Monthly Archives: December 2013

International Human Rights Day 2013

Solidarity Links

 

A UFCW Canada Human Rights Department Release

December 10, 2013 – International Human Rights Day is commemorated annually on December 10th. Sixty-five years ago, on this date, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR) was born, as a mechanism to promote human rights for all people.

These rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and inter-related. The interrelation and interdependency between human rights and the rights of working people and families – to earn a decent wage, to be able to provide for their children, to have protective shelter, and to thrive – is an often overlooked facet of human rights. These labour rights have allowed Canada to prosper for over a century. The immense contribution and struggles of aboriginal workers, immigrants, women, men, disabled workers and the LGBT community, has meant that some of us have been able to celebrate, provide, and share, while others continue to face ongoing struggles for basic necessities in society.

International Human Rights Day marks a time for reflection as the New Year approaches and 2013 falls to the history books. Unfortunately, 2013 marks a pivotal year of mean-hearted attacks on the human rights and labour rights of individuals and families in Canada. Horrendous Harper Tory legislation has created immense challenges for seasonal workers who migrate to work in Canada as a way to improve the lives of family members in the global South. The impact of these spirited attacks can be seen close to home where many families must deal with the prospects of lost wages now and in the year to come, such as those who work for the Heinz Plant in Leamington, Ontario, set to close in 2014. An attack on working families IS an attack on human rights.

Corporate world greed resulting in the 2008 meltdown unfortunately seems to be the ongoing pattern for 2014. Mr. Harper and the Tory caucus will attempt to ram through two pieces of legislation that attack working families and Canadian values: Bills C-525 and C-377. Both bills have a central goal – to undermine the ability of working people to come together in their workplaces. Bill C-377 attempts to tie up unions with red tape and bureaucracy a mile high so that they are too busy to do their first job: to represent and protect working people and families. Bill C-525 makes it exceptionally more difficult for working people to join trade unions, as is their right under Section 23 of the UNDHR.

Indeed, less money in the pockets of those who most need it, working families, is to be the result of these atrocious and unnecessary changes brought on by these bills.

International human rights day marks exactly two weeks prior to Christmas Eve. With the impending holiday season, let us all be thankful for the contribution of all workers towards laws that protect working people and families, and let us vigorously commit to ensuring that these human rights won’t be so easily trampled on in 2014.

 

In solidarity,

Paul Meinema

National President

 

UFCW Canada is Canada’s largest private sector union with more than 250,000 members across the country working in almost every sector of the food industry from field to table. UFCW Canada in association with the Agriculture Workers Alliance (AWA) (www.awa-ata.ca) also operates ten agriculture workers support and advocacy centres across Canada, which have provided assistance to thousands of workers since the first centre opened its doors in 2002.

 

The partitioned home of Manto

Creative Corner

From: Daily Times, Sunday, January 20, 2012

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012\01\22\story_22-1-2012_pg3_3

  Saadat Hassan Manto and the partition of India

By Ishtiaq Ahmed



This year marks the centenary of one of the most remarkable Urdu short-story writers of the Indian subcontinent: Saadat Hassan Manto (May 11, 1912-January 18, 1955). His contemporary, Krishan Chander (1914-1977), himself a literary icon who some critics have described as the “the imam of the Urdu short-story” graciously wrote in his obituary on Manto that indeed he was the greatest short-story writer of his generation.

Manto had wanted inscribed on his gravestone that he wondered who the greater story-teller was: he or God. His sister was prescient enough to sense that in Pakistan it would sooner or later invite vandalism and much worse. So it was supplanted by a more modest claim: that Manto was aware of the fact that his was not the last word in this world.

Like many other youngsters initially I read Manto’s so-called sex stories primarily in search of salacious excitement, but sensed immediately that far from providing entertainment he was exposing in a shocking manner the misogynist culture and hypocrisy that pervaded South Asia. Some of his stories,  set in the background of the partition, on sexual violence against women are masterpieces.

Some biographical data is in order — Manto was born at Samrala in eastern Punjab in 1912 in a Muslim family of Kashmiri-Brahmin extraction. He grew up in Amritsar. He started his literary journey by translating Russian and French literature. According to some experts, the influence of Russian writers such as Chekov and the Frenchman Maupassant were the profoundest on his writings. He worked as a script, dialogue and story writer in Bombay, then joined All-India Radio, Delhi, but returned to Bombay some years before partition. He was well received and earned a good living. 

