Anti-State Repression

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TIAA-CREF MUST Withdraw all Investments In POSCO NOW!

15 May, 2011

Nearly a week after former Afghan Parliamentarian and acclaimed human rights activist Malalai Joya was denied a U.S. visa, a national network of activists is calling on everyone across the country to demand that the State Department let Ms. Joya in.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

On Wednesday March 23, call Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the State Department at 202-647-5291 between 9 am to 5 pm Eastern Standard Time. Press “1″ and leave a comment stating that you are outraged at Malalai Joya’s exclusion from the U.S. and that you would like the State Department to immediately grant Ms. Joya an emergency appointment and visa at any U.S. Embassy she has applied.

BACKGROUND

Joya was due to enter the U.S. on March 19th for three weeks of events spanning over a dozen states to promote the paper-back edition of her book A Woman Among Warlords. She was turned down for her visa application on the basis of “living underground” and being “unemployed.” Afghan activists who criticize their government are routinely forced to live underground due to the risks to their lives, and the vast majority of Afghan women are unemployed. Ms. Joya has come to the U.S. at least 4 times before since 2006. She was listed last November by Time Magazine as one of the top 100 most influential people in the world, and this month by the Guardian newspaper as one of the top 100 women activists and campaigners in the world. Joya faces incredible security threats – she has survived at least 4 assassination attempts leading her to live underground.

The reasons for Ms. Joya’s exclusion is most likely politically based – her outspoken opposition to the U.S.-NATO war in Afghanistan now resonates with a majority of Americans and her 2011 tour would have potentially drawn the biggest audiences yet. The ACLU has called the increased phenomenon of denying visas to international activists and intellectuals, as “ideological exclusion.” On Friday March 19, nine U.S. representatives and Senators including Jim McDermott, John Kerry, and Bernie Sanders, wrote to the U.S. Embassy urging them to reconsider their decision. To date there has been no official response that we know of.

Currently Ms. Joya is at an undisclosed location. American officials have privately responded that she ought to apply at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and that she would likely be granted a visa from there. However, Ms. Joya faces grave risks to her life in Afghanistan and is unable to move freely and openly there – a fact that U.S. authorities seem ignorant of. Additionally when she was forced out of the Afghan parliament by U.S.-backed warlords in 2007, a ban on her travel from Afghanistan was issued, which is still in effect.

The United States should grant Malalai Joya a visa immediately from any U.S. Embassy.

It is an insult to her and all Afghan women that she has been excluded from attending her speaking events in the U.S. and it is a travesty that Americans are denied the right to hear directly from her about the Afghan war.

Click here to find out what else you can do to help Malalai Joya be allowed into the U.S.

Click here for our press release about Malalai Joya’s visa denial.

22 Mar, 2011

“aame bheeta maati dobu nahin.”  (We will not give up our land!!”)

-- PPSS, Women’s wing member

Mark International Human Rights Day This Year By Joining the Protest to Protect Livelihoods and a Fragile Coastal Ecology that Supports over 50,000 Small Peasant, fisherfolks and Agricultural Workers in India

WHEN: DECEMBER 10 2010

@ the Korean Consulate, New York City

335 E 45th St (between 1st and 2nd Ave)

Time: 4:00 -5:30 p.m.

Join us to urge the Korean Government to Intervene … 

•    The Pohang Iron and Steel Company (POSCO) project, representing the single largest FDI (USD 12 billion), is being celebrated by the Indian government as an example of its economic success, while people affected by the proposed steel plant, mining and port in Orissa have been protesting against the project since its inception due to the adverse impact on their lives, lands, and livelihoods.  

 

•    More than 25,000 people will be displaced by the project, including 22,000 in the plant/port area, and conservative estimates suggest that over 50,000 people would suffer loss of livelihoods. 

•    For more than 5 years, villagers under the leadership of PPSS have blockaded themselves in protest and have ensured that not a single brick has been put in place, even in the face of systematic human rights violations, including false criminal cases.

•    A Report prepared by MZPSG Iron and Steal points to the vibrant local economy in the area and challenges the economic basis of the project. 

•    The committees set up by the Indian government have found that the project has violated the Forest Rights Act and noted that all the forest, coastal regulation and environmental, were obtained by fraudulent means. 

•    Korean civil society groups have organized press conferences in front of the POSCO office in Korea, visited the proposed project area in Orissa twice and have highly recommended a “thoroughly reconsidering of the POSCO project.”

•    More than 480 people have recently signed a petition asking the government of India to scrap the POSCO project. 

Organized by: South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI), New York; Mining Zone People’s Solidarity Group (MZPSG) and others 

For More Info Contact: Murli Natrajan, (973)-771-8704 Email:  mzpsginfo@gmail.com ,contact@southasiainitiative.org                    

 

4 Dec, 2010

K. Balagopal – the celebrated civil liberties activist is no more. When you grow up in Hyderabad, there are shadows that you grow up under. These are shadows that nurture you – give you the courage.

