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Monday, September 30, 2013

A Detained Egyptian-American Activist’s Letter to His Mother

As our colleague David Kirkpatrick reports, smuggled letters from three North Americans detained during Egypt’s security crackdown last month “offer a rare outsiders’ perspective on longstanding Egyptian prison conditions.”

One letter, written by the Canadian doctor Tarek Loubani and John Greyson, a filmmaker, was released on Saturday. Below is the complete text of a second letter, from Mohamed Soltan, an Egyptian-American activist who was shot during a raid on an Islamist sit-in in Cairo and then detained by Egypt’s military-led government.

My Dearest Mama,

I pray that this letter finds you in the best of health and the highest of spirits. Not often do we find ourselves in circumstances that prevent us from communicating with our loved ones, but unfortunately that is my current situation. As I sit in my cell, isolated from the entire world, I write this letter with the sincere hope that it finds its way to you, and conveys to you how much I love you, and long for your embrace.

Mama, I know you have many questions about what happened to me and how I ended up in this situation. Two weeks ago, the police stormed our home and arrested me and my guests who were visiting following a surgery to remove a bullet lodged in my arm from a gunshot wound I suffered in Rabaa on August 14, 2013. We were taken to a police station and tossed into a room nicknamed ‘The Fridge,” which was a room without seats, benches, windows, and lights. I was not allowed a phone call, nor any communication with a lawyer, with one guard quipping that he could get me anything I wanted, drugs, alcohol, prostitutes. Just not due process.

The next morning the officers blindfolded me and led me to a room where a man I could not see asked me a series of questions about our home, our family, and our reasons for being in the country. I was then told I would be formally charged with 6 crimes: funding a terrorist organization; membership in a terrorist organization; membership in an armed militia; disturbing the peace; falsifying and spreading rumors about the internal affairs of Egypt; and finally, the killing of protestors. I was completely shocked that such charges, none of which had any basis in reality, would be so casually brought against me, and thought of the future plans I had for my career, and family, and thought that they would all be so casually ruined by this sham I was being subjected to.

The brutality with which I have been treated has been mind boggling. During the day, soldiers and police would get in two straight lines, and we would have to run in between them as they beat us with rocks and sticks. They roused anger amongst the officers by falsely proclaiming that we had killed police officers. The officers stripped off our pants and shirts as they beat us with clubs. They put us in jail cells with what must have been 60 other inmates, and it was terribly hot and water was not made available to us. I saw an inmate suffer a heart attack right before my eyes and not receive proper medical attention. The surgical wound on my arm was open and oozing, and not one of the guards seemed to care because I was labeled a political prisoner.

I am moved frequently, precluding visits from my extended family here in Egypt, as well as the American Embassy in Cairo. The police officers routinely exhibit great amount of disdain towards us. One officer sarcastically shared with a fellow officer that he was confused as to why they hadn’t just shoot us dead and that he hoped we would attempt to escape so they could hunt us like chickens and kill us. At one of the prisons, I was handcuffed to another inmate, mandating that when I used the bathroom I had to take him in with me.

My fellow inmates aren’t members of the Muslim Brotherhood, nor am I. My fellow inmates are the impoverished, the disenfranchised, the ill, the homeless. In short, the forgotten. One fellow inmate is an 11 year old accused of theft, another a man picked up while visiting relatives in jail, and yet another a former government employee forced to take the rap for more senior officials. These men’s freedom does not threaten national security or public safety; they threaten the financial security of those that imprison them. 200 Egyptian pounds are paid to the prosecutor for every Egyptian he puts in a prison. The culture of corruption in Egypt is thriving and is more ingrained and widespread than ever.

Mama, I do not tell you these things to make you fret. You raised me as a proud American and an Egyptian. My American identity has afforded me the opportunity to taste freedom, to breathe its limitless air, and to enjoy the liberties given to me. My Egyptian identity sincerely desires those very same privileges, and to witness Egyptians be deprived of those rights motivates me to persevere and to work towards their cause. Khalil Gibran once said that birds don’t build their nests within a cage so that their offspring don’t inherit slavery. These are the principles that the American founding fathers also spoke highly of. The people of Egypt, have the natural right to freedom.

Mama, it is my hope that we will be reunited again, and I can rest my head on your lap, as the family gathers and rejoices with happiness. My heart hurts to see all your faces. Know that you, father, and my siblings are in each and every one of my prayers. I love you all.

Your loving son,

Mohamed Soltan



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Iran’s Foreign Minister Calls the Holocaust ‘a Heinous Crime’ and ‘a Genocide’

Video of Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, discussing his country’s nuclear program, relations with the United States and the Holocaust with ABC News on Sunday.

Iran’s foreign minister insisted on Sunday that his country does not deny the historical reality of the Holocaust, which he called “a heinous crime,” and “a genocide,” which “must never be allowed to be repeated.”

Near the end of an interview with ABC News that was otherwise concerned with negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program and the prospect of improved relations with the United States, Iran’s chief diplomat, Mohammad Javad Zarif, was challenged on his claim during a Twitter conversation about the Holocaust last month that “Iran never denied it.” He argued that a statement calling the Holocaust a “myth” still posted on the English-language Web site of Iran’s leader, Ayatllah Ali Khamenei, was poorly translated from Persian.

Mr. Zarif, who is fluent enough in both American culture and English to have included a reference to the film “Lost in Translation” in his response, skirted around the convening of a state-supported conference for Holocaust deniers in Tehran in 2006, and referred to a series of previous remarks by Iranian officials on Israel and the Holocaust that have set off disputes about the parsing Persian remarks and metaphors.

I have spoken to the leader on this issue; he rejects and condemns the killing of innocent people…. No, the Holocaust is not a myth. Nobody’s talking about a myth. If it’s said â€" I haven’t seen it â€" if it’s there it’s a bad translation, and it is translated out of context and they are using it…. He was talking about the reaction to somebody talking about a historical faâ€"incident and requiring research about that historical incident, and said, ‘What is it that people are so upset that people are simply asking that we should do some studies of that?’

But, you see, this is the problem when you translate something from Persian to English, you may lose something â€" as the film goes, ‘Lost in Translation’ â€" you may lose some of the meaning. This has been unfortunately the case several times over.

Mr. Zarif then took up an argument made by Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, last week: the claim that Israel has used the mass murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany to shield the Middle Eastern state from criticism of its treatment of the Palestinians.

The point is: we condemn the killing of innocent people, whether it happened in Nazi Germany or whether it’s happening in Palestine. One crime, however heinous â€" and Holocaust was a heinous crime, it was a genocide, it must never be allowed to be repeated â€" but that crime cannot be, and should not be, a justification to trample the rights of the Palestinian people for 60 years. We should abandon this game and start recognizing the fact that without respect for the rights of the Palestinians, we will never have peace in our region.

Asked if the translation of the leader’s remarks would be changed on his Web site, Mr. Zarif said, “I will talk to them.” One day later, the translation remains on Khamenei.ir, unchanged, along with several similar statements.



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Saturday, September 28, 2013

Canadians Detained in Cairo Describe Beatings in Captivity

In a letter from a small jail cell in Cairo, two Canadian men who were swept up in the security crackdown by Egypt’s military-led government last month describe the brutal and “ridiculous conditions” in which they have been held without charge for six weeks.

