Month: May 2009

By Michelle Chase

Last week, on the eve of the Summit of the Americas held in Trinidad and Tobago, President Barack Obama announced new measures to permit unlimited Cuban-American travel and remittances to the island. These relaxations immediately set off predictions that the entire travel ban would soon be lifted. And in fact, there are bills in both the House and Senate that aim to do just that.

The excitement over these new possibilities, however, should be tempered with a note of caution.
Although there have always been important voices raised in the United States over the injustice of the embargo, much of the progressive mobilization effort of recent years has focused on a complete end to the travel ban, demanding the right to travel “for all, not for some.” The campaign has generated support partly by casting the embargo as a violation of U.S. citizens’ freedom to travel.

But as full liberalization of travel now looms, it is clearer than ever that a progressive opposition to U.S. Cuba policy needs to focus on ending the entire embargo, and for the right, big-picture reasons: The embargo violates Cuban sovereignty and is patently imperialist. Otherwise, the momentum for U.S. Cuba policy reform will be co-opted by representatives of the tourism, agricultural and telecommunication industries.

The new relaxations announced by Obama are, of course, mostly positive and welcome; any measures that diminish the daily hardships endured by Cubans would be. But these changes will also ensure that money and goods sent to Cuba will go through private hands and family networks, rather than allowing the Cuban state to guide the distribution of those resources. While the socialist government has a decidedly mixed record on overturning historic inequalities based on race and class, we nevertheless know, based on what happened during the Special Period, that resources funneled through private channels greatly exacerbate existing class and especially race tensions.

Obama’s reforms will play out differently among Miami’s increasingly diverse Cuban community. Recently emigrated, less educated, darker-skinned migrants will likely use the reforms to help improve their families’ situation back on the island, primarily at the level of everyday purchases like food, clothes, and home repairs. However, assistance sent by Miami’s more established and affluent Cuban-Americans could help their relatives on the island acquire centrally-located property on the black market or proffer the substantial bribes that have increasingly become necessary to secure small business licenses and sometimes even to obtain plum jobs in the tourist sector.

Thus, the new measures will not benefit all Cubans equally. They will raise the consumption levels of those with family abroad and, less directly, of those employed in the service sector in Havana and other tourist destinations. But the embargo, which remains firmly in place through the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act and the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, will still block things like the importation of badly needed modern farming equipment and key infrastructural improvements.

Fully ending the travel ban is necessary and desirable, but doing so while leaving the embargo in place is one way that Washington is trying to scuttle Havana’s ability to guide its own internal affairs.

The capital’s youth population is already particularly frustrated with the inaccessibility of certain consumer goods and the difficulties of receiving permission to travel abroad. An avalanche of iPod-toting U.S. spring-breakers will only exacerbate this frustration. A U.S.-induced tourist boom also stands to increase the steady stream of migration from places like the impoverished easternmost province of Oriente toward Havana. These migrants already face difficulty legalizing their residency in Havana and are often forcibly deported back to their place of origin. In either case, tensions with their Havana neighbors and police could grow.

Anyone who has spent time in Miami knows that Bush’s draconian restrictions, imposed during his campaign for reelection in 2004, never managed to fully contain visits and remittances. Countless small outfits sent money through unofficial channels and paid “mules” to carry goods to the island. Cuban-Americans flew through third countries to visit their relatives and friends. Such endeavors were costly and complicated, but they were rarely if ever prosecuted.
Read more

By Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

In Muslim states, violence against women is validated. A dark age is upon us

I am a Muslim woman and, like my late mother, free, independent, sensuous, educated, liberal, contrary and confrontational when provoked, both feminine and feminist. I style and colour my hair, wear lovely things and perfumes, appear on public platforms with men who are not related to me, shake their hands, embrace some I know well, take care of my family.

I defend Muslims persecuted by their enemies and their own kith and kin. I pray, fast, give to charity and try to be a decent human being. I also drink wine and do not lie about that, unlike so many other “good” Muslims. I am the kind of Muslim woman who maddens reactionary Muslim men and their asinine female followers. What a badge of honour.

