Month: May 2009

by Kristin Bricker

San Cristóbal de las Casas,

Chiapas, México

To members of the other campaign both national and international

To the alternative national and international media

Sisters and brothers in national and international resistance movements

Cordial greetings! We are writing you today to ask for your strong and committed support in action and solidarity in the search for justice for 8 activists unjustly and illegally imprisoned, tortured, badly treated, stigmatized by the media, and now awaiting possible incarceration for false accusations. Presently these activists, Jerónimo Gómez Saragos, Antonio Gómez Saragos, Miguel Demeza Jiménez, Sebastián Demeza Deara, Pedro Demeza Deara y Jerónimo Moreno Deara, members of the Other Campaign and residents of Ejido San Sebastián Bachajón, in the municipality of Chilón, detained on April 13th, 2009; as well as Alfredo Gómez Moreno y Miguel Vázquez Moreno, who is a a member of the Zapatistas, and was detained on the 17the and18th of April in the prison “El Amate” CERESS 14 in Cintalapa, Chiapas, Mexico. In the course of the next 4 days, ending on Friday, May 8th, the state will decide whether these activists are innocent and free from the crimes which they are falsely accused or whether they will be incorporated in the corruption of this government and imprisoned.

These activists, members of the Other Campaign and the Zapatistas, among the most active of those working for social change, are part of the first dignified voices to proclaim themselves against the new highway project that will connect the cities of Ocosingo and Palenque. These projects will initiate the basic infrastructure for a series of massive projects proposed by the government and multinational corporations. These projects engage in the theft of the abundant natural resources in the region and the implementation of a large scale tourism business that will destroy the surrounding environment.

If we allow this process to continue in silence, we, the national and international community will leave open the possibility for this government to continue their crimes; allowing repressions to continue against social activists; giving permission to torture, intimidate, and detain anyone that defends their legitimate right to live without fear and demand their basic human rights; we will allow them to continue to develop massive projects that will lead to the destruction of a dignified life for any human being.

Now is an important and urgent moment to act in every way possible to achieve liberty for these activists. In the next few days any type of political act in your city or country that will call attention to the unjust detention of these activists and support this struggle for basic human rights will help. We need to pressure the state government and administration of Juan Sabines Guerrero to liberate these political prisoners. Any act is useful whether it be in group or individual; marches, letters to the government of Chiapas and the federal government of Mexico, signed petitions, calls and letters to the press…will all bring attention to these injustices.

Sincerely,

Adherents to the sixth declaration of the Lacandon jungle, San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, México.

Addresses for sending letters:

Lic. Juan José Sabines Guerrero
Gobernador Constitucional del Estado de Chiapas
Gobernatura del Estado de Chiapas
Palacio de Gobierno del Estado de Chiapas
Av. Central y Primera Oriente, Colonia Centro, C.P. 29009
Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, México
Correo-electrónico: secparticular@chiapas.gob.mx
Fax: +52 (961) 61 88088 +52 (961) 6188056

Dr. Noé Castañòn León
Secretario General de Gobierno del Estado de Chiapas
Secretaría General de Gobierno
Palacio de Gobierno, 2o. piso, Colonia Centro
Tuxtla, Gutiérrez, Chiapas, México
C.P. 29000 Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas.
Fax: +52 (961) 61 20663
Conmutador: + 52 (961) 61 2-90-47, 61 8-74-60

Lic. Juan Gabriel Coutiño Gómez
Tribunal Superior de Justicia
Magistrado Presidente Juan Gabriel Coutiño Gómez
Palacio de Justicia
Libramiento Norte Oriente No.2100
Fraccionamiento El Bosque
C.P. 20047
Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas
Tel-Fax : (52+)(961) 6178700
(52+)(961) 6165350
Contacto: administrator@mail.scjn.gob.mx

