Ninety-Nine magazine - May 2019

Challenging the power of the

Issue 14 - May 2019

Britain’s Empire Problem How Brexit lifted the lid on our imperial delusions

Also in this issue Jallianwala Bagh 100 years on Chagossians face the hostile environment Decolonising our movements

ISSUE 14: May 2019 03 Campaign news 06 Global news 08 Brexit and global justice 10 Empire state of mind 13 Global Justice Now supporters 14 Decolonising our movements 16 Jallianwala Bagh, 100 years on 18 Chagossians face the hostile environment 19 Reviews

Ninety-Nine is published three times a year by Global Justice Now Global Justice Now campaigns for a world where resources are controlled by the many, not the few.

We champion social movements and propose democratic alternatives to the rule of the 1%. Our activists and groups in towns and cities around the UK work in solidarity with those at the sharp end of poverty and injustice.

Ninety-Nine magazine, Global Justice Now 66 Offley Road, London SW9 0LS 020 7820 4900 • offleyroad@globaljustice.org.uk • globaljustice.org.uk Editors: Jonathan Stevenson and Radhika Patel Graphic Design: Matt Bonner www.revoltdesign.org Cover image: Liam Fox as Cecil Rhodes by Matt Bonner, after The Rhodes Colossus by Edward Linley Sambourne, Punch magazine, 1892; Chris McAndrew/UK Parliament.

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Britain has an empire problem Radhika Patel Communications and campaigns officer I don't think anyone would disagree that Brexit has stirred up feelings of imperial nostalgia. This has been most evident in the government’s plans to renew old trading ties with ‘Commonwealth’ countries (aka ex-colonies), in a process dubbed ‘Empire 2.0’ by civil servants. Liam Fox, so long as he remains a government minister, is leading the charge, but it extends far into society.

Yet all Brexit has really done is expose the reality of a problem that has sat under the surface for years. The popular understanding of the British Empire is not only dangerous, but completely delusional. In a 2016 YouGov poll, carried out before the date of the EU referendum was announced, 44% of Britons said they were “proud” of Britain’s history of colonialism and 43% said they thought the British Empire was “a good thing”.

Would those numbers be so high if we were all taught the reality of empire?

That Britain’s wealth came at the expense of theft from brown and black people through ‘free’ trade? Or that Britain was not the ‘benign’ coloniser so many seem to think – that bloodshed, massacres, 44% of us in a 2016 famine and slavery cannot be separated from Britain’s poll were ‘proud’ of ‘greatness’? Confronting this Britain’s history of history is necessary if we are to challenge the legacy of colonialism. This empire as it insidiously creeps would have been a up on us today.

problem whatever In this issue of Ninety-Nine we’ve taken a step back the Brexit result. to ask what Britain’s empire problem means for our work for global justice today. The treatment of the Windrush generation and the people of the Chagos Islands; how our government uses aid and trade as a way of administering new forms of wealth extraction; the suppression of movements attempting to put black stories at the forefront of British history; the failure to meaningfully apologise for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre 100 years on – many global justice issues are impacted by our failure to confront the continuities between the days of empire and Britain’s global role today.

It’s time we stepped out of fantasy-land.

Many of us have long been aware of these issues. But Brexit – and the way it is being carried out – makes it more urgent than ever. In these pages we have necessarily only scratched the surface. And we might not agree on everything. But the work of turning around the attitudes shown in that 2016 polling is vital for building a world based on co-operation, not exploitation, today.

Corporate America sets out hitlist for US-UK trade deal Lobbyists for US corporations have made more than 130 demands of the US government over a post-Brexit trade deal, an official report has revealed. The standard-slashing policies demanded include allowing meat filled with antibiotics and steroids onto UK shelves, as well as vegetables covered in chemical residues and milk with more pus in it.

US companies also want Britain to pay more for medicines, costing the NHS billions of pounds. They want new data rules allowing Big Tech to use and abuse our data at will. And they want more GMOs, worse chemical standards, plus a corporate court which can be used by US multinationals to challenge government decisions.

