Pro-Khalistan activists heckle Indian envoy in New York

Anwar Iqbal 

DAWN

Published November 28, 2023 

WASHINGTON: Pro-Khalistan activists heckled the Indian ambassador to the United States, Taranjit Singh Sandhu, during his visit to a gurdwara in New York, forcing him to leave.

Viral videos showed activists confronting Ambassador Sandhu and making statements about attacks on Sikh activists Hardeep Singh Nijjar and Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.

Mr Sandhu visited the Gurunanak Darbar Gurdwara in Long Island, New York, on Sunday to participate in Gurpurab celebrations — the most important festival for the followers of the religion of Sikhism.



Nijjar was assassinated in the parking lot of a Sikh temple in British Columbia on June 18, 2023. In September, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau blamed India for the assassination.

Last week, the Financial Times reported that Washington recently thwarted another Indian plot to assassinate Pannun as well.

On Wednesday, the White House announced it was treating the reported assassination attempt on American soil “with utmost seriousness” and has raised the issue with the Indian government “at the senior-most levels”.

Videos from the Gurdwara show protesters chanting slogans against India’s attempt to suppress the Sikh movement. One protester can also be seen raising the Khalistani flag as the ambassador was leaving the Gurdwara.

“Ambassador Sandhu aborted his visit and fled the Hicksville Gurdwara in haste, embarrassed and without answering the questions raised by the pro-Khalistan Sikhs about his role in the assassination attempts,” Mr Pannun said in a statement.

“From the incoherent answers of… the fleeing ambassador” it was obvious that India was “using mercenaries to stop the Khalistan referendum voting,” he added.

“Despite India’s attempt to assassinate me, Khalistan referendum voting will continue, and the American phase is going to start from January 28, 2024, in San Francisco, California,” he said.

The activists asked the Indian ambassador if he was also involved in the failed bid to assassinate Pannun.

Himmat Singh, who leads pro-Khalistan Sikhs at the Gurdwara, claimed that New Delhi had assassinated Mr Nijjar. The slain Sikh leader was the president of Surrey Gurdwara in Canada and the coordinator for the Canadian chapter of Khalistan Referendum.

“I only wanted answers from Ambassador Sandhu as to why India is using violence to stop the global Khalistan Referendum voting,” said Himmat Singh, who heads the East Coast Coordination Committee.

Published in Dawn, November 28th, 2023

India's envoy to US Taranjit Singh Sandhu visits Gurudwara in New York, Khalistan supporters heckle him

Sandhu received a warm welcome at the Hicksville Gurdwara against the perceived notion of opposition from Khalistanis

PTI New York Published 27.11.23

Sandhu, accompanied by Consul General in New York Randhir Jaiswal and Deputy Consul General Varun Jeph, highlighted growth in the India-US partnership, whether in the healthcare, energy, IT, new emerging technologies, semiconductor or education sectors.

X/ @SandhuTaranjitS


India's Ambassador to the US, Taranjit Singh Sandhu, offered prayers at a gurudwara in Long Island in New York on the occasion of Gurpurab where a group of Khalistani supporters heckled him but were escorted out by members of the Sikh community.


"Privileged to join the local Sangat, including from Afghanistan, at Guru Nanak Darbar of Long Island in celebrating Gurpurab- listened to Kirtan, spoke about Guru Nanak’s everlasting message of togetherness, unity, & equality, partook langar, and sought blessings for all,” Sandhu said in a post on X on Sunday.



Sandhu received a warm welcome at the Hicksville Gurdwara against the perceived notion of opposition from Khalistanis. A few nuisance makers tried to heckle him but were escorted out by members of the Sikh community, sources said.

In his remarks at the gurudwara, Sindhu assured members of the Sikh community that Indian diplomats in the US will provide all help and support to them.

Sandhu, accompanied by Consul General in New York Randhir Jaiswal and Deputy Consul General Varun Jeph, highlighted growth in the India-US partnership, whether in the healthcare, energy, IT, new emerging technologies, semiconductor or education sectors.

On the occasion, the gurudwara members and officials honoured and felicitated the Indian Ambassador.

Sandhu also spoke about the historical linkages between Sikh Gurus, Sikhs and Afghanistan. He noted that Afghan Sikhs have shown how to face adversities.

He mentioned that three Saroops of the Sikh scripture Guru Granth Sahib were brought from Kabul to Delhi in August 2021 after the Taliban took over the war-torn country.

During the visit to the gurudwara, some pro-Khalistan elements heckled Sandhu and shouted questions about Khalistani separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, killed in Canada in June this year, according to videos being circulated of the incident.

Earlier, in a separate tweet, Sandhu said Guru Nanak Dev ji’s timeless message of equality and universal oneness in the well-known Shabad of Guru Ravidass as he paid his respects at Sri Guru Ravidass Temple in New York on Saturday.

'Responsible for Nijjar killing': India envoy heckled by Khalistani backers in US

During a visit to a New York gurdwara, Indian envoy to the US Taranjit Singh Sandhu was heckled by Khalistani supporters, who accused him of involvement in the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

Indian Ambassador to the United States, Taranjit Singh Sandhu, was heckled by pro-Khalistanis at Hicksville Gurdwara in Long Island, New York. (Credits: X)

India Today World Desk

New Delhi,UPDATED: Nov 27, 2023 17:52 IST

Written By: Devika Bhattacharya

Indian Ambassador to the United States, Taranjit Singh Sandhu, was heckled by Khalistani supporters during his visit to a gurdwara in New York, according to a video circulated on social media.

"You are responsible for Nijjar's killing. You plotted to kill Pannun," some people are seen shouting at the envoy, referring to Khalistani terrorists Hardeep Singh Nijjar and Gurpatwant Singh Pannun. The video was shared by BJP spokesperson RP Singh.

