SACW - 2 Aug 2013 | Bangladesh: Hefazat’s violent godmen / Pakistan: Victimhood / India: Food Security; Militarised Kashmir; University's ‘Ad-hoc’ teachers; Batla House / Killing the Arab Spring / Polish Dissident Adam Michnik / Violent Favelas of Brazil

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 02 August 2013 - No. 2795
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Contents:

1. The Concert for Bangladesh - 1 August 1971, New York
2. Bangladesh: Hefazat-e-Islam’s violent ‘Godmen’ or pretentious clerics who we in our ignorance have permitted to proliferate
3. Che Guevara’s manuscripts preserved by UNESCO
4. An American Woman Lawyer Doing Some Fine Work in Afghanistan
5. India: Jean Dreze defends the National Food Security Bill from snipers
6. Pakistan unions support the struggle of Maruti automobile workers in India | press reports
7. Pakistan: Permanent victimhood (Afiya Shehrbano)
8. India: Summer of shame 2013 - Sacking ‘Ad-hoc’ teachers and playing with the future of Higher Education at Delhi University (Mukul Mangalik)
9. Henry Bernstein’s book review of Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation by Jairus Banaji
10. India’s Jawaharlal Nehru University - impossible hopes & innermost desires | Avijit Ghosh
11. India: Kashmiris are fed up of soldier as state | Suvir Kaul
12. India: Life in the militarised border regions of Rajouri and Poonch (Jammu and Kashmir) | Sahba Husain and Rita Manchanda
13. India: Migrant Workers in Kashmir | Rashmi Singh
14. India: Supreme court rules against ban on Bombay’s dance bars | Womens groups petition for rights of bar dancers
15. India: CNDP Statement in Solidarity with the Anti-Nuclear Struggle in Chutka: Say NO to Farcical EIA Hearings!
16. India: Batla House Shahzad Verdict is perverse and a mockery of Justice - Press Release JTSA
17. India: Waiting for a nuclear disaster | Mallika Sarabhai
18. Book review: The Frankfurt School at War - the Marxists Who Explained the Nazis to Washington
19. Full text of letters from 65 members of Indian parliament to President Obama to deny US visa to Narendra Modi
20. Text of Solidarity Statement from Japan to the People’s National Convention Against Nuclear Energy, India
21. Selected Posts on Communalism Watch:
 - India: Obsessive measurement devalues the democratic order  (Ananya Vajpeyi)
 - Bangladesh court cancels registration of right-wing party Jamaat-e-Islami - banned from contesting future polls 
 - India: The real danger to India is from parivar’s communal fascism (Editorial, Kashmir Times) 
 - India First or Upper Caste Elite First? (Irfan Engineer)
 - India: Press Release - CJP, MSD shocked over gagging of Amina Wadud in Tami Nadu 
 - India: Gujarat SIT turned blind eye to damaging evidence
 - India: Mukul Kesavan takes apart the claim that 1984 riots means Congress is the same as Modi's BJP 
 - India: Hindutva moral police circulate photo and message asking Amartya Sen to control his daughter rather than modi
 - India: The decline of Sanskrit has little to do with the ascendancy of English
 - India: Nemesis of Narendra Modi? (Anand Teltumbde) 
 - Indian Nationalism or Hindu Nationalism (Ram Puniyani) 
 - Sectarian Violence in Burma - Cartoon in New York Times (21 July 2013) 
 - Book review: Jan Mieszkowski on Christian Ingrao’s “Believe and Destroy” 
 - Book review: Ayodhya Conspiracy 1949: The Real Story (Anil Rajimwale)

::: Full Text :::
22. Sri Lanka: Busting the common wealth of the people (Editorial, The Daily Mirror)
23. India: Forests of the night (Christophe Jaffrelot)
24. Killing the Arab Spring in Its Cradle (Karima Bennoune)
25. Bangladesh's radical Muslims uniting behind Hefazat-e-Islam (Julien Bouissou)
26. USA: The Spiritual and Political Warfare of the New Religious Right (Bill Berkowitz)
27. Egypt Shows How Political Islam Is at Odds With Democracy (Youssef Rakha)
28. India: Panchayat orders UP woman’s gang rape (Piyush Srivastava)
29. Arab World: Tunisia paralyzed by general strike, protests after Brahmi killing
30. After Mubarak, the Brotherhood was triumphant. Now it is in crisis (Peter Beaumont)
31. Egypt: On violence and the path ahead (Ismail Serageldin)
32. Polish Dissident Adam Michnik: 'We Are Bastards of Communism'
33. In the Violent Favelas of Brazil (Suketu Mehta)

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1. THE CONCERT FOR BANGLADESH - 1 AUGUST 1971, NEW YORK
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The Concert for Bangladesh (1 August 1971, New York) — organized by George Harrison and inspired by Ravi Shankar—the Concert marked the first time rock musicians collaborated for a common humanitarian cause.
http://www.sacw.net/article5159.html

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2. BANGLADESH: HEFAZAT-E-ISLAM’S VIOLENT ‘GODMEN’ OR PRETENTIOUS CLERICS WHO WE IN OUR IGNORANCE HAVE PERMITTED TO PROLIFERATE
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there is a sinister pattern emerging this Ramadan in Afghanistan and Pakistan where unheard of clerics are handing out vitriolic fatwas (edicts or decrees) targeting women and ones their respective governments are shockingly acquiescing to. No different is the case of Bangladesh.
http://www.sacw.net/article5144.html

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3. Che Guevara’s manuscripts preserved by UNESCO
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Che Guevara’s manuscripts including his famous Motorcycle Diaries recently came under the spotlight, as UNESCO recognised that the items belonging to and concerning Guevara up until his execution in the Bolivian village of La Higuera in 1967, should be preserved for posterity.
http://www.sacw.net/article5158.html

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4. AN AMERICAN WOMAN LAWYER DOING SOME FINE WORK IN AFGHANISTAN
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Say you’re a Westerner in Afghanistan, trying to do some business, and suddenly you find yourself in a bit of a scrape—allegations of wrongdoing, of criminal activity, maybe even of personal violence. The legal system in Afghanistan is opaque. Where do you go for help?
http://www.sacw.net/article5141.html

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5. India: Jean Dreze defends the National Food Security Bill from snipers
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Despite its many flaws, the food security bill is an opportunity to end the leakages from the PDS and prevent wastage of public resources
http://www.sacw.net/article5156.html

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6. PAKISTAN UNIONS SUPPORT THE STRUGGLE OF MARUTI AUTOMOBILE WORKERS IN INDIA | PRESS REPORTS
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South Asian Labour Forum (SALF) on Thursday demanded immediate release of Maruti Suzuki workers in India, who were arrested by the police last year as well as withdrawal of all cases lodged against them by the administration. Addressing a press conference at the Karachi Press Club (KPC), the trade union leaders and human rights activists expressed solidarity with the Indian workers.
http://www.sacw.net/article5126.html

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7. PAKISTAN: PERMANENT VICTIMHOOD
by Afiya Shehrbano
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Politically speaking, Malala’s gravest error was to survive the attack by the Taliban gunmen who shot her in the head on her way back from school in 2012. Had she succumbed to her injuries or deteriorated to a vegetative state in some underequipped Swat hospital then she may have been forgiven (and forgotten) as a passive patriot. Survival has earned her suspicion and accusation of being an anti-Pakistan agent of the west.
http://www.sacw.net/article5118.html

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8. INDIA: SUMMER OF SHAME 2013 - SACKING ‘AD-HOC’ TEACHERS, DESTROYING LIVES, AND PLAYING WITH THE FUTURE OF HIGHER EDUCATION AT DELHI UNIVERSITY (DU)
by Mukul Mangalik
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DU colleges are in the grip of frenzy. With the University Administration breaking promises for appointing permanent teachers against existing and newly sanctioned posts since 2009-10, large numbers of ‘ad-hoc’ appointees are being shown the door as new ‘ad-hocs’ are poised to replace them. This has been happening systematically and with determination since 2012, but the scale on which it is being pursued this summer appears to be unprecedented.
http://www.sacw.net/article5070.html

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9. HENRY BERNSTEIN’S BOOK REVIEW OF THEORY AS HISTORY: ESSAYS ON MODES OF PRODUCTION AND EXPLOITATION BY JAIRUS BANAJI
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The collection provides an opportunity to assess Jairus Banaji’s original and provocative contributions over more than three decades. This review tries to chart a path across the range of the essays as a whole, marked by three themes and their connections and possible disconnections: what constitutes modes of production; modes of production before capitalism and their histories; and characterizing and periodizing capitalism. Banaji’s emphatic arguments for long histories/trajectories of commodity production, exchange and accumula- tion across different times and places, especially in estate agriculture and the circuits of merchant capital, traverse these three themes.
http://www.sacw.net/article5116.html

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10. INDIA’S JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY - IMPOSSIBLE HOPES & INNERMOST DESIRES
by Avijit Ghosh
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They say, JNU is all about Marx. For many small-town and non-public school boys like me, it was also about Freud.
http://www.sacw.net/article5149.html

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11. INDIA: KASHMIRIS ARE FED UP OF SOLDIER AS STATE 
by Suvir Kaul
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In Kashmir, elements of the military apparatus act as they deem fit, as for them Kas­h­miris are but subjects of the Indian state, and in the name of surveillance and security they can act with whatever violence they deem appropriate. And why would they not, for their violent actions are protected by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, promulgated in 1990, as well as other acts that apply to ‘disturbed’ areas, and they know that no military man has been punished for any crime committed in Kashmir.
http://www.sacw.net/article5157.html

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12. INDIA: PEOPLE’S EXPERIENCES OF LIVING IN THE MILITARISED BORDER REGIONS OF RAJOURI AND POONCH (JAMMU AND KASHMIR) 
by Sahba Husain and Rita Manchanda
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In the militarised border regions of Rajouri and Poonch (Jammu and Kashmir), the boundaries are blurred. Violence had breached the security of people’s homes, changing their lives forever. Despite the enormity of the violence done to their lives and livelihood, the cry for justice seems to be missing. The region appeared to have been enveloped in hopeless resignation.
http://www.sacw.net/article5154.html

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13. INDIA: MIGRANT WORKERS IN KASHMIR | RASHMI SINGH
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Migrant workers have been a close part of Kashmiri workforce for over two decades now. Though there are no statistics on total numbers, current estimates presume that about 5 lakh outside workers come to work in the Valley seasonally every year. They have been working in paddy fields, construction, brick kilns, as domestic help and in various other quarters including petty trade and sales. Most of them are from U.P., Bihar, Bengal and other north Indian states and work seasonally through the summer returning to their native places once the winter sets in. According to some sources they have been in Kashmir since late 70‟s.
http://www.sacw.net/article5155.html

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14. INDIA: SUPREME COURT RULES AGAINST BAN ON BOMBAY’S DANCE BARS | WOMENS GROUPS PETITION FOR RIGHTS OF BAR DANCERS
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Women’s organisations across Maharashtra have come together to petition their demands concerning the rights of bar dancers to the government. Their petition is in response to the recent Supreme Court verdict which declared that the ban on dance in bars was in violation of the Constitution.
http://www.sacw.net/article5153.html

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15. INDIA: CNDP STATEMENT IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE ANTI-NUCLEAR STRUGGLE IN CHUTKA: SAY NO TO FARCICAL EIA HEARINGS!
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We congratulate the people of Chutka (Mandla district, Madhya Pradesh) for their vigilant and massive protest which has forced the government to cancel the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) public hearing for the second time. An earlier attempt to organise a farcical public hearing was thwarted by people’s resistance in May.
http://www.sacw.net/article5151.html

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16. INDIA: BATLA HOUSE SHAHZAD VERDICT IS PERVERSE AND A MOCKERY OF JUSTICE - PRESS RELEASE JTSA
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Calling the verdict by a Delhi court holding Shahzad Ahmad guilty of murder and many other offences in controversial Batla House encounter case as “perverse and a mockery of justice” , the Jamia Teachers Solidarity Association (JTSA) has expressed shock over the flagrant violation of settled principles of criminal jurisprudence in the case.
http://www.sacw.net/article5148.html

