Political upheaval in Thailand reaches new levels as opposition threaten counter-protests. Sudan elections criticised, but seen as positive step forward. Iranian leader Khameini labels US ‘nuclear criminal’. Constitutional clause hinders formation of new Iraqi government. Clinton urges renewed peace efforts in the Middle East. All this and more, in todays security update.
The Thai army moved hundreds of soldiers into the business district of Bangkok early on Monday to prevent anti-government protesters entering the area. The troops were deployed to Silom Road, where offices for some of the nation's largest companies are located, including the headquarters of the Bangkok Bank. The government has said the intent is not to attack the protesters, but simply to block any attempt they might make to enter the business district. Government spokesman Panitan Wattanayagorn stressed: "police units are assigned to maintain order in the Silom area while troops provide back-up support nearby.”
Since the clashes between troops and demonstrators on 10 April, when 24 people were killed and more than 800 injured, an ‘uneasy calm’ has spread across the capital. The ‘red-shirts’, supporters of the ousted former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, have labelled the current government illegitimate and called for the dissolution of the incumbant Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s parliament. The protestors have occupied the commercial centre for the last five weeks, and have indicated their intent to occupy and protest in the financial centre on Tuesday.
On Friday, Abhisit put the army’s commander-in-chief, Anupong Paochinda, in charge of national security following the escape of three protestors in a botched security raid.
Asaba-Post verdict: There is little doubt that the situation in Bangkok is reaching critical levels. With increased military involvement, and warnings to avoid the financial centre, there is a good chance that the protests, should they continue, could quickly spin out of control. The military has stressed that it will take action to prevent the protestors from entering Silom Road, increasing chances of civilian-military clashes.
More importantly, many Thais have become frustrated by the government’s inability to control the protestors. The ‘no colours’ have already held demonstrations in the capital demanding government action to restore order. The group, called the Civilians Protecting the Country, supports the government and the military, but thinks the time has come to take strong action against the red shirts. “The problem facing the country now cannot be solely solved by politics,” it said in a statement. “It has become terrorism, and only military strategy and strict law enforcement can tackle such acts.”
Another pro-government group, the ‘yellow-shirts’ (formally known as the People’s Alliance for Democracy, or PAD), has said it would hold "our biggest rally ever" if the government fails to end the protests within a week. In 2008, members of PAD staged an airport blockade, closing the airports and stranding hundreds of thousands of tourists for more than a week. Considering their vast numbers, demonstrated ability, and the additional support they would likely gain from ‘no colours’, protests by the yellow-shirts would cause additional and severe upheaval and likely bring further violence.
The red- and yellow-shirts stand in direct opposition to each other and embody irreconcilable differences in the country’s deep-running social and political divisions. While the red shirts are formed mainly of the country’s rural and urban poor, the yellow shirts are largely a grouping of royalists, businessmen and the urban middle class. There is no doubt that simultaneous demonstrations by both parties would lead to severe street clashes and violence on a significant scale. Thus, it is imperative on the government to find a peaceful resolution to the crisis before its supporters take matters into their own hands.
The protests have already damaged the national economy. Upmarket shops in the commercial centre have been closed for more than two weeks due to the occupation, losing the industry millions of dollars a day. The tourism industry has also been affected, particularly around the major Thai New Year celebrations last week, as many countries have raised security warnings against travel to Thailand. Furthermore, the stock market has been visibly affected by the political upheaval, potentially damaging to the economic and financial stability of the country.
With the government and security forces in disarray and street clashes between rival demonstrators imminent, speculation is growing that military hardliners may decide to stage a coup to end the political impasse. However, Thailand’s election commission, an independent government body, has recently recommended the dissolution of Abhisit’s party. This recommendation is now being considered by the country's attorney general's office; should it agree, the Constitution Court will ultimately issue a ruling on the matter, which would likely mean fresh elections. The process could take up to six months and may itself prompt further violent interventions; the prospects of a speedy and peaceful resolution to the present crisis is bleak.
Sudan elections criticised, but seen as positive step forward
Sudan’s first multiparty Sudanese elections in 24 years have fallen short of international standards, observers have said. Nonetheless, the elections have been praised for their high levels of civil participation and public engagement, and are seen to mark an important step in the implementation of the comprehensive peace agreement that brought an end to the Sudanese civil war. The European Union Election Observation Mission praised the growing strength of civil society in Sudan: "hundreds of groups, encompassing thousands of individual citizens, displayed high levels of commitment and engaged in election observation for many days. This extensive involvement by Sudanese civil society who showed great commitment, particularly in domestic observation, contributed to the transparency of the electoral process."
But as detailed previously, the elections are guilty of serious shortcomings. Sudan's election commission extended the vote for two days past the original deadline due to widely reported technical problems, including ballots being sent to the wrong polling stations and registers that were missing voters' names. Results are expected Tuesday, with the current president, Omar al-Bashir, expected to be re-elected. Following recent charges of war crimes by the International Criminal Court, Bashir is hoping for a respectable victory to demonstrate the Sudanese people’s support for him.
Iranian leader Khamenei labels US ‘nuclear criminal’
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has labelled the US an ‘atomic criminal’ in a speech made at the nuclear disarmament conference in Tehran. In his statement, Khamenei added: "only the US government has committed an atomic crime…. The world's only atomic criminal lies and presents itself as being against nuclear weapons proliferation, while it has not taken any serious measures in this regard."
He was echoed by the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who criticized western powers for what he calls “hypocritical and dangerous policies” that inspired nuclear proliferation, adding that the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were ineffective because they were dominated by a few nations. The Iranian leaders called for the creation of an independent body to oversee nuclear disarmament and have demanded that all countries that possess nuclear weapons to be suspended from the IAEA.
The US hosted an international nuclear security conference last week composed of 47 nations; Iran was not invited due to US concerns over Iranian nuclear weapons. However, Tehran says its nuclear programme is for purely peaceful purposes and that the use of nuclear weapons is prohibited by their Islamic faith.
Constitutional clause hinders formation of new Iraqi government
One month after the Iraqi elections, little progress has been made in forming a new government. Though Iyad Allawi of the secularist Iraqiya party won the most seats, he is unlikely to head the new government. The Iraqi constitution states that the bloc with the most seats is accorded the first chance to form a government but the Supreme Court has ruled that this bloc could be formed after the election. Allawi continues to fight against this interpretation of the consitituon but with less than half a percent lead in the popular vote cannot command definitive public backing. Allawi gained 91 seats in the 325-seat Council of Representatives, just two ahead of Prime Minister al-Maliki’s State of Law Coalition, but would need 163 seats to form a majority and 217 votes to secure the presidency.
In these circumstances, smaller parties wield disproportionate influence in determining who forms the largest bloc. Though al-Maliki had the second largest majority in the elections, observers argue “it is Muqtada al-Sadr, head of the third largest bloc, the Iraqi National Alliance, who calls the shots.” With 39 of the 70 seats in his Shia religious alliance, al-Sadr has significant veto power within the Shia groups—and a strong dislike for al-Maliki having had his brigades suppressed under the al-Maliki administration.
As new faces emerge for the position of prime minster and the parties continue to fight for the largest bloc, it is clear that the struggle to form a new government may continue for some time, leaving a potentially-hazardous power vacuum that jeopardises American intentions to withdraw troops later this year.
Clinton urges renewed peace efforts in the Middle East
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged the countries of the middle east to restart peace talks, in an address to ambassadors from Israel and Arab nations. In her statement, Clinton said ‘bold leadership’ would be needed on all sides to find a viable solution to the conflict. She pressed Israel to support the Palestinian Authority and help strengthen its institutions in the West Bank as a weapon against Hamas and other extremists; she also urged Palestinians to end the incitement of violence and fight corruption within their territories.
While Clinton claimed that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu had embraced the two-state solution, she acknowledged that “easing up on access and movement in the West Bank, in response to credible Palestinian security performance, is not sufficient to prove to the Palestinians that this embrace is sincere." Clinton encouraged Israel to demonstrate respect for Palestinian aspirations by freezing all settlement activity and addressing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
'Soft law' and hard choices: a conversation with Gita Sahgal
A conversation exploring the challenges posed by the international conjuncture following the “war on terror” for gender justice and women’s rights.
Part one
Deniz Kandiyoti is Professor of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
DK: We find ourselves at a particularly critical juncture with respect to upholding the principles of universal human rights. On the one hand, grievous human rights abuses have been committed in the name of the “war on terror”. On the other, the global resurgence of politicised religion is calling into question the very notion of the universality of human rights. How can a women’s rights activist, such as yourself, establish a morally defensible and consistent position?
GS: Struggles for women’s rights, and more broadly sexual rights, have taken place at the grassroots in many different countries and in international arenas, over several decades. These have had a profound impact on the human rights framework. We actually have answers to your questions that are both legal and ethical. Yet what we are seeing now, is that a prominent western dominated human rights organisation, such as Amnesty International, doesn’t appear to understand what a commitment to universality entails. That is why it is being challenged by its own partners in South Asia and in many parts of the world. The formal human rights movement has been left behind by the activism and the transformative legal work that is taking place outside it.
DK: What sorts of examples do you have in mind?
GS: Let us take the example of 'forced marriage'. For many years, it did not exist as a human rights violation recognised by human rights organisations, although the right to choice in marriage is stipulated in the Convention on the Elimination Against All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). But human rights organisations were not taking up this issue and saw different forms of marriage merely as manifestations of “culture”. Even the Fourth UN World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 barely mentioned the term ‘forced marriage’ except in relation to the trafficking of women.
Now, it has been recognised in various parts of international law, including as a violation of international criminal law. Last year, the Special Court for Sierra Leone convicted three former leaders of the RUF of ‘forced marriage’ which the prosecution argued was a crime against humanity. It’s been about a decade and a half since the term was coined to deal with abuses in the family to becoming recognised as a mass crime. This is a relatively short space of time for an issue to gain such recognition and become embedded in international law. I remember that we first started to use the term ‘forced marriage’ when I was still at Southall Black Sisters in the 1990s and tried to get funding to research the issue - but it was seen as a non-issue and it was a hard fight to put it onto the British government’s agenda. In fact, one of the questions we kept being asked was how widespread the problem was. That is exactly the kind of thing you don’t know until you research it. But you don’t get research funding until you show that it is a major problem. It is important to note here that this major shift was not led by the formal human rights movement but by feminist activists and legal practitioners such as Sara Hossain, one of the women who drafted the global petition to Amnesty International on the Integrity of Human Rights.
Sara used classical remedies under law that are usually applied to people detained by the state. She filed habeas corpus petitions in the Bangladesh courts to get young women detained by their families produced in court, so that they could speak for themselves and say whether they were under some form of duress. She also worked on a key briefing when she was at Interights in London which showed that forced marriage was against the law of the land in South Asian countries, and that this was consistent with international law. This exercise helped to remove the ‘cultural excuse’ for non-interference that the British government was using as a reason to justify its refusal to act to protect and rescue its citizens who had been kidnapped by their families and taken to South Asia.
The change from seeing ‘arranged marriage’ as a cultural practice, to using ‘forced marriage’ in cases where coercion and duress are involved, helped to develop the idea that this is a serious violation of rights. These advances were reflected in academic research and activism on crimes in the name of honour. ‘Honour: Crimes, Paradigms and Violence against Women’, by Sara Hossain and Lynn Welchman, 2005, and in my film Love Snatched: Forced Marriage and Multi-culturalism which was part of the same project, as well as Tying the Knot? made to inform young people that choice in marriage is a fundamental human right.
DK: What, in your view, are the obstacles in the way of recognition of certain forms of abuse against women?
GS: Many atrocious practices are simply not recognized as violations until they are named and acknowledged by the legal human rights framework. This process of recognition often lags years behind what is actually being done in local courts and through local movements, for instance on domestic violence.
But there are also double standards. A great deal of international effort has gone into developing strong standards - what is called ‘hard law’- particularly on the absolute prohibition on torture. In refugee law the term ‘non-refoulement’ refers to the fact that people should not get returned to countries where they are at risk of torture. These two standards work together. It seems to me that the way that these standards have been interpreted has traditionally excluded harms that are more likely to be inflicted upon women. Now governments often attack or dilute the standards. The release by the Obama administration of the torture memos was a major victory for human rights which was, of course, celebrated by all who were fighting to uphold or restore the absolute prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Attempts to introduce a more thorough gender analysis are far more contested whether they come from a leading expert on civil and political rights such as the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, or are part of the gender work at Amnesty International, such as a briefing on the impact of the complete ban on abortion in Nicaragua. But there are also international law experts who feel they “own” the standards and spend a great deal of time trying to exclude abuses against women from them. This keeps standards frozen in time rather than creatively exploring ways of advancing them in the light of gender analysis, which is consistent with existing definitions. I'm sure that the two UN experts knew that when they argued that women should be protected from violence by using the 'hard law' of the torture standard.
Even when the standards do change, the work of international organisations does not. For instance, in the 1990s there were many who fled violence at the hands of fundamentalists in Algeria. They found that because they were not suffering from state persecution they could not get refugee status. Yet the fundamentalists who attacked them and who were under threat of arrest and torture by the state, also fled Algeria and were able to obtain refugee status. Now those fleeing armed violence by non-state groups, or even from other perpetrators, should be able to get refugee status because the standards have changed. Yet those facing gender-related persecution often still don’t get protection. And what is worse is that there is insufficient attention in the human rights community to addressing this imbalance.
DK: In the case of women’s rights, do you think that this is because there are alternative discourses around these issues? Doctrinally grounded conceptions of what is right and wrong can compete powerfully with the sorts of criteria adopted by human rights instruments. For instance, there may be various religious and doctrinal justifications concerning the levels of mobility women are allowed, or whether virginity or heterosexuality are mandatory.
GS: Yes, except that the human rights frameworks are not meant to be susceptible to such justifications, especially if they violate fundamental rights. After all human rights are supposed to uphold universality and indivisibility of rights.
Yet these justifications persist. When water boarding was introduced as an interrogation technique, the human rights organisations quite rightly wanted to define it as torture, and have spent a lot of energy trying to do so. Yet there are pervasive and widespread practices which are quite illegitimate, such as virginity testing and anal testing (to ‘test’ for homosexuality) that are used by the police and medical practitioners in many countries, and it has been far harder to get these defined as either torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading practices. I think that new practices applied to the sort of men who the writer Meredith Tax has called ‘the normative subject of human rights is once again a male prisoner, this time in Guantanamo' can readily be analysed to see if they meet the definitions in the Convention Against Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment. But applying a feminist analysis to the definitions was more likely to be met with resistance. Rather, the legal tendency would be to wait and see what an expert committee said rather than trying to lead the legal analysis on the issue.
Underlying this reluctance was a kind of cultural relativism and a fear of the type of feminist analysis that argues that state control (and not just family and community control) of sexuality is systematic and purposeful and often policed with both violence and discrimination.
DK: Do you think these tendencies have contributed to keeping gender issues marginal to human rights frameworks?
GS: One of the reasons for this marginality is that many of the standards on women’s rights have developed through ‘soft law’ – that is declarations from UN conferences such as those at Vienna (1993), Cairo (1994) and Beijing (1995) or from declarations such as the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Now ‘soft law’ is not a legally binding treaty and therefore for some lawyers is not persuasive. Human Rights Watch has been reluctant to cite this ‘soft law’, whereas Amnesty International made very creative use of it during the Stop Violence Against Women Campaign Making Rights a Reality: the duty of States to address violence against women. It was also essential to developing work on sexual and reproductive rights by feminist human rights organisations such as the Center for Reproductive Rights as well as Amnesty International.
Historically, many specific harms against women, such as female genital mutilation (FGM), were elaborated through UN discussions on what were called ‘harmful traditional practices’. Now some post-colonial discourse theorist may suggest that this is a plot by Westerners to make Africans feel bad ( or, these days, Muslims, since the trope of the Global South is the Muslim woman as victim). However, I think you would find that it was primarily women - and often men - who come from contexts where these practices are most prevalent who pushed for these discussions in the UN and also fought for the legally binding anti-discrimination treaty CEDAW. They were directly affected by these issues and they needed international attention to put pressure on their own governments.
