South Asia Citizens Wire - 10 December 2014 - No. 2842 [since 1996] --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents: 1. Crisis Group Briefing on the upcoming 2015 Presidential Elections in Sri Lanka 2. Sri Lanka: A Tribute to Rajani Thiranagama - A Beacon for the Left | Rohini Hensman 3. Bangladesh: Court Sentencing of Journalist David Bergman Threatens Media Freedom - Statements By Rights Groups in the West; Shocking Silence of Groups in South Asia 4. The London Conference on Afghanistan Won’t Rock The Boat: Helena Malikyar 5. Nepal: Federalism as decentralised feudalism in which warlords will rule states | Bihari K Shrestha 6. People’s SAARC Declaration 24 Nov. 2014 7. A Crime Unpunished - A video reportage on rape in Bangladesh 8. Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster, Thirty Years on - the tragedy continues | select commentary and media reports 9. India: 1985 URG Statement and Report on the Role of Managerial Practices in the Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster 10. Problem trends deepen while the BJP spreads its wings: India Study Group Briefing, November 2014 11. The illegal Bangladeshi – a view from West Bengal | Garga Chatterjee 12. India: The Uses of the Past | Mukul Dube 13. India: The language of Hindutva | Nandini Sundar 14. India: Execution of Surinder Koli Would be a Travesty of Justice: Plea for Mercy from Women’s Groups, Lawyers, Academics, . . . 15. India: Photos of social movements rally - ’abki baar hamara adhikar’ at New Delhi on 2 Dec 2014 16. India: Order a Judicial Enquiry into Burning of Catholic Church in East Delhi and into persecution of Christians in Central India 17. Areva alarms police against Jaitapur solidarity protest in Germany | via DiaNuke.org 18. India: Cultivating Communal Hatred in Bengal | Kumar Rana and Manabi Majumdar 19. Don’t make excuses for a genocidal criminal | Sabbir Khan 20. Maria Xynou On Surveillance In India 21. India - Karnataka: Villagers March To Reclaim Amrit Mahal Kavals Illegally Blocked for Nuclear - Military Industrial Complex 22. Recent Posts on Communalism Watch: - India: Jammu vs Kashmir? (Muzamil Jaleel) - Announcement: Upcoming Launch of Nagrik Ekta Manch & Release of Report on Communal Situation in Delhi (10 Dec at IWPC @ 10.30 pm) - China is passé, learn from Nepal (Jawed Naqvi) - India: The 'Haramzada' Manoeuvre - India: Will Muslim Dominated Parties empower Muslims? - The politics of converting Hindus to Hindutva (Suhas Palshikar) . . . and more ::: FULL TEXT ::: 23. Left at the old guard’s mercy | Sabyasachi Bhattacharya 24. Unholy row as nativity scene ban divides France | Anne Penketh 25. Diary: I was a Greek neo-fascist | Alexander Clapp ========================================= 1. CRISIS GROUP BRIEFING ON THE UPCOMING 2015 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS IN SRI LANKA ========================================= Should Sirisena win the vote, the president and his brothers could find other means to retain power, including resorting to the politically compliant Supreme Court to invalidate the result, or using the military as a last resort. In this volatile pre-election context, foreign governments and international institutions concerned with Sri Lanka’s long-term stability – among them, China, India, Japan, U.S., the UN, European Union (EU), World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB) – should seek to limit the risks of serious political violence http://sacw.net/article10110.html ========================================= 2. SRI LANKA: A TRIBUTE TO RAJANI THIRANAGAMA - A BEACON FOR THE LEFT by Rohini Hensman ========================================= A tribute to the Tamil doctor, feminist and human rights defender of Jaffna, Rajani Thiranagama, on her 25th death anniversary. She was killed by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. This is an occasion to revisit the issues of self-determination, the strategy to prioritise certain forms of struggle over others, and the question of rebuilding the left - matters which are relevant not only in Sri Lanka but everywhere in the world. ========================================= 3. BANGLADESH: COURT SENTENCING OF JOURNALIST DAVID BERGMAN THREATENS MEDIA FREEDOM - STATEMENTS BY RIGHTS GROUPS IN THE WEST; SHOCKING SILENCE OF GROUPS IN SOUTH ASIA ========================================= Statements by English PEN, Reporters Without Border and Human Rights Watch following contempt of court ruling against journalist David Bergman. Unfortunately no statements of solidarity have come so far from Journalists unions or from rights organisations based in South Asia. http://sacw.net/article10090.html ========================================= 4. THE LONDON CONFERENCE ON AFGHANISTAN WON’T ROCK THE BOAT: Helena Malikyar ========================================= A monitoring of most donors’ direct aid to Afghanistan will highlight alarming corruption and waste. http://sacw.net/article10077.html ========================================= 5. NEPAL: FEDERALISM AS DECENTRALISED FEUDALISM IN WHICH WARLORDS WILL RULE STATES | Bihari K Shrestha ========================================= [This article was carries in the previous sacw dispatch and is repeated here] federalisation, the main stumbling block in the constitution, they decided to say nothing. The tragedy in all this, of course, is that federalism was never a demand of the Nepali people. It was imposed first by the Maoists for want of a better people-oriented agenda, and then a section of Madhesi leaders who seem to be striving to drive a wedge between the Madhesi people and the rest of the country. Both have been at a loss of words to explain how federalism would benefit Nepal’s underserved. http://sacw.net/article10039.html ========================================= 6. PEOPLE’S SAARC DECLARATION 24 NOV. 2014 ========================================= We, the participants of People’s SAARC Convergence met in Kathmandu on 22-24 November 2014 to reaffirm our solemn commitments to justice, peace, security, human rights, and democracy in the region for equality for all and to eliminate all forms of discrimination. http://sacw.net/article10041.html ========================================= 7. A CRIME UNPUNISHED - A VIDEO REPORTAGE ON RAPE IN BANGLADESH ========================================= November 2014. VICE News correspondent Tania Rashid traveled to Sylhet and met with both perpetrators and victims of rape as well as local police to find out what is driving Bangladeshi men to rape and abuse women, and what steps the authorities are taking to put an end to it. http://sacw.net/article10103.html ========================================= 8. BHOPAL GAS LEAK DISASTER, THIRTY YEARS ON - THE TRAGEDY CONTINUES | select commentary and media reports ========================================= [A selection of commentary and articles in the media] http://sacw.net/article10078.html ========================================= 9. INDIA: 1985 URG STATEMENT AND REPORT ON THE ROLE OF MANAGERIAL PRACTICES IN THE BHOPAL GAS LEAK DISASTER ========================================= Posted here are two documents from 1985. The first is statement by the Union Research Group (Bombay). The second document is a scanned version of the long out of print original 1985 report produced by the Union Research Group (Bombay). This report investigated and brought to public knowledge the role of management practices in the Bhopal gas leak disaster. [These documents are hosted here as part of the sacw.net rare document archive] http://sacw.net/article10064.html ========================================= 10. PROBLEM TRENDS DEEPEN WHILE THE BJP SPREADS ITS WINGS: India Briefing, November 2014 ========================================= In our India Briefing for November 2014, the India Study Group presents a second snapshot view of developments in the world’s largest democracy. We describe how the problematic trends we identified in our last briefing continue to deepen, with respect to the economy, social violence and the insecurity of people’s livelihoods. We also discuss India’s recent foreign policy initiatives, and the possible violence and instability that may follow changes in the electoral landscape. http://sacw.net/article10075.html ========================================= 11. THE ILLEGAL BANGLADESHI – A VIEW FROM WEST BENGAL by Garga Chatterjee ========================================= The massive victory of Narendrabhai Modi led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the recently concluded parliamentary elections of the Indian Union has brought much cheer to Islamo-nationalist political forces in the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. The cynical calculation behind the jubilation is that the new government will squeeze illegal Bangladeshi migrants who are in the Indian (...) http://sacw.net/article10089.html ========================================= 12. INDIA: THE USES OF THE PAST by Mukul Dube ========================================= Almost all people seek to justify their beliefs and their actions by invoking the past. They look to the past also to find ways to claim that they are better than others. They speak of past glories, whether real or imaginary, to make the barrenness of the present easier to live with. We think, foolishly, that we are better people because our ancestors did something great or were exceptional. We forget that no past greatness can wipe out the fact that today we are at the bottom of the heap. http://sacw.net/article10076.html ========================================= 13. INDIA: THE LANGUAGE OF HINDUTVA by Nandini Sundar ========================================= HRD Minister Smriti Irani’s commitment to the Constitution is absolutely commendable. We are supposed to understand that the decision to stop the teaching of German in Kendriya Vidyalaya (KV) schools has nothing to do with the influence exercised by the Sanskrit Shikshak Sangh to replace the third optional language taught to children in school with Sanskrit and everything to do with the Constitution. http://sacw.net/article10069.html ========================================= 14. INDIA: EXECUTION OF SURINDER KOLI WOULD BE A TRAVESTY OF JUSTICE: PLEA FOR MERCY FROM WOMEN’S GROUPS, LAWYERS, ACADEMICS, . . . ========================================= As women who have been engaged in the struggles for women’s rights and justice, we appeal to you to commute Koli’s death sentence or at least to stay his execution till the completion of the other cases involving other Nithari victims in which he is an accused. http://sacw.net/article10066.html ========================================= 15. INDIA: PHOTOS OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS RALLY - ’ABKI BAAR HAMARA ADHIKAR’ AT NEW DELHI ON 2 DEC 2014 ========================================= Many social movements in India converged at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, on 2 December 2014 to demand people’s rights and a democratic and secular society. The photos posted here were taken by Mukul Dube http://sacw.net/article10065.html ========================================= 16. INDIA: ORDER A JUDICIAL ENQUIRY INTO BURNING OF CATHOLIC CHURCH IN EAST DELHI AND INTO PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS IN CENTRAL INDIA ========================================= Press Statement by Archbishop of Delhi http://sacw.net/article10057.html ========================================= 17. AREVA ALARMS POLICE AGAINST JAITAPUR SOLIDARITY PROTEST IN GERMANY via DiaNuke.org ========================================= October 20th, 2014 was the date of first screening of „Jaitapur Live“, latest documentary film by Pradeep Indulkar. Last year, Pradeep Indulkar won a "Yellow Oscar Award“ for his documentary "High Power“ about the effects of Tarapur nuclear plant on the villagers living near the reactor site. http://sacw.net/article10045.html ========================================= 18. INDIA: CULTIVATING COMMUNAL HATRED IN BENGAL | Kumar Rana and Manabi Majumdar ========================================= Blasts in Khagragarh in Bardhaman district in West Bengal on 2 October 2014 have led to growing anti-Muslim propaganda in the state. Such incidents related to political violence have their roots in the political-economic structure of central Bengal where rural surplus has led to uneven economic growth, paving the way to political domination of one class over another. This can be seen from the