<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Maoists gun down top Hindu priest
Press Trust of India
Posted online: Friday, May 06, 2005 at 1222 hours IST
Updated: Friday, May 06, 2005 at 1304 hours IST
Kathmandu, May 6: Suspected Maoist rebels on Friday shot dead a top Hindu priest and injured one of his aides in western Nepal while he was performing a religious ceremony at a temple.
Narayan Prasad Pokharel, president of Nepal chapter Vishwa Hindu Parishad, was gunned down around 0630 hrs at Ram Nagar near Butwal, 300 kms southwest of Kathmandu, sources in the organisation said, adding one of his associates was wounded in the attack.
His body will be airlifted to Kathmandu for last rites, they said.
Pokarel, 50, was performing a yagna to appease gods and raise money for a local college.
The rebels have not claimed responsibility for the attack.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
FOIL Statement on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's US Visit.
FOIL expresses its concern over the tenor of the joint agreement signed between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President George W. Bush on July 18, 2005. While there are some elements in it that appear to be beneficial to the people of both countries, the broad context of the agreement will be detrimental to peace and security in the South Asian subcontinent.
Mr. Singh comes to Washington within a month of his Defense Minister, who signed a "framework" for the further inter-penetration of the Indian and US military establishments. The Bush administration has expressed the highest contempt for the views of the world's peoples, not only in its open disdain for the UN, but also in its rigidly Manichean world view (you are either with us or against us). The military link-up between the US and India and Mr. Singh's visit must be seen in this context. One cannot look at India's promissory note to dispatch its troops for US operations in a vacuum: as the Bush administration extends itself around the planet, it will rely upon these "frameworks" to call upon assistance. Mr. Singh's government has gone against the will of Parliament and the wishes of the Indian people on this score. FOIL looks forward to this issue being raised in the Monsoon Session of the Lok Sabha.
The most crucial development during the visit has been the de facto acknowledgement by the US of India as nuclear power, indeed "as a responsible state with advanced nuclear technology." The statement pledges that the US President would "seek agreement from Congress to adjust US laws and policies, and the United States will work with friends and allies to adjust international regimes to enable full civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with India." While it is broadly ! a good idea for all civilian nuclear establishments to be under the regulation and inspection of the International Atomic Energy Agency, we question the timing of this development.
This agreement on civilian nuclear energy and on "energy security" obscures
three important points:
(1) The US government continues to play fast and loose with the planet's environmental and energy security (it refuses to abide by the Kyoto Protocols).
(3) The US government and the Manmohan Singh section of the Congress are eager to push for further liberalization of the "energy market" within India, a project which can only undermine the energy security of the nation (this is the project of the US-India Energy Dialogue).
What has the Indian government conceded for access to nuclear fuel? The statement is silent on the concessions, but in the silence this much is apparent:
(1) Security Council seat: The US government is on record against the expansion of the UN Security Council, and it did not offer any reversal on this. India, therefore, is no closer to getting a permanent seat on the UNSC.
(2) Regional Cooperation: The UPA government has made some strides to create
confidence with India's neighbors. This statement does not acknowledge the importance of regional cooperation, but on the contrary seems to exude the disdain for multi-polarity that is a hallmark of the Bush administration. The two leaders expressed "satisfaction" at the new US-India Defense Relationship. While Singh met Bush, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke with Pakistani Foreign Minister K. M. Kasuri to assure him that the US would remain responsive to Pakistan's security concerns. In other words, the Bush administration wants to arm both sides rather than help build the bridges of peace. Furthermore, while India and China have come close to finding a solution to the boundary dispute, this Defense Relationship, particularly in its emphasis on patrol of sea lanes crucial to China (the Straits of Malacca, for instance), seems designed to fulfill another Bush administration policy, the containment of China.
FOIL is an international network of people with a connection to South Asia. We have come together to help create a just and equitable world. The direction of the Bush administration is contrary to that vision. The Indian government's association with this vision is a broad violation of the hopes and dreams of people both in India and the United States.
For more information, please email vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
For those who don't know -
Vijay Prashad is Beranda Karat's brother.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Gandhian leader's unGandhian act </b>
Sonia Sarkar/ New Delhi
Hosting a dinner party at Rajghat with funds from the Samadhi Committee account? That's exactly what "veteran Gandhian" and Samadhi Committee co-chairperson Nirmala Deshpande did when she consented to a dinner party in the honour of self-exiled MQM founder-leader Altaf Hussein, neither a peacenik nor a Gandhian.
<b>A note dated November 10 asking for arrangements for a dinner party was put-up by panel secretary and an approval given by Ms Deshpande for Rs 14,000.</b>
The note (The Pioneer is in possession of it) written by Mr Rajnish Kumar in Hindi stated: "To make Indo-Pak relations strong, Altaf Hussein has come to Delhi... He will come to Rajghat at 7 pm on November 12, 2004. Special guests will participate with him. Arrangements will have to be made for about 100 persons.<b> Evergreen Caterers have been assigned the work as per the menu approved by you. A total of Rs 14,000 has been fixed for food, tent, lighting and others. Approval may be given for this." Ms Deshpande signed the note, saying "approved."</b>
Though Hussein visited Rajghat, at the last minute the dinner was shifted to Ms Deshpande's residence at AB-98, Shahjahan Road. A bouquet and a shawl were presented to him by Ms Deshpande.
<b>All expenses were made out of the Rajghat Samadhi Committee account. (Voucher number 61 dated November 16.)</b>
Hussein was neither a State guest nor invited by the Government as he is in self-exile in London for the last 13 years. Maintaining an armed cadre, <b>Hussein's MQM has repeatedly indulged in urban terrorism in the name of lending a voice to mohajirs</b>.
