Hard-hitting documentary reveals hidden apartheid

By Rahul Goswami

Berlin, Germany, Nov. 22 (IPS)— Minutes into ‘Behind The Open Door’ we see a woman, a ragged broom in one hand and a small metal board in the other, reaching across into a filthy dark recess at the foot of a brick house. From it, she is scraping out into a bin a slurry formed from human feces.

The metal plate she uses to scrape out the excreta is covered with newspaper, as protection from the filth, but the liquid spatters over her hands and wrists nonetheless, and flecks the ‘sari’ she wears. She scrapes out as much as she can into the battered metal bin, then she places the bin on her head, and walks to the next house.

This is Patna, the capital of the eastern Indian state of Bihar, circa now. The woman is one of the subjects of the documentary, Behind The Open Door, which is directed by Berlin-based filmmaker Falko Zubairi.

The film is an honest, at times wrenching, effort at depicting the lives of a large section of the Indian populace — the ‘dalits’, untouchables and outcastes — one that has been ignored by the modern Indian state and its institutions of democracy.

Zubairi’s effort is a brave one, for the issues that surround the section of South Asian society known as ‘scavengers’ are kept away from the public eye by a combination of state neglect and blatant upper-caste maneuvering.

What made the filmmaker — whose background is the theatre, who is a film theorist and academician, and who describes himself as a product of the left political movement — choose such a subject?

“I saw what we did as part of understanding globalisation,’’ Zubairi told IPS. ‘’What I found both curious and disturbing was that officially, it is as if they do not exist. Yet when we interviewed scavengers in [the western state of] Gujarat, in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh [in north India] they often told us ‘this life is gone’.’’

Behind The Open Door has employed straightforward editing to catch the establishment’s lies. When the film team spoke to a city official in Patna, he earnestly informed them that while the scavengers were indeed an oppressed section of society, their condition has changed and they now lived in clean and sanitary surroundings.

The film then cuts to a point of view that is alongside a sewage canal. The water is black with filth and decomposed matter. Some pigs warily make their way through it. Along the canal’s banks are wretched shanties, in which live the scavengers of Patna.

Sweepers and scavengers, though they perform essential tasks for city dwellers in Indian cities, remain an utterly neglected section of the population of the metropolis. Their work is traditionally regarded as ‘degrading’ and ‘defiled’ by upper castes and society tends to keep them at a distance, despite their ubiquity and the importance of the work they do.

“They stand at the very bottom of the social ladder,’’ said Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, the founder of the non-government organization, Sulabh International, which has been responsible for the public sanitation revolution in Indian cities because of its low-cost toilet design.

’’They are compelled, on the ground of ‘untouchability’, to do scavenging or sweeping or to remove any carcass — the ‘compulsion’ includes the threat of social or economic boycott,’’ explained Pathak. ‘”It was untouchability and the practice of social discrimination amongst the Hindus that was largely responsible for conversion to another faith, but the scourge of untouchability never really left those who converted.’’

Zubairi said that he found this scourge reflected in not only the lives of those he and his film team interviewed and filmed, but also amongst those who viewed Behind The Open Door at its Sept. 19 premiere in Berlin.

’At the premiere I found that the talk about India and by Indians was about the American green card, about information technology, cooking, spirituality, business,’’ he recalled. ‘’But there was no talk about social issues. There was denial about it, as if it didn’t exist.’’

He said he confronted the same in India, on location. “ ‘Why as a foreigner are you interested?’,’’ he recalled being asked. But Zubairi is not as foreign as all that —the Indianness in him comes from that part of his family which has roots in Meerut, a town in northern India.

The most powerful voice, and the most powerful presence, in Behind The Open Door belongs to Martin Macwan, a dalit activist and lawyer in the state of Gujarat who set up the Navsarjan Trust and has been working to rid his community and country of the dehumanizing practice.

Macwan’s work to combat the hidden apartheid against dalits has won him the Kennedy Human Rights Award for 2000 and the 2001 International Activist Award.