class structure of the rice belt of Bardhaman, Hooghly and part of Birbhum districts, where the proportion of agricultural labour is still very high, between 40% and 50%. There is an urgent need to separate such instances of criminal activities, related to the political economy, from those of the purported Islamic jihad. http://sacw.net/article10047.html ========================================= 19. DON’T MAKE EXCUSES FOR A GENOCIDAL CRIMINAL | Sabbir Khan ========================================= Anything that lionises convicted war criminals is an insult to the countless victims http://sacw.net/article10046.html ========================================= 20. MARIA XYNOU ON SURVEILLANCE IN INDIA ========================================= Indian mobile operators are required to install lawful intercept and monitoring (LIM) systems to use on request from law enforcement authorities, but Xynou notes that the Indian government has its own system too, monitoring traffic through ISPs. The Network Traffic Analysis (NETRA) system only came to light in 2013. http://sacw.net/article10104.html ========================================= 21. INDIA - KARNATAKA: VILLAGERS MARCH TO RECLAIM AMRIT MAHAL KAVALS ILLEGALLY BLOCKED FOR NUCLEAR - MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX ========================================= Hundreds of villagers from Doddaullarthi and other villages surrounding the massive expanse of Ullarthi Amrit Mahal Kaval of Challakere Taluk, Chitradurga district, entered the grasslands which were fenced by Bhabha Atomic Research Centre braving the might of the police and district authorities today. http://sacw.net/article10038.html ========================================= 22. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH: ========================================= available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/ - India: Jammu vs Kashmir? (Muzamil Jaleel) - Announcement: Upcoming Launch of Nagrik Ekta Manch & Release of Report on Communal Situation in Delhi (10 Dec at IWPC @ 10.30 pm) - India: RSS 'converts' 200 Agra Muslims to Hinduism, claims more coming (report in Times of India) - China is passé, learn from Nepal (Jawed Naqvi) - India: Former BJP minister Swami Chinmayanand contines with vile speech - India: The 'Haramzada' Manoeuvre - India: People living in the 6 Camps, set up in post-Communal Violence in Muzaffarnagar (UP) are at imminent risk of forced eviction - Are all Indians son of Ram? (Ram Puniyani) - The politics of converting Hindus to Hindutva (Suhas Palshikar) - India: At the Gita Prerna Mahotsav held at the Red Fort on 7 Nov 2014, Hindutva nuts call for Gita to be declared a national scripture - India: Babri not Hindu-Muslim fight says historian Irfan Habib - UP BJP chief Laxmikant Bajpai claims Tajmahal was an ancient temple - India: ‘Destruction of the Babri Masjid: A National Dishonour’ (Third Volume by A.G. Noorani) - BJP campaign poster claims they will make the place safe Delhi's women, but how? will they introduce lynch mobs for purity and 'safety'? - Assert Your Right to a Democratic and Secular Society (statement by People's Alliance for Democracy and Secularism, 6 Dec 2014) - India: Poster Announcing A National Seminar on Secularism, 18-20 Dec 2014, Bombay - India: Hindu and Muslim Moral Police (Deepthi Sanjiv's report in Bangalore Mirror) - Violence against Churches and Personnel in India: Text of Memorandum - Video [in Hindi] : The Other Ramzada - the BJP leader from UP speaking at November 2013 rally to felicitate Muzaffarnagar riots accused - India: Riot Affected Trilok Puri Fact Finding Team Report (by Delhi State Unit of NCHRO) - India: Shariah-compliant financial products will only advance a retrograde political agenda (Sadanand Dhume) - India: Will Muslim Dominated Parties empower Muslims? - Hindutva: Hindu Nationalism in India (BBC) available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/ ::: FULL TEXT ::: ========================================= 23. LEFT AT THE OLD GUARD’S MERCY (Sabyasachi Bhattacharya) ========================================= (DNA, 26 November 2014) Nehru’s sympathies for working class were tempered by the divided opinion in Congress It is not generally known that in 1945 Jawaharlal Nehru went through a critical moment of rethinking about Gandhism. That experience was confided only to Gandhi himself. However, more is known about another similar critical moment: his departure from the radical and socialistic approach with which young Nehru was identified. As he went up in the party hierarchy he had to negotiate with the old guard in the Indian National Congress. That was the beginning of Nehru’s departure from the socialistic inclinations associated with the Labour Party in England where Nehru had numerous friends, the Soviet-sponsored League Against Imperialism at the international level where Nehru was quite active till the end of the 1920s, and the All India Trade Union Congress led by communists in his own backyard. That departure came in the mid-1930s, but there were premonitions earlier. There was always some amount of scepticism amongst Nehru’s close acquaintances as to whether he was right in wading into the labour question — for instance accepting the presidentship of the All India Trade Union Congress at the age of 32 in December 1928 when venerable veterans like Muzaffar Ahmad and DB Kulkarni were his vice presidents and SA Dange his assistant secretary. A school friend of his, Charles Trevelyan, wrote to Jawaharlal later: “You and I began at Harrow where we were not taught to be champions of the underdog.” That was very true, but at the same time it is an obvious error to assume that the personal class location of an individual will necessarily determine his or her ideological position or the political choices he or she might make. Jawaharlal had made a choice but, as they say in the world of business, ‘conditions apply’. The conditions were revealed in 1934-36. About that time two events in Nehru’s political career demonstrated the limits of the support he would be willing or able to offer to the spokesmen of the communist or socialist cause. The limits were set by his prioritisation of total support to and dependence on the Congress. The