A man declared an "absconder" in his home country, however managed to visit the samadhi of the Father of the Nation on his very first visit to India, thanks to Ms Deshpande. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<b>Sunita Narain with Sen, Bhagwati among top intellectual nominees</b><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Indians or people of Indian origin on the list include US-based economist Jagdish Bhagwati, Singapore-based diplomat and author Kishore Mahbubani, New Delhi-based environmentalist <b>Sunita Narain</b>, novelist <b>Salman Rushdie</b>, Nobel laureate economist <b>Amartya Sen</b> and Newsweek international editor <b>Fareed Zakaria</b>.
Prospect and Foreign Policy define a public intellectual as "someone who has shown distinction in their own field along with the ability to communicate ideas and influence debate outside of it".
"This list is about public influence, not intrinsic achievement. And that is where things get really tricky. Judging influence is hard enough inside one's own culture, but when you are peering across cultures and languages, the problem becomes far harder. Obviously our list of 100 has been influenced by where most of us sit, in the English-speaking West," their announcement notes.
The list is dominated by litterateurs, academics, scientists and experts on global affairs.
Two intellectuals who provided theoretical underpinning to US President George W Bush' politics -- Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilisations, and <b>Francis Fukuyama</b> of End of History - figure in the list.
So does <b>sociologist Anthony Giddens</b>, known to be close to British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
World Bank president <b>Paul Wolfowitz </b>competes with economists Jeffrey <b>Sachs</b> and Paul Krugman and columnist Thomas Friedman.
The eclectic list also includes American linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky, Iran's human right activist Shirin Ibadi, feminist author Germaine Greer, biologists Richard Dawkins and EO Wilson, physicist Steven Weinberg, cognitive scientists Daniel C Dennett and Steven Pinker and historian Eric Hobsbaum.
The world of letters is represented by Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, South African novelist JM Coetzee, Italian scholar-novelist Umberto Eco, US-based Chinese novelist Ha Jin, Czech playwright Václav Havel, Israeli novelist Amos Oz, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, <b>Indonesian dissident and writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Nigerian activist and playwright Wole Soyinka,</b> Peruvian novelist and politician Mario Vargas Llosa and Chinese Nobel winner Gao Xingjian.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
worth archiving in full <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>India's top Communist leaders are stunned and upset over Russian President Vladimir Putin wanting to remove Lenin's mummified body from Moscow's Red Square and give it a final burial.</b>Â <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo-->
The Kremlin this week reportedly announced that it was time to bury Lenin's body alongside other Bolshevik leaders.
The news has been received with bewilderment and anger by top Communist Party of India-Marxist leaders like Jyoti Basu and Anil Biswas.
<b>So angry was Basu that he said socialism was finished in Russia and that capitalism had grown deep roots in Moscow.</b>
"They (Russians) have buried Stalin's body and now they want to do the same to Lenin's. This is most unfortunate," Basu said. <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Stalin's mummified body was kept alongside that of Lenin for many years, and Basu remembered one of his Russia visits when he had seen the mortal remains of both leaders together at the Red Square.
Also angry was CPI-M's politburo member Anil Biswas who said Lenin's body had remained in Red Square despite several attempts within a quarter in Kremlin to bury it.
"Lenin's mummified body is a Russian heritage and a national memorial in itself. <b>We don't support the move to bury Lenin's body" Biswas said.</b>Â <!--emo&:o--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/ohmy.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='ohmy.gif' /><!--endemo-->Â <!--emo&:lol:--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/laugh.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='laugh.gif' /><!--endemo-->
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The whole irony is that if any of of the Indian gods/goddess/national leaders/patriots are abused, you won't even hear a peep from these commies. <!--emo&:angry:--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/mad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='mad.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Ex-Russian ambassador rubbishes Mitrokhin
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->"Gandhi and the Congress as the ruling party could have raised any amount of money through Indian business houses and were not in the need of foreign funds. Yes, I know that the Communist Party received funds from the CPSU (Soviet Communist party) like any Communist Party of the world. It was never a secret for anyone.
"They were transferred through non-diplomatic channels, so I am not aware of any transactions," Vorontsov said.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->
Gabriele Dietrich is a theology teacher, a german who claims to have become an Indian citizen. Of course, leader of the Pennurimai Iyakkam (Women's Rights Movement). Didn't Sandeep Pandey talk about gender? Gender, Gandhi, Coke (water), teaching kids about KPN through textbooks authored by the great educationist Balaji Sampath, are the stock-in-trade for the naxals.
Well, here is the collation on Ghadar, thanks to the questions raised by Radha Rajan.
Ghadar parties and China-Comintern in league with AID Inc./ASHA operatives and naxals
In 1912, Hindustani Association of the Pacific coast was formed at Portland (USA). The Hindustan Association later changed its name to the Ghadar Party. Leaders of the Ghadar Party in general were migrant Hindus and Sikhs. But the party got a great fillip in Japan through Maulvi Barkat Ullah who was a professor at the Tokyo University.
Hardial Bains: Born in India into a communist family in the Punjab, Bains became a member of the youth wing of the Communist Party of India ("CPI")⦠Bains was a leader of the anti-revisionist movement internationally and founded or helped found anti-revisionist parties around the world including the Hindustani Ghadar Party (Organisation of Indian Marxist-Leninists Abroad), the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), and the Communist Party of Ireland (Marxist-Leninist) and the Communist Ghadar Party of India. http://www.mondopolitico.com/elections/can...ies/marxist.htmÂ
National Office: 1867 Amherst Street, Montreal, Quebec H2L 3L7
Tel: (514) 522-1373 or 1-800-749-9553 Fax: (514) 522-5872 http://www.cpcml.ca/ The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) is registered with Elections Canada by the name "Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada"; the party takes the stand that Canada's other Communist Party is "revisionist", in the sense of not being true to Stalinism/Maoism.
The Third Congress of the Communist Ghadar Party of India on 29 January 2005 was honoured by the presence and participation of delegations of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) and the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). Comrade Lal Singh is the General Secretary of CGPI. Comrade Prakash Rao as the Spokesperson of the Party.
Organization:Â Â Alternatives, reseau d'action et de communication pour le developpement
Description:  Organisme de cooperation, solidarite et devel. Â
Admin-Postal:Â Â Alternatives, reseau d'action et de communication pour le
        3270, avenue Parc                Â
        Bureau 300                           Â
Montreal
QC
H2X 2J1
Canada           Â
Admin-Phone:Â Â 514-982-6606Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
Admin-Fax:Â Â Â 514-982-6122Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
Admin-Mailbox: ns@alternatives.ca               Â
Tech-Name:Â Â Â M. Michel Lambert
      Â
Ghadar is a publication of the Forum of Inquilabi Leftists (FOIL) In April 2005 issue Biju Mathew gives an insider's account of the mobilization against Narendra Modi. Simultaneously shedding light on the multi-dimensional nature of US imperialism, his article powerfully endorses the power of desi progressive movements. http://ghadar.insaf.net/
Inquilabi and Ghadar
Prior to 2004, FOIL was called Forum of Indian Leftists. The FOIL has graduated to Inquilabi Leftists. Inquilabi Zindabad (Sounds familiar? It is the salute on Communist Ghadar Party of India
(cgpi). Ghadar means 'revolution'. http://www.proxsa.org/activities/index.html
The PROXSA site [ PROXSA / YSS members: http://www.proxsa.org/yss/org.html]describes YSS (Youth Solidarity Summer â radical education for a new generation of South Asian activists).<b> The slogan of YSS is "Inquilab Zindabad!" </b>
Why Ghadar? Ghadar party in Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu means 'party of revolt'. "The name resonates with the historical, revolutionary, anti-imperialist Hindustan Ghadar Party (of the 1920s), that existed in India as well on this continent. Today, however, Ghadar has no relation whatsoever with the Canada
based HGP." http://www.proxsa.org/resources/ghadar/v1n1/edit.html
CGPI is also listed at: http://www.broadleft.org/antirevi.htm Since Ghadar Party has early association with Sikhs, it is no wonder that Biju Mathew takes up the cause of taxi drivers in New York
. Thanks to the links with Communist Ghadar Party of Canada
, the Alternatives.ca helps set up the website of cpiml.org (Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist), a legacy of the Peoples' War group (which is kept on terror watch list by US State Dept.)
In April 2002, a conference funded by Oberlin-Shansi Foundation was titled 'Siting Secularism in India'. Prof. Anuradha Needham of the English Department, the organizer and contact point for the conference, was also a Trustee of the Oberlin-Shansi Foundation. "the Oberlin Declaration of April 21, 2002. Coming within weeks of the Gujarat riots triggered by the Godhra atrocity of February 27, the 45 signatories declared the Indian government guilty of genocide, etc. etc. The signatories came from the US, India, UK and France. "Professor"(?) Biju Mathew of Rider University, "Professor"(?) Raza Mir of Monmouth college and Harsh Kapoor of the South Asia. "Press Statement regarding Gujarat" By madurai collective 15/05/2002 At 08:32 issued by the participants at the 'Siting Secularism Conference', 21 April 2002 , Oberlin College , Oberlin , Ohio , USA .
Proxsa is a proxy of FOIL with the same people participating in both..
Oberlin College is an ancient institution, reputed for its liberal admission policies and inclusive environment. It was also thus favored by "leftist" (some would say "Communist") academics, from the days of the Russian Revolution, through the horrors of the McCarthy era. " Shansi" used to be "Shanxi", a city and province in China. In the 19th century, Christian missionaries from the US opened a mission there. During the Boxer Rebellion, the missionaries were killed and dumped in ditches. After the rebellion was suppressed, their remains were exhumed and moved to a proper graveyard. The Mission's sponsors evolved into an academic institution, fostering China-US exchanges. They also expanded into India , particularly South India, bringing Chinese studies there, and Indians to the US . The thrust was still to spread Chinese culture. In the 1950s, all contact with the People's Republic was cut off, and the Foundation focused more on India . Then, circa 1998 (coincidentally, about when the FOIL found resources to start "Ghadar") the Shansi Foundation found favor with the Beijing regime again. Now there are excellent contacts with Shansi University â presumably with official blessings from the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China. "Ghadar reappeared suddenly29 after a two-year absence, and with evident hurry â on February 21, 2002."Â
By 1997-98,
China had re-established links to the Oberlin Shansi Foundation. This coincided with the appearance of Ghadar magazine.
Comintern is dead after the collapse of the USSR
. It is now replaced by Ghadar, the China-Comintern. The operatives are Communist Ghadar Party of India
, Proxsa/FOIL and their charity-collection arms: AID Inc./ASHA.
Now, it is clear why Sandeep Pandey is associated with naxals and gets funded from charities operating in USA
(charities such as AID Inc./ASHA). Naxals are part of the China-Comintern, an international brotherhood of comrades. Inquilab Zindabad. The headquarter is operating from Communist Ghadar Party of Canada, which explains why CPI-ML gets its website set up by Alternatives.ca (ca means Canada).