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17. INDIA: WAITING FOR A NUCLEAR DISASTER
by Mallika Sarabhai
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In direct violation of a Supreme Court verdict on ensuring safety and to report back to the courts, the Nuclear Power Corporation, the DAE and its Board and the Ministry of Environment and Forests went ahead with making Kudankulam critical before the courts could have time to check on findings and reassure themselves and the public of the overall safety of people and the earth.
http://www.sacw.net/article5147.html

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18. BOOK REVIEW: THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AT WAR - THE MARXISTS WHO EXPLAINED THE NAZIS TO WASHINGTON
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(Via Dilip Simeon's Blog)
Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort, by Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, And Otto Kirchheimer. edited by Raffaele Laudani
reviewed by William E. Scheuerman 
http://www.sacw.net/article5134.html

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19. FULL TEXT OF LETTERS FROM 65 MEMBERS OF INDIAN PARLIAMENT TO PRESIDENT OBAMA TO DENY US VISA TO NARENDRA MODI
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Text of letters by sixty five members of both houses of India’s parliament to President Obama, urging the US administration to maintain the current policy of denying visa to Me Narendra Modi
http://www.sacw.net/article5110.html

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20. TEXT OF SOLIDARITY STATEMENT FROM JAPAN TO THE PEOPLE’S NATIONAL CONVENTION AGAINST NUCLEAR ENERGY, INDIA
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People of Japan convey their solidarity with everyone gathered at the People’s National Convention Against Nuclear Energy and express their agreement with National People’s Charter Against Nuclear Energy
http://www.sacw.net/article5106.html

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21. SELECTED POSTS FROM COMMUNALISM WATCH
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India: Obsessive measurement devalues the democratic order | Ananya Vajpeyi
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2013/08/india-obsessive-measurement-devalues.html

Bangladesh court cancels registration of right-wing party Jamaat-e-Islami - banned from contesting future polls 
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2013/08/bangladesh-court-cancels-registration.html

India: The real danger to India is from parivar’s communal fascism (Editorial, Kashmir Times) 
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2013/07/the-real-danger-to-india-is-from.html

India First or Upper Caste Elite First? (Irfan Engineer)
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2013/08/india-first-or-upper-caste-elite-first.html

India: Press Release - CJP, MSD shocked over gagging of Amina Wadud in Tami Nadu 
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2013/07/india-press-release-cjp-msd-shocked.html

India: Gujarat SIT turned blind eye to damaging evidence
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2013/07/india-gujarat-sit-turned-blind-eye-to.html

India: Mukul Kesavan takes apart the claim that 1984 riots means Congress is the same as Modi's BJP 
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2013/07/india-mukul-kesavan-takes-apart-claim.html

India: Hindutva moral police circulate photo and message asking Amartya Sen to control his daughter rather than modi
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2013/07/india-hindutva-moral-police-circulate.html

India: The decline of Sanskrit has little to do with the ascendancy of English
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2013/07/india-decline-of-sanskrit-has-little-to.html

India: Nemesis of Narendra Modi? (Anand Teltumbde) 
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2013/07/india-nemesis-of-narendra-modi-anand.html

Indian Nationalism or Hindu Nationalism - Ram Puniyani 
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2013/07/indian-nationalism-or-hindu-nationalism.html

Sectarian Violence in Burma - Cartoon in New York Times (21 July 2013) 
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2013/07/sectarian-violence-in-burma-cartoon-in.html

Book review: Jan Mieszkowski on Christian Ingrao’s “Believe and Destroy” 
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2013/07/book-review-jan-mieszkowski-on.html

Book review: Ayodhya Conspiracy 1949: The Real Story (Anil Rajimwale) 
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2013/07/book-review-ayodhya-conspiracy-1949.html


::: FULL TEXT :::
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22. SRI LANKA: BUSTING THE COMMON WEALTH OF THE PEOPLE
Editorial, The Daily Mirror, 31 July 2013
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While millions of people in Sri Lanka are struggling for survival and the cost of living keeps on soaring, the Government is to spend a staggering Rs. 1,930 million for the Commonwealth Summit to be held here in November.
The Government had waged an international battle to ensure that the summit was held here amid widespread calls for a change of venue because of the Rajapaksa regime’s track record on human rights issues, alleged war crimes, destroying the independence of the judiciary and the independence of the media with a major breakdown in the rule of law.

Eventually, political analysts say India brought about a turning point by insisting that Colombo should be the venue of the summit. The full political price the Government paid for this is still not known, but most analysts believe that the holding of a free and fair election to the Northern Provincial Council without any changes to the 13th Amendment was one of the conditions agreed to by the Rajapaksa regime. Whatever the political price and whatever the internal consequences with some of the Rajapaksa regime’s main allies, strongly and openly opposing the compromise, the financial cost appears to be far too much and the people would have the right to ask who gave the Rajapaksa regime the political power to bust up the common wealth of the people. After all, the Commonwealth is regarded by most analysts as a pompous artefact of once colonised countries and the main benefit will be the privilege given to the President to be the Chairman of this largely powerless organisation for the next two years.

Reports say that at a recent meeting, the President himself cautioned ministers to be careful of what they say or do not say about the summit. He pointed out that the former Prime Minister had presided over the Colombo summit of leaders of more than 70 countries in the Non-Aligned Movement in 1976. The next year her party was thrashed at the July general elections and it did not have enough seats for her to even become the Leader of the Opposition.

According to our sister paper the Sunday Times, in addition to the colossal Rs. 1,930 million, the Rajapaksa regime is also to import super luxury cars for Commonwealth leaders. The choice now is between full option BMW 7 series and Mercedes Benz super class vehicles or a combination. Earlier the regime had planned to rent the fleet from owners of luxury vehicles or buy them and after the summit to sell them at a public auction. But latest reports say some UPFA ministers - who already enjoy an extravagance of privileges including the payment from public money of their monthly electricity bills amounting to more than Rs. 200,000/= - have asked for these super luxury summit cars to add to their fleets of vehicles. Such and other instances of super luxury living if not vulgar extravagance has raised questions among millions of people as to whether politicians are serving them and giving to the country or whether they are shamelessly grabbing the wealth and resources of the country.

According to a report submitted to the Government, the expenditure for the summit is like the accounts book of a billionaire.
For millions of people, especially those living below the poverty line, such expenditure and numerous other instances of super luxury living by politicians who are elected to be servant leaders of the people are outrageous. These millions of people may be wondering whether they are considered as collies in a company or sovereign citizens of the country.

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23. INDIA: FORESTS OF THE NIGHT
by Christophe Jaffrelot
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(Indian Express, July 29 2013)
How Chhattisgarh became a sanctuary, and then a laboratory, for Naxals

Some time ago, Chhattisgarh hit the headlines because of a Maoist attack on state Congress leaders, in which V.C. Shukla and Mahendra Karma died. Since then, the Congress has accused the BJP government of a conspiracy, and some BJP leaders have accused former chief minister Ajit Jogi of being part of a conspiracy himself. Politicising this tragic episode is not the best way to understand why Chhattisgarh has become a Maoist stronghold.

Today, the state is the worst affected by Maoist-related violence. According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, between 2005 and June 2013, 2,055 lives have been lost in this guerilla-like war, including 755 members of the security forces, 662 militants and 638 civilians. That is twice more than in Jharkhand and about four times more than in West Bengal and Orissa.

There is a history behind the entrenchment of the Naxals in Chhattisgarh. It started in the late 1970s, when Maoists from Andhra Pradesh initiated the Go to Villages Campaign, which prepared them to work among the Adivasis, then subjugated by landlords and the state. The latter limited their access to forest products such as tendu leaves, not to mention the violent scorn with which the police treated tribal people. When the Naxalites were repressed by the Andhra government in the 1980s, they used southern Chhattisgarh, and more especially Bastar (roughly equivalent to the region known as Dandakaranya), as a base, because the jungle made them difficult to track down.

This sanctuary gradually turned into a laboratory. Militants from the cities learned the local dialect, sometimes married tribal women and, above all, obtained better wages for Adivasis who gathered tendu leaves and bamboo stalks for paper mills. These successes were made possible by intimidation and an effort to organise the tribal people, which in 1989, culminated in the foundation of the Dandakaranya Adivasi Mazdoor Kisan Sangh. Himanshu Kumar, a Gandhian activist who established his ashram in Dantewada (Bastar South), has given valuable testimony to these reasons for the Maoists' popularity.

In the 1990s, the rush for the area's mineral resources began. The region harbours rich deposits of coal, iron ore, manganese, bauxite, quartz, gold, diamonds and uranium. These treasures attracted public and then private investors, once India embarked on the path of economic liberalisation that promised to make such riches more accessible. For these resources to be exploitable, especially when it involved opencast mines, tribes were displaced and their land confiscated. Maoists, with support from new partisans recruited among them, reacted to the multiplication of mines and factories by targeted attacks. For instance, the National Mineral Development Corporation iron ore mine in Bacheli (Dantewada district) has been the object of repeated attacks since 2006, all attempts to block supplies to the Essar steel mill in Andhra. These attacks also enable the Maoists to obtain explosives that they later use to plant landmines along the tracks. To fund their operations, they do not hesitate to extort money from mine or factory owners.

The historical and economic reasons due to which Maoism developed in Chhattisgarh can be traced back to another meta-explanation: the Adivasis represent 32 per cent of the population and they have never been given their due in the region. In spite of their demographic advantage, and in contrast to what happened even in Jharkhand, they could never dislodge upper-caste leaders from dominant positions in the state government. Although trade union leaders like S.G. Niyogi, assassinated in 1991, and the Gondwana Gantantra Party have tried to organise the sons of the soil, they have rallied around mainstream, upper-caste dominated parties, including the BJP, for elections. That was partly because the Sangh Parivar has been able, since the creation of the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram in 1952, to co-opt — and Sanskritise — some Adivasis, with the support of Rajput ex-rulers such as Dilip Singh Judeo (and his father). Jana Sangh MLAs started to run the show as early as the 1960s, as evident from the career of Baliram Kashyap, an MLA in Bastar district in 1972-92.

Neither the Congress, whose leaders — be they the Shukla brothers or Motilal Vora — were traditionally from the upper castes, nor the BJP, has been interested in promoting the cause of the Adivasis, whose socio-economic conditions kept declining in relative terms. If Chhattisgarh had among the lowest human development indices in 2011, it was largely because of its tribal population. Indeed, 55 per cent of its rural tribal population lived below the poverty line (against 32 per cent of its SC rural population) and the under-five mortality rate among STs was 40 percentage points higher than that among SCs, which was already very high.

Yet, the main reason for the rise of Maoism in Chhattisgarh is probably the form of the state's repression. Ill-equipped and poorly trained in counterinsurgency methods, the state's police force has proven powerless in the face of the Naxal strike forces. The local political elites, be they close to the BJP or the Congress, thus set up a militia in 2005 with support from the state's business community and the Central government itself. This organisation, named the Salwa Judum ("peace hunt" in the language of the Gond tribes), has recruited among the urban youth. It began by emptying entire villages of their inhabitants to prevent them from being used as Naxal bases. In 2007, between 70,000 and 1,00,000 displaced persons left for Orissa, Jharkhand and Andhra, according to the NGO Campaign for Peace and Justice in Chhattisgarh. It was as if the state had delegated its policing powers to a private army. Indeed, special forces officers were found in its ranks, and a district collector is said to have taken part in its meetings. Petitioned by human rights activists, the Supreme Court ordered the state to take direct action rather than playing with fire by arming some citizens against others. But Salwa Judum has continued to operate illegally, with the blessing of mainstream political parties, in spite of the Supreme Court ruling, which at least managed to free Binayak Sen after years of tragicomedy.

In 2009, P. Chidambaram, as home minister, launched Operation Green Hunt, mobilising thousands of police and paramilitary forces. In 2010, 20,000 troops were deployed in the Bastar zone alone, an area of about 40,000 square kilometres, combing the place, requisitioning schools. The interrogations they conducted to unmask Maoists have apparently degenerated more than once, resulting in several accusations of torture. Some years ago, Chhattisgarh's created the Counter-Terrorism and Jungle Warfare College and another similar training centre, the Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School.

