South Africa built a special hell for asylum seekers: Refugee Reception Offices

July 23, 2015 by 14 Comments

A report released yesterday in Johannesburg reveals “shocking levels of corruption and serial abuse” at South African refugee centers. Of the five Refugee Reception Offices, Marabastad, in Pretoria, wins the Most Corrupt Award … again. The report, while dismaying, is no shock.

According to the report’s introduction, “Established in 1998, South Africa’s asylum system was designed to identify those individuals in need of protection in accordance with the country’s international obligations and democratic character.” By 1998, the South African government had traded in the Reconstruction and Development Programme, or RDP, for the Growth, Employment and Redistribution, or GEAR, strategy, which traded any promise of social justice for something called “growth.” Asylum seekers and refugees didn’t fall into the GEAR strategy, and so by the time South Africa decided it was time for asylum, it was already too late: “The current state of affairs is the product of a deliberate government choice to avoid addressing fundamental issues in the asylum system.”

Here’s Marabastad in 2008: “Asylum applicants at Marabastad have taken to sleeping outside the office, in the hope that this will improve their chances of getting inside. There are regularly between eighty and three hundred people sleeping outside. At night armed criminals visit the site. Incidents of theft are common. There have been several reports of rape. There is no shelter in the vicinity of the office and people often endure rain and very cold conditions. Many women sleep with babies by their side. On some occasions the police have visited during the night and arrested asylum seekers or extorted them for bribes. Fights about places in the queue are common, sometimes degenerating into the throwing of bricks and stones and leading to several cases of hospitalisation. On at least one occasion metropolitan officials arrived in the morning to clear all temporary shelters, bedding, and belongings of people gathered outside the office.” In 2011, “the conditions at Marabastad … still are, to most objective onlookers, appalling.”

And now, in 2015, Marabastad is the most corrupt, and this in South Africa, which had one of the highest asylum and refugee rejection rates in the world last year, rejecting between 90% and 100% of all asylum applications processed from Mozambique, Lesotho, Malawi, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Pakistan, Ghana, India, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Burundi and Uganda. South Africa is the land where all roads lead to rejection.

To the toxic brew of incompetence, underfunding, and xenophobic and sexist violence, yesterday’s report adds corruption. One has to pay to play, and many are the ways: pay to cross the border, move up the line, renew a permit, pay spurious fines, avoid arrest, and generally improve `service.’

Women figure in this variously. First, the researchers interviewed mostly men because there were more men than women outside the reception centers and because “women were generally less willing to participate.”

Second, in discussing the Department of Home Affairs, or DHA, tepid response to corruption, the report tells a story, “In July 2014, an asylum seeker told Lawyers for Human Rights that a refugee status determination officer (RSDO) at the Marabastad refugee reception office had asked her for R2500 in exchange for refugee status. LHR contacted the counter-corruption unit, which agreed to set up a sting operation.” What followed was a nightmare of bungling and general lack of concern on the part of the DHA, so that, in the end, all the weight falls on the most vulnerable and least able: “Asylum seekers must be willing to come forward, despite fear of reprisals, and must be able to provide … details. The DHA does not target the wider processes outside of these individual complaints.”

Finally, one asylum seeker in Cape Town reports: “People ask for money. Officials don’t help you or tell you what is happening. They play on their phones. Security guards ask for money but not openly. It is a previously made deal. Then they grab the people and take them to the front of the queue. Never women. People from Zim only get a one month extension and other people from other countries get 3 to 6 months.”

Never women.

 

(Photo Credit: Kristy Siegfried / IRIN)

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In France, isolation is not the answer to anything!

July 22, 2015 by Leave a Comment

In the manner of black French citizens, as recently described in the documentary Too Black To Be French, “you know you are black when…” the question of social, racial categories reappears in prison. Today inside the prisons in France one may ask: “You know you are being radicalized when the French prison system isolate you to treat you as a person of no rights (personne de non-droit).“

Since the occurrence of various acts of sectarian violence, the discourse of Islamic radicalization has occupied the political scene, with the help of media propaganda. The January attacks in Paris triggered diverse types of responses from the French government. In October 2014, Prime Minister Manuel Valls had already taken a “radical” approach, ordering an experimental isolation of about ten inmates labeled “radicalized” in the prison of Fresnes, in the suburb of Paris. In the aftermath of the attacks, it was easy to extend this experiment to three other prisons.