China, by re-establishing the links to Oberlin Shansi Foundation, is operating from the US soil to further revolution everywhere. It will be interesting to see how Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez became a communist owing allegiance to the China-Comintern. A recent visitor to Venezuela for a meeting with Hugo Chavez was Prakash Karat, who is now General Secretary of CPI-M.Â
CPI, CPI-M, CPI-ML, CGPI why so many communist outfits? They are all in it together now. The last pow-wow and orchestrated get together was during the socialist summit held in Mumbai. This was called 'World Social Forum 2004' Mumbai. Anti-imperialism grows worldwide proclaimed a website. http://www.socialistworld.net/eng/2004/01/22wsfb.html
Some groups try to achieve revolution-by-stealth, by infiltrating the Congress, for example. Some try to work through Science Foundations such as Tamilnadu Science Foundation with a jeevan saathi named Balaji Sampath receiving regular project charity disbursements from AID Inc. The recent tsunami in Tamilnadu helped AID Inc. gather about $2 million. Balaji Sampath who wrote thoughtful reports about what should be done, is yet to report on what exactly was done with the moneys and account for the money trails to income-tax authorities and to Ministry of Home Affairs who should get a report on the use of foreign funds.
<b>World Social Forum March 24-29: Karachi to host Arundhati Roy, Dalai Lama</b>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->KARACHI: <b>Arundhati Roy, the Dalai Lama, Bishop Desmond Tutu and Tariq Ali </b>are some of the globally admired people who will be taking part in the World Social Forum (WSF) in Karachi from March 24 to 29, organizers announced on Monday.
The opening and closing plenary sessions will be held at the People's Stadium Lyari, while the KMC Sports Complex on Kashmir Road, National Coaching Centre, Liaquat National Library, auditoriums of Dawood Engineering College, Adamjee College, Jinnah Medical College, Islamia College and Nishtar Park have been chosen as venues.
Camp sites will be set up at the Scouts Training Centre, Gulshan-e-Iqbal and Christ the King Seminary (13-D), Gulshan-e-Iqbal to provide lodging to the WSF delegates and participants at cheaper rates.
The WSF was initially scheduled for Jan 24-29 this year but was postponed due to the Oct 8 earthquake. Around 20,000 participants are expected to take part in the 'critical reflection' of globalization, wars, terrorism and a host of other issues, said convener Saleha Akthar while briefing the press at the WSF secretariat<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Will FOSA, Romila "Red" Thapar, CIIS's Angana, et al, (Please) protest the following "human right" violations? OR are they not human enough for these people?
(came via email)
It is from Falun Gong, perhaps dated, but seems like the state has shut Falon Gong's website down.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Stories of "Made in China"</b>
Dear reader:
In this issue, we continue our discussion of slave labor in China.
The Chinese communist regime has one primary goal: to maintain power at all cost.
Those who insist on their beliefs and place their conscience above the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) face the full weight of the Chinese regime. For having such courage, they may be charged with "betraying" their homeland or "revealing state secrets." They risk loss of reputation, long-term imprisonment, torture, and even death.
A primary method of suppression is punishment by "re-education through labor." Skilled at propaganda that twists logic and common sense, the CCP claims that such punishment gives people a chance to "reform" themselves. Crushed by methods perfected over the ages, they give up their conscience and "reform" into "patriotic" beings that never question the CCP.
The low cost of products made with slave labor has attracted great demand for them around the world. For corrupt officials, the forced labor camps are such a profitable business that they care little that the millions of inmates in the estimated 1,200 camps nationwide have never had a trial or a chance to defend their innocence.
We bring you the stories of two such souls - Falun Gong practitioners who were imprisoned for their beliefs and forced to endure "re-education" through grueling forced labor for refusing to betray their conscience, making goods for export to western countries.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->I Hope Children Don't Put Them in Their Mouths
By Wang Bin, Ph.D.
During the years 2000 and 2001, the Chinese National Security Division of the Beijing Police Department arrested a large group of intellectuals who practiced Falun Gong, including university professors. They were tortured until they accepted the Party's "reeducation." This was proclaimed to the outside world as being done gently as "a breeze and rainfall in spring." I was one of them.
<b> <i>
After his release, Mr. Wang Bin gave speech at a human rights event in Chicago, USA. </i></b>
I was kept in a gloomy prison cell on death row with about 30 prisoners who were waiting to be executed. The cell was only about 30 square meters (about 323 square feet). When I was first imprisoned in this cell, I could smell all kinds of stinky odors from feces, urine, mold, rotten flesh and materials. After a few months, I could no longer smell anything. I was used to the smell that permeated the cell all day.
It was so quiet in the cell that one could even hear a needle drop. Everyone took advantage of this short silence to ponder over his past. One day after another, quite a few people were getting closer and closer to execution day.
<b>Doors </b>
The prison cell had two doors, the front and the back. The front door was a thick iron door and an iron fence. The back door was also an iron door, as big as the front door. The front door was an entrance-exit where prisoners were escorted in and out, or dragged out for execution.
Ten armed-policemen guarded the door against potential runaways. Every time the front door was opened, it could mean someone was to die soon.
<b>Air and Sun </b>
"Open the cage!" the loud shout came from a policeman standing on the top. It broke into my thinking and the stillness of the cell. The pale, unkempt prisoners started to show a hint of happiness on their faces. One by one, prisoners walked outside of the back door. They nodded and bowed to show their gratitude to the policeman. Then they quickly occupied a place with more sunlight.
The first time I was let out, I was shocked by what I saw. The first thing the prisoners did was get naked. The scabies, sores and psoriasis on their bodies were fully exposed. I was not too surprised by this.
<b>Survivors and Labor </b>
If they were not sentenced to death, the inmates surviving the detention center were sent to prisons to complete their sentence and do slave labor. They brought their infections and sexually transmitted diseases with them to the prisons, while they provided a vast cheap work force. An amazing number of products made in China are produced in prisons and forced labor camps.
