Scenes from an immigrant’s workers rights I went to yesterday in Taipei.  The theme this year was domestic workers, who want the right to a day off.  David on Formosa has a blog post about the march and immigrant workers in Taiwan.

Every time I see labor contractors in the Foreign Affairs office, they give me the heebie jeebies, they seem like a cross between pimps and petty landlords scared to death of losing their petty privileges, so it was great to attend something where immigrant workers could articulate their concerns.

The visual theme for the protest was slippers, since the Chinese word for slippers 拖鞋, shares its first character to mean ‘delay,’ as in ‘dragging your feet.’  The event ended with the Council of Labor Affairs being pelted with slippers. Me and my friends were in the front of the crowd, the wrong place to be if a crowd is going to be throwing slippers!

This is the first video I shot using the Flip. It was a pain editing it on FCP, and I pretty much had to do it blind, unless I wanted to spend hours rendering it to preview things. I marked in and out points on the audio track and picked an in point on the video and let the chips fall where they may.  Its not the greatest video ever, but it did get done in a couple of hours.

Each year approximately 2.8 million students graduate from US High Schools. Some will go on to college, join the military, or take other paths in life, hopefully all becoming productive members of society.

But for approximately 65,000 of them, these opportunities will never be available. Not because they lack motivation, or achievement, but because of the undocumented status passed on to them by their parents.

The DREAM Act would allow these kids to do the things other people take for granted like being able to go to college, get a driver’s license, and get a job. It would allow them to participate fully in society, in the only country they know.

There are a couple of videos in the post. The first one was produced by Theresa Thanjan and me, and the music was composed by John Plenge. Theresa and I also did a music video of a song, ‘I have a dream,’ written by a couple of the kids.

….common saying among Indians that “our economy grows at night when the government is asleep.”

And the second, by Paul Krugman talks about the Republican contempt for government as being a product of its decision to “make itself the party of racial backlash”

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.

Why are the three kids wearing kaffiyehs? Nobody in India wears a kaffiyeh. We are not shy about wearing head gear, but a Palestinian kaffiyeh is not part of the sartorial vocabulary. In fact, according to the police, the leader:

..was against the typical looks of a bearded Muslim youth and encouraged workers to wear jeans and trousers.

So who put this head gear made fashionable by Arafat on these kids?  The police have shown great alacrity in finding the culprits, as they should (one can only hope for such promptness when VHP and Bajrang Dal go on the rampage). One has to wonder whether the meaning of this picture can be found in these questions about  what has been going on:

1) It has been widely reported (and not refuted by the Police) that in early August this year Atif, who is described by the Delhi Police as the mastermind behind the recent terrorist bombings in Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Delhi, underwent a police verification exercise along with his four roommates in order to rent the apartment they were staying in Jamia Nagar.

All the five youth living in the apartment submitted to the Delhi police their personal details, including permanent address, driving license details, address of the house they previously stayed in, all of which were found to be accurate.

Is it conceivable that the alleged kingpin behind the terrorist Indian Mujahideen outfit would have wanted to undergo a police verification- for whatever purpose- just a week after the Ahmedabad blasts and a month before the bombings in Delhi?

2) The four-storeyed house L-18 in Jamia Nagar, where the alleged terrorists were staying, has only one access point, through the stair case, which is covered by an iron grill. It is impossible to leave the house except from the staircase. By all reports, the staircase was taken over by the Special Cell and/ or other agencies during the counter-terror operation. The house, indeed the entire block, was cordoned off at the time of the operation.

How then was it then possible, as claimed by the police, for two alleged terrorists to escape the premises during the police operation?

3) The media has quoted ’police sources’ as having informed them that the Special Cell was fully aware about the presence of dreaded terrorists, involved in the bombings in Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Delhi, staying in the apartment that was raided.

Why was the late Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma, a veteran of dozens of encounter operations, the only officer in the operation not wearing a bullet proof vest? Was this due to over-confidence or is there something else to his mysterious death during the operation? Will the forensic report of the bullets that killed Inspector Sharma be made public?

4) There are reports that towards the end of the counter-terror operation, some policemen climbed on the roof of L-18 and fired several rounds in the air. Other policemen were seen breaking windows and even throwing flower pots to the ground from flats adjacent or opposite to L-18

Why was the police firing in the air and why did it indulge in destruction of property around L-18 after the encounter?

5) The police officials claim that an AK-47 and pistols were recovered from L-18.

What was the weapon that killed Inspector Sharma? Was the AK-47 used at all and by whom? Going by some reports that have appeared (see ’Times of India’, 20.09.08), the AK-47s have been used by the police only. Is it not strange that alleged terrorists did not use a more deadly and sophisticated weapon like the AK-47, which they purportedly possessed, preferring to use pistols?

The crisis was precipitated when East Pakistanis (who later became Bangladeshis) voted overwhelmingly in favour of autonomy and West Pakistan responded by sending in its army.

Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, including Hindus, political activists, intellectuals and students. The Pakistani army carried out “collective punishment” where they suspected villagers of helping the freedom fighters.

Thousands of women were raped, millions fled into India. Bangladeshis say the killings amounted to a genocide and that three million people died.

Sometimes one can pin-point the exact moment one’s sense of self and the world changes irrevocably. Reading about that war was a moment like that. I must have been about ten, and it dawned on me that the world could be an anonymously cruel place. I did not know what the words ‘rape’ or ‘massacre’ meant, but it didn’t matter. The horror of 1971 was hard-wired into my brain.

