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Opposition and government to take part in internationally-sponsored peace conference, Syria peace envoy says.

Thirteen people killed and scores injured in blasts in capital and beyond amid escalating sectarian violence.

Barack Obama promises help as emergency teams sift through rubble in Oklahoma suburbs where dozens feared dead.

fieldset class="fieldgroup group-tv-guide"div class="field field-type-text field-field-current-show" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" Is this show currently playing? /div /div /div /fieldset div class="field field-type-date field-field-story-publish-date" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" span class="date-display-single"May 21, 2013/span /div /div /div div class="field field-type-text field-field-summary" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" CAIA protested outside the venue where Morgan Freeman accepted an award from Canadian Friends of Hebrew University, ignoring the cultural and academic boycott of Israel. /div /div /div fieldset class="fieldgroup group-video-information"div class="field field-type-emvideo field-field-embedded-video" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" div class="emvideo emvideo-video emvideo-vimeo"div id="media-vimeo-1" class="media-vimeo" iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/66095551?fullscreen=1show_title=1show_byline=1show_portrait=1autoplay=0" width="562" height="350"/iframe /div /div /div /div /div div class="field field-type-link field-field-where-to-find" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" a href="http://vimeo.com/66095551" target="_blank"BDS groups protest: Morgan Freeman pull the plug, say No!/a /div /div /div /fieldset pBest-of-the-Net video: On May 6 CAIA protested outside the venue where Morgan Freeman accepted an award from Canadian Friends of Hebrew University, ignoring the cultural and academic boycott of Israel launched by Palestinian civil society in 2005. Radio host Jian Ghomeshi was emcee of the event./pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=oJRNGSICwXI:AFzTUg4xSZs:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=oJRNGSICwXI:AFzTUg4xSZs:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=oJRNGSICwXI:AFzTUg4xSZs:dnMXMwOfBR0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?d=dnMXMwOfBR0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=oJRNGSICwXI:AFzTUg4xSZs:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?i=oJRNGSICwXI:AFzTUg4xSZs:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=oJRNGSICwXI:AFzTUg4xSZs:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?i=oJRNGSICwXI:AFzTUg4xSZs:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/rabble-news/~4/oJRNGSICwXI" height="1" width="1"/

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pThree years after the ECHR's decision innbsp;emOršuš and Others v. Croatia/emnbsp;found separate but equal education to be unconstitutional, the Roma Education Fund traveled to Međimurje County in Croatia to see how the integration of Croat and Roma schoolchildren had progressed./p /div /div /div p class=image-captionimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/02 REF Monitors and Teacher at Kursanec.JPG alt= width=460 height=345 /REF monitors in a classroom innbsp;Kuršanec, Croatia.nbsp;Roma Education Fund/Tom Bass. All rights reserved./ppTo mark the third anniversary of thenbsp;ema href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Or%C5%A1u%C5%A1_and_Others_v._CroatiaOršuš and Others v. Croatia/a/emnbsp;ruling of the European Court of Human Rights, the Roma Education Fund traveled to Međimurje County in Croatia as part of its regular monitoring of preschool integration projects. REF has been in partnership with the county and the Croatian Ministry of Education since 2010 as part of Croatia’s obligation to prevent discrimination against Roma in its school system./ppJoining other landmark decisions by the ECHR in cases such asnbsp;emD.H. and Others v. Czech Republic/emnbsp;and this year’snbsp;emHorváth and Kiss v. Hungary/em,nbsp;Oršušnbsp;found that Romani children’s rights had been violated in the Croatian school system. This judgement also adds weight to the judgments against other states in Central Europe that persist in allowing segregated schools and classes for Roma. If and how the states choose to act is another question due to the Court's limited powers of implementation. REF has been instrumental in providing models and policy solutions to what many people, including state representatives, often presuppose to be an intractable Roma problem./ph2strongČakovec: The county seat/strong/h2pPressed between Slovenia and Hungary is a triangle of Croatian land surrounded by flood-prone river boundaries. Međimurje County is the northernmost, smallest, yet most densely populated Croatian county. It is home to approximately 120,000 people who work primarily in agriculture and also supply western economies with migrant labour. According to a 2001 census, there are less than 3,000 Roma living in the county; although the real number of Roma is estimated to be nearly 30,000 - the highest number of Roma anywhere in Croatia./ppAt the county seat of Čakovec, the prefect and local school officials assure us they are doing their utmost to provide Romani children in the area with quality, inclusive education. This willingness to change is only after much persuasion by REF in the aftermath of the county’s loss of face in the Oršuš case. Their responsibility is to create the preconditions for integration in primary schools within the framework of a two-year REF-led project./pp“We have to live together,” says the prefect, “We have to work with children, parents and the majority population.”/ppThe plants and binders seem to nod in perfect harmony with the lofty school and county officials. Do they really believe their schools to be islands of integration between the Mura and Drava rivers that hem in this region?/pp class=image-captionimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/03 Romani Children and Teaching Assistant in Kursanec.JPG alt= width=460 height=345 /Teaching assistant at a Romani class in Kuršanec.nbsp;Roma Education Fund/Tom Bass. All rights reserved./ph2Kuršanec: the new centre/h2pWe splash down rural roads and round snowy villages until we split off the main road at Kuršanec. A half kilometre beyond the village, with its looming church spire still in sight, we arrive at our first destination, Kuršanec Family Center, a new community facility adjoining the Romani settlement./ppA group of Romani parents greet us inside; their children play in two classrooms across the hall. In the presence of the eavesdropping officials, the mums and dads assure us that they are satisfied with the new family center and the preschool preparation their children receive; indeed, knowing how to read and how to speak Croatian are real achievements for the children of Romani parents, many of whom did not even complete primary school./ppIt leaks out that things are not quite so rosy, especially when it comes to employment. There are few opportunities for any job more sustainable than casual labour in the agricultural sector./ppOne father says, “For them, we aren’t Roma, we’re Gypsies.”/ppApparently, that’s enough in Međimurje to guarantee discrimination in the labour market and to qualify for every other kind of injustice and lack of public service – so much so that one mother claims that a better preschool in another locality demanded payment to enroll her child when absolutely no payment is necessary./ppThe officials point at their watches, declare the meeting over, and hustle us into the two classrooms. Lunch already has been served from the kitchen and the children are playing inside. One room is engaged with clusters of children working with tape, scissors, yarn, paper and glue – on the walls, series of snowmen and bunnies. In the adjoining classroom they’ve set up a store with a till and groceries. The children appear well cared for and the school appears to be comfy and cozy, with all the necessary amenities. But despite the proliferation of toys and learning tools, and the cordial atmosphere, no majority children from the village are enrolled; they’ve got their own school in the village and they are not attending. The teachers and officials smile together, satisfied./pp class=image-captionimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/romani.JPG alt= width=460 height=345 /Croat and Roma children learning together innbsp;spanMursko Središće/spanspan. Roma Education Fun/Tom Bass. All rights reserved./span/ph2Mursko Središće: our dream in action/h2pWe zigzag across the county to Mursko Središće, a small town huddled against the Slovenian border. The school is just seconds away from the border post, from Schengen, the EU and prosperity. Built before the First World War, the Maslačak (Dandelion) kindergarten is housed in an elegant building of large rooms and high ceilings./ppREF’s Country Facilitator Biserka Tomljenović issues a short brief: “This is a great example of cooperation between the local community, REF, the county and the ministry; here, all children from the Roma community have been integrated fully into the city kindergarten since 2005. The city is paying for half of the price of preschool education and the other part is paid by the ministry. REF pays for transportation.”/ppWe’re ushered inside and the school is teeming with a mixture of Romani and non-Romani children. They’re in the halls, in the bathrooms, on the staircase and in the classrooms, which are well-furnished and brimming with the children’s creative output./ppWith 33 Romani and 60 non-Romani pupils, Mursko Središće’s school is what REF speaks about when it advocates for integration and equality in education. And like all cases where improvements have been made, this hinges on local initiative and will, here embodied in the school principal, Radmila Baljak, a former refugee from the Balkan Wars, who wanted to make a difference in her adopted home town./ppWe huddle together with more staff in the teacher’s lounge. The circle is joined by Milorad Mihanovic, an elected representative of the Roma National Council in Croatia, whose children also have attended school here. “She was the only teacher who loved us Roma,” says Mihanovic, nodding at Ms. Baljak who then explains her motivations for leading the integration of the town’s preschool: “In the first month of the first year the situation was very sensitive with the majority parents. For the first two months we kept the children apart in the same building, we must admit, but after that we put them together. Since then it’s been getting better and better each year. In the first year we started with fifteen children, although there were more of them officially on the list but their attendance was uncertain, and now this has improved as well. We’re making great progress and the parents know that.”/ppVice-principal Spomenka Cilar adds, “The majority parents put a lot of pressure on us. Some parents took their children away and enrolled them in a private kindergarten. But they began to change their minds the moment when the children, who were involved in the preschool here, were enrolled in the primary school. When the non-Romani parents saw the difference, how this works better, how there were no problems like they had previously, then they started to see it as a benefit for them, too. The city mayor and the cooperation of the county school officials were also crucial.”/ph2Pribislavec: coping with change/h2pA few kilometres across the fields from Čakovec is the village of Pribislavec, home to a prominent Neo-Gothic castle. The tower casts a shadow over the town hall, where two representatives of the local Romani community are waiting. Here in Pribislavec, Romani children are bussed daily from the settlement to the village preschool and back./ppThe words of Kristijan Balog, president of the Association of Young Roma of Croatia, come as a surprise./pp“I think it would be good for the preschool programs to take place in the Romani settlement. I know that the results are achieved here as well, but I think that better results would be achieved there. I think it would be more rational economically to have it in the Roma settlement and use the funds for transportation for other things like meals.”/ppWe try to counter by arguing that if the settlement has few if any public services then, by default, educational services will also be lacklustre. We advise that integration does not equal segregation in the Romani community. REF’s entire existence is based on eliminating the geographical and physical isolation of Romani communities from mainstream schools./ppKristijan says, “The same staff from here would work there. Integration is an ideal situation which we cannot achieve overnight. This group of preschool children is getting preschool or primary education in a class where there are only Romani children anyway, so it is a Roma-only group of preschoolers in the municipality building. I see no difference here. My opinion is that the costs would be lower if the school would be in the Roma settlement. Full integration is a completely different issue.”/ppBiserko adds, “I agree with Kristijan that our people got used to getting things for nothing. Now you give them a bus. Tomorrow they will ask for the teacher to come to their home.”/ppKristijan wants to reassure us. “It may seem that we are against our own people. This isn’t true, we just see that the path we have taken, assuming responsibility as parents, directing our efforts towards our children's education. All other parents should do this as well; this is good for Roma, this will benefit the whole community.”/ppAccording to REF’s experiences, having a local Roma school is a common and contradictory demand from many communities and REF treads a fine line when deciding how to work with a community and how to meet its needs./ppUntil education systems reform, Romani schools in Romani settlements are going to stay Romani schools with inferior services and curricula. Virtually no majority parents will allow their children to attend Romani schools and would rather enroll them somewhere else; nor do they understand the benefit to their children learning in a multicultural environment in mainstream schools – as we will see at the next stop./ppSo far, no state has genuinely implemented such a program, and even the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights cannot persuade politicians held hostage by their constituents to act. What usually follows: lip service to the language of democracy, foot dragging in the halls of power and no commitment on the ground - budgetary, educational, or otherwise. /ppMeanwhile, Romani children face poor attendance, lower teaching standards, missing early childhood development goals, malnutrition, segregated schools or classrooms, culturally biased entry tests for schooling, a high risk of dropping out, and general exclusion from school life./pp class=image-captionimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/romashift.JPG alt= width=460 height=345 /span class=image-captionAfternoon nutrition program at a school innbsp;/spanspanGornji Hrašćan. Roma Education Fund/Tom Bass. All rights reserved./span/ph2Gornji Hrašćan: the spark/h2pThe site of spontaneous protests by disgruntled non-Romani parents at the start of the 2012 school year, the preschool at Gornji Hrašćan is a stone’s throw from the road./ppBiserka Tomljenović describes the conflict: “The preschool start was delayed for two days - two very difficult days - but finally an agreement was made with the non-Roma parents. These were organised protests and the children were not allowed to enter the school. The entire road was blocked, the police were here, and it was a really tough incident this school year, but a lot of effort was made by Sonja Tošić Grlač [county school official], the principal and the county prefect.”/ppThe majority’s grievances have been driven by the economic crisis and the perceived inequality in the distribution of social benefits, along with objections to the “Roma lifestyle,” leading to what is now the third public incident in Međimurje County against Roma integration.nbsp;/ppAfter reaching a compromise in September, the school now works in two shifts. The morning shift for non-Romani children attending primary school and the afternoon shift of mostly Romani children in preschool program. The building, drab and featureless, looks in need of renovation. Inside cheerful children are queuing to wash their hands before their afternoon snack. In another room they’re squeezing one by one into a cardboard house or leafing through photo albums. The shelves are stacked with Duplo blocks, the walls are covered in their vivid pictures – a ghost, a devil, a clown, a troubadour.nbsp;/ppThe pedagogue says, “This is the third year of implementation of the preschool program at our school. This year we have 52 preschool pupils, 44 Romani children and eight Croatian children. They are divided into three groups and start the afternoon at 1 PM. In the morning it is a primary school. There is only one preschool in this municipality and it is too small to receive all the children in need.”/ppShe adds more about the background to the protest, revealing what the conflict boils down to. She says, “The municipality of Trnovec to which this settlement belongs is angered by the fact that the Roma did not pay their communal expenses to take out the garbage.”/ppBut that’s not all: “Many young Croatian parents are not working - they've lost their jobs and are living off a few thousand kuna per month. But the state gives very high amounts to the Roma every month and they are not working at all. This is one thing that causes conflict.”/ppWhat we uncover is a complex story, a protest like any other, its main message supposedly about Romani pupils dumbing down the majority in class, but with another subliminal message in the background, a mixture of envy and entitlement, of disenfranchisement and dispossession, as majority membership is no longer a guarantee in the tough economic realities of today./ppNo one speaks of this, and why would they, if they can claim they are making steps to change the situation.nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;/ppThe school principal Božena Dogša wants us to look on the bright side. She says, “There is no single child [from Parag] who does not attend a preschool program. Everyone aged six to seven is here. They are coming regularly by bus. The parents are very satisfied. We organize workshops with the parents in cooperation with ISSA [International Step by Step Association], so we are teaching parents how to be responsible, how to raise their child in a proactive way, and how to work with their children to achieve some skills. So when we compare the situation to ten years ago, it has improved a lot. Two groups come once a week. And four trainers from school, too. We have one group where all the parents are together, Roma and non-Roma. Despite the differences between them, they’re cooperating, they are exchanging their parenting and life experiences, even recipes.”/ppWhen asked if there is any progress, one of the school officials encapsulates the state of affairs better than anyone, “Ten years ago we had no problem because children did not go to school. Now we have them in school.”/ppMaybe so, but by the meeting’s close, no miracle changes the mood from defensive to cooperative; we’re shepherded down the steps and wave adieu, but not without one last word from Sonja Tošić Grlač, “We expect protests here next year. It is too soon, it takes time.”/ppLater, once we’ve been hustled into the school official’s favourite hunting lodge for a meal in Čakovec, one begins to get a sense of the scale of what needs to be changed for all Romani children to have access to inclusive, quality education: from the entire Romani population of Međimurje, only two Roma are university graduates, one of whom is unemployed, and only one Roma is currently attending university./ppFor them, it’s a choice, good will, altruism; for us, we have no other choice but to wrangle concessions in the courts and in the classroom if Romani children are to fulfill their rights to inclusive, quality education./pfieldset class=fieldgroup group-sideboxslegendSideboxes/legenddiv class=field field-related-stories div class=field-labelRelated stories:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd a href=/bernard-rorke/hate-is-where-heart-is-time-for-europe-to-confront-anti-gypsyismHate is where the heart is: Time for Europe to confront anti-Gypsyism/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/valeriu-nicolae/failing-roma-againFailing Roma, again/a /div /div /div /fieldset div class=field field-country div class=field-label Country or region:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Croatia /div /div /div