There is a convergence between some of the demands of the ‘soft law’ and ‘hard law’. As women’s rights have developed there have been strong demands to criminalise rape more effectively and to criminalise practices such as domestic violence, that are seen as culturally acceptable right across the world. In ‘hard law’, torture was sometimes seen as the only human rights violation which states were under a duty to criminalise. The ‘soft law’ advances have crept up on some international experts. Yet, feminist lawyers such as Hilary Charlesworth feel that there has been great resistance to the absorption of issues of gender and sex into international law and that their work continues to be marginalized. And ‘classical’ academic human rights lawyers or practitioners can get quite cross when you point out that there is now a duty to criminalise gender based violence, and that an analysis has developed which fits the description of torture. Under the definition in the Convention, torture can only be committed by state agents or with the consent or acquiescence of the state. This, in fact, fits exactly the definition of ‘due diligence’ which Amnesty International used so powerfully in the Stop Violence Against Women Campaign. According to this principle, the state is responsible, even if it is not the perpetrator, because it has failed to prevent, prosecute or punish the immediate perpetrator.
It’s interesting that Amnesty International started some of its work on gender issues, whether on hate crimes against LGBT people and the state failure to act against them, or state failure on domestic violence, under the Torture Campaign which preceded the Stop Violence Against Women Campaign. But as soon as there was a use of the ‘soft law’ standards, such as the various conferences and Declarations that we have talked about, the analysis that linked domestic violence to torture fell into disuse. Amnesty International generally ceased to use standards relating to torture. One of the women who first developed this analysis and was very disappointed that Amnesty International did not take this perspective on board in the campaign against violence against women was Rhonda Copelon who made the case in 'Intimate Terror: Understanding Domestic Violence as Torture' in Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives ).
FGM has now been defined as a form of torture, because of marked state failure to act to end the practice as well as the nature of the act itself. But this is quite controversial and it is sometimes argued strongly against by international law experts on torture for whom FGM is a cultural practice with no detrimental intent. The drive to control the sexuality of women is not seen as a form of systematic discrimination. To prove that an act constitutes torture under definition of the Convention, it must also be intentional and carried out for a purpose such as extracting information or exercising discrimination. That is why it is so important to look carefully at whether all elements of the definition are present. But not to shy away from the conclusion if all the tests are met.
One of the big challenges in human rights is that the battle between what are called ‘black letter ‘ lawyers and feminist lawyers and advocates was partly resolved by a truce that allowed the ‘women’s standards’ to develop on this parallel track of soft law. This left what are called 'jus cogens' norms relatively untouched by gender considerations which Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin explore in their work. It is when feminists and others seek to understand these norms in new ways that they are fiercely defended as if they are under attack from those who would wish to destroy them.
DK: Do you think that there is a paradox at the moment whereby gender issues are both made prominent and visible, through global practices such as gender mainstreaming, and yet sidelined and marginalized because nobody wants to deal with them in any politically meaningful way?
GS: It is one of the paradoxes of our time, that what is known as ‘gender mainstreaming’ is a conventional practice often used to water down specific work on women. In spite of many very vigorous struggles and great advances, gender analysis has been thoroughly depoliticised as well as remaining marginal in practice.
Of course when I say depoliticised, there were actually profoundly political choices made. The attack on the torture standard – that is to say the attempt by the US administration (among others) to try and water down the absolute prohibition on torture during the war on terror , led to the decision to protect the standard vigorously. One of the ways of protecting it was to decide to exclude any re-interpretation as it was thought that this would make the definition 'inflationary’. I’ve participated in several discussions where as soon as any aspect of gender based violence is mentioned, someone invariably uses the term ‘inflationary’ to preclude any consideration of gender-related abuses.
Torture was seen as something that primarily applies to men and not to the more routine ways in which women experience harm. Thus, the 'war on terror' has had a very profound effect on women’s rights. Yet there is really very little analysis of what has happened. So much commentary has concentrated simply on what Bush or Blair said about women’s rights at one time or another to further their own instrumental agenda, that we have simply ignored the areas where advances in women’s rights have been undermined - either because of a fundamentalist backlash to enforce what they consider their cultural and religious rights, or by human rights professionals who, as they see it, are trying to protect the purity of the human rights framework.
Gita Sahgal is a former Head of the Gender Unit at Amnesty International. She left Amnesty International on April 9th 2010 due to 'irreconcilable differences'.
Part one
Deniz Kandiyoti is Professor of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
DK: We find ourselves at a particularly critical juncture with respect to upholding the principles of universal human rights. On the one hand, grievous human rights abuses have been committed in the name of the “war on terror”. On the other, the global resurgence of politicised religion is calling into question the very notion of the universality of human rights. How can a women’s rights activist, such as yourself, establish a morally defensible and consistent position?
GS: Struggles for women’s rights, and more broadly sexual rights, have taken place at the grassroots in many different countries and in international arenas, over several decades. These have had a profound impact on the human rights framework. We actually have answers to your questions that are both legal and ethical. Yet what we are seeing now, is that a prominent western dominated human rights organisation, such as Amnesty International, doesn’t appear to understand what a commitment to universality entails. That is why it is being challenged by its own partners in South Asia and in many parts of the world. The formal human rights movement has been left behind by the activism and the transformative legal work that is taking place outside it.
DK: What sorts of examples do you have in mind?
GS: Let us take the example of 'forced marriage'. For many years, it did not exist as a human rights violation recognised by human rights organisations, although the right to choice in marriage is stipulated in the Convention on the Elimination Against All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). But human rights organisations were not taking up this issue and saw different forms of marriage merely as manifestations of “culture”. Even the Fourth UN World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 barely mentioned the term ‘forced marriage’ except in relation to the trafficking of women.
Now, it has been recognised in various parts of international law, including as a violation of international criminal law. Last year, the Special Court for Sierra Leone convicted three former leaders of the RUF of ‘forced marriage’ which the prosecution argued was a crime against humanity. It’s been about a decade and a half since the term was coined to deal with abuses in the family to becoming recognised as a mass crime. This is a relatively short space of time for an issue to gain such recognition and become embedded in international law. I remember that we first started to use the term ‘forced marriage’ when I was still at Southall Black Sisters in the 1990s and tried to get funding to research the issue - but it was seen as a non-issue and it was a hard fight to put it onto the British government’s agenda. In fact, one of the questions we kept being asked was how widespread the problem was. That is exactly the kind of thing you don’t know until you research it. But you don’t get research funding until you show that it is a major problem. It is important to note here that this major shift was not led by the formal human rights movement but by feminist activists and legal practitioners such as Sara Hossain, one of the women who drafted the global petition to Amnesty International on the Integrity of Human Rights.
Sara used classical remedies under law that are usually applied to people detained by the state. She filed habeas corpus petitions in the Bangladesh courts to get young women detained by their families produced in court, so that they could speak for themselves and say whether they were under some form of duress. She also worked on a key briefing when she was at Interights in London which showed that forced marriage was against the law of the land in South Asian countries, and that this was consistent with international law. This exercise helped to remove the ‘cultural excuse’ for non-interference that the British government was using as a reason to justify its refusal to act to protect and rescue its citizens who had been kidnapped by their families and taken to South Asia.
The change from seeing ‘arranged marriage’ as a cultural practice, to using ‘forced marriage’ in cases where coercion and duress are involved, helped to develop the idea that this is a serious violation of rights. These advances were reflected in academic research and activism on crimes in the name of honour. ‘Honour: Crimes, Paradigms and Violence against Women’, by Sara Hossain and Lynn Welchman, 2005, and in my film Love Snatched: Forced Marriage and Multi-culturalism which was part of the same project, as well as Tying the Knot? made to inform young people that choice in marriage is a fundamental human right.
DK: What, in your view, are the obstacles in the way of recognition of certain forms of abuse against women?
GS: Many atrocious practices are simply not recognized as violations until they are named and acknowledged by the legal human rights framework. This process of recognition often lags years behind what is actually being done in local courts and through local movements, for instance on domestic violence.
But there are also double standards. A great deal of international effort has gone into developing strong standards - what is called ‘hard law’- particularly on the absolute prohibition on torture. In refugee law the term ‘non-refoulement’ refers to the fact that people should not get returned to countries where they are at risk of torture. These two standards work together. It seems to me that the way that these standards have been interpreted has traditionally excluded harms that are more likely to be inflicted upon women. Now governments often attack or dilute the standards. The release by the Obama administration of the torture memos was a major victory for human rights which was, of course, celebrated by all who were fighting to uphold or restore the absolute prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Attempts to introduce a more thorough gender analysis are far more contested whether they come from a leading expert on civil and political rights such as the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, or are part of the gender work at Amnesty International, such as a briefing on the impact of the complete ban on abortion in Nicaragua. But there are also international law experts who feel they “own” the standards and spend a great deal of time trying to exclude abuses against women from them. This keeps standards frozen in time rather than creatively exploring ways of advancing them in the light of gender analysis, which is consistent with existing definitions. I'm sure that the two UN experts knew that when they argued that women should be protected from violence by using the 'hard law' of the torture standard.
Even when the standards do change, the work of international organisations does not. For instance, in the 1990s there were many who fled violence at the hands of fundamentalists in Algeria. They found that because they were not suffering from state persecution they could not get refugee status. Yet the fundamentalists who attacked them and who were under threat of arrest and torture by the state, also fled Algeria and were able to obtain refugee status. Now those fleeing armed violence by non-state groups, or even from other perpetrators, should be able to get refugee status because the standards have changed. Yet those facing gender-related persecution often still don’t get protection. And what is worse is that there is insufficient attention in the human rights community to addressing this imbalance.
DK: In the case of women’s rights, do you think that this is because there are alternative discourses around these issues? Doctrinally grounded conceptions of what is right and wrong can compete powerfully with the sorts of criteria adopted by human rights instruments. For instance, there may be various religious and doctrinal justifications concerning the levels of mobility women are allowed, or whether virginity or heterosexuality are mandatory.
GS: Yes, except that the human rights frameworks are not meant to be susceptible to such justifications, especially if they violate fundamental rights. After all human rights are supposed to uphold universality and indivisibility of rights.
Yet these justifications persist. When water boarding was introduced as an interrogation technique, the human rights organisations quite rightly wanted to define it as torture, and have spent a lot of energy trying to do so. Yet there are pervasive and widespread practices which are quite illegitimate, such as virginity testing and anal testing (to ‘test’ for homosexuality) that are used by the police and medical practitioners in many countries, and it has been far harder to get these defined as either torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading practices. I think that new practices applied to the sort of men who the writer Meredith Tax has called ‘the normative subject of human rights is once again a male prisoner, this time in Guantanamo' can readily be analysed to see if they meet the definitions in the Convention Against Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment. But applying a feminist analysis to the definitions was more likely to be met with resistance. Rather, the legal tendency would be to wait and see what an expert committee said rather than trying to lead the legal analysis on the issue.
Underlying this reluctance was a kind of cultural relativism and a fear of the type of feminist analysis that argues that state control (and not just family and community control) of sexuality is systematic and purposeful and often policed with both violence and discrimination.
DK: Do you think these tendencies have contributed to keeping gender issues marginal to human rights frameworks?
GS: One of the reasons for this marginality is that many of the standards on women’s rights have developed through ‘soft law’ – that is declarations from UN conferences such as those at Vienna (1993), Cairo (1994) and Beijing (1995) or from declarations such as the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Now ‘soft law’ is not a legally binding treaty and therefore for some lawyers is not persuasive. Human Rights Watch has been reluctant to cite this ‘soft law’, whereas Amnesty International made very creative use of it during the Stop Violence Against Women Campaign Making Rights a Reality: the duty of States to address violence against women. It was also essential to developing work on sexual and reproductive rights by feminist human rights organisations such as the Center for Reproductive Rights as well as Amnesty International.
Historically, many specific harms against women, such as female genital mutilation (FGM), were elaborated through UN discussions on what were called ‘harmful traditional practices’. Now some post-colonial discourse theorist may suggest that this is a plot by Westerners to make Africans feel bad ( or, these days, Muslims, since the trope of the Global South is the Muslim woman as victim). However, I think you would find that it was primarily women - and often men - who come from contexts where these practices are most prevalent who pushed for these discussions in the UN and also fought for the legally binding anti-discrimination treaty CEDAW. They were directly affected by these issues and they needed international attention to put pressure on their own governments.
There is a convergence between some of the demands of the ‘soft law’ and ‘hard law’. As women’s rights have developed there have been strong demands to criminalise rape more effectively and to criminalise practices such as domestic violence, that are seen as culturally acceptable right across the world. In ‘hard law’, torture was sometimes seen as the only human rights violation which states were under a duty to criminalise. The ‘soft law’ advances have crept up on some international experts. Yet, feminist lawyers such as Hilary Charlesworth feel that there has been great resistance to the absorption of issues of gender and sex into international law and that their work continues to be marginalized. And ‘classical’ academic human rights lawyers or practitioners can get quite cross when you point out that there is now a duty to criminalise gender based violence, and that an analysis has developed which fits the description of torture. Under the definition in the Convention, torture can only be committed by state agents or with the consent or acquiescence of the state. This, in fact, fits exactly the definition of ‘due diligence’ which Amnesty International used so powerfully in the Stop Violence Against Women Campaign. According to this principle, the state is responsible, even if it is not the perpetrator, because it has failed to prevent, prosecute or punish the immediate perpetrator.
It’s interesting that Amnesty International started some of its work on gender issues, whether on hate crimes against LGBT people and the state failure to act against them, or state failure on domestic violence, under the Torture Campaign which preceded the Stop Violence Against Women Campaign. But as soon as there was a use of the ‘soft law’ standards, such as the various conferences and Declarations that we have talked about, the analysis that linked domestic violence to torture fell into disuse. Amnesty International generally ceased to use standards relating to torture. One of the women who first developed this analysis and was very disappointed that Amnesty International did not take this perspective on board in the campaign against violence against women was Rhonda Copelon who made the case in 'Intimate Terror: Understanding Domestic Violence as Torture' in Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives ).
FGM has now been defined as a form of torture, because of marked state failure to act to end the practice as well as the nature of the act itself. But this is quite controversial and it is sometimes argued strongly against by international law experts on torture for whom FGM is a cultural practice with no detrimental intent. The drive to control the sexuality of women is not seen as a form of systematic discrimination. To prove that an act constitutes torture under definition of the Convention, it must also be intentional and carried out for a purpose such as extracting information or exercising discrimination. That is why it is so important to look carefully at whether all elements of the definition are present. But not to shy away from the conclusion if all the tests are met.
One of the big challenges in human rights is that the battle between what are called ‘black letter ‘ lawyers and feminist lawyers and advocates was partly resolved by a truce that allowed the ‘women’s standards’ to develop on this parallel track of soft law. This left what are called 'jus cogens' norms relatively untouched by gender considerations which Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin explore in their work. It is when feminists and others seek to understand these norms in new ways that they are fiercely defended as if they are under attack from those who would wish to destroy them.
DK: Do you think that there is a paradox at the moment whereby gender issues are both made prominent and visible, through global practices such as gender mainstreaming, and yet sidelined and marginalized because nobody wants to deal with them in any politically meaningful way?
GS: It is one of the paradoxes of our time, that what is known as ‘gender mainstreaming’ is a conventional practice often used to water down specific work on women. In spite of many very vigorous struggles and great advances, gender analysis has been thoroughly depoliticised as well as remaining marginal in practice.
Of course when I say depoliticised, there were actually profoundly political choices made. The attack on the torture standard – that is to say the attempt by the US administration (among others) to try and water down the absolute prohibition on torture during the war on terror , led to the decision to protect the standard vigorously. One of the ways of protecting it was to decide to exclude any re-interpretation as it was thought that this would make the definition 'inflationary’. I’ve participated in several discussions where as soon as any aspect of gender based violence is mentioned, someone invariably uses the term ‘inflationary’ to preclude any consideration of gender-related abuses.
