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	Egypt: Generation of young activists imprisoned in bid to crush all dissent by Amnesty International   Continuing repression against young activists by the Egyptian authorities is a blatant attempt to crush the spirit of the country’s bravest and brightest young minds, and nip in the bud any future threat to their rule, said Amnesty International in a new briefing.   Generation Jail: Egypt’s youth go from protest to prison focuses on the cases of 14 young people who are among thousands who have been arbitrarily arrested, detained and jailed in Egypt over the past two years in connection with protests. The briefing shows that the country has reverted fully to being a police state.   “Two years after the ousting of President Mohamed Morsi, mass protests have been replaced by mass arrests. By relentlessly targeting Egypt’s youth activists, the authorities are crushing an entire generation’s hopes for a brighter future,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Deputy Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International.   “After the 2011 uprising, Egypt’s youth were lauded as a beacon of hope by the country’s military leaders and its international partners alike. It was their idealism and commitment to calls for ‘bread, freedom and social justice’ that proved a crucial driving force for change. Yet, today, many of these young activists are languishing behind bars, providing every indication that Egypt has regressed into a state of all-out repression.”   More than a year after he came to power, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government has shown no sign of easing its repressive rule. The crackdown has seen more than 41,000 people arrested, charged or indicted with a criminal offence, or sentenced after unfair trials, according to the last available estimates by Egyptian human rights activists.   “The scale of the crackdown is overwhelming. The Egyptian authorities’ have shown that they will stop at nothing in their attempts to crush all challenges to their authority,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui.   “Those behind bars range from internationally lauded youth movement leaders, to human rights defenders, to students arrested for wearing T-shirts with anti-torture slogans.”   The Protest Law, passed in November 2013, enables the authorities to arrest and prosecute peaceful demonstrators on a whim, and criminalizes the very act of 10 or more people taking to the streets without prior authorization. It also grants the security forces free reign to use excessive and lethal force against peaceful protesters.   “The Protest Law has become a fast-track to prison for peaceful demonstrators, who are being treated like criminals. It must be scrapped immediately,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui.   A crackdown that began with the arrests of Mohamed Morsi and his supporters, including leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, in July 2013 has rapidly expanded to encompass the whole of Egypt’s political spectrum.   Among those arbitrarily imprisoned are activists from the “6 April Youth Movement”, bloggers, university students, teachers, protesters, and prominent human rights defenders.   Many have been imprisoned for defying Egypt’s draconian Protest Law, or other legislation that arbitrarily restricts the right to freedom of peaceful assembly.   A new wave of arrests in mid-2015 saw at least 160 people detained in conditions amounting to enforced disappearance according to the Egyptian activist group Freedom For the Brave. The Muslim Brotherhood movement separately reported new arrests of its members.   The Egyptian authorities have often sought to justify their heavy handed tactics by saying they are maintaining stability and security. While some demonstrators have used violence during protests, the response of the security forces has routinely been disproportionate.   Many of those detained have found themselves hauled before courts on trumped-up or politically motivated charges, or sentenced during mass trials in which hundreds have been convicted based on little or no evidence, or solely on the basis of testimonies from the security forces or investigations by National Security.   Others have been detained for prolonged periods without charge or trial. They include student Mahmoud Mohamed Ahmed Hussein, who was just 18 years old while he was arrested on his way home from a protest because of the slogan on his T-shirt. He spent his 19th birthday in prison and has now spent more than 500 days without charge or trial.   The thousands of protesters convicted on spurious charges or because of laws that arbitrarily restrict freedom of peaceful assembly and expression, stand in stark contrast to the paltry number of security forces prosecuted for human rights violations since January 2011. No members of the security forces has faced criminal charges over the deaths of hundreds of Morsi supporters at Rabaa Adawiya and al-Nadha Squares on 14 August 2013.   Amnesty International is warning Egypt’s international partners not to sacrifice human rights in their talks with the authorities.   The leaders of EU countries, have all sat down with President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi while his administration has been putting thousands of its political opponents behind bars. The US government announced in March that it was lifting a freeze on arms transfers to Egypt and would continue military and security assistance to the country’s army.   “World leaders are breaking the pledges they made to stand by Egypt’s young people when Mubarak fell in February 2011. Egypt is jailing peaceful activists while the international community looks the other away.   