Day: June 1, 2024

Zelenskyy said he understands men who do not want to fight, but mobilization is necessary

“Someone does not want to. Someone is afraid. We are all human beings. But you can’t say that everyone is running away now, but they didn’t run away before. No, it’s not true. Of course,… pic.twitter.com/cfm8AlwxoH

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) June 1, 2024

40 years ago, a colourful, kaleidoscopic array of old second-hand vehicles — trucks, coaches, buses, even old military vehicles — began arriving in the fields opposite Stonehenge, the ancient stone sun temple on Salisbury Plain, for what would be the last huge, unlicensed, unpoliced, weeks-long temporary autonomous zone to root itself to the earth of ancient Albion.

The vehicles that arrived were the vanguard of the eleventh annual Stonehenge Free Festival, a month-long anarchic happening, which began in June 1974 with a handful of playful mystics, but had grown significantly in its latter years, as ever-increasing numbers of young refugees from Margaret Thatcher’s decimation of the economy joined the political hippies of an earlier generation, on the road, and on a circuit of free festivals whose biggest manifestation was at Stonehenge, to rock out, to consume vast amounts of drugs, and to — in some cases — to visit the stones for invented pagan rituals on the morning of the summer solstice.

It was a demonstration that, more or less, the anti-materialistic US counter-culture of 1960s America, which had spread to the small towns and suburbia of Britain in the 1970s, could create a low-impact nomadic lifestyle, in convoys that travelled across England and Wales from May to September, and that, at Stonehenge, involved a gathering of the tribes, joined by tens of thousands of other participants, who arrived in cars and camper vans, or who came by train to Salisbury, set up tents and stayed for days or for long weekends to soak up the acid rock, punk and reggae, and the rebel atmosphere.

Unimaginable now, the festival was not without its problems — particularly, in that last year, relating to heroin dealers and the aggressive presence of Hell’s Angels — but it’s unarguable that its crime rate was significantly less than that of any booze-fuelled small town of a comparable size over an average weekend.

Much of the darkness, too, came from the jarring psychic realities of living in Thatcher’s Britain, as she literally waged war on jobs, the working class, the welfare state and traditional notions of solidarity, reshaping Britain as a deregulated, privatised basket case of selfish consumers, revelling in their own atomised materialistic appetites, and increasingly hostile to those who refused to conform. “There is no such thing as society”, as she once triumphantly declared.

I had first visited the Stonehenge Free Festival in 1983, spending a day with friends — if you must know, a future ambassador, a future film producer, and, our conduit, a charismatic but troubled establishment iconoclast who is no longer with us — in a delightful magic mushroom haze, but by 1984 the persistent undercurrent of British state violence in Northern Ireland had spread to the British mainland, as Thatcher declared the striking miners “the enemy within”, and paramilitarised the police’s response to them.

The “enemies within”

Just three days before the solstice in 1984, at what has become known as the Battle of Orgreave, which took place near a coking plant in Rotherham, in South Yorkshire, Thatcher’s paramilitarised police violently attacked striking miners in what has been described as “a defining and ghastly moment” that “changed, forever, the conduct of industrial relations and how this country functions as an economy and as a democracy”. 71 miners were charged with riot, which, at the time, was punishable by life imprisonment, although their trials collapsed when the police evidence was deemed “unreliable.” Efforts to hold the police accountable, however, have been persistently thwarted in the decades since.

Personally, I found it hard to maintain much optimism at that time, when, to recall just one incident, I overheard two old ladies in Beverley Minster, in the ancient market town near my family’s home in Hull, declare that Arthur Scargill, the miners’ leader, was “worse than Hitler.”

Almost entirely unnoticed at the time, the police responsible for the violence at Orgreave turned their attention, just a month later, to the next “enemy within” identified by Thatcher — the ‘Peace Convoy’ travellers who set up a free festival outside the Nostell Priory music festival — a paid festival — near Wakefield, and where riot police, as I described it in my book The Battle of the Beanfield, “raided the site at dawn, ransacking vehicles and arresting the majority of the travellers — 360 people in total — with a savagery that had not been seen since the last Windsor Free Festival in 1974” (the Windsor festivals, in the Queen’s backyard, took place from 1972 to 1974).

