Category Archives: Government Oppression

After weeks of violence, the Israel-Hamas cease-fire is now holding. Several human rights groups, including ones inside of Israel, are condemning the Israeli governments actions against the people of Gaza.President Biden continues to emphasize that the U.S. position is always to stand with Israel, but many Americans are demanding action against the statefor their treatment of the Palestinianpeople.

I say this even about policing in our own country. You cant police away poverty and you cant bomb away oppression you cant do that and have a result that will be more peaceful. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, MI-13

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (MI-13)says she wants to takeaway the Islamophobiaand antisemitismfromconversations surrounding the conflict, and focus on the injustices. And she begins by reflecting on her own familys experience in the WestBank.

Rashida Tlaib

Rep. Rashida Tlaib represents Michigans 13th district. She isthe only Palestinian member of Congress and has family in the West Bank. She says she has firsthand experience of Israeli occupation.I remember as a little girl some seven years old to 12 years old and even in my late teens visiting my grandmother in the West Bank in Palestine. AndI would be holding her hand while we went through the checkpoints. I remember the moment and the trauma it caused me to watchan Israeli military officer holdahuge gun towardsher.

When President Biden visitedDearborn last week, Tlaib confronted him onhis policies surroundingthe conflict.I welcomed the president to my hometown with a smile, she says.And one of the things he asked about was my grandmother, and right away I expressed the disappointmentthat his words are being used against people likeme.

Tlaib says when Americans talk about the conflict, it should not be framed as Islam vs. Judaism.I listen to Jewish Voices for Palestine many are my Jewish neighbors who are saying this isnt making Israelis safer these policies are not making life safer. Tlaib says the violence inflicted on Palestinians by Israel makes everyone more unsafe.I say this even about policing in our own country. You cant police away poverty and you cant bomb away oppression you cant do that and have a result that will be morepeaceful.

We need to differentiate between the current Israeli governments policies and what most Israelis actually think and feel. Howard Lupovitch, Wayne State UniversityCohn-Haddow Center for JudaicStudies

Howard Lupovitch is an associate professor of history at Wayne State University and directorof the Cohn-Haddow Center for Judaic Studies. He says Israelis were trying to form a coalition government before the current conflict.We need to differentiate between the current Israeli governments policies and what most Israelis actually think and feel. He says he believes the state of Israel is necessary, but says it also created this conflict.Looking at both sides is very important Zionism and the state of Israel solved a European problem and created an Asian or a Middle East problem it was created to be not only a Jewish state but also a democratic state both of those things arenecessary.

Lupovitch says Hamas does not represent all Palestinians, and the same goes for the current Israeli leadership and citizens of Israel.If we could remove the Israeli right-wing extremists from this equation, the conflict could resolve itself veryeasily.

Saeed Khan is a lecturer of near east and Asian studies at Wayne State University. He says Palestinians are disenfranchisedin multiple ways under Israeli occupation.Part of the way to understand whats happening currently is that Israel is moving farther and farther to the right. He says with extremism from Hamas and the state of Israel, its becoming more difficult to resolve the conflict.We are finding that the space for some kind of return to negotiation is looking precarious because the [political]center is in jeopardy of no longer holding, Khansays.

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Rep. Tlaib on Family in Palestine: "They Just Want to Live" - WDET

The ubiquitous star of David across historic Palestineon the uniforms of occupying soldiers, on checkpoints and military vehicles, on banners waved by fascist mobs chanting death to Arabs, on the lapel pins of politicians overseeing apartheid, on flags fluttering on West Bank settler outpostsis a reminder that non-Jewish people are at best tolerated by the ethno-supremacist Israeli state and at worst are to be displaced.

In 1947, Arabs held 94 percent of the land in Palestine, but with the founding of Israel the following year, 80 percent of Palestinians were turned into refugees overnight as 78 percent of the land was claimed by the new state. Today, all of historic Palestine is occupied, and Palestinians have suffered genocide comprising ethnic cleansing, pogroms, military rule, apartheid and national oppression.

For Sri Lankan Tamils, 1948 also marks the beginning of national oppression and the growth around them of an exclusionist, ethno-religious chauvinist state. Pogroms, mass displacement, inequality under the law and state violence for them are too familiar. According to Jude Lal Fernando, assistant professor in the School of Religion at Trinity College Dublin, almost 40 percent of Tamil Eelam (the Tamil homelands in the north and east of the island) is today occupied by the Sri Lankan security forces; more than three-quarters of all army divisions are located there.

In Sri Lanka, citizens live under a flag depicting a golden lion bearing a Kastane sword, a symbol of Sinhalese ethnic purity derived from the mythologies of the Mahavamsaa sixth century chronicle of Buddhisms history on the island. Sinhala derives from the Sanskrit Simha (lion). The Sinhalese, the dominant ethnic group, are lion people, sons of the soil. All others, according to the nationalist interpretation of the ancient texts, exist only by the benevolent tolerance of the majority ethno-religious group.

Like Zionisma political movement premised on the belief that Jewish people could never live in peace unless they obtained a national state of their ownthe Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism that dominates Sri Lanka emerged as a reaction to oppression. Initially, it was a contradictory phenomenon. On one hand, the new nationalism was anti-colonial in character, motivated by a desire to reassert Sinhala language and culture and the Buddhist religion in the face of the British colonial administration of what was then called Ceylon. On the other hand, it was imbued with notions of ethnic superiority and the claim that the island was destined to be the exclusive holy land of Theravada Buddhisman ominous prognosis for Tamil-speaking Muslims, Hindus and Christians.

From the early twentieth century, a Buddhist revival and radicalisation took shape. One of the most notable revival preachers was Dharmapala, who is reported to have gained a following among the middle classes and in rural areas. His exhortations brought about a fanatical Sinhala-Buddhist national consciousness, K.T. Rajasingham writes in the Asia Times. The new wave of Buddhist awakening began to turn against non-Buddhists in general, and against non-Sinhalese in particular. In May 1915, monks turned their attention to the countrys Muslims. The Sinhalese attacks lasted more than a week. According to available records, losses sustained included 86 damaged mosques, more than 4,075 looted boutiques and shops, 35 Muslims killed, 198 injured and four women raped. Seventeen Christian churches were burnt down.

The British, interpreting the pogroms as an anti-colonial rebellion, declared martial law to put down the violence and arrested scores of prominent Sinhalese leaders, among them Don Stephen Senanayake, who later became the first prime minister of independent Ceylon. Although the burgeoning Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism and disagreements over representation had led to tensions between Sinhalese and Tamils, notes Neil DeVotta, a professor of politics and international affairs at Wake Forest University, their leaders maintained a united front when clamoring for independence from the British, and Sri Lanka became a free state in February 1948. None then could have anticipated the virulence and intolerance Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism would embrace.

Almost immediately, the Sinhalese-dominated government denied citizenship to Tamils of Indian descentmore than 11 percent of the countrys population. The following year, they were stripped of the franchise. The political radicalisation of a section of the monks was only further encouraged by this. State-sponsored colonisation of Tamil lands began in earnest also. Initiating one such scheme in the North Central province, Don Stephen Senanayake is reported to have invoked the final battle for the Sinhala people and told the settlers that the islands destiny was carried on their shoulders: The country may ... forget you for a few years, but one day, very soon, they will look up to you as the last bastion of Sinhala.

One goal was to dilute demographically the majority-Tamil areas and undermine the claims for a federal, rather than unitary, government that would have allowed political autonomy in the north and the east of the island. Many Sinhalese in the more heavily populated south were landless and endured great poverty, which made them perfect pawns in the designs of the nationalists. Malinga Gunaratne, at the time a state bureaucrat, organised one scheme into the Batticaloa district in the early 1980s. In his book For a Sovereign State, Gunaratne paints a detailed picture of how the state worked hand in glove with sections of the sanghathe Buddhist monastic ordersto motivate colonisation. Having obtained the services of a monk to lead thousands of settlers, Gunaratne describes:

He had been chanting that most soothing melody of Seth Pirith and flying the banner of the Buddhist flag on his vehicle. He was playing on the emotions of the Sinhala people. One race, one language, one religion, seemed to be his battle cry ... he had thrown in the correct ingredients of religion, adventure and patriotism to move the settlers. They were moving to the promised land ... The warlord was not arming the people, he was doing something more effective, he was raising their spirits.

Gunaratne favourably compares Don Stephen Senanayake and his nephew Richard Gotabhaya Senanayake (one of the countrys early trade ministers) to David Ben-Gurion and Yigal Allon, principal actors in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and founders of the Zionist state. There are clear parallels in terms of motivation. And the schemes in many respects have had their desired effect, particularly in the Eastern province. Yet Israel was different. It was a settler-colonial state founded through the dispossession and expulsion of the Palestiniansa process that benefited the whole Jewish settler population, whose own self-determination entailed them being at once transformed into an oppressor nation. The Jewish colonists, of all classes, quite literally moved into the houses and onto the farms of the people they had expelled.

By contrast, the post-independence colonisation schemes in Sri Lanka were the fruits of an already established capitalist state. They were the logical conclusion of the radicalised politics of a section of the Sinhalese population and carried out in the name of national unity by those who had taken over the governmentbut they werent necessary for the integrity of the state or to guarantee the existence of Sinhala society in Sri Lanka. The overwhelming majority of Sinhalese, who were generally more impoverished than Sri Lankan Tamils, gained nothing from the settler schemes of the politicians and the clerics.

Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism was in fact a distraction from the fight against their own exploitation at the hands of Sinhalese capitalists and landlords, who in part backed the schemes in order to undermine the powerful Sinhalese communist movement by expanding the base of small farmers in the country and reducing the number of landless peasants. (A failed insurrection in 1971 proved the latter to be a potent radical force that could be mobilised by the left.)

