Watch Budrus even if it’s a one-hit wonder
June 13th, 2011 § 4 Comments
This review first appeared in +972 Magazine.
The Israeli army in Budrus
Have you heard of Budrus? It’s a Palestinian farming village of about 1,500 people near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. In 2003 Israel began constructing its “separation barrier” (otherwise known as the “Apartheid wall”) on the village’s territory. Its planned path would cut through Budrus’s cemetery and confiscate 300 acres of land, demolishing thousands of olive trees and the inhabitants’ livelihood. But after 55 unarmed demonstrations in less than one year, Israel rerouted the wall, dramatically reducing the confiscated territory to 5%. Although it led to more non-violent resistance in other villages facing similar threats, Budrus’s success is rare. To date it’s one of the first and only examples of how organized non-violent resistance resulted in the pulling back of Israeli forces.
Burdrus’s inspiring story became the subject of an award-winning 2009 documentary that was released on DVD this year. Written and directed by Julia Bacha who produced it with Ronit Avni and Rula Salameh, the film charts the village’s struggle mainly through the eyes of a Palestinian father, daughter and Israeli soldier.
Ayed Morrar spent 7 years in an Israeli jail for organizing Fatah activities during the first intifada even though he never “injured or killed an Israeli”. During his imprisonment he educated himself about non-violent resistance history and co-founded the West Bank’s first Popular Committee Against the Wall to stop Budrus’s planned demolition. Morrar admits that peaceful resistance was adopted as a tactic because it was Budrus’s only option. What kind of force can a tiny village show against one of the world’s mightiest armies? The only (unplanned) instance of rock-throwing was met with stun grenades, tear gas, live bullets and violent arrest by the Israelis.
Selmiyyeh?
June 11th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
This piece was published at Foreign Policy.
“Selmiyyeh, selmiyyeh” — “peaceful, peaceful” — was one of the Tunisian revolution’s most contagious slogans. It was chanted in Egypt, where in some remarkable cases protesters defused state violence simply by telling policemen to calm down and not be scared. In both countries, largely nonviolent demonstrations and strikes succeeded in splitting the military high command from the ruling family and its cronies, and civil war was avoided. In both countries, state institutions proved themselves stronger than the regimes that had hijacked them. Although protesters unashamedly fought back (with rocks, not guns) when attacked, the success of their largely peaceful mass movements seemed an Arab vindication of Gandhian nonviolent resistance strategies. But then came the much more difficult uprisings in Bahrain, Libya, and Syria.
Even after at least 1,300 deaths and more than 10,000 detentions, according to human rights groups, “selmiyyeh” still resounds on Syrian streets. It’s obvious why protest organizers want to keep it that way. Controlling the big guns and fielding the best-trained fighters, the regime would emerge victorious from any pitched battle. Oppositional violence, moreover, would alienate those constituencies the uprising is working so hard to win over: the upper-middle class, religious minorities, the stability-firsters. It would push the uprising off the moral high ground and thereby relieve international pressure against the regime. It would also serve regime propaganda, which against all evidence portrays the unarmed protesters as highly organized groups of armed infiltrators and Salafi terrorists.
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The murder of Syed Saleem Shahzad
June 11th, 2011 § 1 Comment
I’ll be reviewing Syed Saleem Shahzad’s book here shortly. Meanwhile here is ‘Pakistan: The most dangerous place to report from,’ an episode of Al Jazeera’s Listening Post which focuses on his assassination.
Peace Caravan Encounters Massacres, Military Abuses and Disappearances in Torreón
June 10th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Man beaten by Mexican soldiers
by Kristin Bricker
This article first appeared at the Americas Program.
Gunmen armed with AR-15 and AK-47 assault rifles massacred thirteen people in a Torreón drug rehabilitation center on Wednesday. The massacre occurred less than twenty-four hours before poet Javier Sicilia and his Citizens Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity were scheduled to arrive in Torreón for a rally against the drug war. The rehabilitation center is located just three blocks from the rally site.
Despite suspicions amongst some caravan participants that the massacre was an attempt to scare them away from Torreón, Sicilia refused to cancel the event in that city. “The march absolutely will not be postponed,” Sicilia told a press conference in Monterrey just before the caravan left for Torreón.
When the caravan arrived in Torreón, puddles of dried blood still filled the bullet-ridden rehabilitation center and ran out the door onto the sidewalk.
Sicilia had no choice but to hold the event as planned in Torreón. In a city ravaged by massacres, military abuses, journalist assassinations, and disappearances, residents risked their lives by simply organizing the anti-war rally.
According to participants, the massacre did have an impact on turnout though. “We live in constant fear,” said one protester. “There were people who wanted to be here today, but yesterday’s attack made them want to stay shut inside their homes.”