Afterwards, some of the survivors made their way to RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire, which, as I described it in my book, was “a disused World War II airbase that had been designated as the second Cruise missile base after Greenham Common [home of the celebrated Women’s Peace Camp], where they joined peace protestors, other travellers and members of various Green organisations to become the Rainbow Village Peace Camp. In many ways, Molesworth, which swiftly became a rooted settlement, was the epitome of the free festival-protest fusion, cutting across class and social divides and reflecting many of the developments — in feminism, activism and environmental awareness — that had been transforming alternative society since the largely middle class — and often patriarchal — revolutions of the late sixties and early seventies.”

However, the Rainbow Village was finally evicted in February 1985 by the largest peacetime mobilisation of troops in the UK, led by then-defence secretary Michael Heseltine, and, as I described it, “The convoy [then] shifted uneasily around the country for the next few months, persistently harassed by the police and regularly monitored by planes and helicopters. In April they were presented with an injunction, naming 83 individuals who supposedly made up the leadership of the convoy, which was designed to prevent them from going to Stonehenge.”

The Battle of the Beanfield

Ignoring the injunction, on June 1, 1985 — 39 years ago today — after groups of travellers from around the country had stopped overnight in Savernake Forest near Marlborough, 140 vehicles set off for Stonehenge in the hope of setting up the 12th free festival. As I noted, “The atmosphere, as described by many eye-witnesses, was buoyant and optimistic. It remains apparent, however — especially in light of the persecution of the previous nine months — that behind this façade lurked generally unvoiced fears.”

Those fears came heartbreakingly true when the vehicles were ambushed and set upon with violence, as police smashed windows and dragged people out through broken glass, and those who had not yet been attacked escaped by driving into a nearly field — the beanfield — where, after a tense stand-off lasting many hours, they were set upon and “decommissioned” with appalling brutality by 1,400 paramilitarised police from six counties and the MoD.

Violently assaulted — in attacks of such violence that they shock the conscience even now — 537 travellers were arrested, their vehicles destroyed and in some cases burned, their children taken into care, and their dogs killed. As Nick Davies of the Observer described it, at the height of the violence, pregnant women were clubbed with truncheons, as were those holding babies. Davies wrote of the police, “They were like flies around rotten meat, and there was no question of trying to make a lawful arrest. They crawled all over, truncheons flailing, hitting anybody they could reach. It was extremely violent and very sickening.”

Deeply traumatised, much of the travelling community never recovered from the shattering violence of the Beanfield, while the only TV reporter on the scene, ITN News’ Kim Sabido, mysteriously found his career curtailed, just as all the press photos also mysteriously disappeared, along with ITN’s footage in which a clearly shaken Sabido, as the violence still swirled around him, said to camera, “What we — the ITN camera crew and myself as a reporter — have seen in the last 30 minutes here in this field has been some of the most brutal police treatment of people that I’ve witnessed in my entire career as a journalist. The number of people who have been hit by policemen, who have been clubbed whilst holding babies in their arms in coaches around this field, is yet to be counted.”

In February 1991, a civil court judgement awarded 21 of the travellers £24,000 in damages for false imprisonment, damage to property and wrongful arrest, but they received nothing, as all the damages were swallowed up by their legal bill, because the judge neglected to award them legal costs.

As with Orgreave, no official inquiry has ever been held into the events of June 1, 1985, despite the evident reality that it was the largest-scale, and most vicious police assault on unarmed civilians in modern British history.

The impact of the Beanfield

The impact of the Beanfield, though now long gone in time, is still felt today, although in ways that many people don’t even realize. While continuing to actively persecute travellers on the ground in the years that followed, the Thatcher government also pursued them through legislation, passing the Public Order Act of 1986, in which, as I explained in an article three years ago, after many years in which “the assertion of a claimed right to gather freely in significant numbers without prior permission … had often been tolerated by the authorities”, the aftermath of the Beanfield “marked a noticeably authoritarian shift in the politics of dissent.”

As I noted in an article last year, “In dealing with ‘public assemblies’, the Act gave the police the power to restrict ‘an assembly of 20 or more persons in a public place which is wholly or partly open to the air’, if they ‘reasonably believe[d]’ that it ‘may result in serious public disorder, serious damage to property or serious disruption to the life of the community.’”

