South Asia Citizens Wire - 21 April 2016 - No. 2892 [since 1996] Contents: 1. Full Audio of Rethinking Civilisation As History by Romila Thapar (8th B.R. Ambedkar Memorial Lecture) 2. The Left Alternative In Sri Lanka - Rajan Hoole 3. Pakistan: TV Interview with Karamat Ali on Labour Rights 4. Pakistan: Bahria Town Karachi - Greed unlimited | Fahim Zaman & Naziha Syed Ali 5. Pakistan: ’More radicalism than violent extremism in Punjab’ - interview with Ayesha Siddiqa 6. A daily plebiscite - Kashmir, the Northeast and India | Mukul Kesavan 7. India: Hate Speech; Hate Crimes and Communal Polarization | Ram Puniyani 8. India: Why businesses love Chhattisgarh | Sudeep Chakravarti 9. Recent On Communalism Watch: - Sufis, Islam’s original mystics, are succumbing to sectarianism too (Sadia Dehlvi) - Gurgaon to Gurugram: It's the symbolic coupling of Hindutva and development (Ajaz Ashraf) - A state of mind, not a brick wall - More inter-faith and inter-caste marriages (Comment by Gauri Lankesh) - India's internaly displaced due to armed conflict, ethnic or communal violence require urgent attention - The Business of Changing City Names According to Fancies of the Hindu Right - Now will they change Shimla into Shyamla? - India: Ban Triple Talaq, Declare Muslim Personal Law Board Illegal (Mohd Asim) - India: [Exclusive] How Gau Raksha turned a petty criminal into Latehar's vigilante hangman (Vikars Kumar and Aditya Menon) - Book excerpt: Godse’s final speech should be compared with Modi’s fervent words of patriotism: UR Ananthamurthy - India: Stay within Limits of the Mask - Says the misogynist MIM Poster promoting the Veil for Women - India: Nationalism vs Hindutva (essay by A G Noorani in Frontline)
::: URLs & FULL TEXT ::: 10. Battle for Bangladesh’s soul | K. Anis Ahmed 11. India - Kashmir: And no one killed anyone in Handwara! | Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal 12. UK: An Attack on Academic Freedom that is Bad for the Public Interest | Bob Ward 13. Africa - Lake Chad Basin: More Children Displaced, Used for Suicide Attacks by Boko Haram | Tharanga Yakupitiyage 14. Sharia Villages: Bosnia's Islamic State Problem | Walter Mayr 15. Balkan Poison, Revisited | Tim Judah 16. USA: Why ice cream makers Ben and Jerry just got arrested | Bamzi Banchiri 17. After Vote to Remove Brazil’s President, Key Opposition Figure Holds Meetings in Washington | Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Fishman, David Miranda ======================================== 1. FULL AUDIO OF RETHINKING CIVILISATION AS HISTORY BY ROMILA THAPAR (8th B.R. Ambedkar Memorial Lecture) ======================================== Audio recording of the 8th B.R. Ambedkar memorial lecture delivered by Professor Romila Thapar in New Delhi on the 14th of April. The subject of the lecture was ’Rethinking Civilisation As History’. The lecture was orgainised by the Ambedkar University in New Delhi [This audio recording was made in public interest by sacw.net and may be used freely for non commercial use] http://sacw.net/article12600.html ======================================== 2. THE LEFT ALTERNATIVE IN SRI LANKA - Rajan Hoole ======================================== As the country drifted towards chauvinism in the post-independence years, the Left until the early 1960s offered hope as an alternative to a politics entrenched in feudalism and the past. ======================================== 3. PAKISTAN: TV INTERVIEW WITH KARAMAT ALI ON LABOUR RIGHTS [in URDU] ======================================== Television interview in urdu with Karamat Ali the prominent Pakistani labour activist, intellectual and researcher at Business Lunch with Host Mahnoor Ali on 14 April 2016 - Business Plus TV http://sacw.net/article12613.html ======================================== 4. PAKISTAN: BAHRIA TOWN KARACHI - GREED UNLIMITED | Fahim Zaman & Naziha Syed Ali ======================================== Bahria Town Karachi (BTK), a sprawling, upmarket gated community being constructed off the Super Highway in the outer reaches of Pakistan’s largest city. http://sacw.net/article12610.html ======================================== 5. PAKISTAN: ’MORE RADICALISM THAN VIOLENT EXTREMISM IN PUNJAB’ - INTERVIEW WITH AYESHA SIDDIQA ======================================== Most of the violent extremist groups based in Punjab carry out violent acts outside Punjab. It is in incidents of sectarian violence or violence against minorities that one begins to feel their presence. These are basically expansionist groups that think in terms of Pan-Islamism and their leadership has more religious training and is conscious of religious revivalism than the Taliban. Their issue is not territorial but to capture state and spread Islam. http://sacw.net/article12614.html ======================================== 6. A DAILY PLEBISCITE - KASHMIR, THE NORTHEAST AND INDIA | Mukul Kesavan ======================================== Regarding Kashmir and the Northeast, mainstream Indian political opinion - with some exceptions - ignores or underplays the violence inflicted on people who are formally citizens of this republic. http://sacw.net/article12609.html ======================================== 7. INDIA: HATE SPEECH; HATE CRIMES AND COMMUNAL POLARIZATION by Ram Puniyani ======================================== While addressing a Sadbhavna rally organized by RSS in Haryana (April, 2016) Baba Ramdev, the entrepreneur cum yoga guru, while referring to Muslims said “Some person wears a cap and stands up, and “… says I will not say ’Bharat Mata ki jai’ even if you decapitate me. This country has a law, otherwise let alone one, we can behead lakhs…if anybody disrespects Bharat Mata, we have the capability of beheading not one but thousands and lakhs.” Just before this Maharashtra (...) http://sacw.net/article12604.html ======================================== 8. INDIA: WHY BUSINESSES LOVE CHHATTISGARH | Sudeep Chakravarti ======================================== India has a shameful record of governments helping businesses acquire land by using police and administration to put pressure on citizens, and obtain the consent of village councils even in areas where there is no internal security “situation”. Imagine then the process in Chhattisgarh, which has an ongoing war to boost the mechanisms of fear and favour in which governments act as an extension of corporate will http://sacw.net/article12579.html ======================================== 9. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH: ======================================== - Sufis, Islam’s original mystics, are succumbing to sectarianism too (Sadia Dehlvi) - India - Moral Policing over Women: Chandigarh set to ban short skirts in discotheques - Gurgaon to Gurugram: It's the symbolic coupling of Hindutva and development (Ajaz Ashraf) - A state of mind, not a brick wall - More inter-faith and inter-caste marriages (Comment by Gauri Lankesh) - India: The political atmosphere & coming assembly elections in UP - an interview with Ramesh Dixit - India's internaly displaced due to armed conflict, ethnic or communal violence require urgent attention - India: religious leaders associated with the VHP's Ayodhya "movement" to meet on a different agenda 'nationalism' & to give the VHP a pan-national identity - The Business of Changing City Names According to Fancies of the Hindu Right - Now will they change Shimla into Shyamla? - India: Ban Triple Talaq, Declare Muslim Personal Law Board Illegal (Mohd Asim) - India: [Exclusive] How Gau Raksha turned a petty criminal into Latehar's vigilante hangman (Vikars Kumar and Aditya Menon) - Triple talaq: AIMPLB to contest Shayara Bano case in SC | Pervez Iqbal Siddiqu - India: Do Educational Institutions need lectures on Patriotism? (Ram Puniyani) - Book excerpt: Godse’s final speech should be compared with Modi’s fervent words of patriotism: UR Ananthamurthy - India: Stay within Limits of the Mask - Says the misogynist MIM Poster promoting the Veil for Women - Agenda First: For Khattar the ‘guru mantra’ is RSS, not development (Editorial in The Tribune, 16 April 2016) - India: Nationalism vs Hindutva (essay by A G Noorani in Frontline) -> available at: http://communalism.blogspot.com/ ::: URLs & FULL TEXT ::: ======================================== 10. BATTLE FOR BANGLADESH’S SOUL by K. Anis Ahmed ======================================== (The Hindu - April 20, 2016) Macabre scenario: “By targeting young freethinkers, the Islamists pose as defenders of religion, placing their progressive opponents on the defensive.” A portrait in Dhaka of Bangladeshi-American blogger Avijit Roy, who was hacked to death in 2015. — Photo: AP Despite the increasing odds, the country’s success in its fight against extremism should matter to the entire world. “Offending religious sentiments shows a perverted mindset,” the Bangladeshi Premier, Sheikh Hasina, recently said at a celebration of the Bengali New Year on April 14. She was careful to add, however, that anyone “killing another person in response to what they have written is not Islamic”. The Prime Minister’s comments came just days after the killing of Nazimuddin Samad, a young social media activist, and capture the terrible duality facing this nation of 160 million, mostly Muslims, whose progressive aspirations are under threat from violent fringe elements like never before. The killing of blogger Avijit Roy in February 2015 brought the level of threat to the world’s attention; a series of subsequent fatal attacks have heightened the concern, in part due to the targeting of self-described or alleged atheists. It is not surprising that in a mostly rural country with low literacy rates, there is little comprehension or sympathy for anything intellectually as rarefied as atheism. But by targeting young freethinkers — atheist or not — the Islamists pose as defenders of religion, placing their progressive opponents on the defensive. Islamists v. secularists This macabre scenario derives from an extended history of Islamist intrusion into Bangladesh. The importation of religion into politics occurred first during the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, and later under the auspices of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). The last tenure of BNP (2001-06) saw the rise of state-patronised militant outfits such as Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami Bangladesh and Jamat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh. In the interim, the influx of petrodollar funding for mosques and madrasas, and the presence of millions of Bangladeshi workers in West Asia, many of whom send back not just money but also conservative values, have fuelled reactionary attitudes. The current Awami League government claims to be committed to secularism, and has boldly initiated the trial of war criminals who committed genocide and mass rape during the Liberation War of 1971, all in the name of religion. Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s leading Islamist party and firm ally of the BNP, has been hardest hit by these trials. Many of their leaders have been convicted of war crimes. Despite questions about due process, these trials remain hugely popular with a public tired of seeing the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes roam free, or occupy ministerial seats, as they did during BNP’s last tenure. The trials, in conjunction with hard-line tactics employed by the Awami League since it came to power in 2009, have left the BNP and Jamaat in tatters. Ahead of the last elections in 2014, the desperate union of BNP-Jamaat resorted to unprecedented forms of violence, including petrol-bombing commuter buses. While Bangladeshi politics has always been full of clashes, such targeting of civilians was new, and when mainstream political parties start attacking their own electorate, extremist elements will take that as licence to go yet further. Regardless of the history of contest between secularist and Islamist forces, many foreign observers, especially American officials and media, appear keen to flag a distant force such as Islamic State (IS) as a key factor in the new Islamist spike in Bangladesh; however, experts on the ground believe self-motivated local outfits such as Ansarullah Bangla are behind the recent attacks. All the murdered bloggers were active supporters of the war crimes trials, which suggests that Jamaat or its proxies may be targeting them. Furthermore, it is in the interest of the deeply beleaguered Jamaat to create instability in the country, preferably to the point of deposing the Awami League government. Red herring, real questions None of this is to discount the potency of a post-Jamaat wave of Islamism. The latest issue of the IS magazine, Dabiq, clearly lays out its intent to make inroads into Bangladesh. Yet any alliance with either al-Qaeda in South Asia or the IS is mainly a tactical move for publicity that suits both sides: the IS gets to project reach on the cheap, and the local thugs enjoy heightened exposure and menace value. Indeed, it is possible that local outfits will rebrand themselves as “IS” to gain greater mileage. The deeper reality is this: even if IS central were eliminated tomorrow, Bangladesh — like so many other places beset by jihadist groups — would still have home-grown Islamists to deal with. Bangladesh managed to contain the threat for nearly two decades; the first terror attacks in the country occurred back in the late 1990s. Hence, the debate over the existence of the IS in Bangladesh is a bit of a red herring. The real question should be: what more can Bangladesh do now to stave off the new surge in extremism? The recent spate of killings is not without precedence: fanatics mounted sufficient protests for free-spirited poets like Daud Haider in the 1970s and Taslima Nasreen in the 1990s to go into permanent exile. Celebrated poet Humayun Azad was hacked to death by Islamists in 2004, just outside the same Ekushey Book Fair where Avijit Roy would meet his end in 2015. The relative complacency of many Bangladeshis, the moment a victim is revealed to be an “atheist”, exposes the brittle nature of its culture of tolerance. Despite the increasing odds, Bangladesh’s success in its battle against extremism should matter to the entire world. Most Muslim nations that have been historically congratulated by the West for being “moderate” owed their relative progressivism to military, monarchic or even civil authoritarianism; for example, in the case of Turkey, Morocco and Malaysia. In contrast, secularism in Bangladesh has survived a tumultuous democracy, including periods when powers sympathetic to an Islamic tone were in charge. If Bangladesh were to survive as a secular nation, it could serve as a model of a Muslim-majority nation where faith and progressive ideals — tolerance and pluralism — could coexist. Part of the problem is that Bangladesh is still at a stage of development where freedom of speech — like so many other fundamental rights, even habeas corpus — is treated as discretionary. And though the Awami League enjoys a reputation as the more liberal of the country’s two dominant parties, its record is not without blemish; it has promulgated a draconian cyber law that allows for detention without bail. Also, and less talked about in the light of the more headline-grabbing blogger killings, dozens of people disappear each year; a bane that did not exist in the 1990s but which has flourished since the early 2000s. Bangladesh has sustained so far as a liberal society thanks to the strength and tenor of its ethno-linguistic culture. Examples of this are the millions of women who ignored the warning of Hefazat-e-Islam, a network of hard-line clerics allied with the BNP and Jamaat, to stay away from the festivities celebrating Pohela Boishakh (the secular Bengali New Year). Yet, heartening as such spirited displays are, culture alone cannot keep us progressive. The less we do to challenge the inhuman arrogance of violent extremists, the more we are in danger of allowing the normalisation of intolerance. To reach our most profound ideals, we Bangladeshis, and our government, must avoid appeasement, and muster the courage once displayed by those who died for our language, and for our independence. K. Anis Ahmed is a writer, and publisher of the Dhaka Tribune. He is also a co-director of the Dhaka Literary Festival. ======================================== 11. INDIA - KASHMIR: AND NO ONE KILLED ANYONE IN HANDWARA! By Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal ======================================== (Kashmir Times - April 16, 2016) Editorial Two weeks ago, non-Kashmiri students of NIT Srinagar were beaten up in brutal police action. There was national outrage of huge proportions. No questions asked about whether the students provoked the police with scuffle, lathis and stones or the latter acted simply dictated by whims. Since the students were carrying the national tricolor and trying to move outside the campus in protest, it was presumed that they were nationalist and therefore completely 'innocent' victims. The discourse of 'brutal' police mellowed down in front of rhetoric of 'anti-national' police. Four days ago, 3 people were brutally gunned down in Handwara, followed by 2 more killings in protests over the April 12 killings, one each in Drugmulla and Natnusa-Kupwara. Barring in Kashmir, the killings are met by a complete denial. Nobody was moved, much less outraged. Nobody killed them. Nobody was 'brutal'. The NIT students were protestors, the Kashmiri protestors in Handwara and elsewhere were 'miscreants', even anti-nationals, mislead by some 'rumours'. The same police won back its 'nationalistic' label by resorting to a brutal role as life was snuffed out of 5 people, one of them a budding cricketer, and leaving many seriously injured. The Army is so unquestionably 'nationalistic' that such murders by its men can be so easily overlooked. The brutality on NIT campus pales into insignificance but the jarring discourse in national media and political circles turns it into a far bigger crisis. Lathicharge is magnified. Cold bloodied murders dwarfed. At the root of the Handwara story is a minor school girl, whose video has gone viral. The civilian version of the story is that an Army personnel tried to molest the girl after which the youth got provoked and attacked the army bunker with stones. The official version does not exist but police sought to fire from the shoulder of the girl in question by keeping her in police custody, video-filming her statement challenging the theory about molestation and instead putting the blame on the young boys who accosted her before they started the protests. Some Bravado! Several questions beg an answer. Why has the girl been kept in custody? 'Protection story' does not suffice. Does anybody needing protection need to be jailed with no access to even family members or legal counsel. Under which law did police film her statement and circulate the video on social media revealing her identity? Does this act violate the supreme court directives in protecting the identity of minor girls in allegations of sexual abuse? Is presumption that no sexual offence had taken place enough to parade the girl before the world enough to overlook this rule? Why is there no action against policemen responsible for such brazen violation of laws and ethics? Was the statement by the girl made voluntarily or under duress, intimidation and much cajoling given the fact that the girl is in police custody and there is a history of tutored confessions and statements extracted by police from people? These questions merit a fair probe as events follow a familiar terrain of denial, intimidation, coercion, repression, fudging evidence and deflecting attention from the main issue. However, these questions are subservient to the larger question. Who killed the two boys and a woman in Handwara and why were two people murdered in Drugmulla and Natnusa? Even if it be presumed that the 'molestation' charge was falsely propped up to create provocation and trouble, how does that justify the actions of the police and army, which are supposed to follow standard operations procedures while dealing with mobs? If such cold blooded murders can be justified on grounds that there was some designed provocation, why is there a different yardstick for judging the hooliganism that NIT students allegedly