I had an occasion to recall that feeling on reading about an effort in Bangladesh to prosecute perpetrators of the atrocities for war-crimes. One of the main organizations behind this effort is the War Crimes Fact Finding Committee, which is pressuring the Government of Bangladesh to go over its documents, gathered over 19 years and prosecute those responsible. Interestingly, many of the people it wants to be brought to justice are those who collaborated with the Pakistani army in the massacres:

In one of the most notorious incidents of the war, more than 150 academics and journalists (including BBC reporter Nizamuddin Ahmed) were rounded up in Dhaka on the eve of Pakistan’s defeat and killed by members of a group call Al-Badr, which was allegedly made up of members of the religious party Jamaat-e-Islami.

Jamaat-e-Islami is a coalition partner in the present government, so this is a very large skeleton rattling in its cupboard. And true to form, as things go in these circumstances, Dr. Hassan, one of the organizers of the movement, has received death threats for his trouble.

To find out more about this particularly dark period in Bangladesh’s history look at the Bangladesh Genocide Archive. I didn’t quite have the stomach to go through it. Wikipedia has a good entry about the war and its political and cultural context.

The article is a butchered version of the original — all the significant details have been taken out. Read the original underneath:

At a Demos fringe event during the Lib Dem conference, a handful of us pondered the question of identity in multicultural Britain. Diverse panelists came to pleasing agreement that people had multiple identities. We rejected New Labour’s quasi-American model of Britishness, with its flags on the lawn, national days, and monolithic ‘British story’.

Luckily, this genial consensus soon came to an end. As we spoke of opening up cultural categories, a familiar canard soon made its inevitable appearance. Voiced in eminently reasonable tones, it goes like this: British liberals respect individual choice and Other Cultures. But what happens when these cultures reject the core Western liberal value, the Equality of Women? It’s a frequently asked ‘genuine question’. I heard it most recently from an American woman who deplored Bush but feared that Islam would end the wearing of bikinis (which apparently symbolizes the achievements of Western liberalism).

Now, a great many women (and men) from outside the enlightened Western world also believe passionately in the equality of women. No ‘moral relativists,’ we have successfully countered Hindu chauvinists, Islamists, Syrian Christian clerisy, Sikh zealots and Catholic fundamentalists, not to mention sundry secular manifestations of sexism. In India, the women’s movement has challenged innumerable practices that patriarchs deem essential to a particular ‘culture,’ including unfair divorce and inheritance laws, female foeticide, and sexual violence (including marital and sex worker rape). In Pakistan, women’s activists have fought discriminatory Hudood ordinances and in Egypt, campaigned for reproductive rights and against clitoridectomy. In practice, culture has always been a battleground between authoritarian and progressive forces, not a clearly defined static object, whatever patriarchs of various ideological hues would have us believe. There is no such thing as an entire culture that unanimously believes in inequality- just powerful forces within them that do.

The insistence that human rights, equality and freedom are Western concepts to be defended against the incursions of Others or somehow bestowed on them (as suggested, for instance, by the Euston manifesto) relies, apart from double standards on colonialism and occupation, on a continued and convenient deafness to resistant voices from outside Judaeo-Christian contexts. (Except when the likes of Ayaan Hirsi Ali concoct a suitable story of oppression and liberatory flight to the West). This, ironically, makes such self-proclaimed liberals useful collaborators for authoritarian chauvinists from outside the West. For they are all in curious agreement that women’s equality is a Western concept and call for it, accordingly, to be either enforced (that’s why we sent in the troops) or rejected (keep her secluded). They are ably assisted by a minority on the left who regard sexism and homophobia as markers of legitimate cultural difference.

That they are not. Women from non-Western cultures have long mounted their own challenges to patriarchal subjection, even before John Stuart Mill denounced the ‘legal subordination of one sex to the other’. In India, women learned self-assertion and the rejection of injustice not from him but from medieval female Hindu poets like Mirabai and Akkamahadevi, and fierce Tarabai Shinde who in 1882 wrote a stinging denunciation of male double standards. Early 20th century Muslim women like Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Ismat Chughtai and Rashid Jahan attacked a range of injustices including seclusion, disinheritance, lack of reproductive choice and illiteracy. They also taught Western feminism that women’s subjection could not be endorsed in convenient isolation from race, caste and class oppression. They wrote critically on matters such as the niqab, apparel that is far from widely embraced in all Muslim societies and one that has always been the subject of debate rather than a simple expression of ‘culture.’ Nowhere, even in these societies, has there been consensus that denying women access to education, work, health and dignity is an expression of ‘culture’.

The talismanic invocation of women’s equality as the key difference between Us and Them is worrying. Apart from the simple hypocrisy of people whose own societies have yet to fully address systemic gender, race and class inequalities, there is a long, dismal history of using the ‘subjection of women’ to justify cultural condescension and colonial occupation. ‘White men rescuing brown women from brown men’ is how scholar Gayatri Spivak describes the attendant fantasy. An anti-war British woman once told me that she was, nevertheless, glad that Iraqi women could now go to school!

Gender inequality no more inheres to non-Western cultures than to European cultures, notwithstanding scriptures and clerics. Like all cultural practices, it is an historical phenomenon subject to human intervention and transformation. Western cultures not have a monopoly on change. Suggesting that ‘other’ cultures are inherently and immutably sexist on the basis of select practices and ideologues is no different from claiming that Western culture or Christianity is inherently racist because of colonialism, apartheid, the British National Party, or indeed, images of foul darkness in the Bible or Shakespeare. Oddly, the same people who defensively insist that racism must be understood in its historical context cannot extend that analysis to gender inequality elsewhere.

Brutal patriarchal thugs and ideologues who seek to control women’s minds and bodies are just that, whoever and wherever they may be. They can and should be fought as such, like the doughty Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) did, at great risk, for many years before Bush played feminist. Claiming sole Western ownership of the concept of women’s equality robs such women of their struggles, their victories and, ultimately, their dignity.