Egyptian authorities have justified the crackdown by pointing to a rise in political violence. Egypt is facing attacks from armed groups, which the authorities have said have led to the deaths of hundreds of members of the security forces, particularly in the north of the Sinai Peninsula, as well as a number of civilians. Amnesty International unreservedly condemns attacks on civilians. However, the organization urges the Egyptian authorities not to use such threats as a pretext for trampling upon human rights.   http://www.amnesty.org/press-releases/2015/06/egypt-generation-of-young-activists-imprisoned-in-ruthless-bid-to-crush-dissent-1/ http://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde12/1873/2015/en/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/reporters-notebook-tahrir-square-five-years-later/   UK surveillance Tribunal reveals the Cameron government spied on Amnesty International.   In a shocking revelation, the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has notified Amnesty International that UK government agencies had spied on the organization by intercepting, accessing and storing its communications.   In an email sent today, the Tribunal informed Amnesty International its 22 June ruling had mistakenly identified one of two NGOs which it found had been subjected to unlawful surveillance by the UK government. Today’s communication makes clear that it was actually Amnesty International that was spied on in addition to the Legal Resources Centre in South Africa.   The NGOs were among 10 organizations that launched a legal challenge against suspected unlawful mass surveillance of their work by the UK’s spy agencies.   “After 18 months of litigation and all the denials and subterfuge that entailed, we now have confirmation that we were in fact subjected to UK government mass surveillance. It’s outrageous that what has been often presented as being the domain of despotic rulers has been occurring on British soil, by the British government,” said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.   “How can we be expected to carry out our crucial work around the world if human rights defenders and victims of abuses can now credibly believe their confidential correspondence with us is likely to end up in the hands of governments?   “The revelation that the UK government has been spying on Amnesty International highlights the gross inadequacies in the UK’s surveillance legislation. If they hadn’t stored our communications for longer than they were allowed to by internal guidelines, we would never even have known. What’s worse, this would have been considered perfectly lawful.”   Today’s IPT email made no mention of when or why Amnesty International was spied on, or what was done with the information obtained.   This shows the urgent need for significant legal reform, including proper pre-judicial authorization and meaningful oversight of the use of surveillance powers by the UK security services, and an independent inquiry into how and why a UK intelligence agency has been spying on human rights organizations. It also underlines Amnesty International’s call for an end to mass communications surveillance by governments.   http://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/07/uk-surveillance-tribunal-reveals-the-government-spied-on-amnesty-international/ Visit the related web page
	It is 50 years since the Indonesian massacre of 1965 but we cannot look away by Laksmi Pamuntjak Guardian News, ABC, agencies Indonesia   As 250 million Indonesians face up to the 50th anniversary of one of the most crushing episodes of our nation’s history – the massacre of up to 500,000 or more alleged Communists between 1965 and 1968 by the Suharto regime – the business of confronting the past has reached a new urgency. And it is an urgency that has only a week ago was sharpened by new disappointments.   That new disappointment is our president Joko Widodo’s stance on “1965” – as the tragedy is commonly referred to. In a statement in front of the leaders of the Muhammadiyah, the country’s second largest Muslim organisation, he has refused to apologise to the victims of 1965. And so ended the campaign promises he made –hollow ones to start with, of giving priority to the country’s unresolved cases of human rights violations, including 1965 – that earned him the people’s votes.   It is a staggering, utterly dispiriting verdict, especially as it came on the heels of the tide of cynicism, both from those who demand an official public reckoning and from those who oppose it, when it seemed he was still toying with the possibility of a groundbreaking gesture.   This recent development notwithstanding, there still is no easy picture to paint about what we have achieved in terms of our struggle against forgetting. Clearly, right now the call is for action. The call is an accelerated series of concrete measures. An official state apology, even if it were to come to pass, would simply not have been enough. It is too late to pledge mere words, for words too have an expiry date.   It has, after all, been almost 20 years since the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998. After 32 years of obsessive and systematic conditioning by the Suharto regime of the perils of Communism, Indonesians, to the limited yet vigorous extent that they have been able to, have since indulged their new thirst for alternative readings on 1965. Since 2000, thought-provoking revisionist histories have been produced by the academia.   The works of the great Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, previously banned, were sought anew. Survivors of Suharto’s prisons published their memoirs with admirable courage and panache. Novelists and documentary filmmakers were emboldened.   