The men, Dr. Tarek Loubani and John Greyson, were arrested during clashes in Cairo on Aug. 16, when they stopped to ask police officers for directions to their hotel after the 7 p.m. curfew. As my colleague Liam Stack reported, they were passing through Egypt on their way to the Gaza Strip, where Mr. Loubani, a professor of emergency medicine at Western University in London, Ontario, intended to provide training to Palestinian doctors as part of a humanitarian mission. Mr. Greyson, a professor at York University in Toronto and a well-known filmmaker, was documenting the trip to Gaza.

They have been detained without charges since then, but an Egyptian foreign ministry spokesman told the Toronto Star on Friday that they would soon be charged, citing what he described as evidence on a memory stick that showed they had recorded some of the crackdown.

Here is the complete text of the letter written by Dr. Loubani and Mr. Greyson from Tora Prison outside Cairo, released by relatives and friends campaigning for their release.

We are on the 12th day of our hunger strike at Tora, Cairo’s main prison, located on the banks of the Nile. We’ve been held here since Aug. 16 in ridiculous conditions: no phone calls, little to no exercise, sharing a 3m x 10m cell with 36 other political prisoners, sleeping like sardines on concrete with the cockroaches; sharing a single tap of earthy Nile water.

We never planned to stay in Egypt longer than overnight. We arrived in Cairo on the 15th with transit visas and all the necessary paperwork to proceed to our destination: Gaza. Tarek volunteers at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, and brings people with him each time. John intended to shoot a short film about Tarek’s work.

Because of the coup, the official Rafah border was opening and closing randomly, and we were stuck in Cairo for the day. We were carrying portable camera gear (one light, one microphone, John’s HD Canon, two Go-Pros) and gear for the hospital (routers for a much-needed Wifi network and two disassembled toy-sized helicopters for testing the transportation of medical samples).

Because of the protests in Ramses Square and around the country on the 16th, our car couldn’t proceed to Gaza. We decided to check out the Square, five blocks from our hotel, carrying our passports and John’s HD camera.

The protest was just starting - peaceful chanting, the faint odour of tear gas, a helicopter lazily circling overhead - when suddenly calls of “doctor.” A young man carried by others from God-knows-where, bleeding from a bullet wound. Tarek snapped into doctor mode and started to work doing emergency response, trying to save lives, while John did video documentation, shooting a record of the carnage that was unfolding. The wounded and dying never stopped coming. Between us, we saw over fifty Egyptians die: students, workers, professionals, professors, all shapes, all ages, unarmed. We later learned the body count for the day was 102.

We left in the evening when it was safe, trying to get back to our hotel on the Nile. We stopped for ice cream. We couldn’t find a way through the police cordon though, and finally asked for help at a check point.

That’s when we were: arrested, searched, caged, questioned, interrogated, videotaped with a ‘Syrian terrorist,’ slapped, beaten, ridiculed, hot-boxed, refused phone calls, stripped, shaved bald, accused of being foreign mercenaries. Was it our Canadian passports, or the footage of Tarek performing C.P.R., or our ice cream wrappers that set them off? They screamed ‘Canadian’ as they kicked and hit us. John had a precisely etched bootprint bruise on his back for a week.

We were two of 602 people arrested that night, all 602 potentially facing the same grab-bag of ludicrous charges: arson, conspiracy, terrorism, possession of weapons, firearms, explosives, attacking a police station. The arrest stories of our Egyptian cellmates are remarkably similar to ours: Egyptians who were picked up on dark streets after the protest, by thugs or cops, blocks or miles from the police station that is the alleged site of our alleged crimes.

We’ve been here in Tora prison for six weeks, and are now in a new cell (3.5m x 5.5m) that we share with ‘only’ six others. We’re still sleeping on concrete with the cockroaches, and still share a single tap of Nile water, but now we get (almost) daily exercise and showers. Still no phone calls.

The prosecutor won’t say if there’s some outstanding issue that’s holding things up. The routers, the film equipment, or the footage of Tarek treating bullet wounds through that long bloody afternoon? Indeed, we would welcome our day in a real court with the real evidence, because then this footage would provide us with our alibi and serve as a witness to the massacre.

We deserve due process, not cockroaches on concrete. We demand to be released.

Peace, John & Tarek

Mohammed Loubani, the detained doctor’s brother, explained in an email to reporters that supporters of the two men had initially withheld their letter from jail, hoping that they would eventually be released. That changed following the report that the two men might now be charged.

“If the Egyptian government wants to claim that Tarek and John are being held in accordance with a free and fair judicial process,” Mr. Loubani wrote, “they will have to address why Tarek and John were beaten by Egyptian police after being arrested â€" their bruises were documented by Canadian consular staff who urged us to keep quiet â€" and why providing medical aid to critically injured Egyptians is a grounds for their detention.”



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Friday, September 27, 2013

Russian News Sites Protest Detention of Journalists With Greenpeace Activists

A Russian court on Thursday ordered that 22 members of the Greenpeace team that protested Arctic drilling by trying to scale a state-run oil rig may spend up to two months in detention in a Murmansk jail, while investigators decide whether to charge them with committing an act of piracy.

Among the activists were two journalists: Kieron Bryan, a British videographer who formerly worked for The Times of London, and Denis Sinyakov, a well-known Moscow-based freelance photographer, whom their colleagues and international organizations say have been jailed for merely doing their jobs. Mr. Sinyakov is a former Reuters photojournalist who has been granted behind-the-scenes access by protest groups including Pussy Riot and Femen.

Reporters Without Borders called on the Russian government to release both photojournalists. And more than a dozen independent Russian media sites responded to the detention of Mr. Sinyakov with a literal blackout: covering all the images on their sites with black squares on Friday as a sign of protest.

The protest included Russia’s most popular radio station, Ekho Moskvy; popular magazines, including one of the country’s top photography weeklies; an Internet television station; the independent newspaper that published Anna Politkovskaya’s writings; and several of Russia’s most popular Internet sites.

For a short time even NTV, a conservative, pro-Kremlin television station that has shown vitriolic documentaries against Russian opposition leaders, joined the protest, to the surprise of many.

Critics have contended that the Russian government overreacted to the protest last week. Many pointed at video recorded by the Russian Coast Guard that showed two of the activists dangling precariously from the oil platform as pressurized water slammed against them from above and law enforcement members tugged on them from below.

Video of the Greenpeace action released by the Russian Coast Guard.

“I’m coming down! I’m coming down!” one of the activists, Sini Saarela from Finland, could be heard yelling above the roar of the waves in the video.

Ms. Saarela was one of eight members of the 30-person crew who still has not been formally arrested by a Russian court, though she remains in police custody.

The police opened an investigation into the protest on Tuesday, and a spokesman for the powerful state Investigative Committee said that all of the participants in the protest, regardless of nationality, would be investigated for what he called an “encroachment on the sovereignty” of Russia.

Mr. Sinyakov, pictured handcuffed in a cage for criminal defendants, argued that he had not participated in the demonstration or broken the law, according to Yulia Bragina of Sky News.

A judge decided that Mr. Sinyakov posed a flight risk, as he traveled regularly and did not have a place of residence in Murmansk. Mr. Sinyakov replied that he is an internationally published photographer with a wife and a child in Moscow. He offered to travel to Murmansk for the hearings. He also pointed out that his passport and equipment had been seized.