As I added, “The Act also took aim at Gypsies and Travellers (and at free festivals), via Section 39, which stated that, if the police ‘reasonably believe[d] that two or more persons have entered land as trespassers and are present there with the common purpose of residing there for any period’, that ‘reasonable steps have been taken by or on behalf of the occupier to ask them to leave’, and that either damage or threats have been undertaken by the trespassers, or that they ‘have between them brought twelve or more vehicles on to the land’, they can be ‘direct[ed] … to leave the land.’”

However, despite Thatcher’s strenuous efforts to suppress dissent, the next ten years were a riot of creative opposition to her vision of a dull corporate Britain in which only the rich were allowed to misbehave, and no one was supposed to be allowed to challenge whatever the government pretended was “progress.”

Firstly, a new music scene — rave music, or Acid House — emerged, accompanied by a new drug, ecstasy, and the youth erupted in vast unlicensed raves that no one had foreseen, and which, eventually, through a crossover with the surviving free festival scene, led to the final vast unlicensed temporary autonomous zone — a weekend-long gathering of the tribes on Castlemorton Common in Gloucestershire on the Whitsun Bank Holiday weekend in May 1992.

Predictably, this led to another punitive civil liberties clampdown via the Criminal Justice Act of 1994, which I described as follows in The Battle of the Beanfield:

One of the most notorious aspects of the Criminal Justice [Act] was that it specifically targeted the ‘repetitive beats’ of the sound systems [‘sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’], and was aimed at further limiting gatherings of travellers and the free party scene by reducing the numbers of vehicles which could come together in one place from 12 to six. In many ways, however, these were amongst the [Act’s] milder repressive measures. Also included were criminal sanctions against assembly — specifically through ‘trespassory assembly’, an amendment of the Public Order Act whereby the police were enabled to ban groups of 20 or more meeting in a particular area if they feared ‘serious disruption to the life of the community’, even if the meeting was non-obstructive and non-violent — and ‘aggravated trespass’, which fulfilled the right-wing dream of transforming trespass from a civil to a criminal concern.

As I also explained:

Most savagely of all, the Act repealed the 1968 Caravan Sites Act, which, by removing the obligation on local authorities to provide sites for Gypsies — ‘persons of nomad habit of life, whatever their race or origin’ — finally criminalised the entire way of life of Gypsies and travellers, with baleful effects that are still being felt to this day.

However, dissent was also breaking out elsewhere. Forbidden from travelling freely, environmentally-focused traveller activists took it upon themselves to protect the sacred earth of Albion from desecration by resisting road and motorway expansion plans, living in trees and tunnels, and locking onto construction equipment in a series of battles from 1992 to 1996, which, although they were almost all lost, led the government to drastically scale down its future road expansion plans.

In the cities, Reclaim the Streets began shutting down and taking over main roads, reclaiming them from the polluting, anti-social tyranny of car culture, and, by the end of the ‘90s, a vast, planet-wide anti-globalization movement emerged to challenge every aspect of the neoliberal ideology that had been implemented in the ‘80s — including the power of banks and corporations, the neglected significance climate change and increasing societal repression.

21st century dissent

Despite efforts to kill the movement — literally, through the killing of protestors by police in various locations — and the huge distraction and civil liberties repression of the post-9/11 “war on terror”, dissent and unrest continued, via the Occupy movement in 2011, and, more recently, via protests by people of colour against police repression (and, in the US, an unchallenged regime of murders by the police) and the whitewashing of colonial history, and, in 2018-19, via vast protests against the complicit of government, banks and corporations in climate collapse, led by the oil, gas and coal companies.

Climate collapse is, without doubt, the gravest threat to humanity that has ever existed, and yet one which is so daunting, so existentially exhausting, and so cynically and sweepingly opposed by those profiting from it, that it hasn’t yet led to what is clearly required — a global people’s revolution.

Over the last eight months, another horror — Israel’s blatant genocide of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip — has revived protest on a scale not seen since the protests against the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, and with good reason. Fully backed by western governments — most notably, the US, the UK and Germany — Israel is not only engaging in the gut-wrenching slaughter of an entire civilian population, and proudly, violently and gleefully celebrating it, it is also seeking to clamp down on all criticism of its actions, via the politicians it has bought, or who cling to Israel because they enjoy its reawakening of the worst excesses of their own glory days of colonial slaughter, with alarming repercussions for what remains of legal protest and dissent in an ever more alarming and authoritarian west.