That such a surge was even possible has not been taken for granted, for the most part. At school, my generation was taught categorically – with no room for other interpretations – that all Communists were atheists and the enemy of the Indonesian state, and that the defeat of the Indonesian Communist party was crucial to the survival of the nation.   Absurdly, not only has this steady propaganda produced a generation schooled in silence and apathy; it has also given birth to successive generations that are wholly ignorant of that period of history.   A survey published by the Jakarta Globe in 2009 showed that more than half of the respondents comprising university students in Jakarta had never even heard of the mass killings of 1965-1966. Never mind the fact that it happened to be, as stated by a CIA report, “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the second world war, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s.” Thus, any sign that “1965” has not been forgotten is a burst of fresh air, a salve to the soul.   Sure, there were the occasional hitches that often seemed like a huge setback: the blatant rejection by a cabinet minister, last year, of the findings of the National Human Rights Committee because he believed that the mass killings were “necessary at the time”; the recent naming of a Suhartoist known for leading the purge, as a national hero; the odious crackdown on a gathering of the families of 1965 survivors, most of them elderly, in Padang Pariaman, West Sumatra.   All such insults, on top of the president’s flip-flopping, coalesce to sharpen our fear of the limit of what is truly achievable.   For while it is impossible to speak of unveiling the truth as though there is only one truth, it is no longer possible to deny that a systematic, politically-charged pogrom in fact took place and that it was, in the simplest possible terms, a crime against humanity.   We know that no great historical struggle ever occurs in a vacuum, and that the seeds of discontent between the left and the right in Indonesia had been sown for decades prior to the tragedy. Prior to 1965, the left, buttressed by the ascendancy of the Indonesian Communist party, were persecuting the right too. Yet what anyone who has watched Joshua Oppenheimer’s landmark documentaries, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, or read Tempo magazine’s 2012 special edition on 1965, in which the perpetrators spoke unapologetically about their role in the killings, cannot do today is to look away.   As with most calamities in history, our collective memory fails because the collective memory can bear only so much. So what does it mean, these days, to not look away? When each passing year takes us further away from the impact and meaning of the tragedy, let alone the full measure of it?   Could it be possible that as we hit the 50 year mark, and as more stories are being told – stories of ordinary people, people who had been excluded from the panoptic view of history – there is, despite the failures of the current regime, something extraordinary happening at the moment?   Having witnessed for years what continued stigmatisation did to people, I never thought we would reach this point: to be anticipating, in The Hague this coming mid-November, an International People’s Tribunal on 1965 Crimes Against Humanity in Indonesia.   This is not to say that this undertaking won’t be painful and full of risk. Even those among the survivors have pondered the wisdom of letting sleeping dogs lie. Transcendence may never be achievable, as is rendering “justice” to the hundreds of thousands of victims. The tribunal, which does not seek punitive measures for the alleged perpetrators, but, rather, to issue a morally-charged verdict which will become the basis for future government policy-making, will not be able to provide answers to every question it asks, nor will it able to put those they can into immediate action.   As such, it is already facing tremendous opposition from certain quarters in the government with prevailing links to the Suharto regime.   In other words, civil society still has to continue its part in setting up “truth-seeking commissions” in order to reveal abuses, to empower victims in telling their stories, to produce and disseminate a revisionist history (especially in schools), and to find ways of properly compensating the victims and their families and rehabilitate their good name.   But the spirit and the commitment of the tribunal, no matter the ambivalences and reservations it too may contain, suggests that memory is a strange and often wondrous thing: there is, blessedly, such a thing as the duty of memory – and it often imposes a continuity, particularly when the time calls for it, upon the act of remembering.   It rebukes us for thinking in terms other than deep outrage, mourning and a call for justice, for to do so would be to dishonor the explicit moral gravity of the subject.   What it embodies promises this anniversary as a marker, a new beginning. It is a time to reckon, reflect, and repair. It is a time to pay tribute to the resilience and vitality of the individual human spirit in the face of unspeakable loss and destruction. Because it isn’t as if there is much else we can hang on to, in the face of the self-righteousness and cowardice of those in power.   * Laksmi Pamuntjak''s first novel Amba, which has been translated into English under the title The Question of Red, will be published in German in September 2015 by Ullstein Verlag, is about the historical violence in 1965, in which up to one million accused Communists in Indonesia were massacred.   