The demands were largely reflected in the formal negotiating objectives for a US-UK trade deal released publicly by the Trump administration in February. By contrast, Liam Fox’s Department for International Trade, which has held regular informal trade talks with the US and others in secret over the last two years, has released no negotiating objectives. Formal trade negotiations can begin the day after Brexit.

Sign the petition against a toxic trade deal with Trump: www.globaljustice.org.uk/UStradedeal

(l to r) Ann Pettifor, James O’Nions and Jason Hickel at the opening session.

CAMPAIGN NEWS

Degrowth conference draws a crowd

© British High Commission, New Delhi

In February, Global Justice Now’s climate network organised its first public event, on Growth, Degrowth and Climate Justice. Having originally booked a community centre in south London, the main venue had to be switched to a nearby church to accommodate the 250 people who turned up.

Our main speakers, economist Ann Pettifor and activist academic Jason Hickel, talked about how our current economic system is incompatible with tackling climate change, with Jason in particular laying out, starkly, the carbon emissions impact of continued economic growth. Workshops then followed up on the implications – what kind of economy do we need instead, and how might a post-growth economy relate to economic justice for countries in the global south?

The success of the conference has already drawn in new activists to our climate network who have started planning future activities. Meetings are in London at the moment, although it is possible to join by Skype. Email activism@globaljustice.org.uk if you’re interested.

To hear an audio recording of the opening session of the conference, go to: www.globaljustice.org.uk/soundcloud

Trade secretary Liam Fox has said “nothing is completely off the table” in US trade talks.

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CAMPAIGN NEWS

Putting pupils before profit Global Justice Now has teamed up with the National Education Union to launch a new campaign, Pupils Before Profit. The UK’s Department for International Development is a leading player in promoting education privatisation around the world, ploughing millions into private schools and schemes which expand the reach of the market. But this approach is failing children across the global south, and here in the UK as well.

Our new joint report, In Whose Interest?

The UK’s role in privatising education around the world, details the mounting evidence that education privatisation is promoting inequality, failing to deliver quality education, and undermining the public system. Instead of changing tack, the UK is currently exploring new ways of promoting privatisation through financing schemes and investing in publicprivate partnerships. This approach is part and parcel of the increasingly aggressive way the UK has been using its aid budget to promote business interests. It’s time we stood up to this together.

Take action at: www.globaljustice.org.uk/pupilsbeforeprofit

© Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

We joined education campaigners from around the world in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire in February.

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Campaigners stage a trade democracy tug of war outside the Department for International Trade. © Guy Smallman

Trade democracy breakthrough in House of Lords Global Justice Now has been campaigning to amend the government’s Trade Bill for over a year. The Bill currently gives no effective powers to parliament to scrutinise and approve post-Brexit trade deals, which could have far-reaching consequences for our food, our public services and our environment. A trade democracy amendment to give MPs a meaningful say over trade deals was narrowly defeated in the House of Commons last year.

After a long delay, the Bill finally progressed through the House of Lords at the start of the year. We wrote individually to each member of the House of Lords to remind them of the 70,000 signatories on our joint petition for trade democracy, while our staff and activists also lobbied key peers. And together with coalition partners, we won a major victory in March as the Lords successfully passed our amendment to the Bill.

As Ninety-Nine goes to press, the Bill is due to return to the House of Commons where a majority of MPs is needed to vote for the amendment for it to stay in the Bill and provide the democratic protections we desperately need.

Find out the latest at: www.globaljustice.org.uk/trade

CAMPAIGN NEWS

Legal victory as hostile environment ruled ‘discriminatory’ The movement against the government’s ‘hostile environment’ for migrants was given a big boost in March when the High Court found that one of its flagship policies was illegal.