Further, the colonisation schemes were not at all the principal means of disenfranchising Tamils. The 1956 election was the turning point to that end, introducing much more effective means of oppression, when a broad coalition rallied around linguistic nationalism to make Sinhala the countrys official language. Over the next sixteen years, DeVotta notes:

Sinhala-only was introduced to the court systems even in the predominantly Tamil north-east, and Sinhalese civil servants were stationed in Tamil areas to ensure linguistic hegemony; Tamil civil servants were forced to study Sinhala in order to be promoted; well-calibrated policies were introduced to keep the number of Tamils hired into government service extremely low; Tamils were required to score higher on exams to gain entry into the countrys universities; quota systems were introduced to increase the number of Sinhalese university students, in particular from rural areas; the government avoided allocating resources to Tamil areas and only invested in the north-east to support transplanted Sinhalese from the south who were promoting the states colonization designs.

After the 1956 election, the first anti-Tamil pogrom occurred in Colombo, the capital, led by newly elected parliamentary secretary K.M.P. Rajaratne, before spreading to the Gal Oya settlement in the east. Another, more vicious, pogrom occurred two years later. The 1972 republican constitution removed the rights of national minorities and made it a requirement of the state to foster Buddhism. The lion was place on the national flag. More anti-Tamil riots were instigated in 1977 and 1981. Then came the 1983 Black July pogrom, led in many instances by monks, police and military officers. Up to 3,000 Tamils were murderedbeaten to death or burned aliveand more than 150,000 were displaced. Half a million fled the country in the aftermath, forming the backbone of the almost million-strong Tamil diaspora.

Palestinians are familiar with such developments, including discrimination against the Arabic language and within educational institutions and the state, laws making them second-class citizens, and violence at the hands of the authorities and organised right-wing zealots, led by politicians and rabbis.

Yet another similarity between Zionism and Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism is that their proponents claim to be besieged minorities, despite Jewish and Sinhalese people making up about three-quarters of the population in their respective states, despite their governments having firmly established, officially or otherwise, relations with neighbouring countries, and despite receiving the firm backing of the large imperialist states. For the Zionists, Israel treads water in a sea of Arab hostility; Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinists similarly point to the 80 million Tamils across the Palk Strait in southern India as a looming existential threat (and the place to which Sri Lankan Tamils should return, which mirrors the Zionist provocation that Palestinians already have a state, namely Jordan).

There is an element of truth to the Zionist claim: mass hostility exists among Arab workers to the crimes of Israeli apartheid. More than that, the road to Palestinian liberation runs through a broader Arab uprising against the dictatorships across the region, which would allow the space to open, and material support to be forthcoming, for a Palestinian national liberation war.

By contrast, while the Tamil national liberation war (ended by the Sri Lankan militarys genocidal offensive in 2008-09) was for a time nourished, and its militants sheltered, by the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and its sympathetic inhabitants, the road to Tamil freedom does not run through Chennai, but through Colombo. Not only is the Sri Lankan capital disproportionately multi-ethnicSinhalese make up 37 percent of the population, Tamils 30 percent and Muslims 30 percentbut the broader region, making up one-quarter of the countrys population, is home to an impoverished and oppressed Sinhalese working class that is, unlike the Jewish population in Palestine, a natural ally of the oppressed minorities because its gains nothing from their subjugation and shares the same common enemy in the ruling Sinhalese capitalist class.

The Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism that dominates the politics of Sri Lanka is by no means identical to the Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine. But the similarities are many, and the results are the same: the national oppression of one group at the hands of a supremacist state run by increasingly radicalised far-right politicians who often justify their abhorrent actions in religious terms.

See the rest here:

Comparing Zionism and Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism - Red Flag

A French Philosopher, Montesquieu once posited that, There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice. And American lawyer and former POTUS Thomas Jefferson once opined that, The minority [the weak in society] possess equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

It is unfortunate that, to date, we still have laws that segregate between the frail and the mighty in society and that there are different laws for each category. On The Perspective today, consideration is on oppressive laws. According to the renowned English playwright, William Shakespeare, when there is, One law for the Lion and Ox is oppression. Laws must be the same and every one must be subject to it.

From the onset, it must be appreciated that the Zambian legal system is one bequeathed to her by the former colonial master. This is a system that segregated the citizenry based on race the majority white settlers and the minority indigenous black people. The laws not only sought to protect the governors, but also promoted white supremacy.

Today, Zambia is a sovereign country governed by the indigenous black people. However, nothing much has changed canonically. Though the whites no longer govern, its now the governors who are protected by the law, in what may be termed as the Black governors superiority. The law protects so much the governors than the governed. And no one can justify why our brothers would be oppressed by our own black governors in the name of justice.

It actually defies any logic that the same ills that the freedom fighters fought against during the liberation struggle still prevail 57 years after attaining independence. Successive governments, starting from the United National Independence Party [UNIP], to the Patriotic Front [PF], have not sought to change the status quo.Despite lamenting about the oppressive laws whilst in opposition, when politicians form government they go quiet. The reason is simple; its because the law serves them better in government than in opposition. Steven Erikson postulated that, Laws decide which form of oppression is allowed, Lord. And because of that, those laws are servants of those in power, for whom oppression is given as a right over those who have little or no power. Unfortunately, when politicians are out of government, they still suffer the same fate they had power to redefine.There are a number of oppressive, colonial laws that need to be repealed. Apart from the Public Order Act, the other most oppressive laws are provisions from the Penal Code Act, Cap. 87 of the Laws of Zambia. And among them are sections 69, 53-57, 191-197.

For today, interest is so much on section 69 of the Penal Code, which provides for the Defamation of the President crime and it carries a custodial sentence of up to three years. This criminal charge has been abused by the governors to stifle dissent among the people. This law is not only oppressive but archaic. A defamation claim is personal in nature because it deals with ones reputation. It is therefore important that the injured person takes action, as opposed to a third party lodging a complaint on ones behalf.

The Republican Constitution coffers judicial immunity upon the President or any person performing Presidential functions. Article 98 of the Constitution provides that, (1) A person shall not institute or continue civil proceedings against the President or a person performing executive functions, as provided in Article 109, in respect of anything done or omitted to be done by the President or that person in their private capacity during the tenure of office as President. (2) The President shall not, in the Presidents private capacity during the tenure of office as President, institute or continue civil proceedings against a person.

There is an old adage which states that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. So if the President cannot be sued, neither should he sue. And none should take action on his behalf, especially on matters that may be of personal nature.

It is actually laughable that we can have such laws in modern times. This writer is opposed to the idea of criminal liability to alleged defamation matters, because it is vindictive in nature. And most complaints are lodged by political operatives, for partisan interests. While criminal defamation is utterly punitive, civil defamation on the other hand is aimed at compensating the injured party. I shall belabour on this notion in subsequent publications.

Most progressive societies have done away with such mundane laws, which only serve the interests of the political actors at the expense of the governors. In the landmark ruling in the case of New York Times v Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), The Court made a number of declarations as regards to defamation matters involving government officials. The court ruled that, Public officials must have a thick skin. If public officials are allowed to successfully sue for any criticism against public function; i) There will not be acknowledging that they are servants of the people, (ii) That there will be an assortment on the freedom of expression matters of public interest.

In the foregoing case, a government official sued a newspaper company. The court further held that, A newspaper cannot be held liable for making false defamatory statements about the official conduct of a public official, unless the statements were made with actual malice. Conclusively, it was said that debate on public issues must be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open and that it may include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials. Public officials must therefore accept criticism, unlike hiding in archaic laws.

A decade later, the court made another decision in Gertz v Robert Welch Inc, 418 U.S. 323 (1974), where it was said that, An individual who decides to seek government office must accept certain necessary consequences of that involvement in public affairs. He runs the risk of closer scrutiny than might otherwise be the case. Those classified as public figures stand in a similar position. Even if the foregoing generalities do not obtain in every instance, the communications media are entiltled to act on the assumption that public officials and public figures have voluntarily exposed themselves to increased risk of injury from falsehoods concerning them.

Though the Zambia caselaw on this matter may be slightly different from the U.S, it still respects the freedom of expression. In the Resident Doctor Association v Attorney General (2003) Z.R. 88, it was held among other things that, The right of free speechis not only fundamental, but central to the concept and ideal of democracy.And in the earlier case of Michael Chilufya Sata v Post Newspaper and others 1993/HP/1395, former Chief Justice Ngulube said that, Let me make it clear that I fully endorse the view that some recognition ought to be given to the constitutional provisions in Article 20 and I accept that impersonal criticism of public conduct leading to injury to official reputation shall generally not attract liability if there is no actual malice. Free speech must be encourage for democracy to thrive.

In concluding, allow me to borrow Justice William J. Brennan Jr.s words who opined that, debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide open and [further that] vehement criticism and even mistakes are part of the price a democratic society pay for freedom. For today I will end here; its Au revoir, from EBP.For comments: elbardogma@yahoo.com

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The Perspective, by Edward Bwalya Phiri: archaic and oppressive laws; a Relic of colonial days The Mast Online - themastonline.com

The images seem made-to-order, and they are. Following prayer, the Uighurs of Kashgar dance in the square in front of the Id Kah Mosque, one of the largest in the Xinjiang region. They spin by the hundreds, throwing their hands in the air, performing the Sema, a traditional dance of the Muslim Sufi brotherhoods, as drummers on the mosques huge portal beat out the rhythm. It is the morning of May 13, the date of this years Muslim festival of Id al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan.

Two drone cameras from Chinese state television buzz over the scene. Later, Chinese propagandists will disseminate the footage over social media channels welcome images to the leadership in Beijing. They seem to prove, after all, that Uighurs can spontaneously and freely observe their traditions.

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There is, however, nothing spontaneous about them. In previous days, the men had practiced the performance on the same square. One Uighur man says that he had been summoned for the occasion by a "lingdao, a person of authority. A producer for state television shared the information in advance that the performance was scheduled for 11 a.m. Dozens of agents in civilian clothing are out on this holiday, standing in dark alcoves around the mosque even before sunrise. Stewards direct the dancing crowd.

Videos of earlier Id celebrations from Kashgar show that the Sema has been performed by Uighurs in previous years, so the staging isnt completely improbable. And many of the children do look like theyre having fun. But upon closer inspection, many of the dancers look more discontented than joyful. One old man, moving along with labored, scurrying steps, seems almost out of breath, but he keeps on dancing anyway.

