By Sonia Shah

Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa

By Dambisa Moyo.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
188 pp. $24.

In a provocative new book, Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo argues that foreign aid in Africa, one of the most haloed sacred cows of the liberal establishment, has been an “unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster,” an idea that “seemed so right” but is in fact “so wrong” that, like asbestos or the Hummer, it should be phased out entirely within the next decade.

Why? Well, he who pays the piper calls the tune. Foreign aid, in some African countries, has become government’s primary source of revenue, Moyo points out. In Ethiopia and Gambia, for example, a whopping 97 percent of the government’s budget derives from foreign aid. Such governments become dangerously untethered from the citizenry upon whose tax dollars they no longer rely, she says.

Local communities, propped up with aid-fueled schools and clinics, are no longer required to build mutual trust to create social institutions. Small businesses selling socially useful commodities–food, clothing, mosquito nets–are cruelly shuttered out of business by avalanches of well-intentioned donations. The effect is anti-democratic, destabilizing, soul-crushingly “malignant,” Moyo writes, and “exceptionally corrosive” to government accountability, civil society and the prospects for economic development.

Aid-powered governments, insofar as they are accountable to anyone, answer only to their donors, who in turn, despite all their hopeful propaganda are even less accountable to the poor, Moyo says. It’s true, beside the dashed hopes of local peoples, there’s not much consequence to a failed aid project. When aid dollars are diverted toward despots’ lavish wedding parties or, less spectacularly, to interventions that are inappropriate or ineffective, reports are duly written, filed away and ignored. To wit: World Bank analyses have revealed that 85 percent of foreign aid is diverted away from its originally intended purpose. After $300 billion in foreign aid, the rate of poverty in Africa grew from 11 percent in 1970 to 66 percent in 1998. Foreign aid plows on regardless, with nary a wiggle on the steering wheel.

There’s a political logic to this paradox, although Moyo doesn’t quite come out and say it. Being seen to be helpful trumps actually being helpful, as anyone who has been loudly offered dishwashing help ten minutes the last plate has been dried can readily understand. Presidents tout foreign aid programs to distract their constituencies from unpopular wars and failing domestic programs, or to win hearts and minds in some distant geopolitical battle. That’s why so many foreign aid agencies spend much more time trumpeting disbursements rather than tracking outcomes. Disease-prevention projects fail to measure the baseline levels of sickness before they commence; aid workers tout their distribution of helpful tools, not whether people actually used them.

That doesn’t preclude foreign aid from being helpful, of course. Through foreign aid programs, children are vaccinated. Schools are built. Water-treatment facilities are constructed. Lives are saved! Moyo doesn’t dispute this. But for her, isolated gains can’t counterbalance the negative, destabilizing effects of massive flows of foreign aid on an economy, especially when there are, she says, much more effective ways to bankroll Africa’s development. She argues in favor of foreign investment (e.g, China’s $900 million invested in Africa in 2004), microloans as per Grameen Bank and Kiva.org, more efficient use of foreign remittances, and better trade deals. The liberal establishment, she says, has completely sidelined these sources of financing in their nearly religious conviction that foreign aid is the “only solution” to Africa’s problems, a conviction spread in no small part by aid agencies’ and NGOs’ fundraising activities, not to mention the likes of “glamour aid” advocates such as Angelina Jolie.

Some reviewers have suggested that today’s economic scenario has mooted Moyo’s call for an end to foreign aid, because everybody’s going to be cutting foreign aid anyway. But the real challenge in pursuing Moyo’s proposal is political, not economic. The international aid community has largely redefined African poverty and illness as not just obstacles to development but as emergencies in and of themselves. Malaria’s toll is likened to a jumbo jet full of children crashing every single day: a disaster, a tragedy, one that requires urgent quick-fixes, now. Economist Jeff Sachs calls extreme poverty a “global emergency.” The global bigwigs at Davos see it as a “development emergency .” Foreign aid, in this perspective, is not just about patiently shepherding fellow countries along the development path. It’s as morally imperative as keeping a finger in the dike. Moyo essentially sidesteps this dilemma by excluding humanitarian and emergency aid from her critique of development aid, even though politically, at least, they’ve become one and the same.

There’s much in this slim book that will rankle. Moyo’s argument that reliance on foreign aid is the reason for Africa’s descent into poverty is less than convincing. True, there’s a correlation between the extent of foreign aid and the growth of poverty, but there are any number of equally plausible counter-explanations for that, including the exact opposite of hers (that is, more aid was needed). Moyo worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs for eight years, and shares her profession’s seemingly endless optimism about the uplifting power of profit-seeking investors. And since the book was written before the global economy’s slow-mo train wreck, Moyo’s supposition that private investors are itching to sink money into emerging African economies is now, sadly, out of date.

Nevertheless, she’s right, of course. Economic development cannot be “shoe-horned” into poor countries, plotted by Western experts with minimal if any input from Africa’s elected leaders and policymakers. Moyo is brave to say it. (Her bravery doesn’t end there, either–besides picking a public fight with none other than U2’s Bono.) And at least some African leaders agree: last month, after hearing Moyo speak, cabinet members in Rwanda vowed to end their reliance on foreign aid.

Readers may not be so inclined, these days, to listen to well-coiffed economists spouting bold plans and promises. But for those who care to truly get development right, Moyo is, I think, one investment banker to whom we should pay heed.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090330/shah

Sonia Shah is an investigative journalist. Her personal website is http://www.soniashah.com/ and her website http://www.resurgentmalaria.com/ is to raise the awareness on the danger of malaria.