The hostile environment policy was introduced in 2012 during Theresa May’s time as Home Secretary and has for years aimed to make life in the UK untenable for undocumented

migrants. Standing out amongst a number of draconian measures was the Right to Rent, which meant that if a landlord was found to be renting a property or a room to a so-called illegal immigrant they would be fined.

The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants began scrutinising and monitoring the scheme as it was rolled out around the country. They collected evidence showing that the Right to Rent was discriminatory against people of colour, people with accents and people with foreign-sounding names. They then took a crowdfunded judicial review against the Home Office.

At the beginning of March, the High Court ruled that Right to Rent was discriminatory and in breach of human rights laws. The scheme has been paused with immediate effect while the government considers whether to appeal.

Although Right to Rent is only the tip of the hostile environment iceberg, this victory is the biggest blow to Theresa May’s pet project so far. It should give confidence and energy to campaigners fighting the hostile environment across the country.

Find out more at: www.globaljustice.org.uk /hostile-environment

© David Mirzoeff

Protesting against the hostile environment outside the Home Office.

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GLOBAL NEWS MOVEMENT NEWS

UN court rules Britain should return ‘colonised’ Chagos Islands

© UK Chagos Support

Chagossians occupy Trafalgar Square to demand an end to half a century of injustice.

The UK’s claim of sovereignty over the Chagos Islands was ruled illegal in February by the international court of justice in The Hague.

Britain separated the Indian Ocean archipelago from its colony of Mauritius in 1968 and retained it after the formal end of the British Empire. At least 1,500

Chagossians were forcibly removed by the British in the 1970s to make way for a US air base at Diego Garcia. A British diplomatic cable at the time refers to the Chagos people as “some few Tarzans or Man Fridays”. Diego Garcia has been used to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq and implicated

in extraordinary rendition and torture as part of the ‘war on terror’.

The UN’s highest court, whose rulings are advisory, called for the UK to hand back the islands to Mauritius “as rapidly as possible”. The UK government said only that it will “look at the detail of the ruling carefully”.

Costa Rica sets out plan for zero emissions by 2050 Costa Rica launched its National Decarbonisation Plan in February, an economy-wide plan to put the country on track to be one of the first in the world to completely “decarbonise”. The Central American nation’s ambitious climate plan aims to reach zero emissions by 2050, including reaching 100% renewable energy by 2030.

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In the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paper presented at the UN climate negotiations in 2018, climate scientists warned that the world needs to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 50% in the next ten years.

Every government, especially from countries that have very high current and historical carbon emission levels, like the UK, must raise their ambitions.

National development plans must include Just Transition measures too. The Paris Agreement review, where governments will again make commitments to take actions for reducing emissions, will be discussed at the next climate negotiations in Chile this year. Climate justice movements will demand that others match and exceed Costa Rica's plan.

GLOBAL MOVEMENT GLOBAL NEWS

NEWS SHORTS Indians and Pakistanis #SayNoToWar in Kashmir

Amid the biggest military escalation in Kashmir for 20 years in March, Indians and Pakistanis responded with calls for peace when the hashtag #SayNoToWar began trending on social media. Pakistan and India have fought three wars since the partition of their countries by the British Empire in 1947 – two over the contested region of Kashmir.

Algerians rise up to force Bouteflika out of office

Armenians resist toxic gold mine despite being taken to ‘corporate court’ Residents of the mountainous Vayots Dzor province of Armenia are currently resisting a new gold mine, having successfully delayed construction on the Amulsar gold project for the past six months.

Blockades led by locals determined to defend their land and livelihoods against toxic mining residue are preventing AngloAmerican firm Lydian International from completing work on the site. Protestors are trying to push newly elected Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan – who came to power on the back of the country’s ‘velvet revolution’

last year – to come out against the project.

In March, however, Lydian launched legal proceedings against the Armenian government. Lydian are trying to use the threat of corporate courts – also known as Investor State Dispute Settlement – to bully Armenian politicians into backing the mine.

Yet locals are refusing to give up.

While corporate courts have, in the past, tipped the scales of justice in favour of big business, the battle in Armenia is just beginning.

