 Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news roundup. You're with Give the People What They Want brought to you from People's Dispatch that's Prashant and Zoe. I'm Vijay from Globetrotter. Happy to be with you. 128th episode today is June 2nd coming toward halfway point in this calendar year. Stunned this week to see photographs from the city of Atlanta, Georgia the home of Coca-Cola and peaches also Jimmy Carter to find large section of police officers breaking down what looked to me like like somebody's private residence not an unfamiliar site in the United States Zoe I don't know why I was surprised what happened in Atlanta, Georgia this week well it is definitely a concerning site police officers in the Atlanta police department and investigators in the Georgia Bureau of Investigations raided an activist house on May 31st they raided the house in order to conduct the arrests of three people three activists who were active in the Atlanta Solidarity Fund a collective that raises money to support activists or anyone who's been arrested in the context of a protest and mobilization or is persecuted because of these kind of political activities this Solidarity Fund is one of these initiatives that's popped up a lot across the United States as the intensification of political repression has occurred with hundreds of arrests taking place especially during the 2020 uprisings where hundreds of people are arrested across the country for taking part in the mobilizations against racism following the murder of George Floyd so on Wednesday essentially these organizers who raise money to then bail people out of jail which is a very very horrific tactic used in the United States to keep poor people in prison essentially those who can't pay their bail have to stay there and so these organizers were charged interestingly enough with money laundering and charities fraud they were charged and in the charge sheet it essentially says that they had been misleading people who had donated and that this money was going towards violent extremist groups specifically known as the Atlanta Forest Defenders and so it's important to understand these arrests of these Solidarity activists these people who are raising money to help people get out of prison in the context of a larger struggle that's happening in the city of Atlanta essentially two years back the city council of Atlanta made a proposal to fund and to build what activists have dubbed cop city and so cop city people have been following this probably know but it is essentially a training grounds that's going to be that they want to build in the Atlanta Forest where cops from across the country not just Atlanta would be able to come learn the latest tactics and police repression of protest train using tear gas stun grenades and other tactics used specifically above all to repress people who are mobilizing and so cop city has unsurprisingly been met with fierce opposition from environmentalists from anti-police brutality activists really from such a wide alliance of progressive groups both in Atlanta and nationally especially given the fact that again in 2020 there were over 14 million people across the country in the streets demanding of course justice for George Floyd demanding justice for all the victims of police brutality but also demanding that the police be defunded and in the city of Atlanta and in so many other cities this demand has not only been ignored but now they're willing to invest millions of dollars into building something to really refine the repressive tactics so these solidarity activists had been very active in accompanying this mobilization against cop city out at the protests raising money for the dozens of people who have been arrested in the protests against cop city and as we've reported on people's dispatch several activists who have been protesting this project have even been slapped with domestic terrorism charges so I think what we're seeing in Atlanta is extremely extremely concerning because this is something that doesn't only impact the struggle against cop city in the city of Atlanta but could really have wider implications not only is it illegal to protest cops is it illegal to protest a multi-million dollar project to destroy a forest but it is also illegal to even raise money for those who are arrested this is such a simple act of solidarity that has been taking place over centuries and now the authorities are trying to clap back at that so that's the update there well US state seized upon the violence that it is going to meet upon people meanwhile Prashant about 10% of the population of Atlanta struggles with hunger pretty high number I was looking at reports from the UN world food program about these 18 hotspots around the world what is this new report Prashant tell us about hunger in South Asia food in South Asia and so on what's the latest from the world food program so the world food program report of course talks about what you like you said they are hunger hotspots and now there are 18 of these hunger hotspots it is identified stretching across 22 countries and I think it bears a very interesting reflection on the global state of the world so to speak for multiple reasons one is of course we can start with South Asia where of course the report identifies a couple of key countries that is Afghanistan Myanmar and Pakistan and in all of these countries the situation is pretty grim Afghanistan I think 15.3 million people that said I believe over 35% of the population is facing various levels of acute food insecurity I mean they have a categorization of 5 categories of which 3, 4 and 5 are considered the most acute so I think around 15 million people fall into these 3 categories 3, 4 and 5 and it kind of actually reflects the fact that while Afghanistan no longer captures the headlines except when Taliban unleashes another round of repressive policies the fact is there is a deep systemic crisis when it comes to the everyday life of people over there and the situation has maybe slightly improved from 2022 which is really the worst Afghanistan could really Afghanistan touched but still it's an extremely serious crisis there are multiple factors to this including the fact that the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan there has been violence over there there is a lot of it is dependent on humanitarian aid which kind of fluctuates from time to time agriculture is not in the greatest of shape which means that poverty is a huge problem