However, the Minister of Justice Christiane Taubira expressed her reservations about this approach, and demanded an evaluation of the procedure. The method included a series of interviews of all the inmates concerned.

The report came out recently. It details in eight points the reasons they advise against this approach. The report debunks many of the myths of the security mentality of our time. “To group together the inmates who are labeled radicalized presents some risks that were not evaluated properly.” As the detainees themselves explained, a major risk is the creation of new ways of casting out sections of the population already frequently discriminated against.

The fact that two of the three perpetrators had been in prison fueled the idea that Islamic radicalization was occurring mainly in French prisons. The report demonstrates that although proselytizing in prison has grown, prison is not the main place of radicalization. Only 16% of the people who have been incarcerated for acts of Islamic radicalism had been in prison before.

In fact, the report describes the absence of legal structures for inmates who are designated as “radicalized.” They are removed from the array of possible recourses, restraining their rights and worsening their condition of detention. The report draws attention to an eventual drift toward more isolation of inmates.

Since these special units are mainly located around Paris and in the North, the report points out that geographic distance between inmates and their families aggravates the risk of becoming vulnerable to the influence of radical doctrine.

In previous years, the Sarkozy administration put in place many appearance-based prejudices while reducing social aid, radically isolating many according to racial criteria that don’t pertain to the civil legal code. This approach tainted many processes of identification and incarceration. The report remarks that there is no reliable and just mode of selection of these inmates since many have various levels of self-identification and understandings of their own origins.

As a result of the toughening of sanctions under the Sarkozy administration, the prisons are grossly overpopulated and for that reason provide a fertile ground for all kinds of radicalization. Fleury-Merogis prison has a capacity of 2600 inmates. It currently houses 4200 people. Moreover, about 50 % of the prisoners are of Muslim origin while only 5 to 10% of the French population has Muslim roots. The report recognizes that the current government has taken seriously this issue but has not been able to significantly reduce the number or proporations of inmates.

The report asks if programs of “de-radicalization” would not weaken the reintegration of this new category of inmates, often arbitrarily selected. Moreover, these programs are being contracted and no reliable evaluations have been published thus far. It would be better to allocate public funds to already well-established programs of reintegration that have been defunded in the past.

After the January attacks, the Association of Victims of Terrorism was asked to survey the prisons to improve the identification of inmates in need of de-radicalization. In response, the Association warned against the isolation of inmates according to sketchy criteria that belong to the mythology and rhetoric of fear. The prison personnel also don’t support such measures of isolation.

In this time of economic unrest with the neoliberal order dictating civil norms, the proper response to all forms of radicalism and narrow parochialism and nationalism must be more freedom and more democracy, not less. The problems are in society; prisons are just the reflection of the formation of a society of global exclusion.

(Photo Credit: Liberation / Fred Dufour /  AFP)

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In the night and fog of the war on drugs, children are being massacred

July 21, 2015 by Leave a Comment

The United States declared a war on drugs and sent Mexico, and in particular Mexican indigenous and rural women and children, straight to hell. The Mexican army repeatedly massacres women and children, and each incident is greeted with shock and outrage … and the ticking of a stopwatch until the next bloodletting. Last June: Tlatlaya, in Mexico State. Last September: the Ayotzinapa massacre, in Iguala, Guerrero. This weekend, it was Santa María Ostula, in Michoacán. The weekend before, it was Calera, in Zacatecas. In each instance, and in all the non-instances in between, children are disappearing, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes silently, other times `without notice’, and it is all part of the plan.