Female oppression in Islamic countries is manifestly getting worse. Islam, as practiced by millions today, has lost its compassion and integrity and is entering one of the darkest of dark ages. Here is this month’s short list of unbearable stories (imagine how many more there are which will never be known):

Iranian painter Delara Darabi, only 22 and in prison since she was 17, accused of murdering an elderly relative, was hanged last week even though she had been given a temporary stay of execution by the chief justice of the country. She phoned her mother on the day of her hanging to beg for help and the phone was snatched by a prison official who told them: “We will easily execute your daughter and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Her paintings reveal the cruelty to which she was subjected.

Meanwhile Roxana Saberi, a 32- year-old broadcast journalist whose father is Iranian, is incarcerated in Tehran’s Evin prison, accused of spying for the US. She denies this and says she has been framed because she was seen buying a bottle of wine. This intelligent, beautiful and defiant woman is on hunger strike. Over in Saudi Arabia, an eight-year-old child has just divorced a 50-year-old man. Her father, no doubt a very devout man, sold his daughter for about £9,000.

I have been reading Disfigured, the story of Rania Al-Baz, a Saudi TV anchor, the first woman to have such a job, who was so badly beaten up by her abusive husband that she had to have 13 operations to re-make her once gorgeous face. Domestic violence destroys females in all countries, but in Muslim states, it is validated by laws and values. As Al-Baz writes, “It is appalling to realise that a woman cannot walk down the street without men staring at her openly. For them she is nothing but a body without a mind, something that moves and does not think. Women are banned from studying law, from civil engineering and from the sacrosanct area of oil.”

Small optimistic signs do periodically appear in this harsh desert, says Quanta A Ahmed, a doctor who worked in Saudi Arabia and then wrote her account, In the Land of Invisible Women. She describes the love she finds between some husbands and wives, idealists who think better rights will come one day.
That faith in the future is echoed by Norah al-Faiz, the Deputy Minister for Women’s Education, chosen in this week’s Time magazine list of the world’s most influential people. They hope because they must, I guess, even though they can see the brute forces lining up on the horizon ready to crush them by any means necessary. This country has spread its anti-female Wahabi Islam across the globe, its second most important export after oil.

In Afghanistan Ayman Udas was a singer and songwriter who wore lipstick and appeared on TV, defying her family. She was a divorced mother of two who had remarried. Ten days after this she was shot dead, allegedly by her brothers, who must think they are upright moral upholders with places reserved in paradise. In March President Karzai gave monstrous tribal leaders what they demanded, absolute control over wives by husbands and the right to rape them on the marital bed. Protests by brave women in that country and international outrage has forced him to step back from this commitment but there is concern that he is too weak to hold out, and once again women will become the personal and political playthings of men.

Alibhai
(Submitted by a reader)

By Beena Sarwar

PERSONAL POLITICAL

Shouldn’t Arundhati Roy come from Pakistan?” sarcastically asked a Delhi freelance journalist, commenting on the Facebook posting about a panel discussion, ‘Does Media Jingoism Fan India Pakistan Tensions?’ The cynical remark stemmed from his annoyance, shared by many, at Roy’s consistent exposure of India’s ‘warts’.

The panel, organised by the recently formed Forum of Media Professionals (www.fmp.org.in ), included four journalists from India besides the celebrated writer and activist Arundhati Roy as well as four Pakistani journalists and The Hindu’s Islamabad correspondent Nirupama Subramanian.

Delhi is far cleaner and greener since I was last there nearly five years go, thanks to laws (that are actually implemented) banning diesel and making CNG compulsory. On a more intangible level, another kind of pollution remains, reminiscent of a phenomenon we face in Pakistan: right-wing jingoism fuelled by emotional appeals to religion and nationalism.