Taliban launches one of the largest attacks of spring offensive in Helmand province as bomb kills seven police in Herat.

div class="field field-type-date field-field-story-publish-date" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" span class="date-display-single"Tuesday, May 21, 2013/span /div /div /div div class="field field-type-text field-field-summary" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" The Indigenous Nationhood Movement quot;aims to begin the process of decolonization through reoccupying, renaming and reclaiming traditional indigenous territories.quot; /div /div /div pemOn Wednesday, an important event will take place in Victoria in support of the Indigenous Nationhood Movement, "which aims to begin the process of decolonization through reoccupying, renaming and reclaiming traditional indigenous territories." The following statement was issued by organizers of a href="http://pkols.org/" rel="nofollow"Wednesday's event/a to reclaim the original name of Mount Douglas.nbsp;/em/pdiv class="field field-type-filefield field-field-image-for-node" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" img src="http://rabble.ca/sites/rabble/files/imagecache/120-width-scaled/node-images/pkols-little.jpg" alt="" title="" width="120" height="76" class="imagecache imagecache-120-width-scaled imagecache-default imagecache-120-width-scaled_default"/ /div /div /div pa href="http://rabble.ca/news/2013/05/pkols-first-nations-plan-day-action-to-reclaim-original-name-mount-douglas-victoria" target="_blank"read more/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=FkE9_7rO6HA:SQdGDq5QfZ4:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=FkE9_7rO6HA:SQdGDq5QfZ4:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=FkE9_7rO6HA:SQdGDq5QfZ4:dnMXMwOfBR0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?d=dnMXMwOfBR0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=FkE9_7rO6HA:SQdGDq5QfZ4:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?i=FkE9_7rO6HA:SQdGDq5QfZ4:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=FkE9_7rO6HA:SQdGDq5QfZ4:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?i=FkE9_7rO6HA:SQdGDq5QfZ4:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/rabble-news/~4/FkE9_7rO6HA" height="1" width="1"/