resorted to on their campus? Handwara incident followed by the NIT controversy exposes the hypocrisy of the manufactured national outrage and discourse with respect to Kashmir. The national outrage in one incident, far milder and less shocking in nature, takes no time in melting into a sneer of cold indifference towards reckless bloodshed in another incident. It is not about brutality, or its various levels. It is about the identity of the victim of brutality. In the national mainstream discourse, if television channels are the primary indication, the ownership of Kashmir is taken but not its people. In cricket matches, Kashmiris become the anti-nationals who root for Pakistan. For demanding azadi, they become seditionists. For peaceful protests, they become provocateurs. For pelting stones, they become miscreants playing into hands of terrorists. In their deaths, they become invisible; their colour of blood turns into invisible ash. They deserve no sympathy, no empathy, not even on humanitarian grounds. Only the land of Kashmir without its people is claimed in this kind of a national imagination. This irrationality, false piety and double standards is being justified brazenly because hypocrisy wears the cloak of ultra-nationalism in Kashmir. ======================================== 12. UK: AN ATTACK ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM THAT IS BAD FOR THE PUBLIC INTEREST by Bob Ward ======================================== (The Huffington Post - UK - 25/03/2016) University researchers on climate change have just over a month left to overturn new Government restrictions that would prevent them from influencing policy-making and countering the vested interests of 'sceptics' and fossil fuel companies. The Cabinet Office quietly announced on its website on Saturday 6 February that, from May, all Government grants would be awarded on the condition that they would not be used "to influence or attempt to influence Parliament, government or political parties, or attempting to influence the awarding or renewal of contracts and grants, or attempting to influence legislative or regulatory action". Although the so-called "anti-lobbying clause" is not explicitly aimed at university researchers, it is an attack on academic freedom because it will apply to all grants awarded by the higher education funding councils and research councils. This draconian move could have dramatic consequences across a wide range of public policy areas. It could, for instance, halt publicly-funded medical researchers from trying to persuade the Government to give regulatory approval for new treatments for diseases. The new rule could also have particularly harmful effects on policy-making about climate change. It could, for example, stop publicly-funded university experts from submitting evidence to Government or Parliamentary inquiries on issues such as flooding or the UK's targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And it would make it more difficult for academic researchers to publicly or privately challenge decisions by Ministers who deny the risks of climate change. What is ironic is that the new rule is being introduced because the Cabinet Office has caved in to a campaign by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a 'free market' lobby group which is ideologically opposed to Government regulation and does not disclose its sources of funding. The IEA also has a long track record of promoting unscientific climate change denial. Its website hosts a number of pamphlets with titles such as 'Climate Alarmism Reconsidered' and 'Global Warming False Alarms'. In 2014, the IEA gave its 'Free Enterprise Award' to Viscount Ridley, the hereditary peer and former Chairman of Northern Rock Bank who is now one of the UK's most strident climate change 'sceptics'. The head of the IEA said that Viscount Ridley's award was recognition for his "many important interventions to promote free-market policy ideas in areas as wide-ranging as energy, the environment and income distribution". Earlier this month, Viscount Ridley tried to defend the application of the new restrictions to publicly-funded university researchers when Jo Johnson, the Minister of State for Universities and Science, was quizzed about the issue by the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee. Mr Johnson indicated that university researchers are not the intended target and that he is seeking an exemption for them. But Viscount Ridley said: "I am impressed that this is not about stopping people lobbying but about stopping people using money that was given for one purpose for lobbying instead. There is nothing to stop an individual from an organization using his own money to buy his own train fare in his own time to come and lobby a politician." One of the beneficiaries of the gagging of climate change experts in universities will be the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which has an all-male "Academic Advisory Council" including Viscount Ridley as a member. The Foundation, set up by Lord Lawson in 2009 to lobby against climate change policies, will find it easier to sway Ministers if university experts are not allowed to challenge its inaccurate and misleading portrayal of the science and economics. In 2014, the Foundation was forced to create a subsidiary lobbying arm, the Global Warming Policy Forum, to undertake its campaigns after the Charity Commission found a breach of its rules. The Foundation's main tactic has been to attempt to discredit the work of climate change researchers in order to undermine the case for policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For instance, one of the Foundation's trustees, Lord Donoughue, has submitted dozens of Parliamentary Questions over the past few years to dispute the scientific evidence, and even arranged a meeting with a minister at the Department of Energy and Climate Change so that a 'sceptic' could accuse the Met Office of being wrong about global warming. The Global Warming Policy Foundation will not be directly affected by the new limits on university researchers. It is funded by secret donors and does not receive Government grants. University researchers on climate change play a vital role in counteracting the harmful propaganda of lobby groups like the Global Warming Policy Foundation which champion ideology over science. It is for this reason that I have started an official petition, calling for the Government to exempt researchers in universities and research institutes from the new 'anti-lobbying' clause. If the petition reaches 10,000 signatures, it will force an official response from the Government, and may persuade Ministers to abandon their plans for a new rule that would be bad for policy-making, bad for the public interest and bad for democracy. Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. ======================================== 13. LAKE CHAD BASIN: MORE CHILDREN DISPLACED, USED FOR SUICIDE ATTACKS BY BOKO HARAM by Tharanga Yakupitiyage ======================================== (Inter Press Service) A meeting session of the #BringBackOurGirls daily protest campaigners at Maitama Amusement Park, Abuja, Nigeria’s capital. Credit: Ini Ekott/IPS UNITED NATIONS, Apr 12 2016 (IPS) - A dire humanitarian and security crisis continues to worsen in the Lake Chad Basin with severe consequences for youth, said Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Sahel Toby Lanzer. “Boko Haram’s horror continues to wreck the lives of millions and millions of people,” Lanzer told press. The Lake Chad Basin comprises of over 30 million residents from Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger. While visiting Northeastern Nigeria, Lanzer saw rampant poverty and food insecurity in the region with villages that were “completely deserted, completely destroyed.” Children especially bear the brunt of this insecurity. According to the UN’s children agency (UNICEF), of the almost 3 million people displaced by Boko Haram-related insecurity, 1.3 million are children. This is one of the fastest growing displacement crises in Africa, UNICEF noted. In its new report, the UN children’s agency found that the number of children with severe acute malnutrition spiked in one year from 149,000 to almost 200,000. Youth also continue to face threats of kidnapping and recruitment. With the second anniversary for the Chibok kidnappings soon approaching, the majority of the girls still remain missing. However, Lanzer noted that this is just one case. “The plight of the girls who were taken…that is one awful example, in a litany of awful examples,” he said, adding that the those who have been taken by Boko Haram now number in the thousands. As they continue to disappear from the Lake Chad Basin, children as young as eight years old are increasingly used in suicide attacks. One out of every five suicide bombers deployed by the terrorist group has been a child and are mostly girls, UNICEF reported. “To me, that’s the epitome of evil,” Lanzer told reporters at a press briefing. “I cannot think of anything more horrifying.” The report found that 44 children were used in suicide attacks in 2015, a ten-fold increase from 2014. Cameroon had the highest number of attacks involving children, reflecting the increased spillover of violence in the region. Many kidnapped girls also experience sexual violence and forced marriage. In one account, Cameroonian 17-year-old Khadija told UNICEF that she was kidnapped while visiting her mother in Nigeria and forced to marry to one of the group’s militants. “’If you don’t marry us, we will kill you,’ they said. ‘I will not marry you, even if you kill me,’ I responded. Then they came for me at night. They kept me locked in a house for over a month and told me ‘whether you like it or not, we have already married you,’” she recalled. For those who do return home, communities often shun them out of fear that they will turn against their families. Khadija revealed the discrimination she faced after escaping Boko Haram and arriving at a displacement camp. “Some women would beat me, they would chase me away. Everywhere I went, they would abuse me and call me a Boko Haram wife,” she said. Lanzer urged for a broader