The incident occurred as Sandhu attended Gurpurab prayers at the Hicksville Gurdwara in Long Island on Sunday (US local time).

Sandhu was warmly welcomed at the gurdwara, news agency PTI said quoting sources, adding that a few troublemakers tried to heckle him but were escorted out by members of the Sikh community.

"Privileged to join the local Sangat, including from Afghanistan, at Guru Nanak Darbar of Long Island in celebrating Gurpurab- listened to Kirtan, spoke about Guru Nanak’s everlasting message of togetherness, unity, & equality, partook langar, and sought blessings for all," Sandhu said in a post on X on Sunday.

The envoy assured members of the Sikh community that Indian diplomats in the US will provide all help and support to them.

Sandhu was accompanied by Consul General in New York, Randhir Jaiswal, and Deputy Consul General Varun Jeph.

The Indian envoy is seen leaving the gurdwara after the heckling, while a lone protester waved the Khalistani flag outside the premises.

BJP leader Manjinder Singh Sirsa condemned the incident, calling the hecklers "goons".

"He [Sandhu] went to the Gurudwara in New York to pay obeisance at the occasion of Gurupurab. He was heckled and threatened by Khalistani thugs. Is this the message of Sikhi? Is this the message of Guru Nanak? These goons are not Sikhs!" Sirsa told news agency ANI.

The incident comes amid a backdrop of heightened tensions between India and Canada following the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar on June 18. The killing led to a diplomatic spat between the two nations after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alleged Indian involvement, an accusation that New Delhi has firmly denied, calling it "absurd."

In a similar incident back in September, Indian High Commissioner to the UK Vikram Doraiswami was denied entry to a gurdwara and heckled by a group of radical British Sikh activist in Scotland's Glasgow.

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) had expressed serious concern over the safety of its diplomats and has taken up the matter with the United States, calling for measures to prevent such incidents in the future.

Published By:

Devika Bhattacharya

Publi

Ireland’s Housing Crisis Is an Indictment of Irish Capitalism

A dysfunctional housing system is putting intense strain on Ireland’s social fabric as rents spiral out of control. The current malaise has deep roots in the structure of Irish capitalism, and radical reform is the only way to turn things around.

Rental signs outside Georgian buildings in Dublin city center, Ireland on February 15, 2023. 

(Artur Widak / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

BY COLIN GANNON
05.06.2023
JACOBIN

On April 1, amid a protracted housing crisis that has been steadily mounting in scale and intensity, the Irish government lifted an eviction ban that had protected tenants since last October. As the current housing minister Darragh O’Brien conceded, the predictable outcome will be a rise in already record-breaking levels of homelessness.

Whatever way you look at this hydra-headed housing crisis (which seems increasingly unmanageable for the ruling parties), it has produced catastrophic effects for the country’s residents, particularly in urban areas. Emergency accommodation houses 11,988 people, with others sequestered away in more hidden forms of homelessness. Those who wish to buy will see that house prices are now seven times the median income.

But we can find the most striking symptoms of the crisis in the private rental sector, as is the case in many other countries. One day last August, only 716 homes were available to rent in the south of Ireland, and rents stood at an all-time high. Even mainstream liberal commentators detect unmistakable signs that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have “decided to bring back nineteenth-century landlordism, to reshape Ireland as a nation beholden to private property owners.”

Overcoming the crisis will require a comprehensive transformation of the Irish housing system. But how are we going to achieve this?
The Irish Housing Question

Exasperated at the ineffectual efforts of bourgeois reformers, Friedrich Engels wrote in 1872 that the “housing question” could only be resolved by ending the capitalist mode of production. Yet Ireland’s capitalist class and its political elite are clearly not staring down the barrel of social revolution, however unanchored they may be in economic reality. While the problems with housing “may not be resolvable under capitalism,” argue Peter Marcuse and David Madden in their book In Defense of Housing, “the shape of the housing system can be acted upon, modified, and changed.”To make sense of the Irish housing crisis, you have to understand why the development of the southern Irish state has been so bound up with housing and property.

If you want to make sense of the housing crisis, you have to understand why the development of the southern Irish state has been so bound up with housing and property. By drawing this historical arc, we can see how the underlying philosophy shaping Irish housing policy for a hundred years in the South — the North deserves its own analysis — has been an unhealthy obsession with owner-occupation. This preference interacted with the forces of globalization and the neoliberal turn to bring us to where we are today.

In the apocalyptic aftermath of an Gorta Mór (the Great Famine), an agrarian movement called the Land League, formed in 1879, organized the rural poor in Ireland into a mass national campaign that resisted evictions and employed rent strikes and boycotts. It eventually concluded that the only way to defeat a vampiric form of rural landlordism was through widescale farmer-tenant proprietorship. This dream soon became a reality.

Before the British state carried out agrarian reforms in response to popular mobilizations known more broadly as the Land Wars, thirteen thousand landlords owned the land of rural Ireland. By 1920, tenants had purchased 316,000 holdings. These tenants became private land- and homeowners, beneficiaries of a mass division and redistribution of estates held by the Anglo-Irish ruling class.

Politically, as the historian Diarmaid Ferriter writes, the implication was that the descendants of the “Land War generation” were “imbued with the idea that home ownership was the ultimate goal and renting was wasted money.” Those descendants, Ferriter concludes a little too definitively, were the “inheritors of a conservative impulse.”
Housing and the Irish State

After gaining independence, the nascent post-partition state in the South would come to assume a leading role in providing housing capital by funding a relatively large social-housing construction program, which constituted a majority of the housing built from the 1920s to the 1950s. At the same time, it also played an outsized role in the funding and building of dwellings for owner-occupation, its preferred type of tenure.