Manto penned sketches of Bombay film personalities in his usual irreverent and caustic style. The kindest words were reserved for legendary actor Ashok Kumar whom he described as a kind and caring friend, and a fellow Punjabi Shyam (died 1951), one of the handsomest actors in Bombay, who became his closest chum. The two were inseparable, but then the dagger and torch of mob fury unleashed during the partition riots in Bombay scared the life out of him. One day Ashok Kumar drove him to his home but they were caught up in the midst of a Muslim wedding procession. Manto was terrified. The people recognised Ashok Kumar but let them pass. At Bombay Talkies where Manto worked, the staff had changed and those Hindus who took over were hostile to his and other Muslims’ presence. His wife and daughter had already moved to Lahore.

He left for Lahore in January 1948.

It must be soon after he arrived in Pakistan that Manto composed an open letter to Indian Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, reminding him that he too was a Kashmiri pandit, highborn and thus his equal. Therefore, since he, a Muslim, had left India, Nehru must vacate Muslim-majority Kashmir, asserted Manto. That was perhaps the only time he bluntly subscribed to the underlying logic of the Two-Nation Theory. 



Returning to Lahore, being among relatives and becoming a part of the Muslim nation understandably heightened his sense of physical security. His family were regular Sunnis, who had — along with thousands of other Muslims — shifted from nearby Amritsar to Lahore, spoke Punjabi — all the ethnic factors were positive. 

However, Manto was more than just a living entity of flesh and blood. His was a restless spirit. He would perish without the freedom of expression — a freedom he was in the habit of exercising without recourse to circumlocution, hitting the nail hard on its head. 

Such an attitude was not going to be treated kindly in Pakistan. Neither he nor the orthodox Communists had anticipated that far from becoming a welfare state based on Islamic social justice or a bourgeois democracy, the deep and virulent fundamentalist dimension in the Pakistani state project would cast a long shadow on the intellectual landscape. Manto came under that cloud rather quickly. He was put on trial for preaching obscenity in his short stories. The case went through different levels. Finally the Lahore High Court confirmed his guilt and fined him, but did not send him to prison. 

Such experience combined with difficulties in earning a decent living from his writing and a personal tragedy — his only son died in infancy leaving him traumatised. As the head of an impoverished family that included his wife and three small daughters, he found himself hopelessly in dire straits. Relatives and friends helped, but he could not cope with the cumulative pressures of poverty and sorrows. He began to drink more heavily, was sent to the mental asylum and on January 18, 1955 — when only 42 — he died a broken man.



Manto’s indictment of the senseless partition violence is proverbial. One can easily put together a long list of select short stories. His ‘Toba Tek Singh’ has been recognised as the most powerful satire of those events. The story is set some years after partition. The governments of India and Pakistan decide to exchange the Muslim, Sikh and Hindu mentally-challenged people who were still in the various mental asylums. Bishan Singh is an inmate of the Lahore mental hospital and part of the exchange programme. When he is told that his hometown, Toba Tek Singh, will remain in Pakistan, he refuses to go. The staff promise to send Toba Tek Singh to wherever he goes but fail to deceive him. The story ends with Bishan Singh lying down between the barbed wire that separates the two countries created through a bloody severance of a territory on which had evolved and flourished a composite culture hundreds of years old. He thus occupies a space with no name.



I will end by narrating one of my other favourites. In his, ‘Siyah Hashiye’ (Black Borders), Manto depicts an excited pro-Pakistan mob that attacks the statue on the Lahore Mall Road of the great Hindu philanthropist of Punjab, Sir Ganga Ram. One of them blackens its face with tar. Another collects old shoes, strung into a garland, and is about to put it around the statue’s neck, when the police shows up and begins firing. The man who is about to put the garland of shoes around the statue’s neck is injured. He is sent to the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital for treatment!



The writer has a PhD from Stockholm University. He is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University. He is also Honorary Senior Fellow of the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. He can be reached at billumian@gmail.com

 

Climate Justice

South Asia Bulletin

Loss and Damage Claims in Climate Justice

By Sujatha Byravan and Sudhir Chella Rajan

From The Hindu, December 2, 2013

 

Compensation or reparation for damages associated with any country’s contribution to historical emissions amounts to a ‘duty to make amends’ and is not an act of charity

India joined nearly 140 countries in staging a walkout during the recent climate negotiations in Warsaw to oppose the attempt to avoid creating a strong institutional mechanism to address “loss and damage.” In the final moments of the conference, however, some form of compromise was found on loss and damage as well as a future course of action to “initiate or intensify domestic preparations for their intended nationally determined contributions” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Notwithstanding India’s overt solidarity with other developing countries, its lack of engagement in discussions on loss and damage indicates that it does not have a clear understanding of the broader ethical and political implications of the concept, nor how it could be important strategically.