“My weapon is a camera,” he added. “I did not poke a hole in the boats, on the contrary, Greenpeace’s boats were punctured. I cannot answer for the actions of the captain of the icebreaker.”

Some journalists covering the hearing were struck by the sentence, the first of 30 decisions concerning the activists that were handed down. Some had traveled on the Greenpeace boat last year, when it carried out a similar demonstration at the same oil rig.

Other photographers began holding individual pickets outside the main office of the Investigative Committee, the only form of public protests that can be held in Russia without prior sanction. Among them was Mr. Sinyakov’s wife, Alina Zhiganova.

Ilya Varlamov, a photographer who is friends with Mr. Sinyakov and has one of Russia’s most popular photoblogs, said that photographers were usually released quickly by police when they were detained at protests.

“It seems like Denis just ended up in a dangerous spot; nobody was trying to figure out who was a journalist, who wasn’t,” Mr. Varlamov said by telephone. “This is the first time I remember something like this happening in Russia. Sure, there have been detentions of journalists, but they’d always release them.”

Mr. Varlamov said that Mr. Sinyakov had taken his place aboard the Arctic Sunrise at the last minute.

“The trip that he went on, that was supposed to be me,” Mr. Varlamov said. “Denis couldn’t go, he asked me if I could go and shoot. It didn’t work out for me, so Denis went, and this is what happened. It was probably supposed to be me in his place.”

Follow Andrew Roth on Twitter @ARothNYT.



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Details of Conversation With Obama Deleted From Twitter Account in Rouhani’s Name

According to Robert Windrem of NBC News, an Iranian who witnessed Friday’s historic conversation between the presidents of the United States and Iran “was giddy” describing it a short time later.

Excitement about the diplomatic breakthrough among President Hassan Rouhani’s aides â€" perhaps followed by second thoughts about diplomatic etiquette or how it might play back home â€" could also explain why a rapid-fire series of updates divulging details of the conversation were posted on the @HassanRouhani Twitter account and then deleted a short time later.

A screenshot of an update to a Twitter account maintained in the name of Iran's president that was posted and then deleted on Friday afternoon. A screenshot of an update to a Twitter account maintained in the name of Iran’s president that was posted and then deleted on Friday afternoon.

Luckily for posterity, before those updates were removed, and replaced with more sober messages, several followers retweeted them and Andrew Kaczynski of Buzzfeed captured part of the stream in a screenshot.

Before seven updates to a Twitter account run in the name of Iran's president were deleted Friday afternoon, a Buzzfeed journalist captured them in a screenshot. Before seven updates to a Twitter account run in the name of Iran’s president were deleted Friday afternoon, a Buzzfeed journalist captured them in a screenshot.

Another of the deleted updates, captured by The Lede, described the two presidents wishing each other farewell in their own languages. Mr. Rouhani offering the American blessing, “Have a nice day!” and Mr. Obama responding with the Persian word for goodbye, “Khodahafez” â€"literally, “May God protect you.”

While the brief updates that later replaced those initial messages were generally dry, a hint of the excitement inside the Iranian delegation did seem to infuse one tweet remaining in the @HassanRouhani feed, a photograph of a beaming Mr. Rouhani on board the plane that would take him back home.

The photograph, shot by someone standing directly in front of Mr. Rouhani and quickly posted online, also seemed to confirm that the account, which the Iranian president has not directly acknowledged as his own, is at least run by someone very close to him.

That echoes what the Iranian-American writer Hooman Majd reported earlier this month, after he helped set up an NBC News interview with Mr. Rouhani in Tehran.

As my colleague Thomas Erdbrink reports from Tehran, the flurry of activity on the social network following the phone call ended with the Iranian president’s account retweeting a message from the State Department. That update from Washington hailed the presidential-level dialogue and the meeting on Thursday between Secretary of State John Kerry and Mr. Rouhani’s Twitter-fluent foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif.

A screenshot taken Friday evening of the @HassanRouhani Twitter account maintained in the name of Iran's president. A screenshot taken Friday evening of the @HassanRouhani Twitter account maintained in the name of Iran’s president.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.



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Pakistan, Citing Religious and Social Values, Bans L.G.B.T. Web Site

The Queer Pakistan Web site was meant to be a virtual refuge for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in a religiously conservative country where homosexuality is illegal.

But this week the Web site, queerpk.com, said it was shut down by the Pakistani authorities, who reportedly said that the content was against Islam and the values of Pakistani society. The administrators of the Web site responded by taking measures to work around the ban, which they said drove up traffic to the site after they redirected it.

Since it was founded in July, Queer Pakistan has served as an online portal where gays, bisexuals, transgender individuals and lesbians could meet and get advice. A series of messages on the site’s online support group suggests both the risks and confusion of users reaching out for support, some of them anonymously, using only initials or apparently using pseudonyms.

“I am new to this group and I am a lost soul,” said one person who wrote in seeking advice from “professionals that can help me with my confusion.” Another person wrote asking for “treatment.” There were also questions about health issues, or whether there were lesbians in Lahore and Karachi.

The site featured an online television section of gay short films with subtitles in Urdu. But it also tracked homophobia in the media and in other public forums in Pakistan, like the remarks by a Pakistani television figure who said transgender people should be killed.

The banning of the Queer Pakistan Web site has renewed attention on Pakistan’s gay and lesbian citizens, just as its establishment in July did. Even though homosexuality is outlawed in Pakistan and is considered repugnant to the tenets of Islam, it is privately tolerated in some sections of society, and the law is rarely brought to bear against people for homosexual behavior.

In August, a report by the British Broadcasting Corporation, which Queer Pakistan linked to on its Facebook account, quoted Pakistani gays and lesbians describing what they must do to live in their society, including taking part in invitation-only online support groups and arranging marriages of convenience with members of the opposite gender. It quoted a researcher, Qasim Iqbal, as saying:

Gay men will make every effort to stop any investment in a same-sex relationship because they know that one day they will have to get married to a woman. After getting married they will treat their wives well but they will continue to have sex with other men.

A lesbian named Beena, in Lahore, said she and her partner were considering arranging a marriage with two gay men, and pooling their money to share a two-family house. She was quoted as saying:

Gay rights in America came after women had basic rights. You don’t see that in Pakistan. You are not allowed a difference of opinion here. My father is a gentleman but I wouldn’t put it past him to put a bullet through my head. I’m all for being ‘true to myself’ but I don’t want to die young.

While homosexuals in Pakistan already use dating Web sites and other forms of Internet communication, the Queer Pakistan site apparently distinguished itself by being a rare forum that openly addressed homosexual issues in Pakistan.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority spokesman was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying that the authorities had halted access to the site after complaints from Internet users. “We blocked the Web site under the law because its content was against Islam and norms of Pakistani society,” said the spokesman, Kamran Ali, according to the news service.

On Friday, Queer Pakistan said on its Twitter feed @queerpk that the ban had driven up interest in the redirected site.

While the site was still accessible outside Pakistan, the BBC journalist Iram Abbasi said in a report about the ban that the site displayed a message saying that because of forbidden content, access inside Pakistan had been denied.