Similar surges in output during the 1960s and ’70s could not conceal the fact that government subsidies still favored, to a considerable degree, the private home-buyer more than the social-housing tenant. The 1966 Housing Act was a further boon for private ownership, extending the right of purchase to all local authority tenants. Come 1969, local authorities had sold an astonishing 64,490 council homes.

As the Sinn Féin housing spokesperson and author Eoin Ó Broin points out, the “largest output of housing in the history of the State” during the 1970s was severely undercut by the “massive transfer of stock from the public to the private sector via tenant purchase.” This transfer tipped the balance in favor of homeownership further still.Irish governments prioritized ownership of property over other forms of social protection.

Private homeownership, having stood at 52.6 percent in 1946, rose to 70 percent in 1971. The ruling conservative parties could reasonably have felt that this was the crowning achievement of the modern Irish state, after centuries of absenteeism, dispossession, and insecurity.

In a landmark study, Michelle Norris disputes the widely held assumption that the southern Irish state failed to develop a comprehensive welfare regime like many of its Western European counterparts. Instead, she argues, a paradigm called “asset-based welfare” meant that Irish governments prioritized ownership of property over other forms of social protection, reminding us of Ferriter’s contestable, if resonant, notion of the inherited conservative impulse.
Financialization

From the 1980s onward, the structure of the system did not change — just the way in which it was financed. In his book Sins of the Father, Conor McCabe writes of a kind of “revolution” that was underway at the time:


Banks were becoming “one-stop shops” for financial services, and the Irish government played its part by changing the rules and allowing building societies and insurance companies to compete with high-street banks in the areas of personal and business loans.

The impact of credit and financial liberalization combined with the withdrawal of the Irish state from providing homes and funding their construction. The 1980s saw a 30 percent collapse in the output of social housing compared to the previous decade.The 1980s saw a 30 percent collapse in the output of social housing compared to the previous decade.

Yet as Ó Broin explains, the effects of credit liberalization on house prices were “more delayed than in Britain,” where the Thatcher government was engaged in a mass sell-off of council housing. By the time prices started creeping upward, financial deregulation and banking standardization steered through by the European Union in the 1990s exacerbated the trend — in particular the newfound access to cheap credit for Irish financial institutions arising from membership of the single currency.

Housing in Ireland, now thoroughly financialized, was thus central to the boom and bust of the Celtic Tiger. In 1994, the average price of a house in the state was €72,000. By 2004, it had soared to €249,000.

Then came the crash of 2008. Construction, private sector investment, and capital spending vanished overnight. Successive austerity budgets by the Fianna Fáil–led government slashed capital expenditure in social and affordable housing from €1.5 billion in 2008 to €485 million in 2011. After the bailout, when the Irish state lost its fiscal sovereignty to the European Union–European Central Bank–International Monetary Fund troika, social-housing output plummeted, shrinking to a new historic low of 642 units in 2014.
Getting Boomier

Meanwhile, housing affordability became a growing problem in the private rental sector, which had expanded during the Celtic Tiger as investors flooded into the market through buy-to-let mortgages. Rents in the state ballooned by 68 per cent between 2010 and 2021. Across the EU as a whole during that period, rents rose by just 16 per cent.By explicit design of government policy, the latest phase of the crisis has increasingly been fueled by investment from what scholars call asset-manager capitalism.

In 2014, the introduction of the landlord-friendly Housing Assistance Payment led, as Ó Broin notes, to a situation whereby “non-subsidised renters were being crowded out of the private rental sector by increasing numbers of social housing tenants.” He describes this as ground zero for the terrifying excesses of the homelessness crisis. All the while, house prices were rocketing skyward, squeezing prospective home-buyers into an ever-larger pool of tenants.

By explicit design of government policy, the latest phase of the crisis has increasingly been fueled by investment from what scholars call asset-manager capitalism. In the words of Rory Hearne, real estate investment trusts (REITS) and similar funds of that kind desire the creation of “a permanent renting class,” out of which they can wrench endless rents.


The economist Josh Ryan-Collins observes that this state-sponsored swarming of asset-management institutions around real estate in Ireland is a global phenomenon, as the “wall of liquidity created by Quantitative Easing” resulted in a search for “high yielding, but safe assets.” When those engaged in this search made it to Ireland, they set their sights on distressed commercial assets that were being held by Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency (NAMA).

Now that the market for commercial assets is contracting, the “wall of liquidity” has moved into the domain of residential development. Deploying scorched-earth investment strategies, these institutional landlords — who bought just seventy-six units in Ireland in 2010 — scooped up 5,132 homes in 2019, and now own more than forty-five thousand across the country.

Put simply, the private rental sector is completely broken, blighted by severe supply shortages and unaffordable, exploitative rents. Various rent subsidy schemes for social-housing tenants also drain close to €1 billion from the exchequer to fill the coffers of private landlords. Only harebrained schemes to line the pockets of developers are forthcoming from the government. The crisis thus rages on with no end in sight.

To make matters worse, the coalition government, in full knowledge of the scale of the crisis and the breadth and depth of hardship, has failed to spend over €1 billion of its housing budget over the last three years. Of perhaps greater concern is the unforgivable refusal of local authorities to spend 90 percent of their allocated affordable housing budget across 2021 and 2022. But if the system appears to be at a tipping point, then where are the main, viable solutions coming from on the Irish left?
Alternatives

On behalf of Sinn Féin, Ó Broin has put forward various proposals, mapping out in detail the most compelling reformist alternative. This vision closely resembles the housing policies supported by the strongest socialist force in the Dáil, People Before Profit (PBP). PBP’s ideas differ from those of Ó Broin in making an explicit call for rents to be set at a percentage of take-home pay and advocating the nationalization of all dwellings owned by corporate landlords. Few on the Left would resist such moves to radically rebalance the system.On behalf of Sinn Féin, Eoin Ó Broin has put forward various proposals, mapping out in detail the most compelling reformist alternative.