as far as families as far as the government is concerned all this together making food front and center one of the biggest issues faced by people in Afghanistan like I said it's interesting because we often don't talk about it when we talk about Afghanistan it's always in the context of the Taliban etc etc but the most essential element which is food is one of the biggest crisis in the country and you know crosses the border to Pakistan again the country which has been sort of this for large part of it due to IMF recommended policies you saw inflation over the past few months rising in Pakistan you know basic essentials very difficult to very difficult to get you cross over to Myanmar again conflict bringing its own prices but even if you take a look I think at the global report it has an interesting picture because some of the a lot of the countries which are named in this report as hot spots in various ways we're looking at say Haiti for instance and the Central American region again the long stomping ground for the US and its activities we're looking at say Lebanon in Syria where policies by the US and its allies have actually caused massive humanitarian crisis a paralysis of government all of which has led to the inability to actually even deliver basic needs we're looking at say a crisis like Sudan which we're going to be talking about in some more detail but again it has been elevated to one of those hunger hot spots as well so we talk about climate change and often we talk about and even many of these reports talk about conflict as one of the reasons is one of the drivers for this global hunger crisis but I think there's often a need to step back and also look at what actually are the drivers of this conflict as well. Conflict not being a neutral term but as a result of very deliberately pursued policies which actually accentuate the crisis in many of these countries and we're looking at two sets of policies here one of course is the militaristic policies of most often of the US and its allies but we're also looking at economic policies which have been the kind of recommendations that are imposed on countries which basically destroy the possibility of livelihoods which take away the security that even whatever minimum security that people of various countries have and leave them in a very desperate situation so I think the food crisis something that of course some of our viewers might remember we did people's dispatch along with our partners across the world we did a series on hunger a couple of years ago and one of the one of the most important findings of that series of hunger during the pandemic was how across the world's governments were failing to even deliver such a basic necessity provide infrastructure for that necessity and if you go to some of these extreme conflict zones that trend gets accentuated even more both due to very deliberately induced conflict and very deliberately induced economic policies both of which are having a very similar effect on people terrible story Prashant I mean you know we gotta keep following this hardly reported hardly reported indeed is the story about overfishing next to the coastline of very poor countries people might remember in 2009 the Somali rapper Gainan gave a interview to the Los Angeles Times and in a radio interview later he said that look you're concerned about Somali pirates but you're not asking what's the reason why there is piracy of the coastline of Somalia so what this rapper said with great clarity is he said there are ships that come to the unregulated waters of Somalia and they dump containers of nuclear waste he says that's one problem that is creating toxicity in the coastline secondly he said trawlers are coming in and overfishing right beside the coastline and Somali fisher people are unable to sustain themselves they can't actually go into deep waters and fish and when they fish near the coastline the trawlers have wiped out the catch by the way this has been a problem in the Indian ocean I will remember in the Indian state of West Bengal and in the country of Bangladesh fisher folk in the deltaic regions there used to complain that large trawlers used to come in basically mass fish the Baghdad prawns the big size prawns those prawns disappeared from the markets of Bangladesh and West Bengal they were a staple of the culture of people's food you know and so on overfishing has been a problem for a long time just last two years ago the UN's food and agriculture organization FAO released a report on overfishing of sardinella and bonga fish of the coastline of Africa of western Africa also talked about massive overfishing of sardines you know that report really didn't have any impact at all well Amnesty Dinesh still has returned with another report going back to sardinella and bonga fish also sardines and so on interviewed people in the coastline region in Gambia in the town of Sanyang which is a tourist area coastal fishing village and what they found was quite interesting two interesting things to put on the table number one of course they calculate and this is a calculation that actually I went back and looked at the UN document this calculation just expands and updates the UN numbers it is estimated that Gambia, Mauritania Senegal, Guinea-Bissau Guinea and Sierra Leone lose about 2.3 billion dollars annually to illegal fishing now that's just the commercial loss which is important because it's wiping out fish of pork from being able to you know bring in the catch as it were but it also has an impact to what Prashant was talking about earlier that nutritious food stocks high protein fish oils and so on that had been in the diet of these some of them coastal countries but not all of them these countries have seen a loss of the nutrition capacity of the of the table in other words they may have to buy frozen fish at great expense that is imported into the country they are not able to eat fish freshly caught by local fisher people so this has a commercial impact upon the fishing communities along the coastline in towns like Sanyang, Gambia but it also has an impact on nutrition it has an impact on hunger it's not just 2.3 billion dollars lost by these countries but also the people have lost those kilo calories of good protein just simply not in their diet but one additional point the company Naseem fishing and fish processing corporate you know private limited which is a foreign-owned factory which has got ships out there harnessing fish but they also have fish