Solidarity Net Kenya

Non-violence and the narrative of peace

2011-06-26T02:06:00.000-07:00

JOSEPH DANA: MIDDLE EAST - Jun 24 2011 00:00

On Sunday June 5, hundreds of Palestinians gathered outside the Qalandia checkpoint separating Jerusalem and Ramallah. They were part of an unarmed demonstration marking the anniversary of Israel's takeover of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, known as Naksa Day.

Simultaneously, thousands of Palestinians descended on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and attempted to mass on the Lebanese border with nothing more than their bodies. As the spring sun beat down on the demonstration, Israel killed 23 demonstrators with live ammunition and injured hundreds.

The Qalandia demonstration, organised by the Ramallah-based March 15 youth movement, was the embodiment of the Arab Spring in Palestine. Demonstrators, inspired by the revolutions sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East, approached the concrete walls of the checkpoint and were met by fully armed Israeli soldiers who, without a moment's pause, opened fire with teargas and stun grenades. Panic descended on the crowd as people collapsed from the effects of teargas inhalation.

I watched as some Palestinian youth responded to the Israeli incursion by throwing stones at soldiers, who then returned fire using large, aluminium teargas canisters as bullets, in violation of Israeli army rules of conduct. Within an hour, soldiers had taken over Palestinian rooftops around the walled checkpoint and were firing rubber bullets at the unarmed protesters. One Palestinian was hit directly in the face. The Israeli military reported that one border policeman was slightly injured in the demonstration.

Mainstream Israeli and international media argued endlessly, as though in a state of reverie, about whether Palestinian demonstrators who threw rocks should be considered unarmed, non-violent or violent. Absent from the conversation was the fact that Israel is rapidly increasing a programme of military repression against demonstrations in a last-ditch effort to dominate the narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Portraying unarmed Palestinians as violent rioters enabled the press to downplay Israel's heavy-handed reaction to the demonstrations. This response was largely based on unsubstantiated accounts of demonstrators' behaviour, most of which came directly from the Israeli military and were completely false.

'Striving for peace'
The entire Israeli-Palestinian peace process -- predicated on the fact that both sides are striving for peace -- has allowed Israel to portray any Palestinian attempts to challenge the status quo through unarmed resistance as antithetical to equitable settlement between the two sides.

This approach ignores the Israeli intransigence of endless settlement construction and the military infrastructure required to control Palestinian life. Night raids, mass arrests and lack of freedom of movement are all too often ignored when the international community envisions the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. In fact, the word "occupation" seldom enters mainstream discourse at all.

Palestinians are now coalescing around unarmed resistance as a way of highlighting what occupation means for them. Although peace is clearly desired among Palestinians, their immediate concern is one of human rights.

In the wake of the Arab Spring, Israel is starting to lose its edge in convincing the international community that the conflict is simply about peace and not rights. Palestinian demonstrations on Israel's borders and checkpoints have highlighted the sea change taking place.

It would seem that Israel's only course of action in explaining its heavy-handed military response to unarmed demonstrators is to describe the demonstrators as violent rioters. In practice, unarmed resistance to the status quo of occupation meets extreme violence from the Israeli army.

Historic episodes of human-rights struggles, such as the American civil-rights movement and the anti-apartheid struggle, underwent similar narrative reformulations. Unarmed demonstrations went from "violent rioters" to respected displays of people power in the face of repression. The Palestinian struggle for human rights will be no different when the history of the conflict is written.

Social media is having a transformative effect on Israel's ability to define Palestinian violence. The internet provides concerned members of international civil society with an intimate and immediate view of unarmed demonstrations in the West Bank. Hours after the demonstration ended in Qalandia, dramatic YouTube clips circulated around the world challenging Israel's portrayal of the demonstrators as violent rioters.

The overall acceptance of the Israeli analytical framework in the collective Western perception of the conflict is changing as a result of the Palestinian reappropriation of unarmed resistance in the new media age. While pundits argue whether a stone-throwing Palestinian teenager is violent or not, Israel is killing protesters armed with nothing but stones in plain sight of the international community.

As such observers begin to understand that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is based on human rights, Israel is going to find it increasingly difficult to muster support in the international community for its on-going military occupation of the West Bank and its blockade of Gaza.

Palestinians are going to maintain the pressure with non-violent measures such as the international boycott, divestment and sanction campaign and the Gaza aid flotilla, which highlight Israeli violation of international law and reaffirm the rights-based nature of the conflict.

Now, more than ever, Israel must devise a strategy to confront non-violent Palestinian resistance in a way that does not rely on semantics but addresses the deprivation of Palestinian human rights.

Joseph Dana, an Israeli-American writer based in Tel Aviv and Ramallah, is a contributing editor of the Israeli web magazine +972
Source: Mail & Guardian Online
Web Address: http://mg.co.za/article/2011-06-24-nonviolence-and-the-narrative-of-peace

Stop the Palestinian Bloodshed and the True reflection of the Nuclear Situation

2010-05-18T09:17:00.000-07:00

Namibia: Reflections on 20 years after independence by Jade McClune, Windhoek

2010-04-05T01:13:00.000-07:00

March 23, 2010 -- Twenty years ago, at Namibia's first independence celebrations on March 21, 1990, many people would have shared the hopes and the euphoria of the moment. People thought that something good would come to us if we kept our peace and relinquished all the power to "the few who knew". Now that terrible hangover is wearing off and time has enforced a certain sobriety on us: the brutish reality of a rapidly falling life expectancy, unprecedented epidemic crises, poverty, vast malnutrition, a ruined education system and chronic mass unemployment, is inescapable.
Yes, there have been achievements: for some people with connections or capital or a lot of luck, life has improved as they moved into the other side of town, but for most citizens life has become meaner and shorter. There is a breakdown of all social and municipal services and a growing chauvinistic brutishness about the bureaucracy. At the same time we are witnessing a new desperate scramble for Africa's mineral wealth, that will make the evils of 19th century colonialism look pleasant in comparison. So let it be said, the struggle is not over.
We must speak the truth to power, insisted the Palestinian scholar, Edward Said. And in Namibia the truth is that there is actually a war going on, a secret war, a war of the rich against the poor.
Now the ruling class and the ruling South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO) party have chosen their team for parliament, but the poor and unemployed, the destitute and the diseased, the hungry and depressed -- though still pacified and disorientated by the shock of post-colonial economic reality - remain a lurking threat to the established order of extracting our natural wealth. Although there is a call for all to pull together as a nation now, there are many forces more strongly pulling us apart.
The ideological hegemony and control of the nationalists is not as strong as it was two decades ago when the whole world was celebrating "the miracle". Because even now there is no clear way to resolve the outstanding tasks of the national democratic revolution under SWAPO (or the African National Congress in South Africa) leadership. The land and natural resources are still under foreign ownership and control and the majority live in a concentration of shacks. This very day, after returning from Namibia's celebrations South African President Jacob Zuma was faced with masses of people marching for houses, jobs and a decent life in Durban.
Today SWAPO does not claim to be leading the Namibian revolution. The party has gone over entirely, decisively and openly to the side of global capital and actually facilitates the extraction economy as the party of law and order, so it acts not so much as a representative of the people, but rather performs an "overseer", or managerial function on behalf of Western capital. This is reflected above all in the government's neoliberal economic strategy, which involves giving everything up to the highest bidder. That much is becoming clear to everyone. Today we are faced with an even greater threat to our health and safety as government begins to soften up and open up the country to whore itself to the world as an easy source of uranium.
For all these terrible reasons the representatives of capital, in the form of an emerging national capitalist class, must come more and more into direct conflict with the people who are bearing the brunt of so much exploitation and inequality. The reason being that increasingly the conflicting class interests that separate the political elites from the masses of rural and urban poor, make rubbish of the notion that the elites represent the national interest, as they are openly seen as allies and accomplices of international capital, so the workers who have to pay for it all, including the accompanying pomp and ceremony, are forced to rethink our position, because not only our jobs, but often our very lives depend on it.
If we scratch beneath the surface of this idea of the "national interest", we find that it refers to the partial interests of the ruling class and economic interest groups. Radical analysis has been suppressed from the national debates in the mainstream, but we must persist in presenting the perspective from the left and show that unbridled capitalism is at the core of the social contradiction and crisis engulfing, and indeed devouring, the country.
This is not an isolated view. As a baromoter of international opinion one need only refer to the motion [debated by the Friends of Namibia and the Royal African Society] at the Houses of Parliament in London on March 18, which proposed that Namibia is a shining example of democracy, good governance and post colonial development. It was voted down.
The point is for us not to base ourselves on vague hopes and fantasies, nice as they may be, but on our real historical experience. Our history is contested, that is true, but it is being reclaimed and rewritten from below. That is a basis for reclaiming our future. Based on the experience of the past 20 years, the working class must prepare itself for a period of renewed struggle as we face attacks on our living and working standards; we must prepare for renewed struggles to defend our communities from the causes and effects of superexploitation and from privatisation of services. We will have to struggle for a renewed understanding that only the combined force, effort and will of the working class can solve the cause of economic inequality and lead the oppressed people of the country out of this crisis.
[Jade McClune is an independent researcher and former coordinator of the Archives of Anti-Colonial Resistance in Windhoek. He writes for the online journal, The New Worker.]

Conference of the Democratic Left: Unite to make another South Africa and world possible!

2010-04-05T01:01:00.000-07:00

The following call was issued by the Conference of the Democratic Left, a left unity project in South Africa. It first appeared at the Conference of the Democratic Left web site.

* * *

A call to a national people’s conference against capitalism and for democratic left politics

A Call for united anti-capitalist action …
This is a call to come together in unity in a Conference Against Capitalism and for Democratic Left Politics.
1. The world is in crisis

Global capitalism threatens our world with disaster. If it is left to plunder the natural resources of our planet and pollute the atmosphere, the oceans and the soil, life itself will be under grave threat.
The current global economic crisis represents the exhaustion of a system that is driven by profit and competition. The basic tenet of capitalism is to grow endlessly with no regard to natural limits, to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few. It explains why wherever we look we see the crisis and decay of the system: be it financial, energy, food, environment, cultural and social. War, global warming and health pandemics threaten the annihilation of humanity within a couple of generations.
This is equally true for South Africa. In spite of the break with apartheid and the establishment of political democracy, the situation for the working people and the poor gets worse. This is because the same crisis-ridden model of development is imposed. The high levels of corruption accompanying the transition from apartheid must be seen not just as greed but an outcome of the failure to redistribute wealth. Government tenders and patronage are the vehicles for accumulation by a minority in the face of the extreme monopolisation of the economy. Polokwane [the African National Congress national conference that replaced President Thabo Mbeki with Jacob Zuma] does not signal a break with a system that has seen a rise in social inequality, social decay and a resurgent social conservatism in the form of ethnic politics, xenophobia, attacks on women and reproductive rights, homophobia, religious fundamentalism, etc.
Internationally:

60 million workers are likely to lose their jobs this year
50 million more people in the ‘Third World’ are likely to be plunged into poverty

In South Africa:

More than 500,000 jobs have been lost since the start of the recession in October 2008;
We have become the most unequal society in the world;
We exceed the world in violence against women and children;
Despite building of houses, more than 2 million families lack decent housing, the same number as in 1994;
We have one of the highest HIV/AIDS infection rates in the world.

The promise of a better life for all has not been realised. As long as the ANC government refuses to confront capital and redistribute wealth, poor communities will continue to be down-trodden.
The rise of a new global left in the context of the World Social Forum, the emergence of left parties (socialist, green) in Latin America and Europe and new anti-capitalist social movements challenge our dogmas.
Another South Africa and another world, free of violence and exploitation, is possible. We have to overcome our disillusionment in the politicians and policy makers.
The future rests in the hands of the working class, the dispossessed, the unemployed, the youth, women and rural people as well as radical intellectuals. But only if we wrestle for power and the right to shape a new agenda rooted in the power of a gigantic movement resting on independent autonomous mass organisations of working people. We must struggle to give meaning to the slogan “we are our own liberators”.
2. Build a platform of struggle and politics of the people!
In a number of forums where the acute problems confronting our people are being discussed the idea that we must draw together left and progressive forces into a united front to confront the ravages of global capitalism is growing. In this task of shaping a new agenda that can make a radical break with disaster capitalism 60 activists from trade unions, social movements and a wide range of radical political organisations and currents came together in October 2008 to begin this process.
It was agreed to work towards developing a new programmatic platform of action on an anti-capitalist basis for democratic left politics The intention is to create a platform that can:

Build a political consensus on the challenges posed by the current international and national situation;
Take forward national and international struggles;
Work towards developing a grassroots democratic eco-socialist, feminist, political program;
Develop strategies for overcoming race, gender, age, sexual orientation and other divisions within South African society and particularly amongst the working class;

As a means of uniting and strengthening the ability of the working class and progressive social forces to struggle around the issues affecting them.
We must struggle to rekindle the mass movement of the 1980s which brought apartheid to an end. We recognise that the conscious forces of transformation are still weak, but believe that such actions can eventually unite class struggle forces in all working-class movements not least from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP).
3. We need a people’s conference, solidarity and united front The Conference of the Democratic Left is not an event and neither is it about merely sharing intellectual ideas. What is envisaged is:

A process of bottom up deliberation, debate in which voices from below shape outcomes and collective action. The organising of the Conference of the Democratic Left is about creating local forums, provincial forums and a national platform. The Conference of the Democratic Left is merely one moment in an exciting, vibrant and self-organised process.
This is a conscious political initiative informed by a recognition that we all fought for the liberation of South Africa. The Conference of the Democratic Left is an affirmation of democratic pluralism and is a process which seeks to elaborate political objectives, practices, alternatives and new ways of engaging in left politics. It aims to create a united front around a programme of action while preserving the autonomy of constituent organisations.

We engage in this process humbly and with modesty, conscious that we do not have all the answers to the complex challenges facing humanity.

4. National and provincial convening committees

The Conference of the Democratic Left will be convened from March 20 – 22, 2010. An interim national convening committee has been established, and provincial convening committees are in the process of being established. These are facilitation structures which will further evolve through adding members in the context of the process.

CALL TO PARTICIPATE

You are invited to participate in the forums and platforms of this initiative convened by the coordinating structures. Convening Committee members will be coming to you, in communities, in factories and farms – in social movements, unions, religious organisations and community groups as we go forward to the National Conference of the Democratic Left to hear your voices and to be influenced by you.
The National Conference of the Democratic Left aims to become a vehicle for the self-organisation of the excluded, the exploited, the discriminated and poverty-stricken majority in South Africa (including all progressive strata) with the power to radically transform South Africa along eco-socialist and participatory democratic lines.

Begin at the bottom left

By Mazibuko K. Jara
March 12, 2010 -- For someone like me, nearly a year of a Jacob Zuma presidency would be an easy, triumphant moment to ask the South African Communist Party (SACP) and Cosatu whether the Zuma path to power was worth it. But this would amount to cheap politicking and lead nowhere.
But there is an important lesson: change cannot ever be the outcome of the big man. Fundamentally it is a product of the way in which power is configured in a society.
The Zuma path was not about the reconfiguration of capitalist power or a break with ex-president Thabo Mbeki's neoliberal and technicist approach.
In pursuing the Zuma path both the SACP and Cosatu had a blind spot: they ignored a basic issue concerning the conditions under which political elites in capitalist societies have been forced to advance developmental programmes. The removal of Mbeki has not changed the framing pre-1994 property relations.
Change in personnel at the top is useless in dealing with class power that is rooted in the monopoly ownership of the economy, the power of financial capital, the exploitation of cheap black labour and a permissive state. As Adam Habib put it to Amandla: "Individuals, wherever they are, simply reflect the institutional constraints of the balance of power within … society".
Indeed, the removal of Mbeki could have opened up a space to create the political conditions conducive to thoroughgoing change if a mass movement built around basic demands and transformative policies had accompanied it.
Even going forward, the SACP-Cosatu focus remains on "keeping our man" in the job. Still absent in their strategy is a willingness to consider a political project outside the ANC.
The past 11 or so months of a Zuma presidency have shown us a government that is not about to challenge the inordinate power of capital. This can be seen on so many fronts: a commitment to two-tier labour-market policies; a lack of responsiveness to the needs of local communities; a foreign policy aligned to global corporate interests, such as at the Copenhagen climate change negotiations; and in the countryside entrenching the power of undemocratic tribal authorities at the expense of the rights of modern citizenship and, particularly, the rights of women.
Within a neoliberal framework, the global crisis has also cut Zuma's space to manoeuvre.
But that cannot be an excuse as Mbeki faced similar pressures, and the discrediting of neoliberalism offers space for alternative policies.
This past year has also shown us a besieged, unstrategic and unstable ANC-SACP-Cosatu alliance leadership. Even in subjective terms, the negative psychology of such an encircled political leadership reinforces its lack of political will and incapacity to build popular power, undo the neoliberal economic policies of the Mbeki era and energetically drive a genuinely transformative agenda.
Meanwhile, capital has not rested -- it has continued to act on and through the state to block any post-Polokwane transformational momentum that may have been flickering. As part of its strategy, capital can actually afford to have an SACP and Cosatu blowing hot and cold -- in reality they are co-opted into what remains a neoliberal government. To illustrate this: the potentially transformative National Health Insurance proposal is now tilted towards becoming an accumulation site that could address the profit crisis facing private hospitals and medical aid schemes instead of delivering a universal, decommodified and quality public health system.
Another glaring example concerns the continued power of the coal industry to determine our energy policy. Such a subversion is possible largely because, at critical times in the post-Polokwane period, key moments and platforms in which to mobilise and harness the voices, interests and power of the popular forces were lost. In addition the space has increased for the political elite to ride shamelessly on mass support to open the doors of wealth accumulation wider -- as can be seen in the defence of ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema as a deserving black businessman.
The Zuma path represents a serious strategic shortcoming on the part of both the SACP and Cosatu. Objectively, the trajectory of the Zuma path has fashioned the political role of the ANC to be about managing a more legitimate capitalist society and state, while keeping the SACP and Cosatu onside.
A populist ANC in rhetoric and yet conservative in its economic policies is consistent with this objective. This is an ANC that will rant and rave rather than unlock a radical programme of redistribution.
This critique is not to deny the ANC-led alliance's potential still to advance its social delivery programme, which would improve the dire conditions of the people. Although such a legitimate programme is important and should be supported, it would still fall far short of the very necessary anti-systemic transformation of the social, economic and political foundations of this society.
Outside the ANC-led alliance, the post-Polokwane scenario has also underlined the broader weakness of the left and the mass movement. Mass protests largely amount to winning piecemeal concessions from the state rather than creating political conditions conducive to thoroughgoing change. There is still no other left-wing political pole that could contribute to the building of a mass movement that would challenge crisis-ridden capitalism and struggle for a feasible, socialist alternative.
In the face of all this, it is not left-wing infantility to underline the need for a serious class project that would begin at the bottom and be a vehicle to meet immediate demands and build a mass movement for transformative policies.
No matter what the balance of forces is inside the ANC-led alliance, without such a project there will be no social force with the weight and voice to block compromises with capital and secure radical changes in favour of the working class. As any trade unionist knows: "What you have not won on the battlefield, you are unlikely to win at the negotiating table."
If anything, this is the language that the SACP and Cosatu should have no difficulty recalling and heeding. The future demands a course of struggle that goes beyond the limitations of the Zuma path.
[Mazibuko K. Jara was recently expelled from the SACP and is part of the conveners of the Conference of the Democratic Left. This article first appeared in South Africa's Mail & Guardian on March 12, 2010.]

`For Venezuela, there is no going back’: A discussion with Federico Fuentes and Kiraz Janicke

2010-03-28T23:41:00.000-07:00

By Ali Mustafa
March 23, 2010 -- As Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution enters a new decade of struggle and defiantly advances towards its goal of “21st century socialism”, serious challenges to the future of the process emerging from both inside and outside the country still abound. As a result, key questions surrounding Venezuela's mounting tensions with the West, the role played by its fiery and outspoken leader Hugo Chavez and the future of the process itself remain as relevant today as ever before. Australian-based journalists and long-time Venezuela solidarity activists Federico Fuentes and Kiraz Janicke have been carefully following Venezuela's ongoing political transformation for several years now, countering mainstream media spin and providing invaluable on-the-ground coverage and analysis about the process as it unfolds. I had the fortunate opportunity to sit down and speak with them in Toronto before they returned to Caracas, following a 10-day solidarity tour of Canada.

* * *

Ali Mustafa: Over a decade now has passed since the beginning of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. Can you provide an overview of the type of gains that have been made since President Hugo Chavez has come to power. What does Venezuela look like today?

Federico Fuentes: Well, I think the first thing to note in regards to the gains that have been made in the 10 years of the Venezuelan Revolution is the huge improvement that has occurred in peoples' daily lives. The fact that the previously excluded majority of people now have access to free health care, free education, unemployment has fallen by more than half of what is was before, the level of poverty has decreased, and many other statistics and social indicators that show that general Venezuelan living standards have improved dramatically. But also extremely important has been the active political participation of people in daily life; we are talking about a country where, literally, something like 80 per cent of the nation were excluded and felt that they were not represented at all by the sort of representative democracy and two party system that had existed.

It’s the collapse of that system and the important movement for change that erupted – prior to Chavez's election but, of course, which then has been stimulated even further by Chavez's election – in the re-writing of the new constitution that's brought about these important gains that Venezuelans have been able to achieve... This reflected itself in important mobilisations that occurred particularly in 2001, 2002, 2003 that defeated a military coup and an attempt by the capitalist class to strangle the economy, which of course meant that the government basically was unable to carry out a lot of the “missions” that it first set out for itself, but through that struggle was able to move into a position where it could begin to carry out a lot of these social programs, and as always places emphasis on the people involved in them. I think one of the most exciting things is, for instance, the health care social missions – it's not just that free health care is now being provided but that this health care is being carried out by the people, for the people.

So, I think the Venezuela that exists today is fundamentally different from what it was like 10, 11 years ago in the social aspect, in the political aspect – and I think it's a Venezuela that today, in its large bulk, refuses to go back to what existed before. That's one of the most common things that you'll find amongst Venezuelan people: that no matter what problems, or whatever they may be encountering, they strongly feel that there is no going back to what Venezuela was like before and they are willing to die to defend what they've won.

Kiraz Janicke: Yeah, I think that for the first time the Venezuelan people have a government that's actually truly independent of US imperialism. But of course in addition to all of the social gains, one of the most fundamental changes is this kind of mass political awakening of the Venezuelan people and the amount of participation of the Venezuelan people in political life through many instances of grassroots participatory democracy. For instance, the communal councils that since the end of 2005 have developed and spread all around the country. You have now approximately 35,000 of these communal councils...where the highest decision making body is the General Assembly of the local community, and importantly they have the ability to recall elected officials or elected spokespeople. This is something that was also another major democratic gain of the 1999 Constitution...which was the first constitution that the Venezuelan people were ever able to democratically decide upon themselves. They democratically voted on that constitution in a popular referendum, and that in many ways has provided a legal framework for further changes. But the real driving force behind the change has been the mobilisation of the people.

Initially when the Chavez government came to power, Chavez said he thought that there was a third way between Capitalism and Socialism and that it was possible to create Capitalism with a human face. For every time that the government attempted to implement reforms in the interest of the poor majority of Venezuelans, they were met with extremely violent resistance by the traditional ruling elite; for instance, the carrying out of the coup in 2002, the bosses lockout of the oil industry, and so on. It's actually been through this process that Chavez himself came out and said that, “I've come to the conclusion that it's not simply possible to reform the system but it's necessary to change the system entirely”, and he came out and made his famous speech at the Porto Alegre World Social Forum in 2005, where he called for “Socialism of the 21st century“. And that really has sparked a huge debate in Venezuela. People are very politically aware, people are participating and debating and discussing an alternative to the capitalist system, which is currently in crisis.

Can you further elaborate on the formation of these communal councils and how they fit into the notion of participatory democracy currently taking root in Venezuela?

FF: Well, when Chavez was elected he said that the only way to get rid of poverty was to give power to the people, and I think that the communal councils are probably the most concrete example of that. The background to the communal councils is that throughout the 90s there was an explosion of community organising – particularly in the poor areas in Caracas, but also in some of the other large cities – and what you saw was the emergence of a lot of small, localised committees dealing with a lot of issues: health, education, housing, roads, water, but all campaigning around local issues. The communal councils emerge out of that necessity to bring together all of these committees, so that rather than being just simply campaigning groups to demand that the government or state do things, it's actually organising those communities so that they themselves can take control over these issues.

The communal councils today represent 200-400 families in an urban area, 20-50 families in a rural area (given that they are more spread out), and it's essentially the community getting together to discuss what are their most urgent needs and, within those needs, which are the ones that they as a community...can collectively come up with a plan for how to combat those problems... The emphasis is, again, not on asking someone else to do it, but doing it themselves – of course with the help of the government – but really empowering the people through that process.

KJ: And there's a vision that is being presented now – and it's a very new development in Venezuela – that is, the formation of what they call communes. These are more than just an aggregate number of communal councils but also other organisations such as cooperatives in a particular geographical area that will coordinate grassroots decision-making on a larger scale than what a communal council can do. For instance, a communal council can make a decision over a smaller project in their local community but they can't necessarily make a decision to build a new school because that's something that affects a much larger area. But the important aspect of these communes is the idea that they have communally owned property or control over the means of production in their local area. So, the idea is not only that communities can get together and make decisions about how resources are distributed; they can also own the means of production that benefit these communities and collectively control them...

