International Women’s Day Statement

Migrante BC, Canada

Together with our sisters in the Philippines, here in Canada and the rest of the world, we commemorate and give tribute to the countless women throughout the years who fought for the rights and interests of marginalized and working women and who stood their ground against capitalist and labour exploitation, domestic abuse, sex and labour trafficking, inequality, patriarchy, occupation and war. These struggles were waged, and continue to be waged, in the factories, farm lands, schools, urban poor communities, cities, indigenous lands, inside prison cells, and deep in the mountains.

In spite of this, many challenges and problems continue to oppress and burden women.  Neo-liberal policies reflected in privatization of essential services and resources, deregulation of labour and economies, militarization, and exploitation of the world’s resources are most especially felt and borne by women and children, most especially in the global south. Neo-liberal policies prioritize profits and interests of the elite and foreign investors over the people’s interests, most especially over that of the women and children.

As Filipino migrant women workers, caregivers and temporary foreign workers, we have joined the hundreds of thousands of women who made their way abroad for work to take care of  the families left behind in the Philippines. As workers in Canada, we face discrimination in our workplaces, violations of employment labour standards and ever increasing difficulty in immigration. This year will most probably see more deportations of temporary foreign workers who entered Canada in 2011 and have reached their fourth year under the “four years in, four years out” revolving door policy of immigration.

As Filipino migrant women, we organize ourselves, educate ourselves and involve ourselves in political action. Our ties to where we come from are strong. Our organizing efforts are related, supportive, and relevant to the surging movement for national and democratic change back home. We add our voices to that of our kababayan and Pinay sisters who demand truth and justice, an end to lies, joblessness, falling wages, impunity, violence and militarization and a call for genuine change starting with the resignation or ouster of the current president Aquino.

We link arms with our Pinay sisters as well as our sisters in Canada and  from all over the world knowing that our role as women is in the midst of struggle.

Long live the working women!Long live international solidarity!

Long live international solidarity!

Happy International Women’s Day!

 Migrante BC Canada

March 6, 2015

http://www.canadaphilippinessolidarity.org

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness…”  

Howard Zinn

From The New Yorker

July   29, 2014

Collective Punishment in Gaza

By Rashid Khalidi

Three days after the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the current war in Gaza, he held a press conference in Tel Aviv during which he said, in Hebrew, according to the Times of Israel, “I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.”

It’s worth listening carefully when Netanyahu speaks to the Israeli people. What is going on in Palestine today is not really about Hamas. It is not about rockets. It is not about “human shields” or terrorism or tunnels. It is about Israel’s permanent control over Palestinian land and Palestinian lives. That is what Netanyahu is really saying, and that is what he now admits he has “always” talked about. It is about an unswerving, decades-long Israeli policy of denying Palestine self-determination, freedom, and sovereignty.

What Israel is doing in Gaza now is collective punishment. It is punishment for Gaza’s refusal to be a docile ghetto. It is punishment for the gall of Palestinians in unifying, and of Hamas and other factions in responding to Israel’s siege and its provocations with resistance, armed or otherwise, after Israel repeatedly reacted to unarmed protest with crushing force. Despite years of ceasefires and truces, the siege of Gaza has never been lifted.

As Netanyahu’s own words show, however, Israel will accept nothing short of the acquiescence of Palestinians to their own subordination. It will accept only a Palestinian “state” that is stripped of all the attributes of a real state: control over security, borders, airspace, maritime limits, contiguity, and, therefore, sovereignty. The twenty-three-year charade of the “peace process” has shown that this is all Israel is offering, with the full approval of Washington. Whenever the Palestinians have resisted that pathetic fate (as any nation would), Israel has punished them for their insolence. This is not new.

Punishing Palestinians for existing has a long history. It was Israel’s policy before Hamas and its rudimentary rockets were Israel’s boogeyman of the moment, and before Israel turned Gaza into an open-air prison, punching bag, and weapons laboratory. In 1948, Israel killed thousands of innocents, and terrorized and displaced hundreds of thousands more, in the name of creating a Jewish-majority state in a land that was then sixty-five per cent Arab. In 1967, it displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians again, occupying territory that it still largely controls, forty-seven years later.

In 1982, in a quest to expel the Palestine Liberation Organization and extinguish Palestinian nationalism, Israel invaded Lebanon, killing seventeen thousand people, mostly civilians. Since the late nineteen-eighties, when Palestinians under occupation rose up, mostly by throwing stones and staging general strikes, Israel has arrested tens of thousands of Palestinians: over seven hundred and fifty thousand people have spent time in Israeli prisons since 1967, a number that amounts to forty per cent of the adult male population today. They have emerged with accounts of torture, which are substantiated by human-rights groups like B’tselem. During the second intifada, which began in 2000, Israel reinvaded the West Bank (it had never fully left). The occupation and colonization of Palestinian land continued unabated throughout the “peace process” of the nineteen-nineties, and continues to this day. And yet, in America, the discussion ignores this crucial, constantly oppressive context, and is instead too often limited to Israeli “self-defense” and the Palestinians’ supposed responsibility for their own suffering.

