 Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news round up. February 25th, Friday. Tensions in Ukraine continue. Yesterday, perhaps a stray fire hit a nuclear dump site in Chernobyl. Radioactive dust in the air flying all over the place. Civilians in cars trying to move towards the Polish border or at least away from Kiev. Russian paratroopers in Kiev. You're listening to give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news round up with Prashant and Zoe from People's Dispatch. I'm Vijay from Globe Trotter. Got to start with what's happening in Ukraine. Obviously, you know, there have been wars other than this one. There was a war in Iraq, destroyed that country, war in Libya, destroyed that country. This is not so different from those wars except one of the adversaries is a nuclear power country. That is to say Russia. And it is facing off another nuclear power country and that is the United States, which has troops in Poland, in Romania, troops in a sense within kilometers of Russian forces. And a confrontation between the United States and Russia is exactly different than any other confrontation we've seen except perhaps in Syria, where even in Syria, there was a direct confrontation between US and Russian troops. The Syria episode was a prelude to what we're seeing now. Lots of very, very harsh rhetoric coming from all sides. The United States and the European partners really unable to formulate a proper response to this Russian entry into Ukraine. Sanctions announced by US President Joe Biden, very limited, unable, unwilling to actually cut Russia off from the Swift system. Once again, contradictions are on display, contradictions coming from the Germans, the French, others. Energy prices have shot upwards for Europe, already inflationary pressure of 5.6%, not easy for the Europeans to deal with this question. Unlikely that the United States and NATO are going to move troops into Western Ukraine, but then what do we know? We were not able to last week, you know, predict in a sense that Russian forces would enter into Ukraine in these numbers. It's also true that the two matters that Russia put on the table. Number one, the question of keeping Ukraine as a neutral power, not as a NATO power, very much still on the table. Secondly, minority rights for Russian speakers, not only Russian speakers, Hungarian, Romanian and other speakers, these languages invalidated by 2019 law passed in the government in Kiev. Minority rights, minorities in the Eastern provinces being battered by not only state policy, disregarding Russian rights to speak Russian in Ukraine, but also by neo-Nazi groups attacking them in the Donbas region and so on. Serious issues on the table, not sure that this military intervention is going to be able to solve any of those problems. Those require negotiation. Will the negotiation table open up again? Will Russia believe that its mission can be accomplished by force? Will the Russian troops accelerate this particular intervention? Will it go on more than a week, 10 days? Will that be possible? Will Russian soldiers coming back in Russia in body bags? Will that influence public opinion? Small sections of liberals on the streets in Russia protesting this action. Easy to take glib political points when it comes to war online, but I must say this is a war. Wars are ugly. There is no good outcome that comes from wars. I began by talking about the hit on the dump in Chernobyl. Serious issues are on the table right here. The acceleration of this is simply not acceptable. What will happen in Warsaw? Will the Bucharest Nine, that is the nine Eastern European countries that are part of NATO, will they operate independently? What will happen in Estonia, Latvia, up there in the Baltics? Will they feel under pressure to do something? This is very hard for small countries like that. Is there the possibility of peace? The United Nations has shown that it has absolutely no legs in this conflict. It's to be seen what's going to happen, but certainly one very much hopes that peace is going to return on the table. I'd like to just say before I move this conversation along that this conflict did not begin this week with the Russian entry into Ukraine. This conflict began in 2014 when the government of Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown, largely by the pressure of the Western Bloc, NATO and the United States. That's when the war actually begins. It emboldens the ultra-nationalists in Ukraine and so on. This is a long conflict. It requires some measure of resolution. The war is not going to be that resolution. I think that's very much part of what we're interested in looking at next week, the following week. Come to peoplesdispatch.org to follow this. It's got to be sober in these times. Meanwhile, of course, the man who revealed or helped reveal much of the information of war crimes committed by NATO and the United States and Afghanistan, Iraq and so on, Julian Assange still sits in Belmarsh prison, also known as the Guantanamo of Britain. There is a tribunal effort to raise the issue of Julian Assange. Zoe, bring us up to speed on the Belmarsh tribunal. Definitely. Well, today in countries across the world, actually, there is a day of action demanding that Julian Assange be freed, demanding that the extradition request, the United States, where