 The broadcast is live. Well, it's great to be back. You're listening to watching, anticipating. Give the people what they want brought to you every Friday from People's Dispatch and Globe Trotter, your whirlwind tour of global movement news coming to you today from Zoe from People's Dispatch. Hi, Zoe. Hello, Prashant. I mean, interesting, interesting. Yes. Okay. And myself, Vijay from Globe Trotter. We don't have Prashant with us, although I'm sure what Zoe meant was Hi Prashant, who is likely watching. We'll most probably have Prashant back next week. It's a lunar new year and we're in the year of, well, what are we, the year of the ox? So happy lunar new year. It's been an interesting period, particularly in India, which is seemingly the front line now of a series of global dynamics, the farmers protest, which picked up speed on November 26th and then intensified from January 26th of this year is ongoing. In parliament today, there were really quite robust debates during the discussion over the budget, the current budget. The opposition took to the floor to really push the government on not only the issues that the farmers are revolting about, but also the reaction of the government to the farmers to call them names and to dismiss them and so on. Part of this reaction of the government against the farmers revolt has been the attack by the government against journalists, individual journalists, number of them have been arrested at the farm protest sites. Journalists have been specifically targeted at the farm protest sites. They've been, as I said, arrests. And now there is a direct attack at one news site, a news channel, Newsclick.in, which last month had between 30 and 40 million viewers, unique viewers, people coming to see the coverage of the farmers revolt. Newsclick being one of the main journalistic sites where the journalists went and essentially embedded themselves with the farmers, stayed amongst them, reported from them and so on. This attack at Newsclick is part of the wider attack by the government against the farmers revolt. Today in parliament, it's important to point out that the opposition was really pushing very clearly against the government's move to delegitimize the farmers revolt. And this assault on Newsclick is very much a part of this and journalists around the world have been sending their messages of solidarity to Newsclick. Press councils have sent their messages of solidarity to Newsclick because I think it's widely understood that this probe that the government has been driving has little to do with any of the issues that have been leaked to the media. The central issue here, of course, is the ability of an independent press house to report the news. And here the most important news story coming out of India now, of course, is the farmers revolt. In Calcutta yesterday, the city of my birth in West Bengal, students, young people attempted to march down the street, come to the government chambers to protest against unemployment, to protest against the really the crackdown on students in general on their future. And they were met with vicious, vicious police violence. This is a government run by the Trinamul Congress, a one-time ally of Narendra Modi's BJP, vicious attack on the students. And something is not quite right in India today. And something is also very right in India today. What's very right, of course, is that this attempt to suffocate the public is being met with, I think, quite brave resistance. And I must say, it's with a great deal of pride that I want to point to those students, young people, women's organizations and so on in Calcutta that returned to the point of their protest immediately, even though 500 people were injured in the demonstration. 500 people injured. They were afraid to go to the hospitals because the police stood outside the hospital waiting to arrest injured students. I mean, imagine that. At the farmer's site, over 150 farmers have died because of the cold, because of the exposure to the elements. They refuse to move. And the journalists at Newsclick continue to report these important stories from their website at newsclick.in. Very significant development right now in India. And I'm very encouraged by the fact that nobody is backing down. This says a lot about the journalistic profession. I want to ask you to just visit the newsclick.in site. Have a look at the kind of coverage. And if you're on social media, send your greetings to the journalists. I'm sure they'll appreciate it very much. Speaking of violence and crackdowns and so on. Zoe, there's some stories that people's dispatch has done on Argentina, on Honduras. There is, of course, a global problem with what is known as femicide violence against women, you know, murderous violence against women. So very interesting category, femicide. Take us a little bit into the femicides in Argentina and in Honduras, but also I think perhaps explain to people what this term means. Yeah, it's unfortunately been a very upsetting week in terms of violence against women across the region of Latin American, the Caribbean. Femicide refers to the violent death of a woman for the condition of her being a woman, violent death or otherwise