This fits into the idea that Chavez has spoken of many times and was part of his proposed reform referendum in 2007 of what he refers to as “creating a new geometry of power in Venezuela”, and essentially this is a vision of creating a new superstructure that's different to the old superstructure of the traditional Venezuelan state. So, in addition to creating the communal councils and the communes, there's a vision of coordinating the activities of communes on a broader scale; so, for instance, creating communal towns or communal cities and then ultimately what they call communal territories. And just before we left Venezuela, there was a new law passed called the “Law of the Federal Government Council”, and the idea is that it will create a space where these representatives or spokespeople for these grassroots institutions – as well as representatives of the traditional structures such as governors and mayors and the national executive – can participate... This is one key example where you see an attempt to decentralise power from the traditional structures of the capitalist state...

Typically, media coverage surrounding Venezuela tends to represent one of two extremes: uncritical praise and acclamation from supporters on one hand, and of course, especially in the Western mainstream media, a sort of reflexive, de-contextualised vilification of Chavez on the other. As two individuals who have spent much time covering Venezuela both inside and outside the country, what is the main misconception about the Bolivarian Revolution that you would like to dispel?

KJ: Well, for me, I think the main misconception or lie that is often repeated in the media is the idea that this is an undemocratic government – that Chavez is a dictator. Most of the international media overwhelmingly focuses on Chavez, but they always ignore the fact that the Bolivarian movement, which is led by Chavez, is a movement that's made up by millions of people that support Chavez: the workers, the urban poor, campesinos, students, sectors from right across Venezuelan society... They feel that the Chavez government is implementing policies that are in their interests. If you look at all the opinion polls over the years, they will show that Chavez has consistently higher levels of support within Venezuelan society, and it's always hovering around 60% support. And it's not only that people are just passive supporters of Chavez, they are active supporters as well, and active participants in the Bolivarian Revolution.

FF: Yeah, I think that definitely one of the main myths of the media is this idea of Venezuela drifting towards an undemocratic dictatorship – which is ironic because I think there is possibly no other country in the world that has more electoral processes than Venezuela. Almost every year there is an election, and there has been at least one example of an election that the government has lost, and that was the Constitutional reform vote in 2007, which generally under a dictatorship doesn't happen... The other major lie is this idea of the restriction of the freedom of the press; I think it's an important issue, particularly in the case of RCTV [Radio Caracas Televisión Internacional]. It's worth just quickly explaining that no TV station has ever been shut down in Venezuela. What we have is RCTV, which in 2007 – after having actively participated in provoking and carrying out a coup that, by law, would have easily justified them being taken off air in any country – was not taken off air; instead, their license was up for renewal...and the government, or the broadcasting authority, decided that at this time it was not in its best interests to continue to give a license to a company that would use it to destabilise the country.

Then, again, at the beginning of this year, it became a scandal internationally because, even though we were told in 2007 that RCTV had been shut down, it was still broadcasting (it was broadcasting on cable). But this was not a question of the government silencing dissent; this was a TV station that was operating illegally: their paperwork said they were an international channel, but by law – and everyone accepted this, including RCTV afterwards – they were a national channel, because more than 80% of their production was made in Venezuela for a Venezuelan audience. So they needed to renew their paperwork, and the government said that until they did, they would be temporarily removed from air. Once the paperwork was put in, they would be able to broadcast again on cable. There are many other examples, but that's I suppose the biggest one that's always in the media.

KJ: Yeah, well, as an independent journalist, I monitor the media everyday about Venezuela and look at what all different kinds of news sources say about the government – both news sources internally and externally – and I would have to say that the kind of manipulation and distortion of Venezuelan reality is something that I've never seen anywhere else. There's an Australian journalist and documentary film-maker, John Pilger, who said that, “What you're seeing is really an unprecedented propaganda campaign that's being waged against the Chavez government” –

FF: It's a media war –

KJ: It really is a media war. And I think if you go to Venezuela and see what the media says, this will become clear immediately. You often hear the claim that there is no freedom of speech and so on, but internally in Venezuela there are more than 50 daily newspapers and about 45 of those newspapers support the opposition and are constantly attacking the government everyday – including having front page headlines calling for the military overthrow of the government... Then you have those 4 newspapers that support the Bolivarian process; and then you have one newspaper that, you know, presents itself as being neutral. So, on the level of the print media, the opposition to the government is overwhelmingly dominant... A lot of the television stations are extremely hostile as well.

The other important aspect to note is that, as a result of the Bolivarian process, you actually have a massive explosion of community media in Venezuela, in particular community radio stations in the Barrios...but also a number of community television stations and other independent media websites and so on. So this is like the first time where a lot of the grassroots groups and Venezuelan poor are actually getting to participate themselves in the production of the their own media; whereas prior to the Chavez government, they didn't have a voice in politics or the media. They were just excluded.

For all the popular support he continues to enjoy in Venezuela, Chavez still remains quite a polarising figure here in the West and to some extent even in Latin America, portrayed as everything from a dictator and demagogue, to a liberator and socialist hero. How much does being the face of the revolution make him an easy target and feed into such facile caricatures?

FF: I think it's undeniable the role Chavez has played in that, what I mentioned before, profound level of local organising that exploded in the 1990s but which was kind of very fragmented and dispersed and localised. What Chavez, more than a person, but as an image, represents is a national project that unites all of these people towards building a new Venezuela. That dynamic bond that exists between Chavez and the people has really been the motor force that has been able to move this process forward. Now of course, the media then tries to use this as evidence of Chavez trying to be a demagogue and a populist, but I think what is clear at every step of the way is that – unlike many of the other cases where you've had a situation where a particular individual has used that power to reinforce it – Chavez has constantly moved to try to empower and organise the people, making it clear to them that the revolution is more than just him, that the revolution is the people and it is with the people that it will continue to move forward.

As he always says, one day he is going to die, so this thing has to keep going with or without him (hopefully he will be there for a while longer) and I think one of the key examples of that is the construction of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela [PSUV] – that is, the attempt to bring together the most politically militant people to discuss and debate the way forward. So, of course it makes him a target and I think it makes it harder to understand from the outside. I think it's easy to see a particular, partial vision of that situation, but I think there's a historical explanation, and I certainly believe that that bond between Chavez and the people has been so fundamental for where the revolution is today...

As phenomenal as the social transformation in Venezuela has no doubt been, at the same time we also see tremendous gains being made in other countries in Latin America – Bolivia for example – but not the same type of virulent attacks from the media or the organised right in general. Why do you think that is?

FF: I think there are a number of aspects to that. The first aspect is the fact that Evo Morales is a much harder target to personally attack – I mean it's much easier to target Chavez who comes from the military; they like to talk about how he attempted to carry out a coup in 1992, but which was in fact a rebellion by a section of the military and the people against the government. So it's easy to try and portray a picture of.. “This guy comes from the military”; “he's carried out a coup”;”he's a strong-man”, and so on, which is very different when you look at Evo Morales, the first Indigenous president in a country where the overwhelming majority are Indigenous. To put it into context, Evo got elected in 2005; in 2003 the president who was there at the time [Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada] literally spoke Spanish with an English accent. In a country where actually there's a lot of people who don't even speak Spanish and their first language is an Indigenous language, this guy's second language was Spanish and his first was English... So, in that kind of context to attack a guy that emerges from a poor peasant family, who goes on to lead social struggles, be part of that social movement, and today represents the first Indigenous president is a little bit harder, I think, to attack.

But that doesn't mean that they haven't attacked Evo as well. We shouldn't forget that in 2008 there was an attempted coup against Evo... The social base of that was a particularly virulently racist, White, upper-middle-class in the east of Bolivia... This was reflected in open calls of things like, you know, 'Let's overthrow this shitty little Indian' – that's how they used to refer to him, and some probably still do now, except they are on the back foot because the social movements pushed them back. When the Constituent Assembly met in Sucre, there were literally racial lynch mobs that went and physically attacked Indigenous people there... That virulent racism in Bolivia, the media tried to portray it as if Evo was responsible for that; they talk about how the Indigenous, now that they are in power, are going to do a 'racial revenge' against the White people (ironically accepting the fact that the White people who dominated for so long were doing that to the Indigenous people) but Evo has made it clear that that's not his mission; his mission is to involve all Bolivians, but understanding that the Indigenous people have a central role to play....

KJ: Yeah, I think it's particularly because Venezuela has really played a leading role – it's the spearhead of this push for independence from the US in Latin America... When there was that attempted coup in Bolivia in September of 2008, it was partly because the strategy of US imperialism at the time was to pick on what they thought was the weakest link in terms of this growing shift to the left in Latin America. But in fact what happen was the opposite occurred and the upshot of that was that, as Fred said, the Morales government came out of that politically strengthened. But I think that they really concentrate on Venezuela because it is playing a leading role in the region, and they want to really try and rollback this process of integration and independence that's happening in Latin America. So you have not only this kind of media campaign against Chavez...but also an ideological or diplomatic offensive against Venezuela. Every day you hear United States diplomats and even Canadian officials, like Peter Kent [Canadian Minister of State for Foreign Affairs of the Americas], come out and make some statement attacking Venezuela...

The other aspect is the increased militarisation of the region to put pressure on the revolution that's developing in Venezuela – so you'll see that with the reactivation of the United State's fourth fleet, which was deactivated after WWII; the seven US military bases in Colombia; the 4 extra military based in Panama; the US-backed coup in Honduras; and now more than 15,000 US troops in Haiti, which I think has a geo-strategic importance for imperialism....however, I think it's not all going imperialism's way. The fact that all the Latin American and Caribbean countries came out recently and said, “We will form an organisation without the US and Canada” just gives you another kind of indication of how much this shift to the left and independence has occurred....

The organised right and the traditional ruling elite are no longer in political power in Venezuela, yet they continue to act as an irrepressible and resilient destabilising force in the country. What can you tell us about this bloc and how much of a threat do they really pose in Venezuela today?

FF: I think the real threat comes from Washington. This opposition within Venezuela is very much backed by Washington and that is what gives it a lot more strength and visibility internationally. But that doesn't mean that the opposition doesn't continue to have strong allies within Venezuela – as Kiraz said, they continue to own the overwhelming majority of the media; economically, they continue to have very firm control over important parts of the economy that they are able to use to pressure the government; and they have a solid base, particularly among upper-middle-class people that constantly come out to vote against Chavez. So that's why we see, even ten years later, most elections tend to be split 60 – 40 per cent; some will be a bit different and get down to 50 - 50, but generally the percentage tends to rely more on the fluctuation of the vote for-or-against the revolution than necessarily the vote in favor of the opposition. The opposition kind of stays steady, its about 4 or 5 million, and they will consistently come out to vote, and it's this bloc that the opposition leaders have been able to maintain through their control of the media and the economy. They are certainly a threat and they have to be taken very seriously, but I think they have to be taken very seriously in the context of what they represent, as I said, as part of that broader front internationally because that's where a lot of their funding comes from....

I think it's also important to note – I don't think that the only threats come purely from US policy, other regimes, and the opposition within Venezuela, but I think that there is also that opposition internal to the process itself; that of course doesn't express itself as being against Chavez (because obviously no one would accept anyone within the process who was against Chavez) but that continually expresses itself in attempts to sabotage government initiatives... This has been expressed in many ways as the process has radicalised. We've seen different people leaving the revolution; the most recent example being, for instance, the governor of Lara, Henri Falcon, who was elected less than two years ago as a PSUV governor but today has left the party and has already started to say that he won't be implementing certain policies that the government is bringing in. So, I think it's also important to realise that within the process itself there are different ideas and there is a battle there. There are sectors within the process that reflect that pressure from outside to hold back this process.

That 60-40 split is really important and indicates that, as much support as Chavez may enjoy and as deep as the gains of the revolution have been, there still exists a sort of tenuous balance in moving from election to election and referendum to referendum that jeopardises the stability of the revolution and can cause it to implode at any point. A lot of it seems to be attributed to low voter turnout or abstentions when it comes to key referendums. To what do you attribute this lack of voter turnout (whether it's a sense of disillusionment or complacency or so on) and how much of a threat does this pose to the revolution moving forward?

FF: As I said, the opposition have maintained a pretty solid voting bloc, and it doesn't really increase much; what fluctuates is how many people come out to vote or not. I think there are both circumstantial and more profound reasons for that. The circumstantial reasons are that when Chavez is up for election, the people come out and vote because they understand and believe that Chavez is the leader, but many of the other governors and mayors and National Assembly deputies don't have that same respect or level of support from the people...

I think the other challenge is that – Fidel Castro said it to Chavez best: “Look, there are 4 million people that pretty solidly vote against you, but there are not 4 million oligarchs or 4 million capitalists”, so it's also a question of how do we, as I mentioned, break down that economic power, that media power.

Because the Bolivarian Revolution, like much of the left resurgence in the region, has taken place primarily in the electoral arena and operated largely within the existing framework of state institutions, what role do grassroots social movements still play in the life of the revolution? To what extent have they been absorbed or collapsed into the state or undercut from acting as a countervailing force to state power?

FF: Well, I think the important aspect is to understand the historical context. For instance, unlike in Bolivia where Evo Morales was elected as president after at least two presidents were overthrown and there were powerful mobilisations of large, national social movements with a history of struggle, with Chavez's election there was a huge sentiment of resistance and opposition to neoliberalism and a huge level of local organising but you can't really talk about powerful social movements like what you had in Bolivia...

I think today there is a challenge. As these new institutions are built from the bottom-up by the people, together with the government of Chavez, they are really set up in parallel to the old existing structures which the government has found don't work. You know that if you have got to set up a special mission to carry out health-care when you have a Ministry of Health, it's because you're basically accepting that the Ministry of Health doesn't work, and that's why there is a necessity to create a new parallel structure. But the problem is how long can you maintain this? How long can you maintain funding for two separate states? Because as the old is dying and the new is being born, the old, of course, is going to try and gain a stranglehold over the new emerging institutions – and sometimes you see that corruption and bureaucratism that infects the old begin to infect the new as well... These are things that predate the Chavez government but that still exist and haven't been wiped out, and are almost impossible to wipe out in one day – so there's that constant tension...

KJ: Yeah, I think there's a real struggle because the Venezuelan government really inherited a capitalist state in crisis, a capitalist state that was unable to even meet the basic daily needs of the Venezuelan people, so the government has had to focus a lot on addressing these basic needs...but I think how this will be resolved depends a lot on the internal struggles within Venezuela – particularly the struggle of grassroots sectors, workers, urban poor, the key activists and militants in the communal councils and the ability to really push and develop these new structures – but also on the strengthening of the PSUV and the idea of creating a political instrument that can drive the process forward...

Venezuela is one of the largest oil producing and exporting countries in the world and, as a result, is heavily dependent on the resource of oil, which has largely funded and bankrolled the revolutionary gains made in Venezuela today. First, is this something that Venezuelans are conscious of, and second, is this the principal obstacle to the deepening of the revolution in the long-term?

FF: I think Venezuelans are very clear that their economy has historically been highly distorted by the role of the oil industry... Of course, the challenge to that is how do you diversify? How do you start to develop local industry? How do you start to have technological transfer, where the Venezuelan government can stimulate a new productive economy? And of course there are ecological factors to this... I think that this dependency on oil is a challenge that's hard to break; it's not that easy to move an economy away from oil... It's just easier to rely on oil funds – the idea that oil money can solve all of our problems.

But I don't think that's the principal obstacle, and I also don't think that the principal obstacle, in and of itself, is imperialism's attack against Venezuela. I actually think that perhaps the foremost obstacle that the revolution faces is that challenge that exists within the process, because it's those sectors – that act to sabotage the governments actions, to hold back the revolution, to confuse the masses – that pave the way for imperialism to be able to carry out its actions... Because it's when internally you have people who wear the red hat, wear the red t-shirt, and salute Chavez – but are doing the opposite – where you start to see, for instance, discontent that perhaps can grow amongst the people; that internal enemy that exists in the revolution that put forward reformist solutions that say, “Really, we should just co-exist with private capital and not see ourselves in a permanent battle against capital”, and that, “Maybe if we conciliate with Washington and extend our hand, they will accept us”, when in fact Washington has made it clear that it wants to not just get rid of Chavez but reverse the whole process... So in order to defend and prepare the revolution, it needs the maximum amount of, of course, discussion, debate, criticism and so on, but also unity and strength putting forward a revolutionary alternative...

KJ: I think the question of oil is pervasive in every sphere of Venezuelan life – politically, economically, culturally. This kind of struggle to change Venezuela and its dependency on oil is very difficult...it means that, of course, the Venezuelan economy is extremely vulnerable to the world price of oil. I've heard arguments by some environmentalists that have criticised the Chavez government because it drills and exports oil, but you can't simply just tell Venezuela to stop producing oil. We saw the effect of that in 2002 - 2003 when there was a bosses lockout of the oil industry: they shut down the oil industry and caused $20 billion worth of damage to the economy, unemployment spiked to 20 per cent, people went hungry... So, it's a very difficult kind of dependency to break, but I think the only way for Venezuela to break its dependency on oil is to actually break with the logic of Capitalism that's imposed from the outside, and it's only through this process of taking control over their own resources that Venezuelans themselves can decide how their going to develop their country...

As central a figure as Chavez has been and continues to be for the revolution, he obviously cannot rule forever. What might a post-Chavez Venezuela look like and do you foresee this political void perhaps posing a real risk of jeopardising some of the gains made under his time in power?

FF: First, the constitutional amendment that was approved in 2009 allows all elected officials to re-stand for elections as many time as they like. So, according to the constitution, Chavez can continue to stand until he decides not to, or the party decides not to preselect him, or he loses the elections. Now, if today Chavez was to leave, say, by a hypothesis of an assassination – which cannot be ruled out – I think there is high likelihood that the country would descend into a civil war because Chavez is that figure that maintains social unity not just amongst the people but also amongst the armed forces... I have no doubt that it's through the development of the PSUV that those millions of “Chavezes” and “little Chavezes” that exist today all over the country will organise themselves politically through this instrument of the masses and ensure that the process will continue...

Finally, what should international solidarity mean in the context of the Venezuelan Revolution?

FF: I think the first thing is that there is a lot to learn from the internationalism of the Venezuelan Revolution itself – that willingness, firstly, to speak out when things have to be said, as Chavez said when the US declared its war in Afghanistan and made that very bold statement to say, “You cannot fight terrorism with terrorism”; that very bold statement denouncing Israel's actions in Gaza and in Lebanon, and many other statement that he has made in all sorts of public forums and summits. So, I think we also need to be willing to speak out in this particular context against any attacks that come out against Venezuela. Any time that any government or any media comes out and says a lie about Venezuela we have to be responding and telling the truth to combat it...

I think it also has to be done through concrete demonstrations of solidarity; the Venezuelan government has placed a lot of emphasis on social programs and financial aid, with no strings attached, to some of poorest countries in the world – classic example being what they're doing now in Haiti with the reconstruction effort. Well, I think we should also think about how we can help to build that concrete element of solidarity in whatever country we are. Every time the US talks about building another military base in Latin America, that means one more protest that we have to organise wherever we are... So, I think that solidarity is so important to the Venezuelan Revolution and so important to what we have to do as well in building a social force, not just to defend Venezuela, but as part of building a social force for change here. How we do that here in Canada or in Australia or wherever we are, that's the question we have to try to deal with.

KJ: Another aspect is that people should actually learn from Venezuela and study the process of the Bolivarian Revolution because there are so many lessons that activists and evolutionaries can actually learn from the process – not to export models and so on but to inspire struggles in our own countries against our own governments. That's why I think promoting as much debate and discussion as possible of what is really happening in Venezuela is really important.

[Kiraz Janicke is an journalist based in Caracas, Venezuela, where she writes for Venezuelanalysis.com. She is also the editor of the Peru en Movimiento blog, part of the Green Left Weekly/Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal Caracas bureau and a member of the Socialist Alliance in Australia. Federico Fuentes is the editor of the Bolivia Rising blog and, together with Kiraz Janicke, is part of the Green Left Weekly/Links Caracas bureau, where his articles are regularly published. He is also a member of the Socialist Alliance in Australia. Both are members of the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network. Ali Mustafa is a freelance journalist, writer, and media activist. He resides in Toronto. His writing can be found at: http://frombeyondthemargins.blogspot.com. This article first appeared at UpsideDownWorld, and is posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with the participants’ permission.]

Walking with the Comrades by Arundhati Roy

2010-03-22T14:11:00.001-07:00

Walking With The Comrades

By Arundhati Roy

22 March, 2010 Outlookindia.com/Dawn.com

Last month, quietly, unannounced, Arundhati Roy decided to visit the forbidding and forbidden precincts of Central India’s Dandakaranya Forests, home to a melange of tribespeople many of whom have taken up arms to protect their people against state-backed marauders and exploiters. She recorded in considerable detail the first face-to-face journalistic “encounter” with armed guerillas, their families and comrades, for which she combed the forests for weeks at personal risk.

Arundhati Roy finds a quiet moment to herself during a punishing visit to the forest where she became the first journalist/writer to break the taboo of of interviewing Maoist guerrillas in their lair.

The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with India’s Gravest Internal Security Threat. I’d been waiting for months to hear from them. I had to be at the Ma Danteshwari mandir in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, at any of four given times on two given days. That was to take care of bad weather, punctures, blockades, transport strikes and sheer bad luck. The note said: “Writer should have camera, tika and coconut. Meeter will have cap, Hindi Outlook magazine and bananas. Password: Namashkar Guruji.”

Namashkar Guruji. I wondered whether the Meeter and Greeter would be expecting a man. And whether I should get myself a moustache.

There are many ways to describe Dantewada. It’s an oxymoron. It’s a border town smack in the heart of India. It’s the epicentre of a war. It’s an upside down, inside out town.

Red Shadow: Centenary celebrations of the adivasi uprising in Bastar; Sten gun at hand

In Dantewada, the police wear plain clothes and the rebels wear uniforms. The jail superintendent is in jail. The prisoners are free (three hundred of them escaped from the old town jail two years ago). Women who have been raped are in police custody. The rapists give speeches in the bazaar.

Across the Indravati river, in the area controlled by the Maoists, is the place the police call ‘Pakistan’. There the villages are empty, but the forest is full of people. Children who ought to be in school run wild. In the lovely forest villages, the concrete school buildings have either been blown up and lie in a heap, or they are full of policemen. The deadly war that is unfolding in the jungle is a war that the Government of India is both proud and shy of. Operation Green Hunt has been proclaimed as well as denied. P. Chidambaram, India’s home minister (and CEO of the war), says it does not exist, that it’s a media creation. And yet substantial funds have been allocated to it and tens of thousands of troops are being mobilised for it. Though the theatre of war is in the jungles of Central India, it will have serious consequences for us all.

If ghosts are the lingering spirits of someone, or something, that has ceased to exist, then perhaps the new four-lane highway crashing through the forest is the opposite of a ghost. Perhaps it is the harbinger of what is still to come.

The antagonists in the forest are disparate and unequal in almost every way. On one side is a massive paramilitary force armed with the money, the firepower, the media, and the hubris of an emerging Superpower. On the other, ordinary villagers armed with traditional weapons, backed by a superbly organised, hugely motivated Maoist guerrilla fighting force with an extraordinary and violent history of armed rebellion. The Maoists and the paramilitary are old adversaries and have fought older avatars of each other several times before: Telangana in the ’50s; West Bengal, Bihar, Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh in the late ’60s and ’70s; and then again in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Maharashtra from the ’80s all the way through to the present. They are familiar with each other’s tactics, and have studied each other’s combat manuals closely. Each time, it seemed as though the Maoists (or their previous avatars) had been not just defeated, but literally, physically exterminated. Each time, they have re-emerged, more organised, more determined and more influential than ever. Today once again the insurrection has spread through the mineral-rich forests of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal—homeland to millions of India’s tribal people, dreamland to the corporate world.

It’s easier on the liberal conscience to believe that the war in the forests is a war between the Government of India and the Maoists, who call elections a sham, Parliament a pigsty and have openly declared their intention to overthrow the Indian State. It’s convenient to forget that tribal people in Central India have a history of resistance that predates Mao by centuries. (That’s a truism of course. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t exist.) The Ho, the Oraon, the Kols, the Santhals, the Mundas and the Gonds have all rebelled several times, against the British, against zamindars and moneylenders. The rebellions were cruelly crushed, many thousands killed, but the people were never conquered. Even after Independence, tribal people were at the heart of the first uprising that could be described as Maoist, in Naxalbari village in West Bengal (where the word Naxalite—now used interchangeably with ‘Maoist’—originates). Since then, Naxalite politics has been inextricably entwined with tribal uprisings, which says as much about the tribals as it does about the Naxalites.