he is likely to face, where he is facing charges that could implicate up to 175 years in prison, be rejected definitively. The Belmarsh tribunal is part of this day of action. This morning, in the morning in Africa and in other countries, there have already been several protests underway. People from the National Union of Mental Workers of South Africa, from the Socialist Movement of Ghana have been taking the streets to join this movement to call for the freedom of Julian Assange. I think in these moments where so much is on the line, where the warmongering rhetoric, where the inability of NATO, for example, to consider other positions, to continue to press on with its objective, to continue to insist on its vision of the world, its construction of the world. It's so important that journalists like Julian Assange, that organizations like WikiLeaks exist because they are the organizations that are willing to tell us the truth, that are willing to tell us what happens in the secret cables between embassies. All of these documents that we wouldn't have had access to are possible because of Julian Assange. Today in New York City, in the People's Forum, there will, as part of this day of action, the Belmarsh tribunal will be going on. It's coming at the 20th anniversary of the establishment of Guantanamo Bay. It will raise awareness to, of course, Guantanamo and the horrific, horrific human rights violations that are taking place, not only at Guantanamo, but in the chain of clandestine prison and torture facilities across the world that the U.S. Army, the CIA has used against innocent civilians, against people accused of crimes in the war on terror. Truly, human rights tragedy is not only against all of these people that have been tortured, detained and imprisoned in Guantanamo and this chain of detention facilities. Guantanamo is also a violation of Cuban sovereignty, a true abomination on human rights order, on the UN Charter, on all of the things that we hold up and treasure for international law. And then similarly in cities across Brazil, they're mobilizing outside the U.K. consulates, embassies to join in this call to demand free Assange. That truth telling about crimes of the empire is not a crime. It's extremely important that this cause be raised, that this be brought to the surface because these are very dangerous times. And if we're to listen to the communiques and the memos from the State Department, from the European Union, we're not going to be getting the truth. As Vijay said, these are times where we need to be sober, where we need to have access to actually the information on the ground. And that has become impossible with mainstream hegemonic media that really seeks to impose its narrative on these events, impose its view and its bias. So more than ever, we need to defend Julian Assange, defend WikiLeaks and defend this kind of journalism that rejects being stenographers of the States and is giving information to the people, to the victims of these crimes and moves us to a world of peace, of multi-colarity and of transparency. I mean, that's exactly true and I think important to reflect on, but we also need to see that there are victories that come out of struggles at the same time. Prashant, you're going to take us to a place that doesn't often have victories, but I know that the Australian government has been threatening to register in the middle of all this. How mass as a terrorist organization strikes me as a bizarre development in the middle of all this, but you're going to tell us something good from Palestine. Right. What's happened. The Australian government's moves are sometimes very difficult to decipher. It seems to have a say in the most random things. But the important thing to note here is that on February 24th, the reports came that Hisham Abu-Hawash and McDadir Kawasme to Palestinian administrative detainees were finally released. And these two are very important people along with many others, including Qaeda al-Fasfus. All of these, all of these prisoners last year had gone on long hunger strikes against the practice of the administrative retention. Now let's take the case of just these two people. For instance, Hisham Abu-Hawash was on a hunger strike for 141 days and McDadir Kawasme was on a hunger strike for 114 days. And the reason they went on a hunger strike was quite simple because we've talked about this of course on the show before, but I think their hunger strike and the hunger strike of others like them over last year was the ultimate method of confronting the Israeli weapon that is administrative detention. And the administrative detention is a practice so patently observed by any standard of law that nothing has actually served to counter it or to prevent it. And in this context, all the Palestinian prisoners who were subjected to this could do was to actually literally put their lives on the line and say that if you did not end this practice whereby you could just arbitrarily detain a person for four to six months, sometimes even without them knowing what the charge against them is about, as long as the prosecution can convince the judge that there is some kind of security aspect involved, as long as that can be convinced without the prisoners knowing what the issue is about four to six months detention, which can be renewed again