South Asian Women in Media (SAWM) in association with Lahore Film and Literary Club (LFLC) invite you to the screening of film:
“Women of the Holy Kingdom” directed by Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy
In Saudi Arabia, women need permission from their male guardians to study, work and travel. They are also forbidden to drive and mix with men in public. Now, a growing number of Saudi Women are challenging these traditions and are clamoring for more rights. Sharmeen Obaid documents the emerging women’s movement. Obaid also interviews religious clerics and young working mothers who denounce change and label the women’s movement as immoral.
Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy is the first non- American journalist to be awarded the prestigious Livingston Award and the youngest recipient of the One World Media broadcast journalist of the year award in the United Kingdom.
Date: Saturday, 11th April 2009 Time: 7 pm Venue: South Asian Media Centre, 177-A, Shadman2. Phone# :(92-42) 7555621-8
Ms Sarah Tareen
Coordinator
Lahore Film and Literary Club
177-A,Shadman-2,Lahore
South Asian Media Centre.
(92-42) 7555621-8

On the 60th anniversary of Burma’s independence, the country is colonized from within by its military rulers. Dinyar Godrej travels to its former capital, Rangoon, to catch what’s in the air.
I’m riding a ghost plane. Apart from the roar of engines, there is an uneasy silence. No holidaymakers of the raucous variety. Just the occasional short, murmured exchange. An elderly Burmese man is fumbling with his immigration form. He turns it over and over in his hands, half the questions unanswered. Next to me a nervous young man cranes his neck, peering out of the window. Eventually he initiates some chit-chat, volunteering that he is returning from London, where he had been staying with relatives. I’m itching to ask how he feels, but I bite my tongue. I’ve been infected by the self-censorship that governs all conversations with strangers in Burma. ‘You never know who is your friend, who is your enemy,’ a local tells me later.
As we touch down, a foreigner abandons her half-read copy of Newsweek. The list of things not to carry into Burma is extensive. I’ve purged my luggage and left all my contact information lurking in an email to myself.
The two women at the immigration desk scribble down details in pencil (no computer in sight) and whisk me through. Following the vicious suppression of street protests in September 2007, tourists are scarce. Numbers were already down due to a long-running boycott urged by the country’s most famous prisoner, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.

Feeding the regime
Since 1962 Burma’s people have been under the heel of a military dictatorship. Business is dominated by military-owned conglomerates and entrepreneurs paying their dues, so buying almost anything here feeds the regime. Chances are that the roads one uses in popular tourist destinations, or the golf courses the rich set might tee off on, were built by forced labour. Pagodas visited or ferries boarded incur a dollar fee that goes straight into the junta’s coffers. One cannot visit this country without in some way contributing to the junta. Large parts of it are off-limits to tourists. These are also the places where rape, murder and pillage have reduced entire communities to refugees. Many Burmese in exile tell me the only way to justify a trip is if the solidarity you can show to the people will outweigh the damage you will do with your dollar.
All this makes me uncomfortable. Posing as a tourist, while hoping to get a sense of the place as a journalist, makes me even more so. It’s not easy being what you aren’t.
Every traveller to Burma is told never, ever to initiate a political conversation; let them do the talking. But politics is everywhere. The beaming staff at the reception desk of my guesthouse ask me why I am staying for such a short period. I say I would have loved to stay longer, but because there’s so little good news from Burma in the West I couldn’t persuade friends and family. Tight-lipped silence ensues and I scurry to my room with all the shame of someone who has farted in a lift.
Next morning I walk up Mahabandoola Road on my way to Sule pagoda. This is the wide thoroughfare where thousands gathered in September 2007, emboldened by the protest of the monks. Today it is calm. Monks I speak with later tell me how they were hunted through the city streets when the crackdown began, how they were taken in by sympathetic citizens who gave them ordinary clothes and smuggled them out of Rangoon, walking in groups around them. They tell of their fellow clergy rounded up, stripped naked and beaten, the families of other leaders arrested in order to smoke out those in hiding.