death for the condition of her being a woman based on her gender, based on her condition of that. This is actually a term that's been, you know, fought for because, of course, femicides have been happening for centuries. People have been killing women because they're women to exert patriarchal dominance, you know, all of the factors and conditions which lead to violence against women. And it's been a struggle to actually achieve this category of femicide to identify that these are not random killings. These are not killings just because, but this is based on a system of oppression, a system of domination against women. And I think something that has been really upsetting over the past year under the pandemic, which I really encourage people to check out the Tricon Dacier Corona Shock and Patriarchy highlights is the worrying increase in violence against women under lockdown. We know all of the conditions kind of facilitate this. Unfortunately, with people being locked inside their homes with their maybe abusers, with overwhelming of the public system in terms of, you know, the healthcare system, but even just general state infrastructures overwhelmed, increase in precarity of conditions. And so what we've seen across the board is an increase in this violence. And then the past week, there were two, and you know, this is something that happens every day. Women are being murdered by partners, by unknown people every single day. This week, there were two very upsetting incidents because they both happened with complicity and direct participation from police. So we have the case of Ursula, a young woman from Argentina, 18 years old, if I'm not wrong, who had been dating a police officer. He was violent. She tried to denounce him 18 times, file complaints, ask her restraining orders, ask for protection, but he's a cop. So of course, there was no kind of response to her. She was not given needless to say the protection she needed, and she was murdered this weekend. She tried to file a complaint on, I think it was Sunday, and they said, no, actually we're closed, it's the weekend. And she was murdered. Following her assassination by, at the hands of her former, you know, partner, a cop, massive protests broke out in her hometown. People are rightfully angered, the fact that this has been denounced, she tried to report this, repeatedly asked for, you know, authorities to intervene in the situation and nothing happened. Of course, these protests were met with violent repression from the police, as one can imagine. And then, you know, almost, I think it might have been the same day in Honduras, a young woman, a 26 year old nursing student, Kayla Martinez, was with a friend, had gone to a bar, was walking home and the police, and I want to just highlight, that a lot of, we've seen, of course, also during the last year, an increase in repression and increase in these kind of detentions under the kind of pretense of lockdown in curfew. So she was detained by police for violating curfew conditions. She was brought to a jail cell. This is in the Northwestern city of La Esperanza, which is also the hometown of Bertha Cáceres, just want to highlight, so, and she was put in a jail cell and some hours later, the police brought her to the hospital, alleging that she had tried to commit suicide and she died. Of course, this story about the police was not accepted by the people of La Esperanza. They immediately went out on the streets to demand an investigation, to demand that the police be held accountable for murdering this young woman who all she was doing was walking on the street. And I mean, these cases really bring up a lot of these key issues, which is, you know, state involvement in femicides, state complicity around femicides, the massive amount of impunity in these cases. And just, I mean, of course, there have been right-wing attacks, trying to vilify these victims, saying, you know, in the case of Kayla, she was walking at 11.30, they said, oh, she was drunk. She was asking for it, you know, and then she tried to commit suicide. And so, I mean, it's insane that the amount of scrutiny brought upon the victims of these horrible crimes, whereas the police are walking free, they're protected even. And in Honduras, of course, we've talked about this before, it's one of the countries with the highest levels of violence against women, the highest indexes of violence against women, abysmal conditions in so many aspects. But the people are on the streets yesterday, two days ago, sorry, five students were arrested in Tegucidalpa for protesting against this femicide. And the other hundreds of femicides have been happening in Honduras. So, I mean, it's a really bleak situation as the power of the feminist movement increases, the backlash increases as the conditions of this capitalist crisis get worse. Of course, violence against the most vulnerable sectors also increases. You know, we're going to spend a little bit of time more, some more time on the American hemisphere, because I'm just going to cross into the Caribbean. I've been following events in Haiti for the last several years. You know, the current president Moises Juvenel has come to, came to office