Last year, Mexican Army soldiers swooped down on Tlatlaya in an ostensible drug raid. According to documents made public this month, they had orders to kill. For the few who survived, like Clara Gómez González, this was old news. They saw the soldiers come in, guns and eyes blazing. For a year, Clara Gómez González has charged the army with premeditated murder. According to Clara Gómez González, it was night, and she was sitting in the corner of a cellar when the door burst open and the soldiers poured in, firing tracer bullets. She immediately went to find her 14-year old daughter Erika Gómez. She found her lying on the ground, face down, shot in the leg. She took her pulse. She was alive: “I couldn’t speak. Then more shots poured in. I turned to hide. I never saw Erika again.”

Now, all Clara Gómez González wants is justice for her daughter. The State might possibly offer Clara Gómez González money. But justice? Never. Children are disappearing. Sometimes spectacularly, sometimes silently, other times `without notice’. None of this is new.

More recently, on July 7, in Calera, seven day laborers, farm workers, were abducted by the armed forces. Their bodies were later found in a pit.. They were all shot at point blank range, almost all in the neck. Two women and five men tried to make some money working the land to send home to their families. Their children are also disappearing.

This past weekend, the army descended on Santa María Ostula, guns blazing. It’s not clear how many were killed and injured, but this much is clear: the army killed 6-year-old Neymi Natali Pineda Reyes and 12-year-old Idilberto Reyes García. According to the boy’s aunt, Edith Balviera, Idilberto was out buying diapers. According to the girl’s aunt Guadalupe, Neymi was playing. The army claims the children were bystanders caught in crossfire. There were no bystanders. There was no crossfire or any accident. There was a massacre … again.

In the world in which everyone is deemed criminal, the army is trained to go in guns blazing, tear gas canisters and incendiary bombs flying. Don’t worry. The State will or won’t pay. Children will continue to disappear, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes silently, other times `without notice’. It’s all part of the plan.

 

 

(Photo Credit: Alejandro Amado, http://subversiones.org) (Photo Credit: sopitas.com)

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Teesta Setalvad and the miracle of women’s justice

July 20, 2015 by 32 Comments

In India, Narendra Modi’s government is going to extraordinary lengths to silence and crush social justice activist Teesta Setalvad. While the Indian press has taken up the story, the world press, with the exception of Reuters, has chosen to look the other way. Teesta Setalvad has refused to look the other way, and that’s why she’s in trouble.

In February 2002 “intercommunal” violence erupted in the Indian state of Gujarat. Within a week, over 1000 Muslims had been killed. From the outset, Teesta Setalvad fixed everyone’s eyes on the violence and then on the State’s role in the intensity and expanse of that violence. Narendra Modi was Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time.

While the Modi administration was trying to “explain” the violence as communal, Teesta Setalvad wrote, in 2002, “Despite the fact that the minority community was being attacked by huge and well-armed mobs, Muslims seemed to have been the main target of police firing. Of the 40 people killed in police firing at Morarji Chowk and Charodia Chowk in Ahmedabad on 28 February all were Muslim.”

Women and children were targeted with extreme sexual violence and other forms of torture. Again, Teesta Setalvad immediately made sure everyone understood the police participation in this, “Women bore the brunt of police repression. They were subjected to verbal abuse of a highly sexualized nature and often mercilessly beaten. Even pregnant women were brutally beaten; indeed they seemed to have attracted special attention from the police, and in many cases, the beating was accompanied by statements such as `Let it die before it is born’.”

Teesta Setalvad insisted that the facts must first be determined and then adjudicated. She headed the Concerned Citizens Tribunal, which investigated the entire situation, including the initial incidents, and found rampant and systematic violence against women and girls. The Tribunal worked assiduously and at the end of 2002 released its three volume findings, Crime Against Humanity.

Teesta Setalvad then founded the magazine Communalism Combat; the ngo Citizens for Justice and Peace; and the human rights organization Sabrang, and kept the focus on the State’s guilt in the Gujarat pogroms. In 2012, 32 people, including a former state minister, of involvement in the violence. Teesta Setalvad responded, “For the first time, this judgment actually goes beyond neighborhood perpetrators and goes up to the political conspiracy. The fact that convictions have gone that high means the conspiracy charge has been accepted and the political influencing of the mobs has been accepted by the judge. This is a huge victory for justice.”