In the past seven or more years, Israel has besieged, tormented, and regularly attacked the Gaza Strip. The pretexts change: they elected Hamas; they refused to be docile; they refused to recognize Israel; they fired rockets; they built tunnels to circumvent the siege; and on and on. But each pretext is a red herring, because the truth of ghettos—what happens when you imprison 1.8 million people in a hundred and forty square miles, about a third of the area of New York City, with no control of borders, almost no access to the sea for fishermen (three out of the twenty kilometres allowed by the Oslo accords), no real way in or out, and with drones buzzing overhead night and day—is that, eventually, the ghetto will fight back. It was true in Soweto and Belfast, and it is true in Gaza. We might not like Hamas or some of its methods, but that is not the same as accepting the proposition that Palestinians should supinely accept the denial of their right to exist as a free people in their ancestral homeland.

This is precisely why the United States’ support of current Israeli policy is folly. Peace was achieved in Northern Ireland and in South Africa because the United States and the world realized that they had to put pressure on the stronger party, holding it accountable and ending its impunity. Northern Ireland and South Africa are far from perfect examples, but it is worth remembering that, to achieve a just outcome, it was necessary for the United States to deal with groups like the Irish Republican Army and the African National Congress, which engaged in guerrilla war and even terrorism. That was the only way to embark on a road toward true peace and reconciliation. The case of Palestine is not fundamentally different.

Instead, the United States puts its thumb on the scales in favor of the stronger party. In this surreal, upside-down vision of the world, it almost seems as if it is the Israelis who are occupied by the Palestinians, and not the other way around. In this skewed universe, the inmates of an open-air prison are besieging a nuclear-armed power with one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world.

If we are to move away from this unreality, the U.S. must either reverse its policies or abandon its claim of being an “honest broker.” If the U.S. government wants to fund and arm Israel and parrot its talking points that fly in the face of reason and international law, so be it. But it should not claim the moral high ground and intone solemnly about peace. And it should certainly not insult Palestinians by saying that it cares about them or their children, who are dying in Gaza today.

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and was an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid-Washington Palestinian-Israeli negotiations of 1991-93. His most recent book is “Brokers of Deceit.”

From india.com zee news DNA

PUCL condemns arrest of Delhi University professor GN Saibaba

Thursday, 15 May 2014 – 4:19pm IST | Agency: IANS

People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) Thursday condemned the arrest of Delhi University professor G.N. Saibaba for his alleged links with Maoists. Saibaba was arrested here May 9 by the Maharashtra Police.

“The harsh and violent manner of the arrest of Saibaba is unacceptable and condemnable in a democracy claiming to follow the law. He had always cooperated with the police whenever they wanted to question him as part of an investigation, a PUCL statement said. Saibaba is an English professor at Ram Lal Anand College here and is wheelchair-bound with 90 percent locomotor disability. “The conduct of the Gadchiroli police was utterly unlawful, breaking all the mandatory provisions relating to conduct of search and seizure,” added the statement.

PUCL also demanded that the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) should immediately intervene in the matter and launch a comprehensive enquiry into the illegalities committed by the Gadchiroli police. “NHRC should immediately intervene to get the professor released from the prison so that he can get expert medical attention, utilise the services of a personal attendant and also be able to access toilet facilities adapted to his personal needs, the statement said.

From Kafila

June 9, 2014

by subhash gatade

People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism (P.A.D.S.)  Statement on the murder of three young persons in Badaun and Pune

While introducing the Draft Constitution in the Constituent Assembly, Dr B. R. Ambedkar had observed, “Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.”  The same continues to hold true sixty four years later. A few weeks ago the people of India participated in the largest-ever election of their representatives in a largely free and fair process. However, other events since then have revealed the shallowness of this democratic top-dressing along with the tyrannical side of our society and polity.

On 27 May two girls aged 12 and 14 from an oppressed caste family of Katra Sadatganj in Badaun district of UP were sexually assaulted and killed when out to answer nature’s call. The rapists, belonging to the local dominant caste, hung their bodies from a tree in a public display of their power.

On 2 June in Pune, twenty-eight year old Mohsin Shaikh, an information technology professional was beaten to death by a group of men belonging to an outfit called Hindu Rashtra Sena. The killers even celebrated their cruelty in messages declaring that the ‘the first wicket is down’.