Nearly four years after Operation Green Hunt and eight years after the launching of Salwa Judum, in the wake of the deaths of V.C. Shukla and Mahendra Karma, one of the chief architects of Salwa Judum, the Union tribal affairs minister, V. Kishore Chandra Deo, declared that the project had been a "sinful tragedy". Why doesn't he try something else? For instance, moving south Chhattisgarh into the Sixth Schedule in order to give more autonomy to tribal communities. Since the carving out of Chhattisgarh has not resulted in any transfer of power to the state's STs, this is now the only way to empower them.

The writer is senior research fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King's India Institute, London, and non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 

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24. KILLING THE ARAB SPRING IN ITS CRADLE
by Karima Bennoune
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(The New York Times, July 29, 2013) 
TUNIS — MOHAMED BRAHMI, the left-wing politician who was assassinated outside his home here last Thursday, was born in Sidi Bouzid, the same town where a desperate fruit vendor set himself on fire in December 2010, triggering the Tunisian revolution — and the Arab Spring.

The Islamist party Ennahda, which governs Tunisia, has blamed the killing — as well as the assassination, nearly six months ago, of Chokri Belaid, a prominent human rights advocate — on a young weapons smuggler who has ties to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

But Ennahda itself bears much of the blame. It should be recognized, and condemned, for being the radical party that it is: a party that has created a climate of escalating fundamentalist violence that threatens the lives of liberal, left-wing and secular activists.

The Western media have portrayed Ennahda as an innocuous voice of moderation, but it has been pushing for a constitution — one Mr. Brahmi vocally opposed — that would lay the foundations for a repressive Islamic state.

Earlier this month, at a rally here supporting the ousted Islamist president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, Sahbi Atig, the head of the Ennahda bloc in Tunisia’s Constituent Assembly, warned: “All those who dare to kill the will of the people in Tunisia or in Egypt, the Tunisian street will be authorized to do what it wants with — including to shed their blood.” Commentators have understandably connected these remarks to the death of Mr. Brahmi, who had saluted the ouster of Mr. Morsi as a return by Egyptians to “freedom” and to “the path of Gamal Abdel Nasser.”

Since it attained independence from France in 1956, Tunisia has had some of the region’s most progressive laws relating to women and families. Many fear that Ennahda is trying to undo those laws. Amel Grami, an intellectual historian at Manouba University, whose campus was besieged last year by Salafi activists opposed to women’s equality and secular education, says the Arab Spring has “triggered a male identity crisis” that has magnified the extreme positions taken by Islamist parties.

In Tunisia, she has noted, fundamentalists have called for girls as young as 12 to don the niqab, which covers everything but the eyes. An Ennahda lawmaker has called for “purification of the media and purification of intellectuals,” while female Ennahda deputies have urged segregation of public transportation by gender. Some Salafists have spoken of legalizing female genital mutilation, a practice largely foreign to Tunisia.

Many Tunisians I interviewed in the last month — in the political opposition, in academia, in the women’s movement — told me that they felt threatened. “You are all Mohamed Brahmi,” one mourner chanted on Thursday evening, among those weeping outside the slain activist’s home.

“The entire left is under threat,” a young female activist in the southern city of Sfax, whose party is in the Popular Front coalition to which Mr. Brahmi belonged, said earlier this month. Just last week, a law professor and women’s rights activist, Sana Ben Achour, warned of the real possibility of violence. “We must be very vigilant,” she urged.

Neighboring Algeria plunged into such bloodshed in 1991, with the rise of radical Islamism. A “dark decade” of extreme violence ensued.

To prevent Tunisia from going the way of Algeria, all anti-fundamentalist groups must unite — which they are beginning to do — and they will need the sort of international support Algeria’s secular democrats never received. Western governments must pressure the Tunisian authorities to protect those at risk. But so far, the European Union and the United States, focused on Syria and Egypt, have mostly turned a blind eye.

Mourad Sakli, director of the International Festival of Carthage, a cultural event, said the killing of Mr. Brahmi would only strengthen “our determination to defend our rights to culture and to life, our right to be different and our right to free thought.” I attended this year’s festival on July 20, in a packed amphitheater here, where a crowd of young people and families — some women in miniskirts, and some in hijabs — sang jubilantly with the Algerian singer-songwriter Cheb Khaled until 1 in the morning, in Arabic, French and a little Berber: “We will love, and we will dance. C’est la vie.”

That mood of joy has been replaced by an atmosphere that the Tunisian newspaper La Presse has described as “insurrectional.” On Saturday, Mr. Brahmi was laid to rest before some 30,000 mourners. One of them, a female lawyer who scaled the cemetery’s walls after finding the entrance blocked, said: “We’ve been taken hostage by religious fundamentalists. Now we the people have decided to take back our country and our revolution.”

Dozens of delegates are boycotting the Constituent Assembly, the body charged with drafting a new constitution, whose legal mandate technically expired last October. They want it to be replaced by a “national salvation government” that can call new elections.

One delegate, Nadia Châabane, stood amid hundreds of demonstrators, some cloaked in the Tunisian flag, who faced off Sunday against a smaller, all-male phalanx chanting “God is great” and waving the black Salafi flag. “Islam has survived here for 14 centuries,” she told me. “It is not under threat. The solution to our problems is economic, not religious.”

Will the West have the courage and vision to help her, and others across North Africa, who are speaking up for freedom and human rights through peaceful protest? If not, the Arab Spring may die in the country where it was born.

Karima Bennoune, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis, is the author of the forthcoming book “Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories From the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism.”
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on July 30, 2013, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Killing the Arab Spring in Its Cradle.

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25. BANGLADESH'S RADICAL MUSLIMS UNITING BEHIND HEFAZAT-E-ISLAM
Government is wary of a movement led by Shah Ahmad Shafi that has gathered strength since its launch in 2010
by Julien Bouissou
=========================================
(Guardian Weekly, 30 July 2013)
Bangladeshi police escort Hefazat-e-Islam leader Shah Ahmad Shafi from a madrasa in Dhaka on 6 May, a day after he instigated mass protests in the city. Photograph: Monirul Alam/Zuma Press/Corbis

Passersby cast wary looks at a bunch of men lurking outside the entrance to the Hathazari madrasa. They stand out, having neither beards nor traditional dress. Indeed, one of them has had the bright idea of wearing a flowered shirt. For the past few weeks the madrasa in Chittagong, central Bangladesh, has been under police surveillance. It houses 12,000 Qur'anic students, guided by Shah Ahmad Shafi, who heads Hefazat-e-Islam, the country's largest radical Islamic movement.

At his instigation over 500,000 demonstrators clogged the streets of Dhaka on 5 May, demanding the application of 13 measures, including a ban on mixing of men and women in public places, the removal of sculptures and demands for the former wording of the constitution to be reinstated, affirming "absolute trust and faith in Almighty Allah". About 50 people were killed in clashes with police and several leaders were arrested. Since then Hefazat has avoided the media, for fear of reprisals. The government is extremely wary of a movement that has steadily gathered strength since its launch three years ago.

We had to climb into a car with smoked-glass windows to enter the madrasa, where a cadre took us to the guide's office. Shafi, 93, only sees visitors after a long early-afternoon nap. He rarely speaks in public, less still to journalists. One of his proteges actually spoke to us, under his supervision, with so much fervour and devotion he might have been saying a prayer. Only once did Shafi raise his bushy white eyebrows, saying: "Above all, do not imagine we are interested in politics. Our aims are noble and exclusively religious."

Hefazat was formed in January 2010, in opposition to plans to give women the same rights of inheritance as men. It gained new recruits in April this year, after secular demonstrations in the capital. Thousands of people flocked to Shabhag Square, demanding the death sentence for the perpetrators of crimes during the war of independence, when they sought to maintain links between Pakistan and Bangladesh, then known as east Pakistan, the better to defend Islam.

But radical Muslims publicised the allegedly blasphemous statements of various bloggers, discrediting the Shabhag movement and regaining the initiative. "We shall fight till all 13 of our demands have been satisfied," promises one of Hefazat's general-secretaries.

Hefazat had previously kept a low profile. "It represents poor people, with little education, mainly country folk, who have always been despised by the urban middle classes. There is nothing transnational or terrorist about the movement, but it may become more radical if it is sidelined," says Farhad Mazar, a political commentator. Hefazat enjoys the support of millions of believers, thanks to the control it exerts over the vast majority of Qur'anic schools in Bangladesh. "Our schools train the best imams. About a quarter of them then leave for the Gulf states, the United Kingdom or the United States, and they support us financially," says Habib Ullah, the movement's deputy-general-secretary.

Hefazat has taken advantage of favourable circumstances to pull together a series of long-established political groups and organisations that have never before displayed such unity. Jamaat-e-Islami, its main rival at the head of a political party, has been undermined by the arrest of several of its leaders, on charges of war crimes.

The rise of Hefazat mirrors the declining secular ideology dating back to independence. Secularism served as a basis for Bangladeshi identity in 1971, when the country united to break away from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, becoming one of the four basic principles enshrined in the constitution of 1972. But it has been disputed ever since. In 1977 the constitution was revised to assert "absolute trust and faith in Almighty Allah [as] the basis of all actions". Then in June 1988 a further constitutional amendment made Islam the state religion.

Islamism fills a gap in the political and ideological spectrum left vacant by the parties that coalesced around the independence movement, worn out by subsequent quarrels and scandals. "It is too soon to say that secularism is dead," says Ali Riaz, professor of politics and government at Illinois State University. "But the rise of Islamism, in the past 30 years, has influenced the political discourse and agenda, and to a certain extent social behaviour."

If this trend persists, it may hold back women's emancipation and fuel a sense of insecurity among religious and ethnic minorities. "The government has failed so far to protect these minorities," Riaz adds. In March hundreds of Hindu shrines and homes were burned down. This particular minority now accounts for less than 10% of the population, compared with 15.5% in 1975.

Hefazat is determined to influence the outcome of the election scheduled for early 2014, though it shuns direct involvement in politics, perceived as "impure". The ruling Awami League is in a difficult position, trapped between the Islamists and the opposition, which accuses it of confiscating power by refusing to form an interim government capable of organising a transparent election.

"The fact that [the Awami League] will not hear of an interim government may mean that it thinks it is going to lose. You may win without the support of the Islamists, but you cannot win against them," warns a Dhaka academic. Safe behind the walls of his madrasa, Shafi could well act as the kingmaker in the next election.

This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde

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26. USA: THE SPIRITUAL AND POLITICAL WARFARE OF THE NEW RELIGIOUS RIGHT
by Bill Berkowitz For Buzzflash At Truthout
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(truth-out.org, 9 July 2013)

As many of the pre-Reagan era Religious Right leaders retire and/or die off, beware of the new breed. Lou Engle is one of the new breed. Although Engle has been kicking around for more than a decade, it is only in the past few years that he and the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), the charismatic evangelical political and religious movement that he has come to personify, has made such a splash that it threatens to drown out the more traditional voices of the Christian Right.

In 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that George W. Bush would be president, Lou Engle saw it as the answer to his prayers. A few months before the election, Engle had held an all-day prayer event in Washington, D.C., that drew approximately 400,000. Although Engle's prayer rally wasn't as magnetic or media buzz-worthy as when the Promise Keepers drew nearly one million to the nation's capital three years earlier, it could be seen as Engle's coming out party.

(The Promise Keepers is a still extant conservative Christian men's organization whose membership and attendance at its stadium and arena events soared in the 1990s, and, due to internal squabbles, subsequently plummeted to earth in the first decade of this century.)

"The prayers of the faithful were answered when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Bush v. Gore decision, giving the election to George W. Bush," Rachel Tabachnick wrote in a long essay titled "The Christian Right, Reborn: The New Apostolic Reformation Goes to War," in the Spring 2013 issue of Political Research Associates' The Public Eye. For the NAR, the DC rally was just the beginning of a more public political journey that has allowed it to become one of the most important and yet least understood religious/political movements in the country.