The jibe about Arundhati Roy, disguised under an urbane sarcasm, is just one aspect of bigoted nationalism. Going by that logic, those in Pakistan who fight for justice — a struggle that necessitates exposing wrongdoings, or ‘washing dirty linen in public’ according to our critics — should represent India. Another aspect of such thinking is evident in the comments back home when I show my documentary ‘Mukhtiar Mai: The Struggle for Justice’, in Pakistan: “Why don’t you make such films about violence against women in India? Women there have these problems too.”

I wonder at this competitiveness that makes us feel self-congratulatory when we can point out how much worse the other is in some way.

Thankfully, not everyone takes this myopic view. In Allahabad, at a crowded meeting of the Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD), there was none of this one-upmanship or finger pointing. The audience immediately saw the commonalities of the issues raised in the films I showed, on Pakistan’s flawed and discriminatory Hudood Laws and Mukhtiar Mai. They understood that the phenomenon in Pakistan of Taliban ‘punishing’ women for alleged transgressions is not much different from those who rape, kill or lynch women and couples for the sake of ‘honour’ in India itself or indeed in traditional communities in Pakistan.

The difference is that most of these ‘honour crimes’ are committed by relatives of the women who ‘transgress’, as opposed to the Taliban who are taking it upon themselves to enact these punishments as part of the imposition of their own criminal justice system that flouts the writ of the state.

Another difference is that the family in Haryana who hanged their daughter and the man she eloped with (in their own home) will be charged, tried and probably punished. In Pakistan, the ostensibly Islamic Qisas and Diyat (retribution and blood money) laws imposed by a military dictator in the 1980s allow the murder victim’s family members to ‘forgive’ the perpetrators who are often their own relatives.

As for the Taliban and their sympathisers, none have ever been charged for their criminal transgressions, ranging from blackening women’s faces on billboards, to disrupting public events in that involve women (remember the Gujranwala marathon?), to blowing up schools, killing teachers and dragging women out of their homes and murdering them for alleged ‘immorality’.

At the Allahabad meeting, the tone was set by senior advocate Ravi Kiran Jain in his introduction when he stressed on the need for a stable government in Pakistan, and the desire to remove misunderstandings. His words reminded me of Nirupama Subramanian’s appeal at the panel discussion in Delhi urging Indians to “be sensitive to Pakistan as a country that has problems and show moderation in we respond to these problems.”

Many Indians already understand this, but we don’t hear their voices in the media very often. For instance, Utpala, a women’s rights activist during the discussion in Allahabad talked about the need for Indians and Pakistanis to be allowed to visit each other’s countries. Her own visit to Pakistan many years ago, she said had expanded her ‘angan’ (literally, courtyard). She ended by asking, “How can we in India be happy until there is a pro-people, pro-women government in Pakistan?”

Beena Sarwar
(Submitted by Abdul Hamid Bashani Khan)

By Jawed Naqvi

Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi.—File

NEW DELHI: A grandson of Mahatma Gandhi has joined demands by a growing number of Indian activists for resumption of talks with Pakistan, saying the beleaguered country needed ‘neighbourly support’ as well as a self-help strategy to overcome its many challenges, a statement said on Tuesday.

In a petition signed by senior Indian citizens, including former prime minister I.K. Gujral, peace activist Rajmohan Gandhi said: ‘At this time Indians must express total and unqualified support to all Pakistanis striving to preserve normal life in their country.’

‘Threats to Pakistanis are not only threats to close neighbours; they are threats moving towards India, and threats that can easily scale the international border.’

The statement said: ‘Self-interest plus the simplest humanity demands that Indians, citizens and the government, do all they can to make the challenges before Pakistanis less arduous. Despite India’s ongoing elections, and notwithstanding Indian complaints against Pakistani governments, agencies and groups, let India and Indians offer every encouragement and support to the people of Pakistan in the difficult times they face.’

Indians could not remain mute witnesses of the serious danger that Pakistan faces and of the brave effort of many Pakistanis to meet that danger, the statement said.
‘Going to work or school is today a hazard in several parts of Pakistan. Many children remain at home. Trust in institutions of government and in security forces has dropped steeply. Mutual blame often replaces joint action.’