From the rural hinterland to our industrial cities, from poverty-stricken villagers to trained professionals, from minor girls to men in the prime of their youth, Indian citizens belonging to certain castes and religious groups in India do not enjoy even a secure right to life. They are killed not by an authoritarian state power, but by groups that appear to be growing naturally in a society Dr Ambedkar characterized as ‘essentially undemocratic’.

There have been many occasions when the provincial or central governments have set aside their duty to uphold the right to life (Article 21) that is a pillar of the constitutional order. Even when governments have not been directly implicated in such crimes, their indulgence (or that of various leaders of ‘mainstream’ parties) towards criminals is no secret. In Pune, the chief of the Hindu Rashtra Sena has 23 cases pending against him related to illegal firearms, extortion and rioting. Yet he and his organization have flourished. Extremist and violent outfits have spread widely in Maharshtra in the recent past. One of these is suspected of murdering the reputed rationalist Dr Narendra Dabholkar in Pune on 20 August 2013. Yet the Congress-NCP led administration appears indifferent or powerless. The criminal justice system in the country is quick to arrest Muslim youth on trumped up charges of terrorism; many of whom are acquitted by courts after languishing in jails for years. But it is lenient towards organizations that terrorise people in the name of Hindu Rashtra.

In the Badaun rape and murder case the accused include two police men. The police station in charge refused to file an FIR when informed about the missing girls by the father of one of them, a casual wage-labourer. The accused belong to the core caste base of the ruling party in UP. In Pune too, the political context of the murder cannot be discounted. The state assembly elections in Maharashtra are a few months away, and the hyper activity of extremist groups is an attempt to polarize voters on religious grounds. Hatred of religious minorities has always been the ideological core of the BJP’s politics.  The current prime minister shot to fame during the Gujarat riots in 2002, when thousands of Muslim women, men and children were butchered on the roads and in their homes. We may hope that the new government will moderate its extremist ideology and that of its mentor, the RSS. However, the hateful utterances made during and after the elections by MP’s, ministers and affiliates of their organizational family are not reassuring.

There are yet more disturbing patterns of official behaviour that citizens should take note of. As the Sixteenth Lok Sabha was being inaugurated, Delhi police performed a barbaric act. Since April 16, four minor Dalit girls – survivors of sexual assault on March 23, in Bhagana village of Haryana – had been camping at Jantar Mantar in protest, along with 80 families. Since they had been thrown out of their village, the women had decided to live on the street there and refused to vacate what they see as their last shelter. On June 4, 2014, at 6 am, more than 800 policemen barged into the area, uprooted tents and seized belongings of the protestors. Some of the women were molested by constables who were not wearing their name-badges. Now the protesters are sitting in the scorching sun, sleeping on the pavements and are facing continuous threats. Their requests to the local MLA and the Union Home Minister go unheard. This is nothing less than an onslaught on the democratic right of protest. The failure of the mass media to report the police attack is an example of the new anti-democratic ideological environment.

The P.A.D.S. condemns these crimes and demands immediate legal action against the culprits. Full social and legal protection should be provided to the families of victims, and to witnesses. States in India routinely indulge in humiliating exercise of giving financial ‘compensation’ to survivors of social crimes, while doing little to prevent them. P.A.D.S. demands strict action against police and officials who failed to prevent these crimes.

These crimes are of course law and order problems, but they also exemplify the anti-democratic nature of Indian society. Indian society has not yet left behind its caste mentality, which remains one of the most brutal systems ever invented to control and dehumanize humans. Despite the talk of tolerance and non-violence, the socially powerful sectors of our society are vicious and intolerant of difference and dissent.  Their influence makes nonsense of criminal justice. As Ambedkar reminded us, a constitution can provide only the institutional framework of a polity – the working of which depends upon the people, their parties, and their politics.

The policy of unrestrained capitalist growth adopted by recent Indian governments has strengthened the deep-rooted authoritarian practices of Indian society. The inter-linkages of state policy, electoral politics, regressive aspects of popular culture and neo-liberal economics indicate that the jargon of ‘development’ will function as a mask for undermining Indian democracy. Only popular movements that struggle against caste, misogyny, communalism and socio-economic inequality can lead to democracy. Hence a clear democratic agenda needs to be argued for and established in every site of struggle.

India’s leading democrats always linked their struggles on specific issues to a vision of a democratic society. We need to fashion such a vision for our times and make it a part of popular aspirations. While the rulers and dominant sections of India are content with and celebrate the thin democratic top dressing, the Indian people will be free of brutalities like those of Badaun and Pune only in a truly democratic society.