and again and again. And when confronted with this practice, the Palestinian prisoners, of course this happened in the past, but last year was an especially important time because at some point nearly six prisoners at the same time were on that kind of a hunger strike and at least three, four of them crossed 100 days. And the impact on these prisoners has been horrific. If you saw some of the pictures, the extent to which they suffered, the kind of health complications, you know, of course they lost a lot of weight, nausea, dizziness, organ damage. And we must consider the fact that, you know, some of this damage could even be permanent. We never know because when you spend 100 days at a hunger strike, what kind of impact does that leave you? But this cause was specifically so important because for many of these prisoners, it meant that they could just spend years in detention. And even after they came out, they would always be vulnerable to even being captured again and put back in exactly the same situation. This has happened with many prisoners, including Khalid al-Jaraal in the past, you know, you're picked up, you're in detention for one and a half years. You're released. Again, two years later, you're picked up and put in administrative detention again. So this practice, finally after, you know, these extraordinarily long hunger strikes, Israeli authorities were, you know, really they were forced to retreat because of the impact the potential death could have. And they said, okay, you know, we'll release. So the Kaid al-Fasbous was released in December. And these two are being released today. I think one more prisoner is definitely said to be released in March as well. The important thing to notice that in January 2021, despite all this 96 administrative detention orders were still issued, 51 of them are new, 45 of them were renewed. And in 2021 reports say that 1,595 such orders were issued in 2021. So that shows the extent to which this is being used as a mere tool of repression. There is no justice. There is no legal process in this. This is just the use of administrative detention as a tool of repression to suppress any Palestinian who dares raise their voice against Israeli apartheid and occupation. It's incredible. I mean, this is just an incredible story. And I mean, you know, I've been writing about this stuff since the 1980s. And I just feel like we write the same story over and over again, Prashant. Yes, two people are being released, but they can be arrested tomorrow. You're listening to give the people what they want brought to you from People's Dispatch, People's Dispatch.org and Globetrotter. Always happy to be with you on Friday. We like your feedback and comments. Let us know how we're doing. We struggle to bring you the stories of the moment and we struggle to find a good way to tell you those stories. Zoe seems to come to us almost every single week with some horrendous story from Colombia. There's a presidential election coming up this year. I saw that the presidential candidate, one of them at least has been putting lots of pictures of himself trying to introduce himself to the country. But still, human rights situation in Colombia abysmal. Tell us what's happening this way. Well, the week started off with a tremendous victory for Colombian women, Colombian people, which was the legalization of abortion up to 24 weeks. This is tremendous. It's actually one of the most progressive decisions that's been made in the region and other countries in Argentina and in Mexico. There's been similar pushes to decriminalize abortion, but actually the Colombian decision goes even further to 24 weeks. Huge victory for Colombian movements that have been, you know, struggling for this for so long. And in many said in typical Colombian fashion, this celebration didn't last even one day. And the next day, at around 10 p.m. at night, armed men, unidentified, broke into the house of historic peasant leaders Seofilo Acuña and Jorge Zafur, and murdered them in front of their families. This is part of a pattern that's been going on for the past six years since the peace agreements were signed over 1,400 social leaders, human rights defenders and ex-combatants of the Revolutionary Imports of Colombia have been assassinated, picked out and targeted by paramilitary groups by members of the National Army and the security apparatus in Colombia. These two murders have had particularly strong impact on the social movement. They are members of the People's Congress of Colombia, a national platform of people's movements across sectors of women's movements, peasant movements, Afro-Columbian movements, indigenous movements. All sectors of society part of this organization, Seofilo Acuña and Jorge Zafur, they were the founding members, some of the founding members of the National Peasant Movement, the Coronador Nacional Agrario, some of those leaders that are the moral leaders behind the movement that are always there, open to give a word to young people about what it means to organize, always there, really just the moral fiber of this movement. And so their assassination has really been a strong hit at the heart of the movement, a really tragic, tragic event. People are really struggling with this. Seofilo Acuña, two years ago, a year and a half ago, was targeted in what people call Montaje