean president to the US military.
Now the Wall Street Journal suggests the US is putting the playbook on hold and ‘dialling back’ its threats. Why? There appear to have been concerns expressed by Seoul that things were getting too dangerous. It seems that the vigour and determination of Kim Jong Un’s response was unexpected, although that in itself is not the major factor since any decision to go to war would lie with Washington, not Pyongyang. As the crisis was escalated the North Koreans responded, not with military action but gestures, such as the abandonment of the 1953 armistice agreement (which had been violated many times already, not least by the US military exercises themselves) and with belligerent, defiant rhetoric. All this got the media worked up into an apocalyptic frenzy.
The framers of the playbook strategy knew what they were doing. The Wall Street Journal article reassures us that ‘US intelligence agencies assessed the risks associated with the playbook and concluded there was a low probability of a North Korean military response because the regime’s top priority has been self-preservation.’
Or to put it another way, they knew that they could be as provocative as they liked, short of an actual incursion into North Korea, because the government would not retaliate. Far from being a crazily threatening country, as portrayed by the media (with a little prompting from US officials), North Korea is small and weak, but is ready to defend itself and calibrates quite carefully its response to provocation. The playbook was based on an understanding of this. The US aim was not to precipitate war, but to prevent peace breaking out.
A step too far
In one respect, though, things didn’t go entirely according to plan. Apparently the Pentagon got carried away and sent ships towards North Korea in a move that was not in the playbook.
The US navy didn’t like it.
If a war was to erupt in Korea, the most likely flashpoint would be in the West Sea around the northern limit line (NLL). This was unilaterally drawn up by the US after the armistice in 1953, ironically to stop South Korea’s Syngman Rhee from re-igniting the conflict. The North does not recognise the NNL and there are often clashes. The two countries’ presidents, Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Jong Il agreed at their summit in 2007 to turn it into a ‘zone of peace’ but Roh was soon to vacate office and his hardline successor Lee Myung-bak reneged on the plan.
Seoul and Washington are reported to have a number of contingency plans for different scenarios. One that would bring the US in at the early stages of a clash is North Korean naval boats crossing the NLL. A battle between the North and South Korean navies could be contained, as has happened in the past. A firefight involving the US navy is another matter. This might be interpreted by Pyongyang as the opening salvoes of an invasion and they might counterattack, as they have threatened, with all means at their disposal, including nuclear weapons. The threat is meant as a deterrent, but deterrents are only effective if both sides believe in them.
The US administration moved to cool things down. A planned ICBM missile test (of which there have been more than a thousand over the years) was postponed on the grounds that it could be misinterpreted and exacerbate the crisis. North Korean, for its part, celebrated the anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth on 15 April not with a missile test or a military parade, as forecast by the western media, but rather by the usual mass dancing in the main square. The media reported, with a sense of bemusement, that all was calm in Pyongyang.
The possibility that North Korea has some sort of nuclear weapons capability, however rudimentary, clearly does provide a deterrent from a US-backed attack either directly, as in Iraq, or through proxies, as in Libya. Ultimately this might force Washington into meaningful negotiations, despite its long-stated precondition of any long-term agreement that North Korea abandon its nuclear weapons programme.
In the past, before it had nuclear weapons, that was negotiable. But no longer. If George Bush had not torn up Bill Clinton’s 1994 agreed framework then North Korea might not have developed its nuclear deterrent. Now that it has it, it will not easily let it go.
What will happen now? It was predictable that tensions would subside and sometime mid-year there would be talks between Pyongyang and Seoul. The playbook would have failed but US opposition to tension reduction would continue. Park Geun-hye came away from her meeting with Obama in May being criticised for not being assertive enough in pressing the South Korean case for engagement. The initiative was taken out of her hands by two North Korean moves. Kim Jong Un sent a top level envoy to deliver a personal letter to Xi Jinping and, in an attempt to repair bridges, agreed to re-join the Six Party Talks. The North then made an overture to the South that could not be rejected and talks about talks swung into action immediately.
How far they will go and what will be achieved is as yet unknown and no doubt there will be wranglings as they spar over details. The State Department gave a frosty reaction to the North-South negotiations. But the big game is that between Washington and Pyongyang and that is very complex, complicated by the strange world of American domestic politics, and the strategic need to keep tension alive on the Korean peninsula as a key part of the strategy of containing China. At the Sunnylands summit in June Obama apparently rebuffed Xi’s plea for the US to come back to the Six Party Talks.
No war, but then no peace either, in the immediate future.
Tim Beal’s most recent book, Crisis in Korea: America, China, and the Risk of War, was published by Pluto Press in 2011. He also maintains the website Asian Geopolitics