In response to this proliferation of protest, western governments have increasingly enacted ever more punitive legislation to try to suppress protest entirely, although it’s apparent to anyone with a functioning brain that it’s a losing battle.

Anti-colonialism is here to stay, genocide is always evil, and will be resisted by those who have not lost touch with their fundamental humanity, and who still exist in significant numbers, and, when it comes to climate collapse, it is absurd to expect that arrests and sometimes pliant courts can stop a movement that is responding not to something abstract, but to the reality that catastrophic climate collapse is already happening, quicker and more savagely than even most climate experts expected, and that notions that we have until 2030 to act — which were common just five years ago — have now been overtaken by events to such an extent that it is now reasonable to assume that half the planet will be unliveable by 2030.

The corruption of music and of festival culture

Compared to all of the above, the loss of the free festival culture may seem largely insignificant, and in some ways that’s undoubtedly true, as it’s more important that people get together in significant numbers to challenge chronic injustice and the collapse of a liveable planet than it is for them to gather freely just to listen to some music.

However, the corporate takeover of festivals, and of the music industry in general, remains deeply troubling, as the Australian commentator and political analyst Caitlin Johnstone recently explained in an article entitled, ‘Why Celebrities Aren’t Speaking Up About Gaza’ (reposted on Consortium News as ‘The Silence of the Artists’). In the article, she noted how, for the last eight months, since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began, “people have been expressing frustration and confusion about the reluctance of celebrities to use their immense platforms to speak out against the US-backed slaughter in Gaza.”

As she explained, however, “it’s not really a mystery why this happens: celebrities are reluctant to criticize the US-centralized empire because they benefit from it directly. It’s actually a very important aspect of imperial narrative-control how all of our society’s largest and most influential voices are intimately dependent on the political status quo upon which the empire is built. Fame and fortune come as a result of being elevated by the wealthy owners of media production platforms like film studios, record labels, TV and news media, and those extremely wealthy people have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo upon which their wealth is premised.”

Personally, I also think fans need to look hard in the mirror and ask themselves why they slavishly devote themselves to egomaniacal musicians whose interest in anyone but themselves is often vanishingly small, but then I’ve always taken to heart a line of Bob Dylan’s, “You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you”, as a reason for not idolizing any artist, including Dylan himself.

Further explaining the emptiness of so much mainstream culture today, Johnstone also asks, “How much depth and profundity can you express if you’re compartmentalizing away from reality like that? How authentic and meaningful can your art be while you are duty bound to help preserve the status quo of a mind-controlled dystopia where everything is fraudulent and meaningless?”

As she adds, “We are ruled by weird, phony freaks in Washington and Virginia who collaborate with weird, phony freaks at the top of the corporate world, and their rule is enforced by weird, phony freaks in New York and Los Angeles who use their celebrity status to help create an artificial mainstream culture that is mindless, heartless, soulless, and completely uninterested in the emergence of a healthy world.”

Rise up!

Everywhere we look, the forces that destroyed the Stonehenge Free Festival at the Battle of the Beanfield have remorselessly continued to try to suppress all dissent. They’ve been remarkably successful in many ways, but only by creating an atomised, empty world of mindless consumers of all that is irrelevant and unchallenging.

All of this is doomed, as anyone who remains awake knows from the ever-shortening ticking of the climate time bomb, and this time, drawing on the joys and agonies of the endless struggle of those who are awake — ‘woke’ — against those who are not, the alienation, the doubt and the discontent need to be awakened in a blaze of righteous anger that refuses any longer to self-suppress and to be silenced, and that begins to reclaim the planet from those whose depravity and boundless greed will, otherwise, kill us all.

This has never been a game, but right now it’s never been more important to embrace the struggle, and to fight for humanity and the planet as though our lives depend on it, because that is exactly what this struggle is: the struggle for life against a well-armed death cult.

By Avinash Chennuri and Kearrin Sims

Demonstrating poverty reduction is a mainstay of political success in India. How much progress has been made, why poverty persists, what more needs to be done and what it means to be poor in modern India are hotly debated issues.

According to the World Bank’s poverty headcount—which sets the poverty line for lower-middle-income countries at US$3.65 per day—poverty in India declined from 60.9 per cent in 2015 to 46.5 per cent in 2021. Over the same period, India’s National Institution for Transforming India (NITI-Aayog) reported that multidimensional poverty fell from 24.85 per cent to 14.96 per cent, while 2022–23 consumption expenditure data suggests a near eradication of poverty at purchasing power parity of US$1.90 per day.