In April 2015, the Modi national government placed the Ford Foundation on a national security watch list, because of its funding the Sabrang Trust. The State accused Teesta Setalvad of “disturbing the communal harmony here and carrying out anti-national propaganda against India in foreign countries.”

On July 15, the police raided Teesta Setalvad’s home and offices. Many view this shameful hounding as a concerted campaign of intimidation and suppression. Teesta Setalvad’s response to the most recent assaults shows the power of the pursuit of justice: “Despite being agnostic, we do sometimes believe in miracles. Through the work we have committed our lives to … I have believed in the purity of motive and the sincerity of faith …The struggle for justice for the victims of the Gujarat riots has validated this belief. It has been awe-inspiring to watch the raw courage of witness survivors – firm in the belief that truth is on their side – testifying before the courts. It is their audacity that has led to the life imprisonment of 120 people. The fact that they stood with us, and we with them, has made them unflinchingly loyal to us. Even in these hours when state vendetta has been unleashed upon us, they are praying for us.”

Teesta Setalvad has steadfastly refused to look the other way. She argues for the miracle of solidarity and the necessity for justice. Do not let the world look the other way. Stand with Teesta Setalvad, firm in the belief in the audacity and miracle of women’s justice.

(Photo Credit: twocircles.net) (Image Credit: The Indian Express)

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What happened to Sandra Bland? The routine tortured death of Black women in jail

July 17, 2015 by 29 Comments

#BlackLivesMatter activist and outspoken critic of police brutality Sandra Bland was “found” dead in a Texas jail. The jail claims Sandra Bland killed herself. The FBI is investigating. Waller County, where the jail is located, is now “discovered” as fraught with racial tensions, “racism from cradle to grave.” Some describe the circumstances as “mysterious”.

Sandra Bland’s arrest, for a minor traffic violation, was caught on video. At one point, she is thrown to the ground, and she yells, “You just slammed my head into the ground. Do you not even care about that? I can’t even hear.” After that, all is silence.

That’s the ordinary of U.S. jails, and so is abuse, torture, rape and death, especially for Black women. That’s not overstated. The jails of America are filling up to choking as the prisons are “releasing”, and women, and especially Black women, have been the principle actors, and targets, of this new phase of mass incarceration. At Women In and Beyond the Global, we have been covering this trend for years. Here are just some of the individual women’s stories we’ve followed.

In 1998 Gina Muniz was incarcerated in the LA County Jail and the California state prison system for her first arrest, related to the theft of $200 related to a rapid onset of drug addiction-in the aftermath of her father’s death. The theft was bizarrely classified as a carjacking, although no one was harmed, and no car was stolen. Muniz received life in prison; her lawyer told her she was agreeing to seven years when she pled guilty. Six months after Muniz was arrested, she was dead: “Gina Muniz, September 2000, handcuffed to her deathbed and under 24-hour-guard in Modesto Community Hospital. Next to her is her daughter Amanda. Gina suffered horribly for six months from diagnosed but untreated cervical cancer. When it was diagnosed in L.A. County Jail, early and aggressive treatment would more than likely have saved Gina’s life. Grace Ortega, her mother, was finally able to win compassionate release for her daughter two days before her death, so that she could die at home”. Compassionate release.

Amy Lynn Cowling went for a drive on Christmas Eve, 2010 in East Texas. 33 years old, a grandmother of a one-day old child, bipolar, methadone dependent, and with only one kidney, Amy Lynn Cowling was picked up for speeding, then arrested for some outstanding warrants on minor theft charges and traffic violations. Five days later, in the Gregg County Jail after a day of wailing and seizures, of excruciating pain and suffering, of agony, Amy Lynn Cowling died. Amy Lynn Cowling died after five days of her family begging and pleading with the prison staff to make sure they gave her the life sustaining medicines she needed. The pills were just down the hall, in Amy Lynn Cowling’s purse, in the jail storage room. Nobody went, nobody came. Amy Lynn Cowling died.

A year before, in Onondaga County Justice Center, in upstate New York, Chuneice Patterson, 21 years old, Black woman, died similarly, screaming and writhing in pain and ignored.