We’re striking to support the movement – interview with Turkish union activist

admin — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 20:53:00 +0000

Most of us like to relax on our birthday – maybe spend time with the family or see close friends. But for Kesk union activist and socialist Ertan Elsoy, whose union has called a two day strike to support a rebellion against the government, his birthday today has been anything but normal.
‘Last night I was keeping guard in Gezi Park under intensive gas attack,’ he tells me. ‘Now I am resting and preparing for this night… Tomorrow morning I will work on the agitation and propaganda activity in the university to support the strike, because the strike on 5 June is so important.’
The Turkish government had been the subject of several complaints from international trade union bodies such as the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) over its treatment and in some cases imprisonment of union activists this year. But now, with reports that political activists have been shot dead and that police and Turkish state security forces are stalking the streets with long knives, tear gas and live rounds, the situation in Turkey couldn’t be any more dangerous or unpredictable for trade unionists.
Fighting the dictator
I ask Ertan if he is scared of being killed. ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘But there is no choice for us except to fight for freedom, democracy and rights!’
‘They will not give us these rights voluntarily. Turkish people are now learning to get their rights. Turkish people are realizing their own power. This is very frightening for the dictator Tayyip Erdoğan.’
The use of the word ‘dictator’ is a powerful accusation, one which on the outside might look far-fetched. Prime minister Erdoğan was elected in multi-party elections and has been credited in some quarters for trying to deal with longstanding human rights abuses against the country’s Kurdish minority. However his implementation of several conservative social policies with Islamist undertones, on top of vigorous free market neoliberal economic policies, has put the prime minister on shaky ground.
The crackdown on environmental protesters in Gezi Park in Istanbul last Friday was the last straw for many thousands of people in Turkey. Spontaneous protests involving a wide range of political viewpoints have erupted across the country.
The police crackdown, and prime minister Erdogan’s insistence that protesters including trade unionists are ‘arm-in-arm with terrorism’, has only raised suspicions that the government is displaying dictatorial tendencies when faced with legitimate criticisms from the public.
Real democracy
‘We just have the right of voting in elections, no more than this. Pluralism, equity and participation are not present in Turkish democracy,’ says Ertan. ‘There are many barriers against usage of democratic rights. So it is just a stylistic democracy. We just vote for our dictators. Turkish people want a real democracy.’
‘Tayyip Erdoğan’s understanding of democracy is “If I am elected, I am allowed to do whatever I want”.’
Although largely unreported in the Turkish mass media, unofficial estimates from citizen journalists and activists put arrests of protesters at well over a thousand, with beatings, a regular occurrence over the last five days. Ertan confirms that he has been an eyewitness to ‘many people being beaten by police’, and says he has seen police use tear gas guns as missiles, firing them directly at protesters and causing them serious injury.
Ertan distances himself from what he describes as ‘marginal groups’ who have used violence during the protests. But he is clear on who started it and the need for the protests to develop further.
‘Turkish police attacked a peaceful demonstration [in Gezi Park]. And they have attacked in the early morning while people were sleeping and sitting in the park. The government and Tayyip Erdoğan are responsible for the violence. There have been neoliberal policies implemented without interruption. This has created deep, long-run unhappiness among people.
‘In addition to this widespread unhappiness, especially since the last general election, Tayyip Erdoğan’s government Islamised the daily life of people stage by stage and implements discriminatory and alienating policies.’
General strike?
Despite this political oppression, Ertan says that the response from people has not been unified nor had a clear direction.
His union, Kesk, which represents 240,000 workers, was due to strike at a later date over regressive changes in the country’s’ labour laws. But bringing it forward to today and tomorrow has prompted calls for a general strike of the country’s major trade union confederations.
‘This rebellion is not organised properly and to determine a right direction is quite difficult under these circumstances,’ Ertan tells me. ‘Trade unions and their confederations should join this rebellion by general strike in order to support and gain the initiative.
‘The organised working class has the ability to find the right way intuitively. However so far the working class have not joined the rebellion as a “political participant”.’
However Ertan is confident that this is set to change, if organised labour takes a stand tomorrow. ‘Today Kesk members have started to strike. I expect other trade union confederations cannot ignore the happenings and will join calls for a general strike in Turkey,’ he concludes.