engagement in the Lake Chad Basin to address not only short-term relief, but also long-term development and security challenges to help stabilise the situation. “More can be done,” he said. “I know that every donor capital at the moment is stretched…but when I see the scale of destruction and the level of suffering that stared me at the face…I haven’t seen anything worse anywhere recently,” he concluded. So far, UNICEF has only received 11 percent of its $97 million appeal to provide lifesaving assistance to families affected by Boko Haram violence in the Lake Chad Basin. ======================================== 14. SHARIA VILLAGES: BOSNIA'S ISLAMIC STATE PROBLEM by Walter Mayr ======================================== (SPIEGEL ONLINE - April 05, 2016) Radical Islamists have found a new refuge in Bosnia. They recruit fighters, promote jihad and preach a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam -- just across the border from the European Union. Almost nothing remains of Ibro. There is just a single childhood photo remaining, an image of a flaxen-haired five-year-old that Ibro's father scanned so he could always carry it with him on his mobile phone. But no recent pictures are available. Before Ibro left Bosnia to join Islamic State (IS) in 2014, he tore up all the images of himself he could find. His interpretation of Sharia included the belief that images of people were haram -- forbidden. Ibro's father Sefik, a 58-year-old casual laborer, regularly visits friends to recharge his phone. Sefik lives in a hovel he built himself on the edge of the village of Donja Slapnica. His home has a wood stove and an outhouse but no electricity. When it gets cold, he wears his jacket and a stocking cap indoors. The emotions Sefik has been carrying around with him since the day when Ibro disappeared are not immediately apparent from the outside. "When you're dead, I won't pray for you because you are an infidel." That's the last thing that Sefik, a slender man with a moustache, heard from Ibro. From his own son. Ibro Cufurovic, born in 1995, is one of 200 to 300 Islamist radicals who have left Bosnia-Herzegovina to join IS or al-Qaida in Syria or Iraq. Two of the most wanted terrorists in the world are among them: Bajro Ikanovic, for many years the commander of the largest IS training camp in northern Syria; and Nusret Imamovic, a leading member of the Nusra Front in Syria, a group tied to al-Qaida. Bosnia, says the American Balkan expert and former NSA employee John Schindler, "is considered something of a 'safehouse' for radicals," and now harbors a stable terrorist infrastructure. It is one that is not strictly hierarchical and is thus considered "off-message" within IS, but it nonetheless represents an existential threat to the fragmented republic. Map: Islamist extremism on the EU border. Zoom DER SPIEGEL Map: Islamist extremism on the EU border. According to findings by the Bosnian Ministry of Security, not only were munitions from Bosnia used in the January 2015 attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, but some of the weapons used in the November 13 Islamic State attack on Paris were also from former Yugoslav production. It increasingly looks as though a new sanctuary for IS fighters, planners and recruiters has been established right in the middle of Europe. In some remote villages, the black flag of IS is flown and, as a share of the population, more fighters from Bosnia-Herzegovina have joined IS than from any other country in Europe, except for Belgium. Around 30 Bosnians have lost their lives in the Middle Eastern battlefields, with some 50 having returned home. Intense Suspicion They are of particular interest to the terrorism investigators. Those who fought at the front and who are suddenly allowed to return home are under intense suspicion of having received orders to carry out a deadly assignment. Indeed, there are not many other reasons to return home. Bosnia-Herzegovina has responded by tightening its criminal law such that mercenaries returning from the Middle East and their supporters now face up to 10 years in prison. In November, shortly before the attacks in Paris, an Islamist shot and killed two soldiers in a Sarajevo suburb. In early December, 37 high-ranking Bosniaks (Muslim Bosnians), in a rare show of unity, demanded public resistance to terror: "We condemn every call for hate and violence," read the appeal, which was signed by the senior-most Muslim in the country, the grand mufti Husein Kavazovic. Just two months later, the moderate cleric became a target himself. In a video, a Bosnian IS fighter threatened to "cut the throat" of Kavazovic. Since then, the grand mufti has been under police protection. Without specifying Bosnia, the European law enforcement agency Europol reported at the beginning of the year about IS training camps that have been established at the periphery of the EU and "in Balkan countries." The report notes that IS recruits are "trained in specific killing techniques, which include beheading." German investigators believe there are around a dozen places in Bosnia where Salafists -- followers of a hardline Sunni interpretation of Islam -- have assembled radicals undisturbed by the authorities. Reports of remote "Sharia villages," however, are denied by the Ministry of Security and the special police force SIPA. But the Sarajevo public prosecutor responsible for terrorism investigations admits that there are places in the northern part of the country where up to 40 Islamist families live in accordance with Sharia law and where IS symbols have been discovered. A Hotspot for Jihadists One of the suspicious places is thought to be in the far northwest of Bosnia: in a village called Bosanska Bojna. Sefik, the father of the Syrian fighter Ibro, knows the area well. The search for clues about his lost son takes us by car through the region surrounding the village of Velika Kladuša, an area of rolling hills where older places of worship with their delicate minarets seem to almost disappear in the shadow of pretentious new mosques. The area around Velika Kladusa, located directly across the border from EU-member state Croatia, is considered a hotspot for jihadist fighters, not least because of its economic struggles. Even now, 20 years after the end of the war, unemployment among young Bosnians stands at 60 percent. We are dealing with "a failing and highly dysfunctional state," says political scientist Vlado Azinovic, co-author of the study, "The Lure of the Syrian War," which focuses on Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Velika Kladuša area -- not even 100 kilometers from the beaches of Croatia -- threatens to develop into a bridgehead for Islamist terrorists heading north, particularly with the help of guest workers radicalized in Austria, Germany or Italy. A Salafist community existed in the surroundings of Velika Kladuša as early as the beginning of the Yugoslavian wars in the early 1990s -- a community that was funded with money from Saudi Arabia and Sudan. "The West should forget about the dangers from the East; the true danger is from the green color of Islam," said the regional radical leader at the time -- when several thousand mujahedeen from Arab and North African countries had already joined the Bosnian Muslims in their fight against the Serbs and, later on, also the Croats. It was this aspect that led the late US diplomat Richard Holbrooke to refer to a "deal with the devil" when talking about the pact formed out of military necessity. The foreign fighters, after all, didn't just bring weapons into the fight. They also brought along an interpretation of Islam that was foreign to the vivacious Bosniaks: the strict Saudi Arabian approach known as Wahhabism. Well Networked The ultra-devout, with their long beards and veiled women, are a small minority among the 3.8 million residents of Bosnia, almost half of whom identify themselves as Muslims. But they exist, and the most zealous among them are becoming increasingly apparent -- in Sefik's village as well. One of the four wives of hate-preacher Husein "Bilal" Bosnic is from one of the houses at the edge of the village. Prosecutors believe Bosnic is the central figure for Bosnian radicals, and he is extremely well networked abroad. In November, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for recruiting IS volunteers and for inciting terrorism. Sefik was one of the witnesses in the trial. He blames the preacher for his son's disappearance: "Ibro got to know Bosnic and moved in with him a short time later. In summer 2014, he received military training and then he was gone, to Syria. To a certain extent, he was sold." The house from which Ibro left for Syria still provides a home to the preacher's four wives and 18 children. The loudspeaker on the roof could be heard through half the valley at prayer times and his wives, should they allow themselves to be seen in the courtyard, wear the floor-length, black abaya and a veil that only leaves slits for the eyes. Bosnic, who was once a fighter in the 7th Mujahedeen Brigade, became a traveling preacher after the war ended. He appeared in the Al-Baraka Mosque in Pforzheim, Germany, as well as in houses of prayer in Italy and Switzerland. There are videos of him singing, "With explosives on our chests we pave the way to paradise," to his followers. Bosnians are not the only ones in the Balkans to follow such calls. Muslims from Kosovo, Macedonia and Serbia are also among the 22,000 names of IS fighters that were revealed in early March. Poverty and a lack of state order ensure plenty of recruits. The liberal ex-imam from the village where Ibro Cufurovic grew up speaks of the mysterious art of "completely transforming young people in just a few days." He says the boy was long a model pupil and later a mosque assistant and muezzin. The faithful even collected donations for Ibro and his attendance at an Islamic university was under consideration. But then things turned out differently. Ibro began insulting his father and telling older Muslims in the village how to pray properly. He also began leaving the mosque early, prior to the closing prayers that are standard in Bosnia but which are not normal in Saudi Arabia. In farewell, he told the village imam -- a man who had supported him like his own son: "You don't have a clue about Islam." 