If accurate, this is cause for celebration. These trends mean India is one of only a handful of countries on track to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of reducing multidimensional poverty by at least half by 2030.

But such poverty data needs careful consideration. The challenges of data collection, reliability and manipulation, mean that statistics on poverty must be treated with scrutiny.

In India, reliability is not only compromised by the politics of poverty statistics but also because the increased number of items included in the 2022–23 Consumption Expenditure Survey inflates poverty reduction when compared against the previous survey in 2011–12.

Further, progress on multidimensional poverty in India has been calculated using the results of the government’s National Family Health Surveys—without use of the latest expenditure data—leading many observers to challenge the credibility of official statistics and their associated narratives of progress.

Real progress on poverty reduction may not be as pronounced as statistical trends suggest.

More difficult still is determining whether poverty alleviation has been the result of good policy and programs or of independent social and economic forces. Whatever progress has been achieved, there’s need to look beyond monetary measures of poverty to better understand what forces push people into poverty, trap them there and lift them out.

In India, structural oppression and systemic injustice have helped maintain cycles of poverty. India is the world’s fifth largest economy and is home to more billionaires than any other country bar China and the United States, but it has the lowest Human Development Index of all G20 countries. India’s poverty is not only due to lack of wealth but also a skewed distribution of wealth resulting from persistent and intersecting forms of discrimination, exclusion and exploitation.

While Hindu Higher Castes account for just 22.28 per cent of India’s population, they hold 41 per cent of total wealth and 35.3 per cent of all land. By contrast, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes—which combined represent 27 per cent of the population—hold just 11.3 per cent of assets and 11.3 of land. Under the caste system, privilege, opportunity, discrimination and disadvantage are ascribed at birth.

Regarding gender inequities, women account for just over 25 per cent of the organised labour force—a rate much lower than in neighbouring Bangladesh, Nepal or Sri Lanka. 

A widely raised concern during the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been the persecution of Muslim communities. This is accompanied by impoverishment, with Muslims being the poorest religious group in the country, owning just 8 per cent of total national assets.

For many of India’s poor, systemic injustice leads to feelings of hopelessness. This is perhaps most strikingly represented in the country’s suicide rate. More than 170,000 suicides were reported in 2022. Nearly one-third of those individuals were daily wage earners, agricultural labourers and farmers. The 2022 suicide rate is the highest recorded since the inception of the National Crime Record Bureau’s reporting in 1967 and represents  an average 468 deaths by suicide per day.

With a national election  in May 2024, renewed interrogation of India’s poverty achievements and challenges is needed.

The data suggest that progress has been made on monetary poverty alleviation, though what this progress looks like remains contested. Even if World Bank poverty data is accurate, it suggests that approximately 651 million Indians continue to live below the lower middle-income poverty line and 166 million suffer multidimensional poverty. Without discounting what has been achieved, there remains much to be done.

In a country of 1.4 billion people, the persistence of poverty is an undeniably complex challenge. Despite this complexity, it is also clear that India’s enduring poverty has political origins, with the ‘overt exclusion of population segments from their basic rights’ a leading cause.

It is the deeply political nature of poverty that is perhaps most concerning, particularly with India’s upcoming election. With democracy in retreat and government control rising, the concentration of political and economic power is felt most severely by the poor.

Poverty is much more than what monetary indicators reveal. Poverty is a lack of voice and capability to lead a fulfilling life. Loss of political freedom exacerbates the poor’s inability to speak out about daily struggles to access to clean water and food, education, land and housing, employment and personal security.

Things left unsaid are things left unchanged. As the avenues for India’s poorest citizens to express themselves become fewer, so too will it become more difficult for the country to meaningfully address its enduring poverty.

About the authors:

• Avinash Chennuri holds a Masters of Global Development from James Cook University.
• Kearrin Sims is Research Fellow at the Cairns Institute and Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at James Cook University.

Source: This article was published by East Asia Forum

The results of the election to the South African parliament on Friday confirmed the widely-held belief that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) which spearheaded the country’s liberation from apartheid in 1993 and since dominated the political landscape like a banyan tree is in steep decline. ANC’s vote share plummeted from 57.5 percent in the 2019 election to around 40%. 