Is participation compulsory? Can those who have had enough simply leave? Wed like to ask the participants, but the state informers are listening in. This is how things always go in Xinjiang for journalists: Even as we observe something with our own eyes, we cant be sure of what we are seeing. People cannot speak freely, and state control is omnipresent. But there are signals, gestures, contradictions everywhere. And so the impression grows that Xinjiang, four-and-a-half times the size of Germany, is little more than a Potemkin village, a make-believe world.

We spend a week travelling through the region, with stops in the capital of Urumqi, the rural area of Shanshan, the sleepy town of Yarkant and the oasis city of Kashgar.

The last time a team from DER SPIEGEL visited Xinjiang was in 2018. My colleague Bernhard Zand described Kashgar as being like "Baghdad after the war. He wrote of museum guards in flak jackets and imperious policemen everywhere he described a region that seemed to be under siege.

Three years later, thats no longer the case. The repression has changed and become less obvious. There are uniformed men patrolling here and there, but they carry batons instead of firearms. The density of security cameras isnt higher than in Beijing and we are only stopped once at a checkpoint and allowed to pass without much fuss. It seems like Chinese leaders believe that they have broken all resistance and can therefore allow things to relax. But the oppression of Muslims in Xinjiang isnt over. It has merely entered a new phase.

This area of Central Asia has always been a place where different populations have mingled. Xinjiang means "new frontier: Emperor Qianlong didnt force it into the control of the Qing Empire until the middle of the 18th century. Purposely settled Han Chinese are now the second-largest population group here after the Uighurs, but the region is also home to Kazakhs, Mongols and Russians.

Following riots and terror attacks involving Uighur extremists, Beijing intensified a campaign against Muslims in 2017. According to estimates, up to one million people have been interned in camps facilities leaders in Beijing denied existed before declaring them "vocational training centers. There have been reports of forced labor and forced sterilizations, and according to Chinas own statistics bureau, Xinjiangs birth rate nearly halved between 2017 and 2019 alone.

The parliaments of Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Lithuania as well as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken have designated Chinas behavior as a "genocide an accusation that Beijing has angrily rejected. The fate of the Uighurs is also an issue in Germany. Just last week, the Human Rights Committee in German parliament, the Bundestag, spent three hours discussing the situation in Xinjiang and how it should be viewed under international law. The discussion came ahead of a vote on a new supply-chain law, which provides for sanctions against companies whose suppliers use forced labor. The vote was ultimately postponed, but if the law passes, it will impact German companies like VW, which operates a plant in Xinjiang.

Recently, the Bundestags Research Services established in an analysis that Chinas campaign in Xinjiang fulfills the criteria for genocide. Should this become the accepted view among Germanys political leadership once pro-Beijing Chancellor Angela Merkels tenure comes to an end this fall, for example it would have grave consequences for Germanys relationship with its most important trading partner.

It isnt long after landing in Urumqi on our flight from Beijing that we discover our first tails. The men from state security always look the same: Between 20 and 40 years of age, physically fit enough to follow their targets for a couple of hours at a time, and dressed in a baseball cap, facemask and sunglasses. Their favorite accessory is a mens handbag.

As we step out of the arrivals hall, a man wearing a wine-red T-shirt stares at me for a few seconds before turning away and raising his smartphone to his ear. At the taxi stand, he is a couple spots behind us in line. When we get a car after a 15-minute wait, he steps out of line and wanders away speaking into his phone, likely passing along the license plate number of our taxi. Well see him again that afternoon, seemingly randomly running into him in the center of the city population 3.5 million. He follows us at a distance of 20 to 30 meters. Its all rather obvious, a message to us that we are being watched.

Such shadows will be our constant companions in Xinjiang. In Urumqi, they follow us in a metallic-brown SUV. In Shanshan, its a white VW. In Yarkant, we are able to pinpoint five men who follow us on foot and on a moped. One of them is clearly not Han Chinese, and we guess that he might be Uighur. We are sometimes able to shake them: In Urumqi, for example, we suddenly cross the street through stop-and-go traffic and enter a shopping center, before then going out the back entrance. We turn around at each corner and see nobody following us. Later, though, theyre suddenly there again. We can only assume that they found us with the help of cameras and facial recognition technology.

They follow us everywhere, but they dont interfere a rather reserved approach compared to years past. Still, normal reporting isnt possible under such conditions. Normally, we would speak with community leaders, clerics and intellectuals, but internal government documents the so-called Karakax List makes it clear that Uighurs have been interned for far milder infractions than speaking with foreign journalists. Things like phoning family members abroad, wearing beards or simply being seen as "unreliable by state agencies. We dont want to put anybody in danger. Our discussions are limited to random encounters and our impressions are thus inevitably incomplete.

The vineyards shine bright green, interspersed with rows of darker poplars, with the desert starting just behind the last irrigation ditch. Its 39 degrees Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit). A region of sand dunes and barren mountains and dotted with oil rigs. Shanshan, a rural area in eastern Xinjiang, is home to a breathtaking landscape. Our Uighur driver Ayni a self-confident 31-year-old who likes to talk is playing Turkish pop music on the car stereo.

He says that life here has become more relaxed in recent years. The police used to stop him all the time, he says, with roadblocks everywhere. Luckily, he says, that is now over. Indeed, we dont have to stop once until we run low on fuel.

In front of the gas station is a gate manned by two men in uniform. One of them opens all of the doors of our car, including the trunk and the hood. The other notes down the number of Aynis drivers license. All passengers have to get out and Ayni has to have his ID scanned before the gate is opened and he can drive in alone in the car. He seems to accept the procedure as a completely normal part of his daily life.

In fact, Ayni seems to have no shortage of patience when it comes to his encounters with the state. He emphasizes, for example, that the police who suddenly showed up in front of the door of his hotel room to examine his ID during his 2019 vacation in Beijing were extremely polite. And the fact that he was unable to travel to the national boxing championships in 2009 because there had been unrest in Urumqi a short time before was a pity, he says. "But on the other hand, our own people brought this upon us.

In Xinjiang, we frequently encounter Uighurs who announce unprompted their loyalty to the party.

He loves the action movie "Wolf Warrior, in which a Chinese hero routs his Western foes. During his drives, he listens to audio books to improve his Chinese. The Communist Party, he says, did a fantastic job during the pandemic just look at India or the U.S. "I am proud to be Chinese.

In Xinjiang, we frequently encounter Uighurs who announce unprompted their loyalty to the party. It could be that it is a genuine emotion. It could also, however, be a preventative step to ward off any potential suspicion.

In the train to Yarkant, an old man shows us pictures of a piece of woodwork he produced apparently a hobby of his. It was not a mosque or anything like that, but the Gate of Heavenly Peace, a symbol of Beijings power. It bears Maos portrait, and it also features on the national coat of arms. The mans model includes five wooden figures intended to represent the leaders of the Peoples Republic: "Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, he recites eagerly. "And this is Xi Jinping.

In Kashgar, we are happy to see that the city is so much livelier than in 2018. Back then, many of the shops in the old town were closed up, and when asked why, people would frequently respond: "The owners have gone to school to study, a common euphemism for the re-education camps.

"You must have misheard, says a young Uighur man.

Apparently, everyone has taken to heart a message that can be read on red banners hanging from several mosques in Yarkant: "Ai dang, ai guo "Love the Party, Love the Fatherland.

The city of Kashgar is located between the Taklamakan Desert and the snow-covered Pamir Mountains. For centuries, Kashgar was an important hub on the old Silk Road, a place of bazaars and caravanserais, a mud-brick maze of alleys, courtyards, passageways, staircases and squares. In 2006, director Marc Foster filmed "The Kite Runner here because of its resemblance at the time to prewar Kabul.

Now, with Xinjiang largely pacified in the eyes of Chinese officials, they are hoping to leverage the citys potential. Kashgar is being developed into a mecca of tourism, a destination with an oriental flair. "Its great, like Morocco, says a visitor from the southwestern Chinese city of Guiyang. The old, mud-brick walls have disappeared behind a uniform coat of plaster, with walls now decorated with wagon wheels and amphoras. Tourists now wander through gates with pointed arches like in Baghdad and a city wall of concrete has been built on the clay cliffs. A Chinese temple with its curved roofline now graces the highest point of the old town. A tout tries to lure guests into a restaurant dressed as the monkey king from "Journey to the West, a classical novel of Chinese literature.

"I came for the spectacle. I think its great, says one Chinese visitor as the Uighurs are dancing the Sema. He introduces himself as Yann and says that he studies philosophy in France. Because of the pandemic, though, he has taken a year off, which he is using for travel. By the way, he adds, "there will be a spectacle with a princess later in the old town. As it turns out, it involves five princesses. They arrive on camelback, dressed in colorful costumes, before they perform a dance as they do every day.

Uighurs as obedient extras in a portrayal of their own lives, a religion without passion or youth, a culture reduced to Disney-esque exoticism, easily digestible for the masses: This version of Uighur existence appears to be the one desired by Chinas leaders.

A Trip to Kashgar

Behind the colossal gate of the Id Kah Mosque flanked by two squat minarets is a roomy ground shaded by poplars, the wind rustling through the branches. A few old men are sweeping up fallen leaves, the only people here aside from a small group at the entrance.

The All-China Journalists Association, which is overseen by the Communist Partys propaganda unit, is currently leading a tour through Xinjiang. In contrast to correspondents traveling on their own, such politically backed organizations are able to set up interviews, but only under official surveillance. The association has invited the Russian broadcaster RT, the Brazilian newspaper O Globo and Dutch television. They are currently interviewing the mosques Friday preacher. We join them.

Abbas Muhammat is 55 years old, a clean-shaven man wearing a Doppa, the traditional Uighur head covering. He has apparently been well briefed, not even pausing for thought at the more sensitive questions.

According to a recent report by the Uyghur Human Rights Project, an NGO based in Washington, D.C., China has arrested at least 1,046 imams and religious figures in Xinjiang since 2014. "Those werent real Islamic clerics, but pseudo-clerics, Muhammat says through an interpreter. "These imams spread extremism and soiled our reputation. They misled people.