Torture was seen as something that primarily applies to men and not to the more routine ways in which women experience harm. Thus, the 'war on terror' has had a very profound effect on women’s rights. Yet there is really very little analysis of what has happened. So much commentary has concentrated simply on what Bush or Blair said about women’s rights at one time or another to further their own instrumental agenda, that we have simply ignored the areas where advances in women’s rights have been undermined - either because of a fundamentalist backlash to enforce what they consider their cultural and religious rights, or by human rights professionals who, as they see it, are trying to protect the purity of the human rights framework.
Gita Sahgal is a former Head of the Gender Unit at Amnesty International. She left Amnesty International on April 9th 2010 due to 'irreconcilable differences'.
The religious lobby and women’s rights
None of the main political party manifestos tackle the encroachment of religion on our society. As more and more public spaces are devoured by religious interests creating particular problems for women, Rahila Gupta argues that it is time to end state funding of religion and faith based organisations as service providers.
As the UK election campaign hots up, various voices are bemoaning Christianity’s apparently anorexic state. Pretend social liberals, like David Cameron, are reopening the abortion debate, fudging gay rights and promoting marriage. Anyone propounding secular ideas is being dubbed a fundamentalist, an oxymoron if ever there was one. It’s very interesting that a powerful lobby can make a half-decent case for itself as victim when, under New Labour, it has seen a huge extension of its powers. This is a fat cat with a mouse complex. Minority religions, which have always used the privileges of the Christian church as leverage for greater rights for themselves on the basis of parity, have also grown. This has led to more and more public spaces being devoured by religious interests and created particular problems for women, especially ethnic minority women who are classically at the bottom of the pile.
This is what the cellulite in the cat consists of: At the end of 2008, it was estimated that the Catholic church had £1 billion in assets and an income of £279million in the UK & Ireland alone. The C of E’s assets in England and Wales are estimated to be worth £8.3 billion with an income of £1 Billion.
Roughly one third of state schools are religious in character. Until 1997 when Labour was elected all state faith schools were Christian or Jewish. Since then, 14 new Jewish schools, 11 Muslim schools, 4 Sikh and 1 Hindu school have been state funded. Funding initiatives targeted at the religious lobby, now innocuously dubbed faith based organisations (FBOs), have formed a central part of the government’s strategy to boost this sector. A capacity building fund which ran from 2006-2008 was worth £10.5m to faith groups. The Regional Faith forums and Faiths in Action programme will together provide £7.5m to promote understanding and dialogue between faith groups from 2009-2011.
As part of the government’s ongoing privatisation of welfare services, FBOs have been encouraged to apply for government grants and contracts. There are no overall figures available for what is known as ‘Non-Faith specific’ funding although the Faith Based Regeneration Network provides a partial figure of approximately £12m for the period 2006-2008 based on an analysis of funding programmes such as Futurebuilders, the DCSF Parenting Fund, Opportunities for Volunteering, Department of Health Section 64 Grant Scheme and Connecting Communities Plus. A number of significant funding sources like the Lottery funds, primary care trusts and regeneration funds, for instance, have not been analysed.
FBOs are not best placed to provide women-centred services. I have written extensively on this elsewhere. CHASTE, an umbrella group of Christian churches, for example, provides three safe houses for women trafficked into the sex industry and yet refuses to be drawn on its abortion policy, an important issue for their users. CHASTE claims that ‘women who have found themselves at the bottom of the rung can receive full divine attention and be set free’ with support from them. I have spoken to women who have used their services and felt stifled by the religious ethos to which they had to submit. Similarly, black women whose uncertain immigration status subjects them to the No Recourse to Public Funds rule, which means that they can be denied access to refuges, have to sometimes fall back on the ‘mercy’ of religious institutions when escaping domestic violence. Here, they may face hostility as nonconformist women or they may be encouraged to return to violent situations to preserve the sanctity of marriage.
An unholy alignment
Why would a modernising ‘New’ Labour, which claims to uphold the rights of women and other minorities, seek to expand the religious sector when church attendances among the white British population are dropping away? This is partly do with Tony Blair’s deeply held belief that religion is a force for good. According to Sukhwant Dhaliwal, member of Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF) whose PhD thesis focuses on this question, ‘there is a significant degree of alignment of interests between the state and religious groups…[on]: policing; a pre-occupation with social order…; the strengthening of patriarchy and of heteronormativity; and the perpetuation of neo-liberal governance.’
Even Tony Blair on his Faith Foundation website has to admit that ‘today we still see how it [faith] can be distorted to fan the flames of hatred and extremism’. And it is in that swamp between ‘moderate’ and ‘extreme’ that government policy is floundering. This is nowhere more apparent than in New Labour’s approach to ethnic minorities. Multiculturalism is out; community cohesion is very much the flavour of this decade. This began to take concrete shape with the Cantle report into the disturbances in Northern cities in 2001. Cantle’s mistaken view that the breakdown in community cohesion was a result of multiculturalism, because it encouraged segregation, led the government to search for new ways of building cohesion. This was mainly articulated through the development of a concept of British citizenship based on shared values which alienated rather than included minorities. It usurped such notions as tolerance and fair mindedness as uniquely British values which did not reflect the experience of minorities. When the whole notion of ‘Britishness’ was exploded by the London bombings in 2005, the official view began to construct minorities as primarily loyal to their religious rather than their race identities. From now on communities were constructed as primarily faith communities and community cohesion was to attempt to bridge different faiths.
PREVENT
The new imperative for government in the wake of 9/11 and 7/7 was to foster the growth of moderate religious (read Muslim) groups. To this end, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) set up their largest funding stream, the Preventing Violent Extremism (PREVENT) programme totalling £45m over three years, which is disbursed through local authorities to mainly Muslim groups to tackle radicalisation in their communities – attempting to cut down what it had pumped up with its other faith funding initiatives. How to define ‘moderate’ is itself a minefield as we have seen in the on/off relationship between the government and the Muslim Council for Britain whose leaders have proven connections with religious extremists such as the Jamaat-e-Islami party on the Asian subcontinent. Besides as Pragna Patel of Southall Black Sisters (SBS) puts it, ‘So called moderate religious groups may be moderate when it comes to bombing the streets of Britain but they are certainly not moderate when it comes to women’.
The Prevent programme is aimed at Muslim youth, women and mosques. According to Arun Kundnani of the Institute of Race Relations, the sums of money given out are directly proportional to the size of the Muslim community in each area making it obvious that the Muslim community has been targeted as a ‘suspect’ community. After much criticism, the government recently annnounced that it will also sweep the far-right racist groups into its ambit.
Announcing the programme, Hazel Blears, the then Communities Secretary, said, "resilient communities can only exist where women are playing a full and active part". Women were to be empowered to challenge and head off extremism amongst Muslim youth. Their human rights are of no intrinsic worth despite the government’s declarations to the contradictory. It is quite despicable that this government should play the same game as religious fundamentalists using women as a means of social engineering.
Little surprise then that Shaista Gohir of the National Muslim Women's Advisory Group resigned recently in protest that the government had not consulted with them on the empowerment of Muslim women ‘ who face multiple discrimination based on their gender, ethnicity, faith and dress; highest unemployment rates; the poorest health; low educational attainment.’
However, the group’s remit clearly involved advising the government on the role of women in preventing violent extremism which should have made the government’s real agenda painfully clear from the start. Gohir found that the Prevent programme was being used to build up Muslim women to 'spy' on their families, rather than participate fully in society and overcome barriers they face. The allegation of spying is confirmed by Arun Kundnani who found that ‘In practice, a major part of the Prevent programme is the embedding of counter-terrorism police officers within the delivery of other local services. The primary motive for this is to facilitate the gathering of intelligence on Muslim communities.’ Furthermore, many organisations were told that they could not access the funds unless they were prepared ‘to sign up to a counter-terrorism policing agenda’.
Gohir also points to the divisive nature of Prevent funding. She feels that other faith and secular women's groups are hostile towards Muslim women's groups as a result of the 'Prevent' funding being targeted towards them. One of Kundnani’s interviewees reported that ‘All the doors to obtaining funding for work with Muslim women were shutting and all the signposts were pointing to Prevent.’ Secular women’s groups are not hostile to Muslim women’s groups per se, but to the idea that women should be defined primarily in terms of their religious identities when many of the issues – such as forced marriage and honour crimes – are faced by Muslim women in common with other minority women, and need to be fought on a common platform, precisely to avoid a racist perspective which equates one community with a particular practice .
When New Labour declared itself against forced marriage as a litmus test of core British values, it led to further contradictions. Instead of it becoming a step towards cohesion, by positing it as an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ issue, it had the opposite effect. By not acknowledging Asian women’s stand against it and thereby, the traditions of dissent in minority communities, it constructed minorities as an undifferentiated mass of ‘backward’ values. Whilst the cohesion agenda claimed to promote race and gender equality, the ‘fighting extremism agenda’ definitely undermined it. For instance, a senior commander of the Met police has found that the government’s agenda on terror is hampering police work on forced marriage because the government is keen not to alienate those same leaders in the bigger fight against extremism.
With the advent of the community cohesion agenda, single ‘group’ funding had fallen out of favour although paradoxically not to religious groups. It was only when Ealing Council’s attempt to cut the funding of Southall Black Sisters, on the basis that it was a ‘single’ group, despite being a secular group which provides services across a range of ethnic groups, was successfully challenged in court that this policy began to unravel. Local authorities which refuse to fund religious groups on the basis that “Single group funding has negative implications for community cohesion" have now been told that this is a myth in the myth-busting guidance published by John Denham, the communities secretary, when he announced a further £1m to faith groups for media training. A somersault that exposes the government’s bare faced cheek!
Equality and cohesion
It took the judge in the SBS/Ealing case to point out that, ‘There is no dichotomy between funding specialist services and cohesion; equality is necessary for cohesion to be achieved.’ That connection between equality and cohesion is the essence of the matter, an analysis that the government shies away from. Equality for women cannot be achieved through the religious route as women’s groups have found, when supporting women who are attempting to break through the cultural and religious stranglehold on their aspirations.
Apart from funding, the government has also used legislation to sweeten Muslim groups after embittering them with their heavy handed War on Terror tactics. Take the enactment of the Incitement to Race and Religious Hatred Act 2006, the intention of which is clear in the title. The history of how this Act came into being itself illustrates the point about the government’s parallel strategy. There were two failed attempts to bring it in: firstly as part of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Bill in 2001; and secondly as part of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill in 2004-5. There was substantial protest from the artistic community and minority women, in particular, that their right or need to be critical of religion could be construed as incitement to religious hatred. The Act was brought in anyway but as a sop to the critics, the key line was amended by the words in bold, ‘A person who uses threatening words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, is guilty of an offence if he (sic) intends thereby to stir up religious hatred.’
Similarly, the Equality Act 2010, despite protest from a number of quarters, has included religion as one of the strands to be protected. This goes beyond tackling religious discrimination and protecting freedom of conscience and religion. Religion is woven into the power structure and hardly in the same place as those unequal minorities who form the other strands of the Equality Act. SBS believes that “the state will be implicated in promoting indirect discrimination and inequality and indeed in human rights violations” because religions often institutionalise race and gender inequality, and inequality on the basis of sexual orientation. It is like introducing legislation that protects the bankers’ bonus as well as the account holders’ deposits.
Where the ‘equalities’ are in conflict, they will have to be resolved in court. The Equalities commission published a document ‘Myth-busting: the Equality Bill and Religion’, which, interestingly, is entirely focussed on religious people anxious that their rights to practice their religion will be adversely impacted by the new laws, with nothing at all for those minorities who are anxious about how their rights might be trampled upon by religious interests. The desire to placate religious anxieties does not bode well. It is more important that religion is held accountable by the Equality Act, rather than being a sectional interest requiring protection, by ensuring that effective mechanisms are in place to enforce the equalities of others, like women and LGBT people.
Irreconcilable contradictions have dogged the government’s funding and legislative response to the religious lobby. How to cut through this welter of contradictions? Religious groups may, in limited circumstances, be a force for good but they have enough of a funding cushion from their own devotees to eschew government support. We should be pushing for an end to the state funding of religion and FBOs as service providers. None of the main political party manifestos deal with the question of religion. Local authorities who do not fund FBOs in the belief that "This is too much of a cosy relationship between faith and government" have been castigated by Denham’s myth busting guidance (Myth no 8) for perpetuating a myth. They have touched a nerve, right?
As the UK election campaign hots up, various voices are bemoaning Christianity’s apparently anorexic state. Pretend social liberals, like David Cameron, are reopening the abortion debate, fudging gay rights and promoting marriage. Anyone propounding secular ideas is being dubbed a fundamentalist, an oxymoron if ever there was one. It’s very interesting that a powerful lobby can make a half-decent case for itself as victim when, under New Labour, it has seen a huge extension of its powers. This is a fat cat with a mouse complex. Minority religions, which have always used the privileges of the Christian church as leverage for greater rights for themselves on the basis of parity, have also grown. This has led to more and more public spaces being devoured by religious interests and created particular problems for women, especially ethnic minority women who are classically at the bottom of the pile.
This is what the cellulite in the cat consists of: At the end of 2008, it was estimated that the Catholic church had £1 billion in assets and an income of £279million in the UK & Ireland alone. The C of E’s assets in England and Wales are estimated to be worth £8.3 billion with an income of £1 Billion.
Roughly one third of state schools are religious in character. Until 1997 when Labour was elected all state faith schools were Christian or Jewish. Since then, 14 new Jewish schools, 11 Muslim schools, 4 Sikh and 1 Hindu school have been state funded. Funding initiatives targeted at the religious lobby, now innocuously dubbed faith based organisations (FBOs), have formed a central part of the government’s strategy to boost this sector. A capacity building fund which ran from 2006-2008 was worth £10.5m to faith groups. The Regional Faith forums and Faiths in Action programme will together provide £7.5m to promote understanding and dialogue between faith groups from 2009-2011.
As part of the government’s ongoing privatisation of welfare services, FBOs have been encouraged to apply for government grants and contracts. There are no overall figures available for what is known as ‘Non-Faith specific’ funding although the Faith Based Regeneration Network provides a partial figure of approximately £12m for the period 2006-2008 based on an analysis of funding programmes such as Futurebuilders, the DCSF Parenting Fund, Opportunities for Volunteering, Department of Health Section 64 Grant Scheme and Connecting Communities Plus. A number of significant funding sources like the Lottery funds, primary care trusts and regeneration funds, for instance, have not been analysed.
FBOs are not best placed to provide women-centred services. I have written extensively on this elsewhere. CHASTE, an umbrella group of Christian churches, for example, provides three safe houses for women trafficked into the sex industry and yet refuses to be drawn on its abortion policy, an important issue for their users. CHASTE claims that ‘women who have found themselves at the bottom of the rung can receive full divine attention and be set free’ with support from them. I have spoken to women who have used their services and felt stifled by the religious ethos to which they had to submit. Similarly, black women whose uncertain immigration status subjects them to the No Recourse to Public Funds rule, which means that they can be denied access to refuges, have to sometimes fall back on the ‘mercy’ of religious institutions when escaping domestic violence. Here, they may face hostility as nonconformist women or they may be encouraged to return to violent situations to preserve the sanctity of marriage.
An unholy alignment
Why would a modernising ‘New’ Labour, which claims to uphold the rights of women and other minorities, seek to expand the religious sector when church attendances among the white British population are dropping away? This is partly do with Tony Blair’s deeply held belief that religion is a force for good. According to Sukhwant Dhaliwal, member of Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF) whose PhD thesis focuses on this question, ‘there is a significant degree of alignment of interests between the state and religious groups…[on]: policing; a pre-occupation with social order…; the strengthening of patriarchy and of heteronormativity; and the perpetuation of neo-liberal governance.’
Even Tony Blair on his Faith Foundation website has to admit that ‘today we still see how it [faith] can be distorted to fan the flames of hatred and extremism’. And it is in that swamp between ‘moderate’ and ‘extreme’ that government policy is floundering. This is nowhere more apparent than in New Labour’s approach to ethnic minorities. Multiculturalism is out; community cohesion is very much the flavour of this decade. This began to take concrete shape with the Cantle report into the disturbances in Northern cities in 2001. Cantle’s mistaken view that the breakdown in community cohesion was a result of multiculturalism, because it encouraged segregation, led the government to search for new ways of building cohesion. This was mainly articulated through the development of a concept of British citizenship based on shared values which alienated rather than included minorities. It usurped such notions as tolerance and fair mindedness as uniquely British values which did not reflect the experience of minorities. When the whole notion of ‘Britishness’ was exploded by the London bombings in 2005, the official view began to construct minorities as primarily loyal to their religious rather than their race identities. From now on communities were constructed as primarily faith communities and community cohesion was to attempt to bridge different faiths.