Lic. Carlos Alberto Bello Avendaño
Juez Segundo de Penal del Distrito Judicial de Tuxtla Gutiérrez
Carretera Tuxtla Gutiérrez ?Cintalapa
Tel- Fax: (52+) (968) 36 46 84
52+)(961) 6178700
Contacto: cbelloa@poderjudicialchiapas.gob.mx

RPTE. DE LA OFICINA DEL ALTO COMISIONADO PARA LOS DERECHOS HUMANOS EN MEXICO
Dirección : Alejandro Dumas #165
Col. Polanco Delegación Miguel Hidalgo
C.P 11560 México D.F
Tel: + 52 (01 55) 5061-6350 Fax: 5061-6358
e-mail: oacnudh@ohchr.org

Please send a copy to:

Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, A.C.
Calle Brasil 14, Barrio Méxicanos, 29240 San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, México
Tel: 967 6787395, 967 6787396, Fax: 967 6783548
Correo: accionurgente@frayba.org.mx

For more information about this case:

Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de las Casas

Bulletins

CIEPAC

Videos and Bulletins

Enlace Zapatista

Denouncements

Denouncements
—
“That is why we think no, no more, enough of this dying useless deaths, it would be better to fight for change. If we die now, we will not die with shame, but with the dignity of our ancestors. Another 150,000 of us are ready to die if that is what is needed to waken our people from their deceit-induced stupor”.

Zapatista Communique

—
“That is why we think no, no more, enough of this dying useless deaths, it would be better to fight for change. If we die now, we will not die with shame, but with the dignity of our ancestors. Another 150,000 of us are ready to die if that is what is needed to waken our people from their deceit-induced stupor”.

Zapatista Communique

(Submitted by Michelle Cook)

By Casmir Igbokwe (cigbokwe2001@yahoo.com)

THIS is a season of flu. Currently, there is swine flu in Mexico and some other parts of the world. In Nigeria and some other African countries, the flu is political. And it is malignant, life-threatening and deadly.

In Kenya, for instance, over 1,000 people died in post-election violence in 2008. The coalition government formed in the wake of that violence is currently shaky. Relations between President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga are said to be frosty. Women have gone on sex strike to protest this development.

In Ekiti, women have also come out in full force to protest the political logjam in that state. Last Wednesday, thousands of women protesters trooped to the major streets of Ado-Ekiti to vent their anger on the stalemated governorship rerun election in the state. Old women marched half naked. Their younger counterparts were part of the protest, but could not bare their breasts.

I think the protest could have attracted more attention and made more impact if the younger women had defied shyness to toe the line of their older colleagues. Yes, the situation in Ekiti warrants even much more than that. It demands total nakedness if that will force our do-or-die politicians to retrace their steps.

Or how do we explain that we cannot conduct a free-and-fair election in 63 wards or 10 local government areas? How do we reconcile the fact that 10,000 policemen could not guarantee peace and security on the day of the election? How can the Independent National Electoral Commission and some other gladiators feed us lies with impunity? How can a senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria conduct himself as Senator Ayo Arise allegedly did on Election Day and still remain a free man?

In Nigeria, there are more questions than answers. Better, the more you look, the less you see. What happened in Ekiti penultimate Saturday was expected. It was more than an election. It was a supremacy battle between the ruling Peoples Democratic Party and the Action Congress for the soul of the South-West.

And so it was not surprising when Governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola of Osun State boasted in a rally in Ekiti on April 4, 2009 that the PDP would win the rerun election by all means. There were allegations too that the ruling party planned to deploy soldiers to the state. Perhaps, the hue and cry that trailed the alleged plan to deploy soldiers put a check to that plot.