Habib Jalib recites his famous poem Dastoor or Tradition
[He is famous for his answer to people inquiring about his residence address: he always gave two addresses – his real home address and the address of the prison where he spent time during most regimes. Ed.]

Habib Jalib’s poem, actor, Mohammad Ali, singer Ahmed Rushdie, in 1964 film Khamosh Raho

Habib Jalib recites Mein Ne uss Se Yeh kaha

Habib Jalib – Mainay Uss Say Yeh Kaha – Laal
Habib Jalib – Mainay Uss Say Yeh Kaha
Shahram Azhar – Vocals
Taimur Rahman – Music
Mahvash Waqar – Backing Vocals
Taimur Khan – Director Producer
Dita Peskova – Assistant Director
Jamie Mill – Recording Director
Laal & Taimur Khan – Music Producer
WIDEi Films – Production Company

“Main Nay Kaha” is a satirical poem by the famous leftist poet Habib Jalib called “Musheer” (Advisor). Jalib wrote it in response to a conversation he had with Hafiz Jalandari during the time of Ayub Khan’s dictatorship. It remains just as fresh and valid today.

The music video contains real images of events in Karachi, London, and Lahore during the tumultuous period between December 27th and February 18th. The song and video were recorded on a shoe-string budget of one session each.

This video and song are connected to a documentary on a journey through a life-changing period in the history of Pakistan. The journey begins in Pakistan on the eve of the assassination of Benazir and the ensuing grief, violence, and carnage. The film maker travels to London to discover a group of young activists organizing protests against Emergency rule. Following these activists full circle to Pakistan, the documentary captures the events around the 2008 elections. The film thus captures a moment in the life of Pakistan, from Benazir’s assassination to the elections, through the lens of young activists. The documentary by Widei Films will also be released shortly.

Translation:

I said this to him
These hundred million
Are the epitome of ignorance
Their conscience has gone to sleep
Every ray of hope
Is lost in the darkness
This news is true
They are the living dead
Completely mindless
A disease of life
And you hold in your hands
The cure for their ills

You are the light of God
Wisdom and knowledge personified
The nation is with you
It is only through your grace
That the nation can be saved
You are the light of a new morning
After you there is only night
The few who speak out
Are all mischief makers
You should tear out their tongues
You should throttle their throats

Those proud of their eloquence
Their tongues are completely silent
There is calm in the land
There is an unexampled difference
Between yesterday and today
Only at their own expense
Are people in prison, under your rule

China
China is our friend
We’d give our lives for her
But the system that they have
Steer well clear of that
From far away say “salaam”
These hundred million asses
That are named the masses
Could surely never become rulers
You are the truth; they’re an illusion
My prayer is that
You remain President forever

By HENRY A. GIROUX

I do not believe that a student of human reality may be ethically neutral. The sole choice we face is one between loyalty to the humiliated and to beauty, and indifference to both. It is like any other choice a moral being confronts: between taking and refusing to take responsibility for one’s responsibility.
Zygmunt Bauman1
In his sobering analysis of recent democratic decline, Sheldon Wolin has rightly argued that in a “genuinely democratic system, as opposed to a pseudo democratic one in which a ‘representative sample’ of the population is asked whether it ‘approves’ or ‘disapproves,’ citizens would be viewed as agents actively involved in the exercise of power and in contributing to the direction of policy.”2 There is a long tradition of critical intellectuals in American higher education extending from Thomas Jefferson to John Dewey, Edward Said, and Howard Zinn, who have all insisted that the university is one of the few spaces where the task of educating students to become critical agents and socially engaged citizens is not only crucial to the meaning of education but also an essential condition of academic labor and democracy itself. As a vast array of public spheres, including some of the nation’s major newspapers, either fall prey to corporate control or simply disappear, higher education becomes one of the few remaining sites where a society might question itself, where it might reflectively consider how lived realities measure against democratic practices and ideals. Universities thus provide the pedagogical conditions for existing and future generations both to defend democratic principles and to incorporate them into their own understanding of what it means to define themselves as engaged citizens and socially responsible adults.
Understanding higher education as a democratic public sphere means fully recognizing the purpose and meaning of education and the role of academic labor, which assumes among its basic goals promoting the well-being of students, a goal that far exceeds the oft-stated mandate of either preparing students for the workforce or engaging in a rigorous search for truth. While such objectives are not without merit, they narrow the focus of human agency, depoliticize education, and ignore the issue of civic responsibility, among other generally unacknowledged shortcomings. Defining education as a search for the truth and preparing students for the workforce says little about the role that academics might play in influencing the fate of future citizens and the state of democracy itself. Surely academics are required to speak a kind of truth, but as Stuart Hall points out, “maybe not truth with a capital T, but … some kind of truth, the best truth they know or can discover [and] to speak that truth to power.”3 Implicit in Hall’s statement is an awareness that the priorities of big business and other powerful interests are not always, or even routinely, the priorities that shape intellectual commitment or pedagogical practice. To speak truth to power is not a temporary and unfortunate lapse into politics on the part of academics: it is central to opposing all those modes of ignorance, market-based or otherwise instrumental rationalities, and fundamentalist ideologies that make judgments difficult and democracy dysfunctional.
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By Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch

Negotiations at the United Nations High Level Summit on drugs in Vienna last week fell flat. Although 25 countries officially stated their support for proven methods such as needle exchange and overdose prevention, the summit’s outcome was a watered-down political declaration that fails to acknowledge crucial lessons that have been learned over the last decade.
The refusal to include the words “harm reduction” seems motivated by ideology rather than science, despite clear evidence showing that needle exchange and substitution treatment keep drug users alive and free of deadly infections.
Those advocating for harm reduction accept that drugs have always been a part of human history and aim to decrease the damage caused by their production and use. A vocal few disagree with this approach, labeling it, in the Vatican’s words, “anti-life.”
Those who strive for the futile goal of a “drug-free world” refuse to recognize the proven benefits of harm reduction. But the evidence against the “war on drugs” is overwhelming: prisons swelling with non-violent drug offenders, billions of dollars spent on military action to curb production while the availability of illicit drugs increases and prices drop, and increasing HIV rates throughout the former Soviet Union and parts of Asia.
Elsewhere, the stories of futility in the “war on drugs are more brutal: capital punishment for drug-related offenses; extra-judicial killings in the name of creating drug-free societies; drug users sent to labor camps as a form of “treatment”; and drug-using women handcuffed to beds during childbirth. The list goes on.
But there is reason for hope.
Since assuming office, President Barack Obama has made clear his desire to lift the federal ban on needle exchange in the United States. Indeed, while the previous Bush administration led the global opposition to harm reduction, the US delegation struck a more conciliatory tone at the Vienna summit, indicating what some perceive as a fresh start to drug policy.

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By BRIAN McKENNA

Where is anthropology’s Ida Tarbell? Its I.F. Stone? Its Lincoln Steffens? All were outstanding journalists, chroniclers of the culture, resources and power of their times.

And where is anthropology’s Juan Cole? Its Stanley Aronowitz? Its Noam Chomsky? A historian, sociologist and linguist respectively. All are academicians. All are well known public writers.

With an upcoming Yalta-esque American Anthropology Association conference in December 2009 titled, “The End/s of Anthropology,” academic anthropology continues to worry about its future while imploring its members to get more involved in public life outside of the ivy. Of course that’s something applied anthropologists (in the break-away Society for Applied Anthropology) have been doing for decades. One wonders how the conference will showcase journalism, one of the most consequential forms of public anthropology. Typically the anthropology profession – both academic and applied – looks skeptically at journalism.

A common refrain among academic anthropologists is this: “I never talk to journalists, they always get me wrong. I just can’t trust them.” Whenever I hear this my mind churns, “Then why don’t you become the journalist and write it yourself?” Applied anthropologists are more inclined to write an occasional journalistic piece, but it’s not viewed as a central focus of applied work. Again, why not become the seasoned journalist?

Is there a career danger for an anthropologist in wanting to be a relevant, publicly engaged writer? Maybe. Consider, why is it that some of U.S. culture’s most talented writers, like David Moberg (senior editor for In These Times) and Kurt Vonnegut felt as though they had to drop out of anthropology graduate programs, (University of Chicago) just inches from the dissertation finish line, to become public communicators, public intellectuals, novelists and journalists?

Hermetically Sealed Classroom, Dusty Journals

Too many academic anthropologists are marooned in the coffin-boxes of university classrooms, their pearls of wisdom echoing wistfully off of hermetically sealed-walls. Paradoxically, just outside of campus bounds, local TV and radio programs – which can potentially educate millions – are staffed by their freshly minted (and inexperienced) former students! These are campus graduates of journalism, broadcast communications, speech, and/or theater programs where they were groomed in the practical arts of elocution and head bobbing for the airwaves and/or TV cameras. According to the FCC, these are supposed to be democratic public airwaves. But in practice, under corporate hegemony, they are mostly off limits to Ph.D.s, social scientists and even investigative journalists, i.e. thinkers and social critics. Anthropologists must fight for access to these spaces. Meanwhile they must circulate their voices in a multitude of public fora in local newspapers, the alternative press, the Internet, public television and public radio.

I worked as a development consultant on FRESH AIR with Terry Gross in Philadelphia in 1991. The show now reaches 4.5 million listeners daily and is in Europe on the World Radio Network. Ms. Gross and her colleagues have featured the work of numerous anthropologists such as David Kertzer, Peter Goldsmith, Sam Charters (musical anthropologist) and medical anthropologists Paul Farmer and Terry Graedon. When I left to pursue a Ph.D. I told Ms. Gross and her staff, “you help do the work of a great many anthropologists, getting the message out about their work. Keep it up.” The broadcast could conceivably profile an anthropologist every week to great effect, but does not. We cannot depend on what Anthony Giddens called the double hermeneutic (interpreters of our interpretations) line of gatekeepers like Gross for our public media education. Anthropologists have no choice. They must become media makers and journalists themselves. This will be tough in a field, anthropology, that does not provide systematic education on “how to become a public intellectual” in its curricula, pedagogy, modes of evaluation or reward structure.

Cracking Chaucer

What makes a good journalist? In a telling Slate Magazine article, “Can Journalism School Be Saved?” editor Jack Shafer said that “I’d rather hire somebody who wrote a brilliant senior thesis on Chaucer than a J-school M.A. who’s mastered the art of computer-assisted reporting. If you can crack Chaucer, you’ve got a chance at decoding city hall.” (Zenger 2002)

Anthropologists can crack Chaucer and much more. Anthropologists can debate Foucault, survive in foreign lands with little more than the grit of our teeth and write insightful interpretations of the global/local intersections of capital. Anthropologists would make great journalists, albeit if they learned to write more quickly, urgently, succinctly and in a public voice.

There are models. Barbara Nimri Aziz is host, executive producer and anthropologist for WBAI radio-Pacifica. Cambridge educated Gillian Tett, Ph.D. is a journalist for Britain’s Financial Times. Maria Vesperi was a reporter and an anthropologist.

Unfortunately, anthropologists rarely write urgently about the local culture for the general public. It’s even rarer for them to do it in their own hometowns where they live. But journalists – particularly investigative muckraking journalists – do. And at a time when corporate media has fired too many investigative journalists, anthropologists need to pick up the slack. Both professional anthropology and professional journalism are in free fall. End is a keyword in both realms. As in “End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate (2006), by top investigative journalists Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. The two recently published a AAA series “Pulse of the Planet” to good effect. Counterpunch is necessary reading for all my University of Michigan-Dearborn students.

And yet, few citizens know about the powerful ethnographic studies that quietly sit in libraries, on dissertation shelves, or in journals like American Ethnologist or Human Organization. Our material rarely sees print in the local “Metro Times” or “City Paper.” Why not write for both audiences, academic and popular?

But, That’s not anthropology!

Anthropologist James Lett is a former broadcaster and present-day anthropologist. In 1986 he wrote abut his dual life commenting that found it “remarkable that [the] similarities [between the two professions] are not more widely appreciated. As an anthropologist, I have been trained to observe, record, describe, and if possible, to explain human behavior, and that is the essence of what I do every day as a journalist.” (Lett 1986)

I interviewed an anthropologist/journalist for this article who asked to remain anonymous. Now an assistant professor she confided that she kept her graduate student journalism quiet because of how it was talked down. “When someone mentioned Deborah Tannen [a popular linguistic anthropologist] professors’ eyes would roll.” She said that since anthropology and journalism have so much in common “anthropologists struggle “to define their discipline as unique.” “They want to distance the profession from journalism. . .you know, how anthropology is always struggling to legitimate itself.”

Anthropologist Thomas McGuire exemplifies this type of border patrol work in defense of anthropology in a recent article called, “Shell Games on the Water Bottoms of Louisiana: Investigative Journalism and Anthropological Inquiry”(Walters et al 2008). In it he discusses the work of two investigative journalists working for the New Orleans Times-Picayne daily newspaper who exposed political corruption over oysterbeds. He argues that investigative journalists, despite seeking to uncover the truth like anthropologists, fail to be anthropologists because they frame a story “like a picture is framed to separate it from the background to focus attention.” They do not tell us enough about why things happened from a larger perspective, he says. He also submits that investigative journalism is not anthropology because it is limited “by what their readers will bear,” and by a “moral imperative that cuts them short (p 119).”

Excuse me? McGuire has evidently never read anything by Mike Davis, Upton Sinclair or Jeffrey St. Clair whose “Been Brown so Long it Looked like Green to Me,” analyzes perceptively capitalist corruption in Louisiana. I myself have learned more about how the media operates from non-anthropologists like Upton Sinclair (see his The Brass Check) and McChesney than any anthropologist. Incidentally it is noteworthy that the two reporters were able to impact public policy to a far greater degree than McGuire who, as evidenced from his piece, does not do journalism.

Some anthropologists argue that journalism has little or no sophisticated social theory. That’s true for mainstream journalists but not for many of the investigative journalists I know. Moreover a significant amount of anthropology fails to adequately theorize its own imperial context of privilege. According to Laura Nader, “it is often the case that the critical potential of a discipline is obliterated as soon as the disciplines gets institutionalized and transformed into an industry.” (Nader: 100). Nader argues that the thrust of American anthropology has supplied the ideological support for imperialism and colonialism, studying down not up, studying away not in their own backyards. The context of most academic anthropology is the university, and the best critiques of the university have not come from anthropologists but educators, sociologists and historians.

Captive Intellectuals
To better understand McGuire one must read Russell Jacoby. In his “The Last Intellectuals, American Culture in the Age of Academe” (1987) Jacoby talks about how the growing academic culture of the 1950s absorbed a great many of our great public writers (like Tarbell, Stone and Steffens) turning them into academics where they lost a public voice. “For many younger intellectuals the dissertation was the cultural event and contest of their lives. . .the dissertation became part of them. The rhetoric, the style, the idiom, the sense of the ‘discipline’ and ones place in it: these branded their intellectual souls. The prolonged, often humiliating effort to write a thesis, to be judged by ones doctoral advisor and a committee of experts gives rise to a network of dense relations and deference that clung to their lives and future careers. . .earlier intellectuals were almost completely spared this rite.” (Jacoby:18)

Twenty-two years later Jacoby’s analysis still rings true. Anthropology programs remain too aligned with an academic culture that creates socialization experiences that have little to do with engaging the public directly.

A Burgeoning Movement of Anthropological Journalists?

It is interesting that the push for anthropology and journalism often comes from students. That is true for the California State University-Fullerton where students organized a “Society of Anthropology in Journalism” recently. That’s also true at the University of Arizona where Hecky Villanueva told me, “A number of us here at the University of Arizona have long debated the relationship between anthropology and popular writing.” They insist that anthropologists must write in accessible styles for diverse audiences. In their 2007 paper “Lessons from New New Journalism” Villanueva and four student colleagues reviewed “the work of five popular nonfiction writers to determine the extent to which their approachable writing styles are compatible with anthropological rigor and nuance.”