Olga Reyes Salazar, who has suffered the murder of six family members over the past two-and-a-half years in Ciudad Juarez, told Torreón residents that they can’t let fear overcome them. “We’re all afraid,” she told the crowd. “But if they keep intimidating us, we’re all just going to lock ourselves in our homes, and they’ll go there to kill us. So let’s leave our homes now and raise our voices against this government that is cruelly killing us.”
Mexican Community Uses Barricades to Drive Out Organized Crime and Political Parties
June 9th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
by Kristin Bricker
This article first appeared at Upside Down World.
Armed with machetes, sticks, and farm tools, residents of Cherán, Michoacan, covered their faces with bandanas and set up barricades around their community on April 15. It is a scene reminiscent of Oaxaca in 2006, except this time, the barricades aren’t meant to keep out paramilitary death squads; they keep out organized crime.
The barricades have come at a cost for the town’s 12,600 residents. Schools have been shut down since Easter, and the economy has come to a standstill. However, without the barricades, kidnappers and illegal loggers who are in league with organized crime would continue to prey upon the town with complete impunity. For Cherán’s residents, unabated impunity is unacceptable, because in addition to the usual laundry list of drug war crimes–murder, kidnapping, extortion, and torture–the illegal loggers, protected by organized crime, have destroyed an estimated 80% of Cherán’s woodlands.
When the municipal, state, and federal governments refused to protect Cherán from organized crime, the community took matters into its own hands. Now, not only are they driving organized crime out of they’re community, they’re also kicking out the political parties, whom they blame for allowing insecurity and crime in Cherán to spiral out of control.
The Specter of Syrian Civil War
June 8th, 2011 § 1 Comment
Uncivilized Relations: Israel confronts its neighbours
June 8th, 2011 § 1 Comment
by Brenda Heard
The turmoil that has beleaguered the Middle East for decades has been described many ways. On the 5th of June, however, the terminology turned vulgar. This enduring conflict was publically characterised as a ‘war between the civilized man and the savage’. Boldly announced with a plea to ‘support Israel/defeat Jihad’, the full page advertisement ran in the New York Post’s special section covering the city’s ‘Celebrate Israel’ parade.
Declaring the Muslim people ‘savage’ is, of course, just a school-yard taunt from Islamaphobe Pamela Geller, who gleefully takes credit for the advertisement. Had her rant been limited to her own blog, we might easily dismiss it. The problem lies in its acceptance into mainstream discourse. The Post may be tabloid journalism, but its paper edition remains the seventh most popular paper in America. And this sort of crude advertisement for a political cause panders to a public comfortable with the mind-set of ‘don’t bore me with the details’.
But the details are critical if we are to consider a conflict that has taken thousands of lives. How can we, for instance, reconcile the concept of ‘civilized’ with the reality of shooting unarmed protesters? The advertisement asks us to accept Israel as ‘civilized’; yet as these very words were first read, Israeli soldiers were shooting into a crowd of Syrian-Palestinians, killing 24 and injuring another 350.
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
June 8th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, by the great documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, is a “series of films about how humans have been colonised by the machines they have built. Although we don’t realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.”
Love and Power
How to avoid extrajudicial execution in Honduras: Throw popcorn at police
June 7th, 2011 § 6 Comments
Death warrant (Photo from tiempo.hn)
Two men were recently tied up, shot, and killed down the street from my friend’s house in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa. When my friend happened upon the scene at around 9 p.m., a forensic investigator commented to him that these were the fourth and fifth cadavers he had personally dealt with that evening and that the number typically doubled by the end of the night. The investigator also insinuated that responsibility for these two lay with the security organs of the state; recounting the story, my friend guiltily confessed his momentary approval of the idea that the Honduran police force had swiftly eliminated persons who otherwise might have eliminated him.
The moral precariousness of popular consent in matters of extrajudicial treatment of hypothetically dangerous human beings has recently been underscored in the much-publicized case of the shooting deaths by police of seven presumed gang members in the neighborhood of Ciudad Planeta in the northwestern Honduran city of La Lima last month. Though the police have advertised the deaths as the result of a shootout between themselves and la mara 18 (Gang 18), family members of the deceased deny that there was any armed confrontation and argue that the corpses were merely decorated with weapons afterward.
The incident attracted the attention of Sandra Ponce, head of the Human Rights Unit of the Attorney General’s Office in Honduras, who demanded an immediate police report complete with names of the police officers involved. This elicited the accusation from Honduran vice minister of Security Armando Calidonio that human rights officials are “encouraging delinquents”.
According to Calidonio, Ponce had failed to understand that the delinquents in this particular encounter “were not throwing popcorn, candy, or rice at the police, as happens at weddings”. As for Ponce’s assessment of the seriousness of the matter and the fact that “we are talking about the lives of seven people here”, other typical arguments in favor of the police include that gang members are not human beings anyway.
