My recent article about Aung Sun Suu Kyi & genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar was published in Countercurrents magazine:
http://www.countercurrents.org/scully090516.htm
(The photo is not identified but this scene is completely familiar from the purge in 2012 when Rohingya refugees fled for their lives to Bangladesh. The refugees often implored Bangladeshi border guards who were under orders to turn them away.)
The dignity of the Nobel Peace Prize should have been sunk when Henry Kissinger won it in 1973 whilst the US was engaged in carpet bombing North Vietnam. It must have invested big money in public relations to recover from that one.
Now the Drumpf has been nominated & there is a campaign to nominate Hillary Clinton for her work toward peace in the Middle East. It was Marx who said history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. Under neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism, tragedy has become indistinguishable from farce.
Aung San Suu Kyi has finally laid her cards on the table. No more bewilderment about why the holder of the Nobel Peace Prize (a worthless honorific most often awarded war criminals), the democracy icon known as “the Mandela of Asia,” the holder of dozens of international honorifics as a champion of human rights has remained dead silent on the genocide against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
Media reports the conflict as primarily a religious one between Muslims & Buddhists but Rohingya have been subject for decades to violent state-sponsored persecution & discrimination conducted by the military, including denial of citizenship (though they have lived in the region for decades), religious persecution, forced labor, land confiscations, arbitrary taxation & various forms of extortion, forced eviction & house destruction, restrictions on travel for health & work, restrictions on marriage, education, & trade. The violence is so extreme & sustained going back decades that hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas flee for asylum to Malaysia & to squalid refugee camps in Thailand & Bangladesh. Myanmar now has forced nearly 150,000 to live in concentration camps.
For years, Suu Kyi dummied up when reporters asked her about the genocide or answered in platitudes urging people to get along with each other or evasions calling for rule of law. Her evasions were taken as diplomacy even though it’s really hard to be a champion of human rights if diplomacy is your schtick. Usually daring & fearlessness are essential qualities of such champions, not cowardice or talking with marbles in your mouth.
But now Suu Kyi is the head of state in what is called (without a hint of sarcasm) “Myanmar’s first democratically elected government since 1962.” She won that election through a loathsome compromise with the military junta & by supporting their neoliberal policies bringing in foreign investment & mining projects at the expense of farmers & rural workers. Some of those farmers & villagers were way ahead of the rest of the world in understanding her betrayals when they booed her out of town for saying the expropriations of their lands & destruction of the environment were “for the greater good.”
Now the NY Times reports that in a recent meeting, Suu Kyi advised the US ambassador against using the term “Rohingya” to describe the Muslim people of Myanmar because her government does not recognize them as citizens. Using the same kind of marble-mouthed deceits she used to blither to reporters, her representative told the ambassador, “We won’t use the term Rohingya because Rohingya are not recognized as among the 135 official ethnic groups.” He added, “Our position is that using the controversial term does not support the national reconciliation process & solving problems.”
The US government is hardly the champion of human rights in all this. Hillary Clinton & Obama have both made high profile visits to Myanmar & paid homage to Suu Kyi as a human rights advocate. US multinationals are pouring billions of investment into Myanmar. If the US ambassador expresses any concern about genocide against Rohingya, it is only that the genocide not come back to interfere with those investments.
Solidarity with Rohingya Muslims against genocide & for justice means educating about their struggle against genocide & part of that education requires exposing the murderous duplicity & collusion of Suu Kyi.
(Photo is from AP)
Motherhood is a a very special thing despite attempts to sentimentalize it, demean it, or glorify it as women’s only purpose–& even if some are epic failures at it. It’s a hard job & special, sacred trust because mothers are entrusted with children & introducing them safely to a scary, complex world.
They’re trying to demean motherhood by making it a techno-electronic or rent-a-womb thing, as if one could ever replace human bonds & nurturance between woman & child.
Feminism is often accused of being anti-motherhood. On the contrary. What feminism wants is respect for women & children & for the bonds of human love.
Happy Mother’s Day.
It would be a lot more impressive that London’s new mayor Sadiq Khan is a Muslim & son of an immigrant Pakistani bus driver if he weren’t also publicly opposed to BDS. Actually, his opposition to BDS makes him very unimpressive indeed since it means he doesn’t understand or is willing to compromise on one of the most urgent issues in world politics today: Israeli apartheid & colonization of Palestine. It means our man doesn’t understand the pernicious role of the US & the UK in the Middle East & is willing to leave the Palestinians completely unarmed before a mighty military machine.
Everybody was all excited in the US when Obama became the first Black president. Look how that turned out several wars & thousands of drone bombings later. Clinton supporters push her as the first woman president. We already know where that’s headed, especially in her pledge to destroy BDS & aggravate conflict in the Middle East at the behest of her Israeli benefactors.
In the early days of feminism, many thought women leaders would herald the dawn of Aquarius & peace would reign on the planet. But there’s that little matter of Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Madeleine Albright, Condoleeza Rice, Angela Merkel, Christine Lagarde, Hillary Clinton.
One’s religion, gender, nationality, ethnicity are of little consequence in political office except for one thing: it means voters are less hateful toward Blacks, women, Muslims. Good. So we should take advantage of that progress & offer voters candidates who are worthy of that respect.