Staying Put: People of Kudur village protest the Bodhghat dam: ‘It does not belong to the capitalists, Bastar is OUrs’y

This legacy of rebellion has left behind a furious people who have been deliberately isolated and marginalised by the Indian government. The Indian Constitution, the moral underpinning of Indian democracy, was adopted by Parliament in 1950. It was a tragic day for tribal people. The Constitution ratified colonial policy and made the State custodian of tribal homelands. Overnight, it turned the entire tribal population into squatters on their own land. It denied them their traditional rights to forest produce, it criminalised a whole way of life. In exchange for the right to vote, it snatched away their right to livelihood and dignity.

Having dispossessed them and pushed them into a downward spiral of indigence, in a cruel sleight of hand, the government began to use their own penury against them. Each time it needed to displace a large population—for dams, irrigation projects, mines—it talked of “bringing tribals into the mainstream” or of giving them “the fruits of modern development”. Of the tens of millions of internally displaced people (more than 30 million by big dams alone), refugees of India’s ‘progress’, the great majority are tribal people. When the government begins to talk of tribal welfare, it’s time to worry.

The most recent expression of concern has come from home minister P. Chidambaram who says he doesn’t want tribal people living in “museum cultures”. The well-being of tribal people didn’t seem to be such a priority during his career as a corporate lawyer, representing the interests of several major mining companies. So it might be an idea to enquire into the basis for
his new anxiety.

The Day of the Bhumkal: Face to face with "India's greatest Security Threat".

Over the past five years or so, the governments of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal have signed hundreds of MoUs with corporate houses, worth several billion dollars, all of them secret, for steel plants, sponge-iron factories, power plants, aluminium refineries, dams and mines. In order for the MoUs to translate into real money, tribal people must be moved.

Therefore, this war.

When a country that calls itself a democracy openly declares war within its borders, what does that war look like? Does the resistance stand a chance? Should it? Who are the Maoists? Are they just violent nihilists foisting an outdated ideology on tribal people, goading them into a hopeless insurrection? What lessons have they learned from their past experience? Is armed struggle intrinsically undemocratic? Is the Sandwich Theory—of ‘ordinary’ tribals being caught in the crossfire between the State and the Maoists—an accurate one? Are ‘Maoists’ and ‘Tribals’ two entirely discrete categories as is being made out? Do their interests converge? Have they learned anything from each other? Have they changed each other?

The day before I left, my mother called, sounding sleepy. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, with a mother’s weird instinct, “what this country needs is revolution.”

An article on the internet says that Israel’s Mossad is training 30 high-ranking Indian police officers in the techniques of targeted assassinations, to render the Maoist organisation “headless”. There’s talk in the press about the new hardware that has been bought from Israel: laser range-finders, thermal imaging equipment and unmanned drones, so popular with the US army. Perfect weapons to use against the poor.

The drive from Raipur to Dantewada takes about 10 hours through areas known to be ‘Maoist-infested’. These are not careless words. ‘Infest/infestation’ implies disease/pests. Diseases must be cured. Pests must be exterminated. Maoists must be wiped out. In these creeping, innocuous ways, the language of genocide has entered our vocabulary.

To protect the highway, security forces have ‘secured’ a narrow bandwidth of forest on either side. Further in, it’s the raj of the ‘Dada log’. The Brothers. The Comrades.

On the outskirts of Raipur, a massive billboard advertises Vedanta (the company our home minister once worked with) Cancer Hospital. In Orissa, where it is mining bauxite, Vedanta is financing a university. In these creeping, innocuous ways, mining corporations enter our imaginations: the Gentle Giants Who Really Care. It’s called CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility. It allows mining companies to be like the legendary actor and former chief minister NTR, who liked to play all the parts in Telugu mythologicals—the good guys and the bad guys, all at once, in the same movie. This CSR masks the outrageous economics that underpins the mining sector in India. For example, according to the recent Lokayukta report for Karnataka, for every tonne of iron ore mined by a private company, the government gets a royalty of Rs 27 and the mining company makes Rs 5,000. In the bauxite and aluminium sector, the figures are even worse. We’re talking about daylight robbery to the tune of billions of dollars. Enough to buy elections, governments, judges, newspapers, TV channels, NGOs and aid agencies. What’s the occasional cancer hospital here or there?

I don’t remember seeing Vedanta’s name on the long list of MoUs signed by the Chhattisgarh government. But I’m twisted enough to suspect that if there’s a cancer hospital, there must be a flat-topped bauxite mountain somewhere.

We pass Kanker, famous for its Counter Terrorism and Jungle Warfare College run by Brigadier B.K. Ponwar, Rumpelstiltskin of this war, charged with the task of turning corrupt, sloppy policemen (straw) into jungle commandos (gold). “Fight a guerrilla like a guerrilla”, the motto of the warfare training school, is painted on the rocks. The men are taught to run, slither, jump on and off air-borne helicopters, ride horses (for some reason), eat snakes and live off the jungle. The brigadier takes great pride in training street dogs to fight ‘terrorists’. Eight hundred policemen graduate from the warfare training school every six weeks. Twenty similar schools are being planned all over India. The police force is gradually being turned into an army. (In Kashmir, it’s the other way around. The army is being turned into a bloated, administrative police force.) Upside down. Inside out. Either way, the Enemy is the People.

It’s late. Jagdalpur is asleep, except for the many hoardings of Rahul Gandhi asking people to join the Youth Congress. He’s been to Bastar twice in recent months but hasn’t said anything much about the war. It’s probably too messy for the People’s Prince to meddle in at this point. His media managers must have put their foot down. The fact that the Salwa Judum—the dreaded, government-sponsored vigilante group responsible for rapes, killings, for burning down villages and driving hundreds of thousands of people from their homes—is led by Mahendra Karma, a Congress MLA, does not get much play in the carefully orchestrated publicity around Rahul Gandhi.

I arrived at the Ma Danteshwari mandir well in time for my appointment (first day, first show). I had my camera, my small coconut and a powdery red tika on my forehead. I wondered if someone was watching me and having a laugh. Within minutes a young boy approached me. He had a cap and a backpack schoolbag. Chipped red nail-polish on his fingernails. No Hindi Outlook, no bananas. “Are you the one who’s going in?” he asked me. No Namashkar Guruji. I did not know what to say. He took out a soggy note from his pocket and handed it to me. It said, “Outlook nahin mila (couldn’t find Outlook).”

“And the bananas?”

“I ate them,” he said, “I got hungry.”

He really was a security threat.

His backpack said Charlie Brown—Not your ordinary blockhead. He said his name was Mangtu. I soon learned that Dandakaranya, the forest I was about to enter, was full of people who had many names and fluid identities. It was like balm to me, that idea. How lovely not to be stuck with yourself, to become someone else for a while.

We walked to the bus stand, only a few minutes away from the temple. It was already crowded. Things happened quickly. There were two men on motorbikes. There was no conversation—just a glance of acknowledgment, a shifting of body weight, the revving of engines. I had no idea where we were going. We passed the house of the Superintendent of Police (SP), which I recognised from my last visit. He was a candid man, the SP: “See Ma’am, frankly speaking this problem can’t be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don’t understand greed. Unless they become greedy, there’s no hope for us. I have told my boss, remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.”

In no time at all we were riding out of town. No tail. It was a long ride, three hours by my watch. It ended abruptly in the middle of nowhere, on an empty road with forest on either side. Mangtu got off. I did too. The bikes left, and I picked up my backpack and followed the small internal security threat into the forest. It was a beautiful day. The forest floor was a carpet of gold.

In a while we emerged on the white, sandy banks of a broad flat river. It was obviously monsoon-fed, so now it was more or less a sand flat, at the centre a stream, ankle deep, easy to wade across. Across was ‘Pakistan’. “Out there, ma’am,” the candid SP had said to me, “my boys shoot to kill.” I remembered that as we began to cross. I saw us in a policeman’s rifle-sights—tiny figures in a landscape, easy to pick off. But Mangtu seemed quite unconcerned, and I took my cue from him.

Waiting for us on the other bank, in a lime-green shirt that said Horlicks!, was Chandu. A slightly older security threat. Maybe twenty. He had a lovely smile, a cycle, a jerry can with boiled water and many packets of glucose biscuits for me, from the Party. We caught our breath and began to walk again. The cycle, it turned out, was a red herring. The route was almost entirely non-cycleable. We climbed steep hills and clambered down rocky paths along some pretty precarious ledges. When he couldn’t wheel it, Chandu lifted the cycle and carried it over his head as though it weighed nothing. I began to wonder about his bemused village boy air. I discovered (much later) that he could handle every kind of weapon, “except for an LMG”, he informed me cheerfully.

Three beautiful, sozzled men with flowers in their turbans walked with us for about half an hour, before our paths diverged. At sunset, their shoulder bags began to crow. They had roosters in them, which they had taken to market but hadn’t managed to sell.

Chandu seems to be able to see in the dark. I have to use my torch. The crickets start up and soon there’s an orchestra, a dome of sound over us. I long to look up at the night sky, but I dare not. I have to keep my eyes on the ground. One step at a time. Concentrate.

I hear dogs. But I can’t tell how far away they are. The terrain flattens out. I steal a look at the sky. It makes me ecstatic. I hope we’re going to stop soon. “Soon,” Chandu says. It turns out to be more than an hour. I see silhouettes of enormous trees. We arrive.

The village seems spacious, the houses far away from each other. The house we enter is beautiful. There’s a fire, some people sitting around. More people outside, in the dark. I can’t tell how many. I can just about make them out. A murmur goes around. Lal Salaam Kaamraid (Red Salute, Comrade). Lal Salaam, I say. I’m beyond tired. The lady of the house calls me inside and gives me chicken curry cooked in green beans and some red rice. Fabulous. Her baby is asleep next to me, her silver anklets gleam in the firelight.

After dinner, I unzip my sleeping bag. It’s a strange intrusive sound, the big zip. Someone puts on the radio. BBC Hindi service. The Church of England has withdrawn its funds from Vedanta’s Niyamgiri project, citing environmental degradation and rights violations of the Dongria Kondh tribe. I can hear cowbells, snuffling, shuffling, cattle-farting. All’s well with the world. My eyes close.

We’re up at five. On the move by six. In another couple of hours, we cross another river. We walk through some beautiful villages. Every village has a family of tamarind trees watching over it, like a clutch of huge, benevolent, gods. Sweet, Bastar tamarind. By 11, the sun is high, and walking is less fun. We stop at a village for lunch. Chandu seems to know the people in the house. A beautiful young girl flirts with him. He looks a little shy, maybe because I’m around. Lunch is raw papaya with masoor dal, and red rice. And red chilli powder. We’re going to wait for the sun to lose some of its vehemence before we start walking again. We take a nap in the gazebo. There is a spare beauty about the place. Everything is clean and necessary. No clutter. A black hen parades up and down the low mud wall. A bamboo grid stabilises the rafters of the thatched roof and doubles as a storage rack. There’s a grass broom, two drums, a woven reed basket, a broken umbrella and a whole stack of flattened, empty, corrugated cardboard boxes. Something catches my eye. I need my spectacles. Here’s what’s printed on the cardboard: Ideal Power 90 High Energy Emulsion Explosive (Class-2) SD CAT ZZ.

We start walking again at about two. In the village we are going to meet a Didi (Sister, Comrade) who knows what the next step of the journey will be. Chandu doesn’t. There is an economy of information too. Nobody is supposed to know everything. But when we reach the village, Didi isn’t there. There is no news of her. For the first time, I see a little cloud of worry settling over Chandu. A big one settles over me. I don’t know what the systems of communication are, but what if they’ve gone wrong?

Spare Beauty: Pots, rifles, jhillies... Everything in these villages is clean and necessary

We’re parked outside a deserted school building, a little way out of the village. Why are all the government village schools built like concrete bastions, with steel shutters for windows and sliding folding steel doors? Why not like the village houses, with mud and thatch? Because they double up as barracks and bunkers. “In the villages in Abujhmad,” Chandu says, “schools are like this....” He scratches a building plan with a twig in the earth. Three octagons attached to each other like a honeycomb. “So they can fire in all directions.” He draws arrows to illustrate his point, like a cricket graphic—a batsman’s wagon wheel. There are no teachers in any of the schools, Chandu says. They’ve all run away. Or have you chased them away? No, we only chase police. But why should teachers come here, to the jungle, when they get their salaries sitting at home? Good point.

He informs me that this is a ‘new area’. The Party has entered only recently.

About 20 young people arrive, girls and boys. In their teens and early 20s. Chandu explains that this is the village-level militia, the lowest rung of the Maoists’ military hierarchy. I have never seen anyone like them before. They are dressed in saris and lungis, some in frayed olive-green fatigues. The boys wear jewellery, headgear. Every one of them has a muzzle-loading rifle, what’s called a bharmaar. Some also have knives, axes, a bow and arrow. One boy carries a crude mortar fashioned out of a heavy three-foot GI pipe. It’s filled with gunpowder and shrapnel and ready to be fired. It makes a big noise, but can only be used once. Still, it scares the police, they say, and giggle. War doesn’t seem to be uppermost on their minds. Perhaps because their area is outside the home range of the Salwa Judum. They have just finished a day’s work, helping to build fencing around some village houses to keep the goats out of the fields. They’re full of fun and curiosity. The girls are confident and easy with the boys. I have a sensor for this sort of thing, and I am impressed. Their job, Chandu says, is to patrol and protect a group of four or five villages and to help in the fields, clean wells or repair houses—doing whatever’s needed.

Still no Didi. What to do? Nothing. Wait. Help out with some chopping and peeling.

After dinner, without much talk, everybody falls in line. Clearly, we are moving. Everything moves with us, the rice, vegetables, pots and pans. We leave the school compound and walk single file into the forest. In less than half an hour, we arrive in a glade where we are going to sleep. There’s absolutely no noise. Within minutes everyone has spread their blue plastic sheets, the ubiquitous ‘jhilli’ (without which there will be no Revolution). Chandu and Mangtu share one and spread one out for me. They find me the best place, by the best grey rock. Chandu says he has sent a message to Didi. If she gets it, she will be here first thing in the morning. If she gets it.

It’s the most beautiful room I have slept in, in a long time. My private suite in a thousand-star hotel. I’m surrounded by these strange, beautiful children with their curious arsenal. They’re all Maoists for sure. Are they all going to die? Is the jungle warfare training school for them? And the helicopter gunships, the thermal imaging and the laser range-finders?

Why must they die? What for? To turn all of this into a mine? I remember my visit to the open cast iron-ore mines in Keonjhar, Orissa. There was forest there once. And children like these. Now the land is like a raw, red wound. Red dust fills your nostrils and lungs. The water is red, the air is red, the people are red, their lungs and hair are red. All day and all night trucks rumble through their villages, bumper to bumper, thousands and thousands of trucks, taking ore to Paradip port from where it will go to China. There it will turn into cars and smoke and sudden cities that spring up overnight. Into a ‘growth rate’ that leaves economists breathless. Into weapons to make war.

Everyone’s asleep except for the sentries who take one-and-a-half-hour shifts. Finally, I can look at the stars. When I was a child growing up on the banks of the Meenachal river, I used to think the sound of crickets—which always started up at twilight—was the sound of stars revving up, getting ready to shine. I’m surprised at how much I love being here. There is nowhere else in the world that I would rather be. Who should I be tonight? Kamraid Rahel, under the stars? Maybe Didi will come tomorrow.

They arrive in the early afternoon. I can see them from a distance. About 15 of them, all in olive-green uniforms, running towards us. Even from a distance, from the way they run, I can tell they are the heavy hitters. The People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA). For whom the thermal imaging and laser-guided rifles. For whom the jungle warfare training school.

They carry serious rifles, INSAS, SLR, two have AK-47s. The leader of the squad is Comrade Madhav who has been with the Party since he was nine. He’s from Warangal, Andhra Pradesh. He’s upset and extremely apologetic. There was a major miscommunication, he says again and again, which usually never happens. I was supposed to have arrived at the main camp on the very first night. Someone dropped the baton in the jungle-relay. The motorcycle drop was to have been at an entirely different place. “We made you wait, we made you walk so much. We ran all the way when the message came that you were here.” I said it was okay, that I had come prepared, to wait and walk and listen. He wants to leave immediately, because people in the camp were waiting, and worried.

It’s a few hours’ walk to the camp. It’s getting dark when we arrive. There are several layers of sentries and concentric circles of patrolling. There must be a hundred comrades lined up in two rows. Everyone has a weapon. And a smile. They begin to sing: Lal lal salaam, lal lal salaam, aane vaale saathiyon ko lal lal salaam (red salute to the comrades who have arrived). It is sung sweetly, as though it was a folk song about a river, or a forest blossom. With the song, the greeting, the handshake, and the clenched fist. Everyone greets everyone, murmuring Lalslaam, mlalslaa mlalslaam....

Other than a large blue jhilli spread out on the floor, about 15 feet square, there are no signs of a ‘camp’. This one has a jhilli roof as well. It’s my room for the night. I was either being rewarded for my days of walking, or being pampered in advance for what lay ahead. Or both. Either way it was the last time in the entire trip that I was going to have a roof over my head. Over dinner I meet Comrade Narmada, in charge of the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangathan (KAMS), who has a price on her head; Comrade Saroja of the PLGA who is only as tall as her SLR; Comrade Maase (which means Black Girl in Gondi), who has a price on her head too; Comrade Rupi, the tech wizard; Comrade Raju, who’s in charge of the division I’d been walking through; and Comrade Venu (or Murali or Sonu or Sushil, whatever you would like to call him), clearly the seniormost of them all. Maybe central committee, maybe even politburo. I’m not told, I don’t ask. Between us we speak Gondi, Halbi, Telugu, Punjabi and Malayalam. Only Maase speaks English. (So we all communicate in Hindi!) Comrade Maase is tall and quiet and seems to have to swim through a layer of pain to enter the conversation. But from the way she hugs me, I can tell she’s a reader. And that she misses having books in the jungle. She will tell me her story only later. When she trusts me with her grief.

Bad news arrives, as it does in this jungle. A runner, with ‘biscuits’. Handwritten notes on sheets of paper, folded and stapled into little squares. There’s a bag full of them. Like chips. News from everywhere. The police have killed five people in Ongnaar village, four from the militia and one ordinary villager: Santhu Pottai (25), Phoolo Vadde (22), Kande Pottai (22), Ramoli Vadde (20), Dalsai Koram (22). They could have been the children in my star-spangled dormitory of last night.

Then good news arrives. A small contingent of people with a plump young man. He’s in fatigues too, but they look brand new. Everybody admires them and comments on the fit. He looks shy and pleased. He’s a doctor who has come to live and work with the comrades in the forest. The last time a doctor visited Dandakaranya was many years ago.

Performing Arts: Members of the Chetna Natya Manch, the cultural wing of the party, waiting in the wings

On the radio there’s news about the home minister’s meeting with chief ministers of states ‘affected by Left-Wing Extremism’. The chief ministers of Jharkhand and Bihar are being demure and have not attended. Everybody sitting around the radio laughs. Around the time of elections, they say, right through the campaign, and then maybe a month or two after the government is formed, mainstream politicians all say things like “Naxals are our children”. You can set your watch to the schedule of when they will change their minds, and grow fangs.

I am introduced to Comrade Kamla. I am told that I must on no account go even five feet away from my jhilli without waking her. Because everybody gets disoriented in the dark and could get seriously lost. (I don’t wake her. I sleep like a log.) In the morning Kamla presents me with a yellow polythene packet with one corner snipped off. Once it used to contain Abis Gold Refined Soya Oil. Now it was my Loo Mug. Nothing’s wasted on the Road to the Revolution.

(Even now I think of Comrade Kamla all the time, every day. She’s 17. She wears a homemade pistol on her hip. And boy, what a smile. But if the police come across her, they’ll kill her. They might rape her first. No questions will be asked. Because she’s an Internal Security Threat.)

After breakfast, Comrade Venu (Sushil, Sonu, Murali) is waiting for me, sitting cross-legged on the jhilli, looking for all the world like a frail village schoolteacher. I’m going to get a history lesson. Or, more accurately, a lecture on the history of the last 30 years in the Dandakaranya forest, which has culminated in the war that’s swirling through it today. For sure, it’s a partisan’s version. But then, what history isn’t? In any case, the secret history must be made public if it is to be contested, argued with, instead of merely being lied about, which is what is happening now.

Comrade Venu has a calm, reassuring manner and a gentle voice that will, in the days to come, surface in a context that will completely unnerve me. This morning he talks for several hours, almost continuously. He’s like a little store manager who has a giant bunch of keys with which to open up a maze of lockers full of stories, songs and insights.

Comrade Venu was in one of the seven armed squads who crossed the Godavari from Andhra Pradesh and entered the Dandakaranya forest (DK, in Partyspeak) in June 1980, 30 years ago. He is one of the original forty-niners. They belonged to People’s War Group (PWG), a faction of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) or CPI(ML), the original Naxalites. PWG was formally announced as a separate, independent party in April that year, under Kondapalli Seetharamiah. PWG had decided to build a standing army, for which it would need a base. DK was to be that base, and those first squads were sent in to reconnoitre the area and begin the process of building guerrilla zones. The debate about whether communist parties ought to have a standing army, and whether or not a ‘people’s army’ is a contradiction in terms, is an old one. PWG’s decision to build an army came from its experience in Andhra Pradesh, where its ‘Land to the Tiller’ campaign led to a direct clash with the landlords, and resulted in the kind of police repression that the party found impossible to withstand without a trained fighting force of its own.

(By 2004, PWG had merged with the other CPI(ML) factions, Party Unity (PU) and the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC)—which functions for the most part out of Bihar and Jharkhand. To become what it is now, the Communist Party of India-Maoist.)

Dandakaranya is part of what the British, in their White Man’s way, called Gondwana, land of the Gonds. Today the state boundaries of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra slice through the forest. Breaking up a troublesome people into separate administrative units is an old trick. But these Maoists and Maoist Gonds don’t pay much attention to things like state boundaries. They have different maps in their heads, and like other creatures of the forest, they have their own paths. For them, roads are not meant for walking on. They’re meant only to be crossed, or as is increasingly becoming the case, ambushed. Though the Gonds (divided between the Koya and Dorla tribes) are by far the biggest majority, there are small settlements of other tribal communities too. The non-adivasi communities, traders and settlers, live on the edges of the forest, near the roads and markets.

The PWG were not the first evangelicals to arrive in Dandakaranya. Baba Amte, the well-known Gandhian, had opened his ashram and leprosy hospital in Warora in 1975. The Ramakrishna Mission had begun opening village schools in the remote forests of Abujhmad. In north Bastar, Baba Bihari Das had started an aggressive drive to “bring tribals back into the Hindu fold”, which involved a campaign to denigrate tribal culture, induce self-hatred, and introduce Hinduism’s great gift—caste. The first converts, the village chiefs and big landlords—people like Mahendra Karma, founder of the Salwa Judum—were conferred the status of Dwij, twice-born, Brahmins. (Of course, this was a bit of a scam, because nobody can become a Brahmin. If they could, we’d be a nation of Brahmins by now.) But this counterfeit Hinduism is considered good enough for tribal people, just like the counterfeit brands of everything else—biscuits, soap, matches, oil—that are sold in village markets. As part of the Hindutva drive, the names of villages were changed in land records, as a result of which most have two names now, people’s names and government names. Innar village, for example, became Chinnari. On voters’ lists, tribal names were changed to Hindu names. (Massa Karma became Mahendra Karma.) Those who did not come forward to join the Hindu fold were declared ‘Katwas’ (by which they meant untouchables) who later became the natural constituency for the Maoists.

The PWG first began work in south Bastar and Gadchiroli. Comrade Venu describes those first months in some detail: how the villagers were suspicious of them, and wouldn’t let them into their homes. No one would offer them food or water. The police spread rumours that they were thieves. The women hid their jewellery in the ashes of their wood stoves. There was an enormous amount of repression. In November 1980, in Gadchiroli, the police opened fire at a village meeting and killed an entire squad. That was DK’s first ‘encounter’ killing. It was a traumatic setback, and the comrades retreated across the Godavari and returned to Adilabad but in 1981 they returned. They began to organise tribal people to demand a rise in the price they were being paid for tendu leaves (which are used to make beedis). At the time, traders paid three paise for a bundle of about 50 leaves. It was a formidable job to organise people entirely unfamiliar with this kind of politics, to lead them on strike. Eventually the strike was successful and the price was doubled, to six paise a bundle. But the real success for the party was to have been able to demonstrate the value of unity and a new way of conducting a political negotiation. Today, after several strikes and agitations, the price of a bundle of tendu leaves is Re 1. (It seems a little improbable at these rates, but the turnover of the tendu business runs into hundreds of crores of rupees.) Every season, the government floats tenders and gives contractors permission to extract a fixed volume of tendu leaves—usually between 1,500 and 5,000 standard bags known as manak boras. Each manak bora contains about 1,000 bundles. (Of course, there’s no way of ensuring that the contractors don’t extract more than they’re meant to.) By the time the tendu enters the market, it is sold in kilos. The slippery arithmetic and the sly system of measurement that converts bundles into manak boras into kilos is controlled by the contractors, and leaves plenty of room for manipulation of the worst kind. The most conservative estimate puts their profit per standard bag at about Rs 1,100. (That’s after paying the party a commission of Rs 120 per bag.) Even by that gauge, a small contractor (1,500 bags) makes about Rs 16 lakh a season and a big one (5,000 bags) upto Rs 55 lakh. A more realistic estimate would be several times this amount. Meanwhile, the Gravest Internal Security Threat makes just enough to stay alive until the next season.