This week the head of the BBC’s Urdu service in London, Aamer Ahmed Khan, drew attention to the ban on his Twitter account, @AakO, and to the report in Urdu by Ms. Abbasi.

Last month the site published a blog post with the headline “The Coming Out for a Pakistani” to address the difficulties.

For a regular Pakistani youngster the internet is the major source of all kinds of knowledge and happenings around the world. Same goes when a young gay Pakistani approaches the internet with his major life problem about being a homosexual. As the internet is dominated by content from western countries almost all the websites about being gay encourage you to ‘come out of the closet’ and tell the whole world you are gay and be yourself. This is great advice but only if you are living in a free country where laws and legislation are strict and there aren’t any religious fanatics going around running their own rule.

In Pakistan things are different. We are not going to be appreciated even by the most educated people if we be who we are in public. Moreover we also run a great risk of being harmed. It doesn’t matter if you are a boy or a girl. The risk is almost the same.

The site also linked to an article carried by SAPA, the South African press agency, and the German Press Agency, profiling the site and quoting one of its founders, who was partly identified as Fakhir Q. The agency reported:

“The main motivation is our own life stories,” said Fakhir Q, one of the people behind the pioneering Queer Pakistan website. “We have been through a lot and we know how it is growing up in a society like Pakistan with practically no support whatsoever.”

“So we want to provide a platform for people like us to show them they are not alone,” Fakhir said, giving only his first name.

He said the response to Queer Pakistan has been “remarkable,” with interest from all parts of Pakistani society.

The membership is from both the genders, with some 44 percent identifying themselves as female and 56 as males.

“It’s pretty diverse, goes from lower-middle to elite-protected class. The age group is 19-35,” Fakhir added.

The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority has previously tried to shut down chat rooms in a move it sees as protecting moral values, according to reports in the Pakistani press this month.

Late last year it also tried to block access to YouTube to prevent people from seeing the film “Innocence of Muslims,” a low-budget film mocking the Prophet Muhammad.

Declan Walsh contributed reporting.

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.



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Thursday, September 26, 2013

What Iran’s President Said, Is Said to Have Said and Says He Said

Video of Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, discussing the Holocaust in an interview with Charlie Rose recorded on Wednesday in New York.

In an interview with Charlie Rose of CBS News broadcast on Thursday, Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, rejected accusations that he had not clearly acknowledged the historical reality of the Holocaust in remarks to CNN earlier this week.

According to the simultaneous translation of Mr. Rouhani’s remarks from Persian into English, he replied:

In principle, we and I condemn the massacre carried out by the Nazis in World War II. I’ll also add that many groups were killed by the Nazis in the course of the war, Jews in specific, but there were also Christians, there were Muslims. So in principle, I’ll tell you that my government, I condemn massacre â€" the killing of people or any group. I’ll tell you that when an innocent person is killed, we never go about asking or inquiring whether they were Jewish or Christian or Muslim. That’s not our way or our creed. We simply say that we condemn any killing, any massacre, and therefore we condemn the massacre of the Jewish people by the Nazis, as we also condemn the other massacres that took place in the course of the war.

“Why would I want to deny it?” Mr. Rouhani asked rhetorically. “Given that we live in the Middle East,” he added, “we feel the impact of what took place in World War II today in our region.”

The president argued â€" as his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had in far more inflammatory language â€" that the Palestinian people had been forced to pay for the crimes of the Nazis when the state of Israel was established as a Jewish homeland in the Middle East after the German genocide in Europe. “We think that it’s time to really separate that event from what’s happening to a group of people now in the Middle East who’ve lost their homes, who have been discriminated against, who have gone through some of the worst kinds of torture that no one â€" even the Jewish people â€" would want to see.”

While Mr. Rouhani made broadly similar remarks in his response to a question about his predecessor’s Holocaust denial from CNN’s Christiane Amanpour a day earlier, a conservative Iranian news agency â€" known for its, at times, comically staunch support of Mr. Ahmadinejad â€" injected a note of uncertainty by pointing out that the simultaneous translation in that broadcast was inexact.

Video of President Hassan Rouhani of Iran answering a question on the Holocaust during an interview with Christiane Amanpour of CNN recorded on Tuesday in New York.

The news agency, Fars, published a more literal translation of Mr. Rouhani’s response side by side with the CNN transcript and called this proof that the American network had “fabricated” the president’s acknowledgment of the Holocaust.

According to the Fars translation, which two Iranian-American journalists told The Lede is accurate, Mr. Rouhani did not actually use the word “Holocaust,” as CNN reported, but did invoke “genocide” in the following exchange with Ms. Amanpour:

Q. One of the things your predecessor used to do from this very platform was deny the Holocaust and pretend that it was a myth. I want to know you, your position on the Holocaust. Do you accept what it was? And what was it?

A. I have said before that I am not a historian and historians should specify, state and explain the aspects of historical events, but generally we fully condemn any kind of crime committed against humanity throughout the history, including the crime committed by the Nazis both against the Jews and non-Jews, the same way that if today any crime is committed against any nation or any religion or any people or any belief, we condemn that crime and genocide. Therefore, what the Nazis did is condemned, (but) the aspects that you talk about, clarification of these aspects is a duty of the historians and researchers, I am not a history scholar.

The editors at Fars, however, seemed unaware that the interpreter heard on the CNN broadcast rendering Mr. Rouhani’s Persian remarks into English on the fly, was not employed by the network but had been provided by the Iranian government.

In response to the accusation from Fars, which the Persian-speaking Ms. Amanpour dismissed as “ridiculous,” CNN posted raw footage of the entire interview online, and Mr. Rouhani’s office published a word-for-word transcript of what he said in Persian on a government Web site.

Arash Karami, a journalist who blogs about the Iranian media from Washington, reports that the transcript provided by the president’s office matches the video. He also explains that some parts of the translation released by CNN, of words Fars had claimed were never spoken, were in fact uttered just after the snippet from the interview that was initially broadcast.

Mr. Karami produced his own translation of the president’s complete answer to Ms. Amanpour’s question, which suggests that the interpreter mainly condensed rather than added to Mr. Rouhani’s remarks.

I have said before that I am not a historian and when it comes to speaking of the dimensions of historical events, historians should explain and discuss it.

But in general, I can say that any crime that is committed in history against humanity, such as the crimes committed by the Nazis, whether against Jews or non-Jews, from our viewpoint is completely condemned. Just as if today a crime is committed against any nation, religion, ethnicity or belief, we condemn that crime or genocide.

Therefore, what the Nazis did is condemnable. The dimensions of it which you say, is the responsibility of historians and researchers to make those dimensions clear. I am not a historian myself.

However, this point should be clear: If a crime took place, that crime should not be a cover for a nation or group to justify their crimes or oppression against others. Therefore, if the Nazis committed a crime, and however much it was, we condemn that, because genocide or mass murder is condemned.

From our viewpoint, it doesn’t matter if the person killed is Jewish, Christian or Muslim. From our viewpoint, [it] does not make difference. Killing an innocent human is rejected and condemned. But this cannot be a reason for 60 years to displace a people from their land and say that the Nazis committed crimes. That crime [too] is condemned; occupying the land of others is also condemned from our viewpoint.