Women around the world strike against gendered violence

Massive nationwide protests have been taking place in Algeria since 82-year-old President Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced plans to stand for a fifth term in February. The largely youthful protesters vowed to continue demanding fundamental change after Bouteflika stood down on 2 April. “This is just a little victory – the biggest is still to come,” one protester said.

Sudanese women take lead as protests remove Bashir

A wave of demonstrations has taken place in Sudan since December against Omar al-Bashir’s rule, as well as the country’s so-called ‘morality laws’ curtailing women’s rights. At least 50 protesters have been killed and hundreds imprisoned, with women forming a large part of the crowds.

Protests have continued after Bashir was removed by the army in April.

© Sedat Suna/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Women with a banner reading “We do not compromise with patriarchy. This is a feminist rebellion" march in Istanbul.

In March, activists around the world marked International Women’s Day by striking against misogyny in myriad different ways. There was anger and hope in equal measure as people from all walks of life protested injustice and gendered violence.

The slogan ni una menos (not one more), which began in Argentina in response to rising attacks on women, was on lips around the world. In Portugal, flags flew at half mast for victims of femicide; in India, there were mass marches for women’s

rights. Hundreds of thousands of women went on strike in Spain; in Turkey, where protesters demanded the release of imprisoned activists, crowds were teargassed by police.

For many of the protestors, gendered violence intertwines with many other systems of exploitation, most of all capitalism and colonialism. But this enormous global mobilisation gave voice to the women crying ‘no more’ to inequality, hatred, and bigoted violence.

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BREXIT

Brexit has unleashed Britain’s imperial demons Below: Jacob ReesMogg and other members of the European Research Group set out their vision of Global Britain, November 2018.

Opposite: Windrush solidarity protest in London, May 2018.

From attacks on the aid budget to the ongoing hostile environment for migrants, Brexit has given licence to a vision of ‘Global Britain’ that betrays Britain’s empire problem, writes NICK DEARDEN A section of Britain’s ruling establishment have never liked the European Union. As they see it, Britain’s entry into the EU was the real end of empire, an acceptance that we now needed to co-operate with other countries rather than sending in the gunboats.

Brexit, for the ideologues, was a chance to reassert Britain’s power, most especially by pushing deep free trade deals, embedding deregulation and asserting the City of London’s financial power and freedom around the world. And that’s just the start of this new ‘Global Britain’.

FREE TRADE EMPIRE Trade has always been central to building ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ – the name given to the low regulation, free market, financially-

driven Britain of which many Brexit leaders dream. After all, it was through trade that the British Empire was built. Today, Liam Fox, the UK’s International Trade Secretary, explicitly draws on this history when explaining his vision of Brexit and the ‘buccaneering Victorian spirit’ which made Britain great.

Much has been written on the threat of a US-UK trade deal, but Fox will also attempt the same type of deals with poorer countries than Britain – soaking up cheap food and basic resources that those countries require for their own development, and selling them back financial services at vastly over-inflated prices. That’s how empire worked – with a ‘core’ economy and a periphery.

Working groups have already started

© Jack Taylor/Ge

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tty Images

BREXIT discussing these trade deals, meeting in near total secrecy which neither MPs nor the public have the right to scrutinise. Gone is talk of trade as a tool of fighting poverty. In fact, fighting poverty has become a tool of promoting British trade.

ASSAULT ON AID Over the last three years, the whole concept of international development has been mercilessly attacked.

Successive international development secretaries have threatened to water down the rules governing the aid budget, and future Conservative leadership candidates are now lining up to criticise it.

Under Priti Patel, there was a move to use aid as a bargaining chip to secure trade deals for Britain and to push

British big business. It can, in other words, rebuild colonial relationships.

That is becoming an unapologetic feature of the way we do ‘international development’.