So what are Ó Broin’s solutions? Chiefly, in the medium to long term, “the expansion of public housing on a scale not seen in the history of the State,” with something in the order of an additional 230,000 public housing units over the next ten years. Ideally, he argues, this would be led by resurgent local authorities that had been reassigned the power to build and build. Developments would be mixed-tenure and mixed-income, as well as world-class from the point of view of amenities and architecture. The housing movement also sees a constitutional right to housing as an imperative.

Ó Broin’s most interesting policy idea may be his lease-holding suggestion. Firstly, he argues, “the land on which the affordable purchase home sits should never be sold, rather it should be leased to the homeowner indefinitely at no or low cost.” Secondly, to avert re-commodification, it should not be possible to sell the property on the private market. A slightly diluted version of this model of affordable housing has already been developed, on a micro-scale, by Ó Cualann Cohousing Alliance in Dublin since 2017.

According to Ó Broin, public-private partnerships, sales of public land, private rental subsidies, and long-term leasing arrangements “all introduce ever greater levels of profit maximisation” and should be phased out of the public housing sector. To address the short-term affordability crisis as we await the largest house-building program in the state’s history, O Bróin has proposed an immediate three-year rent freeze, which would replace the existing, unfit-for-purpose Rent Pressure Zones.

To achieve a reduction in existing rents, he also wishes to introduce a refundable tax relief, pegged to “8.3 percent of rent paid in the previous year.” A three-year rent freeze, combined with a refundable tax relief alongside an ambitious program of public house-building, should in Ó Broin’s view see “private rental supply and in turn rents start to return to pre-peak levels by the time the freeze and relief expire.”

Even if these policies are successful, should the limit of our ambition, against a backdrop of hyperinflated rents and stagnating wages, be to return the cost of rent to precrisis levels? For Sinn Fein at least, that seems to be the case.
Supply Is Not Enough

Other policy interventions called for by Ó Broin include greater tenant participation in policy formulation and decision-making as well as far-reaching land reform. The latter could, he maintains, be tackled by actively increasing the stock of publicly owned land, reintroducing credit controls, and reviewing the current vacant tax rate. More broadly, he wants a reconsideration of how “land speculation is financed and taxed” in order to “end the corrosive impact of speculative investment in land on the housing system.”

The continued use of Irish housing as an asset class by international asset-management institutions deepens the links between the domestic housing system and global financial markets. For economist Ann Pettifor, the main “propellant” of this crisis is not supply shortages but an excess of finance. House prices will fall, she has argued, “when the propellant is withdrawn — and flows of finance decline.”

There is a serious engagement with the history of financialization in the interventions of Ó Broin, Hearne, and others. However, they fail to fully connect the financial exuberance that underpins the current economic order in Ireland to the need for a reformed housing system. Extra supply will not resolve everything.Irish housing activism must make arguments that challenge the entire edifice of housing commodification and Irish capitalism.

We should therefore place greater emphasis on land reforms. We should also give more consideration to whether a continuation of the current Irish economic model — based on an overreliance on foreign direct investment, with Ireland as an intermediary zone between US and European capital — will allow for the kinds of reforms that are required, and not simply bake further instability and pricing flux into the system.

As the example of Finland has shown, the policy of Housing First — giving homeless people a home unconditionally, preferably with integrated support in a context of higher supply — can work and come close to ending different types of homelessness. It is also necessary to rein in the brutal predations of landlordism through regulation and possibly new taxes.

A common narrative suggests that this whole crisis was not a necessary outcome of Irish economic policy in general but rather a housing-policy failure in particular, which arises from the misjudgments of politicians, not any inner logic of capital. If not for those misjudgments, everything might be okay.

However, this reasoning is seriously flawed and myopic. Irish housing activism must make arguments that challenge the entire edifice of housing commodification and Irish capitalism.
Housing Activism

Amilitant uprising in the style of the nineteenth-century Land Wars seems unlikely, and not only because those struggles arose from the specific historical conditions of post-famine rural Ireland. It is also because Sinn Féin, on the brink of real power for the first time in the South, has effectively monopolized the debate on an alternative model, ably assisted by housing activists, the socialist left, and even some social democrats in other parties.Postcrash Ireland witnessed a new wave of extra-parliamentary housing activism.

Over the past decade, however, there have been real echoes of the Land Wars on the ground, particularly in Dublin. Postcrash Ireland witnessed a new wave of extra-parliamentary housing activism, from Housing Action Now to Home Sweet Home to Take Back the City. These campaign groups emerged to build a counternarrative on the housing crisis and engaged in forms of direct action such as the occupation of vacant buildings. Many were connected to the Right2Water campaign, Ireland’s largest grassroots mobilization so far this century.

Formed in 2019, Community Action Tenants Union (CATU), the only tenants’ union in Ireland, has gone from strength to strength, accumulating members across the island on an all-Ireland basis. Along with the inherent difficulty in organizing atomized tenants, Irish tenant politics, in the judgement of Michael Byrne, suffers from political centralization, which moves sites of organized conflict away from the city or town to central government.

This is an obstacle CATU must overcome, but it is not helped by the passivity of the trade-union movement and the pacifying effects on the housing movement of NGOs. A number of small charities that rely heavily on state funding are among the loudest voices in the debate, yet simultaneously find themselves unable to advocate for sufficiently radical change because of “service level agreements” and the threat of losing access to funding.