Since that first rally, "Engle has staged more than 20 similar rallies, and each has attracted tens of thousands of participants to stadiums across the United States. He and his organization have also become deeply involved in U.S. politics, especially in anti choice and antigay organizing," Tabachnick, a PRA research fellow who has over the past several years become one of the nation's leading experts on the New Apostolic Reformation, reported.

None other than the venerable Dr. James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, one of the Christian Right's flagship entities, and a long-time culture warrior, credited Engle with bringing out the troops for a rally at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego one week before Election Day in 2008, and making a huge difference in helping pass Proposition 8, California's anti-same-sex marriage initiative. According to Tabachnick, "Engle's organization mounted a radio campaign and sent out email and phone blasts in support of Proposition 8, and he urged attendees to be martyrs for the cause."

Journalist and Talk2Action co-founder, Bruce Wilson described Engle as "the unofficial prayer leader of the Republican Party." He has been called a "radical theocrat," and the Southern Poverty Law Center has said that he says he can occasionally "venture into bloodlust."

Engle, a New Apostolic Reformation leader, has helped build a movement that has veered away from what we have come to know as the "traditional" Christian Right. It "is rooted in Charismatic Christianity, a cross-denominational belief in modern-day miracles and the supernatural." It emerged from neo-Pentecostal movement of the 1980s and "spread to Roman Catholics and mainline and evangelical Protestant churches in the United States and worldwide."

According to Tabachnick, the NAR embraces women and minorities, and is particularly focused on youth, "sponsoring youth events that look more like rock concerts than traditional church services." Its "stylish leaders dress in casual clothes, encourage fasting and repetitive chanting as a means of inducing altered mental states, and use sophisticated media strategies and techniques to deliver their message."

It's not all style over substance as the NAR's "most prominent leaders and prolific authors claim to be creating the 'greatest change in church since the Protestant Reformation,' and they describe themselves as modern-day prophets and apostles."

What the movement is really after is "to unify evangelical and all Protestant Christianity into a postdenominational structure, bringing about a reformation in the way that churches relate to one other, and in individual churches' internal governance."

Engle calls for massive "spiritual warfare" that will result in a complete worldwide "political and social transformation": "The revolution begins, they believe, with the casting out of demons, Tabachnick states. "NAR training materials claim that communities around the world are healed of their problems — experiencing a sudden and supernatural decline in poverty, crime, corruption, and even environmental degradation — once demonic influences are mapped and then purged from society through NAR's particular brand of 'spiritual warfare,' which is sometimes referred to as 'power evangelism.'"

Demonic activity has caused the downfall of society, both at home and abroad. "The sources of demonic activity can include homosexuality, abortion, non-Christian religions, and even sins from the past." According to NAR leaders, "strategic prayer can literally alter circumstances in the temporal world: the spontaneous burning and destruction of religious icons and structures," Tabachnick noted.

To achieve its goals, the NAR aims to have its apostles seize control over every important aspect of society, including, the government, military, entertainment industry and education."

If the NAR falls short of world denomination, it intends, as a minimum, to "turn America back to God."

Why pay any attention to what thus far appears to be a marginally effective political movement?

Tabachnick argues that, "The movement is bringing about profound changes in the character of conservative Christianity and the Christian Right, both in the United States and around the globe." It is not only "building new institutions, but [it is] creating new networks and alliances among long-established institutions. The NAR's leaders are methodically transforming the nature of the relationship between congregations and their leaders, creating a much more authoritarian leadership style than has traditionally been true of evangelical Christianity. That shift is central to the movement's political potential.

"The NAR's charismatic, authoritarian leaders are well-positioned to reinvent the Christian Right, infusing it with a new wave of energy, expanding its base of support, conducting sophisticated political campaigns, and doubling down on right-wing social and economic agendas — all while giving the Christian Right a new gloss of openness and diversity."

The "leading theorist" and the NAR's "most important organizing force" is C. Peter Wagner, a professor of "church growth" for three decades at Fuller Theological Seminary, a nondenominational evangelical seminary in Pasadena, CA. In the 1990's, Wagner headed up the International Coalition of Apostles, a networking group that "presided over an association of apostles — many of which, in turn, claimed hundreds or thousands of ministries under their leadership." He "also formed networks of faith-healing ministries, 'deliverance ministries' that claim to free people from demon possession, and an inner-circle of leading prophets, in addition to the Wagner Leadership Institute (WLI), a network of training programs in locations across the United States, Canada, and several Asian nations."

Tabachnick pointed out that the New Apostolic Reformation's influence does not end at America's shores: "Engle was featured extensively in God Loves Uganda, a documentary about U.S. evangelical conservatives' antigay influence in Uganda, where the infamous Anti-Homosexuality 'Kill the Gays' Bill was first introduced in 2009."

The NAR might have reached its pinnacle in the summer of 2011 when 30,000 people attended a prayer rally in Houston, Texas. Promoted heavily of Texas Governor Rick Perry, then a leading contender for the Republican Party's presidential nomination, the rally featured several NAR leaders, "apostles and prophets who had for years remained under the radar were suddenly subjected to scrutiny from the media."

"Exposed to this scrutiny, NAR's leaders publicly distanced themselves from some of their more radical ideology. Webpages were removed and websites were amended to explain that the NAR's apostles are either not Dominionists, or that the term simply means to gain influence in society."

This increased scrutiny may have led to a retreat of sorts, but certainly not to surrender.

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27. EGYPT SHOWS HOW POLITICAL ISLAM IS AT ODDS WITH DEMOCRACY
by Youssef Rakha
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The New York Times, July 15, 2013
https://tinyurl.com/lztfeql

CAIRO — Egypt’s top military commander, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, went on the air Sunday to defend the army’s decision to oust Mohamed Morsi, the country’s first democratically elected president, on July 3.
“The armed forces remained committed to what it considered the legitimacy of the ballot box until this presumed legitimacy moved against its own purpose,” General el-Sisi said. “The Egyptian people were concerned that the tools of the state could be used against them. The armed forces had to make a choice, seeing the danger of deepened polarization.”

The general said that the military had offered Mr. Morsi the option of a referendum on whether he should stay in power, but that the deeply unpopular president had refused.

Painful as it was to see the democratic process interrupted so soon after the revolution that overthrew the longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011, the military’s action was necessary. At its most blatant level, there was no way that Mr. Morsi and his affiliates in the Muslim Brotherhood were going to leave power willingly, no matter the severity of the civil discontent over the president’s efforts to consolidate his power while mismanaging major problems from fuel shortages to rising inflation.

When has an Islamist government, however democratically elected, ever ceded power to non-Islamists through a functional political process? Is democracy about periodically displacing absolute power by force or about laying the foundations for its peaceful rotation, including mechanisms not only for transparency in governance but also for the protection of women and religious minorities?

Instead of reaching out to other parties and trying to effectively govern, the Brotherhood focused on consolidating its power, by forcing out competent national administrators and members of local government councils and replacing them with its own cronies and allies. Last December, the Morsi regime showed no hesitation as its Islamist supporters attacked protesters camped outside the presidential palace. The government was happy to suppress protest as long as the army stood aside.

In Egypt, the army has been seen as the “arm of the people” since long before the 1952 coup that led to the establishment of Egypt’s first republic in 1953. Like Mr. Mubarak, his predecessors, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar el-Sadat, drew their authority less from political competence than from their belonging to the military establishment.

Like it or not, the military is the core of Egypt’s deeply bureaucratic state apparatus. But the army, always a major political player, has seldom interfered with politics unless forced to. Just as the army pushed out Mr. Mubarak in 2011, so it forced out Mr. Morsi when it seemed like the Egyptian state might very well cease to exist. At risk were not only basic amenities but also control of the borders, notably with the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip, and diplomatic failures regarding Ethiopia’s plans to build a new dam on the Nile, Egypt’s long-term water supply.

The Brotherhood managed to antagonize every arm of the state as well as much of the business sector. In seeking office, it sold subsidized foodstuffs and fuel at reduced prices, or distributed them free of charge. It seemed clueless as power cuts and gas shortages became the norm.

The wiles and guile of Islamic fundamentalism were given free reign as never before, threatening not only republican norms but the spiritual wellbeing of the average moderate, and presumably pro-democracy, Sunni Muslim on the street. The legacy of the Morsi episode may sadly be that in the Middle East, democracy and political Islam “don’t mix.”

They don’t mix not only in theoretical terms — the Umma (or community of believers) vs. the modern nation state; the sect vs. the citizen; Islamic morality vs. individual liberties — but also because political Islam gives political cover to all that is undemocratic in an Arab society.

Under Mr. Morsi, jihadists blew up the export gas pipelines on the Sinai Peninsula with relative impunity. Indeed, when militants went so far as to abduct military personnel, Mr. Morsi expressed concern for both the abductors and abductees. (The kidnap victims were later released.) Members of unofficial Saudi-style religious police forces could kill a young man for taking a walk with his girlfriend. Women who did not wear the hijab could be subjected to discrimination and sexual harassment — not to mention having their hair forcibly cut with scissors on public transportation and in school. The despicable practice of child marriage threatened to resurge.

In the dysfunctional Parliament, Islamist members focused on such issues as legalizing female genital mutilation and banning the teaching of foreign languages in state schools.

A controversial Salafi preacher, Abu Islam, defaced a Christian Bible to make his sectarian point. (He was ordered to pay a fine.) Meanwhile, in southern Egypt, a Coptic Christian schoolteacher, Dimyana Abdel-Nour, was tried on trumped-up charges of attacking Islam in the classroom. She paid a much larger fine, and her case is still open.

A glaring example of the Brotherhood’s sectarianism occurred at a Syria Solidarity Conference convened by Mr. Morsi on June 15. What at first seemed like a fascist-style pro-Morsi rally quickly devolved into a hate-speech bonanza against the Alawite regime of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. A number of popular Wahhabi preachers, like Mohamed Hassan and Mohamed Abdel Maqsoud, not only complained of Mr. Morsi’s earlier, tentative rapprochement with Iran but also frothed at the mouth as they openly identified the Shiites with all evil. Mr. Morsi may not have been directly responsible, but he did nothing to prevent it.

On June 23, a mini-pogrom took place in which Hassan Shehata, a leader of Egypt’s tiny homegrown Shiite community, was dragged through the streets in his village outside Cairo, and then killed, along with three of his followers. Not a peep from Mr. Morsi.

To say that the events of the past month cannot be described as a coup — contrary to the position of some Western democratically obsessed political observers — should in no way imply a pro-military position. The generals are not eager to govern directly and they fear Western censure (and the possible cessation of American military aid), as well as the Islamists’ continuing political power, as demonstrated by ongoing pro-Morsi protests. What happens next is an open question.

What is no longer an open question is how Washington’s role in propping up political Islam is more likely to result in the death and discontent of Muslims. The Obama administration, which has largely stayed on the sidelines as our crisis has unfolded, must recognize that Islamic fundamentalism will always be more of a problem than a solution.

Youssef Rakha, a writer, journalist and photographer, is the author of the forthcoming novel “The Crocodiles.”


A version of this op-ed appeared in print on July 16, 2013, in The International Herald Tribune.

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28. INDIA: PANCHAYAT ORDERS UP WOMAN’S GANG RAPE
by Piyush Srivastava in Lucknow
=========================================
(Mail Today, 29 July 2013)
IN A shocking incident, a 24- yearold woman has been brutally gangraped and forced out of the home by her in- laws with the consent of a village panchayat in Uttar Pradesh.

The incident, which happened in Kamheda village of Muzaffarnagar, came to the fore when the victim, Noor Jahan, mustered up the courage to file a police complaint against the accused on July 27.

The village panchayat reportedly forced Jahan to marry Mohammad Shadab after her brother Mohammad Azeem had eloped with Shadab’s sister Gulsida Bano on February 15. Azeem works as a civil contractor in Delhi.

Justification

The panchayat later justified the July 20 incident, saying “ an eye for eye is the actual justice”. The rapists — Shadab’s family members — declared that it was their revenge.

A panchayat, which was convened around 10 days after Azeem eloped with Gulsida, demanded that Jahan marry Shadab.

