Reflections as Egypt goes all #shahbag

Patrick Galey puts the happenings in Egypt in a way that renders the foolishnesses rampant in Bangladesh (Re: Shahbag) and Turkey (re: Occupygezi) http://patrickgaley.com/2013/07/01/the-day-the-revolution-died/

The power of the Fascmob, a spontaneous gathering of intolerant mendacity,  to reverse justice and political gains is never to be under estimated.

I remember when the news of Mubarak's stepping aside was announced on Jumma day of February the 11th 2011, the closing day of the World Social Forum in Dakar Senegal. Then, the possibility of another world seemed closer then than it does today.

It was a strange time that I called Threedom, where Islamists, Leftists and Liberals jumped for joy and painted their meanings all over the matter.

The problem of seculib cheating, and the support for this cheating needs to be investigated.

#OccupyGezi, as Turkey's own #Shahbag, but not exactly and the #OccupyHypocrisy of the spectacle

Similarities
Ultra nationalist symbols.... check
Liberation motanarratives.... check
Occupy branding without irony.... check
Political partisan capture, mediation if not blue-printing.... check
Secularist political polarity .... check
Strategic Civic Tree Conservationism.... check
Crazy seculib intellectuals in favour of.... check
Muslim Islamophobia well expressed .... check
Better Art than the adversary.... check
Bandwagoning from seculiberalefty internationale and neocon-gineers .... check
Limits of bismilla capitalism on show .... check

Differences.
#Occupygezi is anti government, #Shahbag was pro-government.
Maturity of response and depth of punditry to contest, and caress, the enraged.... uncheck. Oh desh where is your Zaman, your people of Aykol's eloquence and intellect if not exact politics?
Depth of social alcoholeering..... uncheck. Can't believe all that fuss over the right-to-get-pissed near mosques and schools, Turkey. Its as if the Alcopaks took over the asylum.
Leadership quality .... AKP have good conciliatory people iA
Nature of International press on the ground..... uncheck. Istanbul is a lovely place, the edge of Europe and an economy of plenty. Dhaka is difficult to move around, a centre for Developmentia, in the hinterland of Asia and only interesting for poverty, disaster and climate pornography.

Analysis
Craig Murray on Talking Turkey
Muslim Matters on Twitter Idiocy
Hugh Pope blog injects a little realism


#OccupyHypocrisy
Any police brutality is abominable, whether in London Istanbul and Dhaka. But what can we say about this selective human rights response?
As the bodies of those murdered in a far more bloody episode of government brutality in Bangladesh decay, ignored for a month, covered up, disinterested in and even insulted in death, we celebrate the #occupyhypocrisy of the hipster lefty for falling for the same love-the-mob set piece so uncritically, again.

Why we don't know enough about Motijheel? Why can't it be simple?

Last month an estimated 10 000 police and paramilitaries fired upon a crowds of up an estimated 100 000 unarmed and sleeping religious protesters in Motijheel, a heavily built up business district in Dhaka Bangladesh. They had come to challenge the religious defamation, denigration and abuse of religious figures by a number of increasingly powerful elements of society and government.

A government cover-up was undertaken, bodies cleared away, mass arrests, follow up operations and misinformation campaigns were waged. Censorship was no only ipmosed, but willingly supported by much of the national media and NGO crowd. Most of the dissenting media had already been silenced in preceding months and weeks. The channels that tried to cover events live were summarily shut down.

Here are some heart searing videos.  Attack on Rally on 5th (day)  Massacre on 6th (early morning) 

The terrible events of 5th and 6th May in Dhaka game changing, but their causal relations with  1) the Bangladesh War Crimes Tribunals,  2) the Shahbag Movement and 3) the politics of election year haunt any attempt to establish the facts, raise the alarm and invoke a community of justice.

These relationships make finding the truth of the Motijheel Massacre fearful ground to tread, as this is hard to work though without challenging the formative national narrative,  contemporary urban pop culture and its associated peer pressure and political distortion.

With such a lot of turmoil going on why should we try to make sense out of yet more trouble in Bangladesh? Isn't that the job of the media and investigative journalism?

But the gauntlet is that we must walk towards the clues and facts, pick them up, look at them and listen to the thousands of stories they tell us. Its not easy

1, 2, 3 Easy as ABC ?