PREVENT
The new imperative for government in the wake of 9/11 and 7/7 was to foster the growth of moderate religious (read Muslim) groups. To this end, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) set up their largest funding stream, the Preventing Violent Extremism (PREVENT) programme totalling £45m over three years, which is disbursed through local authorities to mainly Muslim groups to tackle radicalisation in their communities – attempting to cut down what it had pumped up with its other faith funding initiatives. How to define ‘moderate’ is itself a minefield as we have seen in the on/off relationship between the government and the Muslim Council for Britain whose leaders have proven connections with religious extremists such as the Jamaat-e-Islami party on the Asian subcontinent. Besides as Pragna Patel of Southall Black Sisters (SBS) puts it, ‘So called moderate religious groups may be moderate when it comes to bombing the streets of Britain but they are certainly not moderate when it comes to women’.
The Prevent programme is aimed at Muslim youth, women and mosques. According to Arun Kundnani of the Institute of Race Relations, the sums of money given out are directly proportional to the size of the Muslim community in each area making it obvious that the Muslim community has been targeted as a ‘suspect’ community. After much criticism, the government recently annnounced that it will also sweep the far-right racist groups into its ambit.
Announcing the programme, Hazel Blears, the then Communities Secretary, said, "resilient communities can only exist where women are playing a full and active part". Women were to be empowered to challenge and head off extremism amongst Muslim youth. Their human rights are of no intrinsic worth despite the government’s declarations to the contradictory. It is quite despicable that this government should play the same game as religious fundamentalists using women as a means of social engineering.
Little surprise then that Shaista Gohir of the National Muslim Women's Advisory Group resigned recently in protest that the government had not consulted with them on the empowerment of Muslim women ‘ who face multiple discrimination based on their gender, ethnicity, faith and dress; highest unemployment rates; the poorest health; low educational attainment.’
However, the group’s remit clearly involved advising the government on the role of women in preventing violent extremism which should have made the government’s real agenda painfully clear from the start. Gohir found that the Prevent programme was being used to build up Muslim women to 'spy' on their families, rather than participate fully in society and overcome barriers they face. The allegation of spying is confirmed by Arun Kundnani who found that ‘In practice, a major part of the Prevent programme is the embedding of counter-terrorism police officers within the delivery of other local services. The primary motive for this is to facilitate the gathering of intelligence on Muslim communities.’ Furthermore, many organisations were told that they could not access the funds unless they were prepared ‘to sign up to a counter-terrorism policing agenda’.
Gohir also points to the divisive nature of Prevent funding. She feels that other faith and secular women's groups are hostile towards Muslim women's groups as a result of the 'Prevent' funding being targeted towards them. One of Kundnani’s interviewees reported that ‘All the doors to obtaining funding for work with Muslim women were shutting and all the signposts were pointing to Prevent.’ Secular women’s groups are not hostile to Muslim women’s groups per se, but to the idea that women should be defined primarily in terms of their religious identities when many of the issues – such as forced marriage and honour crimes – are faced by Muslim women in common with other minority women, and need to be fought on a common platform, precisely to avoid a racist perspective which equates one community with a particular practice .
When New Labour declared itself against forced marriage as a litmus test of core British values, it led to further contradictions. Instead of it becoming a step towards cohesion, by positing it as an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ issue, it had the opposite effect. By not acknowledging Asian women’s stand against it and thereby, the traditions of dissent in minority communities, it constructed minorities as an undifferentiated mass of ‘backward’ values. Whilst the cohesion agenda claimed to promote race and gender equality, the ‘fighting extremism agenda’ definitely undermined it. For instance, a senior commander of the Met police has found that the government’s agenda on terror is hampering police work on forced marriage because the government is keen not to alienate those same leaders in the bigger fight against extremism.
With the advent of the community cohesion agenda, single ‘group’ funding had fallen out of favour although paradoxically not to religious groups. It was only when Ealing Council’s attempt to cut the funding of Southall Black Sisters, on the basis that it was a ‘single’ group, despite being a secular group which provides services across a range of ethnic groups, was successfully challenged in court that this policy began to unravel. Local authorities which refuse to fund religious groups on the basis that “Single group funding has negative implications for community cohesion" have now been told that this is a myth in the myth-busting guidance published by John Denham, the communities secretary, when he announced a further £1m to faith groups for media training. A somersault that exposes the government’s bare faced cheek!
Equality and cohesion
It took the judge in the SBS/Ealing case to point out that, ‘There is no dichotomy between funding specialist services and cohesion; equality is necessary for cohesion to be achieved.’ That connection between equality and cohesion is the essence of the matter, an analysis that the government shies away from. Equality for women cannot be achieved through the religious route as women’s groups have found, when supporting women who are attempting to break through the cultural and religious stranglehold on their aspirations.
Apart from funding, the government has also used legislation to sweeten Muslim groups after embittering them with their heavy handed War on Terror tactics. Take the enactment of the Incitement to Race and Religious Hatred Act 2006, the intention of which is clear in the title. The history of how this Act came into being itself illustrates the point about the government’s parallel strategy. There were two failed attempts to bring it in: firstly as part of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Bill in 2001; and secondly as part of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill in 2004-5. There was substantial protest from the artistic community and minority women, in particular, that their right or need to be critical of religion could be construed as incitement to religious hatred. The Act was brought in anyway but as a sop to the critics, the key line was amended by the words in bold, ‘A person who uses threatening words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, is guilty of an offence if he (sic) intends thereby to stir up religious hatred.’
Similarly, the Equality Act 2010, despite protest from a number of quarters, has included religion as one of the strands to be protected. This goes beyond tackling religious discrimination and protecting freedom of conscience and religion. Religion is woven into the power structure and hardly in the same place as those unequal minorities who form the other strands of the Equality Act. SBS believes that “the state will be implicated in promoting indirect discrimination and inequality and indeed in human rights violations” because religions often institutionalise race and gender inequality, and inequality on the basis of sexual orientation. It is like introducing legislation that protects the bankers’ bonus as well as the account holders’ deposits.
Where the ‘equalities’ are in conflict, they will have to be resolved in court. The Equalities commission published a document ‘Myth-busting: the Equality Bill and Religion’, which, interestingly, is entirely focussed on religious people anxious that their rights to practice their religion will be adversely impacted by the new laws, with nothing at all for those minorities who are anxious about how their rights might be trampled upon by religious interests. The desire to placate religious anxieties does not bode well. It is more important that religion is held accountable by the Equality Act, rather than being a sectional interest requiring protection, by ensuring that effective mechanisms are in place to enforce the equalities of others, like women and LGBT people.
Irreconcilable contradictions have dogged the government’s funding and legislative response to the religious lobby. How to cut through this welter of contradictions? Religious groups may, in limited circumstances, be a force for good but they have enough of a funding cushion from their own devotees to eschew government support. We should be pushing for an end to the state funding of religion and FBOs as service providers. None of the main political party manifestos deal with the question of religion. Local authorities who do not fund FBOs in the belief that "This is too much of a cosy relationship between faith and government" have been castigated by Denham’s myth busting guidance (Myth no 8) for perpetuating a myth. They have touched a nerve, right?
Breaking point: why the Kyrgyz lost their patience
Kyrgyzstan is suffering from a crisis of governance, reports Madeleine Reeves. But an analysis of the problems that limits itself to “state failure” is missing the point. What brought the Kyrgyz on to the streets was inequality and economic misery, muffled for years by the New Great Game.
Kyrgyzstan is still reeling from the bloodiest week since independence. On Wednesday, 84 people were killed and hundreds injured when troops opened fire on an opposition rally in front of the government building, or White House, in the capital, Bishkek. This was the violence of a government in fear of its people; of a state that was, despite the brutal display of force, chronically weak, and of a president who no longer knew or cared whether live rounds got mixed in with rubber bullets. The violence in Bishkek was chaotic and indiscriminate. It was also profoundly miscalculated. Rather than containing a crowd whose leaders had been arrested the previous night and whose actions had turned violent, it provoked and dispersed it, leading to attacks on government buildings and ministries throughout the city centre and to the arming of a previously unarmed crowd.
In a bloody re-run of the “Tulip Revolution” from five years earlier, state power imploded with remarkable speed. Not only were international media outlets caught by surprise – the footage that made it onto news bulletins from Tuesday’s seizure of the regional administration building in Talas and Wednesday’s carnage in Bishkek came overwhelmingly from mobile phones and amateur reportage – so were Bishkek dwellers, many of whom had little time for either President Kurmanbek Bakiev or the opposition and their “dirty politics”. On Wednesday morning, city folk had gone to work, school and university aware of a political crisis in far-away Talas, on the border with Kazakhstan. Few had thought that by lunch-time they would be joining the streams of people heading away from the centre to the city’s residential districts, fleeing an afternoon of political violence and a night of looting which stripped many of the city’s shops and markets to the light-bulbs.
The speed with which events escalated is telling, certainly: of the fragility of the state in Kyrgyzstan – a state which New York Times Op Ed pieces and Russian political commentators alike have both been quick to describe as “failed” – and of the depth of grievances which brought people out to demonstrate despite ominous warnings the night before that “all available force” would be used to disrupt unsanctioned gatherings. Yet the speed with which government fractured at a moment of crisis; the lack of symbols, banners and flags in contrast to the “tulip revolution” of 2005; and the fact that there is still disagreement over how this bloody uprising should be named should not lead us to assume that the events of last week came from nowhere. Nor should the images of angry young men and marauding gangs that have dominated television accounts of events lead us to assume that there was not, also, a considerable degree of quiet coordination prior to Wednesday’s events.
The limits of patience
The roots of Kyrgyzstan’s 2010 “revolution” go back to 2005, when Kurmanbek Bakiev came to power promising to end the “clan politics” that had characterized the last years of rule of Askar Akaev. I remember at the time, shortly after a hasty presidential election legitimized the March seizure of power, sharing a ride across the mountain range that separates the north and south of the country with a middle-aged man who quipped that he feared only more of the same form Bakiev. “At least Akaev could be satisfied when his wife and children were full. Bakiev has six brothers, after all, and you think they’ll stay quiet if they don’t get a nice position?” My interlocutor, sadly, was right. Bakiev’s brothers and two sons are well known in the country, and within a year of the “tulip revolution” the country’s opposition parties were campaigning against the excesses of the Bakiev “family rule”. By April 2010, the president’s brother, Janysh, headed the National Security Service and elder son, Marat, was the head of one of its internal departments. The president’s second son, Maxim, reputedly the richest man in Kyrgyzstan, was responsible for a lucrative state committee overseeing foreign investment. Another brother, Marat, was Kyrgyzstan’s Ambassador to Norway and Germany, and yet another Bakiev brother was Trade Representative to China, the country with which Kyrgyzstan has the most lucrative and sizeable deals.
This kind of “family rule” is not unique to Kyrgyzstan of course. The size of the population, however, together with the dense social ties that link city and village, and the speed with which word spreads makes such nepotism harder to conceal than in the region’s geographically larger and more populous neighbours. As one Bishkek resident put it after last week’s events, contrasting Kyrgyzstan’s form of family rule to those of other Central Asian states: “they can crush the mass media all they like here, but here everything is written on the palm of the hand. Everyone knows where [the elite] build their houses; everyone knows that they’ve been looting the country”. On Wednesday night and into Thursday, as Maxim Bakiev’s home in central Bishkek was looted and burned to a blackened shell, the sense of “rough justice” was palpable. Men carrying away booty told awaiting news reporters that this was the just deserts for years of stealing from the people. The angry graffiti that emerged on Wednesday night across central Bishkek told the same story, in often violent and graphic language. So, in more measured tones, did the public figures who appeared in an improvised live broadcast on national television on Wednesday evening, and the bards whose poetry accompanied the public funeral for the uprising’s dead three days later.
The anger that brought people to the streets was borne of inequality. The gulf that has emerged between the small group of politically-connected “haves” in Bishkek and the masses of “have nots”, many of whom are recent arrivals to the city’s sprawling migrant districts (novostroiki) has reached colossal proportions in recent years, and it greets the urban dweller at every turn. But it is poverty, in an absolute sense, as much as inequality that brought people out to demonstrate. In the last few months, inflation in the cost of basic goods and services; a steep rise in the price of telecommunications, and an overnight doubling in the rate of electricity earlier this year (the latter widely rumoured as facilitating the quick-and-fast privatization of the electricity sector which followed suspiciously soon after) has pushed many families who were struggling to stay above the poverty line back down below it. For many households the choice this winter has been a simple and stark one of cutting down on heating or cutting down on food. At the same time, the single primary source of income for many rural and peri-urban families – the remittances sent by family members working in the Russian construction sector – has declined dramatically this year. Many of those who travelled to Russia in search of work in 2008 or 2009 are “working on empty”. My research in the south of the country earlier this year suggests that many families who would ordinarily expect to receive money from family members in Russia once every one or two months have been waiting, without transfers, for a year or more as the financial crisis stopped Russia’s mid-2000s building boom in its tracks.
Sinking freedoms
This economic squeeze has been coupled with a shocking – and shockingly fast – decline in the state of basic civic freedoms. In December last year, Freedom House reduced its assessment of Kyrgyzstan in its annual world rankings from “partly free” to “unfree”. This category shift passed with little attention in the international media (and, unsurprisingly given the pressure present on the Kyrgyzstani press, with barely a mention at home). But it is a shift which is at once symbolically important and a mark of the extent to which basic freedoms had declined over the preceding few years. For one thing it puts this one-time “island of democracy” into the same category as its spectacularly authoritarian neighbours, reminding conclusively that the “island” had long since been washed away.
For another, the shift seemed to barely ruffle an international community whose “strategic partnerships” – military in the case of the US and Russia; economic in the case of China and Canada –meant that human rights often received lip-service at best. It is a decline of freedom reflected in the jailing and silencing of opposition figures; in the mysterious deaths of several key politicians who left the Bakiev government, and in the fleeing of many others to refuge abroad. It is reflected in new pressures on civil society organizations and in the actions of an increasingly intrusive and well-funded security service, the successor to the KGB. Perhaps most starkly, for ordinary people, it is reflected in the transformation of parliament into the plaything of the president; in constitutional amendments that limit the representation of minority voices in parliament, and in the undermining of meaningful electoral democracy through ballot-stuffing and the monopolization of airwaves.
These changes have made a mockery of “free and fair” elections. In 2005, Bakiev took 88.9% of the vote in a hastily conducted post-revolutionary vote. Four years later, in an election condemned by the OSCE for “failing to meet key OSCE commitments”, he was reelected as President with over three-quarters of the ballots. His key opponent, former Prime Minister Almaz Atambaev, had earlier pulled out of the race, declaring it flawed. Bakiev’s election posters, which dominated billboards in the run-up to this election, featured a variety of smiling Kyrgyzstanis, young and old, Kyrgyz and Russian, next to slogan “Bakiev - of course”. The rhetorical “of course” that was meant to rally support and confidence more accurately captured the pervasive mood of inevitability about the outcome of the election. Few people in 2009 anticipated any kind of meaningful electoral contest. Fewer still thought that anyone other than Bakiev might win. This was a vote in the grand tradition of Central Asian elections: performative, undemocratic, predictable, and concealing a great deal of structural instability behind a surface of national “consensus”.
Flawed elections alone would not be enough to send a critical mass of people onto the street. They are hardly a novelty to Kyrgyzstan, after all. But the squeezing of electoral freedoms has been coupled with a dramatic decline in opportunities for the sanctioned expression of disagreement or discontent. For a population much more used to speaking its mind and accessing alternative viewpoints than in other countries of Central Asia, this shift has been felt acutely, in rural areas as much as the city. It has also stifled a once-vibrant independent press. In the years since the tulip revolution, the number of attacks on journalists has increased dramatically. Many have abandoned addressing “political” themes. One close journalist friend turned to making a living from Kyrgyz-Russian translation over the last year because honest reporting became too risky. Self-censorship, in selection of themes and style of reporting, became the norm and newspapers once characterized for their investigative journalism became filled with celebrity-portraits and puzzle-pages.