Istanbul: a tree grows in Gezi

admin — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:26:47 +0000

This is a story that spans the continents, and is spreading. The recent occupation of Gezi park in Istanbul and the ripples it has had throughout 48 cities in Turkey is filling a political space that exists between Occupy and the Arab Spring; linking them like the bridges of Istanbul that span the continents. This week we have seen the violent repression of expression that marks the fine line between democracy and dictatorship, the domination of private financial interests over the common good. We are learning each year that all of our grievances are connected.
A single tree, in a small park, in the crossroads of the world. It began.
Power is a rebel force, and here in Turkey the prime minister, Erdogan, is armed with the conviction of a religious man who has been elected. He has recently passed a series of deeply unpopular but tolerated laws. He pushed his people into a corner, and has kept pushing. Like many leaders, he is acting as if the national power is his, because the millions of people in this representational democracy had given their power to him. He has played their power like a violin – so loud he couldn’t hear there wasn’t any applause, and so long he didn’t notice the rest of the orchestra had dropped out. Maybe he is afraid of what could happen in that silence.
Pots and pans
Saturday night the silence was filled. From any open window you heard the people playing their pots and pans as if these utensils were finally freed to be the joyful instruments they had always wanted to be – singing their metal hymns for a good life. This is that sound that comes to fill the silence. People who had nothing in their hands used their hands, and sat leaning clapping from car windows and in crowds. The people had retaken the park, and it was Saturday night, so there would be too many people tonight to do what they had been doing the past nights. Saturday night felt like a celebration, in some places.
In other places the violence was still building like friction in any unoiled machine. Violence was encouraged by Erdogan himself, who broken the media blackout and had gone on TV and asked his supporters to personally stop ‘the terrorists’, who he claimed were a marginal group of radicals. A friend had seen teenagers attack a group of students because they were carrying gas masks. Erdogan is mixing strong forces, concocting dangerous politics in an earthquake zone.
These stories I share were told to me by a friend who noticed he was still trembling to speak of them. He arrived late, because he had been teargassed again, and so had to shower the chemicals from him. He told me these stories, recounting like legends in days of this same week. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Today.
The trees and the machines
Wednesday. It started with machines. The supreme court had ruled that Gezi, the last green space in the center of this sprawling megalopolis, would not be razed to make way for a new shopping center. The rogue prime minister sent the excavators anyway, but by the time they had ripped out the first of the trees, some 20 or 50 people had gathered. Some hugged the trees (perhaps the most pacifist of all possible acts), others tied themselves to the trees. They set up tents, read to the police and shared food. They called it Occupy Gezi.
Thursday. At 4am the police came and filled the air with teargas. They didn’t fire the metal canisters at the ground, they fired it at the people, at their faces, smashing holes in skulls. They burned down their tents. They kicked people from the trees they held on to. The police expected to have the park cleared by morning, but by morning 5,000 people were there. A line had been crossed – if people are not allowed to peacefully demonstrate what they believe in, and if their expression is met with such brutality, then this is not a democracy. And if one is obedient, silent or waits in hopes it will pass, than power is the only one who has freedom.
Friday. These days were battles of bravery and violence. The police surrounded the park, attacked, and refused to let anyone leave; later they wouldn’t let anyone enter. Water cannons threw people off their feet and onto their thin necks, batons cracked skulls of anyone within range, the teargas canisters littered the ground like confetti. Police fired gas into residential buildings that were helping the wounded and housing those hiding from the acid smoke. Police fired gas into a Starbucks full of people and into the Hilton Hotel. Every photograph from these days is wrapped in that tyrannical gas.
Violence vs kindness
But opposites attract, and the people who lived in the area began to leave out baskets of lemons to help soothe teargas. Old ladies lowered baskets of food from their windows by rope to support the people below – doing what they could to support those doing what they could not. Restaurants left bags of food outside their windows. The state’s violence was countered by the people’s kindness. Lovers led their gas-blinded lover through the smoke-filled streets to safety; strangers did the same.
Turkish flags with their floating moon and star sprang up everywhere, and the bridge that you cannot walk across was filled with 40,000 people walking in the space between two continents. What was 50 people in tents became 5,000, became the more than a hundred thousand that surrounded the park until they so outnumbered the police that they were let back into it, and the shade of the trees that were still standing.
Today. In this small park, a great many conflicts are colliding. There is the tree that started this, and the fight for the rights of nature against the cold machinery of progress. There is the fight to protect the commons: to save one of the few public spaces that still exist from its transformation into a private space dedicated to the production of personal capital. There is the issue of democracy: that the people have the right to speak out, and the necessity to be heard by those they have empowered. This is history, after all, and people know that if they cannot speak their mind then it is not their story.
This is no longer a story about a tree, a park, a politics or a cause. It is a story of a people, all over, knowing that they are standing on the global frontline of history. It is not a struggle to change the story, it’s the struggle to be allowed to write it.
Tomorrow. No one knows what will happen in the coming days, but some of that will be determined by us. We need to make sure the world is watching the trees and people of Gezi square, and that Erdogan knows we are watching. Where do you draw the line?
Kevin Buckland is on Twitter: @change_of_art