In a recent ABC (Australia) radio programme some progress is made in explaining the tribunals, if just at least to register the, probably consensual absence of Bengali Muslims from telling the story and the Bangladeshi establishment positions of Meghna Guhatakurta, a Dhaka academic whose father was killed by pak forces in operation searchlight, who says that 'victims are satisfied with the tribunal process', and Australia based Bina D'Costa, who pronounces Pakistan is a very peculiar way, who says that the independent government drew on soviet sources for the 3 million (multidimensional bollocks).

Listen here, its rare to hear both sides in the same programme because the seculib block maintains a total non engagement with the substance of their increasingly coherent and articulate companion's discourse. Dr Guhatakurta complains that the victim's don't have the international resources and connections that those accused of war crimes have. I think this is odd, given that a third of the educated bangladeshis int he world talk about little else than 1971 and that their discourse dominates the establishment literature and media's bias against non secular people.

Toby Cadman, London-based barrister assisting the accused in the tribunals, and Sarmila Bose, Oxford-based researcher whose 'Dead Reckoning' book the Bangladeshi establishment has been discriminating against and avoiding the substance of for 2 years, also feature in the edited programme. I think radio/sound is a good medium of integrating contesting voices from around the globe. As a multipolar learning exchange with the truth as the objective is nigh on impossible without descending to a cat-fight or a massacre, the indignity of playing this out over the airwaves of whitey seems inevitable.

I remember when Brick Lane Circles hosted Sarmila Bose in London, (watch it on Vimeo here) the Awami League establishment tried to institute a boycott against the platform by scaring the curious away from it. One competing west Bengali researcher, Nayanika Mukherjee made an ass of herself at the event and is on record blowing her top of.

It is interesting that the official gatekeepers of the victims of 1971 should suggest 'you are marginalising our voice', with the symbolically unassailable identity of being orphaned by this carnage, part of the present knowledge producing establishment, urban, academic, female and not of the majority religion. On the contrary, I think the 1971 establishment narrative has the greatest global soft power projection and have spoken about the Double Standards of Evidence in relation to the Motijheel incident recently. Take the comparative coverage of yesterdays police brutality in Istanbul and last month's massacre of protesters in Motijheel.

#OccupyHypocrisy

In Turkey yesterday the AKP government's urban development thinking  (bismillah capitalism) and use of police came in for attack as they cracked down violently on Occupygezi protesters, killing one. Hardcore ultra-nationalist CHP and global occupy infrastructure then became one and the global media jumped up and down, not out of interest for public spaces, but because of the opportunity to give a non-secular government a good kicking. The constructive alignment of interests show that its not killing that's a problem, but who you kill, and the reporting interests and relay infrastructure around them.

The corporate media has its weakness written into its business model.

By contrast, there was very little national or international interest in the Motijheel massacre, which killed many many people. Here the secular liberal Bangladeshi establishment, with its people well embedded in the international media ( Sabir Mustafa at BBC Bengali, Anushay Hussain at Al Jazeera the Stream for a start) has confused, blocked scrutiny and toed the government line.

The #Occupy phenomena has been thoroughly captured by neoliberalism and bled of meaning for partisan national politicking.  Frame your spectacle with occupy branding and range it against any political islam for easy digestibility and travel along the global left. Here we have Turkey' very own Shahbag movment, but with open alcohol, kissing (last week) and  irresponsible (ab)use of mosque facilities.

Both government brutalities in Dhaka and Istanbul had equipment in common, the Otokar Kobra, a Turkish manufactured riot car. In the still captured here, a Dhaka Metropolitan Policeman is caught mid-fire in vehicle serial number 26. This is sad because Turkish Muslim political and civil society has done much for justice in Bangladesh and for the Rohingya. Chillingly, the Dhaka Metropolitan Police have been busy hobnobbing with the US Embassy over "Special Event Management"

A young Dhaka Metropolitan Police officer fires into an unarmed crowd of what looks like a Otokar Kobra vehicle in the early hours of 6th Feb. 