div class="taxonomy-images"a href="/taxonomy/term/1807" class="taxonomy-image-links"img src="http://rabble.ca/sites/rabble/files/imagecache/thumbnail/category_pictures/Final-Matthew%20Behrens.jpg" alt="Matthew Behrens" title="Matthew Behrens" width="75" height="100" class="taxonomy-image-term-1807 taxonomy-image-vid-14"//a/divdiv class="field field-type-date field-field-story-publish-date" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" span class="date-display-single"May 21, 2013/span /div /div /div div class="field field-type-filefield field-field-image-for-node" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" div class="filefield-file"img class="filefield-icon field-icon-image-jpeg" alt="image/jpeg icon" src="http://rabble.ca/sites/all/modules/contrib/filefield/icons/image-x-generic.png" /a href="http://rabble.ca/sites/rabble/files/node-images/cbsa.jpg" type="image/jpeg; length=116957" title="cbsa.jpg"Photo: GRC-RCMP/ Frontière-Border/flickr/a/div /div /div /div pToronto's legendary refugee rights lawyer Barb Jackman has a unique way of framing issues at their most human level, an art often lost by those who spend their lives in courts and immigration tribunals fighting for their clients' right not to be deported to torture and other cruelties. Testifying recently before a Senate committee on a repressive piece of deportation legislation, Jackman aptly summed up the mean political culture that increasingly grips the land./pdiv class="field field-type-text field-field-summary" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" Testifying before a Senate committee on a repressive piece of deportation legislation, refugee rights lawyer Barb Jackman aptly summed up the mean political culture that increasingly grips the land. /div /div /div fieldset class="fieldgroup group-related-items"div class="field field-type-link field-field-related-item1" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" a href="http://rabble.ca/columnists/2012/12/perversions-justice-canadas-cases-inadmissibility" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"Perversions of justice in Canada#039;s cases of inadmissibility/a /div /div /div div class="field field-type-text field-field-related-item1-desc" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" Findings of inadmissibility in Canada#039;s immigration system are condemning growing numbers to endless deportation procedures or decades of essentially stateless limbo. /div /div /div div class="field field-type-link field-field-related-item2" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" a href="http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/michael-stewart/2013/03/harper-government-responsible-cbsa-made-tv-debacle"Harper government responsible for CBSA made-for-TV debacle/a /div /div /div div class="field field-type-text field-field-related-item2-desc" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" As the smoke clears from the CBSA#039;s made-for-TV debacle, it#039;s important to point out that the conditions which made it possible are the direct result of Harper government policy. /div /div /div div class="field field-type-link field-field-related-item3" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" a href="http://rabble.ca/news/2013/04/open-letter-artists-and-cultural-producers-end-border-security-tv-series" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"Open letter from artists and cultural producers: End the #039;Border Security#039; TV series /a /div /div /div div class="field field-type-text field-field-related-item3-desc" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" quot;We write this letter out of serious concern for those already affected and those who may be harmed by future episodes of this show.quot; /div /div /div /fieldset pa href="http://rabble.ca/columnists/2013/05/canadas-culture-mean-beating-on-refugees" target="_blank"read more/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=xsssBhQueY4:rGUGobgZ38Q:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=xsssBhQueY4:rGUGobgZ38Q:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=xsssBhQueY4:rGUGobgZ38Q:dnMXMwOfBR0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?d=dnMXMwOfBR0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=xsssBhQueY4:rGUGobgZ38Q:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?i=xsssBhQueY4:rGUGobgZ38Q:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=xsssBhQueY4:rGUGobgZ38Q:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?i=xsssBhQueY4:rGUGobgZ38Q:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/rabble-news/~4/xsssBhQueY4" height="1" width="1"/

Chief executive to be questioned after Senate investigation finds it uses overseas companies to avoid paying US taxes.

Round-the-clock curfew in Maiduguri relaxed as military claims gains in battle against Boko Haram fighters.

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pCelebrations to mark the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war perform the function of collective forgetting. If the country looked back at recommendations made in the past, Sri Lankans might understand better how to go forward./p /div /div /div pOn 18 May 2013 the government of Sri Lanka ‘celebrated’ the fourth Victory Day, or as the state-owned newspaper the emDaily News/em referred to it, ‘Humanitarian Victory Day’. On the same day in Vavuniya in the North, members of the public along with politicians organised an event in memory of those who lost their lives during the last stages of the armed conflict in 2009. The government ceremonies were a show of pomp, military might and triumphalism. In these celebrations, although state forces that lost their lives were remembered and honoured, any mention of civilians who were killed and those who are still missing was absent. /p pThis is not surprising. As Marita Sturken states in her a href=https://courses.marlboro.edu/pluginfile.php/45112/mod_page/content/45/Marita%20Sturken%20The%20Wall,%20The%20Screen%20and%20The%20Image.pdfpaper on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial/a and memorialisation in American society, ‘discourses of public commemoration have become inextricably tied to the question of how war is brought to a closure’. The commemoration events held on 18 May are an extension into the post-war era of the ethos upon which the war strategy was founded, and the manner in which the armed conflict was brought to an end. /p pAn example of this is the a href=http://www.defence.lk/new.asp?fname=SandahiruSeyagovernment's plan/a to ‘erect nine monumental Stupas (Buddhist commemorative monument) in each province of the country in appreciation of the noble service rendered by the armed forces and Police to defeat terrorism and bring lasting peace to the country’. The happy union of militarisation and Sinhala Buddhist nationalism is evident in the message posted on the Ministry of Defence website, which calls for donations for the building project and directs those with inquiries about the project to officers at the Ministry of Defence, which is co-ordinating the project. The title of the project is ‘Sandahiru Seya: The triumphant Stupa’./p h2strongForced forgetting/strong/h2 pAt the crux of the government’s theory of reconciliation lies the need to ‘move on’ and ‘bring closure’, all euphemisms for closing off public discussion about violations of human rights and humanitarian law during the last stages of the armed conflict. According to this theory, forgetting is an integral aspect of bringing about reconciliation. On the contrary, acknowledgment, remembering and memorialising are important components of any reconciliation initiative, and should be viewed as forms of symbolic reparation. As the a href=http://ictj.org/publication/we-can%E2%80%99t-be-sure-who-killed-us-memory-and-memorialization-post-conflict-northern-ugandareport on/a ‘Memory and Memorialisation in post-conflict Uganda’, published by the International Centre for Transitional Justice, states, ‘Symbolic reparations aim to show understanding of and empathy with pain and loss and acknowledge suffering and injustice’. /p pArthur Danto, a href=https://courses.marlboro.edu/pluginfile.php/45112/mod_page/content/45/Marita%20Sturken%20The%20Wall,%20The%20Screen%20and%20The%20Image.pdfquoted in Sturken/a, points out that, ‘We erect monuments so that we shall always remember, and build memorials so that we shall never forget. Monuments are not generally built to commemorate defeats; the defeated dead are remembered in memorials. While a monument most often signifies victory, a memorial refers to the life or lives sacrificed for a particular set of values’. /p pThe statues of soldiers, guns and armoured tanks that one sees dotted all over the North are therefore monuments, built to remember the great war victory, not memorials. Scant regard is paid to the need to acknowledge and commemorate the loss of lives, property and livelihoods, and the suffering and trauma of the war affected population, particularly those caught in the last stages of the armed conflict. If anything, the use of the word ‘celebration’ to describe the ceremonies on 18 May, defies the public to even feel grief, let alone express it. Even families of the Sri Lanka armed forces are expected to show only pride in and happiness about the achievements of their departed family members; they too are expected not to express their loss, loneliness and grief. /p pLike in most post-war contexts, the question of who can be remembered is controversial. For instance, can families of slain LTTE cadres engage in private memorial activities to remember their loved ones, not in order to glorify or remember the LTTE, but to remember the individual as a family member? On 18 May, the emDaily News/em quoted the Army Commander of the northern Vanni region, a href=http://www.dailynews.lk/2013/05/18/sec02.aspwho declared that/a ‘Any citizen has the right to commemorate their loved ones but no one can commemorate terrorists who were disloyal to the government.’ Hence, families whose loved ones were members of the LTTE (whether they joined voluntarily or were forcibly conscripted) will likely not observe his or her death anniversary in a visible manner due to fear of state censure and harassment, since the act is viewed as an act supportive of the LTTE, and hence a threat to national security./p pEven within communities the act of remembering and forgetting can cause tension, conflict and animosity. For instance, former LTTE cadres state that during the armed conflict they were willing to sacrifice their lives for the armed struggle, yet now due to numerous reasons, including military surveillance, their sacrifices are not remembered or respected by the Tamil community, and they often receive little community support in re-integrating into society. It could be argued that the sections of the Tamil community which supported the LTTE are ‘forgetting’ due to fear of state retaliation, or did the community always have a utilitarian relationship with the LTTE?