Besides this, it also asked her parents to pay ` 75,000 as compensation to Gulsida’s parents.

“ I agreed to the panchayat’s decision because I knew that there would be bloodbath in the village if I refused to marry him,” Jahan told police.

“ My brother- in- laws Irshad and Shahzad raped me mercilessly the same day I married Shadab. It became a routine. My father- inlaw claimed that he had agreed to my marriage since he wanted to take revenge this way. On March 26, they registered a case against my brother and police traced him and Gulsida. They were released after Gulsida confessed before the magistrate that she married him willingly,” Jahan alleged in her complaint.

Jahan somehow managed to escape their clutches on July 21 early morning and filed a complaint with Muzaffarnagar police on July 27.

Senior superintendent of police Manzil Saini said: “ The victim has met me. A case has been registered under Section 376 of the IPC. The accused would be arrested soon,” said Saini.

The victim’s elder brother alleged that the decision that led to the incident was taken under the active supervision of the panchayat.

“ Police gave time to the accused to flee the village. The husband of the panchayat chief was also present when the fate of my sister was decided. He was very vocal and wanted the harshest punishment for us,” he said.

Mohammad Imran — panchayat head Mehrit Jahan’s husband— confirmed the decision of the panchayat to M AIL T ODAY . Imran claimed he had asked them to reach an amicable solution. “( But) she has approached the police.

Now, I don’t have anything to say.”

The panchayat in UP later justified the July 20 incident, saying “ an eye for eye is the actual justice”

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29. ARAB WORLD: TUNISIA PARALYZED BY GENERAL STRIKE, PROTESTS AFTER BRAHMI KILLING
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http://www.dw.de/tunisia-paralyzed-by-general-strike-protests-after-brahmi-killing/a-16978016
[26 July 2013]

Tunisia has been largely sealed off to the outside world, with all flights into and out of the country cancelled. The main labor union had called a general strike in response to the killing of politician Mohammed Brahmi.

Tunisia observed an official day of national mourning on Friday, in response to the deadly shooting of secular politician Mohammed Brahmi, with shops and banks closed in anticipation of potentially violent protests.

Brahmi was shot dead on Thursday outside of his home near the capital, Tunis, by unidentified gunmen on a motorbike. The 58-year-old was the second leading member of the leftist Popular Front to be shot dead this year.

In February, Chokri Belaid was gunned down outside of his home, sparking protests that led to resignation of the prime minister. Interior Minister Lofti Ben Jeddou told reporters Friday that Brahmi was killed by the same gun used to assassinate Belaid.

The country's main trade union body, the General Union of Tunisian Labor (UGTT), had called a general strike for Friday to protest against "terrorism, violence and murders." According to Reuters news agency, protesters assembled outside of UGTT headquarters in Tunis on Friday, preparing to march down the city's main boulevard as riot police deployed.

UGTT Deputy Secretary-General Sami Tahri said that all sectors of the country were observing the strike, including banks, health services and most public transport. The UGTT claims to have 500,000 members.

Thousands of protesters had already taken to the streets on Thursday in Tunis and Sidi Bouzid, the birth place of the Arab Spring. Demonstrators set fire to offices of the incumbent Islamist Ennahda party in Sidi Bouzid, while riot police fired tear gas at protesters outside of the Interior Ministry in Tunis.

Accusations against Islamist Ennahda party

Brahmi's 19-year-old daughter, Balkis Brahmi, told the AFP news agency that she saw two men dressed in black who fled the murder scene on a scooter.

"At around midday, we heard gunfire and my father crying with pain," she said. "We rushed out - my brother, mother and I - to find his body riddled with bullets at the wheel of his car parked in front of the house."

A state autopsy found that he had been shot 14 times. The slain secular politician's sister, Chhiba Brahmi, accused the governing Ennahda party for the murder. "I accuse Ennahda," Brahmi told AFP. "It was them who killed him."

Similar accusations were leveled against Ennahda after Belaid's assassination in February. The moderate Islamist party denied involvement in Belaid's murder and vehemently rejected similar accusations in connection with Brahmi's assassination.

Ennahda chief Rachid Ghannouchi called Brahmi's killing "a catastrophe for Tunisia," saying that "those behind this crime want to lead the country towards civil war and disrupt the democratic transition."

Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki called the national day of mourning Friday and has asked the army to arrange a state funeral for Brahmi. The slain politician's family postponed his funeral until Saturday, to avoid exacerbating tensions.

Ennahda accuses radical Salafists of being behind the assassinations of both Belaid and Brahmi.

slk/dr (AP, AFP, Reuters)

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30. AFTER MUBARAK, THE BROTHERHOOD WAS TRIUMPHANT. NOW IT IS IN CRISIS
Under attack in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, the leadership has to answer the question: 'How did you let this happen to you?'
by Peter Beaumont
=========================================
(The Observer, 27 July 2013)

Supporters of Mohamed Morsi bettle police
Supporters of deposed president Mohamed Morsi battle with Egyptian police in Nasr city, east of Cairo yesterday. Photograph: Asmaa Waguih/Reuters

Outside the Rabaa al-Adaweya mosque in Cairo, the bodies of Muslim Brotherhood supporters were laid out in rows. In Libya, its offices in Benghazi and Tripoli were attacked during the same night. In Tunisia, the Brotherhood's offshoot, Ennahda, was facing its own political crisis following the assassination by suspected

Salafist extremists of a prominent leftwing politician outside his home.

A year ago it seemed as if Islamist parties – in particular those with roots in the Brotherhood – were in the ascendant following the Arab spring. This week they are confronting a profound crisis.

If Egypt is the centre of gravity for the Muslim Brotherhood – the party was founded here in 1928 – it is also where the move against the ikhwan (brotherhood) has been sharpest in recent weeks. It was here that it was pushed out of office by an army-backed coup that has enjoyed – for now at least – substantial popular support from some sectors of Egyptian society. The Egyptian army and judiciary have in recent days reached into the Gamal Nasser playbook of half a century ago to pursue and decapitate the Brotherhood's leadership, including president Mohamed Morsi, who is detained on charges of murder and kidnapping.

If opposition to the Brotherhood on the ground has been mounting in individual countries, it has been matched by a growing regional alliance against it, led by Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The latter was among the first to congratulate Egypt's new interim president, Adly Mansour, barely hours after Morsi was deposed. It comes, too, as the influence of Qatar, a strong supporter of the Brotherhood, has appeared to wane.

Shadi Hamid, research director at the Brookings Doha Centre, however, cautioned against those writing "premature obituaries" of either wider political Islam or the Brotherhood itself: "The groupings being targeted at the moment are those with prominent positions in power and government. It's not the Salafist parties that are coming under pressure. The lesson we are learning is that Middle East politics is more fluid than we thought, and the electorate is very fickle."

Despite that, he believes that the Brotherhood in Egypt made a series of serious miscalculations after the fall of Hosni Mubarak, not least reversing its proclaimed position that it would not seek the post of president: "In late 2011 I recall senior Brotherhood leaders, including Essam Erian [one of its senior officials], saying that the people will not accept an Islamist president."

Others were hearing the same message, including Nathan Brown, an Egypt expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who described meetings with Khairat al-Shater, the Brotherhood's deputy leader. "I met Shater three times in 2011-2012," Brown told Reuters last week, "and each time it was clear that the political appetite was growing, but the first time he was extremely explicit that the Brotherhood would not seek political power right away.

"He was very clear as to the reasons: the world's not ready for it, Egypt's not ready for it, and – the phrase he kept using – the burdens of Egypt are too big for any one political actor. Those turned out to be very sound judgments, but he abandoned them."

Instead, confronted with the candidacy of a popular former Muslim Brotherhood member, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, and believing their cohesion under threat, the Brotherhood abandoned its instincts and fielded its own candidate, ending up with Mohamed Morsi.

In power the ideologically conservative organisation compounded that miscalculation. The Brotherhood's majoritarian outlook – borne out of its centralised and disciplinarian organisation, with its "listen and obey" credo – ensured that it failed to reach out and engage with other key groups in Egyptian society, confirming the suspicion for its opponents that it was only pursuing its own narrow interests.

It has not only been in Egypt that the Brotherhood has faced a strong push back. In Libya, where the Brotherhood's political wing, the Justice and Construction party, controls the second-largest number of seats in the country's legislature, there has also been growing opposition to its increasing power and influence. On Friday hundreds took to the streets overnight to denounce the killing of a prominent political activist and critic of the Brotherhood, Abdelsalam al-Mosmary, who was shot dead after leaving a mosque following Friday prayers.

It was Mosmary's death that led to the attacks on party offices in Benghazi and Tripoli. "The people were in the streets because they are fed up of all political parties and how the state has failed," said Hisham Idris, who had demonstrated in Tripoli's Martyrs Square. "Maybe the growing opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood is because they are trying to achieve their political ambitions using religion as a cover for their agenda."

It is Tunisia, perhaps, that holds the key to the difficulties being experienced by the Brotherhood and similar movements. "Tunisia," says Shadi Hamid, "is a very interesting point of comparison. The Ennahda party there has made significant concessions. It is in a coalition with other parties and has been very well-behaved. What is instructive is how much hatred of them remains."

Omar Ashour, an expert in Islamist movements and their ideologies at Exeter University, believes that the difficulties facing the Brotherhood and its allies across north Africa reflect a wider problem for the democratisation process: "The losers don't accept that they have lost elections, but the winners have not been able to contain the forces against them and have not been able to rule. The Islamist parties can win, but have found it difficult to rule. A large part of it has to do with the relevance of power. Ennahda in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood have been faced by powerful interests.

"They have access to wealth – which is where the influence of United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia comes in – and they have strong connections with the police and army and other state institutions like the judiciary."

He believes that for the Muslim Brotherhood itself, the crisis, in Egypt in particular, will pose a difficult internal question. "The leadership has to answer the question: how did you let this happen to you?"

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31. EGYPT: ON VIOLENCE AND THE PATH AHEAD
by Ismail Serageldin
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(Al Ahram Weekly, 30-07-2013)

Egyptians in vast numbers want to turn a page and move on. Violence and terrorism are an obstacle, but will not succeed in turning the clock back, writes Ismail Serageldin

The Egyptian revolution is ongoing. It got its second wind and corrected its path 30 June 2013 when millions took to the streets to say “No” to the rule of president Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. Then, after president Morsi was toppled and the interim government was installed, vast numbers of the people began to abandon the streets and were ready to turn the page and start a new chapter. But the escalation in rhetoric of Islamist supporters of Morsi continued and calls were issued for fighting, violence and attacking the enemies of Islam — the enemies of Morsi.

That definition of enemies included all who did not agree with the Muslim Brotherhood, including large factions of other Islamist groups. The talk was inciting of public violence and in some cases even called for shihada (martyrdom) in fighting for the return of Morsi. The Brotherhood having lost their bid to entrench themselves in power, tried to argue that the people were split and the army had taken the side of their opponents in a brazen coup, and was using violence against the supporters of Morsi to quell their demands for his return. Having failed to mass the larger numbers this time, the Muslim Brotherhood wanted to turn to violence instead. They tried to provoke others by sending some toughs to Tahrir Square — where they were repelled — and continued to incite their people to hold on to the squares where they were camped and to fight non-believers in order to restore Morsi to power.

Morsi supporters remained in the streets after the rest of the crowds went home, and continued to hold the same two squares — Rabaa Al-Adaweya and Al-Nahda in Cairo — and their orators in the squares and on their TV channels continued to try to incite violence. The general view is that the Muslim Brotherhood has chosen to escalate into violence while maintaining demonstrations in order to show the outside world, especially the US, that it is a case of the military using force against civilians. They have now activated full blast their allies in Sinai, where the tunnels that served Hamas in Gaza work both ways. Violence in Sinai is serious as Egypt’s military presence is limited by the Camp David Treaty. But a full scale military operation there is probable and is likely to succeed, at least in checking rampant lawlessness, even if some terrorist acts are still possible after that.