The steady decline in press freedoms since 2006 reached a glaring crescendo in the last year. In December 2009, shortly before he was due to open an internet portal in support of the Kygyzstani opposition, the respected Bishkek journalist Gennady Pavliuk was thrown from the sixth-floor window of an apartment block in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s business and cultural capital. The pressure also extended to political commentators and academic researchers, most prominent of whom was Alexander Kniazev. A political analyst who had written critically of the 2005 “revolution”, Kniazev was brutally attacked days before he was due to meet ousted president Akaev in Moscow. In the two weeks prior to the April uprising, Kyrgyzstani citizens found internet sites blocked, independent radio stations taken off the air, and the parliament debating a law that would allow the security services more easily to tap mobile telephones. On April 1st, one of the most respected internet-based broadcasters, Stan.TV was subject to a raid on its offices, ostensibly for using unlicensed software. Although, as the TV station’s director noted, the financial police themselves used the same pirated software on their office computers, the station was off the air and officially closed down by the following Tuesday. The following morning the station’s reporters found that their mobile phones had been blocked and that they were unable to make or receive calls.
“Harmonious” gatherings and the sapping of politics
It is in this context of dramatically deteriorating rights and declining patience that two significant events occurred in the run-up to the April events. The first was the holding of a national “Congress of Harmony” (Yntymak kurultai) on the anniversary of the 2005 revolution, intended to “consolidate” a fractious population angry at crushing utility increases. In his keynote speech, Bakiev critiqued “imported” concepts of human rights and advocated the need for what he called “consultative democracy” (kengeshme demokratiia in Kyrgyz; soveshchatel’naia demokratiia in Russian) as better suited to Kyrgyz nomadic traditions. “Today across the world”, he declared to the carefully selected hall of delegates, “the failures of accepted models of democracy, based primarily on elections and human rights, are being actively debated. It is far from clear that such models are appropriate for all countries and all people”. Bakiev was, indeed, by this stage extremely scared of anything smacking of real, democratic contention, and the Congress was “harmonious” in the most problematic sense of the term. The selection of delegates, the average age of whom was far from representative of Kyrgyzstan’s young population, the stream of presentations and appeals which left little room for debate, and the stress upon the dangers of “division” served to stifle any substantive discussion over the country’s political course.
The “Congress of Harmony” served to reproduce in miniature the very problems of political exclusion that could be found at national level. By condemning the opposition as unconstructive, preoccupied, as he put it, with “one-sided criticism and sweeping attacks”, Bakiev effectively placed his opponents outside legitimate politics. This not only served to consolidate the opposition – leading to an alternative “people’s” Kurultai days before its state-sponsored alter; it also served to provide a focus for critique, shifting the opposition’s language from one of appeals to one of ultimatums. More fundamentally, the Congress served to undermine “politics” in any meaningful sense of the word: politics as a zone of contention and debate; as a field of agonism between government and opposition.
Bakiev’s national Kurultai passed off harmoniously enough. But it also served to demonstrate, quite publically, and at a time of considerable economic pressure and political grievance, just how much real debate had been sapped in favour of appeals to thriftiness, harmony and hard work. The congress was, in this sense, a coup for the opposition. Coinciding as it did with price hikes, public holidays and the jailing of a popular and much-respected former Defense Minister, the March congress served to mobilise and crystallise grievances whilst also crucially, providing a form (the kurultai as an indigenous institution) and a language (“consulting with the people”) that the opposition could productively appropriate for its own ends. It is indicative that when the opposition put forward its list of 7 demands to the government, with a deadline of April 7th, it also stressed that it would work to “mobilise the people” precisely by holding local-level kurultais in district and oblast’ centres.
“Black PR"
The second crucial event – which coincided with the very period that the opposition had given for its ultimatum – concerned the behaviour of the Russian mass media (and thus, one can assume, of a decisive shift in mood of the Russian government). In the second half of March there began a quite concerted period of negative reporting on Kyrgyzstan in the Russian mass media, both on television and in print. Since much of Kyrgyzstan (including in areas well beyond predominantly Russophone Bishkek) tune in to Russian state TV stations for their news, the “Vesti affair” as the wave of negative reporting came to be known, was at once a source of shock and of curiosity, not least because much of the most vociferous critique concerned none other than the President’s son, Maxim, and his shady financial dealings. As one local media report noted at the time, the affair was all the more curious because the normally un-doctored Vesti bulletin, retransmitted from Russian national television through Kyrgyz channels for domestic consumption, suddenly seemed to “get cut off as soon as conversation turned to our republic”, fostering rumours that behind this “black PR” lay a worsening political conflict. When, on April 1st, and in the midst of the spring planting season, Russia suddenly announced a 100% customs duty on the import of fuel products to Kyrgyzstan, rumours began to give way to a real sense of fear about the consequences of a souring of relations with the country on which so many Kyrgyzstanis rely for their livelihood.
Social networks and mobilisation
None of these events should be read as “causing” the April uprising in any direct sense. But they provided a context in which everyday material concerns – with finding employment, buying fuel, working the land, getting to Russia, making phone calls, feeding one’s children – translated into political issues and came to be read as indicative of a more fundamental crisis of state. For these demands to turn into political action, however, we need to turn to the role of social networks, which mobilised at a speed that caught government and opposition alike by surprise. In the 2005 coup, the crowds of young men who took to the streets and stormed the White House were predominantly from the country’s south. Many had been bussed to the capital by prominent local politicians and patrons. There was a significant degree of top-down “management” of the crowd, and from the start of the demonstration, opposition politicians were present and visible – with megaphones, banners, flags and the yellow tulips that came to symbolise hopes for progressive change.
On April 7th this year, by contrast, the morning rally at the Eastern end of town in front of the opposition Social Democratic Party headquarters swelled in large part due to word of mouth and informal social networks. Many of the young men who came out onto the square were from Bishkek’s migrant distracts and near-lying villages, arriving by public transport, responding to the phone calls of friends already making their way to the centre of town. If in 2005 mobile phones were the privilege of Kyrgyzstan’s emergent middle class and network coverage extended little beyond the country’s cities and resort district, by 2010, a mobile phone could be found in pretty much every household, rural and urban alike. Throughout Wednesday morning, the crowd grew exponentially thanks to exchange of information and individual appeals, as young men urged their friends, school-mates, brothers and cousins to come and join them on the square.
Crucially, moreover, phone communication meant that a last-ditched attempt to control the airwaves and limit access to information backfired. As Bishkek burned in the early afternoon of Wednesday, Kyrgyz National Television showed a replay of the previous night’s press conference and an emergency parliamentary session held several hours earlier, before switching to children’s cartoons and bucolic shots of apricot orchards in blossom. This tried-and-tested strategy might have worked in the past to keep the majority of the population in the dark about events in the capital, but this time, it served, if anything, to fire rumours that something serious was afoot. As the national television building was seized early in the afternoon, and the orchard scenes cut dramatically to a hastily assembled live broadcast from opposition supporters, viewers nationwide witnessed the take-over of the state played out live on national television.
Breaking points and the risks of “business as usual”
What, then, are the lessons of these events for our understanding of Kyrgyzstan’s crisis? The first is perhaps that we should be wary of over-stating the similarities between last week’s seizure of power and the “tulip revolution” of 2005. Many of the popular grievances that drove people onto the street are similar. But the social dynamics and the preceding political crisis were also instructively difficult – and so, crucially, was the role of violence on both sides of the barricades. What has remained consistent, despite the considerable concentration of resources into the so-called “force structures” (silovye struktury) is a governmental structure in Kyrgyzstan that is chronically weak and which, by 2010, had become catastrophically ill-equipped to hear and address popular grievances. The result was a veneer of “harmony”, played out in elections and stage-managed kurultais, which concealed a deepening political and economic crisis.
This brings us, then, to the second lesson to be taken from events, concerning the failures of an approach based on “business as usual” in the face of mounting political discontent. Too many western powers have allowed business interests to trump concern with declining human rights and to muffle critique of the Bakiev regime, most egregiously so in the case of the US. The grey US military planes lined up on the tarmac in Bishkek’s international airport, Manas, which play a key role in supplying the Afghan campaign, have come, for many ordinary Kyrgyzstanis, to symbolise great power heavy-handedness when it comes to relations with Kyrgyzstan and a colossal missed opportunity for real infrastructural investment. Few citizens have seen any benefits from the rental agreements paid for hosting the US base (tripled last year to $60 million), or from the lucrative sales of jet fuel, which have been shrouded in secrecy. When I asked one man from a village 3 kilometres from the base what benefits, if any, he had seen from its presence, he thought for a while, before replying that he had managed to acquire an exercise bike that had been dumped, for want of a few missing screws, in one of the base’s refuse bins. “Rich pickings from the refuse” effectively captures, for many Bishkek residents, the limits of the base’s benefits for those living in its shadow.
This in turn has implications for how we theorise the crisis and its origins. In 2010, as five years earlier, commentators have been quick to talk of “state failure” as the reason why things unravel so quickly in Kyrgyzstan in times of crisis: Kyrgyzstan as a state that “dazzles by its absence” as one commentator put it after the 2005 overthrow of Akaev. There has been a crisis of governance in Kyrgyzstan, certainly. But an analysis focused on state failure conceals the extent to which what has occurred is also the product of a glaring social and economic crisis – part of the “long-range” fall-out from the global financial crisis that has pushed many families to the brink. Moreover, a focus on internal state “failure” ignores the degree to which Kyrgyzstan, like other small, poor countries that suddenly find themselves hailed as strategic partners in a dubious “war on terror”, has also been consistently failed byrealpolitik as much as a failure of state. As politicians and diplomats hurry to negotiate new partnerships with Kyrgyzstan’s interim government, they would do well to heed the lessons of this failure, and to enquire how their “strategic partnerships” either exacerbate or address the inequalities that brought people onto the street in their thousands last week. the international community. The Obama administration, like its predecessor, has been too willing to take surface quiescence in Kyrgyzstan as an index of “stability”, whilst failing to ask how its base deals have propped up a deeply authoritarian government. In this sense, last week’s crisis should be read as a failure of realpolitik as much as a failure of state. As politicians and diplomats hurry to negotiate new partnerships with Kyrgyzstan’s interim government, they would do well to heed the lessons of this failure, and to enquire how their “strategic partnerships” either exacerbate or address the inequalities that brought people onto the street in their thousands last week.
Kyrgyzstan is still reeling from the bloodiest week since independence. On Wednesday, 84 people were killed and hundreds injured when troops opened fire on an opposition rally in front of the government building, or White House, in the capital, Bishkek. This was the violence of a government in fear of its people; of a state that was, despite the brutal display of force, chronically weak, and of a president who no longer knew or cared whether live rounds got mixed in with rubber bullets. The violence in Bishkek was chaotic and indiscriminate. It was also profoundly miscalculated. Rather than containing a crowd whose leaders had been arrested the previous night and whose actions had turned violent, it provoked and dispersed it, leading to attacks on government buildings and ministries throughout the city centre and to the arming of a previously unarmed crowd.
In a bloody re-run of the “Tulip Revolution” from five years earlier, state power imploded with remarkable speed. Not only were international media outlets caught by surprise – the footage that made it onto news bulletins from Tuesday’s seizure of the regional administration building in Talas and Wednesday’s carnage in Bishkek came overwhelmingly from mobile phones and amateur reportage – so were Bishkek dwellers, many of whom had little time for either President Kurmanbek Bakiev or the opposition and their “dirty politics”. On Wednesday morning, city folk had gone to work, school and university aware of a political crisis in far-away Talas, on the border with Kazakhstan. Few had thought that by lunch-time they would be joining the streams of people heading away from the centre to the city’s residential districts, fleeing an afternoon of political violence and a night of looting which stripped many of the city’s shops and markets to the light-bulbs.
The speed with which events escalated is telling, certainly: of the fragility of the state in Kyrgyzstan – a state which New York Times Op Ed pieces and Russian political commentators alike have both been quick to describe as “failed” – and of the depth of grievances which brought people out to demonstrate despite ominous warnings the night before that “all available force” would be used to disrupt unsanctioned gatherings. Yet the speed with which government fractured at a moment of crisis; the lack of symbols, banners and flags in contrast to the “tulip revolution” of 2005; and the fact that there is still disagreement over how this bloody uprising should be named should not lead us to assume that the events of last week came from nowhere. Nor should the images of angry young men and marauding gangs that have dominated television accounts of events lead us to assume that there was not, also, a considerable degree of quiet coordination prior to Wednesday’s events.
The limits of patience
The roots of Kyrgyzstan’s 2010 “revolution” go back to 2005, when Kurmanbek Bakiev came to power promising to end the “clan politics” that had characterized the last years of rule of Askar Akaev. I remember at the time, shortly after a hasty presidential election legitimized the March seizure of power, sharing a ride across the mountain range that separates the north and south of the country with a middle-aged man who quipped that he feared only more of the same form Bakiev. “At least Akaev could be satisfied when his wife and children were full. Bakiev has six brothers, after all, and you think they’ll stay quiet if they don’t get a nice position?” My interlocutor, sadly, was right. Bakiev’s brothers and two sons are well known in the country, and within a year of the “tulip revolution” the country’s opposition parties were campaigning against the excesses of the Bakiev “family rule”. By April 2010, the president’s brother, Janysh, headed the National Security Service and elder son, Marat, was the head of one of its internal departments. The president’s second son, Maxim, reputedly the richest man in Kyrgyzstan, was responsible for a lucrative state committee overseeing foreign investment. Another brother, Marat, was Kyrgyzstan’s Ambassador to Norway and Germany, and yet another Bakiev brother was Trade Representative to China, the country with which Kyrgyzstan has the most lucrative and sizeable deals.
This kind of “family rule” is not unique to Kyrgyzstan of course. The size of the population, however, together with the dense social ties that link city and village, and the speed with which word spreads makes such nepotism harder to conceal than in the region’s geographically larger and more populous neighbours. As one Bishkek resident put it after last week’s events, contrasting Kyrgyzstan’s form of family rule to those of other Central Asian states: “they can crush the mass media all they like here, but here everything is written on the palm of the hand. Everyone knows where [the elite] build their houses; everyone knows that they’ve been looting the country”. On Wednesday night and into Thursday, as Maxim Bakiev’s home in central Bishkek was looted and burned to a blackened shell, the sense of “rough justice” was palpable. Men carrying away booty told awaiting news reporters that this was the just deserts for years of stealing from the people. The angry graffiti that emerged on Wednesday night across central Bishkek told the same story, in often violent and graphic language. So, in more measured tones, did the public figures who appeared in an improvised live broadcast on national television on Wednesday evening, and the bards whose poetry accompanied the public funeral for the uprising’s dead three days later.
The anger that brought people to the streets was borne of inequality. The gulf that has emerged between the small group of politically-connected “haves” in Bishkek and the masses of “have nots”, many of whom are recent arrivals to the city’s sprawling migrant districts (novostroiki) has reached colossal proportions in recent years, and it greets the urban dweller at every turn. But it is poverty, in an absolute sense, as much as inequality that brought people out to demonstrate. In the last few months, inflation in the cost of basic goods and services; a steep rise in the price of telecommunications, and an overnight doubling in the rate of electricity earlier this year (the latter widely rumoured as facilitating the quick-and-fast privatization of the electricity sector which followed suspiciously soon after) has pushed many families who were struggling to stay above the poverty line back down below it. For many households the choice this winter has been a simple and stark one of cutting down on heating or cutting down on food. At the same time, the single primary source of income for many rural and peri-urban families – the remittances sent by family members working in the Russian construction sector – has declined dramatically this year. Many of those who travelled to Russia in search of work in 2008 or 2009 are “working on empty”. My research in the south of the country earlier this year suggests that many families who would ordinarily expect to receive money from family members in Russia once every one or two months have been waiting, without transfers, for a year or more as the financial crisis stopped Russia’s mid-2000s building boom in its tracks.