An emptying drain
The protests had begun for economic reasons, but economics is politics in Burma. The military regime is fabulously inept at handling the country’s finances. It used to be called the State Law and Order Restoration Council or SLORC – like the sucking sound of an emptying drain – but now goes under the moniker of the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), on the advice of a US PR consultancy. After a disastrous isolationist period supposedly following the ‘Burmese way to Socialism’, it now aspires to the authoritarian capitalism of its neighbour, China. But without the infrastructure or the business acumen of China, it is presiding over a grand sale of the country’s assets, with the top military brass amassing fortunes. Transparency International has dubbed the country, jointly with Somalia, the world’s most corrupt. On top of the heap is the ruthless Senior General Than Shwe, whose daughter’s wedding in 2006 cost an alleged $50 million. Meanwhile, an estimated five million Burmese face chronic hunger – in a country which used to be known as the rice bowl of Asia. About half of all children don’t enrol in school any more; healthcare is among the worst in the world.

Read more Feeding the regime
Since 1962 Burma’s people have been under the heel of a military dictatorship. Business is dominated by military-owned conglomerates and entrepreneurs paying their dues, so buying almost anything here feeds the regime. Chances are that the roads one uses in popular tourist destinations, or the golf courses the rich set might tee off on, were built by forced labour. Pagodas visited or ferries boarded incur a dollar fee that goes straight into the junta’s coffers. One cannot visit this country without in some way contributing to the junta. Large parts of it are off-limits to tourists. These are also the places where rape, murder and pillage have reduced entire communities to refugees. Many Burmese in exile tell me the only way to justify a trip is if the solidarity you can show to the people will outweigh the damage you will do with your dollar.
All this makes me uncomfortable. Posing as a tourist, while hoping to get a sense of the place as a journalist, makes me even more so. It’s not easy being what you aren’t.
Every traveller to Burma is told never, ever to initiate a political conversation; let them do the talking. But politics is everywhere. The beaming staff at the reception desk of my guesthouse ask me why I am staying for such a short period. I say I would have loved to stay longer, but because there’s so little good news from Burma in the West I couldn’t persuade friends and family. Tight-lipped silence ensues and I scurry to my room with all the shame of someone who has farted in a lift.
Next morning I walk up Mahabandoola Road on my way to Sule pagoda. This is the wide thoroughfare where thousands gathered in September 2007, emboldened by the protest of the monks. Today it is calm. Monks I speak with later tell me how they were hunted through the city streets when the crackdown began, how they were taken in by sympathetic citizens who gave them ordinary clothes and smuggled them out of Rangoon, walking in groups around them. They tell of their fellow clergy rounded up, stripped naked and beaten, the families of other leaders arrested in order to smoke out those in hiding.

An emptying drain
The protests had begun for economic reasons, but economics is politics in Burma. The military regime is fabulously inept at handling the country’s finances. It used to be called the State Law and Order Restoration Council or SLORC – like the sucking sound of an emptying drain – but now goes under the moniker of the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), on the advice of a US PR consultancy. After a disastrous isolationist period supposedly following the ‘Burmese way to Socialism’, it now aspires to the authoritarian capitalism of its neighbour, China. But without the infrastructure or the business acumen of China, it is presiding over a grand sale of the country’s assets, with the top military brass amassing fortunes. Transparency International has dubbed the country, jointly with Somalia, the world’s most corrupt. On top of the heap is the ruthless Senior General Than Shwe, whose daughter’s wedding in 2006 cost an alleged $50 million. Meanwhile, an estimated five million Burmese face chronic hunger – in a country which used to be known as the rice bowl of Asia. About half of all children don’t enrol in school any more; healthcare is among the worst in the world.
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By Benedict Carey

Look around you. On the train platform, at the bus stop, in the car pool lane: these days someone there is probably faking it, maintaining a job routine without having a job to go to.