meal factories beside the coastline women farmers who farm beside the coastline are saying that pests and insects from the fish meal factories are destroying their vegetables now imagine that not only a fish disappearing from the market in these countries but also vegetables it's related to the story Prashant just did hunger is produced by greed hunger is not produced by lack of food and the story of overfishing of the coastline of Gambia demonstrates that you're with give the people what they want we come to you from people's dispatch that's Prashant and Zoe I'm Vijay from Globetrotter happy to be with you every week we know you listen to us live you also enjoy our podcast it's a delight to be with you now something is wrong in Paris France where it's pretty surprising that French poets had this problem with a Cuban poet Nancy Morejon a great Cuban poet that was removed as honorary president I don't know what the French are afraid of Zoe but the entire French poetry establishment seems to be afraid of a Cuban poet what's going on well that's exactly right Nancy Morejon was set to be the honorary president of the French poetry festival it's 40th anniversary it's 40th edition this year it's the Marseille actually I'm just going to say it in English the poetry market and this is a renowned festival international poets come it's very big it's you know a whole week of activities one of these great moments where artists and writers can come together talk about the craft share their own work be honored these are moments that professionals look forward to all year and what better place than Paris in the summer I guess but there was a very very aggressive extremely aggressive but you know not as aggressive as it even could be by a Cuban right-wing writer he essentially wrote a Facebook post saying that he thought it was ridiculous that Nancy Morejon be awarded this honor this prestigious recognition and that he personally was offended and that she if she was if this went forward then it would really tarnish the reputation of a festival so this is something that Cuban right-wing activists do anytime a Cuban appears in any public space because anyone who is not critical of the government who thinks that maybe it's great that they were given free education, free health care and that attacks from US imperialism are actually the problem they somehow have an issue and so these kind of campaigns are actually not new and it really unfortunately happens anytime anytime a Cuban artist, musician sports player I mean we saw this happen in Miami when the Cuban baseball team played in the international baseball series and so essentially what happened instead of understanding the context within which these criticisms arise that it comes from this persistent right-wing campaign to essentially erase Cuban intellectuals and artists from the map this right-wing activist found some allies in the French poetry community they wrote a letter to the festival with very very strong words saying that oh you know we forgive you because you probably didn't know anything about this woman's history for example the fact that she was a traveling academic, worked in several US universities, writes about racism wrote a beautiful poem dedicated to George Floyd and essentially with this letter from the French Free Press Society Pen Club Française the festival announced that they would withdraw this honorary presidency and it's interesting that this happens in the same month where Buena Fe a very very famous Cuban band was touring Spain and they were forced to cancel some of their concerts because of physical attacks by right-wing extremists in Spain and because of these attacks and because of similar pressures several club owners actually even cancelled some of their shows and so this is such a despicable censorship violation of freedom of expression I mean these are artists, these are poets who like any other artist and poet from any other country want to share their work, want to share with their colleagues and because of this political pressure from the right-wing they have essentially been removed from these spaces and there's been a large outpouring of solidarity with Nancy Morejon as well with Buena Fe the international union of left publishers also released a statement you can find it on our website at People's Dispatch in Spanish and English it's so important to recognize that these are moments when the right-wing is trying to impose their kind of vision of silencing of trying to suppress these extremely human expressions like poetry so very unfortunate developments there in France that's a great poem on George Floyd she sings in that poem the smoke from your flesh rises to the wet sky highly recommend people go and read it and perhaps tweet it to the Marché de Poissy Paris well Prashant Pavan Kulkarni back at People's Dispatch new story on violations of the ceasefire in Sudan Sudan, Sudan, Sudan here we go please what's happening in Sudan right unfortunately like in many war situations the events have overtaken that story although the basis of that story remains very much the same and has been true for many many years right now but we have not talked about Sudan on the show for a couple of weeks for multiple reasons one being the fact there was maybe a depressing pattern which was continuously going on fighting escalating of both sides Sudanese armed forces and the rapid support forces refusing to acknowledge the fact that innocent civilians were getting caught in their conflict over who would control Sudan there was a bit of hope about the 20th of May around 21st when there was a ceasefire agreement to sign Saudi Arabia and the US mediating it and on 22nd it came into effect now this ceasefire was a 7 day ceasefire it was supposed to expire on 29th it was extended for 5 more days but after that it seems to have pretty much collapsed and not only as the ceasefire collapsed Saudi Arabia and the US which were mediating the talks have basically said they are not going to continue doing it at least for this ceasefire so much is that the observers across the world hope that this ceasefire might be the beginning of some kind of a settlement it was definitely not to be unfortunately and I think the reasons why it has not worked out are pretty clear to understand the fact that it does seem like both parties used this ceasefire to sort of recoup to sort of consolidate and then start a fresh round of fighting and the violations of the ceasefire were having enumerated multiple