Sinking freedoms
This economic squeeze has been coupled with a shocking – and shockingly fast – decline in the state of basic civic freedoms. In December last year, Freedom House reduced its assessment of Kyrgyzstan in its annual world rankings from “partly free” to “unfree”. This category shift passed with little attention in the international media (and, unsurprisingly given the pressure present on the Kyrgyzstani press, with barely a mention at home). But it is a shift which is at once symbolically important and a mark of the extent to which basic freedoms had declined over the preceding few years. For one thing it puts this one-time “island of democracy” into the same category as its spectacularly authoritarian neighbours, reminding conclusively that the “island” had long since been washed away.
For another, the shift seemed to barely ruffle an international community whose “strategic partnerships” – military in the case of the US and Russia; economic in the case of China and Canada –meant that human rights often received lip-service at best. It is a decline of freedom reflected in the jailing and silencing of opposition figures; in the mysterious deaths of several key politicians who left the Bakiev government, and in the fleeing of many others to refuge abroad. It is reflected in new pressures on civil society organizations and in the actions of an increasingly intrusive and well-funded security service, the successor to the KGB. Perhaps most starkly, for ordinary people, it is reflected in the transformation of parliament into the plaything of the president; in constitutional amendments that limit the representation of minority voices in parliament, and in the undermining of meaningful electoral democracy through ballot-stuffing and the monopolization of airwaves.
These changes have made a mockery of “free and fair” elections. In 2005, Bakiev took 88.9% of the vote in a hastily conducted post-revolutionary vote. Four years later, in an election condemned by the OSCE for “failing to meet key OSCE commitments”, he was reelected as President with over three-quarters of the ballots. His key opponent, former Prime Minister Almaz Atambaev, had earlier pulled out of the race, declaring it flawed. Bakiev’s election posters, which dominated billboards in the run-up to this election, featured a variety of smiling Kyrgyzstanis, young and old, Kyrgyz and Russian, next to slogan “Bakiev - of course”. The rhetorical “of course” that was meant to rally support and confidence more accurately captured the pervasive mood of inevitability about the outcome of the election. Few people in 2009 anticipated any kind of meaningful electoral contest. Fewer still thought that anyone other than Bakiev might win. This was a vote in the grand tradition of Central Asian elections: performative, undemocratic, predictable, and concealing a great deal of structural instability behind a surface of national “consensus”.
Flawed elections alone would not be enough to send a critical mass of people onto the street. They are hardly a novelty to Kyrgyzstan, after all. But the squeezing of electoral freedoms has been coupled with a dramatic decline in opportunities for the sanctioned expression of disagreement or discontent. For a population much more used to speaking its mind and accessing alternative viewpoints than in other countries of Central Asia, this shift has been felt acutely, in rural areas as much as the city. It has also stifled a once-vibrant independent press. In the years since the tulip revolution, the number of attacks on journalists has increased dramatically. Many have abandoned addressing “political” themes. One close journalist friend turned to making a living from Kyrgyz-Russian translation over the last year because honest reporting became too risky. Self-censorship, in selection of themes and style of reporting, became the norm and newspapers once characterized for their investigative journalism became filled with celebrity-portraits and puzzle-pages.
The steady decline in press freedoms since 2006 reached a glaring crescendo in the last year. In December 2009, shortly before he was due to open an internet portal in support of the Kygyzstani opposition, the respected Bishkek journalist Gennady Pavliuk was thrown from the sixth-floor window of an apartment block in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s business and cultural capital. The pressure also extended to political commentators and academic researchers, most prominent of whom was Alexander Kniazev. A political analyst who had written critically of the 2005 “revolution”, Kniazev was brutally attacked days before he was due to meet ousted president Akaev in Moscow. In the two weeks prior to the April uprising, Kyrgyzstani citizens found internet sites blocked, independent radio stations taken off the air, and the parliament debating a law that would allow the security services more easily to tap mobile telephones. On April 1st, one of the most respected internet-based broadcasters, Stan.TV was subject to a raid on its offices, ostensibly for using unlicensed software. Although, as the TV station’s director noted, the financial police themselves used the same pirated software on their office computers, the station was off the air and officially closed down by the following Tuesday. The following morning the station’s reporters found that their mobile phones had been blocked and that they were unable to make or receive calls.
“Harmonious” gatherings and the sapping of politics
It is in this context of dramatically deteriorating rights and declining patience that two significant events occurred in the run-up to the April events. The first was the holding of a national “Congress of Harmony” (Yntymak kurultai) on the anniversary of the 2005 revolution, intended to “consolidate” a fractious population angry at crushing utility increases. In his keynote speech, Bakiev critiqued “imported” concepts of human rights and advocated the need for what he called “consultative democracy” (kengeshme demokratiia in Kyrgyz; soveshchatel’naia demokratiia in Russian) as better suited to Kyrgyz nomadic traditions. “Today across the world”, he declared to the carefully selected hall of delegates, “the failures of accepted models of democracy, based primarily on elections and human rights, are being actively debated. It is far from clear that such models are appropriate for all countries and all people”. Bakiev was, indeed, by this stage extremely scared of anything smacking of real, democratic contention, and the Congress was “harmonious” in the most problematic sense of the term. The selection of delegates, the average age of whom was far from representative of Kyrgyzstan’s young population, the stream of presentations and appeals which left little room for debate, and the stress upon the dangers of “division” served to stifle any substantive discussion over the country’s political course.
The “Congress of Harmony” served to reproduce in miniature the very problems of political exclusion that could be found at national level. By condemning the opposition as unconstructive, preoccupied, as he put it, with “one-sided criticism and sweeping attacks”, Bakiev effectively placed his opponents outside legitimate politics. This not only served to consolidate the opposition – leading to an alternative “people’s” Kurultai days before its state-sponsored alter; it also served to provide a focus for critique, shifting the opposition’s language from one of appeals to one of ultimatums. More fundamentally, the Congress served to undermine “politics” in any meaningful sense of the word: politics as a zone of contention and debate; as a field of agonism between government and opposition.
Bakiev’s national Kurultai passed off harmoniously enough. But it also served to demonstrate, quite publically, and at a time of considerable economic pressure and political grievance, just how much real debate had been sapped in favour of appeals to thriftiness, harmony and hard work. The congress was, in this sense, a coup for the opposition. Coinciding as it did with price hikes, public holidays and the jailing of a popular and much-respected former Defense Minister, the March congress served to mobilise and crystallise grievances whilst also crucially, providing a form (the kurultai as an indigenous institution) and a language (“consulting with the people”) that the opposition could productively appropriate for its own ends. It is indicative that when the opposition put forward its list of 7 demands to the government, with a deadline of April 7th, it also stressed that it would work to “mobilise the people” precisely by holding local-level kurultais in district and oblast’ centres.
“Black PR"
The second crucial event – which coincided with the very period that the opposition had given for its ultimatum – concerned the behaviour of the Russian mass media (and thus, one can assume, of a decisive shift in mood of the Russian government). In the second half of March there began a quite concerted period of negative reporting on Kyrgyzstan in the Russian mass media, both on television and in print. Since much of Kyrgyzstan (including in areas well beyond predominantly Russophone Bishkek) tune in to Russian state TV stations for their news, the “Vesti affair” as the wave of negative reporting came to be known, was at once a source of shock and of curiosity, not least because much of the most vociferous critique concerned none other than the President’s son, Maxim, and his shady financial dealings. As one local media report noted at the time, the affair was all the more curious because the normally un-doctored Vesti bulletin, retransmitted from Russian national television through Kyrgyz channels for domestic consumption, suddenly seemed to “get cut off as soon as conversation turned to our republic”, fostering rumours that behind this “black PR” lay a worsening political conflict. When, on April 1st, and in the midst of the spring planting season, Russia suddenly announced a 100% customs duty on the import of fuel products to Kyrgyzstan, rumours began to give way to a real sense of fear about the consequences of a souring of relations with the country on which so many Kyrgyzstanis rely for their livelihood.
Social networks and mobilisation
None of these events should be read as “causing” the April uprising in any direct sense. But they provided a context in which everyday material concerns – with finding employment, buying fuel, working the land, getting to Russia, making phone calls, feeding one’s children – translated into political issues and came to be read as indicative of a more fundamental crisis of state. For these demands to turn into political action, however, we need to turn to the role of social networks, which mobilised at a speed that caught government and opposition alike by surprise. In the 2005 coup, the crowds of young men who took to the streets and stormed the White House were predominantly from the country’s south. Many had been bussed to the capital by prominent local politicians and patrons. There was a significant degree of top-down “management” of the crowd, and from the start of the demonstration, opposition politicians were present and visible – with megaphones, banners, flags and the yellow tulips that came to symbolise hopes for progressive change.
On April 7th this year, by contrast, the morning rally at the Eastern end of town in front of the opposition Social Democratic Party headquarters swelled in large part due to word of mouth and informal social networks. Many of the young men who came out onto the square were from Bishkek’s migrant distracts and near-lying villages, arriving by public transport, responding to the phone calls of friends already making their way to the centre of town. If in 2005 mobile phones were the privilege of Kyrgyzstan’s emergent middle class and network coverage extended little beyond the country’s cities and resort district, by 2010, a mobile phone could be found in pretty much every household, rural and urban alike. Throughout Wednesday morning, the crowd grew exponentially thanks to exchange of information and individual appeals, as young men urged their friends, school-mates, brothers and cousins to come and join them on the square.
Crucially, moreover, phone communication meant that a last-ditched attempt to control the airwaves and limit access to information backfired. As Bishkek burned in the early afternoon of Wednesday, Kyrgyz National Television showed a replay of the previous night’s press conference and an emergency parliamentary session held several hours earlier, before switching to children’s cartoons and bucolic shots of apricot orchards in blossom. This tried-and-tested strategy might have worked in the past to keep the majority of the population in the dark about events in the capital, but this time, it served, if anything, to fire rumours that something serious was afoot. As the national television building was seized early in the afternoon, and the orchard scenes cut dramatically to a hastily assembled live broadcast from opposition supporters, viewers nationwide witnessed the take-over of the state played out live on national television.
Breaking points and the risks of “business as usual”
What, then, are the lessons of these events for our understanding of Kyrgyzstan’s crisis? The first is perhaps that we should be wary of over-stating the similarities between last week’s seizure of power and the “tulip revolution” of 2005. Many of the popular grievances that drove people onto the street are similar. But the social dynamics and the preceding political crisis were also instructively difficult – and so, crucially, was the role of violence on both sides of the barricades. What has remained consistent, despite the considerable concentration of resources into the so-called “force structures” (silovye struktury) is a governmental structure in Kyrgyzstan that is chronically weak and which, by 2010, had become catastrophically ill-equipped to hear and address popular grievances. The result was a veneer of “harmony”, played out in elections and stage-managed kurultais, which concealed a deepening political and economic crisis.
This brings us, then, to the second lesson to be taken from events, concerning the failures of an approach based on “business as usual” in the face of mounting political discontent. Too many western powers have allowed business interests to trump concern with declining human rights and to muffle critique of the Bakiev regime, most egregiously so in the case of the US. The grey US military planes lined up on the tarmac in Bishkek’s international airport, Manas, which play a key role in supplying the Afghan campaign, have come, for many ordinary Kyrgyzstanis, to symbolise great power heavy-handedness when it comes to relations with Kyrgyzstan and a colossal missed opportunity for real infrastructural investment. Few citizens have seen any benefits from the rental agreements paid for hosting the US base (tripled last year to $60 million), or from the lucrative sales of jet fuel, which have been shrouded in secrecy. When I asked one man from a village 3 kilometres from the base what benefits, if any, he had seen from its presence, he thought for a while, before replying that he had managed to acquire an exercise bike that had been dumped, for want of a few missing screws, in one of the base’s refuse bins. “Rich pickings from the refuse” effectively captures, for many Bishkek residents, the limits of the base’s benefits for those living in its shadow.
This in turn has implications for how we theorise the crisis and its origins. In 2010, as five years earlier, commentators have been quick to talk of “state failure” as the reason why things unravel so quickly in Kyrgyzstan in times of crisis: Kyrgyzstan as a state that “dazzles by its absence” as one commentator put it after the 2005 overthrow of Akaev. There has been a crisis of governance in Kyrgyzstan, certainly. But an analysis focused on state failure conceals the extent to which what has occurred is also the product of a glaring social and economic crisis – part of the “long-range” fall-out from the global financial crisis that has pushed many families to the brink. Moreover, a focus on internal state “failure” ignores the degree to which Kyrgyzstan, like other small, poor countries that suddenly find themselves hailed as strategic partners in a dubious “war on terror”, has also been consistently failed byrealpolitik as much as a failure of state. As politicians and diplomats hurry to negotiate new partnerships with Kyrgyzstan’s interim government, they would do well to heed the lessons of this failure, and to enquire how their “strategic partnerships” either exacerbate or address the inequalities that brought people onto the street in their thousands last week. the international community. The Obama administration, like its predecessor, has been too willing to take surface quiescence in Kyrgyzstan as an index of “stability”, whilst failing to ask how its base deals have propped up a deeply authoritarian government. In this sense, last week’s crisis should be read as a failure of realpolitik as much as a failure of state. As politicians and diplomats hurry to negotiate new partnerships with Kyrgyzstan’s interim government, they would do well to heed the lessons of this failure, and to enquire how their “strategic partnerships” either exacerbate or address the inequalities that brought people onto the street in their thousands last week.
Chile's President faces a double challenge
Conservative billionaire Sebastian Piñera was sworn in as Chile’s 38th president while the chandeliers and flower displays in their Congress swayed to aftershocks of the 8.8-magnitude earthquake that had fractured a large swathe of the country less than two weeks earlier. The tremors were a reminder that Piñera’s success as president will depend on his ability to lead an efficient recovery from the country’s worst natural disaster in 50 years. But they could also be interpreted as an omen that the country’s first president from the right since the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet ended in 1990 will have a rocky time in office, if he fails to run a transparent government that responds to the concerns of the average Chilean.
Outgoing Michelle Bachelet, a socialist backed by the left-of-center Concertación coalition, left office with an approval rating of 84%, whereas Piñera won just 51.6% of the votes in a second round marked by low turnout and voided ballots. But the natural disaster that wracked the country on February 27 produced a surge in patriotism and hopes that the new president – a 60-year-old, self-made magnate with a PhD from Harvard – would apply to the task of reconstruction the energy and acumen that has helped him become one of the nation’s richest men.
The quake led to a temporary truce between the country’s two main political blocks, Concertación and the Coalition for Change. But Piñera’s reluctance to fulfil his promise to divest from his business ventures before assuming the presidency, together with the hefty profit he earned from the sale of Lan Airlines stock two weeks into his term has already provoked a chorus of criticism and doubts about the new president’s priorities.
Credibility gap
According to the first opinion poll of his government, conducted by Adimark during his first two weeks in office, Piñera had a 52% approval rating. Survey respondents asked to identify his favourable traits chose “active and aggressive” - whereas the traits the fewest Chileans attributed to their president were “credible and trustworthy.”
This may reflect the negative campaign of Concertación presidential candidate Eduardo Frei, which highlighted the low points of Piñera’s business career. Piñero was fined approximately US $680,000 for the equivalent of insider trading in 2007, following a purchase of Lan Airlines stock. He was cleared of charges of violating the country’s banking laws following the 1982 government seizure of the insolvent Banco de Talca, where he was general manager. On the whole, however, Piñeras’ story has been one of smart investments and effective management, which allowed him to rise from the position of bank manager to one of Chile’s wealthiest citizens in less than three decades.
During the campaign, Frei warned voters that Piñera would govern for the rich. Yet many Chileans felt that Concertación was already doing that. The coalition expanded an export-based economy that had been a priority of the Pinochet government and oversaw economic growth that averaged 5.1% per year. During Concertación’s two decades in power, the percentage of Chileans living in poverty decreased from nearly 40% to less than 14%, but the country also gained hundreds of new millionaires and on the whole, its rich got considerably richer.
Piñera campaigned on promises to boost economic growth and improve conditions for the middle class: he recruited ministers from the business world to help him do so. But the president’s reluctance to sell some of his assets, the circumstances surrounding his final sale of Lan Airlines stock, and the varied business connections of his ministers have left some Chileans wondering exactly who will benefit from his administration’s promised dynamism.