'They Confiscated Everything We Had' Ibro was 19 at the time, Sefik, his father, recalls. "He didn't even have a thick enough beard to look like a Salafist. But not long later, he was gone." The first sign of life from Syria came by telephone: Ibro demanded that his mother leave her husband and come to Syria to find a new mate from among the IS fighters -- the "brothers" -- there. On the way into the border village of Bosanska Bojna, Sefik stops in front of a gray-painted house. It is the home of Rifet, his companion in suffering. Together, they took the eight-hour overnight bus to Sarajevo to testify in the trial against Husein Bosnic. Together, they watched as the preacher flatly denied all the charges against him. Rifet's son was named Suad until he joined the war in Syria. Now, he is celebrated as a martyr in Internet videos under his nom de guerre "Abu Furqan al-Bosni." He fell in Syria at the beginning of 2015. On this morning, the brother of the martyr shows himself: black beard, black crocheted cap and a mistrustful expression on his face. He is free for the time being, despite the fact that he and his comrades-in-arms were found in possession of an arsenal including hand grenades, land mines, carbines and pistols in addition to an IS flag. Were they preparing for an attack near the Croat border? He is not in the mood to talk: "Leave me alone. They confiscated everything we had." The external EU border runs along the outskirts of Bosanska Bojna. A gravel road leads past a rusty border barrier directly into Croatia. Those looking to smuggle people, weapons and money into the EU could hardly find a better place to do so. Should Croatia soon become a part of the Schengen border-free travel area, this remote border region east of Krajina would represent a largely open southern flank. The public prosecutor in Sarajevo believes that the Salafists purchased eight hectares (20 acres) of land from Serbs who used to live here, using a $200,000 donation from the emirate of Qatar. As a rule, fundamentalists in Bosnia buy property where it is cheap, remote and unlikely to receive unwanted visitors. Difficult to Penetrate Since the end of the war in 1995, Bosnia and Herzegovina has been a political wasteland where it is easy to hide. It is divided into two distinct entities along with the the Brčko District, a self-governing administrative unit. There are 10 cantons. In order to reach the Salafist stronghold of Gornja Maoča, for example, federal police must enter the autonomous region and report to their counterparts there. "Plenty of time," says an investigator, "for the radicals to pull in their IS flags." Units of the Bosnian special force SIPA, which comb through villages searching for those who might be preparing to travel to Serbia, are measured in their response to queries: "There are a number of places where people live who are of interest from the perspective of security. But they are under constant surveillance by security officials." Igor Golijanin, a man with the stature of a basketball player at the Ministry for Security in Sarajevo, is a bit more skeptical. The head of the minister's cabinet, Golijanin says that Islamist communities are attracting "increasing numbers of followers" and that their hermetic networks are difficult to penetrate. "We're talking about villages where children no longer go to the public schools, opting instead for private schooling in accordance with a Jordanian curriculum. We're talking about violence prone people who communicate using secret codes in video games. We're talking about concealment: What used to perhaps be recognizable as a training camp disappears today under the cover of a non-governmental organization." Those are remarkable admissions of impotence -- from a representative of a country which received €90 billion in postwar funding from the international community in order to establish stability. Hardliners of All Stripes Already three years ago, the International Crisis Group said that Islamism and nationalism were dancing a "dangerous tango" in Bosnia. And the beneficiaries of the dispute between the Bosniaks, the Serbs and the Croats have always been and still are hardliners of all stripes. Most recently, 64 illegal Muslim communities suspected of radicalism have been counted. Since March 1, security forces are empowered to take action against the renegades. Otherwise, chaos could ensue, warns Bakir Izetbegovic, the Bosniak member of the tripartite presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina. For many, though, this warning comes too late. Ibro Cufurovic is one of them. Recently, a new photo has appeared in the Internet, showing a young man with sparse blonde hair and blue eyes: Ibro. Anybody, including his father Sefik, can take a look -- the wanted photo for the arrest of Ibro Cufurovic has been posted in the Interpol website since Feb. 26, 2016. The charges against the young Bosnian read as follows: "Organizing a terrorist group related to the criminal offense of terrorism." ======================================== 15. BALKAN POISON, REVISITED | Tim Judah ======================================== (NYR Daily - April 6, 2016) What are the limits of international accountability for crimes of war? And what does it mean for the local populations in question? As human rights groups prepare for cases which might be brought when the war in Syria ends, the last few weeks have brought some stark results from the Balkan wars of the 1990s. First was the March 24 conviction of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, the most senior figure from the wars to be convicted by the UN’s war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The court in The Hague found him guilty on ten of eleven charges—including genocide for the executions of 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica in 1995. Then came the baffling acquittal, on March 31, of Serbian ultra-nationalist Vojislav Šešelj, who was a leading advocate of ethnic cleansing and whose militia was deeply involved in campaigns to drive out Croats and Bosniaks from regions claimed for a Greater Serbia in the early 1990s. Similarly shocking was the January murder conviction of Oliver Ivanović. Sent to jail by judges of the EU’s law and justice mission in Kosovo, the politician Ivanović had done much to work for reconciliation between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. Something seems amiss here. Faced with these erratic results after so many years, few in the Balkans are happy with the work of The Hague tribunal or local ones, except perhaps the victims who have testified in court and whose words and experiences are recorded for posterity. Nor is there much indication that leaders in war-torn countries today, like Syria, are even listening. What has been less predictable, however, is the extent to which some people, at least in Serbia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, are themselves beginning to reassess what took place in their countries during the 1990s, even as there appears to be little political will in their countries to see that justice is fully done. As it happens, the recent verdicts in The Hague have coincided with a series of stunning new films about the wars made in the region. There is no single explanation for why this is happening now, and it would be wrong to exaggerate how widespread the phenomenon is. But these works—including both documentaries, and feature films—suggest that some are not prepared to forget or gloss over a past that is still dominated by a victim mentality in each of the countries in question. Meanwhile, an important new book has given us the full story of how men like Karadžić were finally tracked down—and why it took so long. AFP/Getty Images Radovan Karadžić in The Hague, July 31, 2008; and in disguise as a mystic healer before his arrest In The Butcher’s Trail, Julian Borger, the world affairs editor of The Guardian and a former correspondent in Bosnia, has pulled together the many different strands of the complicated effort to bring suspected war criminals from the Balkans to justice. One way or another, every single one of the 161 suspects on the list of the UN’s war crimes tribunal was eventually accounted for. The so-called big fish included the Croatian general Ante Gotovina, but inevitably the most interesting stories are about the leading Serbs—Karadžić, his military commander Ratko Mladić, and their boss of bosses, Slobodan Milošević. Milošević died in 2006, before his trial had finished; Mladić’s trial is expected to wind up next year. Accounting for each of these suspects was no mean feat, given that the tribunal had no force of its own to arrest the people it was indicting. It had to rely on UN troops in Croatia, soldiers from the NATO peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, national police forces if the suspects were no longer in the region, and the intelligence agencies of any countries prepared to help. “More than half the suspects were tracked down and captured,” writes Borger. “Others gave themselves up rather than lie awake every night wondering whether masked, armed men were about to storm into their bedroom. Two committed suicide. Others decided they would rather die in a blaze of gunfire and explosives than be taken alive.” The single most extraordinary story is that of Karadžić himself. At first, NATO forces, which flooded into Bosnia after the peace deal of 1995, were deeply reluctant to arrest him, fearing reprisals against their own men. Eventually, as arrests began and it was clear that international forces would not be threatened, Karadžić fled only later to live in plain sight in the middle of Belgrade: using a stolen identity provided to him by the Serbian State Security Service, he grew a bushy beard and reinvented himself as a mystic healer. His cover was so good that the lady who lived opposite him and who worked for Interpol was utterly unaware who he really was. But when Karadžić was finally tracked down in 2008, he shaved off his beard, and, as though a switch had been flicked, turned back