In May 2002, I was sent to the Beijing Repatriation Division of Provincial Criminals with several other Falun Gong practitioners. We were waiting to be repatriated to other prisons to serve our sentence. From this experience I gained a real understanding of the forced labor in prisons.
<b><i> One of the torture tools used in the Chinese labor camp. </i></b>
We were expected to labor tirelessly. The routine was to labor for 15 or 16 hours a day. If anyone had trouble finishing the assigned work, he was punished by having to "sing until the dawn," which meant he had to keep working and could not sleep. Since the cells were more than full, the prisoners had no time to take care of personal hygiene. They counted the days, with their diseases worsening day by day.
I was arrested for practicing Falun Gong. I had committed no crimes. So I just considered myself as a "correspondent" sent there to seriously observe what was happening around me. I hoped that one day my observations would enable the world to have a better understanding of what goes on in Chinese prisons.
<b>From Christmas to Underwear </b>
Our tasks included packing women's underwear, making copies of audio and video materials, attaching trademarks to various products, processing books, binding books, and making fishing floats, colored Christmas bulbs and accessories to be exported. I participated in all of the manual labor and had a good understanding of each work procedure.
During one hot summer, the prison authorities ordered us to make packages for Gracewell underwear. It was really hot and yet the prisoners hadn't showered for a very long time. They scratched all over their bodies, while being engaged in manual labor. Some of the prisoners scratched their private parts every now and again. When they took out their hands, I saw blood on their fingernails. I was not sure if women would really look graceful in that underwear.
Another time, the prisoners processed a kind of packaged food called "Orchid Beans" for some small business owners. This snack was made from broad beans. They kept trucking broad beans into the prison. In the prison there were barrels in which the broad beans were soaked in water until they were swollen. To spare themselves some trouble when changing water in the barrels, sometimes the prisoners would dump a whole barrel of beans into a dirty urinal and then pour water into the barrel putting the beans inside. When the beans became swollen in the water, the prisoners would start to peel the beans. In front of each person there was a set of parallel knives. The prisoner picked up a bean, rolling it over the knife and removing the bean skin on either side leaving a "golden belt" in the middle. In this way the beans looked good, though they were dirty and muddy. Then, the last step was to throw the beans back into the basket.
At least 10,000 beans had to be peeled in one day to finish the assignment. As the prisoners bustled around peeling the beans, their mucus and sputum mixed with the beans. Then the processed beans were put into a big bag to be taken to the stores where they would be fried. The fried broad beans looked golden and shining. They packed them in beautiful packages and sold them to customers.
The broad beans are in demand in the market and thus provide a high profit to sellers. Consumers enjoy the beans. In a U.S. supermarket, I saw fried broad beans imported from China. I wondered if our prison had made those beans.
Annually, a large number of Christmas items and clothing for western countries are made in Chinese prisons. Once the prison was assigned to make light bulbs. Every day prisoners were supposed to tie copper wires tightly around a plastic tank in a fixed shape and then connect all the light bulbs together. The prisoners' hands were usually bleeding. Needless to say, that stuff from their skin and sexually transmitted diseases were left on the light bulbs.
Once the prison I was in made strings of beads as jewelry accessories. The prisoners used needles and thread to string colored beads and then connected the two ends to make a string of beads. The strings of beads looked beautiful. But, I hope that women don't put them around their necks and that children will not put them in their mouths.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Contd..
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>My Experience in a Chinese Labor Camp</b>
<i>
Ms. Chen Ying was detained three times for practicing Falun Gong. She had been sent to a forced labor camp for one year while she was visiting her family in China. Prison guards forcefully injected her with toxic drugs, resulting in damage to the nerves on the left side of her body, spasms, and partial memory loss. Ms. Chen is currently residing in France. </i>
<i>
Ms. Chen Ying giving her personal testimony during a UN Human Rights Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. </i>
I was imprisoned between November 2000 and November 2001 for refusing to give up practicing Falun Gong. During that period of time, I was held in servitude at the Tuanhe Prisoner Dispatch Center and the Xin'an Forced Labor Camp in Beijing.
<b>Products Made </b>
1. Beijing Tuanhe Prisoner Dispatch Center
Packaged large quantities of disposable chopsticks. Most of them were for use in restaurants and hotels, while some were exported.
Made "Florence Gift Packages"
2. Beijing Xin'an Labor Camp
Packaged large quantities of disposable chopsticks. Most of them were for use in restaurants and hotels, while some were exported.
Knit sweaters.
Knit woolen gloves (exported to Europe).
Crocheted cushions for tea sets.
Crocheted hats for a company in Qinghe Township, Beijing.
Knit seat cushions.
Re-processed sweaters; removed sundries from yarn.
Made large quantities of slippers. The job was mainly gluing the sole and the instep together, and the labor camp demanded a high-quality product. When I was there, it was the hottest time of the summer. Many practitioners and I were working in our prison cells. Working in a humid prison cell full of irritating glue odors was suffocating. We worked until midnight or one o'clock in the morning every time there was a shipment.
Made stuffed animals, such as rabbits, bears, dolphins, penguins, etc. Major steps included putting the stuffing material inside, stitching the doll together, sewing the eyes, stitching the mouth, etc.