Yes, he says, one of his predecessors at the Id Kah Mosque had been arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Yes, some members of the parish were also interned. "Some people followed this imam, they were his victims, so to speak. There were a couple such incidents, yes.

Muhammat seems unconcerned by how empty his mosque is: "Its a common global trend that young people are increasingly focused on earning money. For them, employment is the priority, he says. "But if they have a bit of spare time, they can come here to pray. There are no restrictions in place to keep the younger generation from praying. He urges the group to return during prayer if they want to see worshippers. They can even hear the call of the muezzin, he says.

In contrast to everywhere else in the world, not a single child or teenager was accompanying his father.

A few of the preachers claims are not borne out by our observations. We dont hear a single call to prayer during our trip, not even on Id al-Fitr, the day marking the end of Ramadan. Thousands streamed into the mosque for morning Id prayers, that is true. But in contrast to everywhere else in the world, not a single child or teenager was accompanying his father. And among all of the faithful Muslims, only a few elderly men wore a beard.

"In Chinas constitution, it says that every Chinese citizen has the right to believe in a religion or not. The laws are very well implemented here, says Muhammat. "There is no such thing as a crackdown or discrimination.

The streets speak a different language. According to Muhammat, there are at least 150 mosques in Kashgar. Yet the doors of many of the neighborhood mosques are padlocked shut and the minarets have been stooped. The mosques are no longer in use.

Officials have repurposed one of the houses of prayer. Through a side door, passersby can walk into the room where the devout used to wash themselves before prayer: masonry benches for sitting facing a wall lined with water faucets and a long, tiled basin. Today, it is used as a urinal. Outside hangs a wooden sign reading in Chinese, Uighur and English: "Tourist toilets.

On the morning that we set out to look for the camps, our minders are surprisingly nowhere to be seen. We spent most of the past few days walking perhaps they have grown a bit inattentive and didnt notice that weve had a rental car delivered to the front of our hotel.

In 2020, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) published a much-cited study on the camp system in Xinjiang. The researchers examined satellite images from the entire region and were thus able to identify at least 380 facilities. We have set out to track down a few of the coordinates from the study.

A 27-minute drive south of Kashgars center, a uniformed guard patrols on a walkway on top of a wall roughly eight meters (25 feet) high. Google Earth shows that there are around two dozen structures behind it. Through a telephoto lens, we can see that the guard has a rifle slung over his shoulder. He approaches a watchtower that juts up from the wall.

Is it a high-security prison of the kind to be found everywhere in the world? Or is it one of the regions infamous camps? Chinese authorities leave our inquiries about the facility unanswered. ASPI analyst Nathan Ruser says that it is, in fact, a camp inaugurated in 2020, at a time when China was claiming that it had already released all interned Uighurs.

The wall is blindingly white and the parallel, razor-wire fences glitter in the sunlight. It certainly looks as though the complex hasnt been here for long. And from the road, it is possible to read slogans affixed on one of the roofs in large, red characters, including "qu ji duan hua which means "deradicalization.

The system of surveillance has been perfected and the populace brought into line.

We also find another facility listed in the ASPI database a similar ensemble of buildings set up parallel to each other. As we slowly drive by the entry gate, we can see two watchtowers in the back of the compound. But there is no razor wire on the wall circling the compound and the gate is only secured with a roll shutter. According to the signs, the facility is now a party school.

These are just two cursory observations, but they do not contradict the conclusions reached in the ASPI study namely that fences and watchtowers have been removed from some of the complexes as they have been repurposed, with security at others having been intensified.

One possible interpretation: Those who China has deemed incorrigible may have since been sentenced and transferred to regular prisons. Many of those who officials believe had assimilated to a sufficient degree could very well have been released or put into the Labor Transfer Scheme that has distributed Uighurs among factories across the country. The system of surveillance has since been perfected and the populace brought into line.

A sandstorm kicks up as night falls on our final evening in Kashgar. Visibility is poor as we step out of a restaurant and wave down a taxi. Plus, we are all wearing facemasks. The driver cannot clearly see who is stepping into his vehicle.

As we drive off, he says cheerfully that he is a Uighur, before asking what ethnicity we belong to. We answer that I am a German and my photographer a Ukrainian. "Foreigners? the driver blurts, suddenly seeming uncomfortable. "Oh no. If I had known that, I wouldnt have picked you up. I thought you were maybe Tajiks! Xinjiang borders Tajikistan and there is a Tajik minority in the region, many of whom have Caucasian features similar to our own and they make for much less-sensitive fares for a taxi driver than we Europeans.

We try to calm him by telling him that we have taken a number of taxis in Xinjiang and none of the drivers have voiced similar concerns. "But you have no idea what happens to us once you get out, he replies. "Look, there are two cameras here in the car! He does drive us the few hundred meters to our hotel but asks that we pay him cash instead of via WeChat, as is standard. He doesnt want a data trail.

The image that we take home with us from Xinjiang remains a bit fuzzy. But one thing is clear: The fear persists.

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In the Sinister Disneyland of Xinjiang: China's Ongoing Oppression of the Uighurs - DER SPIEGEL International Edition

It may seem surprising to American readers, but one of the most vibrant human rights movements around the world today is gay reparations, or policies intended to make amends for the legacy of systemic discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. In the last decade alone, Canada, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom have embraced gay reparations.

The policies hardly comprise a homogenous experience, and they do not entail giving people money simply for being gay, as some suspect. In most countries, gay reparations are limited to a government apology to the LGBTQ community for past wrongs and a promise to do better in the future. In others, they have entailed memorializing the victims of state-sponsored repression of homosexual citizens. In 2008, the German government opened a monument to gay victims of the Holocaust, an unknown number whom perished in Nazi concentration camps, many of them victims of gruesome medical experiments intended to eradicate their homosexuality. In still other countries, gay reparations have centered on a pardon to anyone convicted under laws that criminalized same-sex attraction, as in the United Kingdom, which in 2017 issued a posthumous pardon to those convicted of gross indecency, including Alan Turing, the mathematician credited with shortening the end of World War II; or even financial compensation for wages or pensions lost due to having spent time in prison or in a mental institution because of a homosexual offense, as in Spain since 2009 and in Germany since 2016.

But none of this momentum has reached the United States. The closest the country has come to embracing gay reparations was in 2019, when, on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the New York Police Department issued a belated apology for the raid that triggered the rebellion. The actions taken by the NYPD were wrongplain and simple and for that I apologize, said New York Police Commissioner James ONeill. Surely, the absence of gay reparationsor even a discussion of themin the United States is not out of a rosy history free of systemic discrimination toward the LGBTQ community, although a valid argument can be made that this history is not particularly well known, save, perhaps, for dont ask, dont tell. That infamous 1993 policy allowed gays, lesbians, and bisexuals to serve in the military as long as they kept their sexual orientation a secret. By the time the Obama administration lifted the policy in 2011, some 13,000 LGBTQ troops had been dismissed from their jobs.

Decades before dont ask, dont tell, from the 1920s through at least the 1960s, there was the policy of entrapment, which involved undercover police officers sending flirtatious signals to other men they presumed to be homosexual in the hopes of ensnarling them into illicit activity. According to the historian Eric Cervinis book The Deviants War, War, which is about gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny, in the 15 years after World War II, homosexual arrestsincluding those for sodomy, dancing, kissing, or holding handsoccurred at the rate of one every ten minutes, for a grand total of 1 million arrests. Entrapment was followed by the Lavender Scare, the midcentury persecution of federal workers suspected of being homosexual.

Perhaps as many as 10,000 people were fired or expelled from their federal jobs during the 1950s and 1960s because they were homosexual or suspected of being homosexual based on evidence as flimsy as how they dressed, talked, or looked. The trigger for this witch hunt was President Dwight D. Eisenhowers 1953 executive order banning perverts from working in the federal government. Some of the victims of the Lavender Scare took their own lives, while others were sent to government-run institutions, especially St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where they were forced to undergo such dehumanizing treatments as lobotomies, insulin-induced comas, and gay conversion therapy, with the aim of changing their sexual orientation.

Gay activists have compared the treatments offered at St. Elizabeths to the governments human experiments with syphilis on Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, which between 1932 and 1972 left hundreds of diagnosed Black men with syphilis untreated so doctors could follow the progress of the illness. As with the Tuskegee experiment, those subjected to experimentation at the hands of federal officials were a despised minority that never consented to be treated, noted Charles Francis, president of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., the main U.S.-based organization championing gay reparationsespecially a formal apology from Congress.

Adding to such mistreatment have been a host of court decisions that for decades stigmatized homosexual people. Two rulings in particular reveal the animus that American jurisprudence has in the past shown toward gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. In Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld the state of Georgias sodomy laws, the court determined that the Constitution did not protect the rights of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals to engage in private, consensual sexual relations, because, the justices concluded, homosexual sex has no connection to family, marriage, abortion, or procreation. In his concurring opinion, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger quoted the 18th-century English jurist William Blackstones characterization of homosexual sex as an infamous crime against nature, worse than rape, and a crime not fit to be named. Homosexuality remained criminalized in the United States until the Supreme Court overturned the Hardwick ruling in 2003. Meanwhile, in Bottoms v. Bottoms (1995), Virginias Supreme Court upheld a lower courts ruling that awarded custody of a child to a grandmother, because the childs biological mother, Sharon Bottoms, was in a lesbian relationship, which at the time was a crime under Virginia law. This ruling was not an aberration; at the time, it was customary for the courts to deny LGBTQ people the right to raise their own biological children and to adopt.