The Epistemic Politics of Knowing Killing

The reporting infrastructure around the Martyrs of Motihjeel has been poor and largely ignored. With the main human rights NGO, Sultana Kamal's 300 strong Ain-o-Salish Kendra taking the side of the government generally on annihilation of opposition, and specifically Motijheel and Tribunals issues, the role of alternatives, like the smaller Odhikar organisation have become more important. They were amongst the first to press release strongly on it after the killings and provide some good data in their monthly review document which can be read online, and ends in their own 13 points.

There are other resources, like the group blog Kaagoj, the indomitable Basherkella Facebook group phenomenon ( get an editor and watch your backs guys), the committed February 28 Info initiative (whose image library and analysis is worth soaking in) and the analytical Khichuri .

I'm not sure that Odhikar accessed them, and feel that there is a great deal of parallel work going on on discovering the truth behind the Motijheel incident, but for various, but ultimately inexcusable, reasons, the important questions, data and spadework is not being done.

In the meantime the Bangladesh government, led for now by the Awami League, has been able to clean the scene, deceive the public and turn this into a fundamentalist/militancy issue. The main opposition BNP is not interested in establishing the facts, Jamaat e Islami Bangladesh are still running for their lives and I really do not know how to describe the (non) function of Hefazot e Islam at present. As the primary oppressed party, condolences and counselling should be offered, not derision and parasitical questioning.

This leaves the knowledge gap quite huge, but it is out there, some of it is digital and accessible to us, some of it human and scared and politically muted, a lot of it physical, think of all the damage to the urban fabric of dhaka that tell stories, bullet holes, broken glass and general detritus. This has not been properly dealt with, people on the ground who have not taken the initiative.

So we must, warts and all.

Looking through the Diganta coverage of the day and the night is useful to get a feel for progression of violence during the day, but what we really need to piece together are the reflected experiences from the day,

• from Lalbagh Madrassa where Hefazot seniors were headquartered, and surrendered.
• through the events around the National Mosque in which police and Awami Aligned thugs attacked protesters from early afternoon,
• and Motijheel where the government violence centred, 
• as well as Kachpur (12km away from Motijheel, where there are rumours of hindi speakers being involved) and Hathazari (near chittagong) madrasas where community's resisted government attacks after the . 

Humans not numbers
I recently came to know of an undergraduate engineering student killed, or shaheed depending of your persuasion, in the government attack on Motijheel. His Facebook account tells us of a young man very much of the middle class, educated in Government Laboratory School and Dhaka City College before gaining entry to the county's most (only remaining?) prestigious institution. His avatar was a cartoon of two young muslim men hugging each other, he liked Lord of the Rings, used to tutor kids and volunteered as part of the youth wing of the Lion's club. He liked Arundhati Roy and The God of Small things. He last posted on 20th April and I wish I could to right by his parents. Many of the other victims of that day and night will not have had such digital presences as the much vaunted 'Digital Bangladesh' is an unequal techno joke. Today (Monday) the New Age of Dhaka even misspelled his names in a report that at least proved the Governments account of non lethal force, a death toll of 11 to be false.

Lord raise you Rehan Ahsan and protect your family from the terror of state abuse. Help truth and justice be made from these despicable events.

What should be done now?
The task for us at this point is not a matter of producing and consuming media but of demonstrating a new kind of, often quite remote, collaborative citizen science and humanity.

Corporate media has its biasing built into its very business model, and so its no surprise that Al Jazeera has steadily got worse in its Bangladesh coverage over the past months as it tries to break into the US market.  What happened in Bangladesh on 5th / 6th May is bigger than any one party or social group, and therefore it is vital that a solid chunk of diverse people work on this issue in an effective manner which carries the scent of the way of things to come.

Non Aligned Movement Summit kicks of in Tehran, far more significant than the Olympics.

Most of the countries of the world imagine and work towards freedom and autonomy from the deathgrip of superpowers. At some level anyway. We do not see it more often because they are afraid.

The Non Aligned Movement (NAM) convenes in Tehran this week is what promises to be a gathering pregnant with decolonial possibilities. Held every 3 years, to mark the rotation of the organisation leadership, its fascinating that Iran are carrying the baton from that very different Egypt which held it's NAM summit in 2009, and will hand it over the Venezuela in 2015.

The next week will see a great deal of activity that we should follow carefully, and I wish I could be there. As PressTV was shunted of the UK airwaves a few months ago, and the western stance is hostile, insulting and disregarding decolonial actors, geeks and dreamers will have to try a little bit harder to know whats going on.  The NAM News Network have provided the following link for the latest news from the summit. The clip below features opening remarks from the Foreign Secretary of Iran Ali Akbar Salehi and a practical account of the relevance of the NAM space today from the Foreign Secretary of Bangladesh Mohammed Quayes. 

Formed in 1961 as an international institution to enable countries of the world to resist falling into the US-Soviet polarity, NAM holds relevance today as a way of creating unity between countries at the bum end of the United Nation's (in)security Council, resisting neoliberal western (NATO) hegemony and a space to simply be and develop positions outside the bullying US-Euro-Zionist political nexus.

Imagine that formative meeting in Belgrade, with Tito (Yugoslavia), Nasser (Egypt), Nkrumah (Ghana), Nehru (India) and Sukarno (Indonesia). What have we (un)learnt since?



It is reported that 150 countries will have representation at the summit, from top tier leaderships, to foreign ministers to less senior/serious delegations. It is worth watching the short video interview with author of The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World Vijay Prashad, where he mulls over the significance of the event simply taking place.

Egypt's President Mursi is due to attend, unlike Turkey who despite recent awesomnesses on the international front are having a frosty time with Iran given their involvement in Syria and maybe even something to do with NATO. We hope that they do find a way to get there. Even the Saudis are sending a deputy Foreign Minister.

Hasina and Zardari, PMs of Bangladesh and Pakistan respectively will attend too, along with UN Sec Gen Ban Ki Moon. Tunisia is sending its foreign minister, as is North Korea. The Palestinians are disunited ( appears that Abbas has won over Haniyeh). And of course the ALBA countries will be in there too.

The summit is awkward and intriguing depending on your politics. Unsurprisingly, Israel and its allies (ally?) have been acting to delegitimise the event and prevent UN attendance. And Iran itself is not feild of cornflowers.  Prof Hamid Dabashi, author of Brown Skin White Masks, has an interesting analysis of this summit's interaction with Iranian politics, from Mosadegh to Mousavi.

The symbolic power of the concept still rings loud, with Non-Alignment 2.0 currently doing the rounds of Indian foreign/security policy circles. (yikes)

To temporarily conclude, its heartening that more and more country groups are demonstrating disobedience to the terrorism and intimidation of the western powers. Decolonial Duas for this gathering, and its outcomes, tangible or otherwise. For updates, intrigues and explorations, you can follow the summit on the NAM News Network's pages.

Viva Palestina!

The ever increasing arsehole footprint of the Israeli State never ceases to amaze me. They kill Arabs daily, now they have killed more of the friends of the Palestinians.

Unless you have spent the whole day gardening, or watching the bbc, you might figure I am talking of the Israeli murder of 10-20 Palestinian solidarity heroes/aid deliverers. There were protests accross the UK today, and I had the opportunity to attend the London one. We were heartened by the good spontaneous turnout, responsibility and mixed origins of protesters.

The Arab League continues to resemble a row of zeroes.

I see leadership from Rais Erdogan of Turkey. Of the national leaders, I see initiative in his hands, and Allah help him and his society helps the situation. We are with you. Duas for Palestine, the convoy and its loved ones, as ever.

A minor demo inventory
Jews for Justice- Its kosher to boycott israeli goods.
College students who surely should have been revising for their exams
Heavily pregnant lady who walked all the way from whitehall to high street kensington.
Slowly driving car with guitarist on top.
And Turks.

Attaturk's face on the flags suggest to me that there are newer allies to the cause.

In international waters, which is where the State Piracy occurred, the law of the ship flag operates. As one of the speakers pointed out today, this suggests that legally the Israeli personel who pulled the triggers/ordered the operation should be extradited and tried under Turkish law.

I am also wondering where the Turkish Navy is at this point. For reference, Zaman is a good way into the Turkish press.

Several actions are being planned, across organisations and communities. See Stop The War for more info. Feet-on-the-ground demonstrations are an important part of any movement, especially this one. I encourage people to make time to participate in activities to support them and take care to implement good demo practices.

That is, to use every available opportunity to forge unity, continuity and trust within the protest ecology. We must weave together with protestors who we dont know, we will develop new tools and watch out for spoilers.