In 2012, Autumn Miller was in the Jesse R. Dawson State Jail, in Dallas, Texas, for a probation violation. She was in for a year. Miller knew something was wrong. She asked for a PAP smear and for a pregnancy test. She was denied. Her cramps and pain increased. One night, her pains became too intense for guards to ignore, and they took Miller down to the `medical unit’. There are no doctors at Dawson overnight, and so guards `took care’ of Miller. The guards said Miller merely had to go to the bathroom, gave her a menstrual pad and locked her in a holding cell. Despite Miller’s pleas, nobody came in to check, and so Autumn Miller gave birth to Gracie Miller, in the holding cell toilet. Guards then came in, shackled and handcuffed the mother, and took mother and daughter to the hospital. Gracie died four days later, in her shackled mother’s handcuffed arms.

Alisha was tried and charged as an adult in DC Superior Court when she was 16 years old. She was sent to DC’s Correctional Treatment Facility (CTF). There are no special units for female youth at CTF, so Alisha was sent to solitary confinement. For weeks at a time, she was on lockdown for 23 hours a day, unable to attend school, and could not participate in any programming available at the jail. Her attorney fought to move her to a more appropriate place that could also address her mental health concerns, but she remained there for a year and a half. In solitary confinement, she attempted suicide.

In early February 2015, Natasha McKenna was killed by six officers in the Fairfax County Jail, in northern Virginia near Washington, DC. McKenna was 37 years old. She was the mother of a 7-year-old daughter. She was living with schizophrenia. She was a diminutive woman, 5 feet 3 inches, 130 pounds. And she was Black. She was killed during a so-called cell extraction, when six deputies tackled her and took care of business.

This is the cruel and usual treatment of women in U.S. jails, across the country. There is no mystery here. There is no mystery concerning what happened to Sandra Bland. Hers was a death foretold. #SayHerName I can’t even hear.

 

(Photo Credit: Facebook) (Video Credit: YouTube)

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#SetHerFree: Yarl’s Wood must give inmates access to guide on their rights

July 16, 2015 by Leave a Comment

On Tuesday, the United Kingdom’s Home Office informed staff at Yarl’s Wood that they must return to prisoners a guide on their rights as asylum seekers and, more generally, people facing deportation. This self-help guide has been circulating in English immigration detention centers for more than ten years, but only recently did the prison staff decide that, “given the nature of the content”, it’s contraband. “The publication, entitled For Asylum Seekers and their Supporters, a Self-Help Guide Against Detention and Deportation, advises on how to pursue legal rights and seek help.” Sound pretty dangerous, doesn’t it?

Since April, Alice Wanja-Maina has been a prisoner in Yarl’s Wood. She explains, “I signed for them but then they took them away. The guides help us fight deportation and detention. The guards said you are not going to have them, that they were banned and that I was going to be deported back to Kenya. The book is really good. It helps us prepare our cases. We don’t have lawyers to help us. This gives us the confidence to carry on. To be enclosed in a detention centre like this is really bad. They treat us like animals. I can’t sleep. I suffered rape and torture in Kenya at the hands of a traditional African organisation which is opposed to western culture. I can’t go back.”

When Alice Wanja-Maina says, “They treat us like animals,” she echoes the statement of a Yarl’s Wood manager, chatting with his mates about Yarl’s Woods African women prisoners: “They’re animals. They’re beasties. They’re all animals. They’re caged animals. Right? Take a stick in with you and beat them up.”

This Yarl’s Wood story has been reported as a story about a “guide on avoiding deportation.” Wrong. The story concerns a guide on due process and women’s rights, including those of African women. Yarl’s Wood is a deportation factory, and if one or two `products’ fall off the assembly line, the factory will keep on churning out deportees. After over ten years, the guides were not confiscated because of deportation concerns. The nature of the content is women’s access to rights and due process. The last thing Yarl’s Wood, and its architects, want is vulnerable women, and in particular African women, accessing due process, rights and, ultimately, power. After all, they’re caged animals. Right? Meanwhile, Alice Wanja-Maina has arranged for new copies to be sent in.