Gathered Storm: Dance troupes of various Janatana Sarkars perform on Bhumkal Day

We’re interrupted by some laughter and the sight of Nilesh, one of the young PLGA comrades, walking rapidly towards the cooking area, slapping himself. When he comes closer, I see that he’s carrying a leafy nest of angry red ants that have crawled all over him and are biting him on his arms and neck. Nilesh is laughing too. “Have you ever eaten ant chutney?” Comrade Venu asks me. I know red ants well, from my childhood in Kerala, I’ve been bitten by them, but I’ve never eaten them. (The chapoli turns out to be nice. Sour. Lots of folic acid.)

Nilesh is from Bijapur, which is at the heart of Salwa Judum operations. Nilesh’s younger brother joined the Judum on one of its looting and burning sprees and was made a Special Police Officer (SPO). He lives in the Basaguda camp with his mother. His father refused to go and stayed behind in the village. In effect, it’s a family blood feud. Later on, when I had an opportunity to talk to him, I asked Nilesh why his brother had done that. “He was very young,” Nilesh said, “he got an opportunity to run wild and hurt people and burn houses. He went crazy, did terrible things. Now he is stuck. He can never come back to the village. He will not be forgiven. He knows that.”

We return to the history lesson. The party’s next big struggle, Comrade Venu says, was against the Ballarpur Paper Mills. The government had given the Thapars a 45-year contract to extract 1.5 lakh tonnes of bamboo at a hugely subsidised rate. (Small beer compared to bauxite, but still.) The tribals were paid 10 paise for a bundle which contained 20 culms of bamboo. (I won’t yield to the vulgar temptation of comparing that with the profits the Thapars were making.) A long agitation, a strike, followed by negotiations with officials of the paper mill in the presence of the people, tripled the price to 30 paise per bundle. For the tribal people, these were huge achievements. Other political parties had made promises, but showed no signs of keeping them. People began to approach the PWG asking if they could join up.

But the politics of tendu, bamboo and other forest produce was seasonal. The perennial problem, the real bane of people’s lives, was the biggest landlord of all, the Forest Department. Every morning, forest officials, even the most junior of them, would appear in villages like a bad dream, preventing people from ploughing their fields, collecting firewood, plucking leaves, picking fruit, grazing their cattle, from living. They brought elephants to overrun fields and scattered babool seeds to destroy the soil as they passed by. People would be beaten, arrested, humiliated, their crops destroyed. Of course, from the forest department’s point of view, these were illegal people engaged in unconstitutional activity, and the department was only implementing the Rule of Law. (Their sexual exploitation of women was just an added perk in a hardship posting.)

Emboldened by the people’s participation in these struggles, the party decided to confront the forest department. It encouraged people to take over forest land and cultivate it. The forest department retaliated by burning new villages that came up in forest areas. In 1986, it announced a National Park in Bijapur, which meant the eviction of 60 villages. More than half of them had already been moved out, and construction of national park infrastructure had begun when the party moved in. It demolished the construction and stopped the eviction of the remaining villages. It prevented the forest department from entering the area. On a few occasions, officials were captured, tied to trees and beaten by villagers. It was cathartic revenge for generations of exploitation. Eventually, the forest department fled. Between 1986 and 2000, the party redistributed 3,00,000 acres of forest land. Today, Comrade Venu says, there are no landless peasants in Dandakaranya.

For today’s generation of young people, the forest department is a distant memory, the stuff of stories mothers tell their children, about a mythological past of bondage and humiliation. For the older generation, freedom from the forest department meant genuine freedom. They could touch it, taste it. It meant far more than India’s Independence ever did. They began to rally to the party that had struggled with them.

The seven-squad team had come a long way. Its influence now ranged across a 60,000 sq km stretch of forest, thousands of villages and millions of people.

But the departure of the forest department heralded the arrival of the police. That set off a cycle of bloodshed. Fake ‘encounters’ by the police, ambushes by the PWG. With the redistribution of land came other responsibilities: irrigation, agricultural productivity and the problem of an expanding population arbitrarily clearing forest land. A decision was taken to separate ‘mass work’ and ‘military work’.

Today, Dandakaranya is administered by an elaborate structure of Janatana Sarkars (people’s governments). The organising principles came from the Chinese revolution and the Vietnam war. Each Janatana Sarkar is elected by a cluster of villages whose combined population can range from 500 to 5,000. It has nine departments: Krishi (agriculture), Vyapar-Udyog (trade and industry) Arthik (economic), Nyay (justice), Raksha (defence), Hospital (health), Jan Sampark (public relations), School-Riti Rivaj (education and culture), and Jungle. A group of Janatana Sarkars come under an Area Committee. Three area committees make up a Division. There are 10 divisions in Dandakaranya.

“We have a Save the Jungle department now,” Comrade Venu says. “You must have read the government report that says forest has increased in Naxal areas?”

Ironically, Comrade Venu says, the first people to benefit from the party’s campaign against the forest department were the mukhias (village chiefs)—the Dwij brigade. They used their manpower and their resources to grab as much land as they could while the going was good. But then people began to approach the party with their “internal contradictions”, as Comrade Venu put it quaintly. The party began to turn its attention to issues of equity, class and injustice within tribal society. The big landlords sensed trouble on the horizon. As the party’s influence expanded, theirs had begun to wane. Increasingly, people were taking their problems to the party instead of to the mukhias. Old forms of exploitation began to be challenged. On the day of the first rain, people were traditionally supposed to till the mukhia’s land instead of their own. That stopped. They no longer offered them the first day’s picking of mahua or other forest produce. Obviously, something needed to be done.

Enter Mahendra Karma, one of the biggest landlords in the region and at the time a member of the Communist Party of India (CPI). In 1990, he rallied a group of mukhias and landlords and started a campaign called the Jan Jagran Abhiyaan (public awakening campaign). Their way of ‘awakening’ the ‘public’ was to form a hunting party of about 300 men to comb the forest, killing people, burning houses and molesting women. The then Madhya Pradesh government—Chhattisgarh had not yet been created—provided police back-up. In Maharashtra, something similar called ‘Democratic Front’ began its assault. People’s War responded to all of this in true People’s War style, by killing a few of the most notorious landlords. In a few months, the Jan Jagran Abhiyaan, the ‘white terror’—Comrade Venu’s term for it—faded. In 1998, Mahendra Karma, who had by now joined the Congress party, tried to revive the Jan Jagran Abhiyaan. This time it fizzled out even faster than before.

Armed Strugglers: A village militia, the ‘base force’ of the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army

Then, in the summer of 2005, fortune favoured him. In April, the BJP government in Chhattisgarh signed two MoUs to set up integrated steel plants (the terms of which are secret). One for Rs 7,000 crore with Essar Steel in Bailadila, and the other for Rs 10,000 crore with Tata Steel in Lohandiguda. That same month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made his famous statement about the Maoists being the “Gravest Internal Security Threat” to India. (It was an odd thing to say at the time, because actually the opposite was true. The Congress government in Andhra Pradesh had just outmanoeuvred the Maoists, decimated them. They had lost about 1,600 of their cadre and were in complete disarray.) The PM’s statement sent the share value of mining companies soaring. It also sent a signal to the media that the Maoists were fair game for anyone who chose to go after them. In June 2005, Mahendra Karma called a secret meeting of mukhias in Kutroo village and announced the Salwa Judum (the Purification Hunt). A lovely melange of tribal earthiness and Dwij/Nazi sentiment.

Unlike the Jan Jagran Abhiyaan, the Salwa Judum was a ground-clearing operation, meant to move people out of their villages into roadside camps, where they could be policed and controlled. In military terms, it’s called Strategic Hamleting. It was devised by General Sir Harold Briggs in 1950 when the British were at war against the communists in Malaya. The Briggs Plan became very popular with the Indian army, which has used it in Nagaland, Mizoram and in Telangana. The BJP chief minister of Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh, announced that as far as his government was concerned, villagers who did not move into the camps would be considered Maoists. So, in Bastar, for an ordinary villager, just staying at home became the equivalent of indulging in dangerous terrorist activity.

Along with a steel mug of black tea, as a special treat, someone hands me a pair of earphones and switches on a little MP3 player. It’s a scratchy recording of Mr Manhar, the then SP Bijapur, briefing a junior officer over the wireless about the rewards and incentives the state and central governments are offering to ‘jagrit’ (awakened) villages, and to people who agree to move into camps. He then gives clear instructions that villages that refuse to surrender should be burnt and journalists who want to ‘cover’ Naxalites should be shot on sight. (I’d read about this in the papers long ago. When the story broke, as punishment—it’s not clear to whom—the SP was transferred to the State Human Rights Commission.)

The first village the Salwa Judum burnt (on June 18, 2005) was Ambeli. Between June and December 2005, it burned, killed, raped and looted its way through hundreds of villages of south Dantewada. The centre of its operations were the districts of Bijapur and Bhairamgarh, near Bailadila, where Essar Steel’s new plant was proposed. Not coincidentally, these were also Maoist strongholds, where the Janatana Sarkars had done a great deal of work, especially in building water-harvesting structures. The Janatana Sarkars became the special target of the Salwa Judum’s attacks. Hundreds of people were killed in the most brutal ways. About 60,000 people moved into camps, some voluntarily, others out of terror. Of these, about 3,000 were appointed SPOs on a salary of Rs 1,500.

For these paltry crumbs, young people, like Nilesh’s brother, have sentenced themselves to a life-sentence in a barbed wire enclosure. Cruel as they have been, they could end up being the worst victims of this horrible war. No Supreme Court judgement ordering the Salwa Judum to be dismantled can change their fate.

The remaining hundreds of thousands of people went off the government radar. (But the development funds for these 644 villages did not. What happens to that little goldmine?) Many of them made their way to Andhra Pradesh and Orissa where they usually migrated to work as contract labour during the chilli-picking season. But tens of thousands fled into the forest, where they still remain, living without shelter, coming back to their fields and homes only in the daytime.

In the slipstream of the Salwa Judum, a swarm of police stations and camps appeared. The idea was to provide carpet security for a ‘creeping reoccupation’ of Maoist-controlled territory. The assumption was that the Maoists would not dare to attack such a large concentration of security forces. The Maoists, for their part, realised that if they did not break that carpet security, it would amount to abandoning people whose trust they had earned, and with whom they had lived and worked for 25 years. They struck back in a series of attacks on the heart of the security grid.

On January 26, 2006, the PLGA attacked the Gangalaur police camp and killed seven people. On July 17, 2006, the Salwa Judum camp at Erabor was attacked, 20 people were killed and 150 injured. (You might have read about it: “Maoists attacked the relief camp set up by the state government to provide shelter to the villagers who had fled from their villages because of terror unleashed by the Naxalites.”) On December 13, 2006, they attacked the Basaguda ‘relief’ camp and killed three SPOs and a constable. On March 15, 2007, came the most audacious of them all. One hundred and twenty PLGA guerrillas attacked the Rani Bodili Kanya Ashram, a girls’ hostel that had been converted into a barrack for 80 Chhattisgarh Police (and SPOs) while the girls still lived in it as human shields. The PLGA entered the compound, cordoned off the annexe in which the girls lived, and attacked the barracks. Some 55 policemen and SPOs were killed. None of the girls was hurt. (The candid SP of Dantewada had shown me his PowerPoint presentation with horrifying photographs of the burned, disembowelled bodies of the policemen amidst the ruins of the blown-up school building. They were so macabre, it was impossible not to look away. He looked pleased at my reaction.)

The attack on Rani Bodili caused an uproar in the country. Human rights organisations condemned the Maoists not just for their violence, but also for being anti-education and attacking schools. But in Dandakaranya, the Rani Bodili attack became a legend: songs, poems and plays were written about it.

The Maoist counter-offensive did break the carpet security and gave people breathing space. The police and the Salwa Judum retreated into their camps, from which they now emerge—usually in the dead of night—only in packs of 300 or 1,000 to carry out cordon and search operations in villages. Gradually, except for the SPOs and their families, the rest of the people in the Salwa Judum camps began to return to their villages. The Maoists welcomed them back and announced that even SPOs could return if they genuinely, and publicly, regretted their actions. Young people began to flock to the PLGA. (The PLGA had been formally constituted in December 2000. Over the last 30 years, its armed squads had very gradually expanded into sections, sections had grown into platoons, and platoons into companies. But after the Salwa Judum’s depredations, the PLGA was rapidly able to declare battalion strength.)

The Salwa Judum had not just failed, it had backfired badly.

As we now know, it was not just a local operation by a small-time hood. Regardless of the doublespeak in the press, the Salwa Judum was a joint operation by the state government of Chhattisgarh and the Congress party which was in power at the Centre. It could not be allowed to fail. Not when all those MoUs were still waiting, like wilting hopefuls on the marriage market. The government was under tremendous pressure to come up with a new plan. They came up with Operation Green Hunt. The Salwa Judum SPOs are called Koya Commandos now. It has deployed the Chhattisgarh Armed Force (CAF), the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), the Border Security Force (BSF), the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), Greyhounds, Scorpions, Cobras. And a policy that’s affectionately called WHAM—Winning Hearts and Minds.

Lohandiguda was never a Naxal area. The comrades moved in when graffiti saying ‘Naxali aao, hamein bachao’ began appearing on walls.

Significant wars are often fought in unlikely places. Free Market Capitalism defeated Soviet Communism in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan. Here in the forests of Dantewada, a battle rages for the soul of India. Plenty has been said about the deepening crisis in Indian democracy and the collusion between big corporations, major political parties and the security establishment. If anybody wants to do a quick spot check, Dantewada is the place to go.

A draft report on State Agrarian Relations and the Unfinished Task of Land Reform (Volume 1) said that Tata Steel and Essar Steel were the first financiers of the Salwa Judum. Because it was a government report, it created a flurry when it was reported in the press. (That fact has subsequently been dropped from the final report. Was it a genuine error, or did someone receive a gentle, integrated steel tap on the shoulder?)

On October 12, 2009, the mandatory public hearing for Tata’s steel plant, meant to be held in Lohandiguda where local people could come, actually took place in a small hall inside the Collectorate in Jagdalpur, many miles away, cordoned off with massive security. A hired audience of 50 tribals was brought in a guarded convoy of government jeeps. After the meeting, the district collector congratulated ‘the people of Lohandiguda’ for their cooperation. The local newspapers reported the lie, even though they knew better. (The advertisements rolled in.) Despite villagers’ objections, land acquisition for the project has begun.

The Maoists are not the only ones who seek to depose the Indian State. It’s already been deposed several times by Hindu fundamentalism and economic totalitarianism.

In true colonial fashion, they send Nagas and Mizos to fight in Chhattisgarh, the Sikhs to Kashmir, and the Tamilians to Assam.

Lohandiguda, a five-hour drive from Dantewada, never used to be a Naxalite area. But it is now. Comrade Joori, who sat next to me while I ate the ant chutney, works in the area. She said they decided to move in after graffiti had begun to appear on the walls of village houses, saying, Naxali aao, hamein bachao (Naxals come and save us)! A few months ago, Vimal Meshram, president of the village panchayat, was shot dead in the market. “He was Tata’s man,” Joori says. “He was forcing people to give up their land and accept compensation. It’s good that he’s been finished. We lost a comrade too. They shot him. D’you want more chapoli?” She’s only 20. “We won’t let the Tatas come there. People don’t want them.” Joori is not PLGA. She’s in the Chetna Natya Manch (CNM), the cultural wing of the party. She sings. She writes songs. She’s from Abujhmad. (She’s married to Comrade Madhav. She fell in love with his singing when he visited her village with a CNM troupe.)

I feel I ought to say something at this point. About the futility of violence, about the unacceptability of summary executions. But what should I suggest they do? Go to court? Do a dharna at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi? A rally? A relay hunger strike? It sounds ridiculous. The promoters of the New Economic Policy—who find it so easy to say “There Is No Alternative”—should be asked to suggest an alternative Resistance Policy. A specific one, to these specific people, in this specific forest. Here. Now. Which party should they vote for? Which democratic institution in this country should they approach? Which door did the Narmada Bachao Andolan not knock on during the years and years it fought against Big Dams on the Narmada?

It’s dark. There’s a lot of activity in the camp, but I can’t see anything. Just points of light moving around. It’s hard to tell whether they are stars or fireflies or Maoists on the move. Little Mangtu appears from nowhere. I found out that he’s part of the first batch of the Young Communists Mobile School, who are being taught to read and write and tutored in basic Communist principles. (“Indoctrination of young minds!” our corporate media howls. The TV advertisements that brainwash children before they can even think are not seen as a form of indoctrination.) The young Communists are not allowed to carry guns or wear uniforms. But they trail the PLGA squads, with stars in their eyes, like groupies of a rock band.

Mangtu has adopted me with a gently proprietorial air. He has filled my water bottle and says I should pack my bag. A whistle blows. The blue jhilli tent is dismantled and folded up in five minutes flat. Another whistle and all hundred comrades fall in line. Five rows. Comrade Raju is the Director of Ops. There’s a roll call. I’m in the line too, shouting out my number when Comrade Kamla who is in front of me, prompts me. (We count to twenty and then start from one, because that’s as far as most Gonds count. Twenty is enough for them. Maybe it should be enough for us too.) Chandu is in fatigues now, and carries a sten gun. In a low voice, Comrade Raju is briefing the group. It’s all in Gondi, I don’t understand a thing, but I keep hearing the word RV. Later Raju tells me it stands for Rendezvous! It’s a Gondi word now. “We make RV points so that in case we come under fire and people have to scatter, they know where to regroup.” He cannot possibly know the kind of panic this induces in me. Not because I’m scared of being fired on, but because I’m scared of being lost. I’m a directional dyslexic, capable of getting lost between my bedroom and my bathroom. What will I do in 60,000 square kilometres of forest? Come hell or high water, I’m going to be holding on to Comrade Raju’s pallu.

Dandakaranya was full of people who had many names, fluid identities. It was balm to me, the idea. Not to be stuck with yourself, be someone else.

Before we start walking, Comrade Venu comes up to me: “Okaythen comrade. I’ll take your leave.” I’m taken aback. He looks like a little mosquito in a woollen cap and chappals, surrounded by his guards, three women, three men. Heavily armed. “We are very grateful to you comrade, for coming all the way here,” he says. Once again the handshake, the clenched fist. “Lal Salaam Comrade.” He disappears into the forest, the Keeper of the Keys. And in a moment, it’s as though he was never here. I’m a little bereft. But I have hours of recordings to listen to. And as the days turn into weeks, I will meet many people who paint colour and detail into the grid he drew for me. We begin to walk in the opposite direction. Comrade Raju, smelling of Iodex from a mile off, says with a happy smile, “My knees are gone. I can only walk if I have had a fistful of painkillers.”

Comrade Raju speaks perfect Hindi and has a deadpan way of telling the funniest stories. He worked as an advocate in Raipur for 18 years. Both he and his wife Malti were party members and part of its city network. At the end of 2007, one of the key people in the Raipur network was arrested, tortured and eventually turned informer. He was driven around Raipur in a closed police vehicle and made to point out his former colleagues. Comrade Malti was one of them. On January 22, 2008, she was arrested along with several others. The charge against her is that she mailed CDs containing video evidence of Salwa Judum atrocities to several members of Parliament. Her case rarely comes up for hearing because the police know their case is flimsy. But the new Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act (CSPSA) allows the police to hold her without bail for several years. “Now the government has deployed several battalions of Chhattisgarh police to protect the poor members of Parliament from their own mail,” Comrade Raju says. He did not get caught because he was in Dandakaranya at the time, attending a meeting. He’s been here ever since. His two schoolgoing children, who were left alone at home, were interrogated extensively by the police. Finally, their home was packed up and they went to live with an uncle. Comrade Raju received news of them for the first time only a few weeks ago. What gives him this strength, this ability to hold on to his acid humour? What keeps them all going, despite all they have endured? Their faith and hope—and love—for the Party. I encounter it again and again, in the deepest, most personal ways.

This army is more Gandhian than any Gandhian, even in sabotage. Before burning a police vehicle, it’s stripped down, the parts cannibalised.

We’re moving in single file now. Myself and one hundred “senselessly violent”, bloodthirsty insurgents. I looked around at the camp before we left. There are no signs that almost a hundred people had camped here, except for some ash where the fires had been. I cannot believe this army. As far as consumption goes, it’s more Gandhian than any Gandhian, and has a lighter carbon footprint than any climate change evangelist. But for now, it even has a Gandhian approach to sabotage; before a police vehicle is burnt, for example, it is stripped down and every part cannibalised. The steering wheel is straightened out and made into a bharmaar, the rexine upholstery stripped and used for ammunition pouches, the battery for solar charging. (The new instructions from the high command are that captured vehicles should be buried and not cremated. So they can be resurrected when needed.) Should I write a play, I wonder—Gandhi Get Your Gun? Or will I be lynched?

We’re walking in pitch darkness and dead silence. I’m the only one using a torch, pointed down so that all I can see in its circle of light are Comrade Kamla’s bare heels in her scuffed, black chappals, showing me exactly where to put my feet. She is carrying 10 times more weight than I am. Her backpack, her rifle, a huge bag of provisions on her head, one of the large cooking pots and two shoulder bags full of vegetables. The bag on her head is perfectly balanced, and she can scramble down slopes and slippery rock pathways without so much as touching it. She is a miracle. It turns out to be a long walk. I’m grateful to the history lesson because apart from everything else it gave my feet a rest for a whole day. It’s the most beautiful thing, walking in the forest at night.

And I’ll be doing it night after night.

We’re going to a celebration of the centenary of the 1910 Bhumkal rebellion in which the Koyas rose up against the British. Bhumkal means earthquake. Comrade Raju says people will walk for days together to come for the celebration. The forest must be full of people on the move. There are celebrations in all the DK divisions. We are privileged because Comrade Leng, the Master of Ceremonies, is walking with us. In Gondi, Leng means ‘the voice’. Comrade Leng is a tall, middle-aged man from Andhra Pradesh, a colleague of the legendary and beloved singer-poet Gadar, who founded the radical cultural organisation Jan Natya Manch (JNM) in 1972. Eventually, JNM became a formal part of the PWG and in Andhra Pradesh could draw audiences numbering in the tens of thousands. Comrade Leng joined in 1977 and became a famous singer in his own right. He lived in Andhra through the worst repression, the era of ‘encounter’ killings in which friends died almost every day. He himself was picked up one night from his hospital bed, by a woman Superintendent of Police masquerading as a doctor. He was taken to the forest outside Warangal to be ‘encountered’. But luckily, Gadar got the news and managed to raise an alarm. When the PW decided to start a cultural organisation in DK in 1998, Comrade Leng was sent to head the Chetna Natya Manch. And here he is now, walking with me, for some reason wearing an olive-green shirt and purple pyjamas with pink bunnies on them. “There are 10,000 members in cnm now,” he told me. “We have 500 songs, in Hindi, Gondi, Chhattisgarhi and Halbi. We have printed a book with 140 of our songs. Everybody writes songs.” The first time I spoke to him, he sounded very grave, very single-minded. But days later, sitting around a fire, still in those pyjamas, he tells us about a very successful, mainstream Telugu film director (a friend of his) who always plays a Naxalite in his own films. “I asked him,” Comrade Leng said in his lovely Telugu-accented Hindi, “why do you think Naxalites are always like this?”—and he did a deft caricature of a crouched, high-stepping, hunted-looking man emerging from the forest with an AK-47, and left us screaming with laughter.

Happiness is taken seriously in Dandakaranya. People walk for miles, for days, to sing and dance together. This is their defiance.

I’m not sure whether I’m looking forward to the Bhumkal celebrations. I fear I’ll see traditional tribal dances stiffened by Maoist propaganda, rousing, rhetorical speeches and an obedient audience with glazed eyes. We arrive at the grounds quite late in the evening. A temporary monument, of bamboo scaffolding wrapped in red cloth, has been erected. On top, above the hammer and sickle of the Maoist Party, is the bow and arrow of the Janatana Sarkar, wrapped in silver foil. Appropriate, the hierarchy. The stage is huge, also temporary, on a sturdy scaffolding covered by a thick layer of mud plaster. Already, there are small fires scattered around the ground, people have begun to arrive and are cooking their evening meal. They’re only silhouettes in the dark. We thread our way through them (lalsalaam, lalsalaam, lalsalaam) and keep going for about 15 minutes until we re-enter the forest.

At our new campsite, we have to fall-in again. Another roll call. And then instructions about sentry positions and ‘firing arcs’—decisions about who will cover which area in the event of a police attack. RV points are fixed again.

Boy, What A Smile: Comrade Kamla, 17, wearing a pistol on her hip. Also, a miracle.

An advance party has arrived and cooked dinner already. For dessert, Kamla brings me a wild guava that she has plucked on the walk and squirrelled away for me.

From dawn, there is the sense of more and more people gathering for the day’s celebration. There’s a buzz of excitement building up. People who haven’t seen each other in a long time meet again. We can hear the sound of mikes being tested. Flags, banners, posters, buntings are going up. A poster with the pictures of the five people who were killed in Ongnaar the day we arrived has appeared.