ANC’s halcyon days are ending but then, all good things come to an end, finally. ANC could at least hang on for thirty years tapping into the legacy of the freedom struggle, which is not an easy thing to do as politics gets more and more competitive and along with empowerment comes the challenge of accountability. In comparison, India’s Congress Party lost the majority in the parliament in less than 2 decades. 

Broadly, outside of some largely rural provinces, support for the ANC is now in general decline with a strong undercurrent of anti-incumbency sentiment working against it on account of massive unemployment, extremely high level of interpersonal violence, collapsing social services, and brazen corruption.

ANC would need help from other parties to reelect Cyril Ramaphosa for a second term. The three other major parties are the liberal-oriented Democratic Alliance [DA], the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters [EFF] and the new MK Party [MK] led by former President Jacob Zuma, who once led the ANC. 

DA, which polled over 21% votes, is an established liberal party, white-dominated and also funded by white capital. EFF, on the other hand, is an authoritarian  populist party, non-ethnic in its support base and orientation and polled a little over 9% of votes. 

The big winner seems to be MK, a breakaway faction of ANC, which entered the electoral fray for the first time and surged on a tide of Zulu nationalism to garner 14.83% of votes. 

The likely character of the incoming ruling coalition is not yet clear. Unsurprisingly, the western media is rooting for a ANC-DA coalition. DA has plateaued and is eager to align with the ANC despite its ideology of national liberation to share power.

The massive investments by the white billionaires in a set of new liberal parties failed to produce the desired results in Wednesday’s election. None of those parties gained traction. The DA is the solitary exception but even in this case, the mediocrity of its leadership and its inability to distinguish differences in pitch in the complex race politics puts inherent limits to the potential for growth beyond its current limits. Many black South Africans mistrust the DA, believing it favours the interests of white people.

Therefore, there is bound to be resistance within the ANC to a tie-up with the DA  under white politician John Steenhuisen, whose free market programme of privatisations and an end to black economic empowerment programmes sits at odds with the ruling party’s traditions. 

Nelson Mandela’s grandson and an outgoing ANC lawmaker,  Zwelivelile Mandela told AFP, the DA held “different ideals” making it too difficult to partner with. He predicted that the radical left groups led by former ANC figures — firebrand Julius Malema’s EFF or Zuma’s MK — were more likely bedfellows for the ruling party. 

But then, arguably, these radical options might also meet resistance within the more moderate sections of the ANC. Besides, the rift between Ramaphosa and Zuma — who has long been bitter about the way he was forced out of office as president in 2018 — remains to be mended. 

Amidst all this maneuvering within the political class, it is difficult to gauge the popular mood, given the vice-like grip of the white liberal media over the national discourse. Thus, the gravity of the deep sense of political alienation driving many voters into forms of anti-liberal and at times anti-democratic populism is being blithely overlooked in the obsession to undermine the ANC’s towering presence on the political landscape.

Without doubt, the ANC has become an eyesore for the Western powers. South Africa’s active role in the BRICS and advocacy of multipolarity and “de-dollarisation”, its audacious move in the ICJ against Israel’s war  crimes in Gaza, its closeness to Russia and China and so on are hugely consequential to western interests in the contemporary world situation. 

The hold on the digital media in South Africa by white capital gives it significant power to shape the national discourse, but there is no attempt to understand the deep alienation of deprived sections of society, leave alone address it critically. Suffice to say, this is fertile soil for ethnic politics to strike roots. The paradox is, the legacy of one of the most progressive movements in the history of anti-colonial liberation may turn out to be the rise of ethno-nationalism and populism under darkly comic political personalities similar to Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro or Javier Milei. 

The crux of the matter is that the left has failed to present a credible alternative to the predatory form of ethnic nationalism and populism spawned by the terrible circumstances of poverty and deprivation in which most South Africans struggle to live. Not a single leader in the manner of Lula da Silva or Jeremy Corbyn is to be seen who could unify the left. All this leaves the field open for the predatory and kleptocratic political class to unleash the demons of ethnic politics. 

Come to think of it, Zuma convinced 2.3 million South Africans to vote for MK Party. The MK wants to increase the power of traditional leaders, nationalise banks and expropriate land without compensation, dating South Africa’s “prolonged period of national shame” back to 1652, when the first Dutch settlement was established. 