Internationally there are some important developments. As Jeremy MacClancy, Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University in the UK said, “If anthropologists have something to contribute directly to journalism, then the doors open for those who know how to write. Personally, my colleagues (e.g. Professor Joy Hendry, a Japanologist, and Simon Underdown, a paleobioanthropologist in my department) and I have found it relatively easy to get on national BBC radio programs and sometimes into the national press, but only when we are able to illuminate clearly a current affair. In France, Marc Abeles used to write frequently for the French quality press. In Spain, anthropologists, like many intellectuals there, can have a significant presence, e.g. Joseba Zulaika in the Basque Country, even though he is based in the Centre for Basque Studies, Nevada.”

McCalancy mentions obstacles: “Many anthropologists, especially younger ones, do not know how open the UK national press and media are to approach by anthropologists.” Then there are “pressures to publish and other increasing demands on our time; a very understandable fear of being made into ‘Dr Rent-a-quote’; little (albeit increasing) recognition for public anthropology by Heads of Faculty; and lack of successful models to emulate.”

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The government has reaffirmed its goal to make the country’s drinking water arsenic-free by 2013.

”Safe drinking water is a major problem in Bangladesh. We have to use more chemicals for more agricultural production to feed more people. Chemicals contaminate the water sources, so does arsenic. We will make the country arsenic free by 2013”, declared Finance Minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhit on 30 January at the biennial conference of the Bangladesh Chemical Society.

Dhaka has placed added emphasis on research and innovative technology to address the issue, as well as additional financial resources, he said.

His words come as more than 2,000 residents in the village of Garchapra, Alamdanga sub-district in Chuadanga District, fear developing arsenicosis after years of drinking contaminated water.
A recent survey conducted by the Department of Public Health Engineering (DPHE) and the Chuadanga District Health Office has confirmed 130 arsenicosis cases in the village. Tube wells in the area showed high concentrations of arsenic.

In the country the arsenic levels are so high that the World Health Organization (WHO) has described it as ”the largest mass poisoning of a population in history”.

Naturally-occurring arsenic-contaminated water was first detected in Bangladesh in 1993 and is largely attributed to arsenic-rich material in the region’s river systems, deposited over thousands of years along with sands and gravels, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said.
Government health centres at sub-district level have been assigned the task of distributing vitamin-fortified anti-oxidant capsules for patients.

Out of 87,319 villages in the country, there are more than 8,000 where 80 percent of all tube wells are contaminated. Many of the first wells were constructed as part of a programme to provide ”safe” drinking water.

Although thousands of tube wells are known to be pumping arsenic-contaminated water, they remain the main source of drinking water for more than 70 percent of the country’s population.

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Sonja Karkar’s comments:

FRANCE: ACTION BOYCOTT ISRAEL – in French

The visual impact of this action is truly amazing and if it could be
replicated in stores throughout the country, it would grab the headlines soon enough and capture the imagination of people everywhere.

Definitely a must-watch video!

ACTION BOYCOTT ISRAEL

avec la participation de plusieurs associations de la Campagne Boycott Israel
Réalisation : l’équipe vidéo “PALESTINE VIVRA”

http://www.europalestine.com/article.php3?id_article=3908

(Submitted by Ingrid B. Mork, who can be reached at ingridbm.mrk279@gmail.com)

Sonja Karkar’s comments:

Tariq Ali puts the case for a total boycott of Israel outside the Israel Embassy in London – 10 January 2009

Israel operates a system of racial Apartheid against its non-Jewish inhabitants and has been illegally occupying Palestinian land in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights since 1967. It has sought to further annex these lands and has systematically transferred its own civilian population into these occupied territories in contravention of
international law. Israel continues to build the illegal Apartheid wall, annexing vast swathes of Palestinian land in the West Bank and creating Palestinian ghettos, despite the ruling of the International Court of Justice that this is illegal.

180 Palestinian organisations and unions have called for a campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Apartheid Israel – I urge you to consider supporting this campaign.

Tariq Ali – Stop The Massacre: Israel Out Of Gaza – 10th Jan

(Submitted by Ingrid B. Mork, who can be reached at ingridbm.mrk279@gmail.com)

by Sumi Krishna

For over eight years, 36-year-old, Irom Chanu Sharmila has been in almost continuous detention in Imphal, in the north-eastern state of Manipur, for her refusal to take any food or drink by mouth till India’s draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958 (AFSPA) is repealed from all of Manipur. Sharmila’s arrest under Indian criminal law (IPC Section 309) for attempted suicide is legally permissible for a maximum of one year at a time. In keeping with the law, yet again in 2009 she was released on 7 March and rearrested two days later on 9 March because she continues to fast.

Violence and corruption have engulfed Manipur for decades. The many communities who inhabit the oval, riverine valley and the surrounding hill ranges are caught in an unending spiral of conflict – between insurgents and the counter-insurgency forces, and among the proliferating ‘UGs’ (as the underground groups are called). With an estimated 30 UGs and 55,000 security forces for a population of under two and half million, Manipur may be the most heavily militarised space in the world. It is this militarisation that is being challenged by the women’s peace initiatives, various non-violent protests and the growing human rights movement in Manipur.

Sharmila’s unique protest began in November 2000 when 10 civilians at a bus stand in the small town of Malom, 15 km. from Imphal, were brutally shot dead by men of the Assam Rifles, in retaliation after a convoy of security forces had been ambushed by Manipuri insurgents. As a voluntary social worker Sharmila had earlier witnessed the agonising testimonies of women assaulted and raped by armed forces personnel. She had also been to Malom for a meeting to plan a peace rally but the massacre at the bus stop made her feel the need to do something more meaningful.