into his former personality. Borger’s book is specifically about the hunt for those the UN’s tribunal indicted but his conclusion given the disappointment with many of its verdicts, already well before the Karadžić one is eloquent. “Resurgent nationalists in the states of the former Yugoslavia are covering over the truth of what happened with a thick layer of revisionism and denial,” but he adds, trying to be optimistic, “the meticulous record of the tribunal, with its seven million documents, cannot be buried forever. Nor can the demand for justice for humanity’s worst crimes.” Balkan Investigative Reporting Network Ranko Momić, Slaviša Kastratović, and Milutin Nikolić, with other members of the “Jackals,” Kosovo, 1999, from the documentary The Unidentified, by Marija Ristić and Nemanja Babić, 2015 Unfortunately, for all the efforts of the international tribunal to catch figures like Karadžić, many who live in the region may doubt that justice for the wars of the 1990s can ever be fully rendered. To them the recent acquittal of Šešelj and the previous acquittals of prominent Croats, Serbs and Kosovo Albanians have shown how limited the court’s efforts may be in practice. The limits of international accountability, coupled with the apparent weaknesses of domestic courts, is certainly one of the main themes of The Unidentified, a documentary about the Jackals, a Serbian paramilitary unit that operated in Kosovo during the period of the NATO bombing in 1999, made by Marija Ristić and Nemanja Babić, two journalists from the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (the only pan-Balkan news organization; it also publishes news in English). I have watched this extraordinary film four times now and it still makes my flesh creep. The Jackals were led by a local Kosovo Serb criminal called Nebojša Minić, aka Dead. He earned that nickname after showing up to a wake that had been held in his honor when, a few years earlier, he had been reported dead. The story begins with the tale of a truck that was full of exhumed Albanian corpses and that had swerved off the road and fallen into the Danube. It was being driven from Kosovo to Serbia, in a period just after the war when the Serbian authorities were trying to conceal massacres (not just by the Jackals) from incoming NATO troops and hence from the UN’s tribunal. The film goes on to show the extent of the Jackals’ brutal killings with testimony from survivors, who describe how the group rounded up civilian men and boys in a couple of villages and then gunned them down in cold blood. But what makes The Unidentified remarkable is the participation of Zoran Rašković, one of the killers, who decided to speak about the Jackals’ activities during the war and who testified in court when some of them were later put on trial in Serbia. Rašković says he decided to talk “because, if this seed of hatred remains among us, we’ll get to each others throats again.” After a graphic description of mass murder, he says: “When they were all dead and quiet, I looked up at the minaret and I thought, ‘God, what a beautiful day.’ It was truly a nice, sunny day. And I could not bring myself to look down.” Then someone was sent to get beer, which they drank, and then they went “back home.” It is possible to imagine what might go through someone’s head who has just gunned down dozens of people, but hearing what they actually thought is something else. Particularly disturbing is the power Dead seems to have had over his men. The paramilitary leader eventually died of AIDS in Argentina but Rašković says unambiguously that, although Dead was “a fanatic with a deranged mind,” if he had still been alive he, Rašković, would not have testified against him. Nine members of the much larger Jackals unit were convicted for these massacres in a Serbian court, but last year that verdict was overturned on appeal and a retrial ordered. An expanded group of twelve are now on trial. Fred Abrahams, of Human Rights Watch, who was among the first to reveal the crimes of the Jackals, in the film describes these men as “sacrificial lambs”: none of the senior military or police involved in crimes in Kosovo have ever been prosecuted in Serbia. (While there have been trials for Kosovo at the UN tribunal, Serbia, like the rest of the region, is supposed to prosecute those further down the chain of command, and its record of success, like that of courts in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, has been mixed.) Mirjana Karanović in her film, A Good Wife, 2016 Cineplanet/This&That Production The extent to which many of the atrocities of the 1990s have simply been ignored, minimized or argued away, except if they were committed by the other side of course, is the subject of A Good Wife, a new feature film directed by Mirjana Karanović, one of Serbia’s most famous actresses. Though it was made for viewers in the countries of the former Yugoslavia and many of its references will be lost outside the region, the film should reach a broader audience. Karanović plays the protagonist, a middle-aged woman named Milena who lives in the town of Pančevo, just outside Belgrade, in a nice house with her successful builder husband. She goes for a routine checkup and her doctor, feeling a problem, orders her to have a mammogram. Fearful of what might be found she delays. Then the doctor says: “Milena, why did you wait so long? The tumor is rather large.” The metaphor is clear: by this time Milena has discovered an old video of her husband and his friends murdering a group of Bosniaks after the fall of Srebrenica. Now Milena understands the tensions between her husband’s friends, the threats one of them makes against her husband implying he will tell investigators about their “secret,” and his subsequent death which we are led to believe is not simply the result of his being drunk on a motorbike. Everyone in the Balkans will understand that the core of the plot is based on the actual discovery of such a videotape, which shocked the region when it emerged in 2005; and Balkan viewers will also recognize that the lady who appears on TV and whom Milena, in an attempt to deal with this tumor, hands the video to, is supposed to be Nataša Kandić, the famous Serbian human rights activist. In real life the paramilitary group who was filmed killing the Bosniaks was called the Scorpions, and during the Kosovo war they committed another massacre. A new short film from Kosovo, called Shok (“Friend”), which received a nomination in this year’s Oscars, involves the activities of such a group in the Kosovo war. Set in 1998, when that war began, it is the story of two twelve-year-old boys. Petrit prides himself on being a businessman and is selling cigarette papers to the Serbs. He brings along his friend Oki, but one of the Serbs declares that his nephew does not have a bike and so Oki is forced to hand the bike over. The story races to its tragic conclusion as Petrit’s family is thrown out of their home by the Serb paramilitaries and told that they will die if they look back. But this is no simple tale of goodies and baddies. It is a study of lingering guilt, with the crimes of past returning to haunt the now-adult Petrit when he comes across a bike, or possibly the same bike, years later. Shok is to be shown at the Tribeca film festival later this month. Eagle Eye Films LLC/Ouat Media Eshref Durmishi as Dragan and Andi Bajgora as Oki in Shok, 2015 Another feature film that has gained much attention in the former Yugoslavia is Death in Sarajevo. It takes place on June 28, 2014, on the day the Bosnian capital is commemorating the centenary of the 1914 assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip—the event that sparked off World War I. Directed by Bosnian filmmaker Danis Tanović, who won an Oscar for his 2001 Bosnian war film, No Man’s Land, this is a tragi-comedy set in the city’s once iconic Holiday Inn hotel. On the roof, a TV reporter named Vedrana is doing a live interview with Gavrilo Princip, a descendent of the assassin. He wants to know whom a modern Gavrilo Princip would kill. They argue about the 1990s war, hurling accusations against one another, including a reminder by Princip that innocent Serbs were murdered in Sarajevo during the war, a fact that is generally ignored in Sarajevo and virtually unknown about outside the region. In the middle of the hotel a Frenchman is practicing a dramatic speech for Hotel Europe, a play actually written by Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher, about the “death of Europe,” while a security man watching him on a hidden camera inside his room sniffs cocaine off his phone as his wife rings to nag him about buying a new couch they can’t afford. Meanwhile Omer, the hotel’s director, prowls the building trying desperately to stave off a strike because staff have not been paid for two months. Again, it is a film made for a Balkan audience but it provides a revealing sense of how Bosnians remain stuck in the past, their leaders unable to work together for a better future. “We are ridiculous in our stupidity,” laments Vedrana to Princip just before the unexpected climax to the film, in a speech that everyone in the region will identify with. “Instead of helping each other we do everything to make each other’s lives miserable.” Aleksandar Seksan as Enco and Izudin Bajrović as Omer in Danis Tanović's Death in Sarajevo, 2016 Margo Cinema/SCCA/pro.ba/Betta Pictures In many respects that could be a motto for the Balkans. Twenty-one years after the end of the wars in Bosnia and Croatia and almost seventeen since the end of the Kosovo war, the region has moved a long away, much of it for the better. Not a day goes by without the region’s leaders or their ministers meeting somewhere to discuss problems, people travel easily now and often don’t even need passports as opposed to identity cards and there is much business between the countries. Yet so much more could be done by Balkan leaders to address the legacies of these brutal conflicts, which have not yet really become history. Sometimes it looks like they are not capable of or interested in doing so and verdicts like the Karadžić one gave Serbian and Bosniak leaders an opportunity to