The army in Egypt has so far been reasonably well behaved and refused to fire on demonstrators — on either side — during the 30 June events. Then came the terrible news of the 51 people killed in front of the Republican Guard complex. The Muslim Brotherhood claims that they were shot while praying the morning prayer. The army claims that they were shot trying to attack the complex, where they thought Morsi was being held. The complex is defined and defended as a military installation. We need a full investigation with proper forensics to settle this, although by far most people believe the army. It is important to have a full investigation of this and all the other acts of violence that have occurred since 25 January 2011 and any additional incidents that may happen. Every attack, every death, has to be accounted for professionally, transparently and in the context of the law. The guilty must be brought to justice. Cover-ups of any kind are not acceptable.

In the absence of any hard evidence to the contrary, I myself tend to believe the army story. The primary reason is that the average Egyptian soldier is very devout. I cannot imagine that these soldiers could fire at people praying and massacre them. Such an act would generate enormous revulsion among all Egyptians, even more than the general Egyptian revulsion at bloodletting of any type. Despite decrying the loss of blood, the public is eager to move on, and look with annoyance at the traffic and other delays that are caused by the actions of the Muslim Brotherhood, and with concern that they will try a campaign of terrorist attacks soon.

It is against that background that General Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi asked the crowds that came out on 30 June to return to public squares in Egypt to demonstrate that the Muslim Brotherhood crowds do not represent the majority of the Egyptian people, and to give the Armed Forces and the police a clear “mandate to fight terrorism and violence”. The people responded enthusiastically, but I doubt that the Muslim Brotherhood will accept that show of support and withdraw. The army, however, has said that by the massive demonstration on 26 July they have a mandate to start putting order back in Egypt. Putting order may include further confrontation with Morsi supporters who are seeking his reinstatement. But most people hope that this will mean that we are turning a page and will restore order in our streets and normality in our lives in keeping with the wishes of the vast majority of the Egyptian people.

In general, I am of course very concerned about all this. I decry all loss of life, and I warn that the censorship of TV channels and the arrest of announcers on the charge that they are fomenting hatred and calling for violence — which they are — is still a breach of free speech that should be resisted. I have called for national reconciliation of all — repeat all — Egyptians, and starting a new page. But emotions are running high and few are willing to listen to this appeal at present. But my faith in Egyptian youth is enormous. I believe that they will be able to build the bridges that their elders have not.

Yesterday, 26 July, was the big day of demonstrations, the largest ever, larger than the crowds of 30 June. It was a historic day as ever more Egyptians came out into the streets everywhere in the cities and towns of Egypt, while the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi supporters remained entrenched in the two squares in Cairo, in Al-Qaed Ibrahim Mosque in Alexandria, and some scattered in other cities. The mood at these enormous demonstrations was generally quite festive. General Al-Sisi is suddenly everyone’s hero, and many comments are comparing him to Gamal Abdel-Nasser.

But soon violence reared its ugly head, and exchanges of gunfire started in several places. Casualties fell from both sides, as well as from the police. As the fighting spilled out of Al-Qaed Ibrahim area it came near the Alexandria Library, and stray bullets struck the library breaking two of the glass panels of the facade and one of the panels that serve as guardrails for the bridge that runs over Port Said Street between the library and Alexandria University. One of the police officers that help guard the library was wounded and the police and the army broke up the street fight and arrested a dozen people and confiscated their weapons.

For the first time bullets hit the glass of the façade and the blood of a man was spilled in the plaza of the Alexandria Library. Although the library was not a target, and the bullets were stray bullets from street gunfights, it is still a sorry day for all of us.

A historic and largely joyful day for most Egyptians has been marred by the horror of the violence, the agony of the wounded, and the shock and grief in the presence of death. Some 70 people were killed, of whom seven in Alexandria. It does not matter which side they were on, for there is really nothing that justifies the taking of human life except self-defence under extreme danger. The casualties were, as usual, the misguided, the innocent and the dutiful. They are the ones who die.

Egypt has turned a page and is writing a new chapter in the history of its second revolution. Sadly, part of that is now written in blood. But the amazing spirit of the Egyptian people will transcend that moment, and in the largely non-violent way that has been distinctively theirs, they will find a path towards national reconciliation. The path has been made more difficult by the emergence of violence and the likely acts of terrorism that will follow. But terrorism is criminalised and pursued in all societies. It is not a reason to abandon democratic ideals and the rule of law, nor is it necessarily a prelude to civil war. Our nation will ultimately find its unity and its strength in openness, freedom and the rule of law.

The writer is director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

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32. POLISH DISSIDENT ADAM MICHNIK: 'WE ARE BASTARDS OF COMMUNISM'
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(Spiegel Online, 31 July 2013)
Adam Michnik is editor-in-chief of Poland's leading daily and its most prominent former dissident. In a SPIEGEL interview, he talks about the threat of authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe, the decline of the region's political culture and feelings of being treated like second-class citizens in Europe.

We are sitting in a room on the sixth floor of the building occupied by the leftist-liberal Warsaw newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. There are stacks of newspapers and books everywhere, and on the walls are certificates from American and German universities next to photos of Adam Michnik with statesmen from around the world. Michnik is sitting at the table smoking an electric cigarette. He is the editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's most important nationwide daily newspaper, which started being published in 1989 as the first legal newspaper of the Solidarnosc (Solidarity) trade union. Michnik, 66, is the country's most prominent former dissident. He was sent to prison several times for his political convictions, starting at the age of 19. He wrote for underground newspapers and supported the independent Solidarity trade union. When the communist regime declared martial law in 1981, Michnik was detained. In the spring of 1989, he took part in the Round Table talks, as an adviser to Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, and negotiated the first free elections. Since then, he has focused his attention on the upheavals in Eastern Europe. For Michnik, the demonstrations in Bulgaria against the corrupt political class, the authoritarian tendencies in Hungary and nascent nationalism are all the delayed consequences of 40 years of oppression and patronization under communism. Michnik has a special relationship with SPIEGEL. When he was allowed to go to Paris in the 1970s to visit Jean-Paul Sartre, he called the SPIEGEL offices in Hamburg from Paris. He wanted to know whether its editors would like to print an essay he had written, which they did. "It was the first article I was able to publish in a truly important Western publication," Michnik says. "It sent a message to Poland's rulers that they could not sideline me with force."

SPIEGEL: Mr. Michnik, for more than six weeks now, thousands of people have taken to the streets in Bulgaria to demonstrate against their country's rotten political system. More than 20 years after Eastern Europe's democratic awakening, political conflicts are still characterized by turf wars and hatred. Why?

Michnik: We lack a political culture, a culture of compromise. We in Poland, as well as the Hungarians, have never learned this sort of thing. Although there is a strong desire for freedom in the countries of Eastern Europe, there is no democratic tradition, so that the risk of anarchy and chaos continues to exist. Demagoguery and populism are rampant. We are the illegitimate children, the bastards of communism. It shaped our mentality.

SPIEGEL: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who is very radical in his approach to the press and the opposition, is not without his admirers in Eastern Europe. The same holds true in your country with conservative nationalist opposition leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Is the authoritarian brand of politician characteristic of the East?

Michnik: We still have politicians who strive for a different type of country: Kaczynski as well as Orbán in Hungary. They want a gradual coup. If Orbán stayed in power in Hungary or if Kaczynski were to win an election in our country, it would be dangerous. Both men have an authoritarian idea of government; democracy is merely a façade.

SPIEGEL: Orbán says that a "centralist majority democracy" is needed so that clear decisions can be made, by decree, if necessary. Otherwise, he says, dangers like the economic crisis cannot be averted.

Michnik: Hitler said the same thing when he issued special decrees and emergency regulations. It's the road to hell. To be honest, Hungary is the country where I would have least expected this to happen, but it was the first to cut a hole into the Iron Curtain. In Romania and Bulgaria, perhaps, but not in Hungary. What is happening there now stems from a disappointment in the Social Democrats, who were in power before and drove the country into economic ruin. Fortunately, Poland quickly implemented the most important reforms needed to make the transition to a market economy at the beginning of the 1990s. It was different in Hungary. That's why the population is now disappointed and is calling everything into question, even the things it once dreamed of achieving.

SPIEGEL: Do people suddenly no longer care that someone is removing judges or editors-in-chief who are not toeing the party line? Have they forgotten what it was like under the communists?

Michnik: A part of society in our countries would still prefer an authoritarian regime today. These are people with the mentality of Homo sovieticus. But they also exist in France -- just think of Le Pen -- and even in Finland and Sweden.

SPIEGEL: Orbán is trying to direct his country into a "system of national cooperation without compromises." What does he mean by that?

Michnik: British historian Norman Davies called this form of democracy a "government of cannibals." Democratic elections are held, but then the victorious party devours the losers. The gradual coup consists in getting rid of or taking over democratic institutions. These people believe that they are the only ones in possession of the truth. At some point, parties no longer mean anything, and the system is based, once again, on a monologue of power. The democratic institutions in the West are more deeply embedded in the West than in Eastern Europe. Democracy can defend itself there. Everything is still fragile in our countries, even two decades after the end of communism.

SPIEGEL: Orbán, Kaczynski and others talk about wanting to finally finish the revolution of 1989 and settle scores with the communists. Do former communist officials still pose a threat today?

Michnik: I think it was a good thing that Poland chose the path of reconciliation and not the path of revenge. Nevertheless, I'm still treated with hostility. I was a supporter of (former German Chancellor Konrad) Adenauer. He too had several options after the war: to send the people around him who had supported Hitler to prison or to turn them into democrats. He chose the second path. We also wanted our new Poland to be a Poland for everyone. The other path would have meant the opposition assuming power immediately in 1989 and not sharing it with the old regime. We would have had to hang the communists from the streetlights, and a small, elite group would have been in charge. That would have been anti-communism with a Bolshevik face.

SPIEGEL: Many say that the old boys' networks have become re-established. In Bulgaria, several thousand people, including many members of a new, urban middle class, are currently demonstrating against their country's political class.

Michnik: Yes, but there were also free elections in Bulgaria, where the opposition has just won. In a democracy, the government is a reflection of society because people are elected. Sometimes the type of person from the old machine, who is everything but an appealing figure, happens to win an election. But democracy applies to everyone, not just the noble and the clever.

SPIEGEL: In Bulgaria, the secret police archives were opened only half-heartedly. And, in Romania, former members of the notorious Securitate are still active everywhere. What's it like to live in a society in which the culprits of the past are better off then their former victims?

Michnik: You're saying the same thing I used to say about Germany --"old Nazis all over the place." But they were ex-Nazis. Of course, Romania was an Orwellian state, and the Securitate was everywhere. All countries that emerge from a dictatorship have these problems, as did Spain and Portugal. But it shouldn't justify introducing an anti-communist apartheid.

SPIEGEL: The West is demanding that there be more of an accounting for the past. Is that too simplistic for your taste?

Michnik: Yes. After the fall of communism in Poland, we had a post-communist as president for two terms: Aleksander Kwasniewski. He was very good. He brought Poland into NATO and the European Union. The call to finally clean house is a propaganda tool of the right, which tolerates the leftists who it condemns. Kaczynski appointed a judge to the position of deputy justice minister who had once sentenced current President (Bronislaw) Komorowski to a prison term. 

SPIEGEL: Nationalism is flourishing once again under authoritarian, right-wing leaders, such as Kaczynski and Orbán. How can this be happening in a united Europe?

Michnik: In times of great turmoil, such as we are experiencing today, people search for something to cling to. In Hungary, it's the Trianon complex. No Hungarian has forgotten that, under the Treaty of Trianon, two-thirds of the kingdom had to be handed over to neighboring countries after World War I, and that many Hungarians now live across those borders. Orbán uses this instrument to his advantage.

SPIEGEL: He preaches a new "Hungarianism."

Michnik: Back in 1990, I wrote that nationalism is the last stage of communism: a system of thought that gives simple but wrong answers to complex questions. Nationalism is practically the natural ideology of authoritarian regimes.

SPIEGEL: And anti-Semitism is on the rise along with it. According to a US study, 70 percent of people in Hungary say that the Jews have too much influence on business activity and the financial world.