first of these was Nehru’s silence in 1934, soon after the withdrawal of the Civil Disobedience movement, when the Congress accepted a resolution denouncing the notion of class war as repugnant to the spirit of non-violence, and recommending “healthier relationship between capital and labour.” There followed Nehru’s presidential address to Lucknow Congress of 1936: he spoke of affiliation of working class trade unions and peasant organisations to the Congress party in a more proactive way. But as GD Birla, cited by Sarvepalli Gopal in his official biography of Nehru, noted: “no new commitments were made by the Congress. Jawaharlal’s speech in a way was thrown into the waste-paper basket, because all the resolutions that were passed were against the spirit of his speech.” Nehru accepted this victory of the old guard. Ten of those were nominated to the Working Committee, and only three socialists made it, Narendra Deva, JP Narayan, and Achyut Patwardhan. That caused surprise and disappointment to the Left. In the previous decade Nehru was actively cooperating with the Left, and according to Intelligence Bureau reports he was personally involved in defending workers on strike in the postal employees’ strike in Calcutta in 1921, in the jute mill strike led by Muzaffar Ahmad in Bengal in 1926, in the general strike of Bombay mill workers in 1928-29, and in the Meerut Conspiracy Case in order to defend the communists on trial, apart from being the AICC specialist in labour matters. Thus socialist leanings were more than just a part of the baggage he brought from his days in England associating with Labour Party leaders and future Indian communist leaders. At the same time, a careful reading of his private letters suggest that he was mulling over those limits I have mentioned earlier. For instance, he writes to the trade unionist DB Kulkarni: “Of course everyone knows that the Congress is not a labour organisation. It does not pretend to be one. To expect it to act as a pure labour organisation is a mistake”. (AICC Proceedings, file no. 16, 10 Sept, 1929). His sympathy for the labouring classes and his appreciation of the work of the trade union leadership notwithstanding, the scale was swayed by the mass and volume of popular support that the Indian National Congress could garner. Time and again Nehru made this point and he made no effort to hide it even when he was addressing the trade union leadership. When CB Joshi of the GIP Railway Union proposed a labour organisation to be set up under Nehru’s leadership, Nehru decidedly declined: “All my activities must be through the Congress.” (Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. 4, p. 34). It is no denigration of Nehru to say that he was with the Left and the working classes, but in his thoughts he observed some limits — and that train of thought coexisted with his socialist sympathies. In the mid-1930s he had to translate his thoughts into public acts, specially when he became the President of the Congress. The third turning point I mentioned earlier is well known and readers need to be only reminded of it. That was again a moment of departure from ideas cherished earlier, his vision of Asian and Third World unity, the slogan of Panchsheel and all that, during the border conflict with China in 1962. It was an idea which often found intellectual articulation in modern India and China. A memorable instance was the speech on Pan-Asianism by Sun-Yat Sen at Kobe in 1924. In 1927 Rabindranath Tagore toured south-east Asian countries and his travelogue, Java, repeatedly harped upon the theme of Asian unity. Nehru himself in his Discovery of India (1946) focused upon the history of India and China as two great civilisations which were linked for centuries, specially after the spread of Buddhism from India to the whole of East Asia. In the Cold War era such ideas were invested with new meanings in the context of the predicament of Third World countries. Nasser in Egypt, Tito in Yugoslavia, Sokarno of Indonesia, no doubt took part in the creation of the concept of ‘Panchsheel’ but there is no doubt that Nehru along with the Chinese took the lead in that regard. Given this background, one can appreciate the shock the Nehruvian vision of Asian unity suffered with the incursion of Chinese troops across the McMahon line. By all accounts of those times, Nehru was shattered and we have inter alia an eyewitness account of that breakdown in the memoirs of PK Banerjee, India’s ambassador to China. This crisis is well-known in contemporary history and further elaboration is unnecessary. Suffice it to say that this was another critical moment when Nehru had to abandon a position with which he had been identified not only in foreign policy but also in a global world outlook he had propagated widely. Of all the critical moments this perhaps was the most traumatic, but all three we have looked at are laden with historical significance and reveal to us some of the complexities of the intellectual life of Jawaharlal Nehru. This is the concluding part of a two-part series on Jawaharlal Nehru The author is formerly professor at JNU, and Chairman, ICHR, New Delhi, and Vice-Chancellor, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan. His most recent book is The Defining Moments in Bengal, 1920-1947 (Oxford University Press, 2014) Published Date: Nov 26, 2014 ========================================= 24. UNHOLY ROW AS NATIVITY SCENE BAN DIVIDES FRANCE by Anne Penketh in Paris ========================================= (The Guardian, Sunday 7 December 2014) Court orders council in La Roche-sur-Yon to dismantle crib, after complaint from secular campaigners Nativity scene at Béziers city hall, France The nativity scene at Béziers city hall, which has also been the subject of demands for its removal. Photograph: Pascal Guyot/AFP/Getty Images It has been called the nativity war. A French court’s ban on a nativity scene in a town hall in order to preserve France’s secular traditions has triggered a fierce backlash. “Why not ban Christmas and the public holidays that go with it?” thundered Le Parisien on Sunday. Its headline read: “Spare us a nativity war.” According to the newspaper, 86% of more than 12,000 readers