Turkey: A people imprisoned

admin — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 08:59:14 +0000

Demonstration outside the court in Ankara in October 2012. Photo: Isabelle Merminod
Lami Özgen can speak in a loud voice. This is useful for trade union rallies, which are often held in the open air outside high security courts these days in Turkey. He is the president of KESK, Turkey’s independent confederation of public service trade unions.
On the day of our interview with him in December 2012, he was organising a rally for 15 KESK women trade unionists facing terrorism charges. He himself is on appeal against one conviction and awaiting indictment in another case, both for trade union activities.
At the time of the interview, 67 members of KESK were in prison facing terrorism charges. On 19 February this year, another 169 KESK members were taken into custody in one of the biggest police operations since 2011.
‘Political genocide’
Lami Özgen says of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) government: ‘We cannot be optimistic. The new policy of the government is that they do not shut the institutions but pick up their officials, activists and others to prevent their activities.’ This allows the government to say to the international community, particularly the EU, that civil society is still alive as the hollowed-out institutions are still in place.
Sebahat Tuncel, a member of the BDP (Peace and Democracy Party), the legal pro-Kurdish progressive opposition party, jokes with the interpreter as she is being interviewed on 25 November 2012. She is, at present, a member of the Turkish parliament. But she has just been sentenced to eight years on charges of being a member of a terrorist organisation. She says that if the supreme court confirms her conviction, the Turkish parliament will remove her immunity. Elected to parliament in 2007 while in prison, she may return there directly from parliament if her immunity is lifted.
‘In practical terms the BDP is already closed because since 2009 [the police] have taken . . . members, officials, managers.’ The numbers change as people are released and others take their place. She calls it ‘political genocide’.
Tuncel says that five previous pro-Kurdish parties have been closed down. Why does the government not just do the same with the BDP? ‘If they close the BDP they are going to be in a difficult situation in front of international opinion and Turkish society. They do not want to be seen as an undemocratic country,’ she says.
Thousands in prison
The International Crisis Group, a respected NGO working on conflict resolution, estimates that the number of people in prison on terrorism charges was about 7,000 in August 2012. Andrew Finkel, who writes for the International Herald Tribune, quotes a figure of about 8,000 in October 2012.
Most of the defendants are Kurdish. Most are charged with being members or supporters of the KCK (the Union of Kurdish Communities). Prosecutors allege the KCK is an urban wing of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), the armed Kurdish movement fighting for autonomy. The defendants are from every part of society: students, academics, lawyers, journalists, elected BDP mayors, trade unionists and members of the BDP party.
Once picked up by the police, activists face anti-terrorism laws drafted in such wide terms that they allow prosecutors to lay charges against almost anyone. ‘Individuals have been prosecuted and tried under the anti-terrorism legislation . . . simply for having participated in public demonstrations by showing banners and shouting slogans,’ according to the UN special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers in a report in mid-2012.
If charged, activists are put before Turkey’s justice system, which has been condemned by human rights agencies and the European Court of Human Rights. Defence lawyers don’t have the same access to evidence as the state; very long pre-trial detention is the norm; the prosecution use secret witnesses; a close relationship exists between prosecutors and judges; and the judiciary is not independent. ‘Judges and prosecutors at different levels [give] precedence to the protection of the state over the protection of human rights,’ warned Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe human rights commissioner, in a January 2012 report about the Turkish justice system.
Blocking local government
In 2009, the local elections gave an electoral bloody nose to the AKP and delivered large gains to Kurdish politicians in the Kurdish areas. The AKP’s share of the vote rose from 34.4 percent in the 2002 national elections, climbing to 42.2 percent in the 2004 local elections and then 46.6 percent in the 2007 national elections. But the 2009 local elections saw it fall back to 38.9 per cent. The BDP’s predecessor, the pro-Kurdish DTP, won 59 mayoral posts – up from 36. But in December the DTP was closed down by the constitutional court. The arrests and trials started in the same year.
Lami Özgen explains the reason for the continued arrests: ‘In 2014 there will be elections for municipal governments. The government wants to capture the administration in the provinces, especially where it was held by Kurdish parties. So as a part of this policy many officials from the BDP and the other opposition voices and trade unionists are arrested . . . Many mayors in the eastern and south east region [the Kurdish area] are arrested. Not only mayors but also the members of the municipality are also arrested. And therefore the government blocks the work of the municipality.’