times both parties reportedly stealing aid consignments both parties the armed forces continuing its sorties in the air the rapid support forces and continuing its occupation of civilian buildings including the office of the Sudanese Communist Party which was occupied by the RSF a lot of condemnation from across the world and of course violence also going on in Darfur where a number of people have been killed in fights between militias which are which is a parallel conflict to what is going on right now and I think the situation right now there is there is a sense of absolute lack of control or chaos in terms of both these players armed forces and the RSF not being accountable in any way to anybody at this point because they are just fighting it out now the US has imposed sanctions on both these players it says but the fact remains that both of these are very strongly entrenched in Sudan's economy and in the regional economy as well both these players have very strong regional ties economically to many other countries in the region including especially the United Arab Emirates so and of course I think over 1.5 million people have already been displaced most of them internally displaced but many of them going to I think neighboring countries like Chad which are already facing a massive crisis so overall a very desperate situation right now in Sudan and civilians there is some very depressing reports of orphans in orphanages dying because there is not enough care provided to them they were not enough basic resources to provide medical care to them to some of them actually and I think from the side of the people's movements you know every week of this war is just unfortunately in a very unfortunate we've indicated them like we've said time and again because it has shown that these generals who hold these who lead the Sudanese army the rapid support forces and who were considered the main interlocutors for peace and stability in the country for so long were absolutely not to be trusted and they are proving that not only through the fighting but through the repeated violations of these ceasefires as well so in general it's very difficult to predict right now at this point what can lead to a maybe in some some more time there might be a halt if there are resources if there is the state of exhaustion if one force suffers more of a more of a setback there might be one of those reasons or sustained international pressure might help but right now it's a very bleak outlook for Sudan very tragic situation for a country that has been wracked by conflict for a long time one of the 18 hot spots for world hunger terrible terrible tragedy meanwhile in Moldova a country that borders Ukraine small country not large NATO AWACS the early warning aircraft flying above Moldova to provide protection as it were for a meeting of the European political community it's an interesting gathering it's a gathering of heads of state and government from 47 countries basically all the EU European Union leaders and others of the 27 member blocks south and east that is people who are there in the former Soviet Union former Soviet Republics and the communist states of the east they belong to this gathering called the European political community now they arrive in Moldova and just now in a castle I found this fascinating they are meeting in a 19th century castle in Vinyard very large summit venue of course protected by NATO even though Moldova is not a NATO member it is merely a partner of NATO but they are coming with three open conflicts pretty important conflicts and each of these conflicts reveals something in common number one Armenia and Azerbaijan are coming to the meeting they are in the middle of a conflict around Nagorno-Korobakh which is often burst since the 1990s into open armed violence including just a few years ago Recep Tayyip Erdogan re-elected president of Turkey had intervened the last time in that conflict actually militarily so one conflict on the table for the European political community is Nagorno-Korobakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan second conflict heating up every day is the conflict between Kosovo and Serbia both countries will be at the table no idea whether there will be intensified armed action between these countries whether there is going to be an appetite in Belgrade to intensify against Kosovo it is very unclear what is going to happen but they are going to be there and third Mr Zelensky arrived immediately he was the first head of state to arrive met the head of the government of Moldova the president Maya Sandu greeted him and walked him in Mr Zelensky comes there to make the case again for Ukraine to get support and to join NATO he already made the case at the Nordic meeting earlier this year where he met with the heads of government of the Nordic states openly talked about Ukraine's need to join NATO and so on three conflicts coming to the table here all have a related history because they are all in some ways about the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia these are long drawn out conflicts they didn't happen yesterday they have a long history interestingly Mr Zelensky is coming there to ask for what he calls security guarantees so are the others they are all worried about what is happening Maya Sandu president of Moldova very keen on deepening Moldova's ties to the European Union the poorest country in Europe very keen on that has been making public statements pledging herself to Mr Zelensky and so on not clear although what the net benefit of this is going to be one of the interesting facets with the re-election of Receptive Erdogan in Turkey and with the fact that it looks plausible that there will be no NATO victory in Ukraine these countries are going to have to create some sort of modus vivendi with Russia but the language at these meetings in fact has increased in a tone anti Russia and it's very complicated and hard to imagine how they are going to walk back we will be watching this carefully because there are more summits on the horizon Mr Zelensky now is on the move one minute in Japan next minute in Moldova where will he be tomorrow you always give the people what they want where brought to you by people's dispatch that Zoe and Prashant go to the website read all the stories there I'm Vijay from Globetrotter so happy to have you with us either live watching us on our various platforms or listening to our podcast available on all the podcast the platforms see you next week