The Wall Street type in suspenders, with his bulging briefcase; the woman in pearls, thumbing her BlackBerry; the builder in his work boots and tool belt — they could all be headed for the same coffee shop, or bar, for the day.
“I have a new client, a laid-off lawyer, who’s commuting in every day — to his Starbucks,” said Robert C. Chope, a professor of counseling at San Francisco State University and president of the employment division of the American Counseling Association. “He gets dressed up, meets with colleagues, networks; he calls it his Western White House. I have encouraged him to keep his routine.”
The fine art of keeping up appearances may seem shallow and deceitful, the very embodiment of denial. But many psychologists beg to differ.
To the extent that it sustains good habits and reflects personal pride, they say, this kind of play-acting can be an extremely effective social strategy, especially in uncertain times.
“If showing pride in these kinds of situations was always maladaptive, then why would people do it so often?” said David DeSteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University in Boston. “But people do, of course, and we are finding that pride is centrally important not just for surviving physical danger but for thriving in difficult social circumstances, in ways that are not at all obvious.”
For most of its existence, the field of psychology ignored pride as a fundamental social emotion. It was thought to be too marginal, too individually variable, compared with basic visceral expressions of fear, disgust, sadness or joy. Moreover, it can mean different things in different cultures.
But recent research by Jessica L. Tracy of the University of British Columbia and Richard W. Robins of the University of California, Davis, has shown that the expressions associated with pride in Western society — most commonly a slight smile and head tilt, with hands on the hips or raised high — are nearly identical across cultures. Children first experience pride about age 2 ½, studies suggest, and recognize it by age 4.
It’s not a simple matter of imitation, either. In a 2008 study, Dr. Tracy and David Matsumoto, a psychologist at San Francisco State, analyzed spontaneous responses to winning or losing a judo match during the 2004 Olympic and Paralympic games. They found that expressions of pride after a victory were similar for athletes from 37 nations, including for 53 blind competitors, many of them blind from birth.
“It’s a self-conscious emotion, reflecting how you feel about yourself, and it has this important social component,” Dr. Tracy said. “It’s the strongest status signal we know of among the emotions; stronger than a happy expression, contentment, anything.”
In one continuing experiment, Dr. Tracy, along with Azim Shariff, a doctoral student at British Columbia, have found that people tend to associate an expression of pride with high status — even when they know that the person wearing it is low on the ladder. In their study, participants impulsively assigned higher status to a prideful water boy than to a team captain who looked ashamed.
The implications of this are hard to exaggerate. Researchers tend to split pride into at least two broad categories. So-called authentic pride flows from real accomplishments, like raising a difficult child, starting a company or rebuilding an engine. Hubristic pride, as Dr. Tracy calls it, is closer to arrogance or narcissism, pride without substantial foundation. The act of putting on a good face may draw on elements of both.
But no one can tell the difference from the outside. Expressions of pride, whatever their source, look the same. “So as long as you’re a decent actor, and people don’t know too much about your situation, all systems are go,” said Lisa A. Williams, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Northeastern University.
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The Catholic Church has described as “unfortunate” the decision to drop corruption charges against Jacob Zuma, the man widely expected to win the South African presidential election on April 22.
South Africa’s chief prosecutor, Mokotedi Mpshe, announced on Monday that charges against Zuma were being dropped after phone-tap evidence showed there had been political interference in the investigation and it was “neither possible nor desirable” to prosecute Zuma.
The decision by National Prosecution Authority (NPA) threw Zuma’s supporters into celebration but also drew sharp criticism from around the country.
Cardinal Wilfrid Napier, Archbishop of Durban and spokesman for the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC), termed the decision unfortunate.
“The NPA decision not to proceed with the prosecution of Mr. Jacob Zuma has denied both Mr. Zuma and the country the chance to establish his innocence or guilt once-and-for-all through the normal process of a court of law, the cardinal said.
“However, in the interests of peace, healing and reconciliation, we appeal to all parties involved to use this unfortunate situation as an opportunity to commit themselves to good governance, with the expected accountability and transparency. It is crucial that all in position of responsibility learn from this episode to shun corruption in all its forms.”
Zuma, 66, the leader of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) party, has been in and out of court over the last four years. In 2005, his close associate Schabir Shaik was found guilty of fraud and corruption in connection with an multi-billion dollar arms deal. President Thabo Mbeki sacked him as deputy president.
Zuma was later charged with corruption and then the HIV-positive daughter of a family friend accused him of rape. He was acquitted of the rape charges in 2006.
Zuma sparked further controversy when he claimed that he knew the woman wanted to have sex with him and that it was against his Zulu culture to turn down a woman. He also said that he did not use a condom but took a shower to “protect” against HIV infection. At the time, he was head of South Africa’s Aids council.
The ANC elected Zuma as party president in December 2007. Within days, prosecutors brought new charges of corruption, racketeering and tax evasion against him.
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By Riyaz Wani