http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/30/it-is-50-years-since-the-indonesian-genocide-of-1965-but-we-cannot-look-away   Aug 2015   ABC Reporter Tony Jones speaks with the acclaimed film maker Joshua Oppenheimer on his latest work which follows a grieving family trying to make sense of the Indonesian anti-communist purge of 1965.   Tony Jones: A startling new film, The Look of Silence, follows a grieving family trying to make sense of Indonesia''s anti-communist purge of 1965 in which at least half a million people were killed. It''s a companion piece to the earlier documentary The Act of Killing, where the killers bizarrely re-enacted their crimes for the camera, the film has been screened over 3,500 times in Indonesia.   Well that extraordinary film by director Joshua Oppenheimer drew both praise and criticism when it was released in 2012. Praise for his courage in confronting serious questions. What kind of person joins in a program of mass killing? Are they monsters or ordinary people capable of savage brutality? But he was also criticised for the way he allowed the killers to reconstruct their crimes and revel in the savagery of their own performances.   This time around in The Look of Silence, Oppenheimer follows an optician, Adi Rukun, as he confronts the men who killed his brother. Adi gains access to the killer''s homes by arranging to test their eyes. This companion film deals with the impact of state-sanctioned mass murder on the surviving families of the victims, but it also raises uncomfortable questions about modern Indonesia, where a number of those involved in the killings still occupy positions of power.   Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer spoke to us in this exclusive interview. And a warning: some of the killer''s confessions are genuinely disturbing. Joshua Oppenheimer, thanks for joining us. Now can we start by telling us a little bit about Adi Rukun, the optometrist, because it''s through his eyes, strangely enough, that we see the mass murderers in this film?   Joshua Oppenheimer: That''s right. Adi Rukun''s brother was killed in the 1965 genocide. Adi was born two years later and was seen by his parents as his older brother''s replacement. And when he met me all the way back in early 2003, he latched on to my film-making as a way of trying to understand really what had happened to his family, what had happened to his village, what had happened to his country.   And he essentially was using my film-making as a way of finding himself. And he started by gathering survivors to tell me their stories, but after three weeks, the Army threatened all of them not to participate in the film. And it was Adi then who said, "Don''t give up. Try to film the perpetrators," and sent me on the journey that really would lead to making my first film, The Act of Killing.   And after editing The Act of Killing, but before it had its first screenings, I went back to Indonesia in 2012 to make The Look of Silence, and Adi said, "I''ve spent seven years watching your footage with the perpetrators. It''s changed me. I need to meet the men who killed my brother to see if they can take responsibility for what they''ve done so that we can reconcile ourselves."   Tony Jones: It''s also extraordinary that he plies his trade, his optometry trade while speaking to the actual killers, so you see him fitting the testing device on their eyes and they are talking, they''re going back into the past and recalling murdering his brother and others. These are scenes I guess you would find hard to do in any other place.   Joshua Oppenheimer: Yes, it was first of all, when Adi suggested that he wanted to confront the perpetrators, I said immediately, "Absolutely not. It''s too dangerous." You see, The Look of Silence is the first film ever made where survivors confront perpetrators who still hold a monopoly on power. It''s normally never done because it is too dangerous.   But we realised - after Adi explained to me why this was so important to him, we realised that my - the production of The Act of Killing was well known across that region to such an extent that I was well known for being close to the most powerful men in the country. The current Vice-President of Indonesia is in The Act of Killing. I was believed to be close to him, the national paramilitary leaders, members of the cabinet - members of the cabinet, members of the Parliament. And because no-one had seen The Act of Killing yet - we realised that I was still believed to be close to these people.   And the men Adi wanted to confront, the men who were involved with death of his brother, were regionally, but not nationally powerful, and they would therefore be unlikely to even detain us, let alone physically attack us.   But I also realised that we would still have to take many precautions to make these confrontations safe if we were to do them at all, and among them, one of the things I realised was that if Adi were to test these men''s eyes, while - they would then in a sense be disarmed. Their guard would be down and they would be likely to tell him the details of what they had done in the same way they''d told me years earlier.   The eye test began as a kind of safety consideration, but I also swiftly realised that they would become this surreal, almost nightmarish, strange, mysterious metaphor for blindness, because Adi is of course testing people''s eyes who are wilfully blind, wilfully blind to the moral meaning of what they''ve done.   http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2015/s4288632.htm http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/1965/6973522
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