K. Balagopal – the celebrated civil liberties activist is no more.

When you grow up in Hyderabad, there are shadows that you grow up under. These are shadows that nurture you – give you the courage. First, Balagopal was a phenomena. We heard about him. Never saw him. In some part because he was in Warangal, not Hyderabad. That’s where he began to be known, politically. A mathematics lecturer, who was deeply committed to revolution. His writings began appearing in the press and the incisiveness of each word he wrote was striking. He never minced words. There was a clarity in his writing – especially his early writings -- that was absolutely rare – a kind of illuminative capacity so well described by the Brechtian idea of “the cold white light” of truth. That was Balagopal. Fiercely honest. Armed with the toolbox of Marxist theory that he had mastered even as he mastered Stochastic Environments, he taught many of us to think.

By the mid 1980s, the legend was visible In the making. As the General Secretary of the APCLC, he guided the organization through the severe period when the NTR government had mounted an all out attack against Peoples War. Balagopal himself was arrested under TADA in the mid 1980s on trumped up charges of murdering a sub inspector.  The repression was so great that there was a choice to be made and he did it without fear or furor. He gave up his professorship and moved full time into politics.

When he decided to distance himself from the Naxalite movement, it was something that came from an intense period of self reflection. His critical essays that signaled his departure and a new beginning were incisive and moved a generation into thinking about the future of left politics in Andhra, if not in India. The mathematics professor turned himself into a lawyer – and he was there at the service of the people.

Balagopal was not a friend. His reticence made it difficult to judge what he thought of you. He was not a mentor for he said little. He offered no personal advice. He just told you things as he saw them – not pushing you one way or the other. And yet, I can say, that there hasn’t been a stretch of time of any significance in my life, when I haven’t thought about him. Every few weeks, something would happen and I would think of something he had written, something he had said, something about the way he led his life. In the wake of Babri Masjid, he wrote a piece in EPW that even today comes to mind – whole paragraphs from it. I think it was that early moment of neo liberalism in India – and here I was reading an article on communal strife and came out feeling that the future of capitalism in India had just been mapped. There have been moments of deep political confusion over the last decade, and often at those moments, I would ask myself – “so what would be Balagopal’s analysis of this?” I would search to see if he has written anything recently – reading him, brought back clarity and a resolve.

A few years ago I met him consistently over the period of several months. I needed some advice on the legal twists that a campaign had taken and I would go to visit him. Each time I would go to meet him, I would walk in with some trepidation: “Will I be disturbing him from some more important work?” because he was always at it – never off. “Will he talk much?” I would ask myself. And then, I   felt, I had discovered a secret. I began to see him just after he returned home from court. He would be home alone with his young cricket crazy son. Prabhas would be lighting up the apartment with a rapid fire series of transformations from one cricketing persona to another. . Vasanthalakshmi, his wife, he knew, would come home soon from her day at work as a journalist.   And he would cook dinner. Something, I felt, was different about him when was cutting vegetables. He would talk more freely suddenly, in the context of that moment where he was just involved in caring for those immediately around him. After that I would joke with people. “If you want Balagopal to talk, get him when he is cooking” I would say and laugh. He was not a friend. He was not a mentor. But he was simply put – an inspiration and a compass – like I have not known.

And how is it, that many like me, saw him this way. He started out as a beacon whose very stature as a teller of truth gave us courage. Even after he moved away from the Naxalite movement, his stature only grew. The sheer breadth of work he did made him that bearer of crystalline truth. He not only wrote for the popular press. He not only practiced law. He not only contributed theoretical writings to journals. He not only spoke at numerous public events. He not only served on fact finding teams and gave testimony. He did all this and more. Even with the rigorous schedule through the week, his weekends were always fixed. He was out. Visiting this jilla or that village, this struggle or that community. There was rarely a weekend when he stayed home. It was popular knowledge in left circles in Hyderabad that if you wanted to see Balagopal you had to do it during the week, for come the weekend, he would board a bus and head out. This summer in Hyderabad, on a couple of occasions, I was supposed to go with him and a few others to visit different SEZ and other land struggles. Once to Medak, another time to the open cast mines in Karimnagar. Both times I missed the trip and I wonder now, what else I would have gained from a man who has already given me so much, if I had been there.

I just spoke with a friend, who had seen him just yesterday morning - Gita. Little did she know that it was the last she would see of him. He had agreed, sometime ago, to translate the book “Curfewed Nights” on Kashmir by Basharat Peer into Telugu. “How come you are not pestering me about it?” he asked Gita, the wry smile across his face. It was all important to him. Kashmir or Polavaram, Chhatttisgarh or Polepally.

The cold white light of truth that guided several generations has just gone out. 

9 Oct, 2009

"We want to understand politics in Pakistan including the alternatives for a different future from the point of view of the peoples of Pakistan and through the visions put forward by social movements."

 A number of activists from the South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI) in New York have initiated a reading group on South Asia.  The notes below are the first in a series of commentaries following reading discussions that some members of the reading group hope to post on Kafila.  This is an attempt to broaden the discussions and in the process make it a productive dialogue to understand developments in the region and deepen our solidarity.

Reading Land and Reform in Pakistan

– Svati Shah, Prachi Patankar and Ahilan Kadirgamar

http://kafila.org/2009/09/10/reading-land-and-reform-in-pakistan/

3 Oct, 2009