Mother’s Day is a time to pay tribute to the tens of thousands of mothers around the world whose children have been disappeared, tortured, murdered for taking an active stand against injustice & oppression. In country after country today, from Mexico to Kashmir, mothers & families of the disappeared organize to provide support to families & demand answers from the oppressive regimes that ripped their children away.
Those mothers never go away even after decades as they continue to pressure the regimes for such monstrous crimes. Photographic montages of the disappeared are a universal feature of their resistance which are still displayed decades later of the disappeared under Franco’s regime in Spain, the dictatorship in Argentina, the genocides in Honduras, Guatemala, Sri Lanka. Those photo montages stand as a symbol that the disappeared, through their families, will haunt justice until it is served.
The protester in the top photo is Jana Begum, a Kashmiri mother & activist in the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) in Indian-occupied Kashmir. APDP was founded by Parveena Ahangar after the disappearance of her 17-year-old son, Javaid Ahmad, in 1990. There are an estimated 8 to 10,000 Kashmiris disappeared under the Indian military occupation.
The protesters in the bottom photo are mothers & family members of 43 Ayotzinapa students disappeared in September 2014 by the Mexican military. In the past decade, over 22,000 Mexicans have been disappeared by the Mexican military which enforces martial law in the country under the guise of the war on drugs.
Our deepest respect to these mothers & activists & our fullest solidarity.
Mother’s Day is problematic for the many women who had/have a troubled relationship with their mothers. It isn’t talked about much & probably isn’t researched enough but it’s very common for mothers to have resentful relationships with their girls. Maybe that’s not true in every culture, but it certainly is in the US. Maybe it wasn’t true before feminism in the 1960s but it sure was after.
Girl’s forms of rebellion are different from boys & are in some ways more confrontational & honest. Many mothers can’t handle that. The tensions that develop don’t usually rise to the level of abuse–though sometimes they do. But the relationship, even if loving, is filled with subtle & acute conflicts & very often competitions.
If you’re the daughter in this exchange, it’s a matter of life-long regret & loss. So when Mother’s Day comes, it’s hard to join the celebration since it seems to trivialize the loss.
This is what you call cultural appropriation–& in the era of Islamophobic hysteria, it is a political affront. The outfits are by Israeli designer Sasha Nassar who won the International Womenswear Prize for the full collection in 2013. Haaretz called Nassar “the Jaffa-born designer with an Arab spring in her step” because she claimed her designs were inspired by the Arab uprisings.
In the florid (not apparently intended to be snide) description of the Haaretz reviewer, Nassar was inspired “by motifs borrowed from Muslim culture, into which she also incorporated Arabic numerals that represent the dates on which protests erupted in Arab countries.” The reviewer added that the collection “can be seen as representing the transition from a traditional Muslim garment to contemporary Western-style clothing, with all its fashionable & seductive elements.”
The judges of the prize say they were “captivated with the investigation of contemporary cultural conflicts that Sasha played with veiling & unveiling, muslim & European motifs.”
The collection can be seen as transitions & investigations & inspirations but that’s only if fashion operates in a hermetically sealed universe where the burqa is not used as a political weapon to justify bombing entire countries to smithereens or to persecuting & denying civil liberties to Muslim women or to denying refugees asylum.
Whether Nassar or the judges understood it intellectually & politically (a doubtful speculation), on a visceral, intellectual, & political level this fashion collection is an affront to Muslim women–in particular those women wearing burqas in Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, & elsewhere who were leading the Arab uprisings for democracy.
Diaphanous is lovely; it’s hard to go wrong wearing it to the prom or at a swanky beach party. But when it’s used to mock women who led the most momentous events of the past several years or Palestinian women opposing Israeli colonialism & apartheid, then it becomes cultural appropriation with sarcastic & malignant intent.
(Photo from runway in Vogue)
Dick Cheney, the former vice president & hated war criminal (now only alive due to electronic fixtures), says he will support Drumpf for president.The Bush gang say they will not. Which one is more the kiss of death?
We wait with feverish anticipation for the lesser evil stuff around Drumpf & Clinton to kick in. The farce of this election will then become the reductio ad absurdum of electoral politics–as is fitting for president of the US during the era of neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism.
This is a boy in a makeshift shelter outside an unused airport in Athens, Greece which is being used to warehouse stranded refugees, most of them Afghans, since the EU is not allowing them to move north to other European countries.
An estimated 856,723 refugees arrived in Greece last year & an estimated 155,300 this year. It’s not certain how many gained entrance to other European countries. But since the Greek border is now hermetically sealed, some estimate nearly half-a-million refugees are stranded in Greece while the EU makes preparations to deport them back to Turkey. That’s a lot of people unaccounted for.
More than 370,000 of the refugees are children, including 90,000 unaccompanied children primarily from Afghanistan, Syria, Eritrea, & Iraq. Their lives are in grave danger because of EU policies.
How long is the EU going to let this situation go on? There is less media coverage of refugees in Greece now since the deportation procedures are going to be aggressive, violent, undemocratic. There is already plenty of evidence for refugees aggressively resisting authorities. So the devil’s pact between the EU & Turkey to forcibly deport them from Greece to Turkey will not go well.
Refugee & immigrant rights are a touchstone in politics today. If you do not stand against wars & sweatshop economics creating refugees & if you do not stand resolutely with refugee & immigrant rights to asylum, you should abandon political activism & take up twiddly-sticks.
Immigration is a human right. Open the damn borders.
(Photo by Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters)