Wednesday, 28 August 2013

To have a dream half a century later



Martin Luther King, Jr.
"I Have a Dream" speech | Full text
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963



Half a century after the March on Washington and the famous “I Have a Dream” speech, the event has been neatly folded into America’s patriotic mythology. Relatively few people know or recall that the Kennedy administration tried to get organizers to call it off; that the FBI tried to dissuade people from coming; that racist senators tried to discredit the leaders; that twice as many Americans had an unfavorable view of the march as a favorable one. Instead, it is hailed not as a dramatic moment of mass, multiracial dissidence, but as a jamboree in Benetton Technicolor, exemplifying the nation’s unrelenting progress toward its founding ideals.

Central to that repackaging of history is the misremembering of King’s speech. It has been cast not as a searing indictment of American racism that still exists, but as an eloquent period piece articulating the travails of a bygone era. 

[...]

When it comes to assessing the political content of the speech, the distinction between segregation and racism is crucial. To the extent that King’s words were about bringing an end to codified, legal segregation, then the dream has been realized. “Whites Only” signs have been taken down; the laws have been struck. Since 1979, Birmingham, Alabama, has had only black mayors. If simply being black—as opposed to the historical legacy of racism—was ever the sole barrier to economic, social or political advancement, that obstacle has been officially removed. 

But to the extent that the speech was about ending racism, one can say with equal confidence that its realization is not even close. Black unemployment is almost double that of whites; the percentage of black children living in poverty is almost triple that of whites; black male life expectancy in Washington, DC, is lower than in the Gaza Strip; one in three black boys born in 2001 stands a lifetime risk of going to prison; more black men were disenfranchised in 2004 because they were felons than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment ostensibly secured their right to vote.

[...] [T]he speech was clearly more about wider racism than just segregation. By fudging the distinction between the two—or by actively misinterpreting them—it is possible to cast racism as an aberration of the past, as the Supreme Court effectively did when it gutted the Voting Rights Act this past spring. Only then can the vast, enduring differences in the material position of blacks and whites be understood as the failings of individuals rather than the consequences of ongoing institutional, economic and political exclusion.


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Sunday, 25 August 2013

Abusive crackdown on migrants in Greece


Athens police are conducting abusive stops and searches and have detained tens of thousands of people in a crackdown on irregular migration, Human Rights Watch said [...].

The 52-page report, “Unwelcome Guests: Greek Police Abuses of Migrants in Athens,” documents frequent stops of people who appear to be foreigners, unjustified searches of their belongings, insults, and, in some cases, physical abuse. Many are detained for hours in police stations pending verification of their legal status.

“It’s cruelly ironic that the authorities named the sweeps Xenios Zeus, after the ancient Greek god of hospitality,” said Eva Cossé, a Greece specialist at Human Rights Watch and author of the report. “In fact, Operation Xenios Zeus is anything but hospitable to migrants and asylum seekers, who are regularly stopped, searched, and detained just because of the way they look.”

Between August 2012, when Operation Xenios Zeus began, and February 2013, the police forcibly took almost 85,000 foreigners to police stations to verify their immigration status. No more than 6 percent were found to be in Greece unlawfully, suggesting the police are casting an extraordinarily wide net.

The report draws on dozens of interviews with people who have been subjected to at least one stop since Operation Xenios Zeus began. Many of those interviewed had a legal right to be in Greece at the time of the stops because they are asylum seekers, legal foreign residents, or Greeks of foreign origin.

Many said they felt they were stopped because of their physical characteristics and gave disturbing accounts of clear targeting on the basis of race or ethnicity.

Tupac, a 19-year-old Guinean asylum seeker, for example, said that in early February police officers forced him and other black and Asian passengers out of a bus in central Athens: “[P]olice officers came to the door and said ‘All blacks out, all blacks out.’”

While stops can involve a relatively quick check of identity papers, Human Rights Watch found that migrants and asylum seekers with a legal right to be in Greece are regularly subjected to lengthy procedures, both on the street and at police stations, that amount to unjustified deprivation of liberty. Many people are held by police officers in the street, confined in police buses, and detained in police stations and the Aliens Police Division for hours without any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing, Human Rights Watch said.

[...]

International and Greek law prohibit discrimination, arbitrary deprivation of liberty, unjustified interference with the right to privacy, and violations of dignity and the right to physical integrity. International and national standards also require respectful treatment by the police.

The Greek government should revise its general stop and search powers, including for Operation Xenios Zeus, Human Rights Watch said. The government should adopt legal and policy reforms to ensure that all measures to identify irregular migrants are conducted in full compliance with national and international law prohibiting discrimination, including ending ethnic profiling, and arbitrary deprivation of liberty.

“No one should be held by the police, even for a short time, without good reason,” Cossé said. “Greece’s struggle to manage immigration is no excuse for violating people’s rights.”