 

(Photo Credit: Channel4.com / YouTube)

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In Uganda, women smallholder farmers say NO! to palm oil plantation violence

July 15, 2015 by 4 Comments

Mangdelena Nakamya, once a proud farmer, now lives on church land

Mariam Nakteeko, Rose Nantume, and Magdalenea Nakamya grew up on Bugala Island, in Kalangala District, on Lake Victoria, Uganda. They farmed, tended to their families, prepared for the future, and supported their community of farmers and fisherfolk. They lived on land that had been family land for generations. That was until two giants – Wilmar International and Bidco Africa – decided to turn the island’s diverse environment into a monoculture palm oil plantation.

Kenya-based Bidco Africa boasts, “We exist to serve daily consumer needs to enhance Happy Healthy Living by Branding, Transforming and Distributing the goodness of Mother Nature.” Singaporean-based Wilmar promises, “Wilmar remains a firm advocate of sustainable growth and is committed to its role as a responsible corporate citizen.” What could go wrong?

Everything. Ask the women.

From its 2005 launch, the project has reeked of corruption, refusal to consult, and the ordinary violence that accompanies mass dislocation. In 2009, local residents and environmental activists documented widespread illegal forest clearing and use of fertilizers. Beatrice Anywar, then-shadow environment minister, explained, ”We are replacing natural forests with palm trees and this is bad for our country. But this goes on because the investors have the backing of the president. They don’t listen. We should begin listening to scientists because we are already witnessing floods and severe droughts.” The president himself agreed, “I invited the investors to start this project here, though some people wanted to block it because they wanted to protect butterflies instead of development. But butterflies can go and live elsewhere.”

Butterflies can go and live somewhere else. So can people, apparently.

In July 2011, 64-year-old farmer Magdalena Nakamya owned and farmed seven acres. One morning, four years ago almost to the day, Magdalena Nakamya awoke to find “yellow machines” turning up her land and razing her crops: “No one came to talk to me before they destroyed my crops. I heard that some people were given money, but I didn’t receive anything.” In February 2015, she joined a hundred other local displaced farmers in a lawsuit for restitution and compensation. The farmers talk of land and money, but when you look into their eyes, the struggle is the restoration of their dignity.

Rose Nantume’s family farmed 40 acres. She was saving to build a new home, and had already laid the foundation when the bulldozers came and took everything away. Now her family of ten live in a two-room shack: “Bidco took our land but paid nothing at all. The situation we’re in is so bad. Our house is in a bad condition and our children cannot study because there’s no money. We thought the money from our gardens would help us but ever since the land was taken, our situation is very difficult.”

Mariam Nakteeko explains what happens when the men are forced to leave: “Our husbands had to leave us to find work elsewhere. After we lost our land, we have nothing, not even enough food.”

Kalangala farmers are working with the National Association of Professional Environementalists, NAPE, and Friends of the Earth – Uganda, to reclaim their land, lives and dignity.

Meanwhile, Wilmar claims everything is fine, no one was coerced into taking money, and no one was evicted. How could they have been when Wilmar has had a clear No Deforestation, No Peat, No Exploitation Policy since 2013? Surely, they say, these women are delusional, except they don’t even say that. Why would they? It’s just smallholder women farmers on some island in the middle of Lake Victoria, and hey, they got a ferry out of the deal.

 

(Photo Credit: Alon Mwesigwa / The Guardian) (Video Credit: YouTube / Nape Uganda)

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THE PRISONER, THE POPE AND THE PRESIDENT

July 13, 2015 by 1 Comment

 

Women inmates, and children, watch Pope Francis leave Palmasola prison, in Bolivia, after his visit on July 10, 2015.

As a literary activist I often find myself inside prisons talking to men and women who reside behind bars. I remember visiting a facility in Utah and being overwhelmed by the color of the inmates. For a moment I guess they saw my blackness as being something associated with privilege. I imagine things have changed. Black men are still being captured as much as during those John Brown/Nat Turner- Freedom days. What some may call the New Jim Crow is simply the changing same.

For several years I’ve spoken about the need for President Obama to visit an American prison. I knew this was something no US President had done. I felt it was a way of placing prison reform and the plight of people of color who are incarcerated on the top of the national agenda for social change.