When he was elected, Piñera owned approximately 26% of Lan, one of South America’s top airlines, which he sold in several packages in February and March. Between his January 17 election and the sale of his last 8% of Lan on March 24, the airline’s stock value increased by 12%. Observers noted that Piñera’s decision to sell Axxion, the holding company that owned his last portion of Lan stock, rather than selling the stock itself, allowed him to pay lower taxes on the sale. In total, he earned almost US $1.5 billion from the sale of his Lan stock, which he has complemented with sales of stock in various other companies, so he won’t need to fret about how to support his family on his $178,000 presidential salary.
Concertación politicians denounced the Axxion sale outright – legislator Jorge Burgos claiming that Piñera may have avoided paying as much as $50,000 in taxes on the deal – and called upon the recently appointed internal revenue chief to testify in congress. Coalition for Change legislators responded by launching an investigation into the Bachelet administration’s transfer of approximately US $3 billion of government funds to NGOs during its last three months in office, which administration representatives claimed was largely destined for the construction of housing for disaster victims. So the post-quake political truce has lasted less than a month.
Another point of contention was Piñera’s decision to create a foundation to manage his television station, Chilevision, rather than selling the business. Critics noted that the issue is rife with conflicts of interest, since Piñera has appointed the director of the public television network, TVN, a direct competitor of Chilevision, and the country’s congress is debating a law to regulate digital television. Politicians on the left and right called upon Piñera to sell Chilevision: but so far the president has resisted the pressure.
According to Raul Sohr, a political analyst for Chilevision and La Nación newspaper, Piñera has drawn fire for conflict of interest ever since he flew to Colombia as a candidate for a meeting with President Alvaro Uribe, and returned with an agreement for Lan Airlines to transport cargo between the two countries. “It wasn’t clear when Piñera was acting as politician and when he was acting as a businessman,” he said.
Sohr noted that various new ministers have similar conflicts of interest, since they have worked for, or own parts of major Chilean corporations. He cited the example of Health Minister Jaime Mañalich, the former medical director of the prestigious ClÃnica las Condes. Piñera owned nearly 10% of this stock before he sold it for approximately US $36 million during his first week in office. Sohr predicted that Concertación will keep the entire administration “under the microscope” during the next four years.
In an interview with the Argentine newspaper El ClarÃn, Piñera said, “In life, one is always dealing with conflicts of interest; only the dead and saints are free from this situation. The important thing is knowing how to resolve them well.”
The comment provoked more criticism from the left, but it was followed by news that the administration would post the declarations of assets that the president, ministers and other high level officials are required by law to complete on the Internet.
Nevertheless, despite the daily coverage of the controversy, Sohr claimed that the average Chilean pays it scant attention. “These aren’t issues that agitate the masses,” he said.
Reconstruction first
The public and media may lose interest in Piñera’s stock sales, but his handling of disaster reconstruction could be more decisive for his political future. The February 27 earthquake and tsunamis destroyed or severely damaged approximately 370,000 homes, 4,000 schools and 79 hospitals, as well as highways, ports and other infrastructure. Political scientist and columnist Patricio Navia predicted that Piñera will face a storm of criticism if his administration hasn’t provided adequate shelter for disaster victims by the time the winter rains begin in May.
“He is not going to have any honeymoon, that’s clear. On the other hand, he now has a clear agenda,” Navia observed on the eve of Piñera’s inauguration. “He is going to have to deliver, or face the consequences.”
Piñera has called reconstruction “the greatest challenge of my life” and assured the Chilean public that it is his top priority. He spent his first weeks in office reviewing reconstruction plans and deciding how to finance the task. He has visited the disaster area frequently and on his second trip abroad as president, stopped in New Orleans to learn about that city’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina.
Luckily for Chile and Piñera, the state is in a good position to cover the cost of reconstruction. The government has more than $10 billion in savings – mostly revenue from the national copper mine – and the country’s economy is predicted to grow about five percent this year. The total cost of repairing quake and tsunami damage is estimated at US $30 billion, less than US $7 billion of which will be covered by insurance companies. Piñera has consequently proposed the creation of a reconstruction fund with government savings, the issuance of a government bond, the sale of minor state assets and a tax increase on corporate profits.
Sohr noted that prominent members of the right have advised Piñera against raising taxes, which Concertación never did during its two decades in power. “It may not be much of an increase and it may be temporary, but it is notable that he is doing it. It is a big step, and it’s ironic considering that Concertación was never able to do it.”
Sociologist Lucia Dammert, of the Latin American Social Sciences Institute (FLACSO), said that the disaster has forced Piñera to change, or scale back much of his original agenda. She noted that predictions that the new administration would fire a large number of government officials had proven false, which may be due to the need to ensure an efficient disaster response.
“Before the earthquake, Piñeras’ proposal was the typical platform of the right – that of a smaller government and greater private investment, but now it is clear that there are parts of the country that need more government, or at least a more efficient government,” she said.
Piñera, who ran on a platform of change, will now need to expand a housing program that was a hallmark of the Bachelet administration, which helped approximately 450,000 poor families get their first home. As a candidate, Piñera echoed criticism that the program had produced low-quality houses and vowed to improve it. But Dammert said the need to replace more than 300,000 homes quickly could make that a hard promise keep.
“I believe that this government, which is in reconstruction mode, will be able to make few and rather limited changes,” Dammert said.
Political futures
Many on the left criticized Piñera’s decision to appoint a cabinet of business executives and technocrats, yet the Adimark poll found that Chileans gave the new administration a higher approval rating (60%) than the president (52%). This was a switch from previous surveys in which President Bachelet was consistently rated more highly than her government.
Most of Piñera’s ministers are unknown to the general public, so the poll may reflect ambivalence toward the president, or it could indicate approval of his promise to abandon the Concertación practice of dividing political appointments among the coalition’s various parties. Most of Piñera’s ministers have no strong party affiliation, and his Minister of Defense, Jaime Ravinet, is a Christian Democrat who served in a Concertación government, which has calmed fears that Piñera would favor military officials from the Pinochet regime.
Less than a quarter of Piñera’s cabinet is from the Independent Democratic Union, or UDI – the Coalition for Change’s larger right wing and the party with the most legislators in congress. Navia noted that Piñera’s neglect of the UDI could hurt him in the long run, because he may need the party’s support if his popularity slips. Sohr disagreed, claiming that Piñera’s goal is to create an alliance with the political center, so he will be more responsive to public opinion than to pressure from the UDI.
“Piñera’s success is that he was capable of breaking Chile’s political mold, because he is a cross-cutting figure – his roots are in the Christian Democrat Party, but he has become a leader of the right,” said Sohr, who claimed that Piñera knows that the only way he can maintain a viable political base is by governing for the center.
If he resolves his conflicts of interest in a timely manner and delivers on reconstruction, Piñera may be able to redraw Chile’s political map. If he doesn’t, he can count on Concertación doing everything possible to make him the earthquake’s last victim.
Outgoing Michelle Bachelet, a socialist backed by the left-of-center Concertación coalition, left office with an approval rating of 84%, whereas Piñera won just 51.6% of the votes in a second round marked by low turnout and voided ballots. But the natural disaster that wracked the country on February 27 produced a surge in patriotism and hopes that the new president – a 60-year-old, self-made magnate with a PhD from Harvard – would apply to the task of reconstruction the energy and acumen that has helped him become one of the nation’s richest men.
The quake led to a temporary truce between the country’s two main political blocks, Concertación and the Coalition for Change. But Piñera’s reluctance to fulfil his promise to divest from his business ventures before assuming the presidency, together with the hefty profit he earned from the sale of Lan Airlines stock two weeks into his term has already provoked a chorus of criticism and doubts about the new president’s priorities.
Credibility gap
According to the first opinion poll of his government, conducted by Adimark during his first two weeks in office, Piñera had a 52% approval rating. Survey respondents asked to identify his favourable traits chose “active and aggressive” - whereas the traits the fewest Chileans attributed to their president were “credible and trustworthy.”
This may reflect the negative campaign of Concertación presidential candidate Eduardo Frei, which highlighted the low points of Piñera’s business career. Piñero was fined approximately US $680,000 for the equivalent of insider trading in 2007, following a purchase of Lan Airlines stock. He was cleared of charges of violating the country’s banking laws following the 1982 government seizure of the insolvent Banco de Talca, where he was general manager. On the whole, however, Piñeras’ story has been one of smart investments and effective management, which allowed him to rise from the position of bank manager to one of Chile’s wealthiest citizens in less than three decades.
During the campaign, Frei warned voters that Piñera would govern for the rich. Yet many Chileans felt that Concertación was already doing that. The coalition expanded an export-based economy that had been a priority of the Pinochet government and oversaw economic growth that averaged 5.1% per year. During Concertación’s two decades in power, the percentage of Chileans living in poverty decreased from nearly 40% to less than 14%, but the country also gained hundreds of new millionaires and on the whole, its rich got considerably richer.
Piñera campaigned on promises to boost economic growth and improve conditions for the middle class: he recruited ministers from the business world to help him do so. But the president’s reluctance to sell some of his assets, the circumstances surrounding his final sale of Lan Airlines stock, and the varied business connections of his ministers have left some Chileans wondering exactly who will benefit from his administration’s promised dynamism.
When he was elected, Piñera owned approximately 26% of Lan, one of South America’s top airlines, which he sold in several packages in February and March. Between his January 17 election and the sale of his last 8% of Lan on March 24, the airline’s stock value increased by 12%. Observers noted that Piñera’s decision to sell Axxion, the holding company that owned his last portion of Lan stock, rather than selling the stock itself, allowed him to pay lower taxes on the sale. In total, he earned almost US $1.5 billion from the sale of his Lan stock, which he has complemented with sales of stock in various other companies, so he won’t need to fret about how to support his family on his $178,000 presidential salary.
Concertación politicians denounced the Axxion sale outright – legislator Jorge Burgos claiming that Piñera may have avoided paying as much as $50,000 in taxes on the deal – and called upon the recently appointed internal revenue chief to testify in congress. Coalition for Change legislators responded by launching an investigation into the Bachelet administration’s transfer of approximately US $3 billion of government funds to NGOs during its last three months in office, which administration representatives claimed was largely destined for the construction of housing for disaster victims. So the post-quake political truce has lasted less than a month.
Another point of contention was Piñera’s decision to create a foundation to manage his television station, Chilevision, rather than selling the business. Critics noted that the issue is rife with conflicts of interest, since Piñera has appointed the director of the public television network, TVN, a direct competitor of Chilevision, and the country’s congress is debating a law to regulate digital television. Politicians on the left and right called upon Piñera to sell Chilevision: but so far the president has resisted the pressure.
According to Raul Sohr, a political analyst for Chilevision and La Nación newspaper, Piñera has drawn fire for conflict of interest ever since he flew to Colombia as a candidate for a meeting with President Alvaro Uribe, and returned with an agreement for Lan Airlines to transport cargo between the two countries. “It wasn’t clear when Piñera was acting as politician and when he was acting as a businessman,” he said.
Sohr noted that various new ministers have similar conflicts of interest, since they have worked for, or own parts of major Chilean corporations. He cited the example of Health Minister Jaime Mañalich, the former medical director of the prestigious ClÃnica las Condes. Piñera owned nearly 10% of this stock before he sold it for approximately US $36 million during his first week in office. Sohr predicted that Concertación will keep the entire administration “under the microscope” during the next four years.
In an interview with the Argentine newspaper El ClarÃn, Piñera said, “In life, one is always dealing with conflicts of interest; only the dead and saints are free from this situation. The important thing is knowing how to resolve them well.”
The comment provoked more criticism from the left, but it was followed by news that the administration would post the declarations of assets that the president, ministers and other high level officials are required by law to complete on the Internet.
Nevertheless, despite the daily coverage of the controversy, Sohr claimed that the average Chilean pays it scant attention. “These aren’t issues that agitate the masses,” he said.
Reconstruction first
The public and media may lose interest in Piñera’s stock sales, but his handling of disaster reconstruction could be more decisive for his political future. The February 27 earthquake and tsunamis destroyed or severely damaged approximately 370,000 homes, 4,000 schools and 79 hospitals, as well as highways, ports and other infrastructure. Political scientist and columnist Patricio Navia predicted that Piñera will face a storm of criticism if his administration hasn’t provided adequate shelter for disaster victims by the time the winter rains begin in May.
“He is not going to have any honeymoon, that’s clear. On the other hand, he now has a clear agenda,” Navia observed on the eve of Piñera’s inauguration. “He is going to have to deliver, or face the consequences.”
Piñera has called reconstruction “the greatest challenge of my life” and assured the Chilean public that it is his top priority. He spent his first weeks in office reviewing reconstruction plans and deciding how to finance the task. He has visited the disaster area frequently and on his second trip abroad as president, stopped in New Orleans to learn about that city’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina.
Luckily for Chile and Piñera, the state is in a good position to cover the cost of reconstruction. The government has more than $10 billion in savings – mostly revenue from the national copper mine – and the country’s economy is predicted to grow about five percent this year. The total cost of repairing quake and tsunami damage is estimated at US $30 billion, less than US $7 billion of which will be covered by insurance companies. Piñera has consequently proposed the creation of a reconstruction fund with government savings, the issuance of a government bond, the sale of minor state assets and a tax increase on corporate profits.
Sohr noted that prominent members of the right have advised Piñera against raising taxes, which Concertación never did during its two decades in power. “It may not be much of an increase and it may be temporary, but it is notable that he is doing it. It is a big step, and it’s ironic considering that Concertación was never able to do it.”
Sociologist Lucia Dammert, of the Latin American Social Sciences Institute (FLACSO), said that the disaster has forced Piñera to change, or scale back much of his original agenda. She noted that predictions that the new administration would fire a large number of government officials had proven false, which may be due to the need to ensure an efficient disaster response.
“Before the earthquake, Piñeras’ proposal was the typical platform of the right – that of a smaller government and greater private investment, but now it is clear that there are parts of the country that need more government, or at least a more efficient government,” she said.
Piñera, who ran on a platform of change, will now need to expand a housing program that was a hallmark of the Bachelet administration, which helped approximately 450,000 poor families get their first home. As a candidate, Piñera echoed criticism that the program had produced low-quality houses and vowed to improve it. But Dammert said the need to replace more than 300,000 homes quickly could make that a hard promise keep.
“I believe that this government, which is in reconstruction mode, will be able to make few and rather limited changes,” Dammert said.
Political futures
Many on the left criticized Piñera’s decision to appoint a cabinet of business executives and technocrats, yet the Adimark poll found that Chileans gave the new administration a higher approval rating (60%) than the president (52%). This was a switch from previous surveys in which President Bachelet was consistently rated more highly than her government.
Most of Piñera’s ministers are unknown to the general public, so the poll may reflect ambivalence toward the president, or it could indicate approval of his promise to abandon the Concertación practice of dividing political appointments among the coalition’s various parties. Most of Piñera’s ministers have no strong party affiliation, and his Minister of Defense, Jaime Ravinet, is a Christian Democrat who served in a Concertación government, which has calmed fears that Piñera would favor military officials from the Pinochet regime.
Less than a quarter of Piñera’s cabinet is from the Independent Democratic Union, or UDI – the Coalition for Change’s larger right wing and the party with the most legislators in congress. Navia noted that Piñera’s neglect of the UDI could hurt him in the long run, because he may need the party’s support if his popularity slips. Sohr disagreed, claiming that Piñera’s goal is to create an alliance with the political center, so he will be more responsive to public opinion than to pressure from the UDI.
“Piñera’s success is that he was capable of breaking Chile’s political mold, because he is a cross-cutting figure – his roots are in the Christian Democrat Party, but he has become a leader of the right,” said Sohr, who claimed that Piñera knows that the only way he can maintain a viable political base is by governing for the center.
If he resolves his conflicts of interest in a timely manner and delivers on reconstruction, Piñera may be able to redraw Chile’s political map. If he doesn’t, he can count on Concertación doing everything possible to make him the earthquake’s last victim.