/p pMany former cadres claim that at rehabilitation centres they were instructed to forget the past. Yet, constant interrogation by the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) and surveillance and monitoring of ex-cadres force them to remember their past. Some cadres said ‘they asked us to forget the past and now when we are trying to move forward, they won’t let us. They continue to ask us about our time in the LTTE’. /p pInternecine violence has also not been forgotten by the Tamil people. Even today, there are those who express anger towards the LTTE, as well as non-LTTE armed groups that were responsible for violations in the past; this is often directed towards former members of these groups who now hold positions of power within the government. In terms of reparation, internecine violence raises many complex questions. For instance, who apologises and provides restitution for the violations committed by the LTTE and other Tamil armed groups? Who apologises and provides restitution for the crimes committed against the Muslim community by the LTTE? What is the role of Tamil political parties, particularly members of these parties who were previously members of armed groups? What about the right to reparation of the families of those who disappeared during the JVP insurrection?/p h2strongReparations and reconciliation/strong/h2 pThe discourse on post-war reconciliation has largely been silent on the issue of reparations. According to the a href=http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/ReparationsProgrammes.pdfOffice of the High Commissioner for Human Rights/a ‘it is generally understood that the right to reparation has a dual dimension under international law: (a) a substantive dimension to be translated into the duty to provide redress for harm suffered in the form of restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction and, as the case may be, guarantees of non-repetition; and (b) a procedural dimension as instrumental in securing this substantive redress.’ It further states that ‘While, under international law, gross violations of human rights and serious violations of international humanitarian law give rise to a right to reparation for victims, implying a duty on the State to make reparations, implementing this right and corresponding duty is in essence a matter of domestic law and policy.’ /p pTherefore, not only does the state have to accept that gross violations of human rights and serious violations of international humanitarian law have taken place but it also needs to acknowledge that doing so is its duty and that persons who have suffered such violations have a right to reparation. Contrast this with the President’s speech at the Victory Day celebration in which he claimed external forces were attempting to destabilize Sri Lanka through calls for a href=http://www.lankamission.org/images/2012images/January%202013/VD_president_speech.pdf‘independence of the judiciary, media freedom and human rights’/a.nbsp; /p pReparation initiatives seek to recognise victims as equal citizens and include a variety of measures, both material (such as compensation for lost property) and symbolic (public apologies and memorialisation), and individual and collective measures. In contrast, the government’s strategy is based on a a href=http://www.defence.lk/new.asp?fname=Children_enjoys_Christmas_Gifts_20121226_03notion of benevolence of the victor towards the Tamil population/a, disregard of the need for a political solution to the ethnic conflict, and the supposed provision of economic benefits. /p pOn 18 May, the Tamil newspaper emThinakkural/em reported that a woman in the North had killed her three young children and attempted to commit suicide due to what appears to be extreme poverty and inability to care for the children. This illustrates the lack of acknowledgment of the continuing marginalisation of the conflict-affected population, which suffers poverty and systemic discrimination. Instead, the conflict-affected population is afforded the opportunity to become part of the state military apparatus, i.e., they are recruited into the army or a href=http://khabarsouthasia.com/en_GB/articles/apwi/articles/features/2012/08/09/feature-01absorbed into initiatives implemented by the Civil Security Department/a that is within the purview of the Ministry of Defence. /p pAccording to the Ministry of Defence, this is proof of peace, reconciliation and a new life for those previously oppressed and impoverished. /p h2strongLooking back to move forward/strong/h2 pThe chapter on Restitution/Compensation in the report of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission a href=http://www.slembassyusa.org/downloads/LLRC-REPORT.pdf(LLRC)/a, a Commission of inquiry that was established by President Rajapaksa in 2010, is disappointingly short, lacks depth and provides no definition of restitution or compensation. By focusing only on the Rehabilitation of Persons, Properties and Industries Authority (REPPIA) and setting out its shortcomings, including lack of funds, which prevent it from paying claims received, the Commission disregards other forms of compensation/restitution that may be required and desirable. /p pIn this regard, it is useful to study the recommendations of past Presidential Commissions, some of which are surprisingly bold. /p pThe Presidential Commission on Ethnic Violence 1981-1984 which was established in 2001 and published its report in 2002, states that compensation is a right and not charity and must be fair and adequate and not nominal or a mere token. It reiterates that every effort must be made to restore the ‘human dignity’ of victims, and that the victim should not be made to feel s/he is receiving charity but is rightly receiving minimum legal dues. It even recommends that delay in the discharge of this duty by the state should be dealt with by the payment of simple legal interest on the amount of compensation, and urges expeditious payments. /p pThe 2001 Commission warns that, ‘For a nation already confounded by political conflicts, ethnic confrontations and constitutional turmoil, the mood for reconciliation can be unnecessarily edged away, by failing to effectively support national reconciliation at the grass root as an on-going process parallel to the peace negotiation.’ It also calls for the need for public recognition of the trauma and suffering the victims had to endure./p pThe All Island Commission on Disappearances which was established in 1998 and a href=http://www.disappearances.org/news/mainfile.php/frep_sl_ai/reported in 2001/a, focuses on symbolic measures of reparation such as the construction of a wall of reconciliation inscribed with the names of those dead and disappeared, whether victims of subversive acts or acts of the security forces. It does not mention the LTTE or the security forces by name, but lists Maaveerar (LTTE martyrs) cemeteries and the memorial in Embilipitiya in the South to the students who disappeared during the JVP insurrection, as examples of memorialisation. The Commission stresses the need for national acknowledgment of the wrongs done, and recognises that another insurrection is a possibility unless the needs of the affected persons are addressed.nbsp; /ppWith regard to compensation, it makes a bold recommendation that it should be paid to all irrespective of categorisation of the person as a terrorist, and recommends the amendment of the Public Administration Circular that prohibits the granting of compensation if a court has declared a person a terrorist. The Commission states that this is ‘morally incorrect’ as it amounts to segregation of certain families of victims as ‘terrorist by relationship’. It proposes that the entire society should share responsibility for helping families of the affected and recommends a 2% tax towards this. /p pThe Commission on Disappearances in the Western, Southern and Sabaragamuwa Provinces which was established in January 1988 and published its report a href=http://www.disappearances.org/news/mainfile.php/frep_sl_western/in 1997/a notes discrimination in the payment of compensation in cases where a person was thought to be a terrorist and a href=http://www.disappearances.org/news/mainfile.php/frep_sl_western/37/states that/a ‘endemic discriminatory practices are to the detriment of the well-being of dependents of disappeared persons’. It points out that there is no definition of terrorist provided by the state, resulting in the police providing clearance in this regard, i.e., it is not a judicial determination. /p pThe Commission also recommends that those who lost their jobs due to time away from work due to searching for disappeared family members should be re-instated if they could prove the period of absence was spent trying to ascertain the whereabouts of the disappeared person. The Commission calls for the reversal of proof in the case of custodial torture, and urges the recognition of rape/sexual assault in custody as torture. It also notes evidence of sexual violence and points out it is used as a tool to control a community. /p pIn Sri Lanka we might consider beginning our attempts to a href=https://courses.marlboro.edu/pluginfile.php/45112/mod_page/content/45/Marita%20Sturken%20The%20Wall,%20The%20Screen%20and%20The%20Image.pdf‘commemorate a war for which the central narrative is one of division and dissent, a war whose history is highly contested and still in the process of being made…’/a not only by looking emat/em the past – at the violence, loss, violations and grief – but also emto/em the past, at the progressive and rather bold, if unimplemented, recommendations of past Presidential Commissions. nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;/pfieldset class=fieldgroup group-sideboxslegendSideboxes/legenddiv class=field field-related-stories div class=field-labelRelated stories:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd a href=/opensecurity/chaminda-weerawardhana/sri-lankas-bbs-old-spectre-in-new-garbSri Lanka#039;s BBS: an old spectre in new garb?/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/opensecurity/kumaravadivel-guruparan-sivakami-rajamanoharan/four-years-on-genocide-continues-off-batFour years on, genocide continues off the battlefield/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/opensecurity/ambika-satkunanathan/militarisation-as-panacea-development-and-reconciliation-in-post-wMilitarisation as panacea: development and reconciliation in post-war Sri Lanka/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/opensecurity/sivakami-rajamanoharan/reconciliation-is-not-happening-in-sri-lanka-and-problem-isnt-quReconciliation is not happening in Sri Lanka, and the problem isn#039;t a question of time/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/opensecurity/frances-harrison/sri-lankas-policy-towards-witnesses-is-revenge-not-reconciliationSri Lanka#039;s policy towards witnesses is revenge, not reconciliation/a /div /div /div /fieldset div class=field field-country div class=field-label Country or region:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Sri Lanka /div /div /div div class=field field-topics div class=field-labelTopics:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Civil society /div div class=field-item even Conflict /div div class=field-item odd Culture /div div class=field-item even Democracy and government /div /div /div