Throughout she has been supported by the Sharmila Kanba Lup (Save Sharmila Campaign) of the Meira Paibi, literally ‘women torch bearers’ who patrol the streets at night. The Meira Paibi are a wide grassroots network of traditional Meite women’s groups across towns and villages in the Manipur valley. They have rallied in protests against colonial oppression in British times and against male alcoholism and drug addiction in more recent years. And they were among the first to take up the human rights struggle against the might of the armed forces in Manipur. The Naga Women’s Union, Manipur (NWUM), an organisation of 16 Naga tribes across all the hill districts, is also with Sharmila and the Meira Paibi in the struggle against the AFSPA and the movement for peace.

The AFSPA is an ‘emergency’ legislation that should be reviewed every six months, but it has been in force in large parts of the north eastern states and Jammu and Kashmir for decades. The Act gives the Indian military and para-military forces unfettered powers to search and destroy any structure, to arrest or shoot to kill on mere suspicion, and it also grants them immunity from prosecution. This has resulted in gross human rights violations in all the areas where the AFSPA is in operation, including Manipur.

In 2004, when a young woman Thangjam Manorama was picked up from her house, possibly raped, then tortured, and killed by the Assam Rifles, the anger of the Meira Paibi exploded in a dramatic protest. A group of 12 elderly ima (mothers) stripped in front of the Assam Rifles quartered at Imphal’s historic Kangla Fort, with banners reading ‘Indian Army Rape Us’. This set off waves of shock and horrified protest with human rights activists and women’s groups speaking out strongly in Sharmila’s support. The Indian Association for Women’s Studies, for instance, has repeatedly called for the repeal of the AFSPA, as has a coalition of several women’s groups across the country.

In October 2006, when Sharmila was ritually released, she had flown undetected to New Delhi along with her brother and a couple of other activists, camping on the pavement near Jantar Mantar on Parliament Street, but was soon rearrested and sent to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences to be force-fed. Later she was taken back to Manipur. Year-after-year, the ritual of release and arrest are re-enacted.

Just before night-fall on 7 March 2009, after her release from the high-security ward of the Jawaharlal Nehru Hospital in Imphal, Sharmila walked to the market place less than a kilometre away where hundreds of Meira Paibi have been fasting in relays from 10 December 2008, the international Human Rights Day. As she walked, she was held up by 64-year-old S. Momen, co-convenor of the Sharmila Kanba Lup, and some of the other women who had been part of the naked protest five years ago. Accompanying the Meira Paibi in solidarity were nearly 100 others including some 50 visiting members of the Network of Women in Media-India.

Throughout the slow walk, Sharmila held her head high, her eyes closed perhaps because of the flashing cameras. She then sat wrapped in a blanket on the ground amidst the Meira Paibi, her uncombed hair framing a very pale, drawn face, piercing eyes and a wry smile. Eight years of confinement, a largely supine existence and being force-fed liquids through a nasal tube have clearly taken a toll on her health. No water passes her lips and she even cleans her teeth with dry cotton. She practices yoga regularly and writes poetry but has said she misses people, because all her interactions are strictly regulated and monitored.

Her elder brother Irom Singhajit, who now manages the Just Peace Foundation, recollects that as a child she was quiet, somewhat solitary, sensitive and inward-looking, with compassion and a poetic sensibility. Speaking softly after her release, Sharmila’s comments made in the Meitei language were lyrical and the ‘mothers’ were often moved to tears. Here is a rough transliteration put together from the recollections of some of the bilingual listeners:

[Question: Are you tired?] ‘I am not tired. I have the strength to walk the streets of Imphal. Will you be able to keep up with me?
Words cannot express my deep gratitude when I see you all waiting for me here. You have renewed my courage. I will continue my campaign till the draconian AFPSA is repealed throughout Manipur.
Tomorrow is International Women’s Day. As the world observes this day, there is a very beautiful place on earth, with lofty hills and the clear flowing water in the streams, where the flowers bloom, a place on earth where one woman is being kept in solitary confinement. Isn’t this ironic?
This time [the release] feels different because you all are here. When I come here and see the Meira Paibi and women from other parts of India, I hope that they will take with them this story and our voices.
The government spends so much energy, so much money, to keep me alive through artificial means. All that energy, all our energy could be channelised productively.
Every year, like clock-work, I come to the waiting hands of the ima. Will you be able to save me this time? What is the end, the purpose, because nobody cares?’

Septuagenarian K. Taruni, convenor of the Sharmila Kanba Lup, replied: ‘We have been on hunger-strike, fasting for 88 days. What more can be done? There are the laws of the land, the might of the state. If a thousand mothers would join you on an indefinite hunger-strike they would be forced to listen. I can join you because I am old, but I am one. Where do I find a thousand women? They have children, responsibilities.’

When Sharmila spoke of her own mother, Irom Sakhi, who she had not met for years, many wept:
‘I had made a pact with my mother, which I have broken. [That they would not meet till Sharmila had fulfilled her mission and the AFSPA was repealed.] Last year when she was lying critically ill in JN Hospital, I went to see her. It was not an easy decision. I paced the corridors outside her ward for hours like a pendulum before I stepped into my mother’s domain. My mother said: “Why have you come here?” I had no answer.’

The struggles have had some results. Kangla Fort, a symbol of Meitei identity and for centuries the seat of the royal family that ruled Manipur, had been seized by the British in 1891, and taken over by the Indian army after Manipur was controversially merged with the Union of India in 1949. The fort has now been returned to the civil administration; the Assam Rifles have been moved out of the fort area and the water in the moats is clean.