Impact of extreme weather

The term “loss and damage” was introduced into international climate negotiations by small island nations and least developed countries in Cancun in 2010, and is now formally a part of the language of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. As a legal concept, it conveys the historical liability for climate change that is largely borne by the rich countries of the world. During the past century-and-a-half or so, carbon has been mined in enormous quantities from the depths of the earth and burned in engines generating vast amounts of goods and services while releasing about two trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide, much of which remains in the atmosphere today. Developed regions such as the United States, Europe and Japan are responsible for more than two-thirds of the stock of carbon dioxide, with the remaining portion due to India, China and the rest of the developing world.

Climate change is expected to cause severe droughts in some parts of the world and flooding in others, and coastal erosion and an increased frequency of extreme weather events such as cyclones, tornadoes, storm surges and heatwaves. One of the sad ironies, however, is that the countries that have emitted the least amount of greenhouse gases will suffer the worst impacts due to warming. People living on small islands, delta regions, those who will suffer droughts and floods and extreme events, are, for the most part, from poor countries, and the poorest from among them will be the worst affected. Bangladesh, which has been a minuscule contributor of greenhouse gases, will have most of its people at risk due to climate change.

Compensation

“Loss and damage” entails claims by the developing world from rich countries to provide compensation for the “losses and irreversible damage, including non-economic losses” (taken from G77 and China’s submission to COP 19 on loss and damage) associated with climate change. The idea is taken directly from tort law, which is probably why North America, Europe and Australia have been virulently opposed to having a separate track discuss the issue. Part of the problem is that the notion of loss and damage might also include non-monetary forms of compensation, whose character might sometimes be unclear. For instance, if small island nations like the Maldives and Kiribati were to become submerged as a result of sea level rise from climate change, the resulting disappearance of these nation states would require unusual measures of recompense, including mass migration to other countries and citizenship rights for the migrants, rather than just money.

In cases of civil negligence, in the U.S., but also elsewhere, courts have long established that where a proximate cause to a loss can be established, whether the action was intentional or not, the perpetrator will bear the liability and will have to pay for damages. This means that if enshrined in international law, the countries most responsible for historically caused losses associated with climate change will have to provide the most compensation for various identified damages that will mostly be in developing countries.

For India

India has long recognised the importance of equity in the climate dialogue, by stressing Article 3.1 of the Convention, which speaks of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.” India’s stance has been that every person should have equal access to development, implying an equal share of the earth’s carbon budget. That is to say, if carbon dioxide emissions were to be reduced globally, the rich should be the first and fastest to do so and the poor, the last. India has used its low per capita emissions to push the point that its engagement in emissions reductions efforts should be deferred until after countries with higher per capita emissions reduce theirs. Since the global climate negotiations in Durban, however, the centrality of this position has been shaken, in part because of a new understanding of the urgency and severity of global emissions reductions needed to avert climate catastrophe and also because of shifts in political positions.

Loss and damage belongs to the same overall framework of climate justice. For one thing, India will be one of the most severely affected countries by climate change, given its sheer size, climatic geography and the impacts associated with Himalayan glacier melt, droughts in various regions, coastal vulnerability from sea level rise, reductions in agricultural production, livelihood loss for the poor, increased severity of cyclones, and potential threats to the entire monsoon system. For another, compensation or reparation for damages associated with any country’s contribution to historical emissions amounts to a “duty to make amends” rather than an act of charity.

Paying attention to “loss and damage” from historical emissions maintains equity with regard to the current “stock” of the carbon space that has been unequally distributed among countries. With regard to “flows” or annual emissions of greenhouse gas emissions, India may want to join with other countries to develop a separate equity-based agreement that is consistent with its own understanding of climate justice. India itself may not be in a position to claim damages, depending on how its own responsibilities and capabilities are accounted for, but it is nevertheless in its clearest interest to understand the issue better and join forces with other developing countries.

(Sujatha Byravan and Sudhir Chella Rajan are based in Chennai and work on climate change policy.)

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/loss-and-damage-claims-in-climate-justice/article5411228.ece?homepage=true