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pSince 2000, activist groups across India have sought to defend slum communities from dispossession in favour of 'participatory' resettlement on the urban periphery. The popularity of such reasoning has lead to the myth that squatters prefer resettlement to illegality, denying squatters a right to remain and masking the real, everyday exclusions in the lives of the resettled. /p /div /div /div pThe landscapes of Delhi’s urban peripheries are changing. Slowly but surely much of its fringes are being transformed into holding grounds for the city’s outcasts – slum and squatter residents. In particular two villages on Delhi’s fringes – Narela and Bawana, both more than 50kms to the North-west of the city have seen large-scale state sponsored slum resettlement projects. Particularly during the run up to Delhi’s Commonwealth Games in 2010, huge numbers of ‘eligible’ slum residents from Delhi’s prime locations were resettled in these erstwhile agricultural market towns. These new resettlement colonies have transformed slum dwellers’ relationships with the city, with its urban fringes and between rural and urban citizens. /ppSince 2000 successive Supreme Court rulings in Indian cities have labelled slum dwellers as ‘illegal’ and ‘pickpockets’ of urban land and thus ineligible for any compensation or resettlement by law. In this context an emergent social activism led by grassroots NGOs and slum organisations have organised in defence of slum communities, arguing that resettlement should be a mandatory provision if and when slums are demolished. Indeed, survey after survey of slum residents have highlighted that slum dwellers would want to be resettled or compensated for demolition of their homes. This of course is a no-brainer, but it has led to the circulation of a popular ‘myth’ that squatters prefer resettlement to informality or illegality. This myth valorises resettlement as a route to social justice in the absence of right to the city, while masking the real and everyday exclusions in the lives of those who are resettled. /ppIndeed, the valorisation of resettlement both by those for and against demolition serves to bolster the neoliberal logics which drive current urban development policy, as the state charges squatters for substandard urban housing and services (electricity, water, sanitation) in resettlement schemes which they can ill afford. This myth also sustains the pattern of continuous demolition of slums from the city and resettlement to its urban fringes by the state. Narela and Bawana are spaces mapped through these logics of a ‘desire for resettlement’ which justifies the state’s exclusionary practices of demolition of slums from the city and the relocation of ‘eligible’ squatters into its urban fringes./p pUsing the example of Delhi’s endeavours towards a slum-free city, my intention here is to challenge the myth of resettlement and further the pervasive language of ‘participation’ that dominates slum redevelopment policy across the global south. Examples of such experiments exist in India and in the rest of the global south – such as the a href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/matt-birkinshaw/battle-for-golibar-urban-splintering-in-mumbaislum rehabilitation projects with Dharavi residents/a. These examples are used time and again to suggest that when resettled through the involvement of residents, resettlement can deliver social justice and a ‘legal’ right to the city. These experiments however perpetuate a violence of law and development that is used by the neoliberal state to simultaneously attract global capital while maintaining authority and control over marginalised urban populations. /p h2The violence of law and urban development/h2 pIn his critique of violence, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) articulated two forms of violence which are perpetuated by law. The first type of violence is that embodied in the process of law-making which reinforces the authority of the state over those within its sovereign territory. Law-making, the writing of national constitutions, legal statutes, regulations and policies gives power to the state to impose particular forms of control and inscribe particular legal subjecthoods upon entire populations. /p pThe second form of violence is embodied in the process and procedure of emenforcing/em laws, enacted by subjecting citizens to bureaucracy, statutory regulations, policing, criminal justice systems and so on. nbsp;For Benjamin, this is a type of law-preserving violence that ‘maintains, confirms, and insures the permanence and enforceability of law’a href=#_ftn1[1]/a. Taking Benjamin’s notion of violence of law forward, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) further argued that law itself is an ‘authorized force, a force that justifies itself or is justified in applying itself’a href=#_ftn2[2]/a and has no connection to justice. Derrida concluded that any interpretation of law by the judiciary in the courts should be understood not as delivering justice, but rather as ‘legal or legitimate in conformity with a state of law’. For Derrida, this interpretation of law itself produces a ‘force of law’ that reinforces the authority and legitimacy of the state in its role of law-making and law-maintaining./p pIt has become imperative to revisit these critiques of law as found in the writings of Derrida and Benjamin since it is the violence and force of law that has become the most potent tool of urban development and slum rehabilitation in Delhi and across India since 2000. With the law on their side, politicians, middle-classes, business investors and multinational corporations have been largely successful in removing the urban poor from the ‘legal’ city. Taken together, law – making, maintaining and interpreting, all serve to legitimise the state’s use of law as an ‘authorised force’ to produce increased uncertainties and anxieties among slum dwellers towards their future, their sense of place, in the ‘legal’ city. /p pimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/datta1.jpg alt= height=315 width=420 /br /smallHomes slated for demolition in an ‘illegal’ settlement in Delhi. Ayona Datta/small/p pThe violence of law in urban India is enacted through the Slum Areas Act 1956, nuisance and trespass laws as well as through urban development practices in the making and enforcing of master-plans and zoning regulations. This violence produces slums and squatter settlements as ‘spaces of exception’a href=#_ftn3[3]/a whereby special rules, codes, legislations and judicial rulings mark them as ‘illegal’ and hence requiring interventions that are starkly different from the rest of the city. In Delhi this is seen in the use of the Slum Areas Act to demarcate specific (and deserving) slums for legalisation or improvement as well as the numerous schemes on slum improvement and resettlement launched by the state, which construct slums as exceptional and outside the law. It can also be seen in the manner in which private property and nuisance laws are used to criminalise slums and squatter settlements and to legitimise their removal through the judiciary. In doing so, the state retracts from its responsibilities towards those in need of housing and basic services in the city. /p pThese processes reaffirm to squatters, on a daily basis, the precarity of their homes and lives in the city. They reaffirm to squatters that a violence of law is enacted not just in its making, maintaining and enforcing but also through the ‘uncertainty regarding one’s right to habitation’a href=#_ftn4[4]/a nbsp;in the city. Resettlement was never a condition that squatters desired; but in a context where their everyday lives are now increasingly shaped by a violence of law and urban development, they have come to accept resettlement as the only way out of continuous uncertainty, anxiety and temporality. /p h2The myth of resettlement/h2 pimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/datta2.jpg alt= height=315 width=420 /br /smallRoad dividing a resettlement colony on the left from a squatter settlement on the right. Ayona Datta./small /ppThe violence embodied in the uncertainty of habitation further perpetuates the myth and valorization of resettlement. This is because squatters, planners, and development professionals all know that the political patronage of the 1980s and 1990s that largely provided informal security and led to the rise in squatter settlements has now shifted to a state obsession with the rule of law. This obsession tends to a form of valorization of a rule of law that Zizek has called tautological – ‘Law is law’ or ‘God is God’ a href=#_ftn5[5]/a. nbsp;In this context squatters can no longer rely on informal assurances made by slum lords or politicians; rather their future in the city is being determined by a force of law produced and perpetuated by the state and judiciary. Thus while state-orchestrated slum demolitions are becoming increasingly common across Delhi and other metropolitan cities in India, the uncertainties and anxieties surrounding squatters’ future home in the city often circulates as a politics of hope. This politics highlights not as a loss but as gain – a legitimate and legal future home in the city via the demolition and relocation of squatter homes to resettlement colonies in the city fringes. Squatters are under no illusion that resettlement means the loss of their current homes in the city, but in a context of a ‘culture of legality’a href=#_ftn6[6]/a pervading urban life in Indian cities, squatters argue for the demolition of those very homes which they seek to legitimise in the future. /p pThis is also the irony of resettlement whereby demolition of one’s home in the city provides moral grounds for squatters to argue for a secure legal home in the urban peripheries. But how secure is this new home; under what conditions is it realised, and what forms of urban citizenship and belonging does it produce? nbsp;/p pThe state ideology of resettlement has often pushed those in state provided ‘legal’ resettlement colonies back into informality in order to meet their basic needs. However, resettlement by the neo-liberal state is more precarious and insecure than it was ever before. In Delhi for instance, Narela and Bawana have become holding grounds of the ‘illegal’ citizens of Delhi who were deemed eligible to receive legal housing on condition that they leave the city. ‘Eligibility’ for resettlement depends upon whether slum dwellers can provide proof of residence before the established ‘cut-off’ periods (1989 and 1991). While in the 1970s and 1980s, ‘eligible’ squatters in Delhi would get a 25sqm plot of land with a freehold title, since the 2000s they receive a 12.5sqm plot of land under a 10 year lease which they can neither sell not transfer to their children. They can also be evicted if municipal inspectors come while they are away from their home or if they are not carrying ID cards. Half of Delhi’s resettlement colony residents do not have individual water connections, there are few individual toilets and community toilet facilities are far from adequate, garbage is rarely collected by the municipality, the roads are in severe disrepair, street lights do not work, and education and health facilities are grossly inadequatea href=#_ftn7 [7]/a. /p pThe Delhi government is now enforcing a new masterplan (2001-2021), which proposes to relocate squatters in high-rise tower blocks in the city. Unlike the earlier resettlement ideology of a plot of land, this new ideology of verticality is neither adequate nor appropriate for the notion of flexibility and incrementality embedded in changing family needs for space.nbsp; /p pResettlement is not an outcome that squatters link in any way to justice, rather they see resettlement as an entitlement from the state which when achieved would acknowledge their inclusion as urban citizens within the ‘legal’ city. To this end squatters use resettlement as a resource/route to make claims for a right to the city, although this claim itself is subject to proving their ‘worthiness’ to the state amidst the impending demolition of their homes.nbsp; Thus while the violence of law produces precarious lives in the city, the same law is often used as a ‘resource’ by slum dwellers to bargain with the state for resettlement. They do this not just through informality and informal networks (as argued by many scholars) but by gaining a working knowledge of the law, through explicit engagements with formal and legal processes, through active engagements with development based NGOs, and through the legal subjecthoods offered by the Indian constitution to campaign for their rights and entitlements to legitimate housing in the city. In doing so, they empower themselves through law as active citizens, but also often ironically align themselves with the very violence of law which they seek to overcome in their daily lives./p pBut what about those deemed ‘ineligible’ for resettlement – those ‘unworthy’ of any form of state compensation? These are the residents of slums and squatter settlements who cannot show any proof of living in Delhi’s squatter settlements before the cut-off dates or those renting rooms in slums, or those without any documentation of their identity as Indian citizens. These are entire populations who are new arrivals to the city, or circular migrants, those who do not possess the ‘right’ documents, or who do not have the means to buy these documents in the informal market. /p pThese are the populations not counted in slum surveys, outside the radar of NGOs and of most urban development policies of slum improvement. While the ‘pioneers’ who settled in the squatter settlements in the 1970s and 1980s have been slowly empowering themselves through knowledge of their legal and legitimate entitlements, it is those without any claims to ‘worthiness’ who usually lose out on state-sponsored resettlement. Continually moving from one demolished home to another in the city, they live under flyovers, next to railway tracks, along sewage canals, and on road verges. So while the politics of hope around resettlement continues to gain ground, we should also ask fresh questions around the violence of law enacted on the lives of those living on the precarious edges of worthiness, law and citizenship. What are the different ways that those ‘unworthy’ of state resettlement respond to a violence of law? How are the links between resettlement and entitlement maintained by those considered unworthy by the state? How is justice perceived through the frame of violence – of law and urban development? The answers to these might help us in exposing the myth of resettlement and present its ideological links with the neoliberal state./p hr / small pAgamben, G. 2005. emState of Exception/em. Chicago: University of Chicago Press./p pBenjamin, W. 1978. Critique of Violence. In emReflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings /embyem /emW. Benjamin and P. Demetz, New York: Schocken Books, 277–300./p pChatterji, R. And Mehta, D. 2007. emLiving with Violence: An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life/em. New Delhi: Routledge./p pComaroff, J. and Comaroff, J. 2006. emLaw and Disorder in the Postcolony./em Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press./p pDerrida, J. 1992. Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority'. In emDeconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, /emedited byem /emD. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld and D. G. Carlson. London: Routledge, 3–67./p pMenon–Sen, K. and Bhan, G. 2008. emSwept off the Map: Surviving Eviction and resettlement in Delhi/em. Delhi: Yoda Press./p pZizek, S. (1991). emFor They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor./em London: Verso./p hr size=1 / pa href=#_ftnref1[1]/a Benjamin, 1978, p. 295/p pa href=#_ftnref2[2]/a Derrida, 1992, p. 925/p pa href=#_ftnref3[3]/a Agamben 2005/p pa href=#_ftnref4[4]/a Chatterji amp; Mehta, 2007, p. 129/p pa href=#_ftnref5[5]/a Zizek 1991, p. 203/p pa href=#_ftnref6[6]/a Comaroff and Comaroff 2006/p pa href=#_ftnref7[7]/a Menon-Sen and Bhan 2008/p/smallfieldset class=fieldgroup group-sideboxslegendSideboxes/legenddiv class=field field-related-stories div class=field-labelRelated stories:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd a href=/opensecurity/matt-birkinshaw/battle-for-golibar-urban-splintering-in-mumbaiThe battle for Golibar: urban splintering in Mumbai/a /div /div /div /fieldset div class=field field-country div class=field-label Country or region:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd India /div /div /div div class=field field-city div class=field-labelCity:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Delhi /div /div /div