<b>The Sanitation and Living Conditions of the Forced Labor Camp</b>
(1) Beijing Tuanhe Prisoner Dispatch Center
<i> Ms. Chen Ying demonstrating how the forced injection performed in the forced labor camp.</i>
I was locked up with over a dozen other Falun Gong practitioners in a cell that was about twelve square meters (130 square feet) in size. There were only eight bunk beds in the room; thus, some of us had to sleep on the floor. We did everything in this cell, including working, eating, drinking, and using the toilet; therefore, there were many flies and mosquitoes. We were allowed to eat only at certain times. Water was rationed, and drinking water was limited. The prison guards never allowed us to wash our hands before meals. After a meal, we had to get back to work immediately. Twice a day, we were given five minutes for personal hygiene. When the time was up, we were forced to stop and not allowed to take any water back to our cell. If we could not finish the work assigned to us, we were not allowed to clean ourselves. When there was a rush to get products out, we had to work late and go to sleep without washing. There were fixed times for the whole group of practitioners to go and use the toilet. Even then, we still had to ask the guards for permission. We were allowed two minutes to use the toilet each time; thus, many people did not even have enough time to have a bowel movement. We could go to bed only at the specified time; otherwise, we would be scolded and not allowed to sleep. At night, the guards locked up all the cells. A small bucket in each cell was used for a toilet. We were watched even during sleep.
We were allowed very little sleep each day, and forced to start working the moment we opened our eyes. My hands had blisters and thick calluses from working long hours to finish the assigned quota of packaging disposable chopsticks. I often worked until midnight. We were not allowed to sleep unless we finished the quota. We were forced to work over 16 hours every day, and everything was done in our cells. The sanitation conditions were extremely poor. Even though we were packaging disposable chopsticks and the label said the chopsticks were disinfected at a high temperature, the entire process was unhygienic. We could not wash our hands, and we had to package those chopsticks that had fallen on the floor. In order to seek a huge profit, Tuanhe Prisoner Dispatch Center and Tuanhe Labor Camp disregarded the health of the general public and knowingly committed such wrongdoings. Many restaurants in Beijing are currently using these chopsticks. I heard they are even being exported to other countries.
Female practitioners are forced to perform excessive physical labor. We were forced to unload trucks full of bagged materials that weighed over 100 pounds each. We had to carry the bags on our shoulders from the truck to our cells. Other physical labors included digging pits, planting trees, and transporting fertilizers. The police exploited our labor to create illegal income for themselves. The dispatch center did not compensate us for any of our work. In fact, we were forced to do long and hard labor without any compensation.
(2) Beijing Xin'an Labor Camp
Both our bodies and minds were imprisoned and severely persecuted under the excessive workload. The police often prevented us from sleeping at regular hours. When there were work orders, we had to work day and night to produce the best product in the shortest amount of time.
During summer time, our cells were so hot that people sometimes collapsed from heat exhaustion. Many practitioners developed symptoms of hypertension and heart disease from overwork. Their entire bodies twitched.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
How much did our South Asian fiends collect? Driving bus loads of Khalistanis to SBE meets in Sacramento or waving "Allaha destory India" flags in San Fransisco doesn't come cheap.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->http://www.telegraphindia.com/1060313/asp/nation/story_5962372.asp
Pakistan weekly spills 9/11 beans
OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
New Delhi, March 12: The Pakistan foreign office had paid tens of thousands of dollars to lobbyists in the US to get anti-Pakistan references dropped from the 9/11 inquiry commission report, The Friday Times has claimed.
The Pakistani weekly said its story is based on disclosures made by foreign service officials to the Public Accounts Committee at a secret meeting in Islamabad on Tuesday.
<b>It claimed that some of the commission members were also bribed to prevent them from including damaging information about Pakistan.</b>
The magazine said the PAC grilled officials in the presence of foreign secretary Riaz Mohammad Khan and special secretary Sher Afghan on the money paid to lobbyists.
"The disclosure sheds doubt on the integrity and honesty of the members of the 9/11 inquiry commission and, above all, the authenticity of the information in their final report," it said.
The report quoted an officer as saying that dramatic changes were made in the final draft of the inquiry commission after the lobbyists got to work. The panel was formed to probe the September 11 terror attack and make suggestions to fight terrorism.
After the commission tipped the lobbyists about the damaging revelations on Pakistan's role in 9/11, they contacted the panel members and asked them to go soft on the country. The Friday Times claimed that a lot of money was used to silence these members.
According to the report, the lobbyists also helped Pakistan win the sympathy of 75 US Congressmen as part of its strategy to guard Islamabad's interests in Washington. "US softened towards Pakistan only because of the efforts of the foreign office," an official was quoted as saying in the report.
The Pakistan foreign office defended the decision to hire the lobbyists, saying it was an established practice in the US.
An observer at the Islamabad meeting said money could play an important role in buying powerful people. The remark came in response to comments made by some US officials after 9/11 that "Pakistanis will sell their mothers for a dollar".
Pakistan had emerged as front-runner in the fight against terrorism unleashed by the US after the terror strikes. Washington pumped in billions of dollars to win President Pervez Musharraf's support in launching a crackdown on al Qaida network thriving on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
<b>World Social Forum discusses Bin Laden</b> http://www.newkerala.com/news2.php?actio...s&id=31449 <!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Al Qaeda and Osama are the creation of the US and its Central Investigation Agency (CIA)" to suit their hegemonic designs, Sehba Khattak, a leading Pakistani human rights activist from North-Western Frontier Province (NWFP) said.
She alleged that bin Laden was created as part of a US global policy to have "elements of instability on the world map" that could allow US involvement in regional affairs.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--emo&:cool--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/specool.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='specool.gif' /><!--endemo--> the conclusion of speech by Chinese PM in Chinese Communist Party National Congress
A GLIMPSE Huâ s VIRTUE LIST
Love, do not harm the motherland.
Serve, don't disserve the people.
Uphold science; don't be ignorant & unenlightened.
Work hard; don't be lazy and hate work.
Be united and help each other; don't gain benefits at the expense of others.
Be honest and trustworthy, not profit-mongering at the expense of your values.
Be disciplined and law-abiding instead of chaotic and lawless.
Know plain living and hard struggle; do not wallow in luxuries and pleasures.