Michnik: Poland is the only country in Eastern Europe that was able to control itself in this respect. Anti-Semitism is no longer socially or politically acceptable in Poland.

SPIEGEL: How should the West treat Orbán?

Michnik: We should be openly critical. Europe cannot remain silent on Hungary. Sanctions should be imposed, if necessary. When the West imposed sanctions on communist Poland after martial law was declared, we said that we didn't notice anything. But they were ultimately effective.

SPIEGEL: The government in Warsaw has also been restrained in its criticism of Hungary.

Michnik: It has the feeling that the Eastern European EU countries are already being treated as second-class members, and that open criticism would make the discrimination even worse.

SPIEGEL: Why do those in the East feel like second-class citizens within the EU?

Michnik: Look at Poland. There are those there who are convinced that we belong in the first class. It has to do with our messianism, with the feeling of being Christian Europe's advance guard on the frontier of the barbaric East.

SPIEGEL: Poland is doing well economically, and it's getting a lot of money from the European Union.

Michnik: That's true, but people don't realize it. Seen from the perspective of Paris, Prague or Berlin, Poland is a great country. But turn on the Catholic station Radio Maryja, and you'll hear that Poland is the land of disaster and is allegedly being run by people who want to biologically wipe out the Polish nation. Some 30 percent of Poles believe that the plane crash in Smolensk, in which then-President Lech Kaczynski was killed, was the result of a conspiracy between (Polish) Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Vladimir Putin.

SPIEGEL: Where does this urge to constantly see the bad side of things -- which is not just prevalent in Poland -- come from?

Michnik: Poland and the entire East haven't seen as much change as in the last 20 years in centuries. But it hasn't reached our consciousness yet. We still love to be pessimists.

SPIEGEL: Is that why hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans flock to the West?

Michnik: Life is still more comfortable in the West than in Eastern Europe. Besides, our countries were hermetically sealed in the past. Now people can finally get out, and they're taking advantage of it. People make money in the West, and then many come back and open a business at home. That's not a bad thing. Conversely, more and more people are now coming to Poland from Belarus and Ukraine.

SPIEGEL: In your view, do those countries also belong in Europe?

Michnik: I would be very much against Europe sitting back and doing nothing on the issue of Ukraine. The French have openly said that they don't want Ukraine, while the Germans have said as much, just not as clearly.

SPIEGEL: As a dissident, you paid a high price for your political convictions. Why do former members of the Polish opposition no longer play a role in politics today?

Michnik: It probably had to happen. Politics in a democracy requires other psychological conditions. The fight against communism was a little like a war: We put on the uniform and went to the front, and after the victory many of us withdrew. We dissidents had very high moral standards. No one believed that communism would actually collapse in front of our eyes. But then it happened, and suddenly people like me, with a completely different background than most of their fellow Poles, were in power. But we hadn't learned to make policy according to the rule of a democracy. Besides, our noble aspirations were probably too much for the majority of the people.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Michnik, thank you for this interview.

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED by JAN PUHL, MARTA SOLARZ and CHRISTIAN NEEF

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

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33. IN THE VIOLENT FAVELAS OF BRAZIL
by Suketu Mehta
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(The New York Review of Books, August 15, 2013)
My Brazilian friend Marina and I were picking up a visiting friend from New York, who heads an NGO, in her hotel lobby near Paulista, the most prestigious avenue in São Paulo. It was 7:30 on a busy Friday night last October.

We walked up to a taxi outside the hotel. I sat in the front to let the two women chat in the back. Marina asked me to Google the restaurant menu. I was doing so when I saw a teenage boy run up to the taxi and gesticulate through my open window. I thought he was a beggar, asking for money. Then I saw the gun, going from my head to the cell phone.

“Just give him the phone,” Marina said from the back seat.

I gave him the phone. He didn’t go away.

“Dinheiro, dinheiro!”

I didn’t want to give him my wallet. The boy was shouting obscenities. “Dinheiro, dinheiro!”

The boy’s body suddenly jerked back, as a man’s arm around his neck pulled him off his feet. The man, dressed in a black shirt, was shouting; he had jumped the boy from behind. He started hitting the boy. The taxi driver sitting next to me was stoic. He said that this had never happened to him before, but he couldn’t have been more blasé.

The next thing I saw was the boy and another teenager, probably his accomplice, running away fast up the street. The man in the black shirt chased them a bit, then came back panting to the taxi. “Did the bastard get anything?” our savior, whom we later nicknamed Batman, asked. He wasn’t a plainclothes cop, as I’d originally thought; he was just an ordinary citizen who was tired of the criminals.

“A phone,” Marina responded.

“Sons of whores. These motherfuckers—they always come in twos. Cowards.”

The taxi driver drove us to the nearest police station. Two lethargic cops were the only people there. “We get ten of these a day, just in this precinct,” said one of them.

The other cop went over to check in his register. “Three before you today.” There are 319 armed robberies a day in São Paulo.

Everyone in this country has a story. Priscilla, whom I met the next day, has been robbed ten times. Once a kid held a piece of glass from a broken bottle to her neck. Another time she was in a home invaded by gunmen, and one of them held a gun to her head for forty minutes.

I had gotten off lightly—just my phone taken. I still had my wallet, thanks to Batman, and I wasn’t beaten or killed or kidnapped.

The cities of Brazil are some of the most violent places in the world today. More people are murdered in Brazil than in almost any other country. In 2010, there were 40,974 murders there—21 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), compared to the global rate of 6.9. The highest number of murders was in India, at 41,726. But India has a population six times bigger than Brazil’s, so its murder rate is only 3.4 per 100,000 inhabitants. (Italy, by comparison, had 529 murders that year, at a rate of 0.9.) Four Brazilian cities had a murder rate of over 100 per 100,000 residents. Between 5 percent to 8 percent of Brazilian homicides are solved—as compared to 65 percent of US murders and 90 percent of British murders. Most of the victims are male and poor, between fifteen and just shy of thirty. The homicide rate has shaved seven years off the life expectancy in the Rio favelas (slums).

And this year another form of violence started making the headlines, with several high-profile cases of rape in Rio, including that of an American woman in a moving public bus. Rapes in the city increased 24 percent last year, to 1,972 reported cases. Sociologists and police officials are at a loss to explain this trend in a country where women are free to dress as they please, whose laws are often held up as a model for combatting gender violence, and whose president, Dilma Rousseff, is a woman.

The violence done to humans parallels the violence visited on the environment. In the great swath of greenery that makes up a large part of the country, fires, logging, and ambitious agribusiness schemes continue to devastate the rainforest, in spite of—or perhaps because of—Rousseff’s changes in the forestry code first formulated in 1965. According to government figures, deforestation, which had declined by 84 percent in the eight years before August 2012, has shown a 35 percent increase since then.

The violence hasn’t prevented Brazil from emerging on the world stage as the preeminent country in Latin America. Next year, it will host the World Cup; two years after that, the Olympics. Between 2003 and 2011, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—“Lula”—Brazil’s remarkable president, brought about one reform after another that improved the country’s economy. Rousseff, his successor, was until the protests of this June favored to win a second term next year. Both she and Lula are from the center-left Workers’ Party. Now, while not growing as fast as it did in the days before the crisis of 2008, the economy is still the world’s seventh largest. Brazil in the 1950s was 85 percent rural and 15 percent urban. Today the figures are reversed: the country is 87 percent urban. It’s the fastest urbanization of any country in recent times.

Brazil is also a model for other developing countries looking to help the poorest of their citizens. “Bolsa Família” (family allowance), introduced by Lula in 2003, is a startlingly successful program in which the government pays small amounts of cash directly to poor families. Some of the benefits are tied to certain conditions that the recipients must meet, such as making sure their children attend school. It covers a quarter of all Brazilians, 50 million people. This has led to a 20 percent drop in income inequality in Brazil since 2001, when it was one of the most unequal countries on the planet. Thanks to Bolsa Família, Brazil’s middle class grew from 40 million to 105 million in the last ten years. This has created the world’s biggest lower-middle class.

Revolutions generally begin with the formation of a middle class, as recent events demonstrate. In June, protests in São Paulo over a ten-cent increase in bus fares swelled into the largest demonstrations since the fall of the dictatorship, drawing millions of people into the streets of all the major cities. They were protesting the lavish outlays on the World Cup and other sporting events at the expense of basic facilities for transport and education; endemic corruption in the Workers’ Party; the slowdown in the economy; and the high levels of violence in Brazilian society. Most of the protesters were young, college-educated, and unaffiliated with any political party.

The government tried hard to respond to the demonstrators’ wide-ranging grievances. The mayors of São Paulo and Rio rolled back the bus fares. Dilma Rousseff promised a referendum on a package of reforms including a shift from proportional representation to voting by district, which could mean more responsive governance in the favelas. The demonstrators, some of whom seek an outright cancellation of the World Cup, do not so far seem to be satisfied. Rousseff’s approval rating plunged from 57 percent in early June to 30 percent a month later.

The anger of the demonstrators arose partly from injustices that have persisted throughout Brazil’s history. Bolsa Família has done much to solve the problem of inequality, but not race. Half of the country is black, but blacks make up 70 percent of the poorest Brazilians. According to studies based on the 2000 census, an eighteen-year-old white Brazilian boy has, on the average, 2.3 years more education than an eighteen-year-old black boy. The father of a white boy also had 2.3 years more education than the father of a black boy. Sixty years ago, the grandfather of a white boy had 2.4 years more education. Practically everything else in the country has changed, but the educational disparity between white and black has remained stubbornly constant over three generations.

Brazilians like to think of themselves as a multiracial society, but a walk around the favelas of the cities demolishes this myth. Most of the residents are dark-complexioned, much darker than most of the rich who live by the water or in the suburbs, and darker than most of the young people who have recently been protesting in the streets. Over the last year and a half, I have been visiting São Paulo and, especially, Rio de Janeiro, observing the process of “pacification,” by which the government attempts to peacefully enter and reestablish state control over the most violent enclaves of the city, those dominated by drug gangs called traficantes, or by syndicates of corrupt police called militias. Until 2008, when the pacification program started, the traficantes controlled roughly half of the favelas, and the militias the other half. Both still hold power in most favelas. The ultimate aim of the state government of Rio’s plan, called the Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora (UPP), or Police Pacification Unit, is to drive both of these groups out and replace them by the state.

Today, of Rio’s 6.3 million people, 1.4 million live in the favelas. There are some 630 of them, containing more than a thousand “communities.” The state government aims to “pacify” forty of these favelas by the time of the World Cup next year—a kind of demonstration effect that will get attention from visitors. Since the program started in 2008, thirty of the largest have been pacified—that is, they are under the control of the official police forces, not the drug dealers or the militias. In the past, the police would raid individual favelas, capture or kill the biggest drug dealers, and leave. They would soon be replaced by other dealers, and the violence would continue. “The new strategy is not to target individual drug dealers. It is to take back territory,” a high police official told me.

Under the UPP program, elite police units—and in some cases troops from the army and even the navy—invade the favelas and stay for up to three months. Then they are replaced by the regular police and squads of UPP civil servants. The UPP establishes schools and garbage collection, brings in public and private companies to provide utilities such as electricity and television, and hands out legal documents such as employment and residency certificates. In the areas under its control, the UPP has set up community security councils, which attempt to mediate conflicts between local hotheads before they spread. The message is: the state is here to stay. So far, the program has generally been seen as a success, and was a major factor in the reelection of Sérgio Cabral in 2010 as the state governor backed by the Workers’ Party.
mehta_2-081513.jpg

Walter Mesquita

A baile funk, or street party, in the favela of Complexo da Maré, Rio de Janeiro, June 2011

One night in Rio, Walter Mesquita, a street photographer, took me to a baile funk, a street party organized by the drug dealers, in the unpacified favela of Arará. It was an extraordinary scene: at midnight, the traficantes had cordoned off many blocks, turning the favela into a giant open-air nightclub. One end of the street was a giant wall of dozens of loudspeakers, booming songs and stories about cop-killing and underage sex. Teenagers walked around carrying AK-47s; prepubescent girls inhaled drugs and danced. On some corners, cocaine was being sold out of large plastic bags. Everybody danced: grandmothers danced, children danced, I danced. It went on until eight in the morning.