In their new book, "The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills," economist David Stuckler and physician Sanjay Basu examine the health impacts of austerity across the globe. The authors estimate there have been more than 10,000 additional suicides and up to a million extra cases of depression across Europe and the United States since governments started introducing austerity programs in the aftermath of the economic crisis. For example in Greece, where spending on public health has been slashed by 40 percent, HIV rates have jumped 200 percent and the country has seen its first malaria outbreak since the 1970s. An economist and public health specialist, Stuckler is a senior research leader at Oxford University. Dr. Basu is a physician and epidemiologist who teaches at Stanford University. "Had austerity been organized like a clinical trial, it would’ve been discontinued given evidence of its deadly side effects," Stuckler says. "There is an alternative choice that we found in the historical data and through the present recessions: When we place people and their health at the center of economic recovery, it can help get our economy back on track faster and yield lasting dividends to our society."

div class="taxonomy-images"a href="/taxonomy/term/6669" class="taxonomy-image-links"img src="http://rabble.ca/sites/rabble/files/imagecache/thumbnail/category_pictures/duncan_0_0.jpg" alt="Duncan Cameron" title="Duncan Cameron" width="75" height="91" class="taxonomy-image-term-6669 taxonomy-image-vid-14"//a/divdiv class="field field-type-date field-field-story-publish-date" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" span class="date-display-single"May 21, 2013/span /div /div /div div class="field field-type-filefield field-field-image-for-node" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" div class="filefield-file"img class="filefield-icon field-icon-image-jpeg" alt="image/jpeg icon" src="http://rabble.ca/sites/all/modules/contrib/filefield/icons/image-x-generic.png" /a href="http://rabble.ca/sites/rabble/files/node-images/clark.jpg" type="image/jpeg; length=140050" title="clark.jpg"Photo: BlueAndWhiteArmy/flickr/a/div /div /div /div pThe capitalists won the B.C. election. Extractive industries make big profits in the province, and have bigger plans for its future. More port facilities for coal exports to China, Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) plants, new pipelines across the mountains, increased tanker traffic in the Vancouver Harbour, and through coastal waters; these environmental disasters in the making represent lucrative ventures to Liberal backers./p pCorporations support the BC Liberals as a form of insurance protecting shareholder privileges. Most of the business and commercial world follows the corporate lead./p pIn B.C., corporations contribute to political parties and have employees who contribute./pdiv class="field field-type-text field-field-summary" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" The capitalists won the B.C. election. Extractive industries make big profits in the province, and have bigger plans for its future. /div /div /div fieldset class="fieldgroup group-related-items"div class="field field-type-link field-field-related-item1" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" a href="http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/mainlander/2013/05/why-did-ndp-lose" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"Why did the NDP lose?/a /div /div /div div class="field field-type-text field-field-related-item1-desc" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" In reality the NDP allowed itself no alternative platform from which to launch a criticism against the BC Liberal record. /div /div /div div class="field field-type-link field-field-related-item2" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" a href="http://rabble.ca/columnists/2013/05/after-stunning-ndp-loss-bc-its-time-new-kind-politics"After stunning NDP loss in B.C., it#039;s time for a new kind of politics /a /div /div /div div class="field field-type-text field-field-related-item2-desc" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" The NDP#039;s stunning loss in B.C. is being deconstructed, dissected, analyzed and mourned over not only here but across the country. /div /div /div div class="field field-type-link field-field-related-item3" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" a href="http://rabble.ca/news/2013/05/dont-mourn-organize-bcs-climate-justice-movement-fight-just-getting-started" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"Don#039;t mourn, organize! For B.C.#039;s climate justice movement, the fight is just getting started/a /div /div /div div class="field field-type-text field-field-related-item3-desc" div class="field-items" div class="field-item odd" Remember that there is no silver bullet solution, the NDP weren#039;t one before this election and there certainly isn#039;t one afterwards. /div /div /div /fieldset pa href="http://rabble.ca/columnists/2013/05/capitalists-win-all-others-lose-bc-election" target="_blank"read more/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=akC7iWzEs0o:LBaHcriMGw0:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=akC7iWzEs0o:LBaHcriMGw0:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=akC7iWzEs0o:LBaHcriMGw0:dnMXMwOfBR0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?d=dnMXMwOfBR0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=akC7iWzEs0o:LBaHcriMGw0:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?i=akC7iWzEs0o:LBaHcriMGw0:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?a=akC7iWzEs0o:LBaHcriMGw0:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rabble-news?i=akC7iWzEs0o:LBaHcriMGw0:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/rabble-news/~4/akC7iWzEs0o" height="1" width="1"/

Dozens have been killed and more than 200 wounded in a devastating tornado in Oklahoma. The storm tore through the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore, leveling two elementary schools, a hospital and scores of homes destroyed. Rescue crews continue to dig through the rubble in a bid to find survivors. It was the deadliest tornado to hit the United States since 161 people were killed in Joplin, Missouri, two years ago. We’re joined by two guests: Beverly Allam, an Oklahoma resident who lives a few miles from Moore and lost everything in the state’s tornado in May 1999, and Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at the Weather Underground.

• Dozens Dead in Oklahoma Tornado
• Guatemalan Court Overturns Genocide Verdict for Ex-Dictator Ríos Montt
• Foreclosed Homeowners Arrested at Justice Department Protest for Bank Prosecutions
• Report: Banks Lagging on Settlement Payments for Mortgage Wrongdoing
• Report: CIA to Transfer Drone Program to Pentagon
• White House Defends Tracking of Fox News Reporter
• Obama Hosts Burmese Leader at White House
• Survey: Scientists Have 97% Consensus Human Activity Causes Climate Change
• Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues Begins at U.N.
• Poverty in U.S. Suburbs Exceeds Urban Areas
• Senate Report Says Apple Avoids Billions in Taxes
• Protest Against School Closings Leads to Arrests at Chicago City Hall
• Landmark "Stop and Frisk" Trial Concludes in NYC
• Hundreds Honor Gay New Yorker Shot Dead in Apparent Hate Crime