Acts of state-sponsored anti-gay discrimination sent an unambiguous message to ordinary Americans that it was acceptable to demean and demonize LGBTQ people, and even to engage in acts of violence against them. The infamous and bloody history of societal attacks on the American LGBTQ community includes singer and spokesperson Anita Bryants 1977 Save Our Children crusade, which depicted gay men as pedophiles; Evangelist Jerry Falwells declaration of war on homosexuality, a rhetorical tactic employed during the 1980s to raise funds for Falwells Moral Majority organization; and the 2016 attack on Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. One of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history, the attack on Pulse killed 49 people and wounded 53, many of them young Hispanic men. Prior to Pulse, there was the now largely forgotten 1973 arson fire at Upstairs, a gay bar in New Orleans French Quarter, which left 32 people dead. The thick homophobia of the era precluded even an acknowledgement of the tragedy by the mayor of New Orleans or Louisianas governor.

Given the terrible history of repression of LGBTQ people in the United States, the absence of gay reparations is puzzling. Canada, a country with a decidedly less troubled history when it comes to homosexuality, issued an apology to the gay community in 2017. The apology came with a multimillion-dollar payout to compensate victims of the gay purge, those fired from the military because of their sexual orientation, and authorized a memorial to the victims of those persecuted for their sexual orientation in the capital city of Ottawa.

An obvious factor behind the delayed arrival of gay reparations in the United States is that the subject of reparations is particularly vexing in American society, stemming from the still-unsettled legacy of slavery and from racism.

Some critics of gay reparations such as the conservative political commentator Michael Medved have maintained that gay people are not deserving of reparations because unlike Black Americans, gay people are not victims of multigenerational damage, meaning that whatever ills homophobia may have caused in the past, these ills are not the same as those left behind by slavery, as they do not carry over from generation to generation. Medved also points to the economic success of some in the American LGBTQ community (which has generated the mythical notion that LGBTQ Americans are more affluent than the population at large) as a reason for why gay reparations are redundant.

Others are opposed to all forms of reparations, racial and otherwise, believing that reparations are inherently divisive and that they lead to a slippery slope scenario in which all groups come to view themselves as victims and worthy of reparations. As argued by a writer for the right-wing website RedState, gay reparations would allow for reparation claims by the obese, the disfigured, the disabled, the short, the bald, and also by [m]igrants who werent treated kindly when they tried to enter the U.S. illegally and by really smart Asians who were rejected from Harvard.

Seen from a global perspective, though, there appears to be more compelling reasons the United States is a gay reparations laggard. The first one is the poor resonance of human rights in American politics and society. Gay reparations movements abroad, especially in Spain, Britain, and Germanycountries that pioneered the gay reparations movementhave waged their struggles as a human rights crusade. This has entailed borrowing the rhetoric and strategies of the international human rights movement to make their claims and push their agenda forward. Inspired by human rights activism, gay reparations activists have emphasized the need for reparations as a moral obligation intended to restore dignity to LGBTQ people. They have also leveraged historical narratives of homosexual repression to influence public opinion and policy toward the LGBTQ community, such as the oppression of gays and lesbians under Nazi Germany or under the homophobic laws of the Francisco Franco regime in Spain, and shamed public officials for failing to stand up for the human rights of LGBTQ people.

But in the United States, theres not much in the way of precedent of social movements arising (much less succeeding) with human rights as their core focus. Even the American civil rights movement failed in its attempt in the 1960s to link its struggle for civil rights to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This was due in no small part to the effective demonization of human rights by American conservatives during the Cold War as un-American, never mind that Americans, such as former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, were among the main drafters of the 1948 declaration and that this document drew on seminal American documents, such as the Declaration of Independence.

Curiously, the view of human rights as un-American lingers to this day. The Trump administration, for example, attempted to reframe the promotion of human rights at the global level as exclusively entailing property rights and religious freedom. That was the mission of then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeos Commission on Unalienable Rights. Predictably, the commissions final report led womens groups and LGBTQ activists to accuse President Donald Trumps Department of State of choosing to promote the human rights it liked, while undermining those it did not support, such as LGBTQ rights.

A less apparent factor in the United States lagging on gay reparations lies with the American LGBTQ rights movement itself. The United States may have birthed the gay liberation movement that came in the wake of the Stonewall riots. Yet in recent decades, gay rights activism in the United States, when seen through international lenses, has been relatively conservative. Since at least the late 1990s, the legal struggle for same-sex marriage consumed American activists almost at the expense of anything else. And that struggle was less than radical. While activists in such countries as Argentina, Germany, and Spain stressed how same-sex marriage would serve to transform society and the culture at large by expanding freedom and equality and by deepening citizenship and democracy, in the United States activists were more inclined to emphasize how same-sex marriage would push same-sex couples toward existing norms, even taming their sexuality. That latter argument came to be known as the conservative case for gay marriage, which contended that American society, including conservatives, should support same-sex marriage because it would bolster traditional values.

Framing the struggle for same-sex marriage around such modest goals as strengthening homosexual households wasted a great opportunity to engage society in a broad debate about the role of LGBTQ people in society. It also made it harder for gay activists to expand the struggle for LGBTQ rights beyond marriage and into such areas as transgender rights and gay reparations. These shortcomings, however, should not portend the end of gay reparations in the United States beyond the Stonewall apology. The international experience demonstrates that it is never too late for nations to right past wrongs. It took the United Kingdom more than a century to reckon with its own persecution of gay men under the charge of gross indecency. And the payoff is more than worth it. Aside from restoring dignity to the victims of state-sponsored policies of anti-gay discrimination and violence, gay reparations hold the promise of putting an end to the history of oppression of LGBTQ people while reminding future generations of the sacrifices and struggles that came before them.

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Why the United States Needs Gay Reparations Now - Foreign Policy

When I asked Peter Beinart to tell me what he thought about the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, announced last week, his tone was resigned. Ive actually been in an Israeli shelter with my daughter when she was younger and I have a lot of friends and family in Israel, so I was grateful, Beinart said. But I also felt that nothing had been solved and that in all likelihood something like this would happen again, unfortunately.

Beinart is a writer and an editor, but above all else, he is an unusual figure for many American Jews. Hes Orthodox, has considered himself a Zionist. Hes also a human rights advocate. And his position on Israel has shifted over time. Having once been a staunch defender of the Jewish state, hes now something elsean interlocutor, challenging everyone to look closely at Israel, and tell him if what they see looks fair.

The people hed really like to talk this out with are in the Biden administration. From the beginning, Beinarts noticed Biden has seemed to want to ignore conflict in Israel. It makes a certain kind of realpolitik sense, except for the fact that America is deeply implicated in this deep oppression, Beinart said. The Biden administration is really stuck. I think the path of least resistance will be for them to try to put on enough of a Band-Aid and just cross their fingers that something like this doesnt erupt again while hes president.

The president might be stuck, but when it comes to Israel, there are signs that other Democrats are shifting their positions. On Mondays episode of What Next, I spoke with Beinart about how significant that shift really is and whether the left flank of the party will influence the White House.Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: Back during the Democratic primary, you wrote a deeply reported piece that seemed to anticipate this very moment. It was titled Joe Bidens Alarming Record on Israel.And it laid out Bidens hesitancy around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You say that Bidens reluctance to act has been a political calculation. There wasnt much to be gained, Biden argued, from having public disagreements with Benjamin Netanyahu or his government. And to explain his reasoning, Biden used this phrase: Never crucify yourself on a small cross.

Peter Beinart: Its kind of an ironic metaphor to use for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a conflict between Jews and Palestinians, who are mostly Muslim. But look, I dont blame Biden. I blame us, which is to say, Biden is a politician. Most of the time, politicians respond to political incentives. Most of the time, politicians arent courageous. When Obama was running for president in 2008, maybe 2007, he was asked by a progressive American Jew whether he would be willing to pressure the Israeli government to change its behavior. And Obama told this story in which the African American labor leader A. Philip Randolph went to Franklin Roosevelt and asked Roosevelt to start desegregating the United States government. And Roosevelt said something along the lines of, You put 10,000 people on the White House lawn and make me do it. And the truth is that those of us who care about the freedom and dignity of Palestinians, who believe that it is a matter of Jewish honor that we are not oppressing other people, we have not done that yet. We have not created enough political force that changes the political calculations for Joe Biden. And although I wish that he would be more out front and more courageous, that ultimately will be the determining variable.

So I guess the question now is really are the politics changing? Because if you were paying attention over the last week or two, you could see various politicians putting themselves forward and making the moral case here, whether thats Sen. Bernie Sanders with his op-ed in the Times.Or Rashida Tlaib, who spoke directly to the president when he was on a visit to Detroit and also spoke on the floor of Congress very movingly about her Palestinian heritage.Are you seeing other things, too, that folks should be paying attention to that show some kind of movement?

In the quote-unquote mainstream media, theres definitely been a significant shift. I think that the Black Lives Matter movement and other things have made the media more conscious of questions of representation and more, frankly, embarrassed at the historic absence of Palestinian voices in these conversations. And so I think you have seen more Palestinian voices in the conversation during this conflict than in previous ones.

Theres been so much conversation about bias, just really transparent conversations.

Yes, and thats a big deal. And you are seeing some of that filter into the most progressive members of Congress. But Im not sold on the idea that were necessarily seeing a fundamental shift overall. First of all, the Democrats are only one of two parties in the United States. And so even though theres a little bit of progressive movement happening in the Democratic Party, the Republican Party has gone way backwards. Twenty years ago, you could find Republicans who were willing to talk about Palestinian rights and about American pressure. George H.W. Bush was the last U.S. president to ever condition aid to Israel to restrain settlement growth. Thats completely gone inside the Republican Party.

And why is that? My understanding is that thats because the Republican Party has become entwined with these religious interests that make it make sense to align yourself with the state of Israel. But is that your understanding too?

Yes, you can say its because of white Christian evangelicals and their influence in the Republican Party and also those American Jews who are involved in the Republican Party, who are disproportionately Orthodox. And so its a powerful kind of alignment.