Prisoners are invisible until there are prison riots. This is unfortunate. When will there be another Attica?

If one believes Babylon is falling there is then a tendency to stand around and do nothing.

We cannot wait for a celebrity prisoner like Martha Stewart to make us want to talk about prisons. We can’t place all our attention or focus on the “outdoors” and police brutality. Nor can we talk about unjust laws and the black nets that trap and scar the sufferers. Prison is hell and the Devil lives elsewhere.

Too many sufferers coming out prison are going to show the signs of mental illness. A caged human being can slowly grow fur on a daily basis.

In September when the Pope goes into a U.S. prison the cameras will follow. One wonders how the “indoor” black men who are Muslims will receive him. How will the media respond if the Pope decides to wash the feet of black men? Might this be a reversal of the Help?

Meanwhile, our Obama will visit a prison in Oklahoma. Look for him to be surrounded by a number of white inmates. I was hoping the Brother from the White House was going to a prison in Maryland to talk to people from Maryland and DC. I wanted him to sit down in the middle of a circle of black man and talk about fatherhood, work, and reflect on the blackness of the times.

I want Obama to give us the “image” that defines his presidency. A strong image that might lift the embargo of hatred and violence against black lives. It’s not a far reach to see how for almost eight years Obama has been “imprisoned” while being in the White House. I want a black man who lives in the White House to walk into a prison and walk out the same day. I want that Mandela walk. That cool swagger that says – my soul is forever free and no chains or bars can hold a black man down. If only so many more of us could walk on water…instead we struggle to swim against the high tides of white supremacy and those who make the rules.

Tide gonna change. Tide changing now. A prisoner, a pope and a president walk into a bar…

(Photo Credit: Reuters/ NY Post)

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The Mymensingh and Khayelitsha “stampedes” were planned massacres of women

July 10, 2015 by Leave a Comment

In this 2011 file photo, women mourn over their relative who died in a stampede triggered by a fire scare at a garment factory in Dhaka.

In the past two weeks, “stampedes” took the lives of at least 33 people, 31 women and two children, in South Africa and Bangladesh. Yet again, the death toll among adults was exclusively, 100% women, and yet again the world will look on the pile of women’s corpses in shock and amazement, as we did in September 2009, when women were killed in stampedes in Indonesia, India, Pakistan and South Africa; or in January 2012 when women were killed in stampedes in Pakistan and South Africa. Each time, despite the gender of the dead and of the event, the fact of this being an assault on women is erased.

Today, in the northern Bangladeshi city, Mymensingh, hundreds of “poor and emaciated” women gathered outside a garment factory owner’s home to pick up free clothing. Someone fell, others fell, and then the rush ensued. Thus far, 25 bodies have been recovered, 23 women, two children. Fifty women have been sent to hospital. A scan of the world’s headlines on this event shows one headline that acknowledges this salient gender feature: “Bangladesh stampede leaves 22 women and child dead”. The rest either cite a number – “Stampede at Bangladesh clothes handout kills 23” – or refer to the clothes giveaway – “23 Zakat cloth seekers killed in Mymensingh stampede” – or mention people – “25 People Killed in Bangladesh Stampede”. Only one, that I’ve found, acknowledges the women. Why? What is so terrifying about saying 23, or however many, women were killed?

In Khayelitsha, in South Africa, two weeks ago, a gunshot at Osi’s Tavern provoked a rush from the tavern. It was 3 in the morning, and the tavern was crowded. It had only one exit, one staircase. The staircase collapsed. Six women were killed on the spot. Two women were killed on their to hospital. The women’s ages ranged from 15 and 23.

In some ways, two seemingly different events end up with the same morbid mathematics of gender: women were killed.

There was no stampede in Mymensingh today, and there was no stampede in Khayelitsha last month. There was a massacre of women. Say it. Women were killed. Now the State steps in, once the women’s corpses have piled up sufficiently, and claims to act, but it will never acknowledge the simple truth. There was no accident. There was indiscriminate and brutal slaughter of women, a massacre, and it was always part of the plan.