As for the EFF, it describes itself as anti-imperialist and inspired by Marxism. EFF also advocates taking land from white farmers and nationalising mines, banks and other strategic sectors, without compensation. It says that apartheid did not end in 1994, arguing that the democratic settlement left the economy in the hands of “white monopoly capital”, a message that resonates in a country where four in 10 adults are unemployed. 

The bottom line is that as with the mainstream Congress Party in India, there is no real alternative to the ANC as a unifier, which still retains the loyalty of many voters for its leading role in overthrowing white minority rule and its progressive social welfare and black economic empowerment policies are credited by supporters with helping millions of black families out of poverty.

• This article was published at Indian Punchline

By Andy Heil

(RFE/RL) — Mika Dzidziguri realized just a few years ago that people from outside the country could help Georgian society turn a corner.

UNICEF and other foreign-based donors and aid organizations were working with her and other parents of children with Down syndrome to raise awareness, correct misconceptions about children with disabilities, and help find jobs for affected young people.

Their work — aided by international organizations that provided grants and support — made up for the desperate lack of services in this Caucasus nation of around 3.7 million. Past research has suggested that Georgian civil society groups get some 95 percent of their funding from abroad and frequently “last for only a project or two.”

“This wouldn’t be possible without the support of international organizations,” Dzidziguri told RFE/RL’s Georgian Service.

But now she and other community-based activists in Georgia might lose that critical help, after lawmakers overrode a presidential veto to enact a controversial “foreign agent” law to publicly name, and seemingly shame, foreign-backed NGOs as “serving the interests of a foreign power.”

“This law is a signal to us that if someone doesn’t like our speech or statement, they can shut us down very easily,” Dzidziguri said.

Critics of the new law have warned of its potentially devastating effect on the country’s 10,000 or so nonprofits, active in areas ranging from antidiscrimination and childhood cancer to local theater and sheltering stray animals.

Dzidziguri’s special-needs daughter, Lile, is now an adolescent, and the nonprofit her mother represents, the Georgian Down Syndrome Association, has founded two more organizations to help more kids with disabilities “live in dignity.”

Since the passing of the law, Dzidziguri said that her association and its offshoots intend to continue their activities, but “we don’t know whether or not we’ll be registered as organizations serving the interests of a foreign power.”

Legal Options

With the threat of not being able to continue their work hanging over their heads, NGOs in Georgia are looking at their legal options, helped by public-interest lawyers and legal-aid groups who, for a while now, have been planning the pivot from the streets to the courtroom.

Guram Imnadze of the Social Justice Center, a Tbilisi-based NGO that provides rights-related legal assistance to the public, told RFE/RL in mid-May that his and around 30 other groups had been working in task forces, including one to “analyze possible legal strategies.”

“We’ll try to use all the legal remedies in order to tackle this legislation,” he said.

But Imnadze and others recognize that legal battles take time — his center’s own 2017 constitutional challenge of a law on secret surveillance is still pending — and they know this can pose an existential problem for community-based NGOs in particular.

Imnadze’s and around 150 other NGOs have described the registration requirement under the new law as unfair and “degrading” and vowed not to comply.

“Of course, we are not going to register ourselves,” Imnadze said. “[But] these community-based organizations…can’t easily declare that they won’t register themselves” because it could endanger their “well-being, their existence.”

Smaller NGOs were already seeking advice from the Social Justice Center well before the “foreign agent” law’s adoption.

“Their main concerns and questions are about legal aspects: What kind of legal ways are there to avoid this registration, and how can they proceed with their daily work if this law is adopted?” Imnadze said.

The new law presents all foreign-funded NGOs with the same stigmatization dilemma, he said, but the penalties for noncompliance can make it “almost impossible” for smaller ones to operate.

Organizations will undoubtedly face increased administrative burdens. And due to initially undisclosed late-hour amendments, both organizations and individuals can face substantial fines of 25,000 lari (around $9,000) per month or even higher for noncompliance.

Personal Information Requests

Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze and other Georgian Dream officials say the new law will promote “transparency” and national sovereignty, although NGOs were already required to disclose their funding to the government.

Even the most outspoken critics of foreign-funding levels among Georgian NGOs acknowledge that the law will ensnare far more groups than its Georgian Dream architects suggest.