Benjamin Netanyahu has been so successful because he has convinced Israeli Jews that they can have their cake and eat it,too. Peter Beinart

But I think just focusing on the religious aspect is perhaps too generous. One of the things weve certainly learned in the Trump era is that when one talks about this category of Christian evangelicals, youre talking about a racial category, not just a religious category. And so part of whats going on is that Israel has hierarchies, ethno-religious hierarchies. You can see it most explicitly in immigration policy, where I as a Jew could go to Israel and become a citizen tomorrow. And virtually theres no way for a Palestinian or almost any other non-Jew to actually to go to Israel and gain citizenship.Thats very appealing to a lot of people in the Republican Party who are basically focused on defendingnot the same hierarchiesbut a set of hierarchies and an ethno-religious, racial definition of America. Tucker Carlson said just the other day, basically, Why cant we have an immigration policy like Israel? So there is a deep ideological association between the kind of America that many Republicans want and the kind of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu presides over today.

Youve said the reason the American debate over Israel and Palestine could shift dramatically and quickly is that behind closed doors there are plenty of politicians who are convinced already that what Israel is doing is wrong, but they just need to be convinced that they can say that out loud without hurting their careers. What is it that would convince those politicians of that?

Seeing other politicians be able to do so and survive politically. Its really important that Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar both won their reelection challenges, even though there were a lot of people who really put a lot of effort into trying to defeat them. Thats really important.

I think its possible that in the Democratic Party you will see more people realizing that this AIPAC, establishment infrastructure that theyre often so afraid of actually isnt as powerful as they might believe. But you have to go through that experience before you can believe it.

AIPAC is the lobbying group that advocates for a strong American-Israeli relationship. And a lot of people have cited them when they talk about the influence of Israel in Washington. Do you feel like theres been any change there? In terms of how much influence they have in the halls of Congress.

AIPACs problem is that its a bipartisan organization. It has to be a bipartisan organization. Its whole point is to basically ensure that U.S. policy toward this war remains largely the same.

No matter whos in power.

And its just hard to be a bipartisan organization on anything in Washington. AIPACs problem is that the momentum in AIPAC is toward it being a more Republican organization, and its struggling very, very hard to hold on to its Democratic flank, talking constantly about progressive values in Israel, LGBT this and blah blah. But the momentum is clearly for AIPAC to become less influential in the Democratic Party.

Rep. Jerry Nadler wrote this op-ed in the New York Times Friday, making an argument that Democrats have always seen the nuances in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship and that Democrats in Congress agree on this. I wondered if you agreed with that or whether you thought what youre seeing now is new.

Eh.I mean, Democrats have seen the nuances, but the vast majority of them have basically still wanted Israel to be able to act with impunity. The really significant shift is among a small number of Democratic members of CongressRashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Betty McCollum from Minnesotawho actually speak full-throated in the language of Palestinian rights and want the U.S. to use its leverage to change Israeli policy.Its still nowhere near a majority of even the Democratic Congress who are taking this position.

What will be significant is when someone like Jerry Nadler is willing to say U.S. money should not be used to imprison Palestinian children and demolish Palestinian homes. Thatll be important. But we are not there yet.

You say that the problem with U.S. support for Israel is that it has been so unconditional, right? You dont want the U.S. to remove itself from Israeli affairs entirely. Congress could attach some strings to Israels nearly $4 billion in U.S. military aid.

First of all, there are certain kinds of practices that are simply too inhumane for U.S. money to be used for. One would be the demolition of Palestinian homes. Its important to understand that the vast majority of Palestinian homes are not demolished because Palestinians have been accused of anything other than not having building permits. And you know what? They cant get building permits because when youre not a citizen, the government doesnt have any real interest in giving you a building permit. So you build illegally because thats the only way you can build. And then they show up one day and say, Sorry, were knocking down your home.

The second thing is that we should condition U.S. aid on Israel actually stopping settlement growth and being open to the idea of a Palestinian state. I myself think that probably the ship has sailed on Palestinian statehood. But we should be using our leverage to say to Israel, If you want this $3.8 billion, then you have to change your policy. I think this would change Israeli politics. I think that one of the reasons Benjamin Netanyahu has been so successful is that he has convinced Israeli Jews that they can have their cake and eat it, too. They can continue this project of inexorably taking more and more Palestinian land and entrenching this oppression of Palestinians, and pay no international price because their big friend America is giving them international impunity. If that were not the case, if there really were a price internationally for Israels behavior, I think that would strengthen Netanyahus centrist and progressive critics.

You wrote a piece last year about how your views had changed. Originally youd been quite in favor of a two state solution, a Palestinian state and an Israeli state. But the more and more this conflict deepened, the less and less possible you thought that was. Why?

I just came to the conclusion that the Israeli settlement enterprise, not just the number of settlers, but the vast infrastructure that Israel has built in the West Bankand when you see it up close, nothing about it looks temporary. And so I began to fear that in continuing to use this paradigm of two states, I was actually blinding myself to the reality that existed on the ground and that the paradigm, instead of being a helpful way of understanding the conflict and a potential solution, was actually becoming a way of essentially justifying this immoral status quo.

So I spent a fair amount of time trying to think about alternatives and trying to think my way through to an idea of one equal state that I thought could work for both Jews and Palestinians.

And I think that that scares a lot of American Jews who think that they will lose power in that situation where its not a Jewish state, its a state thats shared.

Yeah, tell me about it. It scares me. Theres a lot of trauma in the Jewish experience and a lot of fear. But I ultimately came to the conclusion that our fears cannot be a moral license to crush other people. That is actually antithetical to the way I understand Judaism. Were not simply a tribe. Judaism has an ethical message. It makes a case about the infinite value of all human life. The Torah doesnt start with Jews. It starts with human beings who are not Jews. Noah, Adam and Evethese are not Jews. The point is to emphasize the infinite value of all human life. So thats one reason I took this position.

The second is I ultimately dont think that Israeli Jews will be more safe in a state where they are brutalizing and dominating another people and making their lives utter hell.

Because those people have nothing to lose.

Yes. The harsh reality is that in virtually every movement of national struggle by people who are oppressed, there is some faction that uses violence. Weve sanitized Nelson Mandela, but he was not an apostle of nonviolence. He supported armed resistance. The IRA planted bombs in and around England. In Myanmar now, there are many people moving to armed struggle. The point is that there will always be some group of Palestinians who are going to meet the violence that they experience, through state oppression, through violence, unless you show them that nonviolence can actually lift that oppression. And Israel has done the opposite.

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Progressive Critics Are Speaking Out About Israel. Will It Change Things? - Slate

I grew up in South Africa during the bleak, violent, seemingly never-ending iron age of apartheid. In 1971, when I was studying acting at Cape Town University, the National Party government built a monolithic 1,500-seat theatre complex in a commanding position near the centre of the city. The Afrikaner Nationalists had an easy rule of thumb by which to distinguish between the value of white people and black people we have culture and they dont. The purpose of the monolith, with its elaborate stairways, fancy colonnades and picture windows, was to declare and celebrate this belief. White musicians, actors and dancers were to perform to exclusively white audiences.

Afrikaans theatre was bursting with contradictions. The finest Afrikaans playwright was William Shakespeare. From the 1950s to the 70s, Afrikaans-language productions of the European modernists Pirandello, Maeterlinck, Strindberg and especially Chekhov toured to church halls all over the country. Uncle Vanya was a quintessential Afrikaans cultural experience.

Then, as now once again in the UK, the making of theatre was in every sense political. Every aspect was resonant and meaningful how it was staged, where, by whom, for whom and, if it was subsidised, with what intention and to whose advantage. In the case of these tours to ultra-conservative farming towns of high-water mark creations of the liberal imagination, the state endorsed them and paid for them.

Of the productions scheduled for the new theatres opening, a play by the South African Bartho Smit, was banned by the official censor before it even went into rehearsal. The highlight was to be Koning Lear. The theatres artistic director, from a distinguished Afrikaans family, had been excited by productions hed recently seen in Europe. He invited the German Dieter Reible to direct.

Lear was played by Cobus Rossouw, the beloved leading Afrikaans actor of his generation. My memory was that Edgar was played by a black actor. However, checking the cast list, I find the part was played by a white actor in fact one who had only recently graduated from my own drama school. He certainly intended to convey that Edgar was a black South African. This, together with the bold, expressionist style of the production, was the cause of an ensuing scandal. Did he actually play the part in blackface? Its unlikely but not impossible. Was he dressed in some version of royal Zulu or Xhosa apparel? No doubt someone will write in and let me know.

When Lear divided his kingdom among his daughters, it was made clear that each was being allocated an apartheid-style black homeland, one in the eye for the governments divide-and-rule politics. In the last scene, with Lear lying dead on the war-torn stage, black Edgar climbed with dignity to the top of a revolving staircase or was it Table Mountain or a giant anthill? The oppressive state had been violently destroyed and he was at long last entering into his kingdom.

That the premiere took place in the presence of the state president heightened the outrage.

We drama students had long agreed to boycott the segregated theatre (the university was, in theory, open to anyone; a handful of my fellow drama students were black) but when we heard what Reible was up to, we knew we had to be at the opening. In the culture palace, formal dress was obligatory. We arrived wearing suits and ties but without shirts. Thus we made our protest.

In 1972 (as I describe in my book, As If by Chance), I was in the audience when Sizwe Banzi Is Dead was first performed away from the township outside Port Elizabeth where it was created. John Kani and Winston Ntshona, two (black) actors of genius, devised the play with Athol Fugard, South Africas most skilled and adventurous (white) playwright.

Everyone is the tiny upstairs room was floored by the plays intricacy, compassion and intensity and its insight into the day-to-day realities of black life under apartheid. Its now acknowledged as one more high-water mark of the liberal imagination, but even then I wondered if it also contained another radical story in code.

In the play the only means by which the man called Sizwe Banzi can survive the Kafka-esque bureaucracy of oppression is to give up his identity and change his name. The title tells us from the get-go that Sizwe Banzi is dead. The play reveals that he isnt. Hes hiding in plain sight.

The armed resistance movement established in 1961 by the African National Congress when the Congress was banned was called Umkhonto we Sizwe, the spear of the nation. Sizwe is the Zulu word for nation. As the play unfolds it seems to tell us that resistance to apartheid cannot be suppressed. It might have to go into hiding but it will re-emerge, it will survive, it will enter into its kingdom.

Or so I deduced. Was this obvious to Zulu speakers? Did the authors intend it?