Anti-communism and local politics
Büşra Ersanlı, 62 years old and a university professor of political science, is a defendant in one of the trials. She replies to our questions amid the traditional flow of glasses of tea. She was imprisoned in the 1970s. Prosecutors are now demanding at least 15 years imprisonment.
Ersanlı says that the various strands of the right wing in Turkey are unified by their anti-communism. Anti-communism has been a force in Turkish politics since the creation of the Turkish state in 1923.
She says that human rights violations had encouraged Kurds to become active in local politics: ‘It is easier for people to participate in local politics because of the face-to-face relations, most especially women. So that created organisational activity in Kurdish cities . . . The Kurdish people, especially the left wing and the poor, have been affected in a similar way. All they could do was local politics. That is why they became active and dynamic, and even creative, at local level.’
She says that also there had been an upsurge of local political action as a result of the 1999 earthquake in the Marmara region of Turkey. The absence of an adequate central government response to the loss of life and damage required local political responses.
Ersanlı says that local politics have become more important in Turkish politics: ‘So if you relate this to decentralisation and left-wing politics, then [local politics] becomes dangerous and [controlling it] becomes part of anti-communism.’
Kurdish autonomy and democratisation
‘This is an authoritarian country, it is patriarchal, so we always have fathers and big brothers who decide for us. Therefore the women’s struggle is the most important in our country: first, women’s and second, the Kurdish political movement. Without these two there can be no democratisation,’ says Büşra Ersanli.
The AKP government was first elected in 2002, led by a former mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is still the prime minister. Many Turks feared another military coup because the AKP was an Islamic party and the military had intervened previously using the protection of Turkey’s secular state as a justification. But the army did not react, although some military officers have since been charged and convicted for plotting a coup in 2003.
In 2002, many Turks and Kurds hoped for democratisation and an end to authoritarian government because the AKP seemed open to a pragmatic approach. Negotiations with the EU seemed to be going smoothly. The EU’s requirements for reform were transformed into positive political change in the first few years of the AKP’s control. Negotiations with the PKK appeared to be moving towards a successful conclusion.
But by 2009, with entry to the EU becoming less likely, reform slowed. In 2011 the AKP won the national elections with 49 per cent of the vote and since then appears to have become more authoritarian. There are increased casualties on both sides in the war between the army and the PKK in the south east; religious education has been expanded; education reforms encourage girls to leave school earlier. And arrests under terrorism laws are increasing. For example, in August 2012, the Turkish press reported that the minister of justice had stated that between January and August, 2,824 high school and university students had been arrested or charged.
Hunger strike
In September 2012, Kurdish prisoners across Turkey went on hunger strike. They demanded the right to speak Kurdish in court, along with the right to mother-tongue education. They also called on the government to grant better conditions to Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the PKK, held in isolation on the island of Imrali.
At the last moment, with fears that prisoners would soon be dying, Öcalan sent out a message saying that the hunger strike should stop. It ended on 18 November as reports circulated in the Turkish press that negotiations between the AKP government and the PKK were re-starting.
Kurdish sources have suggested that the murder of the three Kurdish women activists in Paris in January 2013 was an attempt to stop any negotiations. On 25 February the Turkish press quoted Öcalan as saying that continued negotiations required that parliamentary parties agree to the right to mother-tongue education, a redefinition of citizenship to stop discrimination against Kurds, and the decentralisation of the Turkish state by increasing local government powers.
Continued repression?
Sebahat Tuncel says: ‘We are realistic people, we are not in a daydream. We know that the Kurdish problem has a history of 200 years in the Middle East and 100 years in Turkey. We know that this problem [will not be] solved suddenly.’
Büşra Ersanlı says she fears a cycle of reciprocal violence if the trials and repression continue. But she also has hope that ‘there is the chance of a swift re-direction by the government in the belief that they could better survive as a political power if they stopped the arrests. And that is correct, of course.’
She declares: ‘I always want to believe that some people are intelligent enough within the government to change their attitude.’
Our thanks to Lami Özgen, SebahatTuncel and Dr Büşra Ersanlı for agreeing to be interviewed despite the circumstances in Turkey. Sign the online petition.