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Tuesday, 20 August 2013

Let there be a landscape of open eyes




On 19 August 1936, Federico García Lorca was murdered by the fascist squads of General Franco. The fascist regime burned his books in public, and subsequently banned them. Federico García Lorca was the greatest modern Spanish poet and dramatist, and is celebrated as one of the most significant literary figures of all time. To this day, the place where his body rests remains unknown.

            In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.
            Nobody is asleep.
            The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
            The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
            And the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the street corner
            The unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the stars.

            Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.
            Nobody is asleep.
            In a graveyard far off there is a corpse
            Who has moaned for three years
            Because of a dry countryside on his knee;
            And that boy they buried this morning cried so much
            It was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.

            Life is not a dream.  Careful!  Careful!  Careful!
            We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
            Or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead dahlias.
            But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;
            Flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths
            In a thicket of new veins,
            And whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever
            And whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.

            One day
            The horses will live in the saloons
            And the enraged ants
            Will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the eyes of cows.

            Another day
            We will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead
            And still walking through a country of gray sponges and silent boats
            We will watch our ring flash and roses spring from our tongue.
            Careful!  Be careful!  Be careful!
            The men who still have marks of the claw and the thunderstorm,
            And that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention of the bridge,
            Or that dead man who possesses now only his head and a shoe,
            We must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes are waiting,
            Where the bear's teeth are waiting,
            Where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting,
            And the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder.

            Nobody is sleeping in the sky. Nobody, nobody.
            Nobody is sleeping.
            If someone does close his eyes,
            A whip, boys, a whip!
            Let there be a landscape of open eyes
            And bitter wounds on fire.
            No one is sleeping in this world. No one, no one.
            I have said it before.

            No one is sleeping.
            But if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the night,
            Open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight
            The lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theaters.




 

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Sunday, 18 August 2013

Amnesty International: prolonged detention of migrants and allegations of police abuse


Amnesty International expresses once more its profound concerns over the prolonged periods of detention of irregular migrants and asylum-seekers and the very poor detention conditions in various immigrations detention facilities and police stations in Greece.

These were the reasons that led people detained in detention centre of Amygdaleza to start a riot last Saturday evening in protest of the treatment they were receiving. According to reports, the riot was prompted by people detained in the centre after finding out that they would be held up to eighteen months and not twelve months as they were originally told; police guards cut off the electricity in two of the containers used as sleeping areas after the migrants started using the air conditioning; some were hit and verbally abused by police guards when they refused to get back to their containers.
In a press release issued by the Attika General Police Directorate, on 12 August 2013, the Greek police stated that the detainees attacked the police and set fire to mattresses and sleeping areas. The riot was stopped following the intervention of the riot police. It was stated that 10 police officers were injured and 41 migrants (from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Morocco) were arrested and that they would face charges of causing of unrest and serious bodily harm. The Ministry of Citizens' Protection also underlined that the aim is to detain each and every irregular migrant until he/she is returned to his/her country unless the competent bodies claim that he/she is entitled to international protection.
The organization was informed by lawyers that the migrants arrested during the riot were beaten by the police when transferred at the Petrou Ralli detention facility in Athens. According to further reports, the police has also stopped people in Amygdaleza from going out of their containers after the riot despite the unbearable heat. 

During the organization's visits at the Amygdaleza detention facility in April and July 2013, detainees expressed their despair over their prolonged detention and reported amongst others poor quality of food, poor hygiene and difficulties of speaking to their families with limited access to phones. Both police and detainees spoke about their concerns over hygiene in view of the lack of funding to employ cleaners in the detention facility. In recent months, the organization also received allegations of ill-treatment of some detainees transferred from Amygdaleza to the Eleftherios Venizelos airport in order to be deported. 

Detention conditions and the lack of procedural safeguards surrounding detention in Greece have been regularly criticized by human rights organisations as well as the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment and Punishment (CPT) and the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA). Furthermore, between 2009 and the end of 2012, the European Court of Human Rights has found Greece in breach of Article 3 in 11 cases concerning the detention conditions of refugees and migrants held in immigration detention centres or border guard stations. 

The Greek authorities must end the practice of systematic and prolonged detention of irregular migrants and asylum-seekers; and, investigate without delay all allegations of abuse by police guards prior to the riot in Amygdaleza and in Petrou Ralli detention facility.

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Friday, 16 August 2013

I think not

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Monday, 12 August 2013

Taksim Commune: a documentary film on Gezi Park and the uprising in Turkey

This short documentary tells the story of the occupation of Gezi Park, the eviction on July 15, 2013, and the protests that have continued in the aftermath. It includes interviews with many participants and footage never before seen.

Since the end of May 2013, political unrest has swept across Turkey. In Istanbul, a large part of the central Beyoğlu district became a battle zone for three consecutive weeks with conflicts continuing afterward. So far five people have died and thousands have been injured.

The protests were initially aimed at rescuing Istanbul’s Gezi Park from being demolished as part of a large scale urban renewal project. The police used extreme force during a series of police attacks that began on May 28th 2013 and which came to a dramatic head in the early morning hours of Friday May 31st when police attacked protesters sleeping in the park.