When the play arrived in London in 1973, standing on the steps of the Royal Court, I asked John Kani if Id cracked the code. He gave me a big John Kani smile. Ask me another question, he said.

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David Lan: In the age of apartheid, theatre resisted - The Guardian

How easily history repeats itself. The world has stood silently by as genocides have taken place right in the middle of the Western world. Today they have come for the Palestinians, and again nobody cares. In fact, they have been coming for the Palestinians for almost a century and the world has stayed largely silent.

Where is the hue and cry from neighbouring countries, from international organizations of peace and from self-acclaimed liberators of the oppressed, who would stop this new genocide! For reasons undefined, there has largely been a deafening silence on this continued occurrence of human rights violations.

Universities, which are the bastions of advocating awareness, are silent. UBC as an incredibly multicultural and international organization, too, remains silent. Neither the UBC administration nor the UBC President have released any public statement of support for their own students affected by this situation, much less for the entirety of Palestine.

The AMS has not released a statement or referred students to any mental health or financial resources. In 2017, the AMS council rejected a motion to direct the BDS referendum (Boycott, Divest and Sanction Israel for its war crimes) to the student court, with aims to revisit this topic at a later date, which they never did

Numerous UBC organizations and clubs, despite their vocality on other human rights issues, continue to remain in the shadows, from all the undergraduate societies to departmental clubs to student associations. Here is a short list of a few clubs which seem to have spoken up: UBC SPHR (Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights), UBC SASC (Sexual Assault Support Centre), the BSA (Bangladeshi Student Association), the MSA (Muslim Student Association) and the ESA (Egyptian Student Organization). Otherwise, UBC and the rest of the world seem to be telling the Palestinians that, to survive, they must silently accept the systematic erasure of their peoples.

It might make sense had this been a conflict between two equal sides; but it is not. It is an occupation and a series of ongoing and continuous acts of aggression by a highly financed and powerful military state against displaced, impoverished and marginalized peoples. When you want a land without its peoples, the goal is to remove said peoples by whatever means necessary. This policy, enabled by Western nations, is by definition genocidal.

The reality of the situation is that Gaza is the largest open air prison in the world. The Israeli onslaught of the last two weeks against people unable to escape the assault has hit a death toll of almost 250, including almost 100 children. Israeli rockets have displaced over 50,000 Palestinians and destroyed over 500 homes. The Palestinian offices of the Associated Press, Al Jazeera and the Ministry of Health, as well as medical aid and trauma response buildings (MSF, PCRF Office) and the only COVID testing centre in Gaza have been levelled.

The systematic destruction of infrastructure has resulted in a lack of access of the Palestinian civilians to the basic necessities of life including food, water, electricity, medical aid and education. This continual assault on Gaza is a violation of multiple human rights.

It is obvious that Israel has no intention of ceasing their efforts to subdue the Palestinian people illustrated by the fact that just days after agreeing to a ceasefire, Israeli settlers and forces stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque, firing tear gas and stun grenades into the crowd of worshippers, injuring over 300 people, allegedly in response to some stone throwers.

The authors of this article stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their ongoing struggle and resistance against the occupation and the apartheid state of Israel. We condemn all acts of violence, whether by Hamas or by Israel. We want to reaffirm that our condemnation of the Israeli government does not extend to the Israeli people or people of Jewish descent.

We are aware of the concerns of safety of our fellow students of Israeli and Jewish descent. We continue to reject all acts of anti-semitism, and extend our support to the Jewish community during this difficult time. We know that there are many Jewish organizations that are working towards establishing peace in the conflict zones. We want to remind everyone that oppression of a people is against humanitarian ideals and can never result in lasting peace. To stand with Palestine is to stand with humanity.

The authors of this article do not claim to know all the answers, nor ask any reader to blindly accept what we are saying we are simply asking you to care enough to educate yourselves on these matters. We are asking you to hold those in power responsible for their silence and for their ignorance on this subject, especially when the consequence of this deafening silence is the mass suffering and loss of human life.

We can start with UBC, by putting pressure on our AMS constituencies and undergraduate clubs and societies to stand in solidarity with Palestine, and by putting pressure on the UBC Administration to release a public statement. While this issue might be occurring halfway across the world for some of you, it is very much happening at home for your fellow students and friends.

Speak up. We hear your silence, we see your silence.

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Letter: Internationally Ignored, Palestine and UBC - Ubyssey Online

Uganda is experiencing its worst wave of political oppression in decades. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of supporters of opposition parties to President General Yoweri Museveni have been abducted, detained and tortured in recent months. Like many, I bear the scars of the baton, have felt the sting of teargas and endured unlawful detention. But I know that this is not personal. It isnt about me.

Many others, whose only offence is to exercise constitutionally entrenched rights and freedoms, have been clobbered, abducted, tortured and put on show trial. The atrocities are numerous: the unresolved carnage of the Kayunga shootings in 2009 that saw 40 left dead, the massacres in Rwenzururu where police and military killed more than 150, or the November 2020 killings in which more than 50 protesters lost their lives. Not to mention the shooting of my driver, Yasin Kawuma, by police forces on 13 August 2018 at a political rally. He was only 27, and left behind a widow and children. A personal tragedy, but also just another incident in the brutal crackdown under way on supporters of opposition parties in Uganda.

Before I was a politician, I was a musician. I have been dubbed Africas Ghetto President. I stood earlier this year as the main opposition challenger to Musevini. At 39 years old, I hope to represent a new face for Ugandan politics that the population, which is the second youngest in the world, can get behind. I want to see Uganda enjoy the same opportunities that countries governed by more sustainable, equal democratic processes enjoy.

Many in my generation were too young or not yet born to comprehend what was happening in the early years of Musevinis National Resistance Armys takeover. The mass dislocation of livelihoods as a result of IMF-backed austerity measures, the withdrawal of the state from basic service provision and the war between the NRA and Joseph Konys Lords Resistance Army in northern Uganda brought home the glaring contradiction between the lofty speeches of Museveni and prevailing realities. Viewed through our eyes as millennials, it has been a lifetime of broken promises, unfulfilled dreams and dashed hopes.

This disenchantment shows in the age of the majority of arrested people, not least Kenny Kyalimpa (18), Lookman Mwijukye (20), Stanley Kafuko and Saphina Nansove (both 22), Shakira Namboozo (24), Joy Strong (25) and Dan Magic (27), all of whom were repeatedly harassed and are still locked up for expressing divergent political opinions in recent months. And then theres my music partner, Nubian Li, and my childhood friend Eddie Mutwe.

Against this backdrop, its not difficult to see why every passing day of Musevenis incumbency stirs even more opposition to his rule. Yet the establishment does not seem to appreciate the fact that you cannot indefinitely detain 40 million people in an airtight cage of poverty presided over by nepotistic ruling elites. Suffice to say that even if I hadnt personally indulged in elective politics and direct activism, other Ugandans would have emerged as they have to challenge years of misrule and mismanagement of our public affairs.

A reader who is not familiar with Ugandas situation might wonder how all the above has been possible. Years of personalised rule create a blanketing malaise whose effect is that neither the judicial system nor any other arm of government, as currently constituted can be trusted to deliver justice. The very parliament I sit in has been rendered powerless as a check to executive overreach.

Court orders are disregarded with dazzling alacrity, as the civilian courts get ousted by the general courts-martial, whose remit is soldiers. Media houses are besieged, in the literal and figurative senses, with editorial independence hampered by the ever-present threats of suspension, revocation of broadcasting licenses, and/or prosecution. In such an environment, alternative thought is frowned on while dissent is criminalised. Active opposition is a cardinal sin. Laws including the Computer Misuse Act, the Public Order Management Act and the Anti-Money Laundering Act provide legal cover for the persecution of opponents and muzzling of citizen voices.

At the start of this year, compelled by these circumstances, I submitted a filing to the international criminal court. As signatories to various instruments including the Rome Statute, we must uphold the values that inspired the creation of the ICC. In lockstep with citizens elsewhere who have sought justice in international courts and tribunals, our complaint seeks a measure of redress for Ugandans whose national institutions are incapable and, in many cases, unwilling to dispense justice fairly and impartially.

We have enumerated the myriad violations and excesses that were meted out on Ugandans in the runup to, during, and in the aftermath of the botched 2021 elections. Ugandan lives remain unaccounted for following the November 2020 shootings, as do numerous detainees who are yet to be arraigned before a competent and civilian court of law. Its critical that the weight of personal accountability is brought to bear by naming individual commanders and officers who have participated in crimes and atrocities against Ugandans.

It must be clear to the world that these actions do not represent the character of Ugandans. Such brazen lawlessness cannot be our identity as a member of the global community of states. Its in the enlightened self-interest of the international community to rein in the regime in Uganda because of the regional economic and security implications that the current posture portends for stability and progress. The apparent stability in Uganda is cosmetic and deceptive. Washington, London, Berlin, and Paris should stop looking at stalemate as stability especially where autocrats like Museveni dangle their readiness to do their bidding in regional politics.

An unstable Uganda makes for a dangerous regional climate and as such a threat to an already precarious Great Lakes region. The contemporary history of eastern and central Africa attests to this fact. The west should end the duplicity and realise the threat that its inaction poses to its own national interests. As Ugandans, we have spoken repeatedly at elections in 2001, 2006, 2011, 2016 and 2021 about the kind of leadership we desire and the vision we hold for our country, only for our will to be subverted by the ruling junta.

If for no other reason than for breathing life into the dreams of those such as Yasin Kawuma, who died in pursuit of democratic ideals, we are determined to prosecute this mission and bring it to its logical conclusion.

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Young Ugandans are being brutally oppressed. They must be allowed a voice - The Guardian

Tamils and their supporters are planning protests in cities around the world to commemorate May 18 Tamil Genocide Day and to remember the Mullivaikkal massacre. In Australia, the Tamil Refugee Council has called demonstrations in Melbourne and Sydney for Sunday, May 16.