But the desperadoes would not relent. They brought in thugs and armed them with charms and ammunition to terrorise the citizenry. Empowered and emboldened, the thugs went to work on the Election Day. They killed. They maimed. They rigged. Not even journalists and observers were spared. Our photojournalist, Segun Bakare, whose pictures of the thuggery came out the following day in SUNDAY PUNCH, became the butt of attacks by female thugs. How primitive can we be?
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By Benjamin Dangl

Workers and activists gathered in the central plaza of Asunción, Paraguay on May 1st to commemorate International Workers Day. Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo marked the day by raising the minimum wage by 5%, half of what many of the unions present were demanding. But another piece of news set the tone for this annual gathering: the return to Paraguay of an ex-minister from the dictatorship who orchestrated the murder and torture of thousands of political dissidents.
In the early hours of May 1st, Sabino Augusto Montanaro, the Interior Minister in Paraguay during the repressive Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship (1954-1989), returned to his country after 20 years in Honduras. Doctors say 86 year old Montanaro is suffering from senility and Parkinson’s disease. Montanaro’s lawyer Luis Troche said his client returned to the country not to apologize for his crimes or face justice, but because, “according to Paraguayan law, he is too old to go to jail.”

Montanaro served as a minister under Stroessner from 1966 to the end of the dictatorship, and played a key role in the regime’s repression, directing the abduction, torture and murder of political opponents of Stroessner. Now, upon his return to Paraguay, he faces various criminal charges, and thousands of angry citizens, many of whom greeted his return to the country with protests, and calls for the ex-minister’s imprisonment.

Martin Almada, a human rights lawyer and former political prisoner, discovered documents which prove that Montanaro played a key role in Operation Condor, a unified, cross-border network of repression coordinated by military dictatorships in the region throughout the 1970 and ‘80s.

In 2006, Stroessner died at age 93 in Brasilia without facing justice for the repression that took place under his watch, including the disappearance of some 400 people and the torture of 18,000, according to a Truth and Justice Commission.
Paraguayan Bishop Mario Melanio Medina told the ABC Color newspaper that Montanaro was Stroessner’s “right hand man” and “number one [in command] after Stroessner.”

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By Albina Kovalyova

Even Though the Subject Matter of Russia 88 May Be Controversial, to Ban the Film Would Mean to Sweep the Issue of Russian Fascism under the Rug

A new film has sparked reactions across Russia’s social and political spectrum, broaching issues of censorship, morality and nationalism. The audience appears to be divided into those who believe that portraying young fascists is an important part of the effort to understand the psychology and influence behind their violence, and those who think that the film simply glamorizes skinheads.

The Russia 88 “mockumentary” has no clear beginning. The viewer is simply thrust into the aggressive world of a fascist gang in the midst of their vandalizing and violence on the Moscow metro. It soon becomes apparent that the filming is being done by one of the gang’s members who is documenting their world.

Due to its controversial subject, the film has encountered distribution problems in Russia. Reportedly, a phone call from the government to the jury of the first international film debut festival the Spirit of Fire, held in Khanty Mansiysk, precluded Russia 88 from receiving the first prize. The filmmakers do not know who the call was from, but would certainly like to. They have been told by journalists that the latter have been discouraged from writing about this matter.

Rumors that the film has been banned are backed by speculations that the portrait of Adolf Hitler that the gang members quickly flip over when visited by the police, only to reveal Vladimir Putin on the other side, has offended the government. Others believe that it was a scene in which a member of an “official” ultra-right group offers the fascist gang a license and a legitimate right to act as part of this group—a clear insinuation that the government actually resorts to such tricks to attain its goals.

But despite the difficulties that this low-budget picture is facing, its producers hope that it will be released in the very near future. Anna Mikhalkova, one of the film’s producers and the daughter of the notorious film director Nikita Mikhalkov, as well as a well renowned actress and a producer in her own right, said that she decided to get involved with this film because of the importance of its subject matter and the necessity for it to be accessible to a wider audience.

