Colonial Misogyny and Women's Activism in Palestine - Possibilities for Transnational Solidarity

How do the Israeli state's colonial strategies specifically target women?

What are the various forms of resistance in which women in Palestine are engaged?

How can we extend and strengthen initiatives for transnational solidarity

Dr Rania Masri

 Associate Director Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship, American University of Beirut

Monday 2nd March 2015, 7-9pm

Rm B111 Brunei Building, SOAS Thornhaugh Street, Russell Sq

 London WC1H OXG

Rania Masri is a social-justice and anti-war activist.  Her writings and activism have centred on the occupation of Palestine, and the struggle against apartheid and racism.  She has also written and organized extensively on the sanctions on Iraq, and civil and environmental rights.  A partial listing of her writings and talks can be found on her personal website: http://greenresistance.wordpress.com/my-writings/

Organised by Freedom Without Fear Platform, Decolonising the Mind SOAS, SOAS Students' Union and SOAS Pal Soc

Britain’s population policies are fuelling atrocities like India’s sterilisation camp deaths

The full horrors of the deaths by sterilisation of poor women in Chhattisgarh are continuing to emerge. At least 14 women have died so far and more than 50 women are struggling for their lives. This is nothing short of a massacre.

Relatives of the victims have revealed that the women were forcibly taken to the camps by health officials. They were operated on in appallingly unhygienic and unsafe conditions in an abandoned private hospital close the Chief Minister’s residence.  The doctor, RK Gupta, who performed 83 operations in 5 hours, had been given an award on Republic Day this year by the Chhattisgarh government for conducting a record number of sterilisations of women. In this case, the deaths appear to have been caused by poisoning by contaminated medicines which the women were given after the operations. 

Indian feminist and left activists are demanding: 

• Action against Chhattisgarh’s Health Minister and resignation of the BJP Chief Minister Raman Singh.
•  A moratorium on the Indian Government’s policy of sterilisation as a form of family planning, and the use of sterilisation targets (which although discontinued at national level are still set by a number of states in India)
• A review of the whole ‘family planning/population control’ framework.
• Expansion of women’s access, through informed choice, to a range of safe methods of contraception, with non-invasive methods being promoted instead of surgery

See more at http://www.aisa.in/poor-women-herded-death-name-family-planning-chhattisgarh/

Britain’s population policies are fuelling atrocities like India’s sterilisation camp deaths

By Kalpana Wilson

The horrifying deaths of at least fourteen women after undergoing surgery at sterilisation camps in Chhattisgarh, one of India’s poorest states, highlight the ongoing violence of the population control policies which the British government is at the forefront of promoting globally. Far from giving poor women in the global South much-needed access to safe contraception which they can control, these policies dehumanize them as ‘excessively reproductive’ and set ‘targets’ which make atrocities like those of Chhattisgarh possible. And while these policies are rooted in deeply racist and patriarchal ideas they are now implemented in the name of reproductive rights and ‘choices’.

Two years ago, the British government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has been instrumental in influencing Britain to take the lead on population issues hosted the London Family Planning Summit. Along with USAID, UNFPA and other international organisations, they announced a $2.6 billion family planning strategy. A few months later Development Secretary Justine Greening announced ‘determined UK action on family planning’: on top of existing drives to get 120m more girls and women in the poorest countries to use ‘voluntary family planning’ by 2020, further initiatives would include the increased distribution of contraceptive implants.

Despite its insistence that it opposes coercion, it had already been revealed that Department for International Development(DfID) aid was helping fund forcible sterilisations in the Indian states of Madhya Pradesh and Bihar in which, as at last Saturday’s sterilisation camp, poor women, many from Dalit castes, died after being lied to about the operation, threatened with loss of ration cards or access to government welfare schemes, and bribed with small amounts of cash, and then operated on under appallingly unsafe conditions, to meet targets set by the government.

Sterilisation of women has long been the main method used in India’s population control policies. During India’s “Emergency” in the mid-1970s, with civil liberties suspended, men were forcibly taken to similar camps for vasectomies but this generated massive opposition contributing to the historic electoral defeat of the Congress party in 1977. Research conducted in 2005-06 suggested that around 37% of married women had under gone sterilisation. Officially recorded deaths caused by sterilisation between 2003 and 2012 translate into 12 deaths a month on average, and actual figures may be much higher. In 2012 a Human Rights Watch Report warned that without a change of policy on sterilisation, the commitments made by the Indian government at the London Family Planning summit would lead to further abuses and increased pressure on health workers to meet targets.