surveyed were in favour of keeping nativity scenes in public places. The court in Nantes ordered regional authorities in the western town of La Roche-sur-Yon to remove the crib from its building’s entrance hall, after a complaint from the secular campaign group Fédération Nationale de la Libre Pensée. The council is appealing against the decision with the support of national politicians including the Front National leader Marine Le Pen, who described it as “stupid and blinkered secularism”. The local senator, Bruno Retailleau, issued a statement saying: “Next we’ll be banning epiphany cakes at the Élysée Palace.” The Nantes tribunal invoked a 1905 law that enshrines the separation of state and church. But other town halls are fighting similar decisions. In the southern town of Béziers, the FN-supported mayor, Robert Ménard, is refusing to dismantle a crib in the town hall in defiance of a letter from the prefect ordering him to respect the constitutional and legislative principles guaranteeing secularism. Authorities in Melun, south-east of Paris, where a nativity scene has been set up in the town hall gardens for the past 10 years, are awaiting a court ruling. The controversy comes as the government is anxious not to be seen as discriminating against only Muslims, who have been banned from wearing burqas or niqabs in public. But critics say the government is leaning too far the other way to protect the country’s secular traditions. Nadine Morano, an outspoken deputy with the centre-right UMP party, said “secularism must not kill our country, our roots and our traditions.” A sociologist, Jean Baubérot, claimed the upholding of France’s religious “neutrality” had become an increasingly aggressive and repressive secularism affecting Islam. “The anti-Islamic climate is causing a crackdown on other religions,” he told Le Nouvel Observateur weekly magazine. But, he added, the law is the law, and “cribs are a religious symbol that has no place in a public space.” France is struggling to contain sectarian tensions. The interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, speaking after the brutal robbery of a Jewish couple in a Paris suburb last week, announced on Sunday that the fight against racism and antisemitism would be a “national cause”. ========================================= 25. DIARY: I WAS A GREEK NEO-FASCIST by Alexander Clapp ========================================= (London Review of Books. Vol. 36 No. 23 · 4 December 2014, pages 46-47) In Kalamata I introduce myself as an American neo-fascist with a strong interest in Greek history. Sceptically at first, later with fervour, a few members of the Golden Dawn invite me to attend meetings. Their offices tend to be located off main squares, usually in residential buildings in quiet neighbourhoods. Large Greek flags hang on the walls, along with news clippings and redrawn maps: Greece in possession of Skopje and bits of Bulgaria, Greece in possession of northern Turkey, Greece in possession of Cyprus and southern Albania. Swastikas (‘ancient Greek symbols’) are everywhere: on pencil-holders, clock faces, a paperweight. On the walls of a room in Gytheio there are reproductions of Hitler’s watercolours. Last autumn, two Dawners were gunned down by Athenian anarchists. Their profiles are pasted on refrigerators and desk drawers. No one says their names. They are just the Athanatoi, the ‘deathless ones’. Kala palikaria itan, the older Dawners murmur. ‘Those were good lads.’ They cross themselves. Meetings last two hours. Dawners spend the first hour talking and drinking instant coffee; a lecture follows. Some offices will play black metal albums by Naer Mataron, the unofficial party band. (Giorgos Germenis, a Golden Dawn MP, is the bassist; Dawners call him ‘Kaiadas’, after the gorge where the Spartans tossed their unfit newborn.) We gather in a few rows of chairs. The Dawn hymn is handed out, sometimes accompanied by a recent article by Nikolaos Michaloliakos, Dawn’s founder. The party’s website has been revived – WordPress shut it down after it kept posting threats to journalists – but the Dawners prefer print. There are two party weeklies, the Wednesday Chrysi Avgi and the Saturday Empros, as well as the Maiandros, a monthly cultural review. Each has a circulation of roughly 3500. Most Dawners wear black at meetings; shorts and sandals are prohibited. About one in four attendees is a woman; I’ve seen kids on two occasions: three teenage girls in Athens and a family of five in Gytheio. The men are big. Dawners like to stress the importance of exercise: they run martial arts camps in the Taygetos Mountains, send a team to the Athens marathon, and claim not to watch television. Small talk wheels around percentages. The average Dawner can rattle off the party’s electoral results in every Greek prefecture; ‘536,442’ is pinned to a wall in many offices: it’s the number of Greeks who voted for the party in May’s European elections. For all their contempt for democratic procedures, the Dawners believe they will one day take over Greece by democratic means. They are not putschists. Their power will come from a grass-roots movement. ‘Every election, the media writes us off,’ the Dawn MP Ilias Panagiotaros told me in Athens, ‘and every election we prove them wrong.’ The Volos Dawners ferry out to the Sporades to discuss policy in grocery stores. The Megarans make speeches in the village square. The Athenians distribute flyers to tourists on the Acropolis. The party pushes its anti-immigration programme not simply because it believes in it, but because it’s popular among Greeks generally. Dawners ambush immigrants about once a week. They call these raids krypteia, ‘secret things’. Most attacks are ordered by the top brass and pinpointed by hour and neighbourhood. Party violence is rarely random. Dawn texting groups and Facebook threads are used to home in on three or four immigrants. A Bangladeshi barber I met in Metaxourgeio said that Dawners mimic the Greek police: they roll up in pairs on white motorcycles, helmeted and decked out in black armour. The party doesn’t go after the illegals in immigrant neighbourhoods; it targets those who have strayed into middle and upper-class areas, where the