The Indian government also appointed a committee headed by retired Supreme Court Justice and former Chair of the Law Commission Jeevan Reddy to examine the demand for repeal of the AFSPA. The report, submitted in 2005, sought to balance the views of the armed forces and different sections of the people. It has not been officially released but was made public by the national daily, ‘The Hindu’. The report recommended repeal of AFSPA, while strengthening the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) that applies to the rest of India. In 2006, KG Kannabiran, national President of PUCL, writing in ‘Combat Law’ said ‘the unanimous opinion in the north east is that the AFPSA should be scrapped’ but was dismayed that the Jeevan Reddy Committee had not evolved a ‘democratic and political method of resolving the problems’ of the region.

Indeed, it seems that the repressive provisions of the special law, the AFSPA have been transferred to the general law, the UAPA. As amended in December 2008, the UAPA provides for arrest, search and seizure on suspicion, pre-trial detention to 180 days, denial of bail on various grounds, and so on. The law renders anyone and everyone suspicious. Human rights activists like Babloo Loitongbam of the Human Rights Alert (HRA), Imphal, do not think the UAPA is relevant to Manipur and are continuing to campaign against the AFSPA.

Human rights abuses continue unabated. Sharmila is reported to have told a group of MPs of the Manipur People’s Party who visited her in hospital in January 2009:
‘I am being kept alive but there is no let up in the killing of innocent people under the immunity granted by the AFSPA.’

In fact, there is evidence that 90 persons (security forces, insurgents and civilians) have been killed in Manipur in just two months, January and February 2009. Most devastating was the kidnapping, bludgeoning and killing of Kishen Singh Thingam, an upright and committed Manipur civil service officer and two others by a section of the Naga underground (NSCN-IM) in the hill district of Ukhrul in mid-February 2009. Kishen Singh an idealistic government official, well known as the founder and editor of the journal ‘Alternative Perspectives’, had given up teaching first at Delhi University and later at a Manipur college to serve the people more directly. Kishen’s Singh’s bereaved wife told us, ‘Like me there are thousands of young widows of men who have been killed without rational grounds, and numerous children orphaned, spoiling their future.’ She had no words to express the pain and agony of the widows of Manipur.

On the evening of 7 March, Irom Sharmila clasped the hands of journalist Anjulika Thingam, a cousin of Kishen Singh, and said to her, the Meira Paibi and all of us clustered around:
‘I heard about your brother. There is more to life than death.
A dew drop on a lotus leaf is just blown away by the breeze. I don’t want to end my life [like a dew drop] without a purpose.’

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(From http://www.sacw.net/)

The following is the history of her struggle:

Irom’s iron in the soul

Young, stoic and dogged, Irom Sharmila has been on a fast-unto-death since November, 2000. She wants the repressive Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act repealed. The Act gives draconian powers to the security forces and has repeatedly been used with brazen brutality in the Northeast. For five years, she has been imprisoned and force-fed by the State for her ‘crime’. Filmmaker Kavita Joshi spoke to her in the hospital room in Imphal, her prison

An eye: piercing, intent. A nose, covered by a swatch of medical tape, as a yellow tube forces its way in. Lips, stretched tight as if in pain. A woman sits against a bare wall, huddled under a blanket, tightly hugging herself. This is my first impression of Irom Sharmila as I walk to her hospital bed. She is incarcerated at the security ward of JN Hospital in Imphal, Manipur, in custody of the Central Jail, Sajiwa. It takes her immense effort to speak, but she tries her best. “How can I explain? This is not a punishment. It is my bounden duty at my best level.”

Irom Sharmila has not eaten for over five years now. For this, she has been locked up in jail by the government under very dubious charges and is being forcibly nose fed. Since November 2000, Sharmila has been on a fast-unto-death, demanding the removal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act 1958 (AFSPA). AFSPA is a law that can come into force in any part of India declared as “disturbed”. The act allows anyone of any rank in the army or a paramilitary force under its operational command to shoot, arrest or search without warrant; and to kill on suspicion alone. Furthermore, there is little scope for judicial remedy. The whole of Sharmila’s state — Manipur — has continuously been under this law since 1980 (with minor exceptions in recent times).

It’s been five years since that day which changed her life. November 2, 2000 was just another Thursday. Till, that is, a convoy of Assam Rifles was bombed by insurgents near Malom in Manipur. In retaliation the men in uniform went berserk: 10 civilians were shot dead. You could say that neither the killings nor the brutal combing operation that followed were new to the people. Manipur had been ravaged by umpteen number of such incidents in the past. But for Sharmila, Malom was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. “There was no means to stop further violations by the armed forces,” she says. She began her epic fast.

From then to now, Sharmila’s frail body has become a battlefield. Within days of her fast, she was arrested on charges of ‘attempted suicide’ and put in jail. She refused bail; she refused to break her fast. For five years now, she has been in custody, being forcibly nose-fed. Time and again, the courts have — rightly — released her. But she resumes her fast and is invariably re-arrested each time.

Mothers of Manipur: Outside Assam Rifles HQ, Imphal, after Manorama’s rape and murder, 2004

She lives with the nagging pain of a tube thrust into her nose. What’s more, for five years, Sharmila has not seen her ageing mother
In the five years that she hasn’t eaten, Sharmila’s body has begun to get damaged severely. She lives with the nagging pain of a tube thrust into her nose. She is 35 but has become feeble and looks older. What’s more, for five years, Sharmila has not seen her ageing mother. In her mother’s own words, “I am weak-hearted. If I see her, I will cry. I do not want to erode her determination, so I have resolved not to meet Sharmila till she reaches her goal.”