in 2017 and tried to push an austerity agenda, essentially on the country, on the population, impose an austerity agenda. This was heightened when the cuts took place, when oil prices firstly began to tank, when Venezuela under immense sanctions no longer could fully support Petro-Carib. You got, you know, indications of great corruption by people around Juvenel, at least with corruption, $4 billion of US dollars of corruption involved in the Petro-Carib sector. You know, it's been a brewing issue that since 2018, there have been rolling protests in Haiti. In 2019, there were direct protests over the fuel subsidy cuts and so on. You know, this has been a persistent problem. Mr. Juvenel's presidency has been marked by illegitimacy. Let me put it like that. I'd like to speak like that about anybody who, you know, is the head of a government. But I mean, there was not a day in which he was a legitimate president because the protests have been essentially rolling right through. Well, this last Friday, the US State Department essentially said, you know, we're with you, we stand with you, which was a curious statement coming from the United States government, you know, which often we know acts as the sort of viceroy of the hemisphere, you know, the Monroe Doctrine fantasy very much in play there. And so then on the 7th of February, when Mr. Juvenel's term ended, you know, according to the Constitution, he claimed that he has another year, you know, a curious reading of the events of the past five years. He claimed that he had another year. This is a highly contentious statement on his part. But because he was emboldened in a way by Washington DC, they went off and they arrested, you know, about 25, 28 people, people in the judiciary, political opponents and so on, just arrested people here, there and everywhere. This is actually a facility, you know, that is now afforded to governments during the pandemic, this thing of any time there is, you know, any pressure from the street, you go out and you just arrest large numbers of people, even from, you know, the judiciary, it's extraordinary. And this is what he did. But what I want to point out is that again, the protests continue, you know, there is a kind of relentlessness about this protest. There is, as I said, a legitimacy question around the long-term economic crisis in Haiti. This long-term economic crisis has no resolution. And Mr. Juvenel made a calculation, you know, he felt that if he joins at the time the Trump administration and supports fully the attack on Venezuela, then the United States government somehow would bail out Haiti's long-term economic crisis. Unfortunately for Mr. Juvenel, Trump and Pompeo and others, the previous administration welcomed his political support, but they didn't provide any support to the Haitian people. I mean, this is a lesson that the people in Haiti know very well since their revolution that nobody has come and supported them. They have had to fight tooth and nail for everything that they've been able to achieve. And here Mr. Juvenel made that classic calculation. If I give in to Washington's political demands, maybe I'll get something. It's the same issue that the leadership in Guyana, Irfan Ali, is calculating. If I allow the United States their political way against Venezuela, then perhaps I'll get some deals. The deal with Exxon could be negotiated again a little bit and so on. It's a long-term political crisis. There is no easy resolution. I think this legal issue of whether his term has ended, whether that goes up into the regional courts, whether it stays in the Haitian judiciary, all of this is to be seen. But I think people need to always keep an eye on what's going on in Haiti. It's an open wound. It's an open wound since the twice, two coups against the governments of Jean-Baptin Aristide, two coup datas against him. The country has not been able to have a political system that well represents the kind of energy on the streets. And I think that's how one should see it, is that energy on the streets is very productive. It reminds me a lot of the kind of energy we've seen from the Kenyan doctors, the kind of energy that we are seeing from the Greek students, the Greek students in the middle of a rolling set of strikes, the similarity between the people in Port-au-Prince with the students in Haiti, with the farmers in New Delhi. This is a very similar global platform and we can whiplash back to the Americas because after all over the last two years, we've seen rolling protests in many of the cities in Colombia where there's been again protests on economic, political, legal things. Something significant happening there. Can you bring us up to speed, Zoe, please? I mean, since Iván Duque has taken office, I'd say there's been almost monthly mass protests in Colombia, all sectors, all cities, all regions, which has been an interesting thing to observe. And of course, one of the trends that we've seen under Iván Duque has been the increase in the systematic assassination of social leaders, of human rights offenders, of signatories of the peace agreements. And there's just this constant trend in Colombia of eternal impunity for state forces that