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pimg style=margin-left: 5px; src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/RebirthNationlogo_0.jpg alt= vspace=5 width=140 align=right //ppRecent calls for 'renewed' identities in the UK mean little so long as they fail to assess the role of the state in a multicultural society. Certainly, a fundamental recognition is needed: that it is easier to be a global citizen when you are confident in the fulfilment of your rights as a national citizen./p /div /div /div pThe a href=http://www.globalcitizen.org/Global Poverty Project/a asks us to proclaim ‘I am a global citizen’ as a declaration against poverty and to ‘change the world’. In a similar spirit, Oxfam UK has learning packs for teachers to guide their teaching on global citizenship. These are clearly well-intentioned campaigns which seek to highlight the injustices of extreme poverty and to foster a sense of the world as an interconnected place. Yet the idea of a ‘global citizen’, whilst seemingly universal and equitable is far from unbounded and still marked with inequality. The global citizen is more likely to be imagined as the one that can take action to fight poverty, rather than the person who is living in poverty. Campaigning against poverty, or even buying sustainable local products (one common tag line is ‘think global, act local’) are acts more likely to be recognized as an action of global citizenship than a migrant crossing a state border – legally or illegally.nbsp;/p pIt is easier to be a global citizen when you are confident in the fulfilment of your rights as a national citizen. In the long decade since 9/11, alongside increasing calls for ‘global citizenship’, we also see the rising demand that nation-states should strengthen their abilities to monitor and control national-state borders. It is perhaps at the border that the idea of the ‘global citizen’ is most challenged. You do not leave or enter a country as a ‘global citizen’, but as a national citizen and passports, the national documents of identification, emdo/em matter. What passport you hold will also determine how easy it is to cross international borders – not all passports are equal. Indeed not all bearers of the same national passport are equal – increasingly travellers are ‘profiled’ by factors such as race, gender, place of birth, age and travel history which leads to accelerated passage through border zones for some and increased scrutiny of others. National sovereignty continues to be rigorously defended and exercised by the state. As Hannah Arendt argued: ‘sovereignty is nowhere more absolute than in matters of emigration, naturalization, nationality, and expulsion' (Arendt 1958: 278). Citizenship of a nation state is therefore critical even while it remains unequal.nbsp;/p pCitizenship not only enables movement across borders, but also secures rights to residence and political and social rights. Within the state, there are many ‘internal borders’ which also police access to rights. Recently David Cameron suggested the restriction of welfare provision to British citizens only – suggesting that doctors will have to scrutinise passports before they treat patients. Or, more likely, only certain groups and individuals would be suspected of not being British and they alone would face the situation of having to prove their status. So we are clearly still tied into a state-based citizenship which defines the relationship between individuals and the state and also between individuals both within and beyond the state. One of the features shaping this relationship is the way state citizenship is intricately bound up with national identity – Arendt saw this as the conquest of the state by the nation. National identity is often spoken about in terms of identity, belonging and loyalty rather than rights and, in Britain as a multi-national state, national identity and citizenship are in a particularly complicated relationship As Bernard Cricknbsp; (Crick 1991: 90) pointed out: ‘I am a citizen of a country with no agreed colloquial name.’nbsp;/p pPart of the confusion around citizenship in Britain is also due to the complex relationship between nationality and citizenship arising out of the post-colonial legacy. Under the 1981 Immigration Act, six categories of citizen were established each with differing rights (only one, British citizenship automatically carries a right of abode in Britain). Few British passport holders, when asked where they came from would answer ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ which is how their citizenship is described on the passport. Public and political debate on the nature of Britishness, its relationship with Englishness and Scottishness and Welshness have a very long history and have been particularly intense since the 1980s, sometimes fuelled by devolution and debates around Europe (Billig, 2006).nbsp;/p pThese debates have also helped to shape the debates on citizenship. In his 2006 Party Conference speech, David Cameron declared that ‘every child in our country, wherever they come from, must know and deeply understand what it means to be British’./p pBut, how do we know if we’re ‘British’ and what does it mean to ‘deeply understand’ what being ‘British’ is? One of the problems with this call is that it suggests that there is a single meaning of ‘being British’ which fails to account for different experiences of being British. Britishness is often suggested as being in ‘crisis’, with that suggestion that we have ‘lost’ a sense of who we are. This relies on a particular reading of the past – where ‘we’ once knew who ‘we’ were, often with the suggestion that this was because the ‘we’ had more meaning and was more unified at some time in the past. But a href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/ted-cantle/statehood-and-problem-of-flux-case-for-interculturalism target=_blankas Ted Cantle has pointed out elsewhere in /aema href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/ted-cantle/statehood-and-problem-of-flux-case-for-interculturalism target=_blankOur Kingdom/a/em, both nations and national identities are constantly in flux, particularly perhaps when nationhood is shaped by processes of empire building./p pDavid Goodhart argues that we need to reinvigorate our national identity - although he is flexible as to whether this should be an identity based on Englishness or Britishness. In emThe British Dream. Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration (Goodhart 2013)/em, Goodhart sets up immigration as a major threat to this re-imagining and indeed as a major threat to the continuing survival of the welfare state. He argues that (ethnic) diversity undermines the bonds which communities need and that it weakens people’s willingness to partake in collective welfare via the state. Goodhart asserts that we need to be able to talk about racism without being immediately labelled as racist and he also joins in the chorus of those who have proclaimed the failure of multiculturalism.nbsp;/p pIt should of course be true that we should be able to talk about immigration policy without being accused of racism, but that would mean that we would have to ensure that our debate wasn’t racialised. We would have to de-couple race from immigration. This involves more than pointing out that Polish immigrants are white and yet some are opposed to their recent immigration in large numbers. We would need to know, for instance, that it doesn’t take longer, or more generations, for the offspring of a black immigrant to become one of ‘us’ than it does for the ancestors of a white immigrant. For example, Goodhart explains that two of his grandfathers were American, but there is no suggestion that he would describe himself as a ‘third-generation immigrant’. Yet, somewhat oddly, he describes Lenny Henry, who was born in Dudley, as a ‘Caribbean’ and continually refers to ethnic minority communities or individuals as second or third ‘generation’./p pMuch of the debate around nationhood and particularly multiculturalism can be understood within the production of what Engin Isin calls ‘neurotic citizenship’ (Isin 2004). For Isin, anxiety has been constructed as the norm for citizens and governance has become about managing or tranquilising those anxieties. The home and border are two critical sites of these productions of a sense of risk and the governance of risks (thus the concept of ‘homeland security’). The home is constructed as the ultimate space of security and the domain for managing anxiety. But homes can also be seen as a threat to the security of the nation. William Walters calls this ‘domopolitics’ where the relationship between home, nation and security are reconfigured which ‘rationalizes a series of security measures in the name of a particular conception of home’ (Walters 2004: 241). It’s also worth noting that the concept of home generally implies a set of gendered relations, threats to which can also provoke anxiety./p pThis neurosis around the home and incursions to the nation by others can be seen in David Goodhard’s concern about homes where English is not spoken (enough). He anxiously recites statistics from the 2009 labour survey which tell how various ethnic minorities ‘come from homes where another language is spoken’ (Goodhart 2013: 57) and repeatedly asserts the dangers of homes where English is not the primary language. An Englishman’s home may be his castle, but the immigrant to England may expect the intimate family practices of home language to be under scrutiny. Here Britishness is presented as threatened within the domestic space of the home and most threatened by the failure of mothers in particular to speak English. Many might argue that the ability to speak more than one language in a globalising world could be seen as a core strength that ethnic minorities bring to Britain. However within this anxious neurosis bi- or multi-lingualism, particularly in the home, is presented as a threat to the nation. Yet the finding that, for example, 64 percent of pupils of Chinese-origin and 78 percent of pupils of Bangladeshi-origin pupils come from homes where another language is spoken tells us nothing about the proficiency of English in those homes and in particular of the pupils surveyed.nbsp;/p pAs the more recent 2011 Census tells us, less than half a percent of residents over 3 years old in England and Wales could not speak any English and only 2 percent could not speak English ‘well’ (2013). Despite the evidence that immigrants to Britain want to, and can, speak English, the refrain of the need to coerce them to learn English continues, across the political spectrum. For example Labour Leader Ed Miliband on a visit to Crawley on 30th April 2013 argued: ‘If you come to this country, you should learn English’./p pMiliband was standing on a wooden pallet in Crawley town centre, echoing the successful campaigning of John Major’s soapbox, designed to show him as a man of the people speaking to the people. His tone is disciplinary and focuses on the apparent unwillingness of migrants to learn English rather than the severe cuts in the provision of ESOL classes and the impact this has on new arrival’s capacity to participate fully in the social, political, economic and cultural life of Britain. The injunction to immigrants feeds anxieties about a Britishness apparently under threat from those who cross its borders and settle here./p pRe-imagining nationhood in Britain would surely require a way of reframing Britishness and Englishness in a way that expressed a sense of value in and confidence about the diversity of Britain rather than a neurotic response to it. Diversity needs to be embraced as a fact not a threat. Those who claim that multiculturalism has failed tend not to acknowledge that ‘multicultural’ means very different things in different contexts and that there has not been a coherent policy in Britain which can be called ‘state multiculturalism’. Nonetheless, however you consider the politics of multiculturalemism/em, Britain surely is a multiculturemal/em society with a diversity of religious, ethnic, classed, regional, gendered and sexual cultures. Neither John Major’s spinsters cycling to Evensong, nor Gordon Brown’s list of ‘classic’ literature representing British values were able to encapsulate how a diverse post-colonial nationhood might be understood. /ppOne problem with the current trend of critiquing all that is ‘multicultural’ is that it becomes impossible to positively reassert a multi-cultural, multi-national nation. This does not have to mean a naïve celebration of ‘saris, samba and samosas’ without paying real attention to the politics of who gets to represent and speak for different ‘communities’. Nor does it mean that we can proclaim an end to racism and racialised hostility and inequality in Britain (as Goodhart claims against a wealth of evidence to the contrary). Rather it requires a re-assessment of Britishness which is not built on racialised superiority and which adapts our sense of ourselves in a way which takes us somewhere other than a melancholic remembrance of things past (Gilroy 2004). This would suggest that there will be many ways of being British, and also that the British will have many ways of being ‘global’. One of the features of our multicultural society, as Nira Yuval-Davis (Yuval-Davis 2008) points out, is that citizenship is ‘multi-layered’. Our sense of ourselves, our emotional, social and economic ties with others are varied and stretch from the local, to the national and the global. This should be seen as an opportunity rather than a threat./ppstrongReferences/strong/p pONS (2013). 2011 Census: Quick Statistics for England and Wales, March 2011, Organisation of National Statistics./p pArendt, H. (1958). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland and New York, Meridian Books./p pCrick, B. (1991). The English and the British. National Identities. The Constitution of the United Kingdom. B. Crick. Oxford, Blackwell Publishersstrong: /strong90-105./p pGilroy, P. (2004). After Empire. Melancholia or convivial culture? Abingdon, Routledge./p pGoodhart, D. (2013). The British Dream. Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration. London, Atlantic Books./p pIsin, E. F. (2004). The neurotic citizen. Citizenship Studies strong8/strong(3): 217-235./p pWalters, W. (2004). Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Domopolitics. Citizenship Studies strong8/strong(3): 237-260./p pYuval-Davis (2008). Intersectionality, citizenship and contemporary politics of belonging. Contesting Citizenship. B. Siim and J. Squires. London and New York, Routledgestrong: /strong159-173./p

Vice president amends constitution to allow President Evo Morales to stand for election in 2015.