Signatories to the public petition included former foreign secretary Salman Haider, rights activists Teesta Setalvad, Aruna Roy, legal activists Fali Nariman and former Justice Rajinder Sachchar.

Read more
(Submitted by Rohilla Pritam)

By Mathew Barakat

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – Prosecutors moved Friday to dismiss all charges against two former pro-Israel lobbyists accused of disclosing U.S. defense secrets, ending a four-year legal battle that promised to put former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration insiders on the witness stand.

Critics of the prosecution of Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee accused the government of trying to criminalize the sort of back-channel discussions between government officials, lobbyists and reporters that are commonplace in the nation’s capital.

To prove the point, Rosen and Weissman’s lawyers won the right to subpoena a parade of Bush administration officials and have them testify at trial under oath.

Those slated to testify included Rice, former national security adviser Stephen Hadley, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and several others.
Rosen’s defense attorney, Abbe Lowell, said each of those administration officials had conversations with Rosen and Weissman and disclosed almost exactly the same type of information that led to the prosecution of Rosen and Weissman.

Prosecutors had sought unsuccessfully to quash those subpoenas, arguing that Rice and the others had nothing relevant to add to the case.

In a statement Friday, Acting U.S. Attorney Dana Boente said the government moved to dismiss the charges after concluding that pretrial rulings would make it too difficult for the government to prove its case.

Boente also said he was worried that classified information would be disclosed at trial.

Defense lawyers, in a joint statement, praised the Obama administration for reconsidering the case.

“This administration truly shows that theirs is a Department of Justice, where the justice of any case can be re-evaluated and the government can admit that a case should not be pursued,” the defense team said.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III had made several rulings — upheld by appellate courts earlier this year — that prosecutors worried would make it almost impossible to obtain a guilty verdict. Among them was a requirement that the government would have to prove that Rosen and Weissman knew they were harming the United States by trading sensitive national defense information with U.S. government officials, reporters and an Israeli diplomat.

The defense had also been prepared to show the information obtained by Rosen and Weissman, while technically classified, was not truly secret and its disclosure was irrelevant to national security.

The federal government’s former arbiter of classification, J. William Leonard, was slated to testify for the defense that the government overuses classification and applies the label to information that by any practical measure does not need to be secret. The government had sought to bar Leonard’s testimony.
The trial had been scheduled to start June 2. Charges were first brought in 2005.

Rosen and Weissman had not been charged with actual espionage, although the charges did fall under provisions of the 1917 Espionage Act, a rarely used World War I-era law that had never before been applied to lobbyists or any other private citizens.

Weissman’s lawyer, Baruch Weiss, called the dismissal a victory for the First Amendment. Had Rosen and Weissman been convicted, he said it would have set a precedent for prosecuting reporters any time they obtained information from government officials that was later deemed too sensitive to be disclosed.
Weiss said the four-year prosecution “has been a tremendous hardship for both Rosen and Weissman,” who have been unable to work.

A former Defense Department official, Lawrence A. Franklin, previously pleaded guilty to providing Rosen and Weissman classified defense information and was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison. Franklin said he was frustrated with U.S. policy toward Iran, and leaked info to Rosen and Weissman with the hopes that they might use their contacts in the administration to get the policy changed.

AIPAC spokesman Patrick Dorton said the organization was pleased the Justice Department dismissed the charges. AIPAC fired Rosen and Weissman in April 2005, when they were under investigation. Dorton declined to comment on whether AIPAC still thinks Rosen and Weissman acted improperly.

The AIPAC case popped back into the headlines last month after reports that Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., was overheard on wiretaps agreeing to seek lenient treatment for Rosen and Weissman.
Read More

By Anand Patwardhan (a filmmaker)

The Times of India

May 14 this year will mark an ignominious date for Indian democracy the start of the third straight year of Binayak Sen’s incarceration in a Chhattisgarh jail. I wonder if there are words left to describe this travesty. What is left to say that has not been said?