I’m drinking tea with Comrade Narmada, Comrade Maase and Comrade Rupi. Comrade Narmada talks about the many years she worked in Gadchiroli before becoming the DK head of the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangathan. Rupi and Maase have been urban activists in Andhra Pradesh and tell me about the long years of struggle by women within the party, not just for their rights, but also to make the party see that equality between men and women is seen as central to a dream of a just society. We talk about the ’70s and the stories of women within the Naxalite movement who were disillusioned by male comrades who thought themselves great revolutionaries but were hobbled by the same old patriarchy, the same old chauvinism. Maase says things have changed a lot since then, though they still have a way to go. (The party’s central committee and politburo have no women yet.)

Around noon, another PLGA contingent arrives. This one is headed by a tall, lithe, boyish-looking man. This comrade has two names—Sukhdev, and Gudsa Usendi—neither of them his. Sukhdev is the name of a very beloved comrade who was martyred. (In this war, only the dead are safe enough to use their real names.) As for Gudsa Usendi, many comrades have been Gudsa Usendi at one point or another. (A few months ago, it was Comrade Raju.) Gudsa Usendi is the name of the party’s spokesperson for Dandakaranya. So even though Sukhdev spends the rest of the trip with me, I have no idea how I’d ever find him again. I’d recognise his laugh anywhere though. He came to DK in ’88, he says, when the PWG decided to send one-third of its forces from north Telangana into DK. He’s nicely dressed, in ‘civil’ (Gondi for ‘civilian clothes’) as opposed to ‘dress’ (the Maoist ‘uniform’) and could pass off as a young executive. I ask him why no uniform. He says he’s been travelling and has just come back from the Keshkal ghats near Kanker. There are reports of 3 million tonnes of bauxite that a company called Vedanta has its eye on.

Bingo. Ten on ten for my instincts.

Sukhdev says he went there to measure the people’s temperature. To see if they were prepared to fight. “They want squads now. And guns.” He throws his head back and roars with laughter, “I told them it’s not so easy, bhai.” From the stray wisps of conversation and the ease with which he carries his AK-47, I can tell he’s also high up and hands-on PLGA.

Jungle post arrives. There’s a biscuit for me! It’s from Comrade Venu. On a tiny piece of paper, folded and refolded, he has written down the lyrics of a song he promised he would send me. Comrade Narmada smiles when she reads them. She knows this story. It goes back to the ’80s, around the time when people first began to trust the party and come to it with their problems—their ‘inner contradictions’, as Comrade Venu put it. Women were among the first to come. One evening an old lady sitting by the fire got up and sang a song for the dada log. She was a Maadiya, among whom it was customary for women to remove their blouses and remain bare-breasted after they were married.

Jumper polo intor Dada, Dakoniley
Taane tasom intor Dada, Dakoniley
Bata papam kittom Dada, Dakoniley
Duniya kadile maata Dada, Dakoniley

(They say we cannot keep our
blouses, Dada, Dakoniley
They make us take them off, Dada,
In what way have we sinned, Dada,
The world’s changed, has it not Dada)

Aatum hatteke Dada, Dakoniley
Aada nanga dantom Dada, Dakoniley
Id pisval manni Dada, Dakoniley
Mava koyaturku vehat Dada, Dakoniley

(But when we go to market Dada,
We have to go half-naked Dada,
We don’t want this life Dada,
Tell our ancestors this Dada).

This was the first women’s issue the party decided to campaign against. It had to be handled delicately, with surgical tools. In 1986, it set up the Adivasi Mahila Sangathan (AMS) which evolved into the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangathan and now has 90,000 enrolled members. It could well be the largest women’s organisation in the country. (They’re all Maoists by the way, all 90,000 of them. Are they going to be ‘wiped out’? And what about the 10,000 members of CNM? Them too?) KAMS campaigns against the adivasi traditions of forced marriage and abduction. Against the custom of making menstruating women live outside the village in a hut in the forest. Against bigamy and domestic violence. It hasn’t won all its battles, but then which feminists have? For instance, in Dandakaranya, even today women are not allowed to sow seeds. In party meetings, men agree that this is unfair and ought to be done away with. But, in practice, they simply don’t allow it. So, the party decided that women would sow seeds on common land which belongs to the Janatana Sarkar. On that land, they sow seed, grow vegetables and build check dams. A half-victory, not a whole one.

In most jan adalats, at least the collective is physically present to make a decision. It’s not made by judges who’ve lost touch with ordinary life.

As police repression has grown in Bastar, the women of KAMS have become a formidable force and rally in their hundreds, sometimes thousands, to physically confront the police. The very fact that KAMS exists has radically changed traditional attitudes and eased many of the traditional forms of discrimination against women. For many young women, joining the party, in particular the PLGA, became a way of escaping the suffocation of their own society. Comrade Sushila, a senior office-bearer of KAMS talks about the Salwa Judum’s rage against KAMS women. She says one of their slogans was Hum do bibi layenge! Layenge! (We will have two wives! We will!). A lot of the rape and bestial sexual mutilation was directed at members of KAMS. Many young women who witnessed the savagery then joined the PLGA and now women make up 45 per cent of its cadre. Comrade Narmada sends for some of them and they join us in a while.

Comrade Rinki has very short hair. A bob-cut, as they say in Gondi. It’s brave of her, because here, ‘bob-cut’ means ‘Maoist’. For the police, that’s more than enough evidence to warrant summary execution. Comrade Rinki’s village, Korma, was attacked by the Naga battalion and the Salwa Judum in 2005. At that time, Rinki was part of the village militia. So were her friends Lukki and Sukki, who were also members of KAMS. After burning the village, the Naga battalion caught Lukki and Sukki and one other girl, gang-raped and killed them. “They raped them on the grass,” Rinki says, “but after it was over, there was no grass left.” It’s been years now, the Naga battalion has gone, but the police still come. “They come whenever they need women, or chickens.”

Rest Station: A Maoist ‘camp’. When they move, all that will remain is the ash from the kitchen fire.

Ajitha has a bob-cut too. The Judum came to Korseel, her village, and killed three people by drowning them in a nallah. Ajitha was with the militia and followed the Judum at a distance to a place close to the village called Paral Nar Todak. She watched them rape six women and shoot a man in his throat.

Comrade Laxmi, who is a beautiful girl with a long plait, tells me she watched the Judum burn 30 houses in her village, Jojor. “We had no weapons then,” she says, “we could do nothing but watch.” She joined the PLGA soon after. Laxmi was one of the 150 guerrillas who walked through the jungle for three-and-a-half months in 2008, to Nayagarh in Orissa, to raid a police armoury from where they captured 1,200 rifles and 2,00,000 rounds of ammunition.

Comrade Sumitra joined the PLGA in 2004, before the Salwa Judum began its rampage. She joined, she says, because she wanted to escape from home. “Women are controlled in every way,” she told me. “In our village, girls were not allowed to climb trees; if they did, they would have to pay a fine of Rs 500 or a hen. If a man hits a woman and she hits him back she has to give the village a goat. Men go off to the hills for months together to hunt. Women are not allowed to go near the kill, the best part of the meat goes to men. Women are not allowed to eat eggs.” Good reason to join a guerrilla army?

Sumitra tells the story of two of her friends, Telam Parvati and Kamla, who worked with KAMS. Telam Parvati was from Polekaya village in south Bastar. Like everyone else from there, she too watched the Salwa Judum burn her village. She then joined the PLGA and went to work in the Keshkal ghats. In 2009, she and Kamla had just finished organising the March 8 Women’s Day celebrations in the area. They were together in a little hut just outside a village called Vadgo. The police surrounded the hut at night and began to fire. Kamla fired back, but she was killed. Parvati escaped, but was found and killed the next day.

That’s what happened last year on Women’s Day. And here’s a press report from a national newspaper about Women’s Day this year:

Bastar rebels bat for women’s rights
Sahar Khan, Mail Today, Raipur, March 7, 2010

The government may have pulled out all stops to combat the Maoist menace in the country. But a section of rebels in Chhattisgarh has more pressing matters in hand than survival. With International Women’s Day around the corner, Maoists in the Bastar region of the state have called for week-long “celebrations” to advocate women’s rights. Posters were also put up in Bijapur, a part of Bastar district. The call by the self-styled champions of women’s rights has left the state police astonished. Inspector-general (IG) of Bastar, T.J. Longkumer said, “I have never seen such an appeal from the Naxalites, who believe only in violence and bloodshed.”

And then the report goes on to say:

“I think the Maoists are trying to counter our highly successful Jan Jagran Abhiyaan (mass awareness campaign). We started the ongoing campaign with an aim to win popular support for Operation Green Hunt, which was launched by the police to root out Left-wing extremists,” the IG said.

This cocktail of malice and ignorance is not unusual. Gudsa Usendi, chronicler of the party’s present, knows more about this than most people. His little computer and MP3 recorder are full of press statements, denials, corrections, party literature, lists of the dead, TV clips and audio and video material. “The worst thing about being Gudsa Usendi,” he says, “is issuing clarifications which are never published. We could bring out a thick book of our unpublished clarifications about the lies they tell about us.” He speaks without a trace of indignation, in fact, with some amusement.

“What’s the most ridiculous charge you’ve had to deny?”

He thinks back. “In 2007, we had to issue a statement saying, ‘Nahin bhai, hamne gai ko hathode se nahin mara (No brother, we did not kill the cows with a hammer).’ In 2007, the Raman Singh government announced a Gai Yojana (cow scheme), an election promise, a cow for every adivasi. One day the TV channels and newspapers reported that Naxalites had attacked a herd of cows and bludgeoned them to death—with hammers—because they were anti-Hindu, anti-BJP. You can imagine what happened. We issued a denial. Hardly anybody carried it. Later, it turned out that the man who had been given the cows to distribute was a rogue. He sold them and said we had ambushed him and killed the cows.”

And the most serious?

“Oh, there are dozens, they are running a campaign, after all. When the Salwa Judum started, the first day they attacked a village called Ambeli, burned it down and then all of them—SPOs, the Naga battalion, police—moved towards Kotrapal...you must have heard about Kotrapal? It’s a famous village, it has been burnt 22 times for refusing to surrender. When the Judum reached Kotrapal, our militia was waiting for it. They had prepared an ambush. Two SPOs died. We captured seven, the rest ran away. The next day the newspapers reported that the Naxalites had massacred poor adivasis. Some said we had killed hundreds. Even a respectable magazine like Frontline said we had killed 18 innocent adivasis. Even K. Balagopal, the human rights activist, who is usually meticulous about facts, even he said this. We sent a clarification. Nobody published it. Later, in his book, Balagopal acknowledged his mistake.... But who noticed?”

Remembering The Martyrs: Pictures of slain comrades displayed on Bhumkal Day

I asked what happened to the seven people who were captured. “The area committee called a jan adalat (people’s court). Four thousand people attended it. They listened to the whole story. Two of the SPOs were sentenced to death. Five were warned and let off. The people decided. Even with informers—which is becoming a huge problem nowadays—people listen to the case, the stories, the confessions and say, ‘Iska hum risk nahin le sakte (We’re not prepared to take the risk of trusting this person)’, or ‘Iska risk hum lenge (We are prepared to take the risk of trusting this person)’. The press always reports about informers who are killed. Never about the many who are let off. So everybody thinks it is some bloodthirsty procedure in which everybody is always killed. It’s not about revenge, it’s about survival and saving future lives.... Of course, there are problems, we’ve made terrible mistakes, we have even killed the wrong people in our ambushes thinking they were policemen, but it is not the way it’s portrayed in the media.”

The dreaded ‘People’s Courts’. How can we accept them? Or approve this form of rude justice?

On the other hand, what about ‘encounters’, fake and otherwise—the worst form of summary justice—that get policemen and soldiers bravery medals, cash awards and out-of-turn promotions from the Indian government? The more they kill, the more they are rewarded. ‘Bravehearts’, they are called, the ‘Encounter Specialists’. ‘Anti-nationals’, we are called, those of us who dare to question them. And what about the Supreme Court that brazenly admitted it did not have enough evidence to sentence Mohammed Afzal (accused in the December 2001 Parliament attack) to death, but did so anyway, because “the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender”.

At least in the case of the Kotrapal jan adalat, the collective was physically present to make its own decision. It wasn’t made by judges who had lost touch with ordinary life a long time ago, presuming to speak on behalf of an absent collective.

What should the people of Kotrapal have done, I wonder? Sent for the police?

The sound of drums has become really loud. It’s Bhumkal time. We walk to the grounds. I can hardly believe my eyes. There is a sea of people, the most wild, beautiful people, dressed in the most wild, beautiful ways. The men seem to have paid much more attention to themselves than the women. They have feathered headgear and painted tattoos on their faces. Many have eye make-up and white, powdered faces. There’s lots of militia, girls in saris of breathtaking colours with rifles slung carelessly over their shoulders. There are old people, children, and red buntings arc across the sky. The sun is sharp and high. Comrade Leng speaks. And several office-holders of the various Janatana Sarkars. Comrade Niti, an extraordinary woman who has been with the party since 1997, is such a threat to the nation that in January 2007 more than 700 policemen surrounded Innar village because they heard she was there. Comrade Niti is considered to be so dangerous and is being hunted with such desperation not because she has led many ambushes (which she has), but because she is an adivasi woman who is loved by people in the village and is a real inspiration to young people. She speaks with her AK on her shoulder. (It’s a gun with a story. Almost everyone’s gun has a story: who it was snatched from, how, and by whom.)

‘Maoist-infested’. These are not careless words. Infest or infestation implies pests. Pests must be exterminated. Maoists must be wiped out.

A CNM troupe performs a play about the Bhumkal uprising. The evil white colonisers wear hats and golden straw for hair, and bully and beat adivasis to pulp—causing endless delight in the audience. Another troupe from south Gangalaur performs a play called Nitir Judum Pito (Story of the Blood Hunt). Joori translates for me. It’s the story of two old people who go looking for their daughter’s village. As they walk through the forest, they get lost because everything is burnt and unrecognisable. The Salwa Judum has even burned the drums and the musical instruments. There are no ashes because it has been raining. They cannot find their daughter. In their sorrow, the old couple starts to sing, and hearing them, the voice of their daughter sings back to them from the ruins: the sound of our village has been silenced, she sings. There’s no more pounding of rice, no more laughter by the well. No more birds, no more bleating goats. The taut string of happiness has been snapped.

Her father sings back: my beautiful daughter, don’t cry today. Everyone who is born must die. These trees around us will fall, flowers will bloom and fade, one day this world will grow old. But who are we dying for? One day our looters will learn, one day Truth will prevail, but our people will never forget you, not for thousands of years.

A few more speeches. Then the drumming and the dancing begins. Each Janatana Sarkar has its own troupe. Each troupe has prepared its own dance. They arrive one by one, with huge drums and they dance wild stories. The only character every troupe has in common is Bad Mining Man, with a helmet and dark glasses, and usually smoking a cigarette. But there’s nothing stiff, or mechanical, about their dancing. As they dance, the dust rises. The sound of drums becomes deafening. Gradually, the crowd begins to sway. And then it begins to dance. They dance in little lines of six or seven, men and women separate, with their arms around each other’s waists. Thousands of people. This is what they’ve come for. For this. Happiness is taken very seriously here, in the Dandakaranya forest. People will walk for miles, for days together to feast and sing, to put feathers in their turbans and flowers in their hair, to put their arms around each other and drink mahua and dance through the night. No one sings or dances alone. This, more than anything else, signals their defiance towards a civilisation that seeks to annihilate them.

I can’t believe all this is happening right under the noses of the police. Right in the midst of Operation Green Hunt.

At first, the PLGA comrades watch the dancers, standing aside with their guns. But then, one by one, like ducks who cannot bear to stand on the shore and watch other ducks swim, they move in and begin to dance too. Soon there are lines of olive-green dancers, swirling with all the other colours. And then, as sisters and brothers and parents and children and friends who haven’t met for months, years sometimes, encounter each other, the lines break up and re-form and the olive green is distributed among the swirling saris and flowers and drums and turbans. It surely is a People’s Army. For now, at least. And what Chairman Mao said about the guerrillas being the fish and people being the water they swim in, is, at this moment, literally true.

Chairman Mao. He’s here too. A little lonely, perhaps, but present. There’s a photograph of him, up on a red cloth screen. Marx too. And Charu Mazumdar, the founder and chief theoretician of the Naxalite Movement. His abrasive rhetoric fetishises violence, blood and martyrdom, and often employs a language so coarse as to be almost genocidal. Standing here, on Bhumkal day, I can’t help thinking that his analysis, so vital to the structure of this revolution, is so removed from its emotion and texture. When he said that only “an annihilation campaign” could produce “the new man who will defy death and be free from all thought of self-interest”—could he have imagined that this ancient people, dancing into the night, would be the ones on whose shoulders his dreams would come to rest?

It’s a great disservice to everything that is happening here that the only thing that seems to make it to the outside world is the stiff, unbending rhetoric of the ideologues of a party that has evolved from a problematic past. When Charu Mazumdar famously said, “China’s Chairman is our Chairman and China’s Path is Our Path,” he was prepared to extend it to the point where the Naxalites remained silent while General Yahya Khan committed genocide in East Pakistan (Bangladesh), because at the time, China was an ally of Pakistan. There was silence too, over the Khmer Rouge and its killing fields in Cambodia. There was silence over the egregious excesses of the Chinese and Russian revolutions. Silence over Tibet. Within the Naxalite movement too, there have been violent excesses and it’s impossible to defend much of what they’ve done. But can anything they have done compare with the sordid achievements of the Congress and the BJP in Punjab, Kashmir, Delhi, Mumbai, Gujarat.... And yet, despite these terrifying contradictions, Charu Mazumdar was a visionary in much of what he wrote and said. The party he founded (and its many splinter groups) has kept the dream of revolution real and present in India. Imagine a society without that dream. For that alone, we cannot judge him too harshly. Especially not while we swaddle ourselves with Gandhi’s pious humbug about the superiority of “the non-violent way” and his notion of trusteeship: “The rich man will be left in possession of his wealth, of which he will use what he reasonably requires for his personal needs and will act as a trustee for the remainder to be used for the good of society.”

How strange it is, though, that the contemporary tsars of the Indian Establishment—the State that crushed the Naxalites so mercilessly—should now be saying what Charu Mazumdar said so long ago: China’s Path is Our Path.

Upside Down. Inside Out.

The Damned: Villagers from the submergence area of the proposed Bodhghat dam

China’s Path has changed. China has become an imperial power now, preying on other countries, other people’s resources. But the Party is still right, only, the Party has changed its mind.

When the Party is a suitor (as it is now in Dandakaranya), wooing the people, attentive to their every need, then it genuinely is a People’s Party, its army genuinely a People’s Army. But after the Revolution how easily this love affair can turn into a bitter marriage. How easily the People’s Army can turn upon the people. Today in Dandakaranya, the Party wants to keep the bauxite in the mountain. Tomorrow, will it change its mind? But can we, should we let apprehensions about the future immobilise us in the present?

How strange that the contemporary tsars of the Indian establishment now say what Charu Mazumdar said: China’s Path is Our Path.

The dancing will go on all night. I walk back to the camp. Maase is there, awake. We chat late into the night. I give her my copy of Neruda’s Captain’s Verses (I brought it along, just in case). She asks, again and again, “What do they think of us outside? What do students say? Tell me about the women’s movement, what are the big issues now?” She asks about me, my writing. I try and give her an honest account of my chaos. Then she starts to talk about herself, how she joined the party. She tells me that her partner was killed last May, in a fake encounter. He was arrested in Nashik, and taken to Warangal to be killed. “They must have tortured him badly.” She was on her way to meet him when she heard he had been arrested. She’s been in the forest ever since. After a long silence, she tells me she was married once before, years ago. “He was killed in an encounter too,” she says, and adds with heart-breaking precision, “but in a real one.”

I lie awake on my jhilli, thinking of Maase’s protracted sadness, listening to the drums and the sounds of protracted happiness from the grounds, and thinking about Charu Mazumdar’s idea of protracted war, the central precept of the Maoist Party. This is what makes people think the Maoists’ offer to enter ‘peace talks’ is a hoax, a ploy to get breathing space to regroup, re-arm themselves and go back to waging protracted war. What is protracted war? Is it a terrible thing in itself, or does it depend on the nature of the war? What if the people here in Dandakaranya had not waged their protracted war for the last 30 years, where would they be now?

And are the Maoists the only ones who believe in protracted war? Almost from the moment India became a sovereign nation, it turned into a colonial power, annexing territory, waging war. It has never hesitated to use military interventions to address political problems—Kashmir, Hyderabad, Goa, Nagaland, Manipur, Telangana, Assam, Punjab, the Naxalite uprising in West Bengal, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and now across the tribal areas of Central India. Tens of thousands have been killed with impunity, hundreds of thousands tortured. All of this behind the benign mask of democracy. Who have these wars been waged against? Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Communists, Dalits, Tribals and, most of all, against the poor who dare to question their lot instead of accepting the crumbs that are flung at them. It’s hard not to see that the Indian State is an essentially upper-caste Hindu State (regardless of the party in power) which harbours a reflexive hostility towards the ‘other’. One that, in true colonial fashion, sends the Nagas and Mizos to fight in Chhattisgarh, Sikhs to Kashmir, Kashmiris to Orissa, Tamilians to Assam and so on. If this isn’t protracted war, what is?

Unpleasant thoughts on a beautiful, starry night. Sukhdev is smiling to himself, his face lit by his computer screen. He’s a crazy workaholic. I ask him what’s funny. “I was thinking about the journalists who came last year for the Bhumkal celebrations. They came for a day or two. One posed with my AK, had himself photographed and then went back and called us Killing Machines or something.”

The dancing hasn’t stopped and it’s daybreak. The lines are still going, hundreds of young people still dancing. “They won’t stop,” Comrade Raju says, “not until we start packing up.”

On the grounds I run into Comrade Doctor. He’s been running a little medical camp on the edge of the dance floor. I want to kiss his fat cheeks. Why can’t he be at least 30 people instead of just one? Why can’t he be one thousand people? I ask him what it’s looking like, the health of Dandakaranya. His reply makes my blood run cold. Most of the people he has seen, he says, including those in the PLGA, have a haemoglobin count that’s between five and six (when the standard for Indian women is 11.) There’s TB caused by more than two years of chronic anaemia. Young children are suffering from Protein Energy Malnutrition Grade II, in medical terminology called Kwashiorkor. (I looked it up later. It’s a word derived from the Ga language of Coastal Ghana and means “the sickness a baby gets when the new baby comes”. Basically the old baby stops getting mother’s milk, and there’s not enough food to provide it nutrition.) “It’s an epidemic here, like in Biafra,” Comrade Doctor says, “I have worked in villages before, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Apart from this, there’s malaria, osteoporosis, tapeworm, severe ear and tooth infections and primary amenorrhea—which is when malnutrition during puberty causes a woman’s menstrual cycle to disappear, or never appear in the first place.

“There are no clinics in this forest apart from one or two in Gadchiroli. No doctors. No medicines.”

He’s off now, with his little team, on an eight-day trek to Abujhmad. He’s in ‘dress’ too, Comrade Doctor. So, if they find him, they’ll kill him.

Comrade Raju says that it isn’t safe for us to continue to camp here. We have to move. Leaving Bhumkal involves a lot of goodbyes spread over time.

Lal lal salaam, lal lal salaam,
Jaane wale saathiyon ko lal lal salaam

(Red Salute to departing comrades)

Phir milenge, phir milenge
Dandakaranya jungle mein phir milenge

(We’ll meet again, some day, in the Dandakaranya forest).

It’s never taken lightly, the ceremony of arrival and departure, because everybody knows that when they say “we’ll meet again” they actually mean “we may never meet again”.

Comrade Narmada, Comrade Maase and Comrade Rupi are going separate ways. Will I ever see them again?

So, once again, we walk. It’s becoming hotter every day. Kamla picks the first fruit of the tendu for me. It tastes like chikoo. I’ve become a tamarind fiend. This time we camp near a stream. Women and men take turns to bathe in batches. In the evening, Comrade Raju receives a whole packet of ‘biscuits’. News:

60 people arrested in Manpur Division at the end of Jan 2010 have not yet been produced in Court.

Huge contingents of police have arrived in South Bastar. Indiscriminate attacks are on.
On Nov 8, 2009, in Kachlaram Village, Bijapur Jila, Dirko Madka (60) and Kovasi Suklu (68) were killed

On Nov 24, Madavi Baman (15) was killed in Pangodi village

On Dec 3, Madavi Budram from Korenjad also killed

On Dec 11, Gumiapal village, Darba Division, 7 people killed (names yet to come)

On Dec 15, Kotrapal village, Veko Sombar and Madavi Matti (both with KAMS) killed

On Dec 30, Vechapal village Poonem Pandu and Poonem Motu (father and son) killed

On Jan 2010 (date unknown), head of the Janatana Sarkar in Kaika village, Gangalaur, killed

On Jan 9, 4 people killed in Surpangooden village, Jagargonda Area

On Jan 10, 3 people killed in Pullem Pulladi village (no names yet)

On Jan 25, 7 people killed in Takilod village, Indravati Area

On Feb 10 (Bhumkal Day), Kumli raped and killed in Dumnaar Village, Abujhmad. She was from a village called Paiver

2,000 troops of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) are camped in the Rajnandgaon forests

5,000 additional BSF troops have arrived in Kanker

And then:
PLGA quota filled.