residents are less welcoming. Dawners generally don’t kill. They break a few limbs in lightning-quick strikes. Last September a Dawn truck driver stabbed an Athenian rapper named Pavlos Fyssas to death in Piraeus. The uncharacteristic murder of a Greek – immigrants don’t count – triggered a government investigation into the party. Sixty top Dawners are now facing criminal charges in trials which began in November. Achilles, a burly hull inspector from Piraeus, invited me to a meeting on Salamis. Some time after eight o’clock, the chapter head entered the room. We rose, bolted our arms to our sides and clapped our right heels against the floor. In came the guest lecturer, a boxy, middle-aged Athenian lawyer called Tasos Dimitrakopoulos. He nodded to the chapter head, adjusted his wire glasses and stepped up to the podium. His black blazer was studded with swastikas. Agapimenoi mou Sunagonistes kai Sunagonistries. ‘My dear brothers and sisters-in-arms.’ Within 15 minutes he’d carefully unpicked the legacy of Konstantinos Karamanlis, the man who restored Greece’s democracy in 1974. What did Karamanlis actually do for Hellenism? First, he rooted the nationalists out of parliament. Then he cosied up to the West. Cyprus was left to fend for itself, the old communist guard was reintegrated, and taxes skyrocketed. Seven years later, the left came to power. Debt and immigration soared. Education was secularised. The military was de-clawed. ‘None of those problems existed under the Junta,’ Achilles whispered to me. ‘The Colonels just built roads.’ We stood up and recited the three Dawn dicta: zito o Archigos! (‘long live the Leader!’); zito i Chrysi Avgi! (‘long live Golden Dawn!’); zito i Ellada! (‘long live Greece!’). We sang the Greek national anthem, then the Dawn hymn. ‘Trackers of ancient glories, Sons of brilliant struggles, We are the New Spartans!’ Then we dispersed and headed home. On the stairwell I passed Dawners changing out of their black party garb into street clothes. At each of Dawn’s 62 chapters there are four or five ‘members’. These are the party busybodies: village lawyers, family doctors, shopkeepers. For the first hour they stay together in a side room. During the lecture they weave in and out of the periphery, taking photos or monitoring the Q&A session. ‘What about the Polytechnic rising? Didn’t the university students first derail the Junta?’ someone asked Dimitrakopoulos. ‘No,’ he answered, drumming his fingers against the podium. ‘That was a bit of New Democracy revisionism.’ Every chapter also has a few ‘soldiers’. They are uniformed – green cargo pants, laced-up boots, black swastika T-shirts – and aren’t necessarily the toughest Dawners. Some are unshaven, grizzly former police officers, their teeth stained by tobacco. One is tasked with guarding the front door. Another scouts the street from the office balcony. Ordinary Greeks have a habit of honking their car horns in protest outside party offices. Dawn money doesn’t leave Athens. Trucks bring the countryside chapters office supplies and groceries for the party’s food handouts. The Dawn’s role as a social movement is often passed over in press accounts, but historically it’s typical of any fascist party infrastructure. The party provides bodyguards to pensioners going to cashpoints. There are blood-donor drives for ethnic Greeks. It gives prescriptions and medical aid to the homeless. Dawners assault employers who hire immigrants in preference to Greeks. In a country with ineffective – or vanishing – public services, these measures are important enough to make many Dawn voters look past the party’s veneration of Hitler. The Dawn also instils pride in being Greek at a time when many Greeks would like to leave the country. This lends credibility to its anti-immigrant stance. Chapters throughout Greece have attempted to buy patches of historic land – a beach facing the straits of Salamis, obscure battlefields from the Balkan Wars – and erect national monuments. They offer to do this out of their own pockets, though local mayors almost invariably deny their requests. Four times a year Dawners from all over Greece gather in Athens and Thermopylae for historical commemorations. The chapter head leads the cohort, waving the office flag. The Dawners from Arcadia parade next to those from Lacedaemonia, who march beside the ones from Messenia. It’s a fascist Catalogue of Ships. Golden Dawn is run from the top. Nikolaos Michaloliakos issues all major commands. He’s currently awaiting trial in Korydallos Prison outside Athens. His framed portrait presides over every meeting. No one refers to him by his name. He is o Archigos Mas, ‘Our Leader’. Around him is a tight circle of relatives and longtime associates. Below this rung sits the Council, approximately sixty Dawners who oversee the opening of new party cells and the refining of the Dawn’s ideology. Every three years they’re elected by the Congress, composed of the roughly three hundred chapter members from all over Greece. The Council in turn votes in two further vertebrae of the party: the ethics and audits committees. The former disciplines Dawners who publicly fail to adhere to party ideals. The latter drafts the party budget. There’s also a political committee – five Dawners handpicked by Michaloliakos to manage the party’s day-to-day operations – and a five-man task force in charge of background checks. A disproportionate number of those in the top ranks come from the Mani, a small spit of land in the southern Peloponnese, roughly half the size of Cornwall. Golden Dawn has close ties with the region. Michaloliakos is descended from a famous Maniot clan; a great-grandfather was a hero in the 1821 Revolution. Maniots have nicknamed the Dawn the Maniatiko Komma, the ‘Maniot Party’. Priests in Gytheio blessed the opening of the town’s Dawn chapter; the bishop of Sparta enjoins his parish to vote Dawn. When Dawn MPs travel to Areopoli, they are welcomed as celebrities; approving crowds attend their meetings; shots are fired from antique pistols. In some parts of the Mani, 50 per cent of the villagers have voted for the party. ‘Maniatika’, a section of Piraeus settled by Maniot families in the 1950s, is probably the most Dawn-heavy