The cost of Kazakh oil

admin — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 18:45:22 +0000

The murder in October 2012 of 20-year-old Aleksandr Bozhenko in Zhanaozen, an oil town in Kazakhstan, is a shocking reminder of the state’s violent revenge on a community that fought back. Bozhenko played a key part in exposing police officers who tortured witnesses to produce ‘evidence’ at a trial of 37 trade union activists. Their real crime was participation in a strike wave that swept the oil field last year.
More than 10,000 oil workers participated in the strikes, which erupted in May 2011, led to a six-month ‘tent city’ demonstration in Zhanaozen’s main square – and ended with a massacre of strikers by police on 16 December 2011 in which at least 16 were killed and 60 wounded. Afterwards, the security services sealed off Zhanaozen and rounded up activists.
When they were brought to court in May this year, trade unionists including 46-year-old mother of three Roza Tuletaeva said they had been tortured in police custody. Then Aleksandr Bozhenko took the witness stand and said that he, too, had been tortured to force him to incriminate his friend Zhanat Murynbaev, who was accused of ‘participation in mass disturbances’.
‘I was beaten and forced to slander Zhanat. They broke my wrist. In the prosecutor’s office they beat me in the kidneys,’ Bozhenko told the court.
Kazakh human rights activist Galym Ageleuov told Bozhenko’s story to diplomats and politicians at a meeting of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Warsaw. Two weeks later, Bozhenko was dead.
The Zhanaozen police say the killing was ‘simple hooliganism’ and that they have arrested two men who confessed to it. But as long as the authorities try to hide the truth about their witch-hunt against oil workers and the December massacre, many in Kazakhstan will disbelieve them.
Strikes and clampdown
The savage clampdown in Zhanaozen, in Mangistau region on the Caspian Sea, is the Kazakh government’s answer to the most wide-ranging strike wave in post-Soviet times. Oil is the cornerstone of Kazakhstan’s economy, accounting for most of its export revenues. But while the skyscraper-strewn city of Astana has become a booming bustle of BMW-driving managers and bureaucrats, Mangistau, where much of the oil is produced, remains the poorest region.
There was a round of strikes in the spring of 2010. And then in April 2011, workers at Ersai Caspian Contractor, an Italian-Kazakh oilfield service company, walked off the job demanding higher wages and an end to managers interfering in union activities.
In May, workers at Karazhanbasmunai, a Chinese-Kazakh joint venture, also struck, demanding higher wages and improved workplace conditions. Finally, a group of activists at Ozenmunaigaz, the largest producer in Mangistau and a subsidiary of the state-owned national oil company Kazmunaigaz, staged a hunger strike in protest at changes to the wages system that cut their take-home pay. Thousands of their colleagues struck in solidarity.
After a series of brutal physical attacks by riot police on the hunger strikers, on pickets and on strikers’ families, the workers decided to stage a tent city demonstration in Zhanaozen’s main square. On 16 December last year, the 20th anniversary of Kazakhstan’s declaration of independence, workers reacted angrily to decorations being put up in the square. Disorder ensued. When the riot police arrived, they issued no warnings and made no attempt to use non-lethal weapons such as water cannon. They just opened fire with automatic weapons, continued to shoot people in the back as they ran away, and beat wounded people with sticks.
A key feature of the strikes was the oil workers’ attempts to set up new unions, or to throw out union officials who helped management. Like most workers in former Soviet countries, Kazakh oil workers are members of ‘official’ unions that worked hand-in-glove with managers in Soviet times and have changed little since.
At Ersai Caspian Contractor, workers voted to form a new, independent union – a common practice during labour disputes. The company and labour ministry refused to recognise it, and the members of its five-person committee were arrested.
At Karazhanbasmunai, activists’ accusations against union officials – that they not only helped management but physically attacked strikers – were detailed in a recent Human Rights Watch report. Mass meetings voted out union officials and elected new ones, but the old ones refused to quit.
Kazakh oil and the west
For the big oil-consuming countries in western Europe and the USA, the emergence from the Soviet Union of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan (for oil) and Turkmenistan (for gas) seemed like a godsend. Here were sources of hydrocarbon fuels that were neither members of the OPEC producers’ cartel nor controlled by Russia, the world’s largest oil producer.
But things have not gone as well as the oil-hungry consumers hoped. Although a new pipeline brings oil from Azerbaijan to the Mediterranean, other new export routes carry Kazakh oil and Turkmen gas to China.
Nonetheless, Kazakhstan remains a key investment destination for the west. Its largest producing project, Tengizchevroil, is owned by a consortium that includes Chevron, ExxonMobil and a Kazakh state share. The new supergiant Kashagan field in the Caspian, due to start producing next year, is owned by a consortium including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Shell.
Direct upstream investment is not the only link between US and UK capital and the killing fields of Zhanaozen, though. Kazmunaigaz Exploration and Production, a subsidiary of Kazmunaigaz and part-owner of Ozenmunaigaz, for whom many of the December massacre victims worked, is listed on the London Stock Exchange.
Richard Evans, former chairman of British Aerospace, is chairman of Samruk-Kazyna, the state-controlled holding company that owns a big chunk of the Kazakh economy, including part of Kazmunaigaz. Other members of the British establishment also have their fingers in the pie. Lord Waverley is an adviser to the chairman of Kazmunaigaz, while former prime minister Tony Blair does consultancy work worth millions of pounds for the Kazakh government. None of them have publicly breathed a word of concern about the shootings and police torture.
Justice for the oil workers
Meanwhile, 13 Zhanaozen oil workers remain in prison, serving sentences of between two and six years. Leaders of opposition political groups who supported the oil workers were also convicted at a trial in September condemned by human rights groups as political. Vladimir Kozlov, leader of the Alga! Kazakhstan party, was jailed for seven years and two others for shorter terms.
Human rights activists have monitored the deteriorating situation in Kazakhstan. The Open Dialog Foundation, based in Poland, has produced excellent reports, and commissioned a report on Kozlov’s trial from the UK-based Solicitors International Human Rights Group.
It is imperative that the international workers’ movement makes louder demands for justice for the oil workers, the release of prisoners and an inquiry into police massacres and torture.
For more information about the solidarity campaign in the UK, contact gabriel.levy.mail@gmail.com