The fallout from what Mr. Rouhani was reported to have said, however, was not limited to disputes about mistranslation. Even before the Fars report appeared, some supporters of Israel called the fact that Iran’s president had mentioned the suffering of the Palestinians in a reply about the Holocaust offensive. Abraham Foxman, a Holocaust survivor who is the director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement:

It is about time an Iranian leader acknowledged the Holocaust as a tragic fact of history. But in practically the same breath President Rouhani engaged in the more subtle form of Holocaust revisionism, minimizing it by accusing the Jewish survivors of taking vengeance on the Palestinians in fulfilling their 2,000-year-old dream of returning to their homeland, Israel. This was a gratuitous swipe at the survivors.

For her part, Ms. Amanpour defended CNN’s reporting and expressed astonishment at the fact that The Wall Street Journal had published an editorial based on the incorrect assumption that the network had altered Mr. Rouhani’s words. As she noted on Twitter, that broadside concluded: “points for honesty go to the journalists at Fars, who for reasons that probably range from solidarity to self-preservation aren’t disposed to whitewash their President’s ideological predilections.”



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Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Image of the Day: Sept. 25

A herd of goats wading through a flooded street after heavy rains in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.Amit Dave/Reuters A herd of goats wading through a flooded street after heavy rains in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.


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Visit to Washington Ends Era in U.S.- India Relations

Manmohan Singh, prime minister of India, left, with Barack Obama, president of the United States of America, during a state dinner in New Delhi on Nov. 8, 2010.Jason Reed/Reuters Manmohan Singh, prime minister of India, left, with Barack Obama, president of the United States of America, during a state dinner in New Delhi on Nov. 8, 2010.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, who is on a visit to the United States, will meet President Obama in Washington on Friday.

Mr. Singh is meeting Mr. Obama at a time when both the United States and India have their attention directed elsewhere. India is preoccupied with domestic political developments and the economy. On the foreign policy front, there is perhaps greater interest in the meeting Mr. Singh is scheduled to meet with Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister of Pakistan in New York. Washington is focused on a potential government shutdown, and Iran and Syria are the top issues on the foreign policy docket.

The United States and Indian governments are keeping expectations low for the Obama-Singh meeting. Thus it is easy to lose sight of what the visit does signify â€" the end of an era during which administrations of different stripes in both countries laid the foundation of a strong bilateral relationship. The question that lies ahead is whether the two countries â€" and not just the governments â€" will build something substantial upon it.

The state of the two countries is different today than it was four years ago when Mr. Singh last visited Washington. Then, the Indian economy was growing at about 8 percent and Mr. Singh’s coalition had recently returned to power. It was the United States that was struggling with the financial crisis and geopolitically. Mr. Singh’s current visit comes after announcement that the Indian economy grew at a 4.4 percent rate in the last quarter and at a time when people are questioning whether his government will have a mandate to do anything substantial before the 2014 elections.

Despite the impending politico-economic crisis in Washington, the American economy seems better off today than four years ago.
In combination with the unconventional energy revolution, this has observers and policymakers cautioning against betting against the United States.

Recently, there has been much talk about the drift and the differences between India and the United States. There is little doubt that there are differences â€" most of which will be on the agenda when the two leaders meet.

On the geopolitical side, there has been much concern in India about what the United States’ drawdown of forces from Afghanistan will mean for India’s role there, the American and Indian relationships with Pakistan, and the American stance on terrorism. In the United States, Indian imports of oil from Iran have been a concern, especially on Capitol Hill. On the economic side, there has been heartburn in the corporate sector.

Over the last decade, corporations had been among the strongest proponents of the United States-India relationship, but more recently it has been the complaints from this sector that have been louder. Some Indian companies are concerned that potential American immigration reform will adversely affect their business model. Sections of American business and labor have expressed chagrin about Indian trade and investment policies â€" their unhappiness has been evident in letters to and from congressional members, at hearings on te Hill, and in advertisements being placed in advance of the prime minister’s visit. Multilaterally, the two countries disagree on climate change, global trade negotiations and issues like Syria.

The agenda, however, won’t just be full of lamentations. The two countries have a host of regional issues to discuss, including those related to the Asia-Pacific region and the Middle East. Both sides are playing down the possibility of potential agreements, but there has been an effort to get deals done on the defense and climate change fronts.

Barack Obama, president of the United States of America, first in the bottom row, and Manmohan Singh, prime minister of India, extreme right, with world leaders at the G20 summit in Saint Petersburg, Russia on Sept. 6.Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Barack Obama, president of the United States of America, first in the bottom row, and Manmohan Singh, prime minister of India, extreme right, with world leaders at the G20 summit in Saint Petersburg, Russia on Sept. 6.

Ashton Carter, the American deputy secretary of defense, just returned from India having offered that country the opportunity to produce the Javelin missile jointly. There were some indications that there might be an agreement on climate change akin to the one China and the United States reached, but an Indian official noted that that was still a “work in progress.”

There are signs of some movement on a deal between Westinghouse and NPCIL â€" which would represent symbolic, even if not highly substantive, progress in the nuclear energy realm. Also on the energy front, the two countries continue to cooperate on clean energy technology, as well as potential American exports of liquefied natural gas to India.

The visit is also a good moment to take stock of the relationship. It is a far cry from the late 1990s. American administration officials routinely talk of the bet they have placed on India, and India is led by a man who put his government’s survival on the line for a bilateral deal with the United States.

The India-United States relationship is broader and deeper than ever before. Cooperation ranges from India buying C-130s from America to the United States Centers for Disease Control helping their Indian counterpart establish an Epidemic Intelligence Service. Bilateral trade and investment have increased; significantly, this has been a two-way street.

Bilateral defense trade has gone from zero to $10 billion dollars and India is likely to purchase more military equipment from the United States. In 2017, U.S. liquefied natural gas exports to India are scheduled to begin. Over the last year, dozens of senior American and Indian policy makers from both the central and state levels have exchanged visits. There are indeed so many dialogues, working groups, and business and government delegations, that policy makers seem to lose track of the exact number.

It has taken a decade and a half to lay this foundation. The question is: what will the new phase of the United States-India construction project require? Some have called for the two countries to look for another “big idea.” Such initiatives can spark optimism and focus the attention of the bureaucracies and the press.

However, a big idea unfulfilled can lead to disillusionment as with the two countries’ civil nuclear deal. Some are waiting for the elections and the formation of a new government in India, but there is no certainty what that government will do. In fact, some of the obstacles in bilateral relations today, especially on the energy and economic fronts, have been placed by India’s opposition parties, which are trying to replace Mr. Singh’s governing coalition in 2014.

One can list a number of specific initiatives for a new phase of the nations’ relationship. A key prerequisite, however, will be to recognize that the partners in this project will differ. Differences don’t have to be deal-breakers. As others have pointed out, the key is to learn how to manage the differences.

India and the United States are clearly learning by doing and are better at dealing with disagreements. The two countries worked together to ensure that their differences over Iran did not spiral out of control. The executive branches have also become more cautious about publicly debating differences on issues such as Afghanistan, Iran and surveillance by the National Security Agency â€" even when there has been domestic pressure to criticize the other side openly. These skills will continue to be necessary, for example, as the two countries head to global trade talks in Bali later this year.