Britain’s support for the mass sterilisations of poor and marginalised women which characterize India’s population policy is covert – but many of the contraceptives which DfID and its corporate partners more openly promote also deny women control and put their lives in danger. Feminists in the global South and feminists of colour in North America and Britain have campaigned for years against unethical testing of new drugs, and the dumping of unsafe injectable and implantable contraceptives, like Depo-Provera - which is being coercively administered to Ethiopian women in Israel - Net-En, and Norplant.

The Gates Foundation has been repeatedly criticized for its close relationship with pharmaceutical giants, and its role in financing drug trials and vaccine programmes which were found to be unethical and unsafe. These include a clinical trial of the HPV vaccine against cervical cancer manufactured by Glaxo Smith Kline and Merck Sharp and Dohme in India in 2009, falsely claimed to be a ‘post-licensure observational study’, for which 23,000 girls aged 9-15 from impoverished communities were selected and requirements for parental consentwere bypassed. The trial was suspended following the deaths of seven adivasi (indigenous) girls aged between 9 and 15.

DfID’s current initiative with Merck involves promoting the long-lasting implant Implanon to ‘14.5 million of the poorest women’ by 2015’. Implanon was discontinued in the UK in 2010 because trained medical personnel were finding it too difficult to insert, and there were fears about its safety. As well as debilitating side-effects, the implant was reported as ‘disappearing’ inside women’s bodies. Merck has introduced a new version Nexplanon, which is detectable by X-ray, but have been allowed to continue to sell their existing stocks of Implanon. This is the drug which is being promoted in DfID and UNFPA programmes in the ‘poorest’ countries, despite these countries’ huge deficit of trained health personnel. In fact, in Ethiopia, one of the target countries, mass insertions of Implanon are part of ‘task shifting’ where hastily trained health extension workers are being made to take on the roles of trained doctors and nurses.

Like earlier versions dating back to Malthus, current approaches to population are based on shifting responsibility for poverty away from capital and onto the poor themselves. Population growth in the global South is being linked to climate change, shifting attention from the role of carbon emissions in the North, and is held responsible for the escalating food crises generated by land grabbing by transnational corporations and foreign governments. While population control is argued to be linked to declining maternal mortality and improved child survival rates, this cannot be achieved without a change in the dominant economic model which could make substantial investment in health provision possible. But current population discourse insists that the World Bank and IMF-imposed neoliberal policies in which health provision, along with education, sanitation and other essential public services, has been decimated since the 1980s, can remain in place. Tellingly, erstwhile Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell described population policies as ‘excellent value for money’ citing the example of Tanzania which he claims would ‘need 131,000 fewer teachers by 2035 if fertility declines - saving millions of pounds in the long run’.

Today population control is in fact part of a broader strategy of global capital in which women’s labour is extended and intensified, with responsibility for household survival increasingly feminised, and more and more women incorporated into global value chains dominated by transnational corporations. It is this, not concerns about rights and choices, which underpins the policies like those of DfID and the Gates Foundation which deny women in the global South real control over their bodies. Increasingly, women are demanding ‘reproductive justice’, which involves exposing this strategy and confronting structures of power and inequality, as the only way of preventing more deaths like those in Chhattisgarh.

(An edited version of this article appears in the Guardian’s Comment is Free)

Calls to action following Women Resisting the Racist Security State Open Meeting

Thank you all who came to the FWFP open meeting on July 3^rd 2014. Special thanks to our speakers who all provided unique perspectives on the struggles for a more meaningful justice.

We will shortly post a more detailed account of the meeting and contributions from the speakers. In the meantime do have a look at the following websites which relate to Aderonke and Sarah's talks:

•  http://lesbianimmigrationsupportgroup.blogspot.co.uk/

•  http://downsizingcriminaljustice.wordpress.com

Kamila and her family were really moved by the support of the people at the meeting and were really encouraged by the messages of support and solidarity. We are working with the sisters to build a campaign of support and will update you in the next two weeks with the next steps. In the meantime:

1. FWFP is looking to organise buses to Gloucester on the 29th September from London and from Birmingham. If you would like to contribute to the costs of this and/or travel on the bus please get in touch with us directly at freedomwithoutfearplatform@gmail.com. We are an unfunded group so would need a critical mass and contribution to afford the bus hire – once we have campaign materials, we will email these out and ask you to circulate widely so that the sisters have some solidarity on the day.
2. For people who want to be in touch with the MP in Gloucester, his details are here: http://richardgraham.org/ . We will be drafting a template letter for people to send to Mr Graham and will send this out with the campaign materials in the next couple of weeks.
3. For people who want to be in touch with the Sheikh sisters to arrange your own solidarity actions directly, please email freedomwithoutfearplatform@gmail.com with your phone number and some details of who you are and why you are wanting to get in touch (the family is understandably cautious of who they provide their details to so please provide as much detail as you can and we can forward directly to the family to respond).