Circulated by
Sainiksangh
All India ex soldierâs league
gs@sainiksangh,com
âSo that we may see light and steer out of darkness in pursuit of prosperity without
Substance and soul
Also in homage to the thousands of simple peasants who have sacrificed their and their familyâs today for our tomorrow bearing arms for the nation unwept , unsung and also forgottenâ
<i>[WEEKLY STANDARD] MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about Osama bin Laden's Islamic fundamentalism; <b>less about the contribution of European Marxist postmodernism to bin Laden's thinking</b>. In fact, the ideology by which al Qaeda justifies its acts of terror owes as much to baleful trends in Western thought as it does to a perversion of Muslim beliefs. Osama's doctrine of terror is partly a Western export. </i>
To see this, it is necessary to revisit the intellectual brew that produced the ideology of Third World socialism in the 1960s. A key figure here is the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who not only helped shape several generations of European leftists and founded postmodernism, but also was a leading supporter of the Nazis. Heidegger argued for the primacy of peoples in contrast with the alienating individualism of modernity. In order to escape the yoke of Western capitalism and the idle chatter of constitutional democracy, the people would have to return to its primordial destiny through an act of violent revolutionary resolve.
Heidegger saw in the Nazis just this return to the blood-and-soil heritage of the authentic German people. Paradoxically, the Nazis embraced technology at its most advanced to shatter the iron cage of modernity and bring back the purity of the distant past. <b>And they embraced terror and violence to push beyond the modern present--hence the term postmodern--</b>and vault the people back before modernity, with its individual liberties and market economy, to the imagined collective austerity of the feudal age.
<b>This vision of the postmodernist revolution went straight from Heidegger into the French postwar Left, especially the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, eager apologist for Stalinism and the Cultural Revolution in China.</b> Sartre's prot g , the Algerian writer Frantz Fanon, crystallized the Third World variant of postmodernist revolution in The Wretched of the Earth (1961). From there, it entered the world of Middle Eastern radicals. Many of the leaders of the Shiite revolution in Iran that deposed the modernizing shah and brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power in 1979 had studied Fanon's brand of Marxism. Ali Shari'at, the Sorbonne-educated Iranian sociologist of religion considered by many the intellectual father of the Shiite revolution, translated The Wretched of the Earth and Sartre's Being and Nothingness into Persian. The Iranian revolution was a synthesis of Islamic fundamentalism and European Third World socialism.
<b>In the postmodernist leftism of these revolutionaries, the people supplanted Marx's proletariat as the agent of revolution.</b> Following Heidegger and Fanon, leaders like Lin Piao, ideologist of the Red Guards in China, and Pol Pot, student of leftist philosophy in France before becoming a founder of the Khmer Rouge, justified revolution as a therapeutic act by which non-Western peoples would regain the dignity they had lost to colonial oppressors and to American-style materialism, selfishness, and immorality. <b>A purifying violence would purge the people of egoism and hedonism and draw them back into a primitive collective of self-sacrifice. </b>
MANY ELEMENTS in the ideology of al Qaeda--set forth most clearly in Osama bin Laden's 1996 Declaration of War Against America--derive from this same mix. Indeed, in Arab intellectual circles today, bin Laden is already being likened to an earlier icon of Third World revolution who renounced a life of privilege to head for the mountains and fight the American oppressor, Che Guevara. According to Cairo journalist Issandr Elamsani, Arab leftist intellectuals still see the world very much in 1960s terms. They are all ex-Sorbonne, old Marxists, he says, who look at everything through a postcolonial prism.
Just as Heidegger wanted the German people to return to a foggy, medieval, blood-and-soil collectivism purged of the corruptions of modernity, and just as Pol Pot wanted Cambodia to return to the Year Zero, so does Osama dream of returning his world to the imagined purity of seventh-century Islam. And just as Fanon argued that revolution can never accomplish its goals through negotiation or peaceful reform, so does Osama regard terror as good in itself, a therapeutic act, quite apart from any concrete aim. The willingness to kill is proof of one's purity.
According to journalist Robert Worth, writing in the New York Times on the intellectual roots of Islamic terror, bin Laden is poorly educated in Islamic theology. <b>A wealthy playboy in his youth, he fell under the influence of radical Arab intellectuals of the 1960s who blended calls for Marxist revolution with calls for a pure Islamic state. </b>
Many of these men were imprisoned and executed for their attacks on Arab regimes; Sayyid Qutb, for example, a major figure in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, was executed in Egypt in 1965. But their ideas lived on. Qutb's intellectual progeny included Fathi Yakan, who likened the coming Islamic revolution to the French and Russian revolutions, Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian activist killed in a car bombing in 1989, and Safar Al-Hawali, a Saudi fundamentalist frequently jailed by the Saudi government. As such men dreamed of a pure Islamic state, European revolutionary ideology was seldom far from their minds. Wrote Fathi Yakan, The groundwork for the French Revolution was laid by Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu; the Communist Revolution realized plans set by Marx, Engels and Lenin....The same holds true for us as well.
The influence of Qutb's Signposts on the Road (1964) is clearly traceable in pronouncements by Islamic Jihad, the group that would justify its assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 as a step toward ending American domination of Egypt and ushering in a pure Islamic order. In the 1990s, Islamic Jihad would merge with al Qaeda, and Osama's Declaration of War Against America in turn would show an obvious debt to the Islamic Jihad manifesto The Neglected Duty.