On Binayak’s behalf, writers, poets, judges, lawyers, doctors, human rights workers and trade unionists have spoken out from across India and the globe. Former Supreme Court justice Krishna Iyer, former US attorney general Ramsey Clark, Noam Chomsky and 22 Nobel laureates are amongst the thousands who grace this impressive list, but so far it has all been to no avail.

For those who may not recall, let me set out a chronology. Binayak is a paeditrician, a gold medallist who eschewed a lucrative urban practice to work amongst the poorest in central India. When i met him in the mid-80s he had helped build a workers’ hospital for the Chhattisgarh Mines Workers’ Samiti led by the legendary Shankar Guha Niyogi. Niyogi and his team were not ordinary trade unionists but visionaries for whom a workers’ union went beyond wage struggles to health care, education, even cinema literacy and, of course, fighting the scourge of alcoholism that inevitably afflicts the unorganised. Niyogi was murdered in 1991.

The liquor mafia was blamed but it is commonly understood that they were merely the medium and that the real killers were politicians aligned to industrialists for whom a union that could not be co-opted had to be crushed.

Niyogi’s murder was followed by widespread repression. As big money entered the mineral-rich region, Adivasis found themselves displaced from their lands. A section joined the Naxalite movement, which in turn spawned greater repression.

Binayak continued his medical work but also began to document human rights violations in his capacity as secretary of the Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties, an organisation founded by Jayaprakash Narayan in 1977. More specifically he wrote against the Salwa Judum operation, through which the state armed and trained local Adivasis as a vigilante militia to fight other Adivasis who had joined the Naxalites, resulting in a brutal civil war.

On a visit to jail, Binayak came across an ailing elderly man, Narayan Sanyal, and began medically treating him. Later this became the trigger for his persecution. Binayak was suddenly accused of carrying letters to and from Sanyal, who was accused of being a Naxalite, even though each jail visit was made under strict scrutiny. Binayak was in Kolkata when he learned about the warrant for his arrest. He insisted on travelling back to Chhattisgarh to clear his name, which is certainly not an act of a guilty man. But guilty or not, two precious years have been snatched from him, just as surely as he was snatched from the marginalised people he so dedicatedly served.

Read more

Scientists say they understand more about how the body responds to pleasurable touch.
A team, including scientists from the Unilever company, have identified a class of nerve fibres in the skin which specifically send pleasure messages.
And people had to be stroked at a certain speed – 4-5cm per second – to activate the pleasure sensation.
They say the study, published in Nature Neuroscience, could help understand how touch sustains human relationships.
For many years, scientists have been trying to understand the mechanisms behind how the body experiences pain, and the nerves involved in conveying those messages to the brain.
This is because people can suffer a great deal.
Neuropathy, where the peripheral nervous system is damaged, can be very painful and sometimes the messaging system goes wrong and people feel pain even when there is no cause.

Hairy skin
But the researchers involved in this work were looking to understand the opposite sensation – pleasure.
This research, which also involved experts at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and at the University of North Carolina, recorded nerve responses in 20 people.
They then tested how people responded to having their forearm skin stroked at a range of different speeds.
They identified “C-tactile” nerve fibres as those stimulated when people said a touch had been pleasant.
If the stroke was faster or slower than the optimum speed, the touch was not pleasurable and the nerve fibres were not activated.
The scientists also discovered that the C-tactile nerve fibres are only present on hairy skin, and are not found on the hand.
Read more

Pakistani Taliban’s treatment of Sikhs in tribal areas is illegal and barbaric

We, religious, political and community leaders of the Indian Muslims, are alarmed at the reports coming out of Pakistan’s tribal areas about the Pakistani Taliban’s kidnapping, extortion of huge amounts of money from their Sikh compatriots as “Jizya” and demolition of the houses and shops of those who fail to pay the demanded sums.

We would like to say that Jizya is a tax paid in an Islamic state for exemption from military service by healthy non-Muslim adults who are free to follow their vocations without restriction or fear, and that there is no other tax payable by them after paying this tax, unlike Muslims who have to pay various taxes including Zakat and have to perform military service as well.