There will continue to be other complications. The very element that facilitates the United States-India relationship  â€" democracy â€" will continue to complicate it. The democracy factor is often cited as driver of good relations. But it also means that debates and differences will play out publicly; that negotiations will take place under the gaze of a free press; and that domestic politics will have to be navigated and negotiated. American policy makers only need to look to their experiences with France and Israel for lessons learned. And Indian policy makers will have to show the same patience with the domestic political constraints their American counterparts face that they demand.

Complications will also arise because the quantitative and qualitative change in the relationship means that it involves more issues, interactions and stakeholders than ever before â€" making greater friction natural. It also involves engagement on issues that span the foreign-domestic divide, including in the economic, energy and immigration realms. These issues require policymakers to tread carefully, given that both countries are sensitive to outsiders trying to influence domestic politics.

There are also legacy issues that will continue to complicate the relationship. While the United States might be popular in India with the public and coalitions led by both parties have worked toward closer bilateral relations, opposition parties still use the term “pro-U.S.” to attack governments. Indian governments continue to feel vulnerable to such attack.

The construction of a substantial partnership between the two nations won’t be easy; there will probably be delays and cost overruns. The two governments have, nonetheless, decided that it is worth building. But the project will need attention and resources at a time when both sides have other, arguably more pressing, preoccupations. It will also require heavy-lifting from the private sector and public, constituencies who benefit from the relationship to be vocal, and the two sides not to shy away from talking transactions.

Tanvi Madan is a fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, and director of its India Project.



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Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Israeli Diplomats Mock Iran’s President Online

On a day when President Obama told delegates at the United Nations that he welcomed the opportunity posed by diplomatic overtures from Iran’s new president, Israeli diplomats in Washington sounded a very different note online, mocking the moderate cleric as scarcely different from his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A message posted on the official Twitter page of the Israeli Embassy on Tuesday morning drew attention to a parody LinkedIn account for President Hassan Rouhani. The mock résumé of Mr. Rouhani’s career, filled with sarcastic asides, described him as “President of Iran, Expert Salesman, PR Professional, Nuclear Proliferation Advocate.”

Under the heading, Skills and Experience, the fake LinkedIn page posted on the embassy’s Web site included “International Sales,” “Deceptive Trade Practices,” “Nuclear Weapons,” “Twitter,” “Public Relations” and “Illusion” in a long list.

A summary of the fake Mr. Rouhani’s experience, written in the straw man’s name, boasted: “Since my election as president of Iran in 2013, I have developed and executed an unprecedented PR campaign for the government of Iran. Through a series of statements, tweets, op-eds and smiles I have re-branded the human-rights-suppressing, Ayatollah-led regime as moderate and a source of hope among the international community.”

The satirical pitch concluded, “If you’re looking for a persuasive communications expert and master salesman capable of making almost anything believable, I’m your man.”

The embassy’s attempt to take some of the shine off the new administration’s image came as Mr. Rouhani’s Twitter-savvy foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, suggested on the social network that his talks this week with foreign ministers of nations concerned about Iran’s nuclear program could produce a breakthrough.

Some hours later, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israeli diplomats in New York would not be present to listen to the new Iranian president’s address, scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.



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Some of the Victims of the Attack in Kenya

Ross Langdon giving a speech during a TED conference.

As our colleagues in Kenya reported, the government has said 67 people were killed in the attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi and the standoff that followed, and 175 have been injured. But the Kenyan Red Cross has said a further 51 people were listed as missing, so the death toll could be higher. It also said there were four unidentified bodies in the mortuary.

Names of the victims have been trickling out in the past few days. One of them was Ross Langdon, an Australian architect who spoke at a recent TED conference, describing his life as a child growing up in Tasmania in a tent “in a lush valley by a river” and the inspiration it had on his work as an architect in Africa.

“I thought it might be better to be like a chameleon - able to adapt and change and blend with our environment rather than conquer it,” he said.
The architectural firm where he worked, Regional Associates, said:

We are deeply saddened by the tragic loss our friend and colleague Ross Langdon and his partner Elif Yavuz.
Profoundly talented and full of life, Ross enriched the lives of all those around him. Ross’s leadership on projects throughout East-Africa was inspirational, and he will be will be very, very sorely missed by us all. Our deepest condolences and thoughts are with Ross and Elif’s families at this very difficult time.

On Saturday, the day that the attack started, Mr. Langdon was at the mall with Ms. Yavuz, who was expecting their first child. Ms. Yavuz worked with the Clinton Foundation, which posted a statement by former President Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton and their daughter, Chelsea.

We were shocked and terribly saddened to learn of the death of Elif Yavuz in the senseless attacks in Nairobi. Elif devoted her life to helping others, particularly people in developing countries suffering from malaria and HIV/AIDS. She had originally worked with our Health Access Initiative during her doctoral studies, and we were so pleased that she had recently rejoined us as a senior vaccines researcher based in Tanzania. Elif was brilliant, dedicated, and deeply admired by her colleagues, who will miss her terribly. On behalf of the entire Clinton Foundation, we send our heartfelt condolences and prayers to Elif’s family and her many friends throughout the world.

In a statement, the United States Agency for International Development said Ruhila Adatia-Sood, the wife of Ketan Sood, a Foreign Service national at the agency’s mission in Nairobi, had been  killed in the attack. Ms. Adatia-Sood was several months pregnant. “Ruhila was a popular radio and TV personality, who was known throughout Kenya for her passion, vibrancy, and gift for making people smile,” the statement said.

On Ms. Adatia-Sood’s Twitter account, she posted Instagram photographs of herself apparently posing with friends and fans. On East FM’s Kiss TV, a recent video shows her presenting programs on chefs.

Ruhila Adatia-Sood presents an East FM program posted 2 months ago.

As my colleague Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura reports from London, the militants specifically targeted non-Muslims, and at least 18 foreigners were among the dead, including six Britons, according to the British Foreign Office. Citizens from France, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, Peru, India, Ghana, South Africa, and China, were also killed, according to The Associated Press, which reported the names and profiles of some of the other victims.

The Daily Telegraph quoted a British businessman, Louis Bawa, who confirmed the deaths of his daughter Jenah, 8, and his wife Zahira, as saying his “heart just stopped” when he was asked to identify them from photographs of victims taken at the mall. “The people who did this, they are vigilantes, they are animals,” he told the newspaper. “They are using religion as an excuse to kill people. Zahira and Jenah were Muslims, but these animals just shot them the same as all of the others.”

He said he had spoken to his daughter last week and promised “to buy her any present in the world” if she did well on her exams. She told him to “start saving up” because she wanted him to buy her a pony and said “she was going to work very hard.” Jenah’s 12-year-old cousin, Ajay Bawa, said, “I don’t understand how people can kill 8- and 9-year-olds.”

The Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor was also killed in the attack as my colleague Adam Nossiter reported on Monday.



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Image of the Day: Sept. 24

Anganwadi workers or community health workers at government-run day care centers, during a protest in Mumbai, Maharashtra. They were demanding better wages and pension.Rafiq Maqbool/Associated Press Anganwadi workers or community health workers at government-run day care centers, during a protest in Mumbai, Maharashtra. They were demanding better wages and pension.