We can see the consequences of this “NGOization” of the response to the housing crisis most starkly in advocacy over homelessness. As some scholars have observed, the Apollo House occupation maintained a rather “restricted focus on homelessness” that “failed to connect up with the wider impacts of the housing crisis.”
Fighting Back

Today, we run the risk of succumbing to the same temptations: focusing our attention on rising homelessness and evictions at the expense of reexamining a wider system that also alienates us in our workplaces and in our everyday interactions with the world around us. As Marcuse and Madden argue, a “truly radical right to housing” cannot be limited to a narrow legal right: it must “comprise a similarly expansive set of political demands”.

Even if a left-leaning coalition led by Sinn Féin comes to power, it would leave the current economic model largely untouched, so activists should not rest on their laurels. Given the scale of the crisis, all actions should be on the table. During the Land Wars, the Whiteboys and Ribbonmen — secret organizations whose tactical repertoires included attacking landlords and their property — attracted notoriety.

But much more recently, at a time when levels of trade-union density and activity were high in Ireland in a European context, tenants still undertook national rent strikes. In 1972 and 1973, tens of thousands of tenants fought back against deteriorating housing conditions and spiraling rents. Powered by a social movement, the Left can confront the beast head on, smashing the neoliberal consensus on housing and cleansing the system of predatory land and property speculation.

Colin Gannon is an Irish journalist and researcher who has written for the Baffler, Tribune, the Guardian, and the Verso Books blog, among other outlets.

An unexpected friendship: The graveyard keeper and the polio survivor

In Lampedusa, friends of 30 years, Vincenzo and Michele, observe the refugee crisis close-up and discuss the value of human life.

Vincenzo Lombardo (R), who was Lampedusa's graveyard keeper for nearly 20 years, meets with his friend, Michele Cappadona (L), at the end of Via Roma, the main street on the island

 [Gianfranco Rescica/Al Jazeera]

By Alessandro Corso
Published On 27 Nov 2023

Lampedusa, Italy – The tourist season has ended and the cafes along Via Roma are almost empty.

Until a few weeks ago, Lampedusa’s main street was full of tourists, sitting at the hundreds of cafe tables that lined the pedestrian walkway. But now that winter is coming, most of the tables have been removed, and most people have left.

For Michele Cappadona and Vincenzo Lombardo, two friends who have been meeting here for the past 30 years, the quiet isn’t unusual. On a warm and windy afternoon, with the wind blowing in from the south, they take their seats outside a bar and begin their usual commentary on the news.

“Michele, did you hear about Palestine and Israel?” Vincenzo asks.

“Oh, I don’t know, Vince. Always something bad around the corner,” Michele replies.

“Poor them. Children, innocent souls,” Vincenzo says before declaring of both the Hamas fighters who attacked communities in southern Israel on October 7 and the Israeli military which has responded by attacking and invading the Gaza Strip: “They are all criminals, assassins.”

These are words Vincenzo has repeated many times over the years, usually to critique people in power he blames for not doing enough to stop human suffering.

When they first met more than 30 years ago, Vincenzo was a strong working man in his 40s with a deep Christian faith. Michele was in his 20s; smaller, lame as a result of childhood polio and with a rather more cynical perspective on religion.Via Roma, the main street on the small island of Lampedusa, south of Sicily, on September 25, 2023 [Tiziana Fabi/AFP]

Born on the island in 1959, Michele moved to Naples as a one-year-old when his parents discovered he had polio. He stayed there, living in a specialist clinic, at first with his parents and then by himself, until he was a teenager and the doctors declared that his treatment had come to an end. In 1975, he returned to Lampedusa to live with his parents and complete his secondary school education.

He remembers first spotting Vincenzo a few years later from the window of his room. Vincenzo had recently returned from Turin, where he had been working at the Fiat car company, and started working as a dustman.

Michele would “see him every morning”. Then, one day, he says, “We met somehow”. He thinks it was at a cafe, but he cannot recall which one.

“Vince, do you remember where we met the first time?” Michele asks, repeating the question more loudly for his friend who is now almost deaf.

“Oh, I see,” Vincenzo finally answers. “I don’t know, it must have been somewhere, maybe at the Amicizia cafe? Anyway, who cares? It doesn’t matter.”

“I only remember that we liked each other,” Michele says with a smile. “It was a very spontaneous thing. And the next day or the day after, we decided to meet again. Since then, we have been meeting here, in Via Roma, pretty much every day. There it is. This is our story. As simple as that.”

Michele, who has never had a job and receives a modest disability pension, says his whole life has been lived in the shadow of his disability. Before he met Vincenzo, he says, he felt as though he was living on the margins of society. “People, you know, how they are. Always judging,” he says. “They see one who cannot work or use his strength as they do, and they turn their back to you. But Vincenzo was different. He didn’t care about that.”
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In death, ‘we are all the same’

In 1996, Vincenzo took a job as a graveyard keeper. When he accepted the role, he had little idea that he would have to bury the bodies of people who had died at sea while trying to reach Lampedusa. But soon after he started, bodies started to be found off the island’s shores.

Nobody knew what to do with the first bodies that were retrieved. With no formal processing system in place, Vincenzo stepped in to take care of them. “What did Jesus say? What you do to my brother, you do it to me,” he says.

The graveyard for unnamed refugees who died at sea, pictured in 2004, three years before Vincenzo retired as the graveyard keeper 

[Eric Vandeville/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images]

He continued doing this up until his retirement in 2007, writing whatever information he could find about the migrants and refugees he buried in a register.

The oldest document the registry office in Lampedusa has is dated April 25, 1996, and identifies the deceased as an “unknown non-EU citizen, possibly Tunisian, between 25 and 30 years old, wearing a ring with the initial letter of his name. His name was Mustafa.”