Srinagar In a rare rapprochement, Kashmiri Pandits and Muslims — including separatists — met here on Tuesday in an attempt to open a dialogue and come to grips with the baggage of the past two decades.
Though some-hard-hitting opinions were expressed, the discussion never crossed the line into hostility. While the leader of Kashmir Sangharsh Samiti, Sanjay Tickoo, talked about the suffering of the Pandit community, Muslims in the audience said the Pandits were indifferent towards the difficulties of Muslims in the Valley. JKLF supremo Yasin Malik, while acknowledging that the Pandits had been hit hard by the situation prevailing in the Valley, said, “The affluent Pandits living in Delhi and other parts of India are not interested in returning to the Valley. They don’t even want the return of the poor Pandits living in tents in Jammu,” Malik said. “There is a huge vested interest which is now rooted in the tragedy of the community.”
The scene for the debate was an exhibition of pictures showing the plunder of Pandit properties and religious places in Valley over the past two decades. Tickoo said the Muslims termed Pandits as traitors and collaborators of the government and hence wanted them out of the Valley. “You (Muslims) say it was Governor Jagmohan who sent us out of the Valley as the violence broke out in 1990. But what about the thousands who had stayed back even then?” Tickoo asked. “They fled after the massacre of 23 Pandits in Wandhama. Now there are no more than 3,000 Pandits in Valley”.

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(Submitted by Rohila Pritam)

Ottawa’s democracy promoters target Venezuela
by Anthony Fenton

Canada’s foreign policy, as that country which is closer geographically, economically, and militarily with the US than any other, has long been circumscribed by the whims of the world’s lone Superpower.
Part of the ‘hidden wiring’ of the US-Canada relationship is premised on the belief that there is a role for Canada in places where the US carries a lot of counter-productive baggage. New records obtained by The Dominion show just how actively intertwined Canada’s foreign policy is with the US-led ‘democracy’ promotion project in Venezuela.
Successive Canadian governments, beginning with Paul Martin’s Liberals and increasing under Harper’s Tory minorities, have pushed full steam ahead with efforts to expand Canada’s democracy promotion efforts globally. Canadian leadership in the regime change and military occupation of Haiti (2004-present) gave rise to a renewed emphasis on the region as an emerging regional power, which carries on under Harper.
Democracy promotion is seldom discussed in the Canadian public sphere, even while it has been the subject of a multitude of federal level conferences, reports, and parliamentary hearings over the last five years. Over that same time, Canada has increasingly been integrating its instruments of democracy promotion with those of the US.
During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama quietly pledged to increase funding for the controversial National Endowment for Democracy (NED), despite scaling back the rhetoric used to describe continuing US aims to promote global, Western-style democracy. Obama has already fulfilled this pledge.
His Omnibus Appropriations Act allocates $115 million for NED’s operations, increasing by $35 million the amount requested by Bush for 2009. All told, the requested 2009 budget for US democracy programs is the highest ever at $1.72 billion. By contrast, Canada spent upwards of $650 million on democracy promotion in 2008.
The NED was formed in 1983 as a new tool to advance US foreign policy and business interests around the world. Nominally independent, NED receives the majority of its budget from Congress, and each of its grants must be approved by the US State Department.
“One of the NED’s first major successes…was helping to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua,” writes journalist Bart Jones in his authoritative biography of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. According to Jones, a couple of decades later “the NED was rapidly infiltrating [Venezuelan] society in a way reminiscent of the Nicaragua experience.” Channelling money and resources to opposition NGOs has been a prime strategy of the NED in Venezuela.
Following a short-lived coup d’etat against Chavez in April 2002, Venezuelan-American attorney Eva Golinger and investigative journalist Jeremy Bigwood obtained a treasure trove of documents through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. These documents, released in conjunction with Golinger’s 2004 book, The Chavez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela, exposed NED’s active role in the attempted subversion of Venezuela’s democracy.
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by Sonja Karkar

Sometimes one just needs to see with one’s own eyes what is possible and
what is not. But even then, it can be difficult to really make anything out
of the morass of lines and shadings on maps that attempt to document
Israel’s complex bureaucratic nightmare of land divisions, allocations,
closed zones, Palestinian areas, checkpoints, the Wall trajectory, and
future Israeli expansionism in the Palestinian West Bank under its military
occupation.