While Al Fatah occasionally still used the old-fashioned Leninist language of class struggle, the increasingly radical groups that succeeded it perfected the melding of Islamism and Third World socialism. Their tracts blended Heidegger and Fanon with calls to revive a strict Islamic social order. We declare, says the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah in its Open Letter to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World (1985), that we are a nation that fears only God and will not accept humiliation from America and its allies and the Zionist entity that has usurped the sacred Islamic land. The aim of violent struggle is giving all our people the opportunity to determine their fate. But that fate must follow the prescribed course: We do not hide our commitment to the rule of Islam, . . . which alone guarantees justice and dignity for all and prevents any new imperialist attempt to infiltrate our country. . . . This Islamic resistance must . . . with God's help receive from all Muslims in all parts of the world utter support.
These 1980s calls to revolution could have been uttered last week by Osama bin Laden. <b>Indeed, the chief doctrinal difference between the radicals of several decades ago and Osama only confirms the influence of postmodernist socialism on the latter</b>: Whereas Qutb and other early Islamists looked mainly inward, concentrating on revolution in Muslim countries, Osama directs his struggle primarily outward, against American hegemony. While for the early revolutionaries, toppling their own tainted regimes was the principal path to the purified Islamic state, for Osama, the chief goal is bringing America to its knees.
<b>THE RELATIONSHIP between postmodernist European leftism and Islamic radicalism is a two-way street: Not only have Islamists drawn on the legacy of the European Left, but European Marxists have taken heart from Islamic terrorists who seemed close to achieving the longed-for revolution against American hegemony.</b> Consider Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, two leading avatars of postmodernism. Foucault was sent by the Italian daily Corriere della Sera to observe the Iranian revolution and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Like Sartre, who had rhapsodized over the Algerian revolution, Foucault was enthralled, pronouncing Khomeini a kind of mystic saint. The Frenchman welcomed Islamic government as a new form of political spirituality that could inspire Western radicals to combat capitalist hegemony.
Heavily influenced by Heidegger and Sartre, Foucault was typical of postmodernist socialists in having neither concrete political aims nor the slightest interest in tangible economic grievances as motives for revolution. To him, the appeal of revolution was aesthetic and voyeuristic: a violence, an intensity, an utterly remarkable passion. For Foucault as for Fanon, Hezbollah, and the rest down to Osama, the purpose of violence is not to relieve poverty or adjust borders. Violence is an end in itself. Foucault exalts it as the craving, the taste, the capacity, the possibility of an absolute sacrifice. In this, he is at one with Osama's followers, who claim to love death while the Americans love Coca-Cola.
Derrida, meanwhile, reacted to the collapse of the Soviet Union by calling for a new international. Whereas the old international was made up of the economically oppressed, the new one would be a grab bag of the culturally alienated, the dispossessed and the marginalized: students, feminists, environmentalists, gays, aboriginals, all uniting to combat American-led globalization. Islamic fundamentalists were obvious candidates for inclusion.
And so it is that in the latest leftist potboiler, Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri depict the American-dominated global order as today's version of the bourgeoisie. Rising up against it is Derrida's new international. Hardt and Negri identify Islamist terrorism as a spearhead of the postmodern revolution against the new imperial order. Why? Because of its refusal of modernity as a weapon of Euro-American hegemony.
Empire is currently flavor of the month among American postmodernists. It is almost eerily appropriate that the book should be the joint production of an actual terrorist, currently in jail, and a professor of literature at Duke, the university that led postmodernism's conquest of American academia.<b> In professorial hands, postmodernism is reduced to a parlor game in which we deconstruct great works of the past and impose our own meaning on them without regard for the authors' intentions or the truth or falsity of our interpretations.</b> This has damaged liberal education in America. Still, it doesn't kill people--unlike the deadly postmodernism out there in the world. Heirs to Heidegger and his leftist devotees, the terrorists don't limit themselves to deconstructing texts. They want to deconstruct the West, through acts like those we witnessed on September 11.
What the terrorists have in common with our armchair nihilists is a belief in the primacy of the radical will, unrestrained by traditional moral teachings such as the requirements of prudence, fairness, and reason. The terrorists seek to put this belief into action, shattering tradition through acts of violent revolutionary resolve. That is how al Qaeda can ignore mainstream Islam, which prohibits the deliberate killing of noncombatants, and slaughter innocents in the name of creating a new world, the latest in a long line of grimly punitive collectivist utopias.
<i>Waller R. Newell is professor of political science and philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa.</i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Conversations with BIJU MATHEW
Labor Organizer
Anti-War Activist, author of Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in New York City TAXI - Book
Cover
WEDS, APRIL 5, 7PM
220 Stephens Hall
University of California
BERKELEY
FRI, APRIL 7, 7PM
Modern Times Bookstore
888 Valencia St.,
SAN FRANCISCO
WHAT: Conversations with Biju Mathew, featuring a discussion of his
book "Taxi!" as well as a wide array of related topics, including
immigrant labor organizing, globalization, the anti-war movement,
and sectarian politics in the South Asian community.
THE BOOK: Taxi! uses the narrative of immigrant labor organizing to
provide a rich commentary on a range of issues - <b>from immigration,
gender, race and multiculturalism to the neo-liberal political
economy and the imaginaries that fuel global cities like New York.</b>
<i>Geeez, when does he teach!</i>
THE AUTHOR: Biju Mathew is an Associate Professor in the College of
Business Administration at Rider University in New Jersey. <b>He is a
member of the Organizing Committee of the New York Taxi Workers
Alliance, co-founder of the Forum of Inquilabi Leftists and Youth
Solidarity Summer, and a member of the Board of the Brecht Forum in
NYC.</b> He co-hosts a weekly radio show called "Global Movements,
Urban Struggles" on WBAI 99.5 FM (NYC). He has written
extensively, spoken and organized around issues such as
communalism, immigration, labor issues, and against the war. He
lives in New York City.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo--> 
rakash Rao
anjay_cpiml@yahoo.com