Vincenzo tried to give the dead he buried some dignity by making wooden crosses that he would erect, adding a number according to his own records and praying for the deceased every day.

He complains that Europe has shown no serious intention of stopping refugees and migrants from dying at sea or of providing “any dignity to the dead and their families”.
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One thing he is grateful for, however, is that he never had to bury a child who had died at sea. “I think that I would have given up,” he says.

The anger Vincenzo feels towards those in power is palpable. He calls it a “travesty” that the world has normalised a situation where thousands of people are left to die in the Mediterranean. “Governments do not care about their lives. Nobody cares,” he says.

For Vincenzo, the living may be treated very differently, but in death, we are “all the same”.

Makeshift wooden crosses mark the graves of unnamed refugees who died on sea voyages to Lampedusa, pictured in 2004 when Vincenzo was still the graveyard keeper [Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images]

The view from the end of the road

From one end of Via Roma, Michele and Vincenzo watch the coastguard or Guardia di Finanza (Italy’s antismuggling agency) boats approaching the Favaloro pier, where most small boat landings take place in Lampedusa.

From this spot, they have a clear view and notice some rescue boats in the distance, full of people wrapped in thermic blankets.

“Do you think this is right?” Michele asks. “Crammed like that? And how many are still dying? Yesterday, or the day before, six died.”

These days, such deaths no longer make it to the global news. Nor is there much coverage of the refugees and migrants who do make it to shore or of the conditions they endure at the “welcome” centre where they are detained.

Michele and Vincenzo are not particularly surprised by this. They have become used to observing how the world’s attention shifts so easily from one tragedy to the next.

“It is always the same. They come, they talk, and they leave. But no worries, at least we stay here to watch these awful situations,” Vincenzo says.

Vincenzo, left, and Michele watch the Lampedusa harbour from the end of the main street on the island, Via Roma 

[Gianfranco Rescica/Al Jazeera]

A never-ending story

In September, Lampedusa did hit the front pages again – albeit fleetingly. National and international newspapers wrote about an “invasion” of thousands of refugees and migrants fleeing from Tunisia.

The number of people who landed in Lampedusa had reached 5,000 or 6,000 in a few days, according to the humanitarian organisations working inside the island’s “reception centre”.

“Yes, they were all there, at the dock. Hundreds of them. There, without water and food,” Michele says, describing how people were left to lie on the pavement under the hot sun. When most of the refugees and migrants were transferred elsewhere in Sicily, the news reporters went away.

But Vincenzo and Michele remain, watching and talking as they have for the past 30 years. “You will always find us here … For as long as we are on this Earth,” Michele explains. Then they return to their earlier conversation, debating the Israel-Palestine conflict.

“They talk about peace. Peace, how to make peace if they keep bombing and playing at war?” Michele says. “And then, can you imagine how many more will come? How many more immigrants? This story will never end, it will never end.”

It is almost 6pm and Vincenzo has pills to take. So the two friends say goodbye. They will meet again the next day to continue their conversation.

“You know how it is,” says Michele with a resigned shrug of his shoulders. “There is the good and the bad, but the bad always wins. Because that one is stronger than the other, and it will always be.”

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

UK 

The Cameron Doctrine Revisited

BY JOSH WHITE

 NOVEMBER 27, 2023
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Photograph Source: UK Government – CC BY 2.0

A familiar face has returned to Westminster as foreign secretary. It’s not every day that a former prime minister is inserted into high office through the House of Lords. But this is Britain, the land of gentlemen’s agreements.

David Cameron has even taken the title of Baron of Chipping Norton, the market town where the Cameron family has a cottage. The media once joked about the ‘Chipping Norton set’ inclusive of the Camerons and their neighbors, such as Murdoch executive Rebekah Brooks.

Of course, Cameron still has his fans despite the Greensill lobbying scandal. We’re told he brings “gravitas” and “experience” to the role. Gravitas like austerity and experience like bombing Libya into rubble.

This appointment is a sign that the Conservative government is in trouble. Rishi Sunak needed to bring on board a big name. He needed to distract from the fiasco of sacking his Home Secretary Suella Braverman over her inciting an outbreak of far-right protests.

It’s been a success at that level. “Daddy’s home,” tweeted Tory journalist Iain Dale when he heard the news. Forget the essay crisis style of leadership. Forget over 100,000 excess deaths thanks to austerity.

Worse still, Lord Cameron will not face awkward questions from MPs because a peer cannot address the House of Commons. British foreign policy has effectively been moved out of parliamentary scrutiny.

Still, such a farce is not unprecedented. The last member of the House of Lords to serve in one of the great offices of the British state was Lord Carrington, who served as foreign secretary in the first Thatcher government.

What Cameron really brings to the role is reassurance that the status quo is secure. He is a safe pair of hands for certain sections of the political and media establishment. But we can better understand Cameron’s foreign policy via a series of snapshots.

Exhibit A: Brexit

First, we have the obvious fact that David Cameron helped make Brexit happen by holding the referendum in the first place. He did so for purely cynical reasons to try and end the old battle in his own party.

After the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the Cameron government was complacent that it could win over the public with similar campaign tactics. Project Fear was rebooted for the Brexit referendum and all criticism of UK policy was surrendered.

Because the Remain campaign was effectively run by Team Cameron the pro-EU debates lacked any serious criticism of austerity. Most of the Conservative base voted Leave in the end, joined by UKIP and a sizeable minority of Labour voters.

Some people have even claimed he is the worst prime minister in British history. That’s a tough call, especially since he was followed by such luminaries as Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. At least Sunak shares his slick, yet empty PR managerialism.

