Theresa May apologised for Britain’s role in the kidnap and torture of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his wife. Photograph: Ozan Kose/AFP/Getty Images
The British government is coming under pressure after failing to meet its own deadline to decide whether to hold a judge-led inquiry into the UK’s involvement in post-9/11 human rights abuses.
Three months ago Theresa May offered an apology for MI6’s role in the kidnap and torture of a Libyan dissident and his wife in 2004.
The following month, after a four-year investigation, Westminster’s intelligence and security committee reported that UK intelligence officers had been involved in human rights abuses on hundreds of occasions, but complained that May had prevented key witnesses from giving evidence.
Foreign Office minister Alan Duncan subsequently told MPs that the government would decide within 60 days whether or not to hold an inquiry led by a judge – a deadline that passed last Monday.
Some government lawyers are understood to be concerned that human rights abuses that took place within the context of an international armed conflict could have amounted to war crimes, and that if the UK does not thoroughly investigate, the international criminal court in The Hague could step in.
On Tuesday morning, the police from the Indian city of Pune (in the state of Maharashtra) raided the homes of lawyers and social activists across India and arrested five of them. Many of them are not household names around the world, since they are people who work silently on behalf of the poor and oppressed in a country where half the population does not eat sufficiently. Their names are Gautam Navlakha, Sudha Bharadwaj, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira and Varavara Rao. What unites these people is their commitment to the working class and peasantry, to those who are treated as marginal to India’s state. They are also united by their opposition, which they share with millions of Indians, to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Gautam Navlakha, a writer, was brought before the Delhi High Court. One of the two High Court judges—S. Muralidhar—was puzzled by the documents produced by the Pune Police. Some were in Marathi, which the judge could not read, while others seemed indecipherable. “It is not possible to make out a case from the documents placed before us,” he said. “What is the specific allegation against him?” the judge asked. The police remained silent. The others are to be moved to Pune. Their fate is uncertain.
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I heard the news in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I was—coincidentally—reading carefully the 1977 letter written by the writer and militant Rodolfo Walsh. Walsh’s Operation Massacre (1957) inaugurates a genre of writing now called “narrative non-fiction.” He went to Cuba in the early years of the revolution and cracked the CIA code that warned the revolutionary Cuban government about the Bay of Pigs invasion. Returning to Argentina, Walsh became part of an organization—Montoneros—that fought against the drift of his country into the arms of the ruthless military dictatorship that began in 1976. On the first anniversary of the dictatorship, Walsh mailed several copies of his letter—an open letter—that detailed the “raw numbers of this terror,” the arrests and detentions, the vanished militants of the trade union and student movement, the gasping for air of his society. “You have arrived at a form of absolute, metaphysical torture, unbounded by time,” wrote Walsh in the letter that sealed his fate. He was arrested and vanished—his body burned and thrown into a river in Buenos Aires.
What befell Rodolfo Walsh is the fate of too many today—in plain sight.
The “raw numbers of this terror” are best counted from Turkey. Since the failed coup of July 15, 2016, the government has arrested, detained or dismissed about 160,000 government officials, dismissing 12,000 Kurdish teachers, destroying the livelihood of thousands of people. The editor of Cumhuriyet, Can Dündar, called this the “biggest witch-hunt in Turkey’s history.” In the name of the war on terror and in the name of sedition, the government has arrested and intimidated its political opponents. The normality of this is astounding—leaders of the opposition HDP party remain in prison on the flimsiest of charges, with little international condemnation. They suffer a fate comparable to Brazil’s Lula, also incarcerated with no evidence.
Governments do not typically like dissent. In Bangladesh, the photographer Shahidul Alam remains in detention for his views on the massive protests in Dhaka for traffic reform and against government corruption. Condemnation of the arrest has come from all quarters, including a British Member of Parliament—Tulip Siddiq—who is the niece of Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The avalanche of criticism has not moved the government. Alam is accused of inciting violence, a charge that is equal parts of ridiculous and absurd.
Incitement to violence is a common charge. It is what has taken the Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour to an Israeli prison. Tatour’s poem, “Resist, my people, resist them” (Qawim ya sha’abi, qawimhum), was the reason given by the Israeli government to lock her up. The Egyptian government has taken in the poet Galal El-Behairy for the lyrics he wrote for the song “Balaha”—the name a reference to a character in a 1980s film who sees the world in a topsy-turvy manner, a name now used colloquially in Egypt for President Sisi. The Ugandan government has arrested the radio show host Samuel Kyambadde, who merely allowed his talk show to become a forum for a conversation that included items labeled by the government as seditious—such as the arrest of journalists and the arrest of the opposition MP Robert Kyagulanyi (also known as Bobi Wine).