participate in this violence and that condone this violence and in many cases facilitate this violence. There's many histories, there's many instances of this, but one of the most stark cases, which I think has become internationally recognized and considered a genocide, is the planned extermination of the Patriotic Union Party. The Patriotic Union Party was created in 1985 as part of a peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. This wasn't a peace agreement that resulted in the complete demobilization of the FARC, but it was an advance in reaching, trying to reach a more political solution to Colombia's now 60-year conflict. So the Patriotic Union was created. It had mass support among bases across the country. It participated in elections. It won many seats on a local level in municipal government. There was a presidential candidate, but as it was gaining political terrain, at the same time, there were dozens and dozens of militants, of party members, of presidential candidates, of candidates for local city councils being assassinated. I mean, the stories are really horrific. Two presidential candidates were assassinated. I mean, there's a story of a massacre that happened in Segovia and Antioquia of members of the UP. I mean, the estimates from the Patriotic Union and other human rights organizations alleged anywhere over 6,000 members of this party were exterminated in kind of a 10-year period. And of course, they've been fighting tooth and nail to bring this case, to get some sort of justice, to get some shred of recognition that this genocide, that this extermination of this effort to bring the will of the people, the aspirations of the people into the political space that's been dominated by the Colombian oligarchy, of course, beginning with the pact of elites in the 1950s. And to bring this political project has been met just with complete violence. So they finally, I mean, this week they started on Monday a case against Colombia alleging that it had, that the state had a role in the extermination of the party. This was brought to the Inter-American Human Rights Court. The proceedings have been going on since Monday and it's a really important step. I think right now we're seeing a lot of different processes happening in Colombia to attempt to hold the state accountable for all of these atrocities that it's committed over the time of these 60 years of the conflict. And so it's a really important case to follow. We also know that in March, if I'm not wrong, the people's permanent tribunal will begin in Colombia also that similarly seeks to hold the Colombian state accountable for its participation and its complicity in crimes against humanity, against the genocide of social leaders. These are really important. And I mean, there are so many victims in the country, so many people that have been fighting to get some recognition of why their family members were just, their lives were taken all before fighting for a better political situation for the people of Colombia. I mean, this is a story that has been going for now, since 1948 when there was a period known as love, love, violencia, the violence. I mean, imagine that one of the signature features or definitional features of its history is known as the violence. Exit from that is going to be, I think, a journey, a long journey. Now you're talking about investigations of this kind of violence in Colombia. I was extremely interested and actually quite puzzled why this was not front page news around the world. Extremely interested in the fact that special prosecutor Fatih Ben-Souda of the International Criminal Court took in the complaint from the Palestinians regarding essentially crimes against humanity conducted by the Israeli government. It's a very significant move by Madame Ben-Souda because the International Criminal Court, as you know, has been extremely wary of taking up many controversial issues and over the last two years, they have attempted to open an investigation of war crimes conducted by all sides in the battle in Afghanistan. That means the Taliban, the Afghan National Army, the NATO forces, United States and so on, and the US government of Donald Trump put such pressure on Madame Ben-Souda personally. They said her family will be sanctioned and so on that the ICC dropped the case. But in this instance, the ICC seems to be wanting to move the case forward. Now why this is so significant is twofold. One is the Biden administration has made it very clear and we know the United States plays a key role when it comes to the so-called peace process between Israel and the Palestinian people, the occupied Palestinian people, the so-called peace process. Biden administration had signaled early they weren't interested in wading into that. Obama and Trump had big plans, Biden, there was no plan. But Madame Ben-Souda's case is going to accelerate the Biden administration's entry into this particularly because the US embassy was moved by Donald Trump in 2017 from Tel Aviv to East Jerusalem. East Jerusalem is occupied land based on UN resolutions from 1967. Why all of this is going to come to a head is in Cairo, the several Palestinian factions, Fatah, the DFLP, PFLP, Hamas