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pThe attempt on May 18th to get the Afghan parliament to ratify a key law on violence against women ended in a fiasco and has been angrily dismissed as the politicking of a single ambitious female politician. But the controversies around the a href=http://www.idlo.int/Publications/EVAW%20ENGLISH.pdfEVAW/a law show that there are no perfect strategies available to women activists in Afghanistanstrong. /strong/p /div /div /div pOn Saturday the 18th May the future of the piece of legislation most treasured by women activists in Afghanistan looked more precarious than ever as a high stake parliamentary debate about it was brought to an end after a href=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-22579098only 15 minutes/a. After a series of inflammatory remarks from conservative MPs, which suggested that support for the ema href=//www.idlo.int/Publications/EVAW%20ENGLISH.pdfLaw on Elimination of Violence against Women/a /em( EVAW law) was tantamount to being against the Sharia, and that even questioned the President’s judgment in issuing it as a decree in the first place, the speaker quickly declared the debate to be over and the law wasnbsp; sent on for further review. /p pFor years, the wisdom of presenting the EVAW law to parliament for ratification has split Afghanistan’s women’s rights community, with the majority seemingly strongly against the idea. Instead, they have argued that the law, which was signed into force by President Karzai in 2009, should be left as a presidential decree as it would never survive parliamentary ratification in an acceptable form. The constitutional grounds for this course of action are shaky, but the fact that it has been the preferred strategy highlights the tensions and dilemmas that have plaguednbsp; women’s rights promotion in Afghanistan since 2001. /p pMany Afghan women, be they MPs, activists or government officials have embraced the opportunities over the last 12 years to put in place stronger mechanisms and institutions that secure women better protection from violence and abuse. The EVAW law, hailed as the greatest single achievement in this regard had been in preparation since 2005. It lists 22 acts as violence against women and prescribes punishments for them as well as setting out various related government responsibilities. Although the country’s penal code, dating from 1976 and still in force, cover crimes such as bodily harm, forced marriage and murder, it makes no explicit references to violence within the family or to underage marriage. (The country’s civil code stipulates the legal marriage age for girls at minimum 15, but there are no punishments in the penal code for violators). The penal code also conflates rape with consensual adultery, both criminal acts. It was therefore felt that having a separate law specifically on violence against women would send a strong signal that there could be no impunity for abuses against women and force the Afghan government to take the issue more seriously. /p pIn the years that followed, a somewhat drawn-out drafting process - occasionally diverted by the donor-fuelled competition between individual women - saw several drafts being prepared and presented to government ministries. By early 2009, however, the EVAW law was on the agenda of the Ministry of Justice for technical improvements. At this point in time, the law suddenly found itself fast tracked due to other developments. An international outrage was growing over the Shia Personal Status Law ( SPSL) , a a href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/deniz-kandiyoti/gender-in-afghanistan-pragmatic-activismnew family law/a for the country’s Shia minority with a host of articles discriminating against women. Local activists and Western diplomats made frantic attempts to stop or alter the law, but the final version still sanctioned underage marriage, made women’s right to marry dependent on their fathers’ or grandfathers’ permission, and constructed a martial relation in which wives were meantnbsp; to submit to sexual relations on demand lest they forfeit claims of maintenance from their husbands./p pIt seems that the EVAW law was increasingly perceived as a counterbalance to the SPSL. US embassy cables from this period show that the US was closely following the status of the EVAW law, repeatedly reiterating their wish to see the law approved by the Afghan cabinet in meetings with government officials. Eventually the EVAW law was offered up as compromise to national and international opponents of the SPSL by the president, who curiously is reported to have signed them both into force on the same day. At this point, SPLS had already been ratified by the parliament, albeit in obscure circumstances, but the signing of the EVAW law was based on article 79 of the Constitution, which allows room for the president to adopt legislation during parliamentary recess in ‘emergency situations’ . Decrees signed by the president under this disposition become laws upon signing but are to be submitted to parliament within thirty days of the first session of the parliament that has the power to reject the laws decreed. Whether the EVAW law qualified as an emergency situation was perhaps debatable, but in fact, a number of laws (11, by a href=http://aan-afghanistan.com/index.asp?id=3396one count/a) have been put into place in this way and remains in force even though parliament has not ratified them. Undoubtedly, an important factor in this ‘law-making by decree’ has been international pressure- for instance, it was even alleged that the US embassy one summer sent an email out to various international aid organizations and actors in the rule of law field, wondering if anyone had suggestions for laws that they wished to see enacted as presidential decrees before the parliament was due to return from their recess. /p pBut with the EVAW law, an attempt to get parliamentary acceptance was made already in autumn 2009, spearheaded by the same MP Fauzia Kofi who was at the center of the controversial plenary debate on the 18th of May. Discussions on the law in the parliament’s joint commission, tasked with garnering as much consensus as possible before the debate in plenum, reached quite an advanced stage at this time. But the progress came at a cost; for instance, conservative male MPs were insisting on exempting fathers from punishments for underage marriage. Then, as now, maintaining fathers’ prerogatives over their young daughters’ sexuality appeared an overarching priority for conservatives. They were also up in arms about an attempt to make polygamy, outside certain conditions, a punishable offense. However, when discussions in the joint commission broke down in late 2009, it was not so much over substantial disagreements as over the trading of petty insults between two individuals that escalated into a shouting match. The result was that the debate was halted for the time being. The news was received with relief by many of the supporters of the law. They argued that the idea of seeking parliamentary approval had been misguided from the outset, because it would never get past the conservative MPs in an acceptable form, and might even lead to the law being declared null and void. /p pIn any case, a large apparatus was set in motion to implement the EVAW law straight after it was signed into force in the summer of 2009. The International Development Law Organization (IDLO) organized the establishment of special prosecution units within attorney generals’ offices, workshops and trainings on the law were organized in many provinces and yearly reporting by the UN keenly monitored progress, although they struggled to obtain systematic data from Afghanistan’s secretive court system. By all accounts, implementation was sketchy, with the UN estimating that by autumn 2012, only 4 percent of all reported incidents were adjudicated on the basis of the new law. The patchy implementation of the law was one of the arguments presented by Fauzia Kofi, in her capacity as the head of the women’s rights commission in parliament, as she prepared to take the law to plenary debate on the 18th of May this year. She argued that the law would attain greater legitimacy with parliamentary approval, improving implementation rates. For weeks, others attempted to stop her, lobbying embassies and UN agencies, as well as the speaker and the President himself in a bid get the law off the parliamentary agenda. /p pThe disagreements over the EVAW law speak of the larger strategic dilemmas facing proponents of women’s rights in Afghanistan: Do they seize the opportunities that have materialized through Western leverage and funds to put in place legal frameworks and infrastructure that are untainted by compromises with Afghan conservatives, or do they engage in long term negotiations with national groups, sacrificing both urgency and feminist ideals in the process?nbsp; /p pMany Afghan activists will protest that the notion that they should make compromises with conservative MPs is unreasonable and even hypocritical. As they point out, many of these MPs came to power twice on the back of Western military agendas; first as Western allies against the Soviet Union during the cold war, and secondly as rehabilitated partners to the US-led invasion in 2001. Qazi Nasir Hanafi, the head of the legislative commission during two parliamentary terms and an ardent opponent of the EVAW law seems a case in point. Reported to have risen to influence as an Islamic judge during the jihad against the Soviets, meting out severe punishments for religious non-adherence, post-2001, he again wields power as an influential member of the ulema council, boosted by his jihadi credentials. For many women’s rights activists, both inside and outside the parliament, the suggestion that they must reach a compromise with these kinds of actors is ludicrous, or at the very least, unhelpful. Two years ago, a similar kind of dilemma erupted over the women’s shelters. Against a growing conservative backlash against these institutions, accused by Hanafi and others of encouraging immorality and ‘destroying the family’, the Afghan government sought to nationalize the shelters, which are run by NGOs. One of the outcomes that this nationalization would entail was to subject abused women who sought access to the shelters to a local admission committee, where charges of adultery would serve as one disqualifying element. Shelter staff and women activists, mobilising international outrage, succeeded in getting the government to back down, leaving the shelters as independent entities, run with donor funds for the time being. However, Hanafi and others seem to be still smarting from the defeat, since the article referring to shelters has been added to their current set of objections to the EVAW law. /p pIn the eyes of many women’s rights activists then, the EVAW law and the shelters are among the key achievements of the last 10 years and even though they have been secured through narrow deals and partly through external pressure, they are still important victories that have made a real impact on individual women’s lives. That is true despite the low implementation rates of the EVAW law- since the law has become a symbol of the end of impunity and a tool of advocacy. /p pFrom this perspective, the insistence by Fauzia Kofi that the EVAW law needed parliamentary approval to be secure was a high risk gamble, and the whole attempt to equip the law with parliamentary approval so superfluous that it could only be explained by Kofi’s personal interest in taking the credit for the law.nbsp; But even if Kofi is a very ambitious woman whose bid for the presidency partly via international fame cultivates the clichéd image of the quintessential Afghan woman lone heroine, her argument that parliamentary approval would strengthen the EVAW law should not be categorically dismissed, even if in this case, it was hastily and poorly executed. /p pOne would do well to be alert to the possibility that the willingness of many women activists to dispense with democratic procedures are not merely an ends-justifies-the-means pragmatism of the moment, but something that also hints at a more enduring disinterest in broad-based politics. Grassroots or party-based politics never had strong support in Afghanistan, and the preference that many woman activists have displayed for executive favor over the parliamentary route reinforces the top down manner in whichnbsp; change has often been conceived. Although it remains something of a taboo topic, there are strong ethnic overtones to this issue, with old guard Pashtun elites particularly hostile towards more democratic impulses./p pBut as international leverage and resources diminish, there seems to be no way around a more nationally- orientated political strategy for women activists. On a positive note, new possibilities might emerge as the international withdrawal could create a more level political field; the former jihadis will have neither the anger against foreign troops to play up nor the off the books resources flowing to armed strongmen to build their political platform. What we saw on the 18th of May was the curious power of a small number of MPs to hold an entire nation hostage simply by declaring something to be against Sharia. If sustainable progress is to be made, that power will have to be curtailed. Otherwise, women will face the same obstacles again and again, next time perhaps in the shape of a president. /ppemRead a href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/16-days-activism-against-gender-violence/16-days-of-activism-against-gender-violence-2012more articles/a on a href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/505050.50/a exploring strategies to end violence against women /em/p pnbsp;/p pnbsp;/p pnbsp;/pfieldset class=fieldgroup group-sideboxslegendSideboxes/legenddiv class=field field-related-stories div class=field-labelRelated stories:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd a href=/deniz-kandiyoti/gender-in-afghanistan-pragmatic-activismGender in Afghanistan: pragmatic activism/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/5050/massouda-jalal/csw-voices-from-afghanistanCSW: Voices from Afghanistan /a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/massouda-jalal/afghanistan-blind-pursuit-of-peace-and-reconciliationAfghanistan: the blind pursuit of peace and reconciliation/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/5050/afiya-shehrbano-zia/taliban-agent-or-victimTaliban: agent or victim? /a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/deniz-kandiyoti/negotiating-with-taliban-view-from-belowNegotiating with the Taliban: the view from below/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/5050/sara-mojtehedzadeh/meeting-in-monochrome-women-and-afghanistan-conferenceMeeting in monochrome: women and the Afghanistan conference/a /div /div /div /fieldset div class=field field-country div class=field-label Country or region:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Afghanistan /div /div /div div class=field field-topics div class=field-labelTopics:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Equality /div /div /div

US president Barack Obama declares major disaster with at least 91 people dead and scores injured and missing.