Le Monde Diplomatique, the French monthly magazine for world affairs offers
a series of strange maps in its 2009 edition of the Atlas du Monde
diplomatique and has one called “An Inverted World” on page 129 which
imagines the Palestinian West Bank as an actual archipelago. Strange indeed because the West Bank is in fact landlocked. However, it clearly illustrates how the Palestinian areas are divided and separated by Israeli settlements, checkpoints and barriers and how impossible the facts on the ground are for any kind of viable state for the Palestinians.

Produced below is the map showing a completely fragmented West Bank surrounded by water followed by an actual map of the West Bank as it appears within Israel. The difficulties the Palestinians face in moving from one city, town or village to another because of the endless checkpoints, poor roads, the Wall and the “no-go” areas become at once starkly obvious when one has to imagine navigating these obstacles by boat. Lest anyone think this would be a kind of pleasure cruise, they need to bear in mind that the distance between many of the towns is only around 30 kms, the sort of distances we don’t even think about when we travel to work or school, go shopping or visiting friends. For the Palestinians, the simplest outing can take all day, if they are even allowed through at all.

Gaza is worse. When Israel was dropping bombs on the Palestinians earlier this year, there was no safe haven to which they could run. Israel does not allow the inhabitants of Gaza out of its barricaded confines, not even by sea. The Palestinians were sitting ducks under Israel’s constant bombardments while the world sat back and watched as if Gaza was some amphitheatre with the Palestinians, the gladiatorial amusement. Not only are the not allowed out of Gaza, almost nothing is allowed in. The list of supplies prohibited from entering Gaza vary from day to day, but when even a staple like pasta is proscribed and not a singe building material has been allowed in since Israel’s 22-day blitz

Gisha – Legal Centre for Freedom of Movement in Israel commissioned a film by the director of the award-winning “Waltz with Bashir”, Yoni Goodman to show just what it is like being caged inside Gaza. It is a 90-second animated film called “Closed Zone” and is enormously powerful in its depiction of the Palestinian condition – the humiliations and the hopelessness – as Israel carries out a painfully slow ethnic cleansing. A press release
VIDEO LINK

The growing belief in a one-state solution

by Nadia Hijab

Ehud Olmert’s nightmare is at hand. Not only does the former Israeli prime minister now really have to fight those corruption charges. He also faces the realization of his fears that the Palestinians might give up on a two-state solution in favor of a struggle for equal rights that would mean, as he put it, the “end of the Jewish state.”

Yo, Ehud, that struggle is a growing movement, and it isn’t a threat to Jews – on the contrary, Jews are very much a part of it.

Just last weekend in Boston, American and/or Israeli Jews accounted for nearly a third of the 29 speakers at a conference organized by TARI (Trans Arab Research Institute) with the William Joiner Center at the University of Massachusetts.

This is the second major public conference on how to achieve a single democratic state for Palestinians and Israelis. The first was held in London in November, and a third is slated for Toronto in June.

In a sign of the one-state movement’s persistence, the conference was over-subscribed weeks before it was held; dozens were turned away because the hall only seated 500 people. Those who got in remained glued to their seats as one intense presenter followed another, in spite of limited time for questions and, on day two, no lunch. For my part, I remain agnostic. As I said in my remarks at the conference, both states must provide equality for all their citizens – Muslim, Jewish, or Christian, women or men, whatever their ethnicity. And, by the way, this isn’t currently the case in either the established Israeli state or the putative Palestinian state.

In other words, even if two states are established, Israel cannot continue to be a state that privileges its Jewish citizens over its non-Jewish citizens. So either one or two states would mean the end of a Jewish state – although not of the state of Israel.

Besides, I believe other vital challenges face the Palestinians, including how to keep Palestinians physically on the land of Palestine, and how to effectively and non-violently challenge a leadership that represents at best a quarter of the Palestinian people so as to prevent the abrogation of Palestinian rights.

I share the view of policy analyst Phyllis Bennis who warned at the conference that the United States might seek to impose a mini-state with minimal sovereignty and rights.

That’s why my talk focused on an analysis of the sources of non-violent power available to the Palestinian people, including economic, moral, cultural, legal, and political power.