neighbourhood in the whole of Greece. No other far-right Greek party – LAOS, Independent Greeks – has a regional backing of this sort. The guiding ideology of the Dawn is rooted in the Greek Civil War. At that time the great division in Greek society – broadly speaking, between Venizelists and anti-Venizelists, or republicans and monarchists – was overwhelmed by a more brutal conflict between communists and anti-communists. The Peloponnese has always been staunchly royalist and anti-communist, more vehemently so as one goes farther south. It was politicians of the right who reconstructed the state after the Civil War, which all but destroyed the left. Many were from the Peloponnese, and had collaborated with the Nazis. They were funded and rearmed by the British and Americans to finish off what the Germans had started: hunting down the communist andartes, the Elas bands who did the lion’s share of the resistance. Many of the Dawners’ fathers were present at the Dekemvriana, the first skirmish on the streets of Athens in 1944. In many ways the Junta, which ruled from 1967 to 1974, marked a return to the Nazis’ wartime regime in Greece. Several Colonels had served in the German ‘security battalions’; Georgios Papadopoulos, the head of the Junta, had been one of the chief Nazi collaborators in the northern Peloponnese. Golden Dawn represents the Junta’s last gasp. In 1973, when Michaloliakos met Dawn’s current ideologues, he was a member of the 4 August Party, a fringe movement named after the day in 1936 when Ioannis Metaxas, the prewar fascist dictator, seized the state. Michaloliakos joined when he was 16. The members of 4 August tended to be former German sympathisers and Nazi nostalgics (Metaxas himself was neither). Ten years later, Michaloliakos put together Golden Dawn. ‘We started in a Leninist way,’ he once told a reporter: ‘We decided to issue a newspaper, the Golden Dawn, and to build a party around it.’ There were 12 contributors. Until the mid-1980s, it remained a highly secretive neo-Nazi club. It took cues from other Third Reich revivals around Europe – notably Cedade, a fascist gathering in Spain. But it also had a legitimate link to the Junta. Michaloliakos had founded the Dawn under the guidance of Colonel Papadopoulos, his boyhood hero. The two met in Korydallos Prison after Papadopoulos had been overthrown and a young Michaloliakos had been caught attacking anarchist cinemas with grenades. Golden Dawn has done its best to reactivate Greece’s mid-century tensions. Dawners everywhere have attempted to rehabilitate Metaxas – when they discovered a statue of the dictator in a sewer on Kefalonia in 2012 they tried to haul it to the central square of Argostoli. They’ve rallied more effectively around the Civil War. Last autumn columns of Dawners in black shirts and boots marched into the cemetery at Meligala, a small Messenian village where a ceremony was being held to honour the Partisans. They entered in military step, shoved the mayor from his podium, called him a karagiozis – ‘jackass’ – and delivered their own version of events. ‘Those who govern us now are traitors to the fatherland,’ Kasidiaris announced. Dawners have wreaked havoc on other Civil War ceremonies and hold an annual rally for Georgios Grivas, the Cypriot commander of the ‘Chi’, a Civil War militia that patrolled the Peloponnese knocking off suspected communists. When party thugs file into Athenian neighbourhoods to crack leftist skulls, it isn’t dressed up as ‘street cleaning’. It’s called emphulios, ‘civil war’. For Golden Dawn, the Civil War isn’t over. For the Mani, nothing is over. The region is a pre-modern bubble or oasis, depending on your view: it’s monitored by a single police officer and remains virtually untouched by industry and tourism. A variety of historical epochs converge there – ancient Sparta, the Byzantine revival at Mystras, the Civil War – but the region is most revered for having resisted the Turks. The concept of adouloti, ‘un-slavery’, is found everywhere: in the names of Maniot stores, squares, the Areopoli newspaper and the local Dawn newsletter. This partly explains the regional fixation with ethnic purity. Maniots call themselves ‘clean Greeks’, uncontaminated by foreign rule. If the idea of everyone belonging to the same race ‘means “racism” then yes, we’re racists,’ Kasidiaris told an audience in Gytheio last March. Even today Maniots are like characters out of Kazantzakis novels who growl audibly and gnash their teeth at outsiders. This summer I hitchhiked to Michaloliakos’s house in Korogonianika, a tiny smattering of stone towers somewhere in the Deep Mani. I was picked up by Romanos, a 22-year-old Maniot who claimed to be Michaloliakos’s nephew. We bounced over dirt roads in his agrotiki, a pickup truck used to haul boulders and cattle. He smoked and slugged back a few cans of beer as we made our way down to the southernmost crag of continental Europe. The Maniots, Romanos explained, are a ‘single family’ and an ‘open mafia’. To leave the Mani is to ‘turn Vlach’ – ‘to become an idiot’. The Mani’s peculiarly violent and nonconformist culture has infused Golden Dawn. For centuries Maniot families feuded among themselves – one reason the region’s villages are mostly empty today. The vendettas dragged on for generations. The last official feud ended forty years ago, with a shot to the head near Dimaristika, but one still reads of knifings in Piraeus alleyways and sighs of Maniatika pragmata, ‘Maniot matters’. When they weren’t killing each other, Maniots were leading battalions to recover Greece’s ancestral lands. Maniot vigilantes, frequently acting out of range of Athenian oversight, won many of Greece’s victories over the Turks in the Balkan Wars and the Cretan insurrections. How do Maniot nationalists who obsess over Greek sovereignty reconcile their views with the German Army’s onslaught on Greece in the Second World War? It requires an acrobatic retelling of history. First, ‘Greece’ is an idea, not a physical place – ‘Hellenism’. It is Orthodox, Greek-speaking, neither Oriental nor Western, capitalist nor socialist, let alone communist. Next, Dawn points to a lineage of heroes, military figures, generally from the Peloponnese: the