beat nationalist drums again and remind their voters that they had better vote for them or the enemy would one day be back. The Šešelj verdict produced altogether more complex reactions, especially in Serbia since the president and prime minister were once—before, as Šešelj charges, betraying him—his trusted lieutenants. The prime minister has since renounced the aims of his extreme nationalist past. President Tomislav Nikolić however recently decorated Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and genocide in Darfur. All this is gloomy, but there is an even gloomier specter haunting the region. In Serbia and Croatia revisionism is in. Last July a court process began in Serbia to rehabilitate Milan Nedić, the Serbian quisling prime minister under the Nazis. In Croatia the new minister of culture is an open admirer of the genocidal Ustasha Independent State of Croatia, which existed during World War II. This year the Croatian Jewish community will boycott the annual ceremony of remembrance which is held at the wartime Jasenovac death camp because it says that the government tolerates revisionism with regards to the Ustasha past. On April 4, a new Croatian documentary about Jasenovac, very much in this spirit, was released to praise from the culture minister. The failure of the postwar Yugoslav Communist regime to deal with some of this dark history left space for spurious and revisionist claims to grow, once the regime had lost its repressive power. This was one reason why, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, nationalists on all sides were able to blow on the embers of the past in order to mobilize their campaigns to come to power. Books and films about the wars of the 1990s may not be able to change politics but, as the UN’s tribunal winds down its work, they remind us how these tendencies remain very much alive. Dealing with them is necessary, not just for victims and societies today, but for future generations too, lest zombie-like the past returns to poison the future as it has already done before in this part of the world. Julian Borger’s The Butcher’s Trail is published by Other Press. April 6, 2016, 5:35 pm ======================================== 16. USA: WHY ICE CREAM MAKERS BEN AND JERRY JUST GOT ARRESTED by Bamzi Banchiri ======================================== (The Christian Science Monitor - April 19, 2016) Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were participating in the Democracy Awakening protests outside the US Capitol, which aim to call attention to the role of money in politics. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the co-founders of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, aren't just ice cream makers. They are also advocates of social change – even if that means getting arrested. The two were among the 300 people arrested and soon released at the US Capitol on Monday, as part of "Democracy Spring" protests that have been taking place for the past week, campaigning for finance reform and voting rights. Many protesters are staunch supporters of Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, whom the famous ice cream duo has publicly backed with a variety of initiatives from ice cream itself to illuminated road signs. Democracy "looks great from the outside, but inside it’s a disappointing mess," reads a statement on Ben & Jerry's website. "With corporations and billionaires pouring unlimited, unchecked dollars into politicians' pockets and new voter restrictions popping up across the country, this is no longer a government of the people and for the people; this is a government of the rich, and for the rich." Recommended: How is money reshaping American politics? Take our quiz. On Tuesday, the Vermont-based ice cream company (a subsidiary of Unilever) featured a blog detailing the arrests of the co founders, including pictures of the two as they were participating the protests. Test your knowledge How is money reshaping American politics? Take our quiz. Photos of the Day Photos of the day 4/19 It's not the first time Ben & Jerry's has brought its political views to the table. "You could say that our passion for social justice has been baked right into everything we’ve ever done," the owners wrote, citing examples like "I Dough, I Dough," the temporary name of their chocolate chip cookie dough flavor after the Supreme Court's landmark decision on gay marriage in June 2015. They've been vocal supporters of Senator Sanders, too. "Jerry and I have been constituents of Bernie Sanders for the last 30 years. We’ve seen him in action and we believe in him," co-founder Mr. Cohen writes on a separate, personal site called "Bernie's Yearning." "Bernie's Yearning," a flavor Cohen created to illustrate the importance of financial and political reform, two of the Senator's most famous causes. The flavor is meant to demonstrate how economic gains benefit only a small number of people, reinforcing a similar message that Bernie Sanders has been campaigning on. "The entire top of Bernie's Yearning is covered with a thick disc of solid chocolate, which represents the huge majority of economic gains that have gone to the top 1 percent," Cohen writes. "Below is plain mint ice cream. The way you eat it is you whack the disc with a soup spoon and mix the pieces around." "After whacking a few pints, we discovered that once you break up the big chocolate disc, it's hard to mix the chips into the ice cream while it's still in the container. What's needed is a proper ice cream bowl to mix it around in." He later collaborated with friends, creating Bernie Bowls which he says would help in achieving the proper mix. "The dark rim at the top of the bowl represents all the wealth that's gone to the top 1 percent," he adds. "As you can see, it's in the process of flowing back down to everybody else." This report includes material from the Associated Press. ======================================== 17. AFTER VOTE TO REMOVE BRAZIL’S PRESIDENT, KEY OPPOSITION FIGURE HOLDS MEETINGS IN WASHINGTON by Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Fishman, David Miranda ======================================== (The Intercept - April 18, 2016 BRAZIL’S LOWER HOUSE of Congress on Sunday voted to impeach the country’s president, Dilma Rousseff, sending the removal process to the Senate. In an act of unintended though rich symbolism, the House member who pushed impeachment over the 342-vote threshold was Dep. Bruno Araújo, himself implicated by a document indicating he may have received illegal funds from the construction giant at the heart of the nation’s corruption scandal. Even more significantly, Araújo belongs to the center-right party PSDB, whose nominees have lost four straight national elections to Rousseff’s moderate-left PT party, with the last ballot-box defeat delivered just 18 months ago, when 54 million Brazilians voted to re-elect Dilma as president. Those two facts about Araújo underscore the unprecedentedly surreal nature of yesterday’s proceedings in Brasília, capital of the world’s fifth-largest country. Politicians and parties that have spent two decades trying, and failing, to defeat PT in democratic elections triumphantly marched forward to effectively overturn the 2014 vote by removing Dilma on grounds that, as today’s New York Times report makes clear, are, at best, dubious in the extreme. Even The Economist, which has long despised the PT and its anti-poverty programs and wants Dilma to resign, has argued that “in the absence of proof of criminality, impeachment is unwarranted” and “looks like a pretext for ousting an unpopular president.” Sunday’s proceedings, conducted in the name of combating corruption, were presided over by one of the democratic world’s most blatantly corrupt politicians, House speaker Eduardo Cunha (above, center), who was recently discovered to have stashed millions of dollars in secret Swiss bank accounts that have no possible non-corrupt source and who lied under oath when he denied to Congressional investigators that he had foreign bank accounts. Of the 594 members of the House, as the Globe and Mail reported yesterday, “318 are under investigation or face charges” while their target, President Rousseff, “herself faces no allegation of financial impropriety.” One by one, corruption-stained legislators marched to the microphone to address Cunha, voting “yes” on impeachment by professing to be horrified by corruption. As preambles to their votes, they cited a dizzying array of bizarre motives, from “the fundamentals of Christianity” and “not to be as red as Venezuela and North Korea” to “the evangelical nation” and “the peace of Jerusalem.” The Guardian’s Jonathan Watts captured just some of the farce: Yes, voted Paulo Maluf, who is on Interpol’s red list for conspiracy. Yes, voted Nilton Capixaba, who is accused of money laundering. “For the love of God, yes!” declared Silas Camara, who is under investigation for forging documents and misappropriating public funds. It is highly likely that the Senate will agree to hear the charges, which will result in the 180-day suspension of Dilma as president and the installation of the pro-business Vice President Michel Temer from the PMDB party. The vice president himself is, as the New York Times put it, “under scrutiny over claims that he was involved in an illegal ethanol purchasing scheme.” Temer recently made it known that one of the leading candidates to head his economic team would be the chairman of Goldman Sachs in Brazil, Paulo Leme. If, after trial, two-thirds of the Senate votes to convict, Dilma will be permanently removed. Many suspect that one core objective in impeaching Dilma is to provide a cathartic sense for the public that corruption has been addressed, all designed to exploit Temer’s newfound control to prevent further investigations of the dozens upon dozens of actually corrupt politicians populating the leading parties. THE U.S. HAS been notably quiet about this tumult in the second-largest country in the hemisphere, and its posture has barely been discussed in the mainstream press. It’s not hard to see why. The U.S. spent years vehemently denying that it had any role in the 1964 military coup that removed Brazil’s elected left-wing government, a coup that resulted in 20 years of a brutal, pro-U.S., right-wing military dictatorship. But secret documents and recordings emerged proving that the U.S. actively helped plot that coup, and the country’s 2014 Truth Commission report documented that the U.S. and U.K. aggressively supported the dictatorship and even “trained Brazilian interrogators in torture techniques.” epa04149938 Legislator Jair Bolsonaro, who supports the dictatorship, participates in a session held at Chamber of Legislators in Brasilia, Brazil, 01 April 2014. Brazilian Chamber of Legislators abruptly stoped the session in rejection of the 50 year anniversary of the military coup at the moment that Bolsonaro wanted to start his speech. Members of Parliament jeered at him and turned their backs in way of protest. EPA/FERNANDO BIZERRA JR. (Newscom TagID: epalive129917.jpg) [Photo via Newscom] Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing, pro-impeachment Brazilian politician who is expected to run for president. Photo: Fernando Bizerra/EPA/Newscom That U.S-supported coup and military dictatorship loom large over the current controversy. President Rousseff and her supporters explicitly call the attempt to remove her a coup. One prominent pro-impeachment deputado who is expected to run for president, the right-wing Jair Bolsonaro (whom The Intercept profiled last year), yesterday explicitly praised the military dictatorship and pointedly hailed Col. Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the dictatorship’s chief torturer (notably responsible for Dilma’s torture). Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, also in the House, said he was casting his impeachment vote “for the military men of ’64″: those who carried out the coup and imposed military rule. The endless invocation of God and Family by impeachment proponents yesterday was redolent of the motto of the 1964 coup: “March of the Family with God for Liberty.” Just as Brazil’s leading oligarch-owned media outlets supported the 1964 coup as a necessary strike against left-wing corruption, so too have they been unified in supporting, and inciting, the contemporary impeachment movement against PT with the same rationale. Dilma’s relationship with the U.S. was strained for years, significantly exacerbated by her vocal denunciations of NSA spying that targeted Brazilian industry, its population, and the president personally, as well as Brazil’s close trade relationship with China. Her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had also alienated many U.S. officials by, among other things, joining with Turkey to negotiate an independent deal with Iran over its nuclear program when Washington was attempting to assemble global pressure against Tehran. Washington insiders have been making it increasingly clear that they no longer view Brazil as safe for capital. The U.S., of course, has a long — and recent — history of engineering instability and coups against democratically elected, left-wing Latin American governments it dislikes. Beyond the 1964 coup in Brazil, the U.S. was at least supportive of the attempted 2002 overthrow of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, played a central role in the 2004 ouster of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lent vital support to legitimize the 2009 coup in Honduras, just to name a few examples. Many on the Brazilian left believe that the U.S. is actively engineering the current instability in their country in order to get rid of a left-wing party that has relied heavily on trade with China, and instead usher in a more pro-business, pro-U.S. government that could never win an election on its own. ALTHOUGH NO REAL evidence has emerged proving this theory, a little-publicized trip to the U.S. this week by a key Brazilian opposition leader will likely fuel those concerns. Today — the day after the impeachment vote — Sen. Aloysio Nunes of the PSDB will be in Washington to undertake three days of meetings with various U.S. officials as well as with lobbyists and assorted influence-peddlers close to Clinton and other leading political figures. Sen. Nunes is meeting with the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Ben Cardin, D-Md.; Undersecretary of State and former Ambassador to Brazil Thomas Shannon; and attending a luncheon on Tuesday hosted by the Washington lobbying firm Albright Stonebridge Group, headed by former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Bush 43 Commerce Secretary and Kellogg Company CEO Carlos Gutierrez. The Brazilian Embassy in Washington and Sen. Nunes’s office told The Intercept that they had no additional information about the Tuesday luncheon. In an email, the Albright Stonebridge Group wrote that there is “no media component” to the event, which is for the “Washington policy and business community,” and a list of attendees or topics addressed would not be made public. Sen. Aloysio Nunes (left) with House speaker Eduardo Cunha (right) and Sen. José Serra. Photo: Marcos Alves/Agencia O Globo/AP Nunes is an extremely important — and revealing — opposition figure to send to the U.S. for these high-level meetings. He ran for vice president in 2014 on the PSDB ticket that lost to Dilma. He will, notably, now be one of the key opposition figures leading the fight to impeach Dilma in the Senate. As president of the Brazilian Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, Nunes has repeatedly advocated that Brazil once again move closer to an alliance with the U.S. and U.K. And — it almost goes without saying — Nunes has been heavily implicated in corruption allegations; in September, a judge ordered a criminal investigation after an informant, a construction company executive, told investigators that he gave Sen. Nunes R$ 500,000 (US$ 140,000) for his campaign — R$ 300,000 above board and another R$ 200,000 in illicit bribes — in order to win contracts with Petrobras. It is hardly the first such accusation against him. Nunes’s Washington trip was reportedly ordered by Temer himself, who is already acting as though he runs Brazil. Temer is furious by what he perceives to be a radical, highly unfavorable change in the international narrative, which has increasingly depicted impeachment as a lawless and anti-democratic attempt by the opposition, led by Temer himself, to gain unearned power. The would-be president ordered Nunes to Washington, reported Folha, to launch “a counteroffensive in public relations” to combat this growing anti-impeachment sentiment around the world, which Temer said is “demoralizing Brazilian institutions.” Demonstrating concern about growing perceptions of the Brazilian opposition’s attempted removal of Dilma, Nunes said that, in Washington, “we are going to explain that we’re not a banana republic.” A representative for Temer said this perception “is contaminating Brazil’s image on the international stage.” “This is a public relations trip,” says Maurício Santoro, a professor of political science at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, in an interview with The Intercept. “The most important challenge that Aloysio faces is not the American government, it is American public opinion. That is where the opposition is losing the battle.” There is no doubt that international opinion has turned against the impeachment movement of Brazil’s opposition parties. Whereas only a month ago Western media outlets depicted anti-government street protests in glowing terms, they now routinely highlight the fact that the legal grounds for impeachment are dubious at best and that impeachment leaders are far more implicated in corruption than Dilma. In particular, Temer was reportedly concerned about, and furious over, the denunciation of impeachment by the U.S.-supported Organization of American States, whose secretary-general, Luis Almagro, said the group was “concerned over the process against Dilma, who hasn’t been accused of anything” and because “among those pushing impeachment are members of Congress accused and guilty of corruption.” The head of the Union of South American Nations, Ernesto Samper, similarly said that impeachment “is a serious reason to be concerned for the security of Brazil and the region.” The trip to Washington by this leading corruption-implicated opposition figure, the day after the House votes to impeach Dilma, will, at the very least, raise questions about the U.S. posture toward removal of the president. It will almost certainly fuel concerns on the Brazilian left about the U.S. role in the instability in their country. And it highlights many of the undiscussed dynamics driving impeachment, including a desire to move Brazil closer to the U.S. and to make it more accommodating to global business interests and austerity measures at the expense of the political agenda that Brazilian voters have embraced in four straight national elections. UPDATE: Prior to publication, Sen. Nunes’ office advised The Intercept that they had no additional information about his trip beyond what was written in their April 15 press release. Subsequent to publication, Sen. Nunes’ office pointed us to his April 17 letter to the editor of Folha, claiming that — contrary to their reporting — Vice President Michel Temer’s call was not the reason for his trip to Washington. Top photo: Pro-government deputies hold a banner that reads in Portuguese “Cunha out!” behind the table of House speaker Eduardo Cunha, seated center, during a voting session on the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, in Brasilia, Brazil, April 17, 2016. _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ South Asia Citizens Wire Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on matters of peace and democratisation in South Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web: www.sacw.net/ ##### #### _\_ ________ ##=-[.].]| \ \ #( _\ | |------| # __| | |||||||| \ _/ | |||||||| .--'--'-. | | ____ | / __ `|__|[o__o]| _(____nm_______ /____\____ DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers. ===================================== _______________________________________________ SACW mailing list SACW@insaf.net http://insaf.net/mailman/listinfo/sacw_insaf.net