In Behind The Open Door Macwan is scathing in his condemnation of the system that allows such casteist apartheid to continue. The Indian government has banned the system of the manual cleaning of human feces and made its practice a punishable offence under the Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993.

Yet Macwan has pointed out that the government ‘’is the largest agency that employs and pays over a million scavengers in the country through its various organs to manually handle human waste.’

For Zubairi, the acute physical risk of what India’s dalits are forced to endure daily hit home during filming. While shooting, his cameraman, Andreas Gockel, was laid low by an infection for four months.

The film’s subjects however cannot afford to fall ill — in the metropolis of Mumbai for example they have neither the security of employment, nor any help at times of illness, incapacity due to accident or retirement.

“The message is not just India or scavengers,’’ Zubairi said, “It is that people at the bottom of the social structure think the same. Even if the caste system is abolished, the class system will replace it. So who takes care of those at the bottom?’’

African-Americans 70-year fight for a national museum

By Rupert Cornwell

Washington, DC, Nov. 22— The Senate finally approved a bill early yesterday clearing the way for the fulfillment of a 70-year-old dream of the black community -- a national museum of African-American culture in Washington.

The measure passed by both houses of Congress and certain to be signed into law by President George Bush upon his return from Britain provides a $17 million down-payment on what will be a $350 million project, to be financed equally by public and private contributions.

The new museum will be placed under the aegis of the Smithsonian Institution, which operates Washington’s most famous museums, including the Air and Space Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the museums of Natural History and American History.

A site has yet to be determined, but almost certainly it will be either on or close to the Mall, the broad green swath stretching from the foot of the Capitol building to the Lincoln Memorial in the heart of monumental Washington, where most of the Smithsonian museums are to be found.

Serious efforts to establish a museum of black history began in the 1930s, but for a variety of reasons they all failed — most recently because of claims that there was no room on the Mall.

In the meantime Washington has acquired memorials, monuments, and museums of every hue. In the past decade memorials to the Korean War and to President Franklin Roosevelt have been inaugurated, and a Second World War memorial, in the shadow of the 554 foot obelisk-shaped Washington monument, opens next year.

In 1994, the city gained a museum dedicated to the Holocaust (an event that occurred 4,000 miles away in Europe). Last year the International Spy Museum opened, and it has rapidly become one of the city’s prime tourist attractions. A news museum, or Newseum, is due in 2006. A national museum dedicated to the American Indian is rising on the Mall, and is expected to open next September. But black America has thus far had to make do mainly with a civil rights museum in Memphis, in the building where Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1963.

The current Bill is a personal triumph for John Lewis, a Georgia congressman and comrade of Dr King in the civil rights movement, who has been campaigning for 15 years for a museum in Washington.

“This has been a long, hard, tedious journey,” Lewis said yesterday. “But our supporters never gave up. They did not give up. They did not give in.” A turning point in the struggle for the museum was the re-enactment this year of the historic 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery seeking voting rights for blacks, of which Lewis, then just 25, was a leader.

The commemorative march was attended by many senior Congressional figures of both parties, including the Kansas Republican, Senator Sam Brownback. This week’s vote was “an important step towards racial reconciliation”, Brownback said.

The African-American History Museum is unlikely to open before 2013. Organizers hope to collect exhibits illustrating the entire experience of black Americans - from slavery to the Civil War, to segregation and the civil rights movement, and their contributions to US fighting forces in two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf. It will document black achievement in sport, politics and the arts.

Source: Independent (UK)

No Means No: No War, Nowhere

A review of 2/15:the day the world said NO to war

By Rebecca Sulock

“Here we are, a kind of Ground Zero for the total disconnection between the citizens’ wishes and what is done in our name by politicians.”

--Oliver James, clinical psychologist and author

(AGR)-- The “total disconnection” James speaks of may be a bit of an exaggeration; there are, after all, sufficient numbers of people distracted enough by televisions and American flags to play follow-the-leader. Certainly, though, people around the world demonstrated in protest of the preemptive war in Iraq earlier this year, and were resoundingly ignored by the current administration.