The main subject matter of Russia 88—Russian nationalism and its racist tendencies—is a topical one. The names of the real victims of Russian Nazi groups are displayed on the screen just after the closing shot of the last scene – over a hundred people were killed in racially motivated attacks in 2008. And the film’s pseudo-documentary style actually does have genuine documentary elements to it: as part of the narrative, the members of the fascist group, dressed in neutral clothing, calmly interview members of the public outside bus stations and inside trains, asking people whether they believe in “a Russia for Russians.” The film’s director Pavel Bardin said that the film crew “wanted honest responses from people, and so the actors stepped out of character so that the public would not feel intimidated.” Most of those questioned agreed that Russia should be primarily for Russians, and that Russian jobs should be filled by the country’s citizens.

Pseudo-interviews with the gang members reveal an attempt to understand the reasons behind people’s involvement in fascist activities. Most do not have clear answers, but the group’s leader, named Blade, does. “I decided this when I became very afraid. I suddenly realized how many of them there are in this country. And there is no space for me. They are taking my jobs, they are after my sister, using her to register at her apartment,” he says in the film. The “they” he is referring to, of course, are non-Russian immigrants.
The creators of Russia 88 hoped that the film would address the wider phenomenon of xenophobia in the country. The explosion in Russian nationalism is partly the work of the government. As more immigrants flock to Russia, the country’s ethnic Russian population diminishes and its demographics change, the government tries to boost patriotic morale by promoting national pride and discouraging anything that would make Russians ashamed of their country.

Bardin said that the film elicited various reactions from real fascists, but most agree that the film’s portrayal of skinheads is realistic. “There were only a few details that these people thought were not authentic, such as the kind of clothes that fascists wear. Now they look very neutral, and do not wear any identifiable fascist clothing,” he said. In the film, the characters wear the tight trousers, boots and braces sported by British skinheads in the 1970s, and their band plays homage to the Oi! music movement of the same era. Some of the characters’ clothing bears references to the American white nationalist David Lane.

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By Ram Puniani

Terror against minorities as happened against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 and Christians in Orissa in 2007 is not simply an episodic act of violence; rather it is the unveiling of a policy by one of the major political parties in India. There is a reason why such sordid acts are not coming to a halt and there is a compelling need why it must.

The after-effects of the anti Christian violence (2007) in Kandhamal district of Orissa are not over, so to say. Recently the Archbishop Cheenath of the state said that the elections in the Kandhmamal district should be postponed as the refugees living in the camps are not able to return. The reason is that many of them who returned were threatened by the local Bajrang Dal workers and associates. They were told to renounce Christianity, convert to Hinduism pay the fine, withdraw the cases and vote for the candidate who they will be told to, obviously BJP candidate. Many of those who tried to return with such hostile conditions awaiting them if they return, came back, some to the camps others to unknown destinations.

Meanwhile BJP candidate of the area, Ashok Sahu, when he came to know about his likely arrest for “Hate speech”, first absconded for few days and then was arrested just three hours before the campaign was to be over (14th April 2009). He told his followers to keep calm; else the elections will be postponed, as being demanded by the Archbishop. One also recalls a similar situation in the post Gujarat violence. There, while state Government claimed that normalcy has returned, the Chief election commissioner James Michael Lyngdoh was visibly upset when he saw the condition of the Muslims living in the camps and their inability to be able to be part of the electoral process.
In Orissa the violence has taken a heavy toll of the amity of the region. The violence which began August 2007 continued till December. It resulted in death of close to 6-7 hundred Panos (Christians) and 90 Churches, 100 other Christian institutions were destroyed. The pretext was that Swami Laxamananand, the VHP swami working in the area has been murdered by Christians. At the same time the Maoist group claimed that they own the responsibility for the act. Since some pretext was needed to launch the attacks, the claim of Maoists was not considered and the VHP, BJP and company kept harping that it is the Christians who have committed the crime. As such the matter is tragic but simple. Whosoever has committed the crime should be punished. Why the whole Christian community has to be targeted and attacked for the act of some group or an individual.