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Image of the Day: Sept. 24

Anganwadi workers or community health workers at government-run day care centers, during a protest in Mumbai, Maharashtra. They were demanding better wages and pension.Rafiq Maqbool/Associated Press Anganwadi workers or community health workers at government-run day care centers, during a protest in Mumbai, Maharashtra. They were demanding better wages and pension.


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Political Battles Intensify in Andhra Pradesh After Jailed Politician Gets Bail

Jaganmohan Reddy, right, chief of the Y.S.R. Congress Party, after his release on bail from the Chanchalguda central prison in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, on Tuesday.Noah Seelam/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Jaganmohan Reddy, right, chief of the Y.S.R. Congress Party, after his release on bail from the Chanchalguda central prison in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, on Tuesday.

HYDERABAD, Andhra Pradeshâ€" Massive crowds gathered in Hyderabad, the capital of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, to welcome Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy, a leading politician of the state, who was released from a local prison on bail on Tuesday. Mr. Reddy, who founded the Y.S.R. Congress Party in 2009, spent 485 days in prison after being arrested over corruption charges. A court of India’s premier federal investigative agency, Central Bureau of Investigation (C.B.I.) granted him bail Monday after being ordered by the Supreme Court of India.

Mr. Reddy’s release is a significant event in the politics of the state. Elections for the state legislature and the lower house of the Indian parliament are expected in 2014.

India’s ruling Congress Party won 33 and 29 out of 42 parliamentary seats in the national elections of 2009 and 2004 in Andhra Pradesh respectively. The embattled Congress Party desperately needs to win in the 2014 national elections in the state, if it has to have any chance to form the federal government.

Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy, the state chief minister and the man who won the May 2009 elections for the Congress Party in the state, died in a September 2009 helicopter crash. Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy, who was released from prison Tuesday, is the deceased chief minister’s son. Mr. Reddy broke ranks with his father’s party and founded his own Y.S.R. Congress party, after the Congress leadership refused to offer him the post of the chief minister in his father’s place. Analysts see the influence of the Congress Party behind Mr. Reddy’s arrest and release.

To ensure maximum electoral benefits, on July 30, the Congress-led federal government lent its support to the old demand to bifurcate the existing state and create a separate state for Telangana region, where the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (T.R.S.) party had led a separatist agitation. By putting its weight behind the creation of a separate Telangana, the Congress Party ensured that the T.R.S. would either support it in the forthcoming elections or merge with it.

In the Seemandhra region, where people oppose the division of Andhra Pradesh, protests have continued for more than a month against the federal government’s decision. The people of the Seemandhra region fear the loss of the capital Hyderabad to the new state of Telangana. Millions of residents of Seemandhra have migrated to Hyderabad to benefit from the economic boom in the city.

“Congress has a clear game plan to maximize its seats in Andhra Pradesh using Telangana and Jagan Reddy as issues in the two regions,” said Sanjaya Baru, political analyst and former media adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.  “Congress now hopes to win in Telangana with the help of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (T.R.S.) over the Telangana issue. In Seemandhra, it hopes that Jagan Reddy, with whom they have stuck a secret deal, will win for it in proxy, by publicly opposing Telangana. Jagan Reddy will support Congress after the elections,” said Mr. Baru.

Mr. Reddy’s Y.S.R. Congress party won a spectacular slew of by-elections caused by the resignation of his mother and other Congress Party lawmakers in the state legislature loyal to his family. In his own election to the lower house of the Indian parliament, Mr. Reddy got an overwhelmingly large number of votes in comparison to his opponentsâ€"a sign of his popularity, which caused considerable anxiety to the Congress Party. The Congress-led federal government ordered an investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation into corruption cases against Mr. Reddy and had him arrested.

N. Chandrababu Naidu, the former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, who leads the Telugu Desam Party, accused Mr. Reddy of amassing over Rs. 100,000 crore, or $20 billion through graft. “It is a test-case for democracy that a person who has looted the public exchequer on this scale is being helped by the Congress to escape the law,” said Mr. Naidu, who believes Mr. Reddy was released after he struck a deal with the Congress Party.

Bharathi Reddy, Mr. Reddy’s wife, refuted having made any deal with the Congress Party. “Why would we see him in jail for nearly 16 months and then make a deal with Sonia Gandhi,” she said. “Y.S.R. Congress will sweep the upcoming elections because we have openly opposed Telangana and are fighting for a united Andhra Pradesh.”

Mr. Reddy’s release will energize the Y.S.R. Congress. His opposition to the creation of Telangana and the sympathy generated by his time in prison, which was perceived as punishment for his rebellion against the Congress Party, will help his electoral prospects.

The prospect of rapprochement between the ruling Congress Party and Mr. Reddy’s Y.S.R. Congress has pushed his competitor, Telugu Desam Party toward the national opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party. “The Congress has put the country and the state in peril. We have to rise to give an alternative, as we have historically done, helping create non-Congress central governments in 1989, 1995 and 1998. We will keep all options open to defeat the Congress game plan,” said Mr. Naidu.

 Sriram Karri is a freelance journalist based in Hyderabad.



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A Conversation With: Environmental Activist Akhil Gogoi

Akhil Gogoi, general secretary of Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti, an organization for farmers, at his office in Guwahati, Assam.Brian Orland Akhil Gogoi, general secretary of Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti, an organization for farmers, at his office in Guwahati, Assam.

Akhil Gogoi, an environmental activist, has been campaigning against the construction of the big dams and highways in the mountainous northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh bordering China. Mr. Gogoi believes that natural disasters like the floods that hit the northern state of Uttarakhand and killed several thousand could also happen in Arunachal Pradesh if dam and road constructions go unchecked.

He first gained national recognition in India for his use of the Right to Information (RTI) Act to fight corruption. Mr. Gogoi, whose parents were sharecroppers, has also worked as an activist for peasant land rights. In 2005, he formed the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS), an organization of farmers in the northeastern state of Assam with more than a million members.

India Ink spoke to Mr. Gogoi at the KMSS office in Guwahati, the capital of Assam.

Q.

Why are you protesting against the construction of large dams in northeastern India?

A.

The rivers have flowed down from the hills from the ancient times to give us life and livelihood. Our farmers are hugely dependent on the river. Dams will destroy this critical relationship between the river and the people. The ecology of Assam is part of the ecology of Arunachal Pradesh. Assam bears the cost of developmental projects in Arunachal Pradesh.

One big dam is enough for all the people in the Northeast. But the dams in Arunachal Pradesh are not being built to supply power for local people. They are being constructed to supply power to corporations. This is corporatization of water. Water should be a community resource.

Before constructing a big dam, we should have a very proper, genuine scientific study on the river and the ecosystem. No such study was conducted.

Q.

Your anti-dam campaign has largely focused on the 2,000 megawatt Lower Subansiri Hydroelectric Project on the border of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, which is now roughly 50 percent complete. In 2011, you led a protest movement to block the turbines from reaching the construction site. How did you do that?

A.

KMSS, along with other organizations, succeeded in mobilizing the farmers and middle classes on the dam question. Hundreds of thousands of people were involved in the process. We chopped down huge trees on the road. We dug a trench. We blocked roads with electricity poles. All the roads were blocked. The government accused us of being Maoists, Naxalites, and carrying on an armed struggle. But we are not. Ours is a ferocious resistance and we have put all our energy against this dam.

Q.