Judicial, a legal frame-up, a case to defame him, political persecution to say that he was promoting terrorism, that he was part of an armed group. This was an unfounded charge. And I think it's really interesting to see he was released from pre-child attention along with the other two leaders from the peasant movement who were also accused in this judicial frame-up. And the reasoning was the judge said that these leaders were too important to their communities and that their imprisonment would, beyond affecting their personal liberty, have a direct impact on the communities they served. I think this is really important when we see a leader like Seofilo is assassinated because this assassination does not only impact his family, does not only impact his friends, but it does impact the community. He was organizing in the region of Magdalena Medio in Colombia, one of the most violent regions where there's been continued paramilitary incursion. There were years during the 90s where people were unable to even leave their communities because of paramilitary occupation. Seofilo had been organizing throughout that whole time, facing so many waves of persecution, of violence, defending the land, defending the rivers, defending the people of the area. And this week, sadly, with great mourning and loss and solidarity for the people in Colombia, he was murdered, one of the many leaders that is the heart of his community. And it's so important that we insist in peace across the world, insist in peace in Colombia that has been suffering 60 years of an armed conflict, waged by the oligarchy against the people and always the civilian population, the movements that dare to express the will for peace for structural change are those who are the victims. I mean, that's the story in Colombia. There is a Colombia in almost every continent, it seems. There's Colombia in Colombia. And then if you go out towards Asia, well, we come to the Philippines. Over the last period, there's been great stress and strain for movement leaders in the Philippines, human rights people and so on. Again, we seem to need to tell these stories because they get muffled in the international media. I suppose Prashant's stories of death of human rights defenders and so on only comes up when it fulfills somebody's war aims. It doesn't fulfill our war aims because we don't have any. We just want to tell these stories. Prashant, what's happening in the Philippines? Right. Today is a historic day actually in the Philippines because it marks the 36th anniversary of what's called the EDSA-1 Revolution, or the People's Power Revolution basically where Ferdinand Marcos, the dictator, was overthrown after a very long and brutal regime. And we talked about this before. We also marked the anniversary of the declaration of martial law itself. A very horrible period in the history of the Philippines. The numbers are that there were at least 35,000 instances of torture, 70,000 political imprisonments, 3,200 extra judicial killings during that 14-year dictatorship, which ended in 1986 and massive, massive corruption to the extent that to this day, those stories of corruption are really famous. And like we talked about before, people came out onto the streets to mark this day. Of course, the key fact being that this is happening in a time when Marcos' son, Bongbong Marcos, is leading the election to become the next president in May. His vice presidential candidate is Sara Duterte, the daughter of the current president, Rodrigo Duterte, from a similar reign of terror has been taking place in the name of the so-called war on drugs. There has been this practice of red tagging where activists of all sorts are accused of being members of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, and therefore, a district facing legal action. A very important example is that of a doctor called Nati Castro, who spent years, in fact, decades working for the health of the people, working for the health of those of the marginalized sections. She was arrested on February 18th and on the very, very weird charge of, I think, something like kidnapping or abducting an armed unit, armed security forces unit. So it's very unclear how a doctor, so yeah, I think the charge is holding a unit of a government, armed militia group captive. So it's unclear how a doctor would be involved in a case like that, but that's how it is in the Philippines these days. You could be an academic, you could be a doctor, you could be a peace activist. Even recently, there was one such instance, activists who gave up military, gave up the armed struggle and started becoming peace consultants, working as negotiators between the government and the existing armed groups, being killed by an identified government or facing legal action, something very similar also happening in Colombia. So today's protests were all the more important that day, all the more important, I think, ahead of this coming election because many rights activists, many groups are worried about what happens if the Marcos de Terte Alliance comes to power in the election in May. It's already been a very difficult past couple of years for Philippines as a whole and whether this is likely to be intensified, considering the record of both of these leaders who have actually very problematic records when it comes to human