Since at that time BJP was part of the ruling coalition it had its way. The death procession of swami was taken through a long circuitous route. The idea was to communalize the atmosphere in maximum area. This again is quite akin to Gujarat. After the Godhra train tragedy the dead bodies were taken in a procession to Ahmedabad, with VHP, BJP workers shouting provocative slogans. The whole hell was encouraged-permitted to be unleashed. Here also a long route was deliberately taken and police and other state authorities acted as the bystanders when the mayhem broke out. Surprisingly the VHP’s Praveen Togadia was permitted to go to the area while the Central Minister of State for Home affairs was not permitted to visit the area.
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(Submitted by Feroz Mehdi)

By Jeremy Harding

Last September, as dust and debris from the tellers’ floors began raining onto the empty vaults below, a note of satisfaction was sounded by bankers in the Arab world. Financial institutions sticking to the tenets of Islam, they announced, were largely immune from the debt crisis. Devout Muslims may lend and borrow under certain conditions; they can even buy and sell debt in the form of ‘Islamic’ bonds, but most other kinds of debt trading are frowned on. Al Rajhi Bank, based in Saudi Arabia, and the Kuwait Finance House posted impressive profits in 2008. Both have come under some nervous scrutiny in 2009 but their ability to weather the recession that has set in behind the credit crunch is not at issue.

Unlike most banks in the Middle East, Al Rajhi Bank and KFH are ‘sharia-compliant’ businesses, which means simply that they try to abide by the evolving body of rules known as the sharia – ‘the path to the headwater’ – which govern the lives of Muslims. The sharia serves mostly as a guide to personal conduct, though some rules are drafted into the legal codes of majority-Muslim states. It’s founded, we’re always told, on revealed truth from the Koran and exemplary stories from the Hadith, the sayings and doings of the Prophet. But the real influence of the sharia lies in the way this material is constantly read and recast by modern Islamic scholars, reinventing old traditions or asserting new ones. Whatever they take it to be, growing numbers of Muslims are keen to stay on the path when it comes to banking and finance. The global Muslim population is upwards of 1.3 billion – roughly one in every five people on earth – and, with a religious revival of twenty or thirty years’ standing, the way of Islam is now a crowded thoroughfare. It is plied by a great diversity of travellers from different parts of the world; some have money to burn, others next to none, but anybody with a modicum of wealth is nowadays a potential opportunity for banks offering sharia-compliant retail services: current accounts, straightforward financing schemes and home-ownership plans.

The term ‘Islamic finance’ wrests a lot of activities down to a catch-all definition. The same is true, in the financial universe, of the words ‘sharia’ and ‘Islam’ itself. Sharia is not a single, coherent jurisprudence for Muslims; there are various schools of interpretation and marked disagreements within each of them. ‘Islam’, a broad term of convenience for most non-Muslims, is a power-point word in the City: it tells bankers and traders that every day for a few minutes they should shut out the din of the money that merely talks and tune in to the money that prays. But why bother, given that sharia-compliant finance is probably worth less than 1 per cent of the total value of the world’s stocks, bonds and bank deposits? This was reckoned at about $170 trillion in 2007; it’s much less than that now of course, but even so, with a value of around $700 billion, Islamic stocks, bonds and bank deposits remain a minority affair, just as Muslims remain a minority in global terms.

What fascinates the markets about Islamic finance, however, is its dramatic growth in recent years and confident predictions that it’s set to expand at 15 to 20 per cent every year. Its allure for moderately prosperous, pious Muslims – and quite a few non-Muslims recoiling from the debt crisis in anger and disgust – is different. They admire what they see as a promise to achieve stability and transparency, and a sense of proportion about money: look it in the eye, tell it you like it, but admit that you have lingering doubts about the transcendent value of paper. That’s an unsophisticated position, but since the credit crunch not many people trust the sophisticated keepers of the modern money culture; in this sense the rise of sharia-compliant products is also a challenge to the unofficial, polytheist faith of offshore Britannia: the worship of markets in general and financial markets in particular.