Some dated newspapers have arrived too. There’s a lot of press about Naxalites. One screaming headline sums up the political climate perfectly: ‘Khadedo, Maaro, Samarpan Karao (Eliminate, kill, make them surrender).’ Below that: ‘Vaarta ke liye loktantra ka dwar khula hai’ (Democracy’s door is always open for talks).’ A second says the Maoists are growing cannabis to make money. The third has an editorial saying that the area we’ve camped in and are walking through is entirely under police control.

The young Communists take the clips away to practice their reading. They walk around the camp reading the anti-Maoist articles loudly in radio-announcer voices.

New day. New place. We’re camped on the outskirts of Usir village, under huge mahua trees. The mahua has just begun to flower and is dropping its pale green blossoms like jewels on the forest floor. The air is suffused with its slightly heady smell. We’re waiting for the children from the Bhatpal school which was closed down after the Ongnaar encounter. It’s been turned into a police camp. The children have been sent home. This is also true of the schools in Nelwad, Moonjmetta, Edka, Vedomakot and Dhanora.

The Bhatpal school children don’t show up.

Bob-Cut Brigade: In Bastar, women with a bob-cut haircut can get you killed

Comrade Niti (Most Wanted) and Comrade Vinod lead us on a long walk to see the series of water-harvesting structures and irrigation ponds that have been built by the local Janatana Sarkar. Comrade Niti talks about the range of agricultural problems they have to deal with. Only 2 per cent of the land is irrigated. In Abujhmad, ploughing was unheard of until 10 years ago. In Gadchiroli on the other hand, hybrid seeds and chemical pesticides are edging their way in. “We need urgent help in the agriculture department,” Comrade Vinod says. “We need people who know about seeds, organic pesticides, permaculture. With a little help we could do a lot.”

Comrade Ramu is the farmer in charge of the Janatana Sarkar area. He proudly shows us around the fields, where they grow rice, brinjal, gongura, onions, kohlrabi. Then, with equal pride, he shows us a huge but bone-dry irrigation pond. What’s this? “This one doesn’t even have water during the rainy season. It’s dug in the wrong place,” he says, a smile wrapped around his face. “It’s not ours, it was dug by the Looti Sarkar (the government that loots).” There are two parallel systems of government here, Janatana Sarkar and Looti Sarkar.

I think of what Comrade Venu said to me: they want to crush us, not only because of the minerals, but because we are offering the world an alternative model.

It’s not an Alternative yet, this idea of Gram Swaraj with a Gun. There’s too much hunger, too much sickness here. But it has certainly created the possibilities for an alternative. Not for the whole world, not for Alaska, or New Delhi, nor even perhaps for the whole of Chhattisgarh, but for itself. For Dandakaranya. It’s the world’s best-kept secret. It has laid the foundations for an alternative to its own annihilation. It has defied history. Against the greatest odds it has forged a blueprint for its own survival. It needs help and imagination, it needs doctors, teachers, farmers.

It does not need war.

But if war is all it gets, it will fight back.

Over the next few days, I meet women who work with KAMS, various office-bearers of the Janatana Sarkars, members of the Dandakaranya Adivasi Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan (DAKMS), the families of people who had been killed, and just ordinary people trying to cope with life in these terrifying times.

Gram Swaraj with a Gun...it’s not an alternative yet. But it’s created the possibility for an alternative. Not for Alaska or New Delhi, but for itself.

I met three sisters—Sukhiari, Sukdai and Sukkali—not young, perhaps in their 40s, from Narayanpur district. They have been in KAMS for 12 years. The villagers depend on them to deal with the police. “The police come in groups of two to three hundred. They steal everything: jewellery, chickens, pigs, pots and pans, bows and arrows,” Sukkali says, “they won’t even leave a knife.” Her house in Innar has been burned twice, once by the Naga battalion and once by the CRPF Sukhiari has been arrested and jailed in Jagdalpur for seven months. “Once they took away the whole village, saying the men were all Naxals.” Sukhiari followed with all the women and children. They surrounded the police station and refused to leave until the men were freed. “Whenever they take someone away,” Sukdai says, “you have to go immediately and snatch them back. Before they write any report. Once they write in their book, it becomes very difficult.”

Sukhiari, who as a child was abducted and forcibly married to an older man (she ran away and went to live with her sister), now organises mass rallies, speaks at meetings. The men depend on her for protection. I asked her what the party means to her. “Naxalvaad ka matlab hamara parivaar (Naxalvaad means our family). When we hear of an attack, it is like our family has been hurt,” Sukhiari says.

I asked her if she knew who Mao was. She smiled shyly, “He was a leader. We’re working for his vision.”

I met Comrade Somari Gawde. Twenty years old, and she has already served a two-year jail sentence in Jagdalpur. She was in Innar village on January 8, 2007, the day that 740 policemen laid a cordon around it because they had information that Comrade Niti was there. (She was, but she had left by the time they arrived.) But the village militia, of which Somari was a member, was still there. The police opened fire at dawn. They killed two boys, Suklal Gawde and Kachroo Gota. Then they caught three others, two boys, Dusri Salam and Ranai, and Somari. Dusri and Ranai were tied up and shot. Somari was beaten within an inch of her life. The police got a tractor with a trailer and loaded the dead bodies into it. Somari was made to sit with the dead bodies and taken to Narayanpur.

Booby-traps has become a Gondi word. Everyone smiles when they hear it. They know other words too: Cordon and Search, Advance, Retreat.

I met Chamri, mother of Comrade Dilip who was shot on July 6, 2009. She says that after they killed him, the police tied her son’s body to a pole, like an animal and carried it with them. (They need to produce bodies to get their cash rewards, before someone else muscles in on the kill.) Chamri ran behind them all the way to the police station. By the time they reached, the body did not have a scrap of clothing on it. On the way, Chamri says, they left the body by the roadside while they stopped at a dhaba to have tea and biscuits. (Which they did not pay for.) Picture this mother for a moment, following her son’s corpse through the forest, stopping at a distance to wait for his murderers to finish their tea. They did not let her have her son’s body back so she could give him a proper funeral. They only let her throw a fistful of earth in the pit in which they buried the others they had killed that day. Chamri says she wants revenge. Badla ku badla. Blood for blood.

I met the elected members of the Marskola Janatana Sarkar that administers six villages. They described a police raid: they come at night, 300, 400, sometimes 1,000 of them. They lay a cordon around a village and lie in wait. At dawn they catch the first people who go out to the fields and use them as human shields to enter the village, to show them where the booby-traps are. (‘Booby-traps’ has become a Gondi word. Everybody always smiles when they say it or hear it. The forest is full of booby-traps, real and fake. Even the PLGA needs to be guided past villages.) Once the police enter a village, they loot and steal and burn houses. They come with dogs. The dogs catch those who try and run. They chase chickens and pigs and the police kill them and take them away in sacks. SPOs come along with the police. They’re the ones who know where people hide their money and jewellery. They catch people and take them away. And extract money before they release them. They always carry some extra Naxal ‘dresses’ with them in case they find someone to kill. They get money for killing Naxals, so they manufacture some. Villagers are too frightened to stay at home.

Dressed To The Nines: Adivasi boys in colourful traditional gear for Bhumkal day celebrations

In this tranquil-looking forest, life seems completely militarised now. People know words like Cordon and Search, Firing, Advance, Retreat, Down, Action! To harvest their crops, they need the PLGA to do a sentry patrol. Going to the market is a military operation. The markets are full of mukhbirs (informers) who the police have lured from their villages with money. I’m told there’s a mukhbir mohalla (informers’ colony) in Narayanpur where at least 4,000 mukhbirs stay. The men can’t go to market anymore. The women go, but they’re watched closely. If they buy even a little extra, the police accuse them of buying it for Naxals. Chemists have been instructed not to let people buy medicines except in very small quantities. Low-price rations from the Public Distribution System (PDS), sugar, rice, kerosene, are warehoused in or near police stations, making it impossible for most people to buy.

Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as:

Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [or] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

All the walking seems to have finally got to me. I’m tired. Kamla gets me a pot of hot water. I bathe behind a tree in the dark. But I can’t eat dinner and crawl into my bag to sleep. Comrade Raju announces that we have to move. This happens frequently, of course, but tonight it’s hard. We have been camped in an open meadow. We’d heard shelling in the distance. There are 104 of us. Once again, single file through the night. Crickets. The smell of something like lavender. It must have been past 11 when we arrived at the place where we will spend the night. An outcrop of rocks. Formation. Roll call. Someone switches on the radio. BBC says there’s been an attack on a camp of Eastern Frontier Rifles in Lalgarh, West Bengal. Sixty Maoists on motorcycles. Fourteen policemen killed. Ten missing. Weapons snatched. There’s a murmur of pleasure in the ranks. Maoist leader Kishenji is being interviewed. When will you stop this violence and come for talks? When Operation Green Hunt is called off. Any time. Tell Chidambaram we will talk. Next question: it’s dark now, you have laid landmines, reinforcements have been called in, will you attack them too? Kishenji: Yes, of course, otherwise people will beat me. There’s laughter in the ranks. Sukhdev the clarifier says, “They always say landmines. We don’t use landmines. We use IEDs.”

Another luxury suite in the thousand-star hotel. I’m feeling ill. It starts to rain. There’s a little giggling. Kamla throws a jhilli over me. What more do I need? Everyone else just rolls themselves into their jhillis.

By next morning the body count in Lalgarh has gone up to 21, 10 missing.

Comrade Raju is considerate this morning. We don’t move till evening.

One night, people are crowded like moths around a point of light. It’s Comrade Sukhdev’s tiny computer, powered by a solar panel, and they’re watching Mother India, the barrels of their rifles silhouetted against the sky. Kamla doesn’t seem interested. I ask her if she likes watching movies. “Nahin didi. Sirf ambush video (No didi. Only ambush videos).” Later, I ask Comrade Sukhdev about these ambush videos. Without batting an eyelid, he plays one for me.

It starts with shots of Dandakaranya, rivers, waterfalls, the close-up of a bare branch of a tree, a brainfever bird calling. Then suddenly a comrade is wiring up an IED, concealing it with dry leaves. A cavalcade of motorcycles is blown up. There are mutilated bodies and burning bikes. The weapons are being snatched. Three policemen, looking shell-shocked, have been tied up.

Who’s filming it? Who’s directing operations? Who’s reassuring the captured cops that they will be released if they surrender? (They were. I confirm that later.)

I know that gentle, reassuring voice. It’s Comrade Venu.

“It’s the Kudur ambush,” Comrade Sukhdev says.

He also has a video archive of burned villages, testimonies from eyewitnesses and relatives of the dead. On the singed wall of a burnt house, it says, ‘Nagaaa! Born to Kill!’ There’s footage of a little boy whose fingers were chopped off to inaugurate the Bastar chapter of Operation Green Hunt. (There’s even a TV interview with me. My study. My books. Strange.)

At night, on the radio, there’s news of another Naxal Attack. This one in Jamui, Bihar. It says 125 Maoists attacked a village and killed 10 people belonging to the Kora tribe in retaliation for giving police information that led to the death of six Maoists. Of course, we know that the media report may or may not be true. But, if it is, this one’s unforgivable. Comrade Raju and Sukhdev look distinctly uncomfortable.

The news that has been coming from Jharkhand and Bihar is disturbing. The gruesome beheading of the policeman Francis Induvar is still fresh in everyone’s mind. It’s a reminder of how easily the discipline of armed struggle can dissolve into lumpen acts of criminalised violence, or into ugly wars of identity between castes and communities and religious groups. By institutionalising injustice in the way that it does, the Indian State has turned this country into a tinderbox of massive unrest. The government is quite wrong if it thinks that by carrying out ‘targeted assassinations’ to render the CPI (Maoist) ‘headless’, it will end the violence. On the contrary, the violence will spread and intensify, and the government will have nobody to talk to.

On my last few days, we meander through the lush, beautiful Indravati valley. As we walk along a hillside, we see another line of people walking in the same direction, but on the other side of the river. I’m told they are on their way to an anti-dam meeting in Kudur village. They’re overground and unarmed. A local rally for the valley. I jump ship and join them.

The government has Koya Commandos, the CAF, CRPF, ITBP, CISF, Cobras, Scorpions. And a policy called wham: Winning Hearts and Minds.

The Bodhghat dam will submerge the entire area that we have been walking in for days. All that forest, all that history, all those stories. More than 100 villages. Is that the plan then? To drown people like rats, so that the integrated steel plant in Lohandiguda and the bauxite mine and aluminium refinery in the Keshkal ghats can have the river?

At the meeting, people who have come from miles away say the same thing we have all heard for years. We will drown, but we won’t move! They are thrilled that someone from Delhi is with them. I tell them Delhi is a cruel city that neither knows nor cares about them.

Only weeks before I came to Dandakaranya, I visited Gujarat. The Sardar Sarovar Dam has more or less reached its full height now. And almost every single thing the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) predicted would happen has happened. People who were displaced have not been rehabilitated, but that goes without saying. The canals have not been built. There’s no money. So Narmada water is being diverted into the empty riverbed of the Sabarmati (which was dammed a long time ago.) Most of the water is being guzzled by cities and big industry. The downstream effects—saltwater ingress into an estuary with no river—are becoming impossible to mitigate.

The Long March: Maoists on the move in Bastar, single file as always

There was a time when believing that Big Dams were the ‘temples of modern India’ was misguided, but perhaps understandable. But today, after all that has happened, and when we know all that we do, it has to be said that Big Dams are a crime against humanity.

The Bodhghat dam was shelved in 1984 after local people protested. Who will stop it now? Who will prevent the foundation stone from being laid? Who will stop the Indravati from being stolen? Someone must.

On the last night, we camped at the base of the steep hill we would climb in the morning, to emerge on the road from where a motorcycle would pick me up. The forest has changed even since I first entered it. The chiraunji, silk-cotton and mango trees have begun to flower.

The villagers from Kudur send a huge pot of freshly-caught fish to the camp. And a list for me, of 71 kinds of fruit, vegetables, pulses and insects they get from the forest and grow in their fields, along with the market price. It’s just a list. But it’s also a map of their world.

Jungle post arrives. Two biscuits for me. A poem and a pressed flower from Comrade Narmada. A lovely letter from Maase. (Who is she? Will I ever know?)

Comrade Sukhdev asks if he can download the music from my Ipod onto his computer. We listen to a recording of Iqbal Bano singing Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s Hum Dekhenge (We will Witness the Day) at the famous concert in Lahore at the height of the repression during the Zia-ul-Haq years.

Jab ahl-e-safa-Mardud-e-haram,
Masnad pe bithaiye jayenge

(When the heretics and the reviled will be seated on high)

Sab taaj uchhale jayenge
Sab takht giraye jayenge

(All crowns will be snatched away
All thrones toppled)

Hum dekhenge

Fifty thousand people in the audience in that Pakistan begin a defiant chant: Inqilab Zindabad! Inqilab Zindabad! All these years later, that chant reverberates around this forest. Strange, the alliances that get made.

The home minister’s been issuing veiled threats to those who “erroneously offer intellectual and material support to Maoists”. Does sharing music qualify?

Does the government think that by rendering CPI (Maoist) headless, it’ll end the violence? It’ll only spread and they’ll have no one to talk to.

At dawn, I say goodbye to Comrade Madhav and Joori, to young Mangtu and all the others. Comrade Chandu has gone to organise the bikes, and will come with me to the main road. Comrade Raju isn’t coming (the climb would be hell on his knees). Comrade Niti (Most Wanted), Comrade Sukhdev, Kamla and five others will take me up the hill. As we start walking, Niti and Sukhdev casually but simultaneously unclick the safety catches of their AKs. It’s the first time I’ve seen them do that. We’re approaching the ‘Border’. “Do you know what to do if we come under fire?” Sukhdev asks casually, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

“Yes,” I said, “immediately declare an indefinite hunger strike.”

He sat down on a rock and laughed. We climbed for about an hour. Just below the road, we sat in a rocky alcove, completely concealed, like an ambush party, listening for the sound of the bikes. When it comes, the farewell must be quick. Lal Salaam Comrades.

When I looked back, they were still there. Waving. A little knot. People who live with their dreams, while the rest of the world lives with its nightmares. Every night I think of this journey. That night sky, those forest paths. I see Comrade Kamla’s heels in her scuffed chappals, lit by the light of my torch. I know she must be on the move. Marching, not just for herself, but to keep hope alive for us all.

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MADAGASCAR: Timeline - A turbulent political history

2010-03-20T01:40:00.000-07:00

Madagascar's history is marked by a struggle for political control. By 1700, France and England had attempted to establish settlements, while the rulers of the island's many kingdoms fought among themselves for dominance.

During the 1700s the Merina ethnic group gained control of the central plateau and established a monarchy; with British help they eventually ruled most of the island. Their reign came to an end when French marines landed on the island in the 1880s and France instituted colonial rule.

Madagascar gained independence in 1960, but since then it has been plagued by assassinations, military coups and disputed elections. Here is a timeline of the major events in the island's turbulent history.

1946 - Madagascar becomes an Overseas Territory of France.

1947 - Thousands are killed when the French put down an armed rebellion in the east.

1958 - Madagascar votes for autonomy.

June 1960 - The Malagasy Republic (Madagascar) gains independence with Philibert Tsiranana as president.

May 1972 - Huge crowds led by students gather in Tananarive, the capital, to demand Tsiranana's resignation. Power is handed to army chief Gen Gabriel Ramanantsoa, who heads a provisional government.

Photo: AP
Didier Ratsiraka

June 1975 - Didier Ratsiraka, a military commander, becomes head of state.

December 1975 - Ratsiraka is elected president for a seven-year term in a national referendum. The country is renamed the Democratic Republic of Madagascar.

August 1991 - Mass demonstrations and civil service strikes start. Over 100,000 people march on the presidential palace and the presidential guard responds with gunfire and grenades.

October 1991 - Ratsiraka remains president but relinquishes power to Albert Zafy, head of the newly established High Authority of the State.

March 1993 - Zafy is elected president, defeating Ratsiraka.

April 1996 - Thousands demonstrate against Zafy amid calls for a military coup in the capital city, Antananarivo.

August 1996 - Zafy is impeached on allegations of corruption.

January 1997 - Ratsiraka makes a political comeback after the constitutional court finds that he won the presidential election in November 1996.

February 1998 - Members of the opposition, including Zafy, make an unsuccessful attempt to impeach Ratsiraka.

Photo: IRIN
Marc Ravalomanana

December 2001 - Ratsiraka faces Antananarivo mayor Marc Ravalomanana in the first round of the presidential election.

January 2002 - Daily protests pressure Ratsiraka's government for a recount of presidential election ballots. Madagascar's High Constitutional Court certifies that Ravalomanana got 46.2 percent of the votes and Ratsiraka got 40.8 percent - neither has the required majority of 51 percent. A runoff is set within two months but thousands of Ravalomanana's supporters take to the streets in protest. Ravalomanana calls for a national strike.

February 2002 - Ravalomanana declares himself president after two months of dispute. Ratsiraka declares martial law in the capital.

March 2002 - Ravalomanana forms a rival government and seizes the defence ministry - the last ministry controlled by Ratsiraka's government - and calls an end to the national strike. The Organization of African Unity (OAU) calls for a government of "national reconciliation" until a new ballot is held, but Ratsiraka rejects the proposal.

April 2002 - The Supreme Court annuls the disputed results of the December 2001 presidential election and after a recount hands the presidency to Ravalomanana with over 51 percent of the vote. Ratsiraka says he will not abide by the decision.

May 2002 - Ravalomanana is sworn in as president. The international community shows cautious support.

June 2002 - Ratsiraka flees to France. He returns and calls for fresh talks, but Ravalomanana rejects this.

July 2002 - Ratsiraka seeks exile in France, marking the end of the seven-month political crisis. In a show of support for the new administration, donors pledge US$2.3 billion in aid.

December 2002 - Ravalomanana's party, I Love Madagascar, wins 102 of the 160 seats in parliament in key elections, seen as a test of popular support for the president.

Photo: IRIN
Crowds waiting for the Election Results - February 2002

February 2003 - A former head of the armed forces is charged with mounting an attempted coup against Ravalomanana.

July 2003 - After a year-long suspension Madagascar is readmitted to the African Union (AU).

December 2003 - Ratsiraka, still in exile, is sentenced to five years in prison for his role in the 2002 political crisis.

May 2006 - Opposition parties boycott talks with Ravalomanana ahead of presidential elections to be held in December.

November 2006 - Tensions flare briefly when an army general's call for Ravalomanana to stand down ahead of presidential elections the following month is "misinterpreted" as a coup attempt.

December 2006 - Ravalomanana wins the presidential election with 55 percent of the votes.

****The most recent crisis****

December 2008 - Andry Rajoelina, Mayor of Antananarivo and owner of the Viva TV station, airs an interview with exiled former president Ratsiraka; authorities promptly shut down the television station.

January 2009 - Thousands take to the streets demanding a new government. Dozens are killed as protests turn violent. Opposition leader Andry Rajoelina calls on Ravalomanana to resign as president and proclaims himself in charge of the country.

February 2009 - Rajoelina is sacked as mayor of Antananarivo. At least 28 people are killed when security forces open fire on an opposition demonstration in the capital. The country's defence minister resigns. Rajoelina and Ravalomanana meet to resolve the crisis but talks stall. The AU warns it will condemn any unconstitutional change of power.

March 2009 - Soldiers in a military camp outside Antananarivo mutiny and say they will defy government orders to repress civilians. Madagascar's army chief issues a 72-hour ultimatum to the feuding political leaders to resolve their disputes or face military intervention. Ravalomanana proposes a referendum as a solution; fearing further unrest he resigns, ceding power to the military. Rajoelina assumes power with military and high court backing. The AU and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) suspend Madagascar.

April 2009 - Security forces clash with supporters loyal to Ravalomanana.

June 2009 - Ravalomanana, in exile in South Africa since March, is sentenced in absentia to four years in prison for abuse of office.

August 2009 - International mediators broker a power-sharing agreement in Mozambique's capital, Maputo, between Madagascar's political rivals who agree to create an interim government to end months of violence. A second round of talks in Maputo ends without agreement on who should be prime minister, or hold other key cabinet posts.

September 2009 - Rajoelina unilaterally names a new "unity" government, amid wide international condemnation.

Andry Rajoelina

October 2009 - Madagascar's opposing political factions agree to retain Rajoelina as head of the transitional government, but will not allow him to run in presidential elections. A consensus prime minister is appointed.

November 2009 - Madagascar's political rivals meet in the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, and agree on a transitional consensus government until fresh polls are held in 2010. Rajoelina retains the presidency but is flanked by two co-presidents.

December 2009 - Rajoelina distances himself from the power-sharing deal, boycotts new talks in Maputo, and announces a plan to hold parliamentary elections in March 2010. Opposition accuses Rajoelina of stalling on implementing a consensus government.

Jan 2010 - Rajoelina snubs the African Union's top diplomat, and again rejects calls for consensus government.

February 2010 - Rajoelina postpones the parliamentary election until May. The AU threatens Rajoelina and his administration with sanctions unless the power-sharing deal is implemented by 16 May 2010.

March 2010 - Rajoelina fails to implement power-sharing deal. The AU imposes targeted sanctions on Rajoelina and his administration.

http://www.irinnews.org/PrintReport.aspx?ReportId=88457

This article also appeared in Pambazuka News 474 for which acknowledgement is made.

Route to the Proximity Peace Talks

2010-03-11T06:25:00.000-08:00

The Transformation of HAMAS

2010-02-18T05:17:00.000-08:00

BY FAWAZ A GERGES

The HAMAS FLAG

Something is stirring within the Hamas body politic, a moderating trend that, if nourished and engaged, could transform Palestinian politics and the Arab-Israeli peace process. There are unmistakable signs that the religiously based radical movement has subtly changed its uncompromising posture on Israel. Although low-key and restrained, those shifts indicate that the movement is searching for a formula that addresses the concerns of Western powers yet avoids alienating its social base.

Far from impulsive and unexpected, Hamas's shift reflects a gradual evolution occurring over the past five years. The big strategic turn occurred in 2005, when Hamas decided to participate in the January 2006 legislative elections and thus tacitly accepted the governing rules of the Palestinian Authority (PA), one of which includes recognition of Israel. Ever since, top Hamas leaders have repeatedly declared they will accept a resolution of the conflict along the 1967 borders. The Damascus-based Khaled Meshal, head of Hamas's political bureau and
considered a hardliner, acknowledged as much in 2008. "We are realists," he said, who recognize that there is "an entity called Israel." Pressed by an Australian journalist on policy changes Hamas might make, Meshal asserted that the organization has shifted on several key points: "Hamas has already changed–we accepted the national accords for a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, and we took part in the 2006 Palestinian elections."

Another senior Hamas leader, Ghazi Hamad, was more specific than Meshal, telling journalists in January 2009 that Hamas would be satisfied with ending Israeli control over the Palestinian areas occupied in the 1967 war–the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. In other words, Hamas would not hold out for liberation of the land that currently includes Israel.