It’s a sad fact that Cameron now looks like a figure of stability after his successors came bouncing onto the stage. Cameron will go down in history for Brexit, though he should be remembered for much worse things.

Exhibit B: China

UK China policy was more pragmatic under Cameron. Back in 2010, Hu Jintao was still general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and Xi Jinping succeeded him just two years later. But it wouldn’t be for several years before Xi removed most limits on his power.

Even though the Obama administration was seeking to pivot US militarism to East Asia, the UK government was still in the ‘end of history’ phase with regard to China policy. Chancellor George Osborne talked up close economic ties to China as de facto support for democracy.

This theory was widely popular in Western liberal circles: China would inevitably move towards multiparty democracy as part of its embrace of capitalism. This was a convenient fantasy when Cameron and Xi were signing off on £30 billion in trade and investment deals.

Now the British right has assumed the same hostility to China as their US counterparts. The China Research Group was founded by Tory MPs in 2020 to forge a more belligerent response to the rise of China (as if they’ve only just noticed).

As a result, the Tory hard right is suspicious of Cameron because of his record in office and after office. He worked for a private Chinese investment fund after leaving Downing Street. Worst still, the fund in question worked on the Belt and Road Initiative.

Exhibit C: Israel and Palestine

Now we come to the biggest foreign policy question today: Israel’s war on the Palestinians. Cameron has been described as the most pro-Israel prime minister the UK has ever had. This requires some unpacking. He came to power just after the horrors of Operation Cast Lead.

Strangely, Cameron was the first British prime minister to refer to Gaza as a prison camp. He did so in a speech in Turkey after the IDF attacked the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in 2010. Cameron called for the end of the blockade of Gaza and criticized the expansion of Israeli settlements.

Two years later, Cameron opposed the recognition of Palestine as a state at the UN. This is despite his claims to support the two-state solution (a prospect blocked by Israeli policy). But the lowest point came in 2014 with Operation Protective Edge.

During the 50-day war, the Cameron government was hesitant to take a strong position against Israeli aggression. Senior Foreign Office minister Sayeeda Warsi resigned from Cameron’s cabinet in protest calling for an arms embargo against Israel.

The Tory Arabism of yesteryear lives on in the form of close relations with the Gulf dictatorships. Cameron walked the line of arming Saudi Arabia and letting Qatar buy up British assets, while supporting Israel’s occupation to the hilt.

This is still the definitive contradiction of UK Middle East policy today. The UK has a £10 billion investment deal with Qatar, as well as a military cooperation agreement (signed by Cameron’s government).

Meanwhile, Qatar has pursued its own agenda. The Gulf kingdom has supported the Muslim Brotherhood, including its Palestinian affiliate Hamas. This feedback loop is rarely touched upon in British media.

Exhibit D: Iran

One of the very few cases where David Cameron helped improve global stability was Iran policy. To his credit, Cameron supported the Iran nuclear deal to lift sanctions in exchange for access to the nuclear facilities and guarantees that the program was for energy purposes.

Cameron met with President Hassan Rouhani in 2013. The reformist Iranian government was open to negotiation and engagement with Western powers. It was an opportunity to reset the West’s relationship with Iran after decades of hostility.

Of course, the UK was not alone in this process. The Iran nuclear deal was supported by the Obama administration, as well as by China, the EU and Russia. It was a great achievement of diplomacy.

The end of sanctions over Iran’s nuclear program allowed a space for dissent in a country blighted by a cruel dictatorship. It was possible to imagine a democratic opening for Iranian dissidents. However, it wasn’t to be thanks to the Trump administration.

All of these hopes were swept away in 2018. Donald Trump tore up US commitments to the nuclear deal and reverted to a tough line on the Islamic Republic. And Iran has since returned to hardline leadership embodied by President Ebrahim Raisi.

Exhibit E: Libya

Arguably, Cameron’s most egregious foreign policy decision was to join the NATO intervention in the Libyan civil war. The Arab Spring had destabilised the balance of forces in the Middle East, taking down dictators in Egypt and Tunisia.

On the back of the UN mandate for a no-fly zone, the UK launched Operation Ellamy as part of its support for the NATO campaign. Of course, the Benghazi rebels had pledged to respect old oil arrangements to win over European support.

Not only did the NATO campaign help destroy the Gaddafi regime, the Western powers did nothing to support a post-war reconstruction effort to create democratic institutions and a functioning civil society. This was neoliberal foreign policy par excellence.

Today, Libya is still a failed state more than a dozen years later. A playground for jihadis, human traffickers and warlords with foreign backers. The hopes of the Arab Spring in Libya have been extinguished by the forces of counter-revolution.

Exhibit F: Syria

Much like the NATO bombing of Libya, Cameron saw another chance for glorious victory in Syria. He was naturally eager to keep on side with the Obama administration and maybe repeat the photo op in Benghazi, but this time maybe in Aleppo.

Not long after the regime change in Libya, the Syrian uprising was turning into an armed conflict with the Assad regime fighting to crush the rebellion. Thousands of foreign fighters were soon rushing into the country to oppose Assad.

A lot of people have forgotten Cameron’s claim that there were ‘70,000 moderate rebels’ in Syria ready to seize power. These rebels just needed an air force to back them up. The truth of the situation was quite different.

Contrary to popular memory, the 2013 vote in Parliament was not about a no-fly zone. It was a vote on punitive bombing. A no-fly zone was never on the table and 2013 would have just been a bombing campaign (as we saw in the years that followed) with no strategy or end goal.

The 2013 vote was ‘lost’ because the government’s motion was rejected, but so was the opposition’s motion. Amazingly, Cameron’s hawkish line on Syria and Labour’s tepid opposition to it canceled each other out. It was a fluke occurrence.