One of the central differences between the Islamic and conventional approaches to finance is that our own cults – which may well see a revision before the end of this crisis – ascribe supernatural powers to money. Cult specialists are at great pains to understand and control how it works, but admit that it does so in magical ways that go beyond the effects of human commerce (for the markets, too, have magical attributes, including innate goodness). Whatever we want from money, we suspect, as devotees, that in the end it will always behave as it sees fit. Our awe of it is a bit like a rapt meditation on the way the shower of gold behaves – shimmering and falling – when it cascades over Danaë in her cloister in Argos. In the story, it’s merely the form chosen by Zeus for her seduction, but in our meditation, there is no Olympian in disguise and no intention to seduce, just the metal shimmering and falling, in consummate self-expression, as deity and dogma. Islamic approaches – there are quite a few – are much closer to Nonconformist and Anglican traditions, where the divinity stands to the side of money, reminding the faithful that he is one thing and mammon another. Money, in this view, is an object of caution rather than superstition – and, in spite of its dangers, a useful tool for anyone who wants to build a respectable world, with God’s instructions pinned to the wall above the workbench.
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(Submitted by reader)

By Rick Nauert, Ph.D. Senior News Editor

Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on April 23, 2009
Watching television is often associated with a negative health connotation of couch potatoes munching on chips and drinking beer.
Now a new study suggests illusionary relationships with the characters and personalities on favorite TV shows can provide people with feelings of belonging, even in the face of low self esteem or after being rejected by friends or family members.

The findings are described in four studies published in the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
“The research provides evidence for the ’social surrogacy hypothesis,’ which holds that humans can use technologies, like television, to provide the experience of belonging when no real belongingness has been experienced,” says one of the study’s authors, Shira Gabriel, Ph.D., UB assistant professor of psychology.

“We also argue that other commonplace technologies such as movies, music or interactive video games, as well as television, can fulfill this need.”
Shira’s co-authors are Jaye L. Derrick, Ph.D., postdoctoral associate and adjunct instructor of psychology at UB, and Kurt Hugenberg, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology at Miami University.

The first study, of 701 undergraduate students, used the Loneliness Activities Scale and the Likelihood of Feeling Lonely Scale to find that subjects reported tuning to favored television programs when they felt lonely and felt less lonely when viewing those programs.

Study 2 used essays to experimentally manipulate the belongingness needs of 102 undergraduate subjects and assess the importance of their favored television programs when those needs were stimulated. Participants whose belongingness needs were aroused reveled longer in their descriptions of favored television programs than in descriptions of non-favored programs, the study found.

Study 3 of 116 participants employed the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule and an eight-item measure of feelings of rejection to find that thinking about favored television programs buffered subjects against drops in self-esteem, increases in negative mood and feelings of rejection commonly elicited by threats to close relationships.

Study 4 asked 222 participants to write a 10-minute essay about their favorite television program, and then to write about programs they watch “when nothing else is on,” or about experiencing an academic achievement. They were then asked to verbally describe what they had written in as much detail as possible.

After writing about favored television programs, the subjects verbally expressed fewer feelings of loneliness or exclusion than when verbally describing either of the two control situations (essays about programs watched when nothing else is on, academic achievement). This is evidence, say the researchers, that illusionary or “parasocial” relationships with television characters or personalities can ease belongingness needs.

It remains an open question, say the researchers, whether social surrogacy suppresses belongingness needs or actually fulfills them, and they acknowledge that the kind of social surrogacy provoked by these programs can be a poor substitution for “real” human-to-human experience.