Jizya was payable by non-Muslims only in lands conquered by Muslims like Egypt, Syria and Iraq but not in unconquered areas like Madina where during the time of the Holy Prophet no Jizya was ever imposed on non-Muslim citizens who enjoyed equal rights and duties under the Constitution of Madina. For many centuries Jizya has not been levied by Muslim states and today even the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Islamic Republic of Iran do not levy Jizya on non-Muslims for the simple reason that non-Muslims in these states pay all taxes payable by others. Prominent Islamic scholars of the modern times like Shaikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi are of the view that Jizya should not be imposed now as non-Muslims are equal citizens of Muslim states and pay all taxes paid by other citizens and shoulder all the duties.

We wish to make it clear that the imposition of the so-called Jizya is nothing more than extortion by an armed and lawless gang which does not constitute a sovereign government or state or even an organ thereof. Moreover, Pakistan’s tribal areas are not “conquered lands” as their non-Muslim population has been living there for centuries. These areas were part of the British India and became part of the new State of Pakistan as a result of peaceful transfer of power on Partition.

As regards the huge amounts in millions reported to be demanded, these are arbitrary and exorbitant as the amount of annual Jizya paid by non-Muslims in early Islam was merely one to one and a half dinar, which is 4.24 gram to 6.36 grams of gold. Moreover, this tax was payable only at the end of the year and not in advance.

We regard this as an act of injustice incompatible with the letter and spirit of Islam and the international covenants accepted by all Muslim states.

We demand that the Pakistani authorities must take earliest steps to retrieve the extorted sums and pay them back to their affected non-Muslim citizens and facilitate their peaceful return to their homes and properties in their traditional homelands and give them all due protection.

Maulana Mufti Mukarram Ahmad (Shahi Imam, Jama Masjid Fatehpuri, Delhi)
Hafiz Muhammad Yahya (President, All India Jamiat Ahl-e Hadees)
Maulana Abdul Hameed Nomani (Secretary, Jamiat Ulama-e Hind)
Syed Shahabuddin (Former MP & ex-President, All India Muslim Majlis-e Mushawarat)
Prof Tahir Mahmood (Member Law Commission of India)
Mujtaba Farooq (Secretary, Jamaat-e Islami Hind)
Maulana Ataur Rahman Qasmi (President, Shah Waliullah Institute, Delhi)
Maulana Waris Mazhari (Editor, Monthly Tarjuman, Delhi)
Dr Zafar Mahmood (President, Zakat Foundation of India)
Dr SQR Ilyas (Member, Muslim Personal Law Board)
Dr Zafarul-Islam Khan (President, All India Muslim Majlis-e Mushawarat)
Mirza Yawar Baig (President of Yawar Baig & Associates)
Shahnawaz Ali Raihan (Secretary, Students Islamic Organisation)

Issued at New Delhi on 2 May 2009
Milligazette

(Submitted by Pritam Rohila)

The following videos and accompanying comments are by the readers. Ed.)

“This is important for the sanity and steadfastness of regular folks who are pummeled every day incessantly by of Taliban sympathizers, propagandizers, deniers and opportunists in the guise of religion barkers.
“Please check it out and think it is not academic anymore to ponder what will happen if Pakistan falls to these obscurantist medieval barbarians. I am sure no place in South Asia, including Bangladesh, will remain unaffected.”

“The TTP spokesperson Muslim Khan says that those whose throats were slit deserved it.”

“If this isn’t enough, here is a link containing propaganda videos being circulated by Taliban showing beheadings of our beloved soldiers by these barbarians (caution: this is very violent material and you should only watch it at your own discretion. For several days, we have been debating whether we should distribute it but have very reluctantly finally decided to do so because we need to recognize the ugly reality that we are facing)”

Watch

“And here is a new blog on the Taliban’s violence, containing more reports and videos.”

Watch

“So straight from the horse’s mouth. No more room for denial. Those Taliban sympathizers who used to defend them by denying their role in these brutal killings must now face reality. Like it or not, they are really as barbaric as they have been portrayed. It’s time to stand up to them and bring an end to their brutality.”