Spartan king Leonidas, the Byzantine emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos, the Revolutionary captains Kolokotronis and Mavromichalis, Metaxas, Colonel Papadopoulos. Many of them were undone by fellow Greeks, which makes for a neat counter-lineage of traitors. As long as there have been Greeks who’ve fought and died for Hellenism, there have been Greeks determined to undermine it. The latter group includes, above all, communists. They are everything true Greeks shouldn’t be – atheists and internationalists. In the Second World War, Greece’s enemies weren’t those who administered the country on behalf of the Nazis. They were the Elas irregulars who banded together to convert a broken state into a Stalinist fiefdom. It’s a charge similar to the one the Dawn now brings against Syriza and the European Union. The Dawn’s current Hitlerism is a reduced version of what it was in the party’s early years. The name ‘Golden Dawn’ derives from a misreading of Nazi mythology. The earliest Dawners believed that Hitler was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society associated with Yeats and Aleister Crowley. In the 1990s Michaloliakos shifted to a more nationalist rhetoric, looking to draw votes with a hard-line stance on the Macedonian issue. But the Nazi fascination never entirely went away. ‘The fact that we now use the terms “nationalism”, “popular nationalism” and “social nationalism” does not mean that we have changed our ideas,’ a 2006 Chrysi Avgi article says. ‘It is simply that we consider it more acceptable to use these terms … given the ocean of propaganda over the last sixty years.’ The party’s Nazism was also mixed into an obsession with ancient Sparta. In July dozens of buses packed with Dawners descended on Thermopylae for the party’s annual commemoration of Leonidas’ last stand. There were fire-lit swastikas and knights’ crosses, fog machines, flares, organ music, prayers for the martyred Athanatoi and a ludicrous roll call of the ancient Greek dead. But Dawners will coyly deny that the celebration had any fascist or Nazi implications. The party’s ‘Nazism’ – the Hitler salute, the youth columns, the translated SS chants, the swastika – is just an attempt to reclaim what Germany’s fascist intellectuals lifted from the classical Greeks: ancient Dorian gestures, Spartan training camps, pagan hymns, vase decorations. Present-day Germany, boxed into another intellectual category, which some Dawners call the New World Order, is a quite different thing, a conglomerate of banks, corporations and international governing bodies. Merkel is the mistress of that order. Golden Dawn stands for Greek self-sufficiency; other parties – even those who claim the mantle of the far right – are conspiring with the Order to sell Greece’s assets to foreign competitors. I became a Dawner in order to find out more about the party than I could from reading the Greek press. When I’m not going to meetings, I work part-time at the Greek newspaper, Kathimerini. If you’re in the press, and you want to meet members of the Golden Dawn, you have to undergo a long, tedious process of introduction. Only a few freelancers have any sort of amicable relationship with the party. They gave me the names of some possible contacts. I called and waited weeks for the chance to interview anyone not in jail. Finally, Ilias Panagiotaros, the husky Maniot who currently administers the party day to day, slotted me in for a half-hour appointment at parliament. I asked specific questions about the party’s earliest known members. He shrugged and claimed never to have heard their names. His description of Dawn operations contradicted much of what I’d read. Then I arranged to have a press tour of Dawn’s headquarters on Deligianni Street. The office was empty. I was handed a bottle of water and sent away with a couple of party pamphlets. Covering Golden Dawn can be dangerous for Greeks. In April 2012, one of my colleagues at Kathimerini wrote an article arguing that the party should be outlawed. Five days later, some Dawners posted a 2500-word response on the party website. ‘They knew every detail about my life,’ she told me. ‘My age, the age of my daughter, where I was born, where I’ve worked, my previous articles. It concluded with a direct threat, written in German, because I was born in Hamburg: “Watch out. We’re after you.”’ This isn’t unusual: there are dozens of accounts of party members – even MPs – either openly calling for journalists’ heads or punching them in public. The old guard of the Junta remains well-entrenched in the Greek deep state; in part, this explains how Dawn has been able to indulge its habit of street violence. Even as the Dawn trials commence, the Greek police, secret services, military and justice systems remain reluctant to take serious action against the party. There is fear in parts of the judiciary that a drawn-out trial won’t conclude in convictions and that the Dawn will successfully present itself as the target of an unfair political system. The deep state has stood in the way of any kind of wide-ranging discussion about Golden Dawn – or the Junta legacy – in Greek society. It has also allowed the Dawners to exercise some control over the story that’s told about them. At Kathimerini, we’ve only had tepid editorials on the party, or investigative pieces written almost exclusively from the immigrant perspective. In July I went to an office in the Piraeus to sign up for Golden Dawn’s Thermopylae rally. They asked for my name – I gave a fake one – and then, unexpectedly, my passport. I claimed not to have it. They found it after searching my bag. During the Leonidas lecture, I saw the chapter head Googling frantically in a closed back office. A few members marched back and joined him. Something was loudly discussed. The lecturer stumbled through the rest of his Herodotus sermon. Then I saw the chapter head pick up the phone. I grabbed my bag, dashed past the soldiers, out the stairwell and ran down the street. I took three different cabs home. I haven’t been back. (Alexander Clapp is a journalist for Kathimerini. He lives in Athens.) _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ 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