In March of this year, Australia backed a UK-led resolution at the UN Human Rights Council that expressed deep concern at the deteriorating situation in Sri Lanka. The resolution noted the accelerating militarization of civilian government functions [and] the erosion of the independence of the judiciary, and the increased marginalization of Tamil and Muslim communities.

However, just one month later, the Australian government gave Sri Lankas police force five aerial surveillance drones. The drones were previously owned by the Operation Sovereign Borders Joint Agency Task Force, part of Australias military-led border security operation whose primary responsibility is to deter and disrupt asylum seekers trying to reach Australia.

Australia claims that the drones will be used to support crime-fighting activities. But past experience makes it perfectly clear that the Sri Lankan authorities are likely to use the drones for surveillance of Tamil refugees fleeing the island and government officials in Canberra know it.

This is not the first time the Australian government has supplied Sri Lankan state forces with military hardware. Twelve years ago, as the countrys military committed one of the largest mass killings so far witnessed in the twenty-first century, Australia provided similar aid that was intended to stop people fleeing.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had once administered three-quarters of the territory of the islands Northeastern Province. By May 2009, they were confined to a small piece of coastland near Mullivaikkal, in the Mullaitivu District. When the Sri Lankan military launched its final offensive, it ordered the 330,000 Tamil civilians behind LTTE lines to shelter in designated no-fire zones. Despite having declared these to be safe areas, the Sri Lankan authorities ordered the evacuation of all media and UN personnel.

The Sri Lankan military then proceeded to shell the no-fire zones, targeting hospitals, food distribution routes, and Red Cross ships. The army had already defeated the LTTE the purpose of this offensive was to destroy the civilian population that had sustained it.

Footage later emerged documenting systematic crimes, including rape, the killing of civilians, and summary executions of surrendering combatants. A 2012 UN report noted that over 70,000 people still remained unaccounted for. The real death toll is certainly higher than this figure. The most precise estimate, based on local census figures, is that 146,679 people died.

On May 13, 2009, as the killings in Mullivaikkal were reaching their peak, the Australian government announced a new aid package for Sri Lanka. With hundreds of thousands of people displaced or held in internment camps around the island, Australia promised to spend $15.1 million over four years establishing posts in Sri Lanka and Malaysia, in an effort to strengthen regional co-operation on people-smuggling. Like this years gift of drones, the 2009 package was intended to stop people escaping the island.

In October 2009, Brendan OConnor, the Australian minister for home affairs, met with Sri Lankan defense secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa. He promised that the Australian Federal Police (AFP) would provide training and logistical aid for the Sri Lankan police. A spokesperson for the minister described the meeting as especially productive, reaffirming Australias commitment to provide resources to help the Sri Lankan authorities to combat people smuggling.The AFP opened an office in Sri Lanka that year.

It didnt take long for the cooperation to bear results. On October 28, 2009, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Sri Lankan authorities had arrested twenty-nine people in Colombos airport. They were mostly Tamils trying to escape, and had been identified thanks to closed-circuit cameras installed by the AFP.

On November 25, 2009, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told the Australian parliament that Australia would provide more than $35 million in development assistance to Sri Lanka between 2009 and 2010. Rudd boasted that the funds had already assisted some 15 disruptions [of people leaving Sri Lanka] already, involving some 260 individuals. Meanwhile, Australian immigration authorities recognized 90 percent of people arriving by boat from Sri Lanka between 2009 and 2010 as refugees in need of protection.

Australias interest in Sri Lanka extends beyond stopping Tamil refugees attempting to flee. It also helped undermine the possibility of a peaceful resolution to the conflict. Moves toward a peace process began in the late 1990s, when the European Union declared itself to be strongly in favor of a negotiated political solution for Eelam Tamils. The EU backed an agreement between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE to explore the option of shared sovereignty between Tamil-speaking and Sinhalese people on the island.

With UK backing, the United States successfully pressured the EU to proscribe the LTTE in May 2006. In the context of the US-led war on terror, branding an organization as terrorist meant placing it beyond the political pale. This gave the Sri Lankan government carte blanche to resume hostilities less than two months later, permanently scuttling the peace process.

Australia supported these efforts, having already introduced a partial ban on the LTTE in 2001. As former Australian deputy high commissioner Bruce Haigh has argued, this helped to whitewash war crimes and state terrorism committed by the Sri Lankan government.

In a 2013 session, the Permanent Peoples Tribunal a continuation of the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam found that the United States was complicit in the Mullivaikkal massacre. As the tribunal argued, Washingtons responsibility

arises not only from its sustained efforts to increase the power and effectiveness of the Sri Lankan military . . . but perhaps even more significantly from its role in blocking and even reversing political and diplomatic initiatives to implement the peace process.

When Sri Lankan forces destroyed the de facto Tamil state in Tamil Eelam in 2009, they also destroyed hopes for self-determination or shared sovereignty between Tamils and the islands Sinhalese majority. Today, Sri Lankas Tamil population lives under one of the heaviest military occupations in the world, and is subject to attacks, racism, and insecurity. Its little wonder that Tamils would flee the island, seeking asylum in Australia.

Australian aid to Sri Lanka is partly aimed at stopping refugees from reaching Australias mainland, in line with a long history of xenophobia. However, as a diplomatic exchange published by WikiLeaks suggests, Australia also recognizes the immense strategic significance of the island and sees good cooperation with Sri Lanka on people smuggling as an entre to deepen relations.

A 2011 article by US and Sri Lankan army officers and officials stated that no other nation in the South Asian region can claim the importance Sri Lanka has in terms of its geography. As the authors argue, the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in 2009 reopened the possibility of the United States using the strategic Trincomalee Harbour, previously held by the LTTE, as a naval base.

Since the arrival of Portuguese colonizers in 1505, great powers have seen Sri Lanka as a prized conquest. Control shifted first to the Dutch, from 1658 to 1796, and then to the British. Before the island gained its independence in 1948, these successive colonial powers used Trincomalee Harbour as local naval and military headquarters. During World War II, the British established a naval headquarters there following the fall of Singapore. Today, in addition to its proximity to the Middle East, the northern coast of Sri Lanka adjoins an important maritime corridor used in 60 percent of the worlds shipping.

Since 2009, Trincomalee has become a hub of activity for Australia and other members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD), hosting vessels from the United States, India, and Japan. In May 2017, the Australian Border Forces largest patrol vessel, the ABFC Ocean Shield, arrived in Trincomalee for the Border Forces first-ever overseas port visit.

In 2019, Sri Lanka joined the Australian-led Indo-Pacific Endeavour, the largest ever overseas military exercise in which the country had taken part. As part of the exercise, the Royal Australian Navy ships Success and Parramatta docked in Trincomalee for four days of training with Sri Lankan forces.

Western NGOs, such as Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group (ICG), as well as the UN, have recognized the 2009 mass killings as war crimes committed in the context of a civil war. However, they have rejected calls from the Tamil community to recognize the massacres as acts of genocide, carried out with the aim of destroying Eelam Tamils, in whole or in part.

Despite this, the ICG has recognized the Sri Lankan states anti-Tamil agenda. In 2012, under the leadership of former UN human rights commissioner Louise Arbour, the ICG issued a report:

With the massive number of troops in the north have come various forms of Sinhalization. The almost entirely Tamil-speaking north is now dotted with Sinhala signboards, streets newly renamed in Sinhala. . . . Sinhala fishermen and businessmen are regularly given advantages not accorded to Tamils. These developments are consistent with a strategy known to be supported by important officials to change the facts on the ground . . . and make it impossible to claim the north as a Tamil-majority area deserving of self-governance.

Tamil resistance to this project continues. In February 2021, at least 50,000 Tamils and Muslims marched 700 km over five days as part of the Pottuvil to Polikandy (P2P) protest, demanding that the military withdraw from majority-Tamil areas and that the Sri Lankan government stop seizing land from Tamils and giving it to Sinhalese settlers. The protesters also called for an end to the destruction of Tamil cultural and religious sites, the preservation of Tamil forest lands and collective grazing lands, and a halt to the killings of cattle owned by Tamil and Muslim farmers. The marchers braved tear gas and multiple arrests.

The Sri Lankan authorities subject Tamils who protest against this treatment to heavy surveillance and intimidation. Shortly after the P2P march, the public security minister, Sarath Weerasekara, warned the protesters:

Now we have their photos and we have their vehicle numbers, we know who these individuals are. We can sue them and confiscate all their vehicles and put them in prison.

The International Truth and Justice Project has documented many cases of torture committed by Sri Lankan police, often involving sexual violence. This draconian treatment is enshrined in laws such as the 1979 Prevention of Terrorism Act, which allows authorities to arrest suspects without a warrant and permits detention for up to eighteen months without pretrial.

Despite overwhelming evidence that they continue to face persecution, Eelam Tamils seeking asylum in Australia face some of the lowest acceptance rates. The Australian authorities have deported many to danger. As Shanmuganathan Nagaveeran, a Tamil refugee in Australia, recently recounted:

I know of Tamils who have been deported from Australia back to Sri Lanka. They are in hiding and are still in fear of their lives. They are not free.

Tamil refugees also remain imprisoned in Australian-run onshore and offshore detention centers.

To justify the refoulement of refugees, the Australian government claims that any abuses against Tamil civilians took place as part of a legitimate struggle against a terrorist organization and are now firmly in the past. As then prime minister Tony Abbott remarked in 2013:

Obviously the Australian Government deplores any use of torture. . . . But we accept that sometimes in difficult circumstances, difficult things happen.

In 2019, to justify the deportation of a Tamil family from Biolela, Defence Minister Peter Dutton claimed:

The civil war in Sri Lanka is now over and Tamils from around the world have returned to their country and have been accepted back by a democratically elected inclusive Government.

The Left must reject this cynical cover-up and stand in solidarity with Eelam Tamils, recognizing both the genocide committed against them and their right to self-determination. In Australia, this means fighting the deportation of Eelam Tamils to Sri Lanka, freeing all refugees in onshore and offshore detention, and demanding an end to all military aid to the Sri Lankan state.

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Australia Is Supporting the Oppression of Tamils in Sri Lanka - Jacobin magazine