Over the course of a few days, the police attacks grew to shocking proportions. As the images of the heavy-handed policing spread across the world, the protests quickly transformed into a popular uprising against the Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and his style of authoritarian rule.




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Thursday, 8 August 2013

Amnesty International: forced HIV testing and harassment of transgender women in Greece

 Barbara Kruger, All Violence is an Illustration of a Pathetic Stereotype, 1991 [arthistoryarchive.com]

The reintroduction of the regulation on the transmission of infectious diseases by the Greek Health Minister puts vulnerable groups including sex workers, HIV positive individuals and drug-injecting users at risk of further discrimination and stigmatization. Amnesty International calls on the Greek authorities to immediately overturn the new regulation and to end these discriminatory practices, which violate European and International human rights obligations.

The regulation by Greece’s new Health Minister, Adonis Georgiadis, comes after Thessaloniki police escalated arbitrary ID checks of transgender women in late May this year. 

Representatives of the Greek Transgender Support Association told the organization that 25 transgender women in Thessaloniki were stopped for ID checks and then transferred to police stations where they were arbitrarily detained for several hours and then released and that the checks are still on-going. Furthermore, Elektra Koutra, a lawyer representing the Greek Transgender Support Association, reported to the organization how she was arbitrarily detained and intimidated by police when she went to see some of her clients at a police station in Thessaloniki last June.

The country’s Minister for Citizen Protection attempted to justify the actions as a bid to “improve the image” of areas of Thessaloniki, saying they were aimed at tackling prostitution and improving safety and “the [city’s] image”. 

The introduction of the regulation for the first time in May 2012, resulted in hundreds of alleged sex workers, drug users and migrants being arrested, transferred to police stations and forced to undergo HIV tests. It was suspended a month ago by the previous deputy Health Minister, F. Skopouli, as a result of severe criticism it received by international human rights bodies, national and international non-governmental organizations including Amnesty International. 

Twenty nine women who underwent forced HIV testing last year and were found to be HIV-positive had their names, personal details and photographs published in the media, under the guise of protecting public health. Accused in media reports of being “prostitutes” and “health bombs”, they were detained for months after being charged with the offence of “causing serious bodily harm with intent”. In January and March 2013, eight of the women were acquitted and released. The rest were also released while for twelve of the women the felony charges brought against them were turned to a lesser offence. 

By disproportionately targeting vulnerable groups, including transgender people, sex workers, and people living with HIV, the new measures will only further marginalize them and leave them open to further human rights violations.

The organization wishes to express its serious concern and calls on the Greek authorities to end the harassment of the vulnerable groups and withdraw this regulation immediately. Furthermore, the organization also calls the Greek authorities to conduct a prompt and impartial investigation into the reported arbitrary detention of Elektra Koutra, the legal representative of the transgender women.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
 
Amnesty International wishes to underline that HIV prevention initiatives must be based on evidence and in-line with human rights law. Testing should be undertaken voluntarily and accompanied by an offer of pre- and post-test counselling, to ensure that individuals are given the opportunity to provide valid, informed consent to testing and treatment. Forced HIV testing and criminalisation of sex work and HIV transmission or exposure have been recognised internationally as running contrary to public health aims. For HIV prevention initiatives to be effective, individuals must feel confident that they can be tested voluntarily for HIV without fear of repercussions or criminalisation. Where punitive sanctions exist, individuals are less likely to come forward to test. 

According to the Greek Transgender Support Association, between 50 to 60 transgender women were arrested and forced to undergo HIV testing following the introduction of the provision last year. 

In relation to the recent arrests of transgender women in Thessaloniki, the representatives of the Greek Transgender Support Association informed Amnesty International that they took place even when the transgender women were in their car or were going to buy something and that during their detention were subjected to abusive and discriminatory remarks. Many of them were stopped and held to the police stations in that manner more than once. Amnesty International also spoke to some of the transgender women arrested who described the fear they experienced following their harassment. 

Discrimination and violence against transgender individuals is widespread in Greece. Amnesty International spoke to a transgender girl who was attending an evening school who described to the organization how she has been discriminated against by school authorities and bullied and physically threatened by her peers. Transgender individuals are targeted with violence by non-state parties on a regular basis and often harassed by the police as Amnesty International was told by the Greek Transgender Support Association last March during a fact-finding mission to Athens.

 
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Sunday, 4 August 2013

Give it up!, by Franz Kafka and Peter Kuper


Franz Kafka
 Give It Up!

It was very early in the morning, the streets were clean and empty as I journeyed to the train station. As I synchronised my watch with a clock tower I saw that it was already later than I had thought, I must make haste, the shock of this discovery left me unsure of the way, I did not know this city so well, luckily there was a watchman nearby, I walked up to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: "You want to hear the way from me?". "Yes", I said, "as I can not find it myself." "Give it up, give it up", he said and he swung around with the momentum of someone who wanted to be alone with his laughter. 
 



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