 

(Photo Credit: Reuters / http://indiatoday.intoday.in)

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In South Africa workers say NO to the dictatorship of debt

July 8, 2015 by 3 Comments

 

Jeffrey Haarhoff, Bulelani Mehlomakhulu, Angeline Arrison, Lisinda Bailey discuss the case

The dictatorship of debt takes many shapes, and Greece is not the only one to say NO! to predators this week. In a landmark case in South Africa, decided in the Western Cape High Court today, 15 low wage workers – cleaners, security guards, farm workers – took on the “micro loan” system of fast money, slow torture and death in life … and won!

Late last year, fifteen people in and around Stellenbosch, in the wine country of the Western Cape, approached the University of Stellenbosch’s Legal Aid Clinic, LAC, and asked for help. They explained that each had taken out a so-called micro loan, and found that at some point [a] the interest soared and [b] their salaries were “attached” by means of emolument attachment orders also known as EAOs or garnishee orders. While the fifteen basically wanted to get out of an impossible and unjust situation, the lawyers at LAC saw that the whole system was in violation of South Africa’s Constitution, and so, in November, they went to court.

As Lisinda Bailey, one of the applicants, explained, “I had to make monthly payments of R2,600 which was more than I can afford. As the only person working in my house, I struggled every month.” Angeline Arrison told a similar tale. Two years ago, she took out a loan of 2000 rand. Now half of her 4200 rand salary is seized every month, and she still owes and she still owes over 3000 rand. Others tell the same stories … and worse: already over indebted, trying to figure out how to organize and lighten the load, while retaining some semblance of dignity.

The fifteen also had the backing of Wendy Appelbaum, one of the wealthiest women on the African continent, a leading philanthropist and the owner of DeMorgenzon, a wine estate in Stellenbosch: “I became aware of the plight of one of my workers, from whom we were legally obliged to deduct most of his salary on behalf of loan sharks. I immediately addressed his circumstances, but discovered how widespread the abuse of garnishee orders had become. I was outraged and decided to intervene on behalf of the helpless and voiceless victims, and have played a convening and facilitating role.” Appelbaum took the fifteen to the Legal Aid Clinic.

The South African Human Rights Commission joined as a friend of the court, and has also taken up the public policy issue of garnishee orders. As SAHRC Commissioner Mohamed Shafie Ameermia explained, “We must knock on Parliament’s doors very seriously to say the house is on fire out there. We need to advocate and champion proper legislation, close the loopholes and gaps in the existing legislation so that at least poor people have the right to live decent lives.”

The fifteen – cleaners, security guards, farm and seasonal workers, evenly divided among women and men, uniformly vulnerable – and their lawyers argued that the credit providers and their lawyers obtained the orders illegally, often by going to distant courts, and that, further, the process was improper because the orders were issued by court clerks and not by magistrates or judges. For those who owed, there was no day in court in this process, only fog and mirrors.

Today, Western Cape High Court Judge Siraj Desai agreed: “The right of access to courts is fundamental to the rule of law in a constitutional state. The … respondents are obtaining judgments and EAOs against the applicants in courts far removed from their homes and places of work and in places which they could not hope to reach, the right to approach the courts was seriously jeopardised, if not effectively denied. This violation of the rights of debtors to access courts and enjoy the protection of the law was the product of the … respondents’ forum shopping for courts which would entertain their applications for judgments and the issuing of EAOs … This is the most disturbing feature of the debt collecting processes employed by the micro-lenders … The absence of judicial supervision and the consequences of the execution process infringes several of the debtors’ constitutional rights … The attachment of an excessive portion of a debtor’s earnings infringes on the right of the debtor and her family to dignity, as well as their rights to access to healthcare, food, education and housing.”

As Wendy Applebaum put it, “It’s a David and Goliath scenario here where their human rights and dignity have been taken away.” And David and Davida said NO! to predatory debt, to debt that consumes body and soul, to debt structures that crush human dignity, and today they won. From Syntagma Square to Stellenbosch, thus far it’s been a good week for the Great Refusal.

(Photo Credit: Masixole Feni / GroundUp.org.za)

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