2011: Expect another June 12, if Jonathan runs, says Yakubu, ACF, NU chieftain
ISMAIL OMIPIDAN
Mohammed Alhaji Yakubu, a chieftain of both the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) and Northern Union (NU) has declared that any attempt to shortchange the North in 2011 would be resisted, insisting that June 12 crisis would be small when compared to what would happen should Acting President Goodluck Jonathan run.il 20, 2010
Speaking in an exclusive interview last Wednesday, the Kogi-born politician, who is the youth leader of the Dr. Abubakar Saraki-led Northern Union, warned that “the consequences of any attempt to shortchange the North in 2011 can better be imagined. I want to place it on record that what we witnessed following the June 12 annulment would be small compared to the consequences of shortchanging the North in 2011.”
He also spoke on the need for the North to come up with its best and to checkmate any attempt by former President Obasanjo to decide for it, among other issues.
Excerpts:
State of the nation
I want it to be on record that this is my personal opinion. It is true that I am the youth leader of the Dr. Saraki-led Northern Union, and that I am also a member of the National Executive Committee, NEC, of the Arewa Consultative Forum, ACF, and at the same time the National Publicity Secretary of the Peoples Salvation Party, PSP, led by Dr. Junaid. But all that I would say in this interview are my personal views.
Having said that, talking about the state of the nation, while not trying to join those who have succeeded in politicizing Yar’Adua’s ill-health, I do not believe he was smuggled back to the country the way you put it. Although I haven’t seen him, I want to commend the National Assembly for using the doctrine of necessity, which gave us a leeway. We have an Acting President, who has not done badly, but it is not yet uhuru, he should strive to write his name in gold as suggested by General Theophilus Danjuma.
I will also advise that since the PDP has zoned the Presidency to the North, and it is the ruling party, which has all the machinery to produce the next President, he (Jonathan) should respect that gentleman’s agreement. He should not listen to those who are urging him to shortchange the North by running in 2011, as they do not mean well for the country.
Still on state of the nation, do you think it was proper for Gusau and Danjuma to have accepted to serve under Jonathan?
I think I am one of those who believe that they should not have taken up the appointments because these are people some of us look up to for direction, and considering the way they were both treated by Obasanjo, one would have expected them to operate from behind. I hope to be proved wrong, but I foresee them getting another Obasanjo treatment.
But don’t you think Jonathan needed a Gusau around him to crush the so-called cabal?
Look, T.Y Danjuma and Gusau have boys like Dangiwa Umar, Col. Hamid Ali, Jafar Isa and the likes. If their boys are there, they can get anything done through their boys, without necessarily taking up an appointment. If they want anything done, they have their boys and I know they can get it done. This is my thinking.
The North and 2011
It will be difficult to shortchange the North. And for peace and tranquility to continue to reign in Nigeria, it will be in the best interest of the peaceful co-existence of this country to respect that arrangement.
Anything wrong in Jonathan running?
There is nothing wrong in him contesting. I mean he is eminently qualified as a Nigerian. He has all the qualities and credentials to run. But at the risk of sounding immodest, we have not reached that stage, where we make this thing open, I am sure when the time comes, the zoning issue would fizzle out.
But let me also warn that the consequences of any attempt to shortchange the North in 2011 can better be imagined. I want to place on record that what we witnessed following the June 12 annulment in 1993 would be small compared to the consequences of shortchanging the North in 2011.
The North and core North in the race for 2011
That is a creation of the media. I read one of your editors today (last Wednesday), I quite agree with him, and his views tally with what we are doing. I want to assure that my generation and the group I am working with, will search for a credible northerner, one of our best 11 to run in 2011. I am a northerner; no one can call me a peripherial northerner. So whatever accrues to the north, I’m entitled to it, as such, 2011 will not be business as usual, as we will not allow any single individual to decide for us, and our commitment and determination will manifest in the days ahead. We are determined to do this, this time around because we believe that Yar’Adua was not the best the North could offer in 2007.
Talking about an individual determining for the North, already some of those showing interest have started consulting with that individual, how do you checkmate him?
You see, there is nothing wrong in IBB consulting, but to consult Obasanjo means he is consulting the wrong person, because this is someone who has not only betrayed the North but the entire country, by inflicting a sick man on us. We will certainly not sit down and allow him determine our future again. Never!
What ACF and NU are doing about the search for a credible northern candidate?
As you are aware, the ACF is a socio-cultural group, the last standing moral authority of the North, while the NU is a political group. I believe they both have different roles to play in the days ahead. But my group will put across our proposal to them to assist in searching for a President of northern extraction, who will not be talking about power (electricity) in the 21st century.
Which is your group?
I am talking about people of my age group, people of like minds, who are bothered about the future of this country. We are talking.
But a young man, Hassan Jallo, an IBB supporter based in Kaduna recently said we should allow old men in their 70’s to continue to rule because your generation has failed the nation. How do you juxtapose that with your latest move?
Well, I know Jallo; he is entitled to his opinion, depending on where he is coming from. But this struggle is for every young man who is desirous of change, every young man interested in seeing a re-play of the Obama kind of Presidency in Nigeria. The struggle is for young men and women who have refused to mortgage their future. Nigeria will be 50 next October, yet we have nothing to show for it. We must make deliberate efforts to change the cause of events in this country.
How are we sure you are not campaigning for GovernorBukola Saraki, considering the fact that his father is the leader and founder of NU?
Well, you see we have a problem in this country, because it is difficult to believe people even when they are doing things based on principle. If I have to work for Bukola, I would have joined the PDP but I am not even a member of the PDP. In any case, he has not told me he is contesting.
If he says so tomorrow, what happens?
When we get to the bridge, we will cross it.
Finally, we understand some northern ministers are already working for the actualization of Jonathan’s Presidency, where does that leave your group and your project?
This is democracy, and people are free to do whatever they like. If it is true, they will return to their constituencies, and let’s see how they can sell the candidature. But let me again warn that those doing that are inviting anarchy. I am sure you are old enough to know what happened in 1993, it was because the Southerners, South-West in particular, felt shortchanged, and that was why we went through those harrowing experiences. Now I want to say that if they try to shortchange the North in 2011, the consequences can better be imagined. I mean 1993 episode will be small compared to what we will witness.
Mohammed Alhaji Yakubu, a chieftain of both the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) and Northern Union (NU) has declared that any attempt to shortchange the North in 2011 would be resisted, insisting that June 12 crisis would be small when compared to what would happen should Acting President Goodluck Jonathan run.il 20, 2010
Speaking in an exclusive interview last Wednesday, the Kogi-born politician, who is the youth leader of the Dr. Abubakar Saraki-led Northern Union, warned that “the consequences of any attempt to shortchange the North in 2011 can better be imagined. I want to place it on record that what we witnessed following the June 12 annulment would be small compared to the consequences of shortchanging the North in 2011.”
He also spoke on the need for the North to come up with its best and to checkmate any attempt by former President Obasanjo to decide for it, among other issues.
Excerpts:
State of the nation
I want it to be on record that this is my personal opinion. It is true that I am the youth leader of the Dr. Saraki-led Northern Union, and that I am also a member of the National Executive Committee, NEC, of the Arewa Consultative Forum, ACF, and at the same time the National Publicity Secretary of the Peoples Salvation Party, PSP, led by Dr. Junaid. But all that I would say in this interview are my personal views.
Having said that, talking about the state of the nation, while not trying to join those who have succeeded in politicizing Yar’Adua’s ill-health, I do not believe he was smuggled back to the country the way you put it. Although I haven’t seen him, I want to commend the National Assembly for using the doctrine of necessity, which gave us a leeway. We have an Acting President, who has not done badly, but it is not yet uhuru, he should strive to write his name in gold as suggested by General Theophilus Danjuma.
I will also advise that since the PDP has zoned the Presidency to the North, and it is the ruling party, which has all the machinery to produce the next President, he (Jonathan) should respect that gentleman’s agreement. He should not listen to those who are urging him to shortchange the North by running in 2011, as they do not mean well for the country.
Still on state of the nation, do you think it was proper for Gusau and Danjuma to have accepted to serve under Jonathan?
I think I am one of those who believe that they should not have taken up the appointments because these are people some of us look up to for direction, and considering the way they were both treated by Obasanjo, one would have expected them to operate from behind. I hope to be proved wrong, but I foresee them getting another Obasanjo treatment.
But don’t you think Jonathan needed a Gusau around him to crush the so-called cabal?
Look, T.Y Danjuma and Gusau have boys like Dangiwa Umar, Col. Hamid Ali, Jafar Isa and the likes. If their boys are there, they can get anything done through their boys, without necessarily taking up an appointment. If they want anything done, they have their boys and I know they can get it done. This is my thinking.
The North and 2011
It will be difficult to shortchange the North. And for peace and tranquility to continue to reign in Nigeria, it will be in the best interest of the peaceful co-existence of this country to respect that arrangement.
Anything wrong in Jonathan running?
There is nothing wrong in him contesting. I mean he is eminently qualified as a Nigerian. He has all the qualities and credentials to run. But at the risk of sounding immodest, we have not reached that stage, where we make this thing open, I am sure when the time comes, the zoning issue would fizzle out.
But let me also warn that the consequences of any attempt to shortchange the North in 2011 can better be imagined. I want to place on record that what we witnessed following the June 12 annulment in 1993 would be small compared to the consequences of shortchanging the North in 2011.
The North and core North in the race for 2011
That is a creation of the media. I read one of your editors today (last Wednesday), I quite agree with him, and his views tally with what we are doing. I want to assure that my generation and the group I am working with, will search for a credible northerner, one of our best 11 to run in 2011. I am a northerner; no one can call me a peripherial northerner. So whatever accrues to the north, I’m entitled to it, as such, 2011 will not be business as usual, as we will not allow any single individual to decide for us, and our commitment and determination will manifest in the days ahead. We are determined to do this, this time around because we believe that Yar’Adua was not the best the North could offer in 2007.
Talking about an individual determining for the North, already some of those showing interest have started consulting with that individual, how do you checkmate him?
You see, there is nothing wrong in IBB consulting, but to consult Obasanjo means he is consulting the wrong person, because this is someone who has not only betrayed the North but the entire country, by inflicting a sick man on us. We will certainly not sit down and allow him determine our future again. Never!
What ACF and NU are doing about the search for a credible northern candidate?
As you are aware, the ACF is a socio-cultural group, the last standing moral authority of the North, while the NU is a political group. I believe they both have different roles to play in the days ahead. But my group will put across our proposal to them to assist in searching for a President of northern extraction, who will not be talking about power (electricity) in the 21st century.
Which is your group?
I am talking about people of my age group, people of like minds, who are bothered about the future of this country. We are talking.
But a young man, Hassan Jallo, an IBB supporter based in Kaduna recently said we should allow old men in their 70’s to continue to rule because your generation has failed the nation. How do you juxtapose that with your latest move?
Well, I know Jallo; he is entitled to his opinion, depending on where he is coming from. But this struggle is for every young man who is desirous of change, every young man interested in seeing a re-play of the Obama kind of Presidency in Nigeria. The struggle is for young men and women who have refused to mortgage their future. Nigeria will be 50 next October, yet we have nothing to show for it. We must make deliberate efforts to change the cause of events in this country.
How are we sure you are not campaigning for GovernorBukola Saraki, considering the fact that his father is the leader and founder of NU?
Well, you see we have a problem in this country, because it is difficult to believe people even when they are doing things based on principle. If I have to work for Bukola, I would have joined the PDP but I am not even a member of the PDP. In any case, he has not told me he is contesting.
If he says so tomorrow, what happens?
When we get to the bridge, we will cross it.
Finally, we understand some northern ministers are already working for the actualization of Jonathan’s Presidency, where does that leave your group and your project?
This is democracy, and people are free to do whatever they like. If it is true, they will return to their constituencies, and let’s see how they can sell the candidature. But let me again warn that those doing that are inviting anarchy. I am sure you are old enough to know what happened in 1993, it was because the Southerners, South-West in particular, felt shortchanged, and that was why we went through those harrowing experiences. Now I want to say that if they try to shortchange the North in 2011, the consequences can better be imagined. I mean 1993 episode will be small compared to what we will witness.
EFCC Intensifies Fashola’s Probe
BABATOLA MICHAEL
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has intensified its investigation into allegations of financial impropriety and contract inflation made by a group operating under the aegis of The True Face of Lagos against Lagos State Governor, Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN).
EFCC spokesperson, Mr. Femi Babafemi revealed this in an e-massage today, stating that the anti-graft commission has not dropped the investigation into allegations leveled against Fashola and his allies.
In his message, Babafemi said EFCC Chairperson, Mrs. Farida Waziri has ordered the commission’s Lagos office to conduct an investigation into all cases of abusive use of public office and funds.
According to Babafemi, "the investigation is currently being handled by EFCC office in Lagos. The investigation is ongoing and progressing."
Last week, the Lagos State House of Assembly reconstituted a 7-man committee to investigate allegations of financial impropriety and contract inflation, which the same group brought against Fashola. They were given within two weeks to submit their report.
The committee is made up of Hon. Ajibayo Adeyeye (from Kosofe), Hon. Sanai Agunbiade (Ikorodu), Hon. Rotimi Olowo (Somolu), Hon. Omowunmi Olatunji-Edet (Oshodi-Isolo), Hon. Funmilayo Tejuosho (Mushin), Hon. Babatunde Adejare (Agege), and Hon. Saka Dayo Fafunmi (Ifako Ijaiye).
But Lovers of Raji Fashola (LORAF) have kicked against the probe, thus calling for neutral bodies like EFCC and Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offence Commission (ICPC) to take over the investigation from the Assembly.
In his response to the probe panel, LORAF Coordinator, Mr. Abiodun Olugbenro said a fortnight can never be enough to thoroughly investigate the allegations.
He said the Assembly "is not a neutral party and therefore should not investigate allegations that also implicated its members. It is a kangaroo probe; they are only interested in impeaching Fashola."
The House however depended on Section 128, paragraph 1 and 2 of the 1999 constitution of the Federal republic of Nigeria, which empowers the House to investigate allegations of corruption brought against the executive arm.
But The True Face of Lagos last Monday asked the Assembly to conduct a public hearing into the allegations.
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has intensified its investigation into allegations of financial impropriety and contract inflation made by a group operating under the aegis of The True Face of Lagos against Lagos State Governor, Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN).
EFCC spokesperson, Mr. Femi Babafemi revealed this in an e-massage today, stating that the anti-graft commission has not dropped the investigation into allegations leveled against Fashola and his allies.
In his message, Babafemi said EFCC Chairperson, Mrs. Farida Waziri has ordered the commission’s Lagos office to conduct an investigation into all cases of abusive use of public office and funds.
According to Babafemi, "the investigation is currently being handled by EFCC office in Lagos. The investigation is ongoing and progressing."
Last week, the Lagos State House of Assembly reconstituted a 7-man committee to investigate allegations of financial impropriety and contract inflation, which the same group brought against Fashola. They were given within two weeks to submit their report.
The committee is made up of Hon. Ajibayo Adeyeye (from Kosofe), Hon. Sanai Agunbiade (Ikorodu), Hon. Rotimi Olowo (Somolu), Hon. Omowunmi Olatunji-Edet (Oshodi-Isolo), Hon. Funmilayo Tejuosho (Mushin), Hon. Babatunde Adejare (Agege), and Hon. Saka Dayo Fafunmi (Ifako Ijaiye).
But Lovers of Raji Fashola (LORAF) have kicked against the probe, thus calling for neutral bodies like EFCC and Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offence Commission (ICPC) to take over the investigation from the Assembly.
In his response to the probe panel, LORAF Coordinator, Mr. Abiodun Olugbenro said a fortnight can never be enough to thoroughly investigate the allegations.
He said the Assembly "is not a neutral party and therefore should not investigate allegations that also implicated its members. It is a kangaroo probe; they are only interested in impeaching Fashola."
The House however depended on Section 128, paragraph 1 and 2 of the 1999 constitution of the Federal republic of Nigeria, which empowers the House to investigate allegations of corruption brought against the executive arm.
But The True Face of Lagos last Monday asked the Assembly to conduct a public hearing into the allegations.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)