rights. So the liberal forces are also mobilizing. It remains to be seen what happens in the elections to early to predict because they're in May. But right now concern is at an all-time high among activists, among human rights defenders in the Philippines about the future of the country. So very difficult times ahead. While you were speaking, I was thinking about the attacks on people all over the place, including in West Bengal in India where there were local level elections and so on. So the use of violence, homeopathically, in a way, small doses of violence during election times. India is in the middle of local elections, local means, you know, in legislative elections, Uttar Pradesh. We say local elections, Prashant, 200 million people live in that state. I mean, it's larger than most countries in the world. But there are these sort of small levels of violence used in the democratic process now almost by habit. No longer, you know, something extraordinary. But in fact, the normal course, we've got to be very, I think, vigilant about not forgetting to report these things, even though they seem to become habitual, if you see what I mean. I was also just looking at Mr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine's speech that he gave in order to pivot us to what's been happening in the Sahel region of Africa. The Chancellor of Germany, Mr. Schultz, said that Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Europe has never seen anything like this in 75 years, he said. It may not be the case. Within the 75 year period, Yugoslavia was pretty much destroyed in a war. But anyway, let's leave him at that. But he said this is the beginning of a war against Europe, against European unity, against basic human rights in Europe. Then Zelensky says something interesting. When bombs fall in Kiev, this is happening in Europe. When missiles kill our people, this is the death of all Europeans. Demand more protection for Europe. Europe, Europe, Europeans, Europe, Europe. But if it happens elsewhere than Europe, well, that's just fine. Pivot to Mali. The Hill website in the United States says that the conflict between Russia and the Europeans in the Sahel region of Africa is going to be worse than Ukraine. Worse than Ukraine, in fact, already is. After all, it was NATO that destroyed Libya, set in motion the confidence of various jihadi groups and so on to make alliances with the aristocratic sections among the Tuareg to begin an insurgency, which brought the French intervention into Mali in 2013. No conversation there about anything, by the way, totally routine to have had the French intervene in Mali in 2013 and now 2022 begin to withdraw from Mali. Begin to withdraw from Mali, not to France, but to Niger. In fact, to bases on the Mali-Niger border. Don't exaggerate the headline. France is not withdrawing from Mali. France is redeploying troops to Niger to actually participate in the same kind of operations, but now from Niger, not from Mali. And I can tell you, having understood that region and traveled there, that it's not unlikely for the French to cross the border and conduct operations in northern Mali when it suits them. Think about what Schultz and Zelensky said, oh my goodness, we have this war that is taking place in Europe, in Europe, Europeans, Europe and so on. But Africa perfectly acceptable, perfectly acceptable. I mentioned last week that Emmanuel Macron conducted this so-called withdrawal partly because he is facing an election presidential election campaign. But also because the French feel in some ways squeezed by Russian moves on the African continent. The Russian-African summit few years ago had Mr. Putin give a speech where he said, Russia is not going to recolonize Africa, break Africa up and so on. That's what the Europeans did. But since then, we have seen Russian trade with many countries almost double, including with Mali. There has been an increase of Russian military activity on the African continent, not the government forces, but the so-called mercenary groups. Some of them owned by oligarchic figures very close to the Kremlin, to Mr. Putin himself, including the Wagner group. Now the French were quite happy to collaborate with the Wagner group, a mercenary outfit in Libya and in Mozambique. Was perfectly happy. So when Macron said, look, Wagner is going to enter Mali, we don't want to cross swords with them. It's a little unclear that he even knows what he himself has been doing in Libya and in Mozambique, or he's merely lying to his own public. But the tension between Europe and Russia in the Sahel region is going to pick up and we have to follow that carefully. I wanted to just put on the table here a little bit of how dismaying it is to hear European leaders talk again about the specialness of Europe and to treat a continent like Africa as in a sense the garbage dump for their own great power ambitions. I want to put that on record because that's a speech Mr. Schultz and Zelensky have just made. You're listening to give the people what they want brought to you from People's Dispatch, your favorite movement news site at peoplesdispatch.org. That's Prashant and Zoe co-editors of that great project. I'm Vijay from Globetrotter. We'll see you next week coming to you with good stories. I hope looking forward to your comments. We need those. Thanks a lot.