The following year Islamic State seized huge amounts of territory across Iraq and Syria. Suddenly, the calls for ‘humanitarian intervention’ shifted to demands to ‘do something’ about the Islamist threat. Naturally, Cameron expanded the use of drone strikes.

The UK followed the US and France into a bombing campaign against ISIS, which also targeted other Syrian rebel positions in coordination with Russia. This was while NATO member Turkey was quietly enabling ISIS to counter the Kurds.

Exhibit G: Yemen

While the West was bombing Syria, another brutal civil war was just getting started in Yemen. The Cameron government would end up on the side of military intervention, albeit not direct, to destroy the Houthi movement.

Fearing the spread of Iranian influence, Saudi Arabia began bombing Yemen in support of the Hadi regime. The US and the UK supported the Saudi operation to keep status quo forces in power in Yemen.

In this case, British policy was moved by its longstanding relationship with the Saudi regime. So the British government has continued to sell vast quantities of military hardware to Saudi Arabia, even as the Yemen civil war resulted in a humanitarian catastrophe.

Any pretense of humanitarian intervention disappeared in the case of Yemen. The forces of regime change were opposed in favor of a blood-soaked tyranny backed by another blood-soaked tyranny.

 

Josh White is the author of Goodbye United Kingdom: Descent into Chaos (2015-2022).

Kenya: Panic as Guests, Staff Attacked at Pinewood Beach Resort and Spa


26 NOVEMBER 2023
Capital FM (Nairobi)

Diani — Fear has gripped staff at Pinewood Beach Resort and Spa in Diani, Kwale County, after several of their colleagues sustained injuries after an attack by armed goons.

The latest incident according to the hotel management is the second, that has risked crippling the business, currently hosting tens of tourists from across the world.

Guests were also not spared during the November 17 incident, with some losing valuables of unknown amounts.

Local police were forced to fire in the air to deescalate the situation, which left many injured.

In a statement on Sunday, the hotel owner and Managing Director Alnoor Kanji accused a receiver manager of Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB) of being behind the violent attack.

"We are grateful that none was killed," he said of the November 17 attack that forced police to fire in the air, to restore peace and order.

"Without the protection of armed police and the courage of our staff, this may not have been the case. Tourist police had to intervene with gunfire while our staff were forced to fight the attackers head on."

The hotel is at the center of a legal dispute, as KCB seeks to take over its management, but has since been restrained by a High Court sitting in Mombasa, until the case challenging its intended move is heard and determined.

The High Court in Mombasa set January 9, 2024 as the mention date for the case. It was issued by Justice Peter Mulwa.

"We fear that despite attaining a clear court injunction to prevent any party from taking over, they will continue to unlawfully to forcefully gain possession," he said.

Deborah Cartwright, a tourist from the United Kingdom, who is also a nurse practitioner, offered help to injured staff during the recent attack.

"I attended to a security guard who had a deep right sided head wound," she said.

Kenya: 'It Will Kill Tourism' - Shaken Tourists Say After Pinewood Beach Resort Attack

26 NOVEMBER 2023
Capital FM (Nairobi)

Nairobi — "I have never seen anything like that," those were the words of a tourist from the United Kingdom, after he was caught up in the attack staged by armed goons at the Pinewood Beach Resort and Spa.

The Resort, one of the best in Kenya, is based in Diani, within Kwale County.

For several instances, armed goons have launched what the owners of the facility say is a well coordinated attack, leaving scores with injuries.

In the latest incident, tourists from across the world lost valuables worth an unknown amount.

"I have never seen something like this before," Steven Cartwright, a UK citizen who is a guest at the hotel said.

"We've been here 8 times and at no time did we ever feel threatened."

Cartwright was in the company of his wife Deborah when the incident, which many guests termed as "scary and horrendous" happened.Goons armed with sticks and machetes were seen forcefully gaining access from the entrance and the beach side, attacking everyone they found their way.

"It will kill tourism if it continues like that," Cartwright said, sentiments shared by his wife.

His wife Deborah called on authorities to protect the tourism sector, a key factor in the country's GDP.

Deborah, who is also a practicing nurse, helped in attending to injured staff, including one who had a deep cut on the head.

Staff at the facility said they lost their valuables like phones when the incident occurred.

At that point, the hotel was hosting 60 tourists from the United Kingdom.

Several goons were arrested, and are due in court on Monday.

"We have now been attacked three times by armed goons," Ali Jama, a staff member, said.

He has been a staff member at the hotel since 2000.

"We need peace. Even if it is about debts, it should be reclaimed peacefully."

Another said, "the goons were threatening guests and destroying property."Of the three incidents, the November 17 attack is the worst, the hotel owners and staff said.

Police were forced to fire in the air to restore peace and order, as the goons carried on with chaos.

The hotel owner and Managing Director Alnoor Kanji linked the incident to a receiver manager appointed by KCB to take over the hotel, despite an existing restraining court order.

Close

The matter is expected to be mentioned on January 9, 2024 at the Mombasa High Court.

Kanji alleged that some of the attackers were security guards from a local security firm used by the receiver manager.

"Their goal was to destroy, pillage and kill," he said of the November 17 incident.

"The attackers overwhelmed us from the main gate and beach. They beat our staff and robbed our guests in broad daylight."

A similar incident had occurred in early August at the facility.

"We are grateful that no one was killed," he said.

He is now calling on security officers to apprehend the armed goons and bring to book those behind their illegal actions.

Further, he has asked tourism stakeholders "to speak up against rogue acts of terror that aim to destabilize our industries."

"This is just a case of impunity. Why can't they just follow the rule of law? Can't they respect the court orders?" one of the hotel officials, who did not want to be named, asked.


Read the original article on Capital FM.