One important fact (simple but of utmost importance) was reiterated by several Palestinians – from the occupied territories, from within Israel, and in exile. They said loud and clear that working for the one-state solution means working with Israeli Jews. As acting TARI chair Hani Faris put it, “The idea of one state cannot fly without a Palestinian wing and a Jewish wing.”

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AMY GOODMAN: President Obama and European leaders arrived in France today ahead of a key NATO summit to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the alliance. Obama will visit Germany today, as well, which is also playing host to the summit.
The French city of Strasbourg is under security lockdown, with 25,000 police on patrol following a day of clashes between protesters and riot police. Three hundred people were arrested, and a German press photographer was hospitalized after being hit in the stomach by a police rubber bullet. Tens of thousands of demonstrators have descended on Strasbourg and the German towns of Kehl and Baden Baden to protest the summit. France has temporarily reinstated border controls with Germany to restrict access to protesters.
The focus of the summit will be Afghanistan, where 70,000 troops, mostly under NATO command, are at war. President Obama will use the talks to enlist support for his escalation of the war. Obama has sent 21,000 extra US troops to Afghanistan, is considering deploying 10,000 more.
Meanwhile, Taliban militants in Pakistan marked the start of the two-day summit by destroying a fleet of nine parked NATO vehicles in transit for Afghanistan.
Last week, President Obama defended his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The world cannot afford the price that will come due if Afghanistan slides back into chaos or al-Qaeda operates unchecked. We have a shared responsibility to act, not because we seek to project power for its own sake, but because our own peace and security depends on it. And what’s at stake at this time is not just our own security; it’s the very idea that free nations can come together on behalf of our common security.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk about Afghanistan, NATO and the state of US economic and military power in the world today, we’re joined by one of the world’s most astute thinkers and most important intellectuals of our time: linguist, philosopher, social critic, political dissident, Noam Chomsky.
Noam Chomsky is a prolific author and Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just down the road from here, where he taught for over half a century. Among his many dozens of books are Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs; The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo; Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians; Manufacturing Consent; Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies; and Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. There’s a great collection of his work, just out now, edited by Anthony Arnove, called The Essential Chomsky.
Noam Chomsky, welcome to Democracy Now!
NOAM CHOMSKY: Very glad to be with you.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to be with you here in Massachusetts in the studio, instead of talking to you on the phone at home.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s start with what’s happening with this NATO summit celebrating sixty years, France rejoining after more than four decades. Your analysis?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the obvious question is why bother celebrating NATO at all? In fact, why does it exist? It’s twenty years now, almost, since the Berlin Wall fell. NATO was constructed on the—with the reason, whether one believes it or not, that it was going to defend Western Europe from Russian assault. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, that reason was gone. So, first question: why does NATO exist?
Well, in fact, the answers are interesting. Mikhail Gorbachev made an—agreed, made a remarkable concession at that time to the United States. NATO’s essentially run by the United States. He offered to allow a reunited Germany to join NATO, a hostile military alliance—

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Durban [South Africa} police constable Kwesi Matenjwa confesses – on the morning of Saturday, 1 November – how “the great white shark”, City Manager Michael Sutcliffe, ordered his unit to evict (without alternative accommodation) 47 desperate people, mostly from the Eastern DRC. The area from which residents of Albert Park fled has witnessed four million casualties in a civil war over resources, as warlords – funded by corporations such as Anglo American (as Human Rights Watch discovered) – loot and pillage for coltan (used in our cellphones) and other minerals, making it unsafe for return. The refugees are also victims of the May 2008 Durban xenophobia and of a confrontation with Sutcliffe at City Hall in July. CCS has produced a photo exhibition by Oliver Meth and colleagues on their plight, displayed in the UKZN library. Sutcliffe accused the refugees – mainly women and children – of being involved in “crime”, offering no evidence. But Matenjwa explained that a political rally on 4 November and the 2010 World Cup were the real reasons police tore down plastic shelters and confiscated refugee belongings – including vital immigration papers – without warning. In the process of their attempted eviction, the refugees’ human rights were “drowned”, Matenjwa admitted, a not uncommon occurrence for a Durban metro police force that regularly shoots to kill. The refugees vow to remain in Albert Park until they have a chance at dignity.

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