Dissident’s family demands his release

The family of Aron Atabek, a Kazakh poet, writer and opposition civil activist since Soviet times, is campaigning for his release from an 18-year jail sentence.
Atabek was convicted in 2007 of ‘orchestrating mass disorder’ after speaking up for shanty-town dwellers at Shanyrak outside Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city. The city authorities, alarmed that a forthcoming change in the law that strengthened home ownership rights would afford the shanty-town more protection, ordered them to leave their homes.
Mass protests in defence of constitutional rights to a home turned into confrontations with the police. The shanty-town dwellers, fearing a violent assault by riot police, kidnapped an officer who was killed as the police moved in.
Atabek had spoken up for the shanty-town dwellers, tried to negotiate with authorities on their behalf and lobbied parliamentarians. His trumped-up conviction has been denounced by numerous campaign groups. He has vehemently refused the government’s offer of a pardon in exchange for admitting guilt.
Twenty-three other people also received heavy jail sentences.
In prison, Atabek has continued to write, detailing illegal and inhuman prison conditions. He has constantly faced restrictions on visiting rights, had manuscripts confiscated, been given spells in solitary confinement and had two years added to his sentence for refusing to wear prison uniform.
Atabek is a lifelong dissident. He took part in a student demonstration in Almaty in 1986, the violent dispersal of which helped to trigger the reform movement in Soviet Kazakhstan. He headed a ‘national patriotic’ political group that in the early post-Soviet years was suppressed by the government of Nursultan Nazarbayev – who remains president to this day.
Information and contact: www.aronatabek.com

Biting the rotten Apple: Taking on Foxconn

admin — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 10:00:52 +0000

Jenny Chan is one of the principal researchers of a group of faculty and students drawn from 22 universities across China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, England and the US. They have joined forces to conduct independent investigations of the labour practices and production system at Apple supplier Foxconn’s factories in China in the wake of recent suicides and reports of corporate abuses. She is currently studying for a PhD in sociology and Chinese labour studies in London.
Tell us about the work you have been doing with Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM)?
When I was studying at the University of Hong Kong, I volunteered for SACOM – a non-profit NGO which originated from a student movement devoted to improving the working conditions of cleaners and security officers. We organised the ‘Looking for Mickey Mouse’s Conscience’ campaign before the grand opening of Hong Kong Disneyland, exposing the worker injuries and rights violation problems at the toy factories supplying Disney in industrial towns in south China.
Over the past seven years, we have aimed to bring together concerned students, scholars, labour activists and consumers to monitor corporate behaviour and to advocate for workers’ rights.
What difficulties are involved in researching labour conditions at Foxconn? How do you collect your data?
Understanding Foxconn’s 1.3 million workers’ conditions requires us to see through the power dynamics of the global electronic supply chain.
Excessive overtime, low wages and high pressure on the factory floor are linked to the unethical ordering practices of Apple, Foxconn’s biggest buyer (40 per cent of Foxconn’s business is from Apple) and other multinationals. Apple is known for its secretive culture, so our access to key data remains very limited.
But through surveys and interviews, eventually we came to learn more about the specifics of the supply chain and the transfer of production pressure onto the frontline workers. Everywhere we go – to Foxconn factory workers’ dormitories, internet cafés, basketball courts and food stalls – we meet with workers. Most of them are very willing to share with us – university student activists – their dreams and anxieties about their future.
Following the Apple scandal, which broke earlier this year, the poor working conditions in Foxconn plants are quite well known. How much anger is there among the workforce, or are people just pleased to have employment?
On 28 March 2012, Apple CEO Tim Cook toured the iPhone factory in Henan province, where Foxconn workers had spent hours cleaning up beforehand. Snapshots of the pre-announced factory audit were staged, with the number of toxins reduced before the visits and workers temporarily reassigned to safer tasks. Workers sent out messages through mobile phones and micro-blogs to vent their anger towards both Foxconn and Apple.
A new generation of Chinese workers is reclaiming their limited living space and time to create and re-mix culturally diversified social struggles, through slogans, songs, poems and protests such as strikes and threats of ‘mass suicides’.
By turning their collective dormitories into communal spaces, they open up new opportunities for labour resistance. Rights awareness is heightened through labour law information sharing via word of mouth and new technologies. Unfortunately, workers’ actions have invariably incited an even stronger disciplinary regime.
Have the recent scandals led to Apple sacrificing profits to pay workers better, or is the pressure still on the supply chain?
For the global brands, the subcontracting arrangement is ideal: they reap the benefits of low-wage, high-intensity labour without accepting direct responsibility for the consequences. Foxconn workers say that after the ‘wage hike’ that followed the wave of suicides in 2010, Foxconn hiked production quotas, demanding both greater labour intensity and in some cases longer hours. A ‘normal’ working day lasted 12 hours. Meanwhile, workers on the line faced relentless speedup. In July 2010, for example, the iPhone casing production quota was raised by 20 per cent to 6,400 pieces per day. Many workers were pressed to the point of desperation.
What potential do you see for a Chinese labour movement to improve conditions?
This new generation of Chinese workers is better educated, more aware of workplace rights and more likely to demand employment protection and decent work. They pierce through the hypocrisy of the global corporate image of ‘care’, behind which companies’ ordering practices go against everything they promise in their labour and environmental standards programs.
What can people in the UK do about these issues?
Conditions can only change if Apple, Foxconn and other leading IT firms are forced to change by some combination of public pressure in the countries where its products are sold and worker protest in the countries where they are made. Direct pressure should put on Apple to ensure workers in its supply chain have a living wage, safe and healthy work environment, and above all, respect and dignity.