In times that are inured to violence, Sharmila’s protest is remarkable for its insistence upon the Gandhian ideals of ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagraha (insistence upon truth). And though her protest is ignored every day in the world’s largest democracy, Sharmila is resolute — “Unless and until they remove the AFSPA, I shall never stop my fasting.” In a rare interview, shot for the film Untitled: 3 Narratives — On Women and Conflict in Manipur, she unravels her heart, slowly, like a stream of amazing struggle and hope amidst intense despair.

Why did you start upon this fast?

For the sake of my motherland. Unless and until they remove the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act 1958, I shall never stop my fasting.

Could you tell me something about the incident that sparked this off for you?

I had gone there (to Malom) to attend a meeting. The meeting was towards planning a peace rally that would be held in a few days.

I was very shocked to see the dead bodies on the front pages of the newspapers. That strengthened me to step on this very threshold of death. Because there was no other means to stop further violations by the armed forces against innocent people.
I thought then, that the peace rally would be meaningless for me. Unless I were to do something to change the situation .

But why choose this particular method? Why a fast unto death?

It is the only means I have. Because hunger strike is based on spirituality.

What about the effect this has on you, your health, your body?

That doesn’t matter. We are all mortal.

Are you certain that this is really the best way? To inflict this upon your body?

It is not an ‘infliction’. This is not a punishment. I think this is my bounden duty.

‘Although the State may think so, I am in no mood for suicide. In any case, if I were a suicide-monger, how could we talk like this? I have no other choice but fasting’

How does your family react to your fast?

My mother knows everything about my decision. Although she is illiterate, and very simple, she has the courage to let me do my bounden duty.

When did you last meet your mother?

About five years ago. There is an understanding between us. That she will meet me only after I have fulfilled my mission.

It must be very hard on both of you…

Not very hard… (pauses). Because, how shall I explain it, we all come here with a task to do. And we come here alone.

Just why are you in custody? Why exactly?

It is not my will. But the State insists it (the hunger strike) is unlawful.

But the government is saying that your fast-unto- death is attempted suicide, which is an offence…

Although they may think so, I am in no mood for suicide. In any case, if I were a suicide-monger, how could we communicate like this, you and I? My fasting is a means, as I have no other.

How long are you prepared to go on like this?

I don’t know. Though I do have hope. My stand is for the sake of truth, and I believe truth succeeds eventually. God gives me courage. That is why I am still alive through these artificial means. (Indicates the tube going into her nose.)

How do you spend your day in the hospital?

A lot of the time I practice yoga. It helps me keep my body and mind healthy. (She points to the tube again.) It is circumstances that make things natural. Though this (tugs the tube) is unusual, it is natural to me.

What do you miss the most?

The people. As I am a prisoner here (in hospital), everyone is restricted from meeting me without permission. So I miss people a lot.

If you had one wish that was yours for the asking, what would it be?

My wish? We must have the right to self determination as rational beings.

Do you think the AFSPA will be repealed? Will you get what you are fighting for?

I realise my task is a tough one. But I must endure. I must be patient. That happy day will come some day. If I’m still alive. Until then, I must be patient. (My time was over, and my crew and I were preparing to leave, when Sharmila stopped us.) Will you help me? I would like to read about the life-history of Nelson Mandela. I have no idea about his life. Will you send me a book about him? It is full of restrictions here. Make sure you address it to the security ward. If not, I may not recieve it.

(We sent Sharmila, the book from Delhi. Her friends tell us that it has reached her.)

Mar 25 , 2006
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Full recognition of women as actors for change in Europe – nothing less!

The average gender pay gap in Europe is 17 %, women are largely underrepresented at decision-making levels in EU institutions, violence against women is persistent throughout Europe, and women’s right to abortion is being denied or restricted in several EU countries. These are some of the reasons why women’s movements remain mobilized throughout Europe. “The International women’s day is relevant for all citizens that want to contribute to a more just and sustainable society. A society where women and men share political and economic responsibilities, where care for elderly and children is shared between women and men and made a societal concern rather than a private one, and where women live lives free from violence”, states Brigitte Triems, President of the European Women’s Lobby (EWL).

With the financial crisis and the evident systemic challenges, a gender perspective is needed more than ever. It is also important to realise that women in Europe face different realities and struggles. Therefore, the possibility to create a more just society will largely depend upon integrating migrant women, lesbians, and disabled women into the core political processes. In view of the importance of the upcoming European elections in June 2009, European Women’s Lobby is running a campaign ‘No modern European democracy without gender equality – 50/50’, calling for more women in decision making at all levels. “It is a question of democracy and of justice, and it is most of all about fully recognizing women as actors of change, as driving forces of sustainable social, economic, and environmental development in Europe”, explains Myria Vassiliadou, Secretary General of the EWL. The 50/50 campaign is supported by more than half of the current 27 European Commissioners, and over 200 prominent supporters have signed up to the campaign.

• Sign the petition and take action – EWL 50/50 Campaign website www.5050democracy.eu

The European Women’s Lobby (EWL) is the largest non-governmental women’s organisations in the European Union, representing approximately 2000 organisations in 30 European Countries. Working with its members at national and European levels, the EWL’s main objective is to fight for gender equality and to ensure the integration of a gender perspective in all EU policy areas.

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