People were outraged. People organized. Millions of people turned out. Many were arrested. Still, our military attacked Iraq. Reason for discouragement? Or reason for ultimate hope?

“2/15:The Day the World Said NO to War” is a collection of photographs sent in by activists from all over the globe, accompanied by quotes and commentary from current visionaries, everyone from Jonathan Schell to Camille Paglia to Michael Moore. Most of the pictures are scenes from this Spring, reactions to the inexplicable and sudden war in Iraq.

Massive crowds in the street, sidewalk graffiti, performance art, witty signage seen at the protests…. the editors have included a diverse representation of expression.

One month before the war officially began, young Iraqi children held up signs that say “PEACE” high over their heads, looking earnest and fearful. In Cape Town, an airplane spells out the words “STOP WAR” in its trail. Shouting heads and waving arms fill the page all the way to the horizon in Turkey, with a rainbow-colored peace flag waving in the foreground, one day after the war started. “It’s not war, it’s bloody murder,”says an old man’s sign in London.

Unfortunately, the editors were not thinking clearly when they chose their final quote and image. Flipping through the pages, absorbing the images, feeling inspired by the idea of organizing and affecting change, the book provokes an emotional reaction. Which is quelled slightly by the farcical end quote from George W. Bush and photograph of a banner that reads, “Finally, the world is united! (against us),” two pages better suited for the beginning of the book. A final, hopeful message would serve the book’s purpose better.

“I’m so honored to be alive at such a miraculous time in history,” said Dr. Robert Muller, former assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations. “I’m so moved by what’s going on in our world today. Never before in the history of the world has there been a global, visible, public, viable, open dialogue and conversation about the very legitimacy of war. Shock and awe has found its riposte in courage and wonder.”

As America anxiously slides toward Empire, it’s important to remember the power we have. This is not time to be cynical; this is not time to retreat. Our hope lies in our power to organize, and “2/15” is a valentine to that power.

“If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that’s something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can’t live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organizations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better next time.” -- Noam Chomsky

Quotes taken from “2/15:The Day the World Said NO to War”

Asheville represented at SOA protests

(AGR)-- My family and I went to Fort Benning, GA on the weekend of Nov. 22-23 to help protest the School of the Americas (SOA), now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC). Over 10,000 people were there to shut down the SOA because it is a military training camp for mass murderers. I traveled on a bus with 35 people from Asheville, NC. It was a fun, long ride. There were about 150 people from Asheville at the protest. There were many different people from all over, but we were all there for the same reason. Everyone was really friendly. I listened to speakers from around the world tell stories and sings songs in protest. Some of the speakers were refugees, some were political prisoners, and some were famous activists like Pete Seeger. I was part of a beautiful peace ritual where we wove a cloth web and wrote on it what we intended to do over the weekend. I helped out in the Medic Tent most of Sunday. Many of the people I saw there had come from the Free Trade of the Americas (FTAA) protest in Miami, Fl. They had bruises from being hit by rubber bullets. The SOA protest was peaceful. Our only threat was dehydration from the hot Georgia sun. I helped hand out water and sunscreen to all the protesters. There was a very moving ceremony on Sunday afternoon. It was a funeral procession. In the ceremony, all the names of those killed by SOA graduates were read aloud. It was sad, especially to hear the names of babies murdered before even experiencing much of life. There was a Puppetista Parade after the ceremony, with 12-foot political puppets. That was very fun. I got to march in the parade as a helicopter. Even though I had already learned a lot about the SOA before the protest, I learned much more on this trip. I also learned a lot about being an activist. I hope that the SOA is closed by this time next year, but if it’s not, I’ll be sure to go again. For more information on the movement to shut down the SOA, see www.soaw.org .

Hannah Storm

Age 10

Asheville, NC