“Turning one’s back on family and friends for the solace of television may be maladaptive and leave a person with fewer resources over time,” says UB’s Derrick, “but for those who have difficulty experiencing social interaction because of physical or environmental constraints, technologically induced belongingness may offer comfort.”
Source: University of Buffalo
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by Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

no, our people are not magical
nor do we work extraordinarily
harder than anybody else

jackie chan did fail out
of primary school, spent
his childhood meditating
back flip to foot to back flip,
a boy growing into man
in constant motion

no, we tend not to learn it
in our families

but the steps of chiang kai shek
memorial are lined each morning
with hundreds of grey haired supplicants
to tiao wu, their aging joints turning
beneath the grey of sky and sun

it is not the most important part
of our culture

but who wouldn’t fall in love
with the helix of bruce lee’s waist,
muscles firm and corrugated
like the rows of rooftop tiles
bearing the lightness of rain
and the lightning of his touch

Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai/s website is Yellowgurl

YELLOWGURL EVENTS MAY 09- For details, check out: Events

By Christopher Ketcham

The French have taken to bossnapping — “sequestering” their bosses while keeping them comfortable and safe — to protest economic unfairness.

In answer to their own economic crisis, the French have taken up “bossnapping.”

Here’s how it works: An executive of a company, perhaps the CEO, stands before a group of his employees, puts his hands together, sighs, and then, with regret as smooth as brie, explains the fact that downsizing is needed to meet the exigencies of economic crisis (read: the preservation of profits in downturn).

The employees get pissed off — and bum-rush the boss. They trap him in his office, barricade the door, feed him espresso and baguette, and demand a fair deal.It’s a sort of soft-touch storming of the Bastille.

And lo, it works. A few weeks back, this happened at the FM Logistics Co. in Woippy, France, as 125 workers charged into a meeting of five company managers and held the poor creatures hostage for a day. At least 475 workers at FM Logistics, which is owned by Hewlett-Packard Co., were facing the specter of “redundancy” as HP sought to move its printer packaging operations to the cheaper labor pool in Malaysia.

By midnight, the company had turned tail, promising “new proposals on redundancy talks,” according to Reuters. The news service quoted one of the bossnappers: “We’ve had enough. We have been negotiating for a year, if you can call it negotiating, and we haven’t managed to make ourselves heard.”

• At 3M’s pharmaceutical factory in Pithiviers, 50 miles from Paris, workers exploded upon hearing that 110 of them were to lose jobs. They surrounded the manager and forced him into his office, where he was held hostage for 24 hours until 3M agreed to resume negotiations.
• The president of Sony France in March was locked in his office by employees who barricaded the doors and windows with tree trunks.
• Angry factory workers at the Caterpillar plant in Grenoble took four managers hostage on April Fool’s Day.

In the last month across France, at least a dozen such incidents have been reported, with no less than five CEOs of major corporations held in what the French are calling, with typical delicate aplomb, “sequestration.” In each case, the sequestered bosses have been well-fed and well-treated — though sometimes, alas, forced to sleep on the floor.

I called my family in France — my ex lives in Paris with our daughter — to get the home-fire take on these outrages.
“Most people are for it,” my ex told me. “Because of les inegalites” — the inequalities of the rich doing well as the rest of the country immolates.

I e-mailed her sister-in-law, a schoolteacher, who wrote back, “These bossnappings seem to be peaceful most of the time, and I’m not so shocked. Workers are totally desperate, and I don’t blame them for wanting to be heard, as long as no one is hurt.” (She also noted that she personally knows a company boss in the south of France who has taken to keeping a bedroll and extra food in his office, just in case.)
A poll this month found that 45 percent of French agree with the practice of bossnapping, while only 7 percent condemned it. A second poll found that 55 percent of French believe that “radical protest” under the current circumstances was justified, while 64 percent said that bossnapping should be depenalized. And perhaps most compelling is that authorities are listening: In most cases, they are declining to prosecute the bossnappers.

It’s lovely to behold all this, and even lovelier to think my daughter is growing up weaned on the grand French tradition of raising hell. The habit goes back to the revolution — its call signs, Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite — to the Paris commune, the resistance, the Soisante-Huitards toppling the republic.

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