All of them—photographers, poets, radio show hosts—are treated as voices of sedition, dangerous people who can be locked up under regulations that would make any fair-minded person wince. But there is not even any public debate in most of our societies about such measures, no genuine discussion about the slide into the worst kind of authoritarianism, little public outcry.
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Pain shudders through the arteries of Indian society. The rule of the current government has hardened society, allowed people of ferocious hatred to walk the streets and deliver the justice that they think is appropriate. These vigilantes believe that they can kill anyone who they think threatens cows or that they can kill anyone they dislike (Muslims, oppressed castes, leftists). These are assassinations of ordinary people—people whose names are flashed across the screen for a day or so and then forgotten as other names of other people who have been murdered arrive. Some of them are killed for their social background, others for their political commitments.
There is more advice from Rodolfo Walsh. He writes in his letter that even if the military junta in Argentina kills the last guerrilla, that would not end matters. The many currents of resistance will not vanish. Instead, Walsh writes with great feeling, the survivors will be “aggravated by the memory of the havoc that has been wreaked and by the revelation of the atrocities that have been committed.” This hope is not for India alone. It is for Bangladesh, for Uganda, for Turkey… for our planet, really. One hopes that the survivors, those whose hearts remain beating on the hopeful sides of their chests, will not stand by silently as the last people of feeling are arrested and murdered.
On 29 August, the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) released a damning report on the effect of the government’s decision to freeze housing benefit rates.
Frozen in time
In 2016, the government froze Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rates which govern the amount of housing benefit people are entitled to. Housing benefit helps low-income households cover the cost of renting, but the government hasn’t increased it in line with rents since 2013.
As a result, renters are facing gaps ranging from £25 a month on a single room in a shared home outside London to more than £260 a month on one to four-bedroom homes in some areas of London. Over 12 months, those gaps rise to £300 and £3,120 – making it increasingly likely that renters will be forced to choose between paying for basic necessities like food and heating or their rent.
And these shortfalls are not just a London issue. The Guardian reported that there are:
striking shortfalls in areas such as Greater Glasgow (£82 a week on a four-bedroom home), Bristol (£71) and southern Greater Manchester (£53).
We fear this policy is putting thousands of private renters on low incomes at risk of poverty and homelessness.
Evictions from private sector tenancies are now the biggest cause of homelessness in the UK. While landlords don’t have to give a reason for evicting tenants, rising rents are seen as a key driver of the problem.
Low-income households facing eviction have very few options apart from presenting as homeless at their local council. Research by Generation Rent found that:
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Jeremy Corbyn delivered the Alternative MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh on Thursday. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian
Jeremy Corbyn has proposed establishing a British digital corporation that would commission online TV, offer easy access to archive material held by public sector institutions and operate a social networking arm that could play a role in direct democracy.
“The public realm doesn’t have to sit back and watch as a few mega tech corporations hoover up digital rights, assets and ultimately our money,” the Labour leader said.
He said the British media was failing and that multinational corporations dominated the internet.
Delivering the Alternative MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh television festival on Thursday, Corbyn said: “A BDC could use all of our best minds, the latest technology and our existing public assets not only to deliver information and entertainment to rival Netflix and Amazon but also to harness data for the public good.”
Plans for the new public sector organisation, which would sit alongside the BBC, have led to suggestions that Corbyn wants to create a nationalised answer to Facebook.
However, Corbyn’s team say social networking would be one part of the proposed organisation. They suggest the login used to access BDC content could also be used by the public to vote on which programmes the organisation should commission. The same voting system could be expanded to give the public a say on other parts of the Corbynite policy platform, such as how proposed regional investment banks would operate.
“A BDC could develop new technology for online decision making and audience-led commissioning of programmes and even a public social media platform with real privacy and public control over the data that is making Facebook and others so rich,” Corbyn told the audience.
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Scientists say thinning of the sea ice has reached even the coldest parts of the Arctic. Photograph: Nick Cobbing/Greenpeace
The oldest and thickest sea ice in the Arctic has started to break up, opening waters north of Greenland that are normally frozen, even in summer.
This phenomenon – which has never been recorded before – has occurred twice this year due to warm winds and a climate-change driven heatwave in the northern hemisphere.