Recently, there has been an increasing presence of Maoists in upper Assam, especially in the tea garden communities. Your leftist ideology and reverence for Maoist revolutionary ideas is very similar to theirs. How is your struggle different?

A.

Our politics is mass people politics and their politics is based on weapons and violence. We have no weapons. We do not do extortion. We collect money through voluntary donations.

Q.

How do you use Right to Information requests to fight corruption and why is this method so important to your movement?

A.

First we get all the information we need for using the RTI and then we start to fight.

The base of our popularity comes from the use of the RTI Act as an instrument of social mobilization and our anti-corruption movement. The anti-corruption movement made KMSS possible. This is why the middle class has accepted us.

Q.

Last year, KMSS opened “fair price” vegetable stalls in Guwahati, the capital of Assam. What does this achieve?

A.

We tried to address two questions. The price of vegetables is high for customers, but the farmers get very little for it. A farmer gets only get 1.5 rupees per kilogram for tomatoes but the customer has to buy it for 30 to 40 rupees. The profit goes to the brokers, not to the producers. We wanted to establish a market that directly connects producers and customers.

We understand that this is a temporary experiment. But it shows that price control as well as profits to the producers can be provided by sincere state effort.

Q.

You recently announced plans to start a political party in 2015. Will you be contesting elections?

A.

We are going to form a party, but not fight for parliamentary elections. The issue has been continuously debated within the organization. The party is for social and democratic reform and revolution. Till now, KMSS is a mass organization, and no mass organization can bring about serious change. Only a strong political party can achieve this.

Q.

The movement you led in 2002 against the forest department’s eviction drive launched you as an activist beyond student politics. What happened?

A.

There was a massive eviction drive by the Forest Department throughout Assam. I was one of the five students from Guwahati University, who went to Tengani area in Nambar Reserve Forest in Golaghat district. We found many houses burned and others demolished by the Forest Department’s elephants. We held a meeting and formed an organization to resist the eviction drive and my real movement was started.

On Aug. 7, 2002, we led a protest from Tengani to the district headquarters in Golaghat 40 kilometers away. We went on foot, 10,000 to 15,000 people, starting at 4 a.m. In Golaghat town we fought against the police. After quarreling for an hour, the deputy commissioner came and he gave an assurance that no eviction drive would happen in Tengani area before discussing it with the people. It was the first time I spoke about land rights.

Q.

How was KMSS formed and what issues does it care about the most?

A.

After two years in Tengani, we had an intense confrontation with the government. The police and the ruling Congress party were strongly opposing us. We could not resist the government in such a small area, so we decided that we must spread the democratic mass movement all across Assam.

On June 28, 2005, we began a bicycle procession with 200 people, split into two teams. One went to lower Assam, and the other to upper Assam. We met many flood-affected people and people living in the forests in every district of Assam. This was a big source of learning for us, and we connected with many local organizations and NGOs throughout the state. After one month, we gathered in Tezpur town and formed the KMSS.

We demand land reforms in Assam. Land must be distributed to peasants and farmers. Our second demand is for community rights over natural resources. And third is to find a solution to problems of flooding and erosion. Also, we want 100 percent irrigation in paddy fields.

Q.

What’s the hardest part about being a leader?

A.

It is a lot of stress. People think Akhil Gogoi will stop dams. They have such big expectations. KMSS has 300 to 400 full-time workers and 30,000 volunteer workers who are all my responsibility. Recently the police registered a case against one of our workers in Barpeta District. I went to his house and his father said, “My son has been sent to jail and is living in terrible conditions. When will he come home? What are you doing about this?” Now I have to figure out how to get him out of jail. Just today, 30 members of our organization are getting bail.

(This interview has been slightly edited and condensed.)

Brian Orland is a freelance journalist.



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Monday, September 23, 2013

Image of the Day: Sept. 23

Stephan Winkelmann, chief executive officer of Lamborghini, standing next to a Lamborghini Gallardo LP 550 car during an inauguration of a new dealership in New Delhi.Anindito Mukherjee/Reuters Stephan Winkelmann, chief executive officer of Lamborghini, standing next to a Lamborghini Gallardo LP 550 car during an inauguration of a new dealership in New Delhi.


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Turkey’s Chief European Union Negotiator Acknowledges Turkey May Never Join Bloc

It has been an open secret for years that Turkey, a majority Muslim country with a strong dose of national pride, would reject joining the European Union rather than waiting for the bloc to deny it entry.

Now, in what appeared to be a tacit acknowledgement by a senior Turkish official that its decades-long bid to join the European alliance might fail, Turkey’s E.U. affairs minister, Egemen Bagis, said Saturday that Turkey would probably never join the union, the world’s biggest trading bloc.

Mr. Bagis said at a meeting in Yalta that prejudice in Europe was thwarting Turkey’s E.U. application much as it had undermined its bid to host the 2020 Olympics, according to a report Saturday in London’s Telegraph newspaper.

“They should understand that they are not hurting me by putting me on the back burner. They are hurting themselves,” the newspaper quoted Mr. Bagis as saying.

While he said that E.U. entry still remained a long-term goal, he stressed that Turkey was more likely to follow the example of Norway and to remain closely aligned with the alliance by adopting E.U. standards and retaining close economic ties, the paper said.

Europe has long had deep ambivalence about admitting Turkey, a country of 76 million, with skeptics citing the country’s geographic and cultural differences. Those doubts were further fanned during the recent bloody clampdown by the government on protesters in Taksim Square.

In June, influential ministers from Germany and France questioned whether Turkey had the democratic credentials to join the club.

“No democracy can be built on the repression of people who try to express themselves in the street,” France’s E.U. affairs minister, Thierry Repentin, said as the protests flared.

Then in July, Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, was more blunt, expressing his opposition to Turkey joining the E.U., and insisting, as the former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, once did, that Turkey was not a part of Europe.

Newly re-elected Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has also advocated for a special partnership for Turkey that falls short of full membership - an idea that Ankara flatly rejects.

Mr. Bagis’s remarks came as a surprise because his mission for years has been to persuade the 28-nation European bloc that Turkey deserved membership. He has long passionately argued that Turkey could be the E.U.’s bridge between the East and West and help it to expand its clout in the Arab world.

Even if the European Union was more enthusiastic, Turks have themselves soured on Europe.

With the union buffeted by the euro crisis and the events of the Arab Spring creating opportunities for Turkey to expand its swagger in the region, many Turks are asking why they would want to join a sick club that in any case does not want to accept them as a full partners.

Skepticism of the .E.U in Turkey has also been fueled by a seemingly intractable political dispute with E.U. member Cyprus. And many Turks feel they are being discriminated against because their country has a Muslim majority.

According to a survey released last week by the German Marshall Fund, popular support in Turkey for E.U. membership has fallen to 44 percent from 73 percent in 2004.

Mr. Bagis, for his part, has been displaying increasing frustration with the Europeans’ frosty attitude toward Turkey. Criticizing European countries skeptical of Turkey’s E.U. membership bid and alluding to Turkey’s economic and political strength, Mr. Bagis recently underlined Turkey’s growing defiance.

“Turkey doesn’t need the E.U., the E.U. needs Turkey,” he told reporters in June. “If we have to, we could tell them, ‘Get lost, kid!’”



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