Cycle city Kathmandu

James O'Nions — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 19:51:05 +0000

Commuting in Kathmandu is difficult, at best. Taxis are extortionately priced, buses are overcrowded, and the city is big enough that walking is often impractical. Increasingly, people are turning to bicycles as a remedy. Proponents are now emphasising the positive effects of cycling in terms of ecology, Nepali independence and improving safety on the streets. It is a dangerous, yet remarkably political mode of transport.

Unlike campaign groups that focus on the macrocosm of global climate change, Kathmandu Cycle City 2020 focuses on the city itself. Member Shail Shrestha describes Kathmandu’s air as ‘unimaginably polluted’, but adds that this pollution is caused by those who can afford private transport, while those who can’t are affected most – witness for example the many Nepalis who live in shacks on the ring road, a highway that leaves passers-by coughing from the fumes of cars, buses and motorbikes.

Kathmandu Cycle City 2020 sees its campaign as rallying against social inequality. As another member, Rajan Kathet, says: ‘The “have nots” have always been victimised by the “haves”.’ Shrestha believes that Nepal can set an example for other countries to follow: ‘If a developing country does this [promotes cycling], it could be an example for countries that pollute.’

Nepal is currently in the midst of a fuel shortage. Schools, small businesses and organisations are struggling to get fuel for their vehicles. There are mile-long queues at every petrol station. Nepali independence activists claim that fuel dependency on neighbouring India is inhibiting progress in Nepal. The fuel shortage is caused, they claim, by deficit and corruption within the Nepal Oil Corporation, which is entirely dependent on the Indian Oil Corporation—to which it is in debt. In order to eradicate this debt, the Nepali Oil Corporation last week announced they would add 10 Rupees (approximately 9 pence) to every litre of fuel sold. Even in UK terms, this is no small amount. It would make fuel unaffordable for many Nepalis. Fortunately the decision was reversed following a Kathmandu-wide strike at the end of January, led by 13 of the city’s Students’ Unions.

Many social organisations in Nepal talk about ‘improving the country’ in terms of making it fuel-independent. The strike action only implies a general consensus that greater sovereignty would be beneficial. Kathmandu Cycle City 2020 is instead keen to ‘do action’. It deems cycling to be the best way to move away from fuel dependence. Indeed, in the context of a fuel shortage, cycling is being increasingly recognised as a cheap, accessible and non-polluting way to keep the city operating. Cycling in Kathmandu has become synonymous with freedom.

Yet safety remains a major concern. Just a few months ago, the revered wildlife conservationist, Dr Pralad Yonzon, was killed whilst cycling on the road in Kathmandu. Refusing to be scared off by the number of accidents, Kathmandu Cycle City 2020 held a rally to promote better visibility and to encourage more people to use bicycles instead of motorbikes.

Although bicycles are in fact generally safer than motorbikes in Kathmandu, they are seen as less fashionable among younger Nepalis. Shrestha explains that, ‘there is an idea that people who cycle are those who can’t afford [motor]bikes’. By highlighting the number of deaths on motorbikes compared to those on bicycles, the group are hoping to challenge this belief.

Promoting cycling on such dangerous streets is the first hurdle that the group have to overcome. On January 11, the group gained one of their first wins. Following extensive lobbying by activists, the government announced that they intend to build cycle lanes on all roads over 22 metres wide. Meanwhile the number of cyclists in Kathmandu has risen since the start of the campaign.

The group’s main aim is that Kathmandu becomes a bicycle-friendly city by 2020. Along the way, they are making a real difference to regular people’s lives and to Nepal as a whole. With advocates like Kathet and Shrestha, it won’t be long before more Kathmanduites will, as the group’s motto says, ‘ride with pride’.

Find out more on Kathmandu Cycle City 2020’s website.