Previously Hamas moderates had called at times for a tahdia (a minor truce, or "calm") or hudna (a longer-term truce, lasting as long as fifty years), which implies some measure of recognition, if only tacit. The moderates justified their policy shift by using Islamic terms (in Islamic history hudnas sometimes develop into permanent truces). Now leaders appear to be going further; they have made a concerted effort to re-educate the rank and file about the necessity of living side by side with their Jewish neighbors, and in so doing mentally prepare them for a permanent settlement. In Gaza's mosques pro-Hamas clerics have begun to cite the example of the famed twelfth-century Muslim military commander and statesman Saladin, who after liberating Jerusalem from the Crusaders allowed them to retain a coastal state in the Levant. The point is that if Saladin could tolerate the warring, bloodthirsty Crusaders, then today's Palestinians should be willing to live peacefully with a Jewish state in their midst.

The Saladin story is important because it provides Hamas with religious legitimacy and allows it to justify the change of direction to followers. Hamas's raison d'être rests on religious legitimation; its leaders understand that they neglect this at their peril. Western leaders and students of international politics should acknowledge that Hamas can no more abandon its commitment to Islamism than the United States can abandon its commitment to liberal democracy. That does not mean Hamas is incapable of change or compromise but simply that its political identity is strongly constituted by its religious legitimation.

It should be emphasized as well that Hamas is not monolithic on the issue of peace. There are multiple, clashing viewpoints and constituencies within the movement. Over the years I have interviewed more than a dozen leaders inside and outside the occupied territories. Although on the whole Hamas's public rhetoric calls for the liberation of all of historic Palestine, not only the territories occupied in 1967, a healthy debate has grown both within and without.

Several factors have played a role in the transformation. They include the burden of governing a war-torn Gaza and the devastation from Israel's 2008-09 attack, which has caused incalculable human suffering and increasing public dissatisfaction in Gaza with Hamas rule.

Before the 2006 parliamentary elections, Hamas was known for its suicide bombers, not its bureaucrats, even though between 2002 and 2006 the organization moved from rejectionism toward participation in a political framework that is a direct product of the Oslo peace process of the 1990s. After the elections, the shift continued. "It is much more difficult to run a government than to oppose and resist Israeli occupation," a senior Hamas leader told me while on official business in Egypt in 2007. "If we do not provide the goods to our people, they'll disown us." Hamas is not just a political party. It's a social movement, and as such it has a long record of concern about and close attention to public opinion. Given the gravity of deteriorating conditions in Gaza and Hamas's weak performance during last year's fighting, it should be no surprise that the organization has undergone a period of fairly intense soul-searching and reassessment of strategic options.

Ironically, despite the West's refusal to regard the Hamas government as legitimate and despite the continuing brutal siege of Gaza, demands for democratic governance within Gaza are driving change. Yet Hamas leaders are fully aware of the danger of alienating more-hardline factions if they show weakness or water down their position and move toward de facto recognition of Israel without getting something substantive in return.

Hamas's strategic predicament lies in striking a balance between, on the one hand, a new moderating and maturing sensibility and, on the other, insistence on the right and imperative of armed resistance. This difficult balance often explains the tensions and contradictions in Hamas's public and private pronouncements.

What is striking about Hamas's shift toward the peace process is that it has come at a time of critical challenges from Al Qaeda-like jihadist groups; a low-intensity civil war with rival Fatah, the ruling party of the PA; and a deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza.

Last summer a militant group called Jund Ansar Allah, or the Warriors of God, one of a handful of Al Qaeda-inspired factions, declared the establishment of an Islamic emirate in Gaza–a flagrant rejection of Hamas's authority. Hamas security forces struck instantly and mercilessly at the Warriors, killing more than twenty members, including the group's leader, Abdel-Latif Moussa. In one stroke, the Hamas leadership sent a message to foes and friends alike that it will not tolerate global jihadist groups like Al Qaeda, which want to turn Gaza into a theater of transnational jihad.

Despite the crushing of Moussa's outfit, the extremist challenge persists. The Israeli siege, in place since 2006, along with the suffering and despair it has caused among Gaza's 1.4 million inhabitants, has driven hundreds of young Palestinians into the arms of small Salafist extremist factions that accuse Hamas of forfeiting the armed struggle and failing to implement Shariah law. Hamas leaders
appear to be worried about the proliferation of these factions and have instructed clerics to warn worshipers against joining such bands.

Compared with these puritanical and nihilistic groups, Hamas is well within the mainstream of Islamist politics. Operationally and ideologically, there are huge differences between Hamas and jihadi extremists such as Al Qaeda–and there's a lot of bad blood. Hamas is a broad-based religious/nationalist resistance whose focus and violence is limited to Palestine/Israel, while Al Qaeda is a small, transnational terrorist network that has carried out attacks worldwide. Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri have vehemently criticized Hamas for its willingness to play politics and negotiate with Israel. Hamas leaders have responded that they know what is good for their people, and they have made it crystal clear they have no interest in transnational militancy. Their overriding goal is political and nationalist rather than ideological and global: to empower Palestinians and liberate the occupied Palestinian territories.

Unlike Al Qaeda and other fringe factions, Hamas is a viable social movement with an extensive social network and a large popular base that has been estimated at several hundred thousand. Given its tradition of sensitivity and responsiveness to Palestinian public opinion, a convincing argument could be made that the recent changes in the organization's conduct can be attributed to the high levels of poverty, unemployment and isolation of Palestinians in Gaza, who fear an even greater deterioration of conditions there.

A further example of Hamas's political and social priorities is its decision to agree in principle to an Egyptian-brokered deal that sketches out a path to peace with Fatah. After two years of bitter and violent division, the warring parties came very close to agreement in October. The deal collapsed at the last moment, but talks continue. There are two points to make about the Egyptian role: first, Hamas leaders say they feel somewhat betrayed by the Egyptians because after pressure from the Americans, Cairo unilaterally revised the final agreed-upon text without consulting the Hamas negotiating team. Second, many Palestinian and Arab observers think Egypt is in no hurry to conclude the Fatah-Hamas talks. They contend that faced with regional challenges and rivals (Iran, Turkey, Syria and Saudi Arabia), the Mubarak regime views its brokering process in the Palestinian-Israeli theater as an important regional asset and a way to solidify its relationship with Washington.

Despite its frequently reactionary rhetoric, Hamas is a rational actor, a conclusion reached by former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy, who also served as Ariel Sharon's national security adviser and who is certainly not a peacenik. The Hamas leadership has undergone a transformation "right under our very noses" by recognizing that "its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future," Halevy wrote in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot just before the 2008 attack on Gaza. He believes Hamas is ready and willing to accept the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. The US Army Strategic Studies Institute published a similar analysis just before the Israeli offensive, concluding that Hamas was considering a shift of its position and that "Israel's stance toward [Hamas]…has been a major obstacle to substantive peacemaking."

Indeed, it could be argued that Hamas has moved closer to a vision of peace consistent with international law and consensus (two separate states in historic Palestine, divided more or less along the '67 borders with East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, and recognition of all states in the region) than the current Israeli governing coalition. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vehemently opposes the establishment of a genuinely viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, and is opposed to giving up any part of Jerusalem–and Netanyahu's governing coalition is more right wing and pro-settlement than he is.

Hamas's political evolution and deepening moderation stand in stark contrast to the rejectionism of the Netanyahu government and call into question which parties are "hardline" and which are "extremist." And at the regional level, a sea change has occurred in the official Arab position toward the Jewish state (the Arab League's 2002 Beirut Declaration, subsequently reiterated, offers full recognition and diplomatic relations if Israel accepts the international consensus regarding a two-state solution), while the attitudes of the Israeli ruling elite have hardened. This marks a transformation of regional politics and a reversal of roles.

Observers might ask, If Hamas is so eager to accept a two-state solution, why doesn't it simply accept the three conditions for engagement required by the so-called diplomatic Quartet (the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations): recognition of Israel, renunciation of violence and acceptance of all previous agreements (primarily, the Oslo Accords)? In my interviews with Hamas
officials, they stress that while they have made significant concessions to the Quartet, it has not lifted the punishing sanctions against Hamas, nor has it pressed Israel to end its siege, which has caused a dire humanitarian crisis. In addition, Hamas leaders believe that recognition of Israel is the last card in their hand and are reluctant to play it before talks even begin. Their diplomatic starting point will be to demand that Israel recognize the national rights of the Palestinians and withdraw from the occupied territories–but it will not be their final position.

There can be no viable, lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians if Hamas is not consulted and if the Palestinians remain divided, with two warring authorities in the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas has the means and public support to undermine any agreement that does not address the legitimate rights and claims of the Palestinian people. Its Fatah/PA rival lacks a popular mandate and the legitimacy needed to implement a resolution of the conflict. PA President Mahmoud Abbas has been weakened by a series of blunders of his own making, and with his moral authority compromised in the eyes of a sizable Palestinian constituency, Abbas is yesterday's man–no matter how long he remains in power as a lame duck, and whether or not he competes in the upcoming presidential elections.

If the United States and Europe engaged Hamas, encouraging it to continue moderating its views instead of ignoring it or, worse yet, seeking its overthrow, the West could test the extent of Hamas's evolution. So far the strategy of isolation and military confrontation–pursued in tandem by Israel and the United States–has not appeared to weaken Hamas significantly. If anything, it has radicalized hundreds of young Palestinians, who have joined extremist factions and reinforced the culture of martyrdom and nihilism. All the while, the siege of Gaza has left a trail of untold pain and suffering.

If the Western powers don't engage Hamas, they will never know if it can evolve into an open, tolerant and peaceful social movement. The jury is still out on whether the Islamist movement can make that painful and ideologically costly transition. But the claim that engaging Hamas legitimizes it does not carry much weight; the organization derives its legitimacy from the Palestinian people, a mandate resoundingly confirmed in the free and fair elections of 2006.

To break the impasse and prevent gains by more extremist factions, the Obama administration and Congress should support a unified Palestinian government that could negotiate peace with Israel. Whatever they think of its ideology, US officials should acknowledge that Hamas is a legitimately elected representative of the Palestinian people, and that any treaty signed by a rump Fatah/PA will not withstand the test of time. And instead of twisting Cairo's arms in a rejectionist direction, Washington should encourage its Egyptian ally to broker a truce between Hamas and Fatah and thus repair the badly frayed Palestinian governing institutions. If the Obama administration continues to shun engagement with Hamas, Europe ought to take the lead in establishing an official connection. European governments have already dealt with Lebanon's Hezbollah, a group similar to Hamas in some respects, and they possess the skills, experience and political weight to help broker a viable peace settlement.

Like it or not, Hamas is the most powerful organization in the occupied territories. It is deeply entrenched in Palestinian society. Neither Israel nor the Western powers can wish it away. The good news, if my reading is correct, is that Hamas has changed, is willing to meet some of the Quartet's conditions and is making domestic political preparations for further changes. But if Hamas is not engaged, and if the siege of Gaza and Palestinian suffering continue without hope of
ending the political impasse, there is a real danger of a regional war.

This article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100125/gerges

How credible is Human Rights Watch on Cuba?

2010-02-16T20:33:00.000-08:00

By Tim Anderson
February 11, 2010 -- In late 2009 the New York-based group Human Rights Watch published a report titled New Castro Same Cuba. Based on the testimony of former prisoners, the report systematically condemns the Cuban government as an “abusive” regime that uses its “repressive machinery … draconian laws and sham trials to incarcerate scores more who have dared to exercise their fundamental freedoms”.

The group says it interviewed 40 political prisoners and claims to have identified extraordinary laws by which Cubans can be imprisoned simply for expressing views critical of their socialist system.
At first glance one might be forgiven for thinking that Cuba must be among the worst of human rights abusers in the Americas. A little reflection, however, might lead one to question such statements coming from the USA, a country with thousands held in an international network of secret prisons, many subject to torture regimes.
So how credible is this scathing report on Cuba? And who does Human Rights Watch represent?
Answering the latter question is a little more difficult than it is for other organisations such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), established by the US government, or even the France-based Reporters without Borders (RSF), funded directly by the US State Department for some of its anti-Cuba campaigns. In the manner of "embedded journalists" who travel with US troops around the world, the NED and RSF can be considered "embedded watchdogs", helping to legitimise or delegitimise regimes, consistent with US policy.
`Privatised, US-based selection of issues'
Human Rights Watch, however, is not funded by the US government. Yet it gets most of its funds from a variety of US foundations, in turn funded by many of the biggest US corporations. These wealthy, private foundations often tie their contributions to particular projects. So for example HRW's Middle East reports often rely on and acknowledge grants from pro-Israel foundations. Other groups ask for a focus on women’s rights or HIV/AIDS issues. More than 90% of HRW’s US$100 million budget in 2009 was "restricted" in this way. In other words, HRW offers a privatised, wealthy, US-based selection of rights issues.
The coordination of all these interests is best illustrated through HRW’s new chairperson, James F. Hoge Jr. A publisher and journalist, Hoge was editor of Foreign Affairs from 1992 to 2009, and a prominent member of that magazine’s sponsor, the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR, regarded as the most influential of US foreign policy think tank, includes much of the US corporate elite (including banks and media) as well as past and present leaders of the two major parties. Past US secretaries of state, such as Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, and the current US secretary of deence Robert Gates are CFR members. It is really a "Who’s Who" of the US elite.
The HRW board is similarly dominated by the US corporate elite, such as banking and corporate media executives, and some academics, but not government officials. The board includes former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda (a former Marxist academic turned right-wing politician), while Chilean-born lawyer José Miguel Vivanco serves as director of HRW’s Americas division.
Vivanco has been the subject of most controversy in Latin America through his attacks on Venezuela and Cuba. If HRW has at times appeared to be acting somewhat independently of US foreign policy, for example, when it supported the US "war on terror" but criticised US operations in Iraq, this has not been the case in Latin America, where the group has closely followed Washington’s line.
Of the HRW's reports on Latin America over the past few years, the only systematic criticism of regimes has been of Venezuela and Cuba. Reports on Brazil, Honduras and Mexico have been on much more specific issues, such as police violence, transgender people's rights and military justice. When it comes to Colombia, HRW has published reports on the use of landmines and the "paramilitary mafias". The latter report does note that Colombia has had worse violence "than almost any other country in the western hemisphere". Indeed, Colombia is way ahead of any other Latin American country in terms of the murder of trade unionists, journalists, lawyers and ordinary people. The Colombian military and its allied right-wing militias have been responsible for most of this slaughter, yet HRW blames left guerrillas and right militias equally, without implicating the regime of Alvaro Uribe, the major Latin American recipient of US aid.
Biased reports
On the other hand, the group’s December 2008 report on Venezuela (A Decade Under Chavez) had an open political motivation. According to Vivanco, it was written “because we wanted to demonstrate to the world that Venezuela is not a model for anyone”. That report was roundly criticised by more than a hundred academics for not meeting "even the most minimal standards of scholarship, impartiality, accuracy of credibility". Rather than a careful report on human rights, it was an attempt to discredit a government, mainly on the basis on allegations of "political discrimination" in employment and the judiciary. The evidence was poor and the approach anything but systematic. HRW disregarded this criticism.
The recent report on Cuba (Different Castro, Same Cuba) is a similar attempt to pillory an entire social system on the basis of some anecdotes. As has been the case for some years, the major US focus on "human rights" in Cuba is on the few dozen people arrested and jailed for what HRW says was simply pursuing their basic rights. The Cuban government says most of these people were taking money from US programs designed to overthrow the Cuban social system. HRW ignores Cuba’s right to protect itself from Washington’s interventionist programs.
In respect of the 40 former prisoners said to have been interviewed in Cuba, HRW draws attention to what it calls a law:

“that allows the state to imprison individuals before they have committed a crime, on the suspicion that they might commit an offence in the future … This ‘dangerousness’ provision [refers to] any behaviour that contradicts socialist norms. The most Orwellian of Cuba’s laws, it captures the essence of the Cuban government’s repressive mindset.”

Other laws have been used, it says, which:

“criminalize the exercise of fundamental freedoms, including laws penalizing contempt, insubordination, and acts against the independence of the state. Indeed, article 62 of the Cuban constitution prohibits the exercise of any basic right that runs contrary to ‘the ends of the socialist state’.”

HRW also claims that in January 2009 a number of young people in eastern Cuba were charged with "dangerousness" simply for being unemployed. One was said to have been jailed for two years just “for being unemployed”. HRW notes that Cuba links some arrests to “a US policy aimed at toppling the Castro government … However, in the scores of cases Human Rights Watch examined for this report, this argument falls flat.” Let’s examine some of the legal and practical aspects of these claims.
Firstly, article 62 of the Cuban constitution actually says that citizens liberties "cannot be used against that established by constitution and the law, nor against the existence and objects of the socialist state, nor against the decision of the Cuban people to build socialism". That is not the same thing as "prohibiting the exercise of any basic right that runs contrary to ‘the ends of the socialist state'". Dissent is not the same thing as attacking the constitutional order.
Legally, there is indeed a principle of "social dangerousness" in Cuban law, but is a concept that qualifies criminal and other offences. For example, "social dangerousness" can aggravate an "act" which is an offence under labour law (Law 176). Conversely, under the Penal Code (art. 14) the absence of "social dangerousness" can mitigate the penalty for an offence. The "dangerous state" defined by the Penal Code (art. 72) is also a qualifier to a range of anti-social conduct, including drunkenness.
In other words, the HRW focus on "dangerousness" is an artefact. There is no substantive offence of "dangerousness". It is a qualifier to actual conduct. Similarly ,the fact of being unemployed in Cuba is not any sort of offence. That is just absurd.
`Dissidents'
However in the case of the celebrated "dissidents" – which include many of the "independent journalists" and "human rights defenders" funded by the US State Department and USAID programs to promote a "transition" in Cuba – the possession of large amounts of money while unemployed can constitute evidence of an offence.
For example, "dissident" Oscar Espinosa Chepe had been unemployed for 10 years at the time of his March 2003 arrest, yet he had more than $7000 hidden in the lining of his suit. That money could have been in the bank with his other savings, but it had recently come from a US-linked group. Similarly, Raúl Rivero, Héctor Palacios, Osvaldo Alfonso Valdés and others were charged because there was evidence (including receipts) that they had received money from US programs aimed to overthrow the Cuban constitution. The HRW report ignores this evidence.
The same Miami groups that sent money to these Cubans (but note, most of the US government money stays in Miami, provoking conflicts within these groups) had organised bombings of tourist hotels in Cuba in the late 1990s. Cuban authorities are unsurprisingly intolerant of this terrorism. The March 2003 arrests were provoked by Cuban fears that the Bush regime would mount an Iraq-style invasion, making use of these paid agents.
After the New Castro report, Human Rights Watch maintained its campaign on behalf of the US-funded "dissidents". It demanded in January 2010 that the Cuban government "immediately cease its harassment of the blind human rights defender Juan Carlos González Leiva, a leader of the Council of Human Rights Rapporteurs". González Leiva heads the Camagüey chapter of the Cuban Foundation for Human Rights, a body which has been funded by Washington via Miami for at least a decade.
Some US "aid" for Cuban agents bypasses Miami. The US government directly supports the "independent journalists" over whom both Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and HRW express so much righteous anger. The US Interests Section in Havana (the de facto embassy) directly prints the Revista de Cuba magazine of the "Márquez Sterling Journalists Society", while El Disidente magazine is printed in Puerto Rico but distributed through the Interests Section.
This information is published in some detail in Cuba but is barely mentioned by HRW, or in any other US reports. Since the US "consensus" has effectively disqualified the entire Cuban system, no regard need be paid to such detail. Yet there can be no doubt that independent countries have the right to self-defence from US subversion and terrorism.
HRW does not condemn US blockade
HRW says the 50-year economic blockade by the US of Cuba has failed, but (unlike the 187 countries that voted against the blockade at the United Nations in 2009) the New York-based group does not condemn this blockade as a violation of human rights.
Rather, HRW argues that Cuba uses the blockade as a pretext for repression. It proposes a new program against Cuba where Europe and Latin America join with Washington in demanding "the unconditional release of all political prisoners", including "the 53 dissidents still in prison from the 2003 crackdown". If these demands do not achieve their end, then countries, including the US, "should be able to choose individually whether or not to impose their own restrictions on Cuba". In fact, the US is the only country with such sanctions against Cuba.
This sort of "human rights intervention" is consistent with US foreign policy in Latin America. Dispensing with troublesome, independent regimes was practised ad nauseum throughout the "American Century", and was always backed by the US corporate elite. Delegitimisation campaigns have always preceded "regime change", for example in Guatemala and Chile. Human Rights Watch apparently sees no abuse of human rights in such interventions.
Sitting down with CIA agents
José Miguel Vivanco has sat on panels with Caleb McCarry, the Bush-appointed and Washington-based "Transition Administrator" for a "Free Cuba", without a word about the appalling human rights abuse implicit in one country pretending to organise the political "transition" of another country. On this count, HRW needs a little homework on article 1 of the International Bill of Rights, which sets out the "right of a people to self-determination".
Vivanco has similarly spoken on panels with former CIA agents Frank Calzon and Carlos Montaner, people who have personally organised terrorist attacks on Cuba. He did not sit down to condemn them for these attacks, but rather to concur with them over support for the US-backed "dissidents". Such is the flexibility of his advocacy.
As a reward for his services, in June 2009 Vivanco received a National Endowment for Democracy award for his work for "Democracy in Cuba". This made the US government link quite clear.
US propaganda campaigns against Cuba have not flagged in half a century, and HRW is just one of the more recent contributors. Responding to cries from the US for "human rights and freedom", one Cuban diplomat wearily replied, "of course, and the US has a very long history in this, from Batista, Somoza, Trujillo, Duvalier, Pinochet, Videla", referring to the US-backed dictators of Cuba, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Chile and Argentina.
All the prisoners HRW spoke with had been released. One wonders what the HRW report might have said had it discovered a hidden prison in Cuba where hundreds were held without charge, tortured and argued to be beyond the reach of any legal system?
In the case of those prisoners – held by the US military in occupied Cuba, at Guantanamo Bay – HRW wrote (in January 2010) that US President Barrack Obama should “renew his pledge” to close the prison. No condemnation of the "abusive" Washington regime for its "repressive machinery". But why should we expect such candour and self-criticism from the US elite?
The lesson from the Human Rights Watch reports on Cuba is that we have nothing to learn about the little Caribbean island – whether on its weaknesses or strengths – from a self-appointed organisation which represents the US corporate and foreign policy elite.
[Tim Anderson is a senior lecturer in political economy at Sydney University.]
A note on sources: Some detail of the charges against the "dissidents" arrested in March 2003 was published at that time by Cuba’s foreign ministry (MINREX), and remains online. More detail emerged in the 2003 book The Dissidents by Cuban journalists Luis Báez and Rosa Miriam Elizalde. Many articles on the US-funded organisations (mostly Miami-based, but also the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders) that work with the US government against Cuba have been written by the French-Canadian journalist Jean-Guy Allard, French academic Salim Lamrani and US journalist Diana Barahona. Human Rights Watch funders appear in its annual reports and linked funding is often acknowledged in its country reports.]

What is Non-Violent Resistance?

2010-02-16T01:37:00.000-08:00

By Sami Awad, Director of the Holy Land Trust

Non-Violence is an alternative to either armed resistance or passive acceptance of the status quo. It is both a strategy and a philosophy which rejects violence as a means to promote change, and instead aims to change power relations through assertive acts of omission (refusal to do something) or commission (actively challenging the status quo). It is a method by which to change the minds of both the oppressor and oppressed so that a new reality can be built upon different perceptions of the ‘other’.

The many tactics of non-violence can be broken down into three broad categories:

1) Civil Disobedience: when individuals or a group refuse to obey rules and laws, therefore undermining the power of the oppressor. For example refusing to respect laws prohibiting the gathering of people, or the waving of a flag as has been the case in Palestine.

2) Reverse Strike: Involves community building and the creation of alter-natives, in order to make a people less dependent on the facilities of their oppressor. This can involve boycotts of the oppressor’s goods and services and the development of alternatives.

3) Direct Action: These are symbolic actions which are specifically directed to gain broad sympathy or express personal grief, opinions and commit-ment to a just cause. Direct action can take many forms along the spectrum between assertiveness and aggressiveness. For example a peaceful protest versus a group of individuals actively removing a roadblock or earth mound.

Successful non-violent campaigns are able to effectively utilize all three of these methods simultaneously.

Non-Violence in Palestine – Past and Present

Despite the common mischaracterization of Palestinian resistance as wholly violent or radical, there is a long and rich history non-violent actions and campaigns, as well as a large number of contemporary ones. For instance:

In 1902, the inhabitants of three Palestinian villages – al-Shajara, Misha and Melhamiyya – held a collective peaceful protest against the takeover of 70,000 dunums (7,000 hectares) of agricultural land by the first European Zionist settlers.

In 1936 Palestinians held a six-month non-violent industrial strike against the British Mandate’s refusal to grant self determination to Palestine. The ultimate aim of the strike was to make Palestine ungovernable by anyone but the Palestinians themselves.