Although such parties are officially prohibited in the pacified favelas because of their multiple breaches of the law, ranging from noise violations to exhortations to murder—even the music played there is called baile funk proibidão—the state and its forces were nowhere to be seen. The rival gangs were a bigger threat than the police. The three gangs that control much of Rio have remained more or less stable for the last couple of decades: the Red Command, the Third Command, and Friends of Friends. According to a top police official I spoke to, in a city of just over six million there are some thirty to forty thousand people in the gangs.

The day after the baile funk, I was flying in a police helicopter over Rio. It took us over Ipanema, a beach for the well-to-do, and the newly pacified favela of Rocinha. I asked if we could fly over Arará. The pilot pointed it out in the distance, and said he could not fly directly over it. He was concerned about getting shot down. A couple of years ago, the traficantes had brought down a police helicopter with antiaircraft guns. So the police cannot safely enter a large part of Rio by land or by air. This, too, is the future of many megacities in the developing world, from Nairobi to Caracas. There is a de facto sharing of power between the legitimate organs of the state and the gangs, the militias. Many people will die as the exact contours of this power-sharing are negotiated.

My friend Luiz Eduardo Soares told me a story about power in the favelas. He is an anthropologist who was the national secretary for public security in 2003. He also wrote the book Elite da Tropa (Elite Squad), a study of police brutality and corruption that was made into the most popular film in the history of Brazilian cinema. He made many enemies among corrupt politicians and police. In 2000, security forces found detailed plans to kill Luiz and his daughters—there were notes on when and where they would be going to school, and at what times. The planners were corrupt police officers. Luiz had to flee with his family, first to the US, and then when he returned to Brazil, to a state in the south of the country.

One night Luiz had a call from a man named Lulu, one of the top traficantes in Rio. Lulu was now old for the drug trade—in his thirties. He wanted to surrender; he wanted to give up the gangs and live to see his children grow up.

Luiz said that if Lulu came to see him he’d have to arrest him. Then he would be put away in a jail like Carandiru, where after a 1992 riot the police opened the gates and sprayed the inmates with gunfire, massacring 111 of them. Luiz hoped for the best for Lulu, but his prospects did not seem good. He was wanted both by the police and by rival gangs.

A little later, Luiz was in the far north of the country, in a traditional temple where they worship old gods, the ones who were here before the Portuguese. Luiz was praying when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned around and saw Lulu smiling at him.

“What are you doing here?” Luiz asked.

“I’m here to see my mother. I got away.”

Soon after that meeting, the Rio police found Lulu. It was stupid of him: the first place a wanted man runs to is his mother. Men came up in a jeep and, without arresting him, took him back to Rio, to his favela, to the police station.

According to Luiz, the chief of the local police appealed to Lulu: “We want you back. It’s been hell since you left. You kept the peace among the gangs. And besides, I need your money for my political campaigns. You have to get back to work, or else.”

So Lulu went back to work, selling coke and meth to the rich kids in the nightclubs of Copacabana and Ipanema. But he had tried to break away; the boys on the corner didn’t trust him, didn’t respect him as they used to. He couldn’t make the 300,000 reais the cops demanded each week.

So one day they came again for Lulu. The cops, Luiz told me, sat him down in a stone chair in an open area of the slum and, with the whole favela watching, shot him in the head. He was useful to the police only when he had power to share. Powerless, he was dead.

Mário Sérgio Duarte is the high police official who led the invasion of Alemão, one of the largest and most dangerous favelas in Rio. In an eight-day operation in 2010, the police found more than five hundred guns: 106 carbines, rocket launchers, bazookas, thirty-nine Browning antiaircraft guns.

“Pacification started with me,” he tells me in the bar at the top of my hotel. Duarte’s mother was a seamstress; his father was murdered in 1972 over a “personal dispute.” Duarte studied physics in college, but chose to join the police force. His T-shirt says, “Listen as your day unfolds.”

In the 1980s, cocaine started coming into the favelas from Colombia and Bolivia, accompanied by Eastern European AK-47s from Paraguay. A carbine, such as an AK-47 or M-15, now costs around fifteen or twenty thousand reais—$7,500 to $10,000. The traficantes have rocket launchers now, says Duarte, “better weapons than the police,” who have .38s and 9-millimeter revolvers. Each year, some fifty cops and around 1,500 traffickers are killed. Last year, over a hundred police in São Paulo were murdered by the drug dealers, and police promised to kill five “bad guys” for every cop killed.

The drug trade in just one favela, Rocinha, Duarte tells me, runs to around a million reais per week. But it’s not just drugs. The dealers run a parallel economy in pirated cable TV, phones, and moto taxis, and have their own systems of justice.

“We don’t expect drugs to be stopped, just the violence with the drugs,” Duarte says. The drugs these days are ecstasy, PCP, and crystal meth, coming in from Europe. He points to Santa Marta as an example of a pacified favela where drugs are still traded, but there are no visible weapons, “no king of the hill.”

The state government has increased the armed police force in Rio from 36,000 to 42,000, toward a target of 50,000. (Another 10,000 are in the “civilian police,” who don’t wear uniforms and don’t carry official weapons.) Their salaries start at 1,500 reais per month, and in six years go up to 1,900 reais. A policeman stationed in a pacified area gets another five hundred a month to help him fight the temptation to take bribes or join one of the violent syndicates—the militias—run by corrupt police.

Duarte calls the militias “the rotten product of the official order.” There are a couple thousand policemen in the militias, he estimates, along with firefighters and ex-soldiers. They started…

“…from 2006!” a waiter from Rocinha who has been listening while getting our drinks chimes in.

The militias don’t allow drug dealing by the traficantes, but they make money in protection, cable TV, transportation, loan sharking. “A trafficker is hell, a militia is purgatory,” Duarte says. The militias create unwritten, though widely obeyed, rules for neighborhoods: you can’t leave your home after a certain time; if you rape women, you’ll be killed publicly in a ceremony. Your radio can’t be too loud. The punishment is often torture or the death penalty. The militias sell arms to traffickers; they deal drugs when necessary; they employ guards who are former traffickers expelled from gangs.

The enemies of the militias are the elite police squad, the BOPE, created during the dictatorship to fight Marxists but then retrained for pacification. (BOPE stands for Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais, or Special Police Operation Battalion—the unit featured in Soares’s book Elite Squad.) Duarte, who led the BOPE for a time, had to try to convince the government that there was a distinctive kind of conflict in Rio: “not ethnic, not religious, not Marxist.” He likes to quote Plato and Hegel in casual conversation. When I later mentioned to a BOPE sergeant that I’d met Duarte, he said, with a mocking laugh, “Ah, the philosopher.”

Along with Marina, I went to meet some “bad guys” in the Parque União subdivision of the Maré favela complex by the port. Two of them meet us in an open-air bar, a twenty-one-year-old ex-traficante and a handsome young man of the same age who sings in a nightclub and acts as the master of ceremonies there. The drug dealer has a tattoo on his right forearm that reads “Emilly.” “Minha filha,” he explains—his daughter. She is seven years old, and he doesn’t want her to go to the baile funk where he picks up his women. “I would like my daughter to escape the statistics.”

When he was active in the gang, he killed people in gunfights, and doesn’t feel bad about it. “At that moment, I can’t afford to think, he might be a father just like me. I’d rather have his mother’s tears falling on his grave than my mother’s on mine.” He’s also been involved in robberies in the rich parts of Rio. After the robberies, he and his gang hijack a series of cars until they get safely back to the favela. He never robs in the favela. Only someone who’s on crack will rob here. This explains why I feel safer here than I did the previous night on the beach in Ipanema.

When the favela wants to have a baile, people steal two buses from the yard across Avenida Brasil and block off the street with them. At the baile they may hear about someone who will be killed by the end of the evening—someone who’s insulted the “owner of the favela”—the top traficante.

The two young men insist on escorting us to our van on the highway. At one point, there are three white metal bollards implanted into the road, turning it effectively into a pedestrian zone. “That’s for BOPE,” the trafficker explains. The police cars will find a surprise when they try to invade.

Their favela, they say, is to be pacified by the end of the week. It’s not that the young traffickers lack alternatives for employment, such as in Rio’s booming tourist industry. It’s that they won’t have the same level of luxury: “a gold chain as broad as a baby’s arm.”

The BOPE did invade the Maré complex—but not as part of the UPP process. During the June protests, robbers from the favela started looting shops along the Avenida Brasil. The BOPE was called in, and a sergeant chasing the robbers into the favela was shot dead. His colleagues erupted. By the time the smoke died down, eight residents of the favela—some of them young traficantes just like the one I had recently interviewed, others merely innocent bystanders—had been killed.

What is happening in the favelas of Rio is not so much pacification as legalization. The dictatorship that ruled from 1964 to 1985 was brought down after many years and great sacrifices. Everyone who was not connected to the junta was its victim. People rushed to spend their pay as soon as they got it in their hands, because by the afternoon it would be worth much less. When democracy came, everybody—the rich in Leblon and the poor in Rocinha—felt they should benefit from it, and in Brazil, for a time, most people did.

But in the favelas there was no democracy. The traffickers continued with their own dictatorship; the people of the favela still had great trouble getting access to the courts or casting a vote. Pacification is an attempt to interrupt a despotic process. It is, for the construction workers and ladies who sell feijoada—a black bean stew—in the slum, the final fall of the dictatorship.

During the last twenty years, the drug dealers took informal control of much of life in the favelas, including, most importantly, music, the cultural lifeblood of Brazil. “Our challenge is what will happen after the pacification,” I was told by Ricardo Henriques, who was until last year the head of the Instituto Pereira Passos, the government’s urban think tank that formulates policy for the UPP.

As Henriques rather optimistically sees it, the takeover of the favelas will happen in three phases. The first consists of the police moving in and denying the drug dealers the ability to do what they want, legally and culturally. The second: “It’s a little bit boring, the police are here.” The third phase consists of the state substituting for the prohibited culture an officially sanctioned culture, or at least culture that doesn’t continue to glorify rape and murder. “You do it in a creative manner,” explained Henriques. “No guns. Less erotic, but really creative. The music is not proibidão.”

For decades, the favelas have existed in a parallel system to the rest of Brazil. “The idea of the state is to stay there for the long, long term,” Henriques said. He wants to reduce the inequality between the favela and the rest of the city. “Our challenge is to integrate those areas into the city.”

If this schematic-sounding vision of pacification works—and the ongoing protests throughout the country are putting it in doubt—what would come after it? One night I went to a jazz club in the favela of Tavares Bastos, which had been pacified for a year, right below the headquarters of the BOPE. The rooms of the club were packed with sweaty bodies and heavy with marijuana smoke. If the BOPE wanted to find drugs it wouldn’t have to go far. But it will never come here, because these are people from the rich, white areas of Ipanema and Leblon. The only black people I could see were the saxophonist and my guide, the street photographer, who lived here.

“The people from the favelas can’t imagine themselves here,” said the photographer. The music was bebop and bossa nova, an American idea of the jazz that Brazilians listen to. No samba here, much less funk.

The club was opened five years ago. A beautiful white economist who works for a bank, wearing an expensive dress, told me she was already bored. “Two years ago there used to be more interesting people. Now I only see all the people I would see near the beaches.”

It costs fifty reais to get in; a beer is fifteen reais. On the way to the club, I passed a number of small cafés. In some, neighbors were enjoying beers that cost a third as much. In one, pleasantly overweight couples were dancing close together to samba. All the lights in the houses of the favela were out; it was after midnight. But the white patrons on their way to the jazz club were raucous, laughing, energized by the thrill of the expedition to this clandestine destination.

In Tavares Bastos, and in favelas like Cantagalo, with its easy access to the rich southern zone of Rio and increased security after the pacification, the residents are being forced out, not by violence, which they can live with, but by high rents, which will make living there impossible. Their right to live there was protected as long as it was illegal. After pacification, the biggest threat to longtime residents of the Rio favelas will come not from drug dealers, but from property dealers.

—July 11, 2013

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