Women resisting the racist 'security' state: A public meeting

Watch these powerful and moving contributions from speakers on the Gender and Hindu Right panel

Kalpana Wilson

Nishrin Jafri Hussain

Angana P. Chatterji

Meena Kandasamy

This meeting was filmed and produced by Fourman Films

India's anti-rape movement - experiences, reflection and strategies for the future

This is a full transcript of the speech Kavita Krishnan (Secretary of the All-India Progressive Women's Association) delivered at our public meeting on Thursday 3 October, 7.00pm at SOAS. 

Amrit Wilson: Kavita has been centrally involved in the anti rape movement in India. Apart from being a feminist she is also a revolutionary left activist. She is the secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association which organises women workers, rural women agricultural labourers and has a record of fighting both feudal violence as well as state repression. She is also the editor of Liberation which is the magazine of the CPI ML (Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist).

Before I hand you over to Kavita, I’d like to say a few words about Freedom Without Fear Platform. As an organisation we have been associated with AIPWA (All India Progressive Women’s Association) and particularly with Kavita. As many of you know, Delhi witnessed both a horrific gang rape in December last year as well as one of the most prolonged and powerful protests against rape and sexual violence. These led to solidarity actions in London including a packed meeting at the London School of Economics where a number of us who were involved in the Black women’s struggle in this country spoke out about our experiences and we also had Kavita speaking to us on Skype. After that very inspiring meeting we decided to set up the Freedom Without Fear Platform. I would just like to emphasise some of the things which we are highlighting in this country as well as across the world.

Firstly we are highlighting the effects of the government’s spending cuts on services and organisations combating domestic violence and violence against women in this country which is a huge issue. Secondly we are exposing the racism in the media, its coverage and state policies relating to violence against women particularly on issues such as grooming, honour based violence and FGM. We are also protesting against the British government’s promotion of racist population control policies which violate the reproductive rights of women in Asia, Africa, Latin America and also BME women in Britain. Also we are supporting the campaign in India and the diaspora to stop someone who is an avowed fascist, an admirer of Hitler- Narendra Modi, from becoming the next Prime Minister of India and we are demanding justice for the victims and survivors of genocidal rapes and murders of Muslim minority women, children and men, which Modi orchestrated in Gujarat, 2002. We are opposing David Cameron’s re-establishment of diplomatic links with Modi.

Today's event is the third major event which we have organised. Firstly, we had a very successful meeting about grooming, both as an issue of violence against women as well as the racist way in which it has been portrayed. Secondly, we organised a protest against an invitation to Narendra Modi to this country, which also was pretty successful. Narendra Modi decided that he wouldn’t be visiting, partly at least as a result of what we did.

Now let me hand you over to Kavita which is what we are all waiting for, so please welcome Kavita Krishnan.  

Kavita Krishnan: Thank you Amrit, thank you all for being here.

One of the first things I was thinking about when I knew there was a chance to speak about the anti rape movement and to reflect on some of the strategies and experiences and the ways in which we are thinking of taking it forward, is the questions we faced especially from the media from Britain, US, France and so on. There were questions from friends and their parents too who lived in these countries, who would ask with great concern: ‘we are concerned about you because you live in such an unsafe place, how bad is it in India, it must be terrible in Delhi’ etc. When I would tell them that rape culture and the kinds of things we were raising show up in different forms in different countries, then there would be this response, ‘yes but, it’s worse in India isn’t it?, it must be worse there’. 

Challenging neoliberal population control

Kalpana Wilson

Exactly a year ago, on the eve of the Olympics, David Cameron was playing host to a different kind of international event in London. On July 11, World Population Day, the British government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted the 2012 London Family Planning Summit, where along with USAID, UNFPA and other international organisations, they rolled out a 2.6 billion dollar family planning strategy.  Population growth has been a key concern of the Gates Foundation, and, reflecting the increasingly direct role of corporates in global development interventions, the Foundation has been instrumental in influencing Britain to take the lead on population issues. So it was no surprise when, ahead of this year’s International Women’s Day, British Development Secretary Justine Greening announced a package of measures by the British Department for International Development (DfID) aimed at ‘women and girls in the poorest countries’. Prominent in these measures was ‘determined UK action on family planning’: on top of existing drives to get 120m more girls and women to use ‘voluntary family planning’ by 2020, further initiatives would include the increased distribution of contraceptive implants.