Fifty years later, in 1986, Hannah Siniora, then editor of the East Jerusalem Arabic Daily, called for Pales-tinian civic disobedience by boycotting Israel-made cigarettes. This led to a full-scale Palestinian boycott of Israeli soap, food, water, clothes and other consumer goods.

The 1987-1993 First Intifada was largely conducted non-violently. Palestinians held mass public demonstra-tions, refused to pay taxes, and sought out local alternatives to Israeli facilities. Community leader Mubarak Awad initiated olive tree planting on Palestinian land about to be confiscated by Israeli settlers. Israeli law prohibited any construction on land dedicated to growing fruit. Awad used non-violent resistance, and Israel’s own laws, to challenge the encroaching settlements.

Currently, and especially since construction of the separation Wall began on June 16th 2002, Palestinian villages across the West Bank have cooperated in non-violent resistance. The communities of Jayyous, Budrus, Bil’in, Ni’lin and Umm Salamonah have all non-violently resisted the Wall being built around them. Weekly non-violent demonstrations against the Wall are held in the cities of Bil’in and Nihlin (north of Ramallah) which bring together Palestinians and Israelis, as well international activists.

The Logic of Non-Violent Resistance

The logic of a non-violent strategy to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is simple. Turning this knowledge into a practical campaign effective in achieveing Palestinian goals is much more difficult. Practically, a non-violent strategy allows for a broader and therefore larger participation among the citizenry than armed conflict does. This was true in the First Intifada – largely credited with empowering civil society, women, as well as the young and old. The players in the Second Intifada, on the other hand, were restricted to their ability and willingness to fight violently.

Secondly, by unilaterally removing violence from one side of the equation, there is the possibility of transforming the perception of victimhood within Israel and the international community, which could in turn affect policy. Looking back through this book, it is clear that Palestinians and Israelis live in a rather assymmetric world, and that this conflict disproportionately affects Palestinians. Yet in the minds of Western Europeans and Americans especially, the perception of Palestinians has been shaped more by the sporadic acts of terror, rather than by the accumulation of suffering wrought by occupation.

It is assumed, but not guaranteed, that a non-violent stategy would lead to a decrease in the cycle of death and injury. This sadly could be both bad and good for the Palestinian cause. A decrease in death and carnage is likely to coincide with a sharp decrease in media attention – precisely what is needed most to inspire change in opinion and policy.

Only a strategy that is assertive, coordinated, inclusive, creative, and one that is more and more adept at creating its own media can hope to succeed in making lots of noise without firing any bullets. There have been powerful, if not controversial, attempts by isolated villages to begin building this movement. It is time now to learn from their experiences and begin coordinating a national non-violent strategy.

Israel’s Response to Non-Violence

Israeli, Palestinian and international human rights organizations routinely catalogue, and often film, Israel’s response to non-violent actions. The response usually consists of using overwhelming force to disburse crowds.

Most typically, Israel employs tear gas, concussion grenades and rubber bullets to do so, but on many documented oc-casions they have employed live ammunition, and most re-cently have begun showering protesters with a mixture of sewage water and chemicals from nearby settlements. The saddest part of this response is the effect that it has upon the non-violence movement in general. The fact that protesters have been literally showered in sewage, beaten and sometimes killed in the daily or weekly events, reaffirms the notion amongst those most skeptical of a peaceful strategy that ‘Israel only responds to violence’.

This perception is further strengthened by the lack of accountability laid upon those soldiers and their commanders who routinely sidestep the law in their use of force. Rarely, if ever, has anyone been punished; and never have these punishments made their way up the ranks or into the realm of those who design policies. This lack of accountability has endowed soldiers with a sense of immunity from their actions; a perception which no doubt adds to their willingness to utilize force – even when unneccessary.

This last summer the small village of Ni’lin north of Ramallah began to organize weekly, and sometimes daily demonstations against the encroaching wall. On July 29th, the ten year old unarmed Ahmed Hassan Yusef Musa was struck in the head by a rubber bullet and killed at one such demonstration. The following day, at Ahmed’s funeral – turned demonstration, 19 year old Yusuf Ahmad Amira was shot dead by the IDF. Neither case has resulted in punishment.

This is the same village where a 17 year old girl Salaam Kanan was able to capture video footage of a bound and blindfolded Palestinian man being shot at point blank range by a soldier a few feet from his commanding officer. This particular case received alot of attention; however, Israeli, Palestinian and international human rights organizations insist that many more incidents like this take place when no cameras are present.

Letter from Venezuela - A different perspective to Valentine's Day

2010-02-12T01:10:00.001-08:00

Hello

4F the Day of found Dignity

Today is a very special day for Venezuelans. Its the day when people in Venezuela and around the world got to see for the first time, a young military man by the name of Hugo Chavez Frias. Today is the day, he decided to raise the sword of Bolivar in defense of his country and his country men. Today is the day of the failed coup attempt, in which he took personal responsibilty for the attempt on national t.v., asked the soldiers to lay down their arms and issued his famous statement, "por ahora" for now.

Up until that point the people of Venezuela have been suffering under the yoke of oppression. They were living with price increases every day, to satifity the World Bank and the IMF. The president at that time, Perez along with these institutions lead the country into debt and the people were made to pay. Oil was trading at $7.00 per barrel and 50% of the population was living in poverty, with half of those living in extreme poverty.

The coup attempt opened a window for the people of Venezuela. They woke up from a long slumber and expressed what the people in power had told them not to even pay attention to. Chavez, was only an expression of what many of the people of Venezuela were feeling. They had had enough of the promises of a better life. Yet while the population was getting promises, the people in power were clearly enjoying that better life.

With each new economic plan issued by the government, the IMF and the World Bank, the people of Venezuela found themselves paying more and getting nothing in return but starvation and promises. There were daily price increases on almost every item to pay off the debt . Meanwhile there was no running water, there was little employment, people couldnt buy food, in many of the poor areas there no electricity, children couldnt go to school to get an education if they parents couldnt pay, and no healthcare, but the people in power kept promising. For many of the people in power, this system was quite ok, since they were benefiting from the polices while Venezuelans paid the price. Then came Chavez on the 4th of February, and the souls of the Venezuelan people woke up.

Since then, history has been written. Chavez is now the President of Venezuela.

This week is the 10 year anniversary of the Bolivarian revolution and what accomplishments have been made. There is now running water in most of the areas in Venezuela, children are now going to school, there are free hospitals, roads, trains, schools and universities and low cost fuel and food for all to enjoy. Yes there is stil work to be done, and thats why they have the amendment.

But the story of Venezuela is not only about Venezuela, its about a people who have been trampled on, lied to, manipulated and abused for many years, while being fed promises of a better life. The story of Venezuela is the story of hope to all those people around the world who are looking for a better future, for themselves, their children and their nation. The story of Venezuela is the story of so many of the people of the world, who all aspire to a better day, where they can walk with their heads held high. The story of Venezuela is the story of a people who one day wake up and find their dignity.

Ojette

Sarah Palin's Secret Hand Notes

2010-02-10T07:56:00.000-08:00

Cartoon of the Day: Uncle Obama's Cabin by Carlos Latuff

2010-02-09T07:38:00.000-08:00

Palestine Strategy Study Group: Prerequisites for an effective strategy

2010-02-07T09:00:00.000-08:00

Posted: 06 Feb 2010 08:25 AM PST

Excerpt from an August 2008 Report.

The Palestine Strategy Study Group suggests that the following three requirements are essential for there to be an effective Palestinian national strategy that is unified, strongly formulated, and clearly communicated to the outside world. All three lie firmly within the capacity of Palestinians to achieve. They can be acted upon straight away. This Report calls on all Palestinians to make this happen.

1 THE REQUIREMENT OF A NEW DISCOURSE

An essential prerequisite for seizing the strategic initiative is to shape the nature of the discourse within which the issue of Palestinian independence is discussed.

A discourse is a framework of language within which verbal communication takes place. It is the discourse that determines what can and cannot be said within it and how this is to be understood. At the moment the Palestinian national struggle is nearly always discussed in terms of other peoples’ discourses. This is like playing all football matches on other teams’ pitches. It is always an away game – we begin one goal down. Palestinians must refuse to participate on those terms. We must explain and promote our own discourse and make this the primary language within which the Palestinian issue is discussed.

Two international discourses in particular are inappropriate for the Palestinian case. Unfortunately these are the usual frameworks adopted by the international community.

The first is a peacemaking discourse, which assumes that the problem is one of ‘making peace’ between two equal partners, both of whom have symmetric interests, needs, values and beliefs. This is the wrong discourse because there are not two equal conflict parties. There is an occupying power and a suppressed and physically scattered people not allowed even to have its own identity legally recognised.

The second is a statebuilding discourse, which assumes that the problem is one of ‘building a state’ along the lines attempted in Cambodia or El Salvador or Mozambique – or even to a certain extent in Afghanistan. This is the wrong discourse because there is no Palestinian state.

The result of the dominance of these two discourses (not to mention the prevailing Israeli-US discourse) is that the essence of the Palestinian problem is not recognised in the first place. This is disastrous for the Palestinian cause.

The Palestine Strategy Study Group strongly urges fellow Palestinians to seize their destiny in their own hands by refusing even to enter these other discourses until it is appropriate to do so and to focus all their energies on explaining and promoting the prior Palestinian discourse. The appropriate discourse uses the language, not of peacemaking or statebuilding, but of national self-determination, of liberation, of emancipation from occupation, of individual and collective rights, of international law. This must be the primary discourse. Only when the priorities defined within the primary Palestinian discourse of emancipation are recognised can the hitherto rightly subordinated discourses of peacemaking and statebuilding move properly into the foreground.

Perhaps the most appropriate comparable discourse here is the discourse of decolonisation. This needs to be clearly understood by the international community. For example before 1947 Gandhi’s primary discourse in India was not a peace-making discourse, because he was not making peace with Britain but struggling to end British occupation. And it was not a state building discourse because there was not yet an Indian state. His primary discourse was one of emancipation and national struggle. The same is true of the Palestinian discourse. Palestinians are of course ready to enter serious negotiations. They are more ready to do this than Israelis. But such peacemaking has to be defined within a context that genuinely aims to deliver Palestinian national aspirations. Anything less is simply not peacemaking but a confirmation of continuing occupation and repression.

There is no space to pursue this in detail further here, except to note the importance of combating a central idea in the peacemaking discourse that what is at issue is two equivalent ‘Israeli’ and ‘Palestinian’ ‘narratives’. No doubt there are Israeli and Palestinian narratives. But what is centrally at issue is not a mere Palestinian narrative, but a series of incontrovertible facts – facts of expulsion, exclusion, dominance and occupation bitterly lived out by Palestinians day by day over the past 60 years and still being endured at the present time. This is not a narrative. It is a lived reality. Finding the best strategy for ending this lived reality is the main purpose of this Report.

Transforming the discourse within which it is discussed is a major part of that effort.

For example, here are some undeniable facts. In 1922 there were 84,000 Jews living in Palestine (census data). By 1947 this number had risen to 608,000. Much of this was the result of deliberate policy to build immigrant Jewish numbers in order to create a Jewish state in Palestine. At that time (1947) there were 1,364,000 Palestinians. Palestinians owned some 95% of the land where they had lived for centuries. Yet in November 1947 UN General Assembly Resolution 181 called for a division in which Jewish land would be 57.12% and Palestinian land would be 42.88%. This was not a Security Council Resolution. The Jewish State of Israel was declared in May 1948. By the time of the ceasefire in 1949 Israel held 78% of historic Palestine and the Palestinians were left with 22%. The 1949 Armistice Line was not and is not a legally defined political border. UN General Assembly Resolution 273 (III) of 11 May 1949 admitted Israel into the UN, not a ‘Jewish’ State. Some 750,000 Palestinians had become refugees (about half the population – see UN Resolution 194). In 1967 Israel occupied the remaining 22% of the land of Palestine.

In November 1988 the Palestine Liberation Organisation, recognised by Palestinians as their sole representative, made the extraordinary sacrifice of accepting the existence of the State of Israel and determining to establish an independent Palestinian state on the remaining 22% of historic Palestine in accordance with UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 (PNC Political Communique, Algiers, 15 November, 1988). Has a national movement ever made a concession on a similar scale? To this day this remains the basis for official Palestinian strategic objectives. Yet for twenty years these objectives have not been realised. Why? In negotiations Israelis repeatedly say ‘we do all the giving and the Palestinians do all the taking’. This is the opposite of the truth. Palestinians continue to demand no more than 22% of their historic land. It is Israel that has done all the taking through continuous government backed settler encroachment on this remaining 22%. The aim has been to create ‘facts on the ground’, now reinforced by the ‘security wall’, in order to reduce the land left for a future Palestinian state below even 22%.

This is not just a ‘Palestinian narrative’. These are facts. At the time of writing Israeli government-backed settler encroachment is still continuing relentlessly despite the negotiations. Palestinians know that Israel is not yet a serious negotiating partner. It is on the basis of these facts and on this understanding that the strategic objectives for Palestinians are set out in the next section.

2 THE REQUIREMENT OF NATIONAL UNITY

The second prerequisite is national unity. A house divided against itself cannot stand. Palestinian strategic action is impossible if the Palestinian nation is unable to speak with one voice or to act with one will. This does not mean agreeing about everything. Nor does it cancel internal Palestinian politics. But it does mean that, when it comes to formulating and enacting a national plan in relation to the outside world, Palestinians must subordinate internal politics to the superior demands of shared destiny and unity of purpose.

It is not surprising that, under the intolerable pressures of occupation, deep internal divisions have surfaced, particularly since the passing away of the charismatic national leadership of Yasser Arafat. It is also true that external powers – particularly Israel but also others – have adopted a deliberate policy of ‘divide and rule’. But this is all the more reason for Palestinians to rise above such rivalries, pressures and provocations when formulating a strategy for national liberation. The future in this respect is in our own hands.

After the hopes engendered by the creation of the National Unity Government in the wake of the achievement of the manifestly free and fair January 2006 elections, the events of June 2007 were a severe blow to Palestinian national unity. The Palestine Strategy Study Group has no interest in allotting blame and it is not its business to make pronouncements on internal Palestinian politics. But the Group is unanimous in calling on all political leaders to conduct internal politics in such a way that the Palestinian people present a unified face to the outside world. The Group is convinced that this is also the wish of the vast majority of the Palestinian people. We owe this to all those who have struggled for so long and made such great sacrifices for the national cause. This is essential not least because of the prospect of a possible national referendum on the current negotiations. How can the Palestinian people make an informed decision on a matter of such supreme national importance without prior extensive and informed national debate that rises above partisan political interest? This Report is an attempt to encourage such a debate.

3 THE REQUIREMENT OF STRATEGIC THINKING

The third prerequisite is that as broad a spectrum of Palestinians as possible should join in the task of strategic analysis, strategic choice, and strategic action. In this report the Palestine Strategy Study Group invites readers to participate in a strategic approach to the national project, because this is the essential means for its realisation.

Strategic thinking is a particular kind of thinking. Strategic thinking formulates clear national objectives and keeps them firmly in view throughout. Everything is subordinated to the achievement of those objectives. But analysis is also guided by hard-headed assessment of relative power capabilities – what Palestinians and others can and cannot do on their own or in combination.

Strategic thinking combines ultimate vision with a firm grasp of practical possibilities.

So the analysis of power links objectives to strategy. The concept of power is central in politics and is elaborately discussed in the literature. But it will be taken here in its simplest sense as the ability to get what you want done. If you get what you want done you have power. If you do not get what you want done you do not have power.

Four aspects of power are important in strategic thinking and are worth bearing in mind while reading this report because they have guided its formulation.

First there is the nature of power (types of power). The American political analyst Joseph Nye distinguishes between ‘hard power’ and ‘soft power’. He sees international politics being played out on a three-dimensional chess-board where the top board represents military power, the middle board represents economic power, and the bottom board represents cultural power. Dominance of any one board does not guarantee strategic success. It depends on the situation. For example in the late 1980s the Soviet Union had invested in enormous military power, but was deficient in economic power and had lost cultural power. The collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrated the severe limits of military power on its own over the longer term. In those circumstances military power proved to be no power at all.

Kenneth Boulding similarly distinguishes between ‘threat power’, ‘exchange power’ and ‘integrative power’:

§ · Threat power says ‘do what I want or I will do what you do not want’.

This is an approach that relies on force and the threat of force.

§ · Exchange power says ‘do what I want and I will do what you want’.

This is an approach that emphasises bargaining and compromise.

§ · Integrative power says ‘do what I want because you want it as well’.

This is an approach that focuses on ‘winning hearts and minds’.

Boulding argues that threat power may be effective over the short term, but is less effective than exchange power and integrative power over the middle term. Repression on its own cannot endure. For Boulding integrative power is the most effective form of power over the long term – the power of legitimacy, of loyalty, of cultural identity, of trust. Enduring families, communities, nations and religions in the end rest on integrative power.

In strategic planning agents must choose the most effective form of power (or combination of forms) in different circumstances, and must be prepared to be flexible in switching from one to the other where appropriate.

Second there are the locations of power (who has power).

The strategic analysis that follows is based on an assessment of what Palestinians can and cannot do on their own or in combination with others in relation to different kinds of challenge. Similar analysis is undertaken of Israeli relative power and options, and those of regional third parties and relevant international players including the United States.

It is essential in strategic thinking to take constant account of how the chessboard
looks from the perspective of the opponent. This is fundamental. A player who does not do this – who only looks at the board from its own perspective – will never be a grandmaster. Such a player will lose. The strategic purpose is to exert mounting pressure on the opponent to act as we want. This can only be done if we understand what the opponent desires and fears, and the sources and limits of the opponent’s power. The same applies to inducing third parties to behave in the ways we want them to.

Third there is the application of power (the strategic deployment of threats and inducements).

Strategic players are able to use threats and inducements (sticks and carrots) effectively in influencing the behaviour of others. Strategic threats must be credible to be effective. This almost certainly means that they cannot be a bluff. Palestinians must therefore be prepared to carry out the threatened actions in case the opponent does not heed them. More is said about this in section 7 below.

Fourth there are the uses of power (how to deploy power to attain strategic goals).

In the end the whole purpose of strategic thinking comes down to the way the various forms of power are used. Oliver Ramsbotham distinguishes between the politician, the visionary and the statesperson in this regard:

§ · The politician understands how to manipulate the levers of power inorder to stay in office, but is not able or willing to use power consistently in order to attain strategic purposes. This use of power is ultimately pointless.

§ · The visionary, in contrast, does keep long-term strategic goals clearly in view. The visionary can inspire aspirations and can articulate longings. But the visionary does not keep the short-term workings of power in his sights and
consequently cannot deliver. This use of power is ultimately ineffective.

§ · The statesperson never loses sight of strategic objectives, but also clearly understands the workings of political power. The statesperson is able to step back at times in order then to leap forward further (reculer pour mieux sauter), has a good grasp of timing, can sense opportunities and act on them, remains flexible but determined in the face of unexpected events or setbacks.

When the statesperson meets an impasse, he does not remain clutching the bars that block his path. He lets go, finds another path around the barrier, and suddenly appears from an unexpected side to turn the tables on those who thought that they had stopped him. The statesperson surprises his opponent.

He does not act as his opponent expects. The statesperson is capable of strategic thought and action. This use of power is what achieves lasting results.

The Palestine Strategy Study Group wants Palestinian leaders to be statespersons. It is hoped that the report may make a contribution towards clarifying what this entails.
source: http://www.palestinestrategygroup.ps/Regaining_the_Initiative_FINAL_17082008_(English).pdf

http://www.palestinestrategygroup.ps/ DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE DOCUMENT IN ENGLISH OR ARABIC

Please, Mr. President, Stop Talking Nonsense

2010-02-07T01:04:00.001-08:00

By Alan Hart

06 February, 2010 Alanhart.net

At a town hall meeting in Tampa, Florida on 28 January, President Obama explained what in his view had to happen if there is to be a two-state solution which would see Israel and the Palestinians living side by side in peace and security. He said, “Both sides are going to have to make concessions“.

My own view is that Israel’s still on-going colonization of the occupied West Bank has destroyed the prospect of a two-state solution on any basis the Palestinians could accept. But for the sake of discussion I’ll pretend that is not necessarily so.

Israel is not required to make concessions. Israel is required to accept and implement UN Security Council resolutions which call for an end to its occupation and, more generally, to cease regarding itself as being above and beyond international law.

The Palestinians made the concession necessary from their side long ago.

There were three related reasons why Yasser Arafat and his mainstream PLO leadership colleagues decided that they had got to compromise with Israel if their people were ever to obtain a minimum but just about acceptable amount of justice.

> The first was the reality of the existence of the nuclear-armed Zionist state – not a legitimate existence (as the true story of its creation proves) but a fact of life.

> The second was the knowledge that the Arab regimes were never going to fight Israel to liberate Palestine, and, would collude with Zionism-and-America to prevent the PLO becoming an effective resistance movement in terms of guerrilla activities.

> The third was the realisation that all the major powers of the world were committed to Israel’s existence inside its borders as they were on the eve of the 1967 war.

It took the pragmatic Arafat six long years, from 1973 to 1979, to sell the idea of compromise with Israel first to his Fatah leadership colleagues and then to the Palestine National Council (PNC), the highest decision-making body on the Palestinian side. And it was a mission that Arafat knew from the start could cost him his credibility with his own people and perhaps even his life. Why? Because he was asking them to accept what most thought was “unthinkable” – recognizing and thus legitimizing Israel’s existence inside its pre-1967 borders in return for only 22% of all the land the Palestinians were claiming.

In fact the full extent of the concessions Arafat persuaded his leadership colleagues to accept and be prepared to make went even further than that. Though they could not say so in public until they had something concrete to show for their policy of politics and compromise, they accepted, and Israel was informed, that the Palestinian right of return would have to be limited to the territory of the Palestinian mini-state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem its capital or the whole of Jerusalem an open, undivided city and the capital of two states.

At the end of 1979, shortly after Arafat had persuaded the PNC to endorse his policy of politics and compromise with Israel, I had the first of many meetings with him. His comment on the PNC vote – 296 for his policy and only four against – was this: “How far we have travelled in six years. No more this silly talk of driving the Jews into the sea. (A statement Arafat and his Fatah colleagues never made). Now we are prepared to live side by side with them in a mini-state of our own. It is a miracle.”

It was the miracle of Arafat’s leadership. What he needed thereafter was an Israeli partner for peace. At a point it seemed that Israeli Prime Minister Rabin might be the partner, but he was assassinated by a Zionist zealot. The assassin was not de-ranged. He knew exactly what he was doing. Killing the peace process Arafat’s policy of politics and compromise had set in motion.

There are no more concessions the Palestinians can make for peace. President Obama’s statement that they must is absurd and obscene. Unclear is whether he was speaking out of ignorance of real history or from Zionism’s script.

Don't worry about it....They're not American

2010-02-06T03:31:00.000-08:00

Letter from Venezuela - The Fourth Earthquake in Haiti

2010-02-06T00:50:00.000-08:00

Hello
As everyone already knows, Haiti has been shaken by three earthquakes. But there was a fourth one, which no one really saw. The fourth one highlighted the difference between the political systems of the U.S. and Latin America.

When the earthquake occured, Venezuela was quick to send food, water, clothing and technical help to rescue survivors. As with many countries all over the globe, they sent aid immediately. Citizens all over the world collected food, water, toothpaste, soap, clothing and whatever else they thought the Haitians needed to help them. The Cubans, of course sent a medical team, Bolivia sent their blood, they open blood banks where people could give their life source to the people of Haiti. Nicaragua sent food, medicines and technical aid.

The U.S. took some time to make a commitment, finally they decided to send troops, and to tell all the governments that were sending aid to Haiti, they had to be under U.S. military domination. The U.S. military was going to lead and direct all the efforts as well as determine, what aid came into the country and how it was distributed. Fourteen thousand troops were dispatched to Haiti. This caused a clog in the distribution system, and to this day, many of the Haitians have not received the materials that were sent to them.

Furthermore, the troops caused a lot of problems in the rescue effort, and everyone needed to go to the U.S. military before they decided to actually excavate buildings to save the lives of the Haitian people. The Italians, Mexicans, the French as well as the countries of the south protested this U.S. military depolyment, which fell on deaf ears.

Recently, there were a group of U.S. citizens who were found with 33 Haitian children. They were planning to take the children out of the country. Already, two plane loads of Haitian children were taken, one to Florida, the other to Amsterdam. No one knows who and how these children were taken. They were taken for supposingly "adoption" in these countries days after the earthquake shook the Nation and everyone was desperate. Im asking myself, with all the Haitians the U.S. doesn't want in the country, why would they allow a plane load of Haitian children for adoption to come days after a natural disaster?

Recently, the countries of the ALBA announced they were going to lead the reconstruction of Haiti. This is important because Haiti is a poor and indebted country without many resources. President Chavez announced a billion dollar effort to help to reconstruct the country which includes not only housing for the Haitians but food and a plan to rebuilt their forrest. The forest are important beecause its the environmental damage caused by the extreme poverty which leads to the many of the natural disasters in Haiti.

The fourth earthquake shows you what happens when you have a political and economic system that is focused on the needs of the people but instead on their exploitation. When you are interested in helping people you send the aid they need, when you are interested in domination and exploitation, you send troops.

Ojette