and others met in Cairo, Egypt and they agreed to a protocol for a legislative election. Now remember the last legislative election in the Palestinian territories, the occupied territories was in 2006 and that ended with some violence and basically a sundering of relations between Hamas which took control of Gaza and Fatah which took control of the West Bank and Israel then occupied East Jerusalem. So the question of the legislative election will it include East Jerusalem for instance which participated in 2006, will it include East Jerusalem? This is going to raise some serious political and legal questions and not sure really how this will be resolved but I must say international media attention on the ICC international complaint against Israeli war crimes has been minimal international attention on the upcoming election in Palestine has been virtually zero and I think this is a real shame it shows you how in the media's eyes the question of the Palestinians has really collapsed it's not an important issue for many people and it should be particularly given the fact that it's most likely that the Biden administration will essentially hold hands with Mr. Netanyahu's government if it gets re-elected after the March elections in Israel. I mean I know there's a lot of moving parts here and I've tried to put all of them in this is always a very important story because we're talking about the occupation of the Palestinian people whose destiny has never really been taken seriously in the world and I hope that people pay attention to this link to this of course is all those arms deals with the UAE, with Morocco and so on which resulted in their recognition of Israel we'll see if some of these arms deals unravels as the Biden administration suggested that they might but we don't know yet. It's been a busy week Zoe I mean take a deep breath I mean there's something I do want to mention before I hand it back to you there was a story in the Washington Post that I've read very carefully and I would like, I don't normally ask people to go to places like the Washington Post and the corporate media in general but this was a story about a case that involves some people in India journalists, writers and so on who were falsely entrapped into something which now is just known as Bhima Koregaon which is the name of a protest there I wanted to return at the end to this story because here the Washington Post and others have alleged that the Indian government implanted malware into the phones of those that they then arrested that malware put in evidence that was used against them this is a very serious issue it's a serious issue not only for the people who are sitting in prison and should of course be released but for journalists we have a hard time sifting through information that's handed to us by security agencies so much that we see that appears in the media is a dossier disinformation dossier handed to us by some agency or the other and I don't want to make any specific allegations at this time but we know this happens doesn't this happen where you have haven't you been handed a dossier like that Zoe? I don't think I'm on that level yet to be handed any dossiers I was surprised to see this Washington Post article I think it's really important I don't think it really received the attention that it needs but I think we really in this context of we're just seeing, I mean India we're seeing this in Columbia we're seeing this across the world of this you know uncontrolled repression on you know activists on journalists on anyone who's trying to challenge kind of the iron rule of the ruling classes and I think we have to know that they're going to come up with new tools to try to you know promote their agenda it shouldn't be surprising that they're able to implant malware we should always believe that they will have you know some I mean some other strategy to kind of promote this and we always need to be watchful and always looking for the truth and always looking to support those who are speaking up for the oppressed That's a wonderful place for us to close our show today yes always looking for I think you said the truth it's a very high standard but we're always in search of it my favorite band The Clash for instance has a great song where the line is looking for that perfect jazz note to knock down the walls of Jericho aren't we in search of that perfect jazz note to knock down the walls of Jericho I think that's a good definition of journalism you know we are looking for that perfect jazz note at least Zoe is looking for that perfect jazz note at People's Dispatch I'm looking for that perfect jazz note at Globetrotter you've been listening to watching give the people what they want brought to you by People's Dispatch and Globetrotter every Friday at Facebook live on the People's Dispatch page and then of course there's a podcast from all the basic platforms tell your friends about give the people what they want we're here for you we also want to hear from you we'd like to have your comments about how we might improve this show how we might improve the perfect jazz note so that we and you can knock down the walls of Jericho thanks for joining us goodbye