“Those NGOs that steered well clear of partisan politics, tried to be mission-driven and not donor-driven, practiced genuine solidarity, and respected citizens’ agency will get caught up in a policy that wasn’t even aimed at them,” Almut Rochowanski, a longtime civil society activist and former grant writer and reviewer in the region, wrote recently.

Final decisions on legal strategies, Imnadze said, will have to wait until enforcement begins. He cited the right to privacy guaranteed by the Georgian Constitution, including the proper handling of individuals’ personal information.

“Nobody, including state institutions, should have unlimited access to this kind of information,” Imnadze said.

Under the new law, the Justice Ministry has the power to request personal information about individuals associated with an “organization serving the interests of a foreign power,” including details about a person’s political views, ethnicity, religious beliefs, or sex life.

Imnadze also said that describing organizations as foreign threats simply because they receive financial aid from foreign partners is discriminatory, especially when numerous state agencies get similar funding.

Fighting The Law At Home And Abroad

One of the most pressing questions for those organizations affected by the new law is whether to fight the legislation in national courts, which are seen by many as highly politicized and influenced by the ruling party, or plan straightaway for a challenge before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the Council of Europe’s international court.

For now, the answer may well be both: On May 30, a group of Georgian NGOs declared their intention to initiate legal proceedings at the country’s Constitutional Court to challenge the validity of the act. At the same time, they said, they will also file a complaint with the ECHR.

“[We] will use all domestic and international mechanisms to impede its operation until the law is unconditionally repealed,” the group said in a statement read out at a news conference in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.

Those targeted by the law have already been looking to the international legal community for help. Another Council of Europe body, the Venice Commission, provided considerable international legal ammunition in a nonbinding “urgent opinion” on May 14.

It cited “fundamental flaws” in the law that “involve significant negative consequences for the freedoms of association and expression, the right to privacy, the right to participate in public affairs, as well as the prohibition of discrimination.”

The commission’s legal opinion also “stressed” the effect of Georgia’s “foreign influence” law on civil society organizations in the context of earlier “foreign agent” legislation in Russia and a “transparency” law passed and eventually repealed in EU wild child Hungary.

The Russian legislation, approved in 2012, laid out criteria in the Criminal Code for a “foreign agent” designation for NGOs that receive outside support and has since been ratcheted up and expanded to include media and individuals. It has been used to crack down relentlessly on critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his policies, including with an amendment this month disqualifying “foreign agents” from elected office.

In 2017, five years into the Russian experiment, Hungarian lawmakers avoided using the term “foreign agent” in their own legislation, taking aim at civil society by instead focusing on “transparency.”

It took three years before the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the European Union’s highest court in matters of EU law, ruled that the Hungarian legislation contravened the bloc’s law. It took nearly another year and an EU threat of further action before the Fidesz party of Hungary’s populist right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban eventually repealed it. Experts say a newer law on “sovereignty protection” appears aimed at casting a similar pall over NGOs and an even broader segment of Hungarian society.

In its legal opinion, the Venice Commission said that the situation in Georgia is largely similar to that of Hungary, as it singles out “certain entities as ‘organizations pursuing the interests of a foreign power’ on the mere ground of their receiving foreign funding.”

This, the commission said, has the “potential of tarnishing the reputation of such entities and creating an atmosphere of mistrust towards them.”

Imnadze called “this stigma aspect the biggest similarity” between the Georgian bill and its Russian and Hungarian counterparts, and one that drives home the perils of compliance. It’s also a lesson, he said, that Georgian Dream learned from the withdrawal under public pressure of its earlier “foreign agent” bill a year ago.

“The [new] version doesn’t include this wording; it’s substituted by the actual explanation of what the word ‘agent’ means,” Imnadze said. “So, in that regard, nothing has changed.”

Written and reported by Andy Heil in Prague with additional reporting by RFE/RL’s Georgian Service.

• Andy Heil is a Prague-based senior correspondent covering central and southeastern Europe and the North Caucasus, and occasionally science and the environment. Before joining RFE/RL in 2001, he was a longtime reporter and editor of business, economic, and political news in Central Europe, including for the Prague Business Journal, Reuters, Oxford Analytica, and Acquisitions Monthly, and a freelance contributor to the Christian Science Monitor, Respekt, and Tyden.