DEMONISING MIGRANTS The starkest illustration, though, of how Global Britain is based on all take and no give is on migration. Prime Minister Theresa May has made her career playing on the demonisation of migrants. Her most important legacy pre-Brexit is the creation of the ‘hostile environment’, under which life is to be made so intolerable for migrants that they leave the country.

The truth, of course, is that migration is inseparable

to stay part of EU deals with humans rights abusing or fragile states like Turkey, Libya and Egypt – governments we too often assist in their abuses by selling them weapons and surveillance equipment. Apparently the one aspect of the EU which the current government does like is the brutal external migration policy.

There we have ‘Global Britain’. A plan to live off the resources and labour of others, to oversee illegally earned capital flowing into the City of London from across the global south and to firmly shut the door on anyone who deems themselves worthy of living in this great land. We’ve surely been here before.

BRITAIN’S ROLE IN THE WORLD

© Steve Ea son/Fli

While this vision of Global Britain has existed since the fall of empire, Brexit has thrust it into the mainstream. That’s why it has never been more important to ensure our critique of empire is an integral part of our campaigns. Dreams of empire are clearly driving many senior politicians, both inside and outside the government, and we need to oppose not only the policies that they seek, but the assumptions about Britain’s role in the world which underlie them.

This debate has long been buried in our society. Brexit has opened the floodgates. But we can defeat this threat, and build a world where we work together with campaigners from right across the planet to create societies where everyone enjoys the dignity and freedom that is their birthright. It’s time to put Britain’s imperial demons back in their box. ckr

more aid into financial markets, helping secure the City of London’s role as the premier financial hub for the developing world. Aid is increasingly used to set up private schools and hospitals and to create new markets for British business.

The danger is that this kind of aid can force countries to be more dependent on British markets, British investment,

from our imperial history, as well as the actions of our government and businesses overseas today. “They are here because we are there”. The current Immigration Bill will extend the hostile environment to millions more migrants – this time from the EU. What’s more, it’s premised on a government strategy to keep as many people out of Britain as possible, by signing up

Nick Dearden is director of Global Justice Now.

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TRADE

Empire state of mind The chance for Britain to resume its glorious role as a proud trading nation is one of the defining myths of Brexit.

It obscures the reality of ‘free’ trade as an enabling tool of empire, a shameful history which Britain has never truly confronted, as RAHUL VERMA explains.

On 7 December, 2016, nearly six months after the referendum, Prime Minister Theresa May gave a speech to the Gulf Cooperation Council in Bahrain.

She said: “As Britain leaves the European Union so we intend to take a leap forward, to look outwards and seek to become the most committed and most passionate advocate of free trade in the world.”

May also cited the East India Company and while it may seem a peculiar and tone deaf reference – historian William Dalrymple describes ‘The Company’ as, "the supreme act of corporate violence in world history" – she was joining the dots between post-Brexit Britain, free trade and empire.

Why? Because May understood that the glories of Britain past – empire and free trade – underpin the fantasies of many Brexiteers. We’ve seen plans to build trade with Commonwealth African countries called

‘Empire 2.0’ and ministers including Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove and Liam Fox champion a new Royal Yacht Britannia (at a cost of £120 million) to rule the waves as Britain strikes trade deal after trade deal.

Where do we begin – or end – with explaining why evoking empire as the inspirational vision for Brexit Britain is grotesque? We could start with how Britain’s imperialism was founded on racist ideologies, white supremacy and brutal violence that racked up a black and brown bodycount in the tens of millions in a ruthless quest for power and capital.

©

Left to right: Edward Duncan’s painting of the East India Company iron steam ship Nemesis destroying Chinese war junks in Anson's Bay, 1843; Cape Coast Castle, one of about forty ‘slave castles’ built on the ‘Gold Coast‘ of West Africa (now Ghana). Its large underground dungeon held up to 1,000 slaves; Spiridione Roma’s The East Offering Her Riches to Britannia, 1778, commissioned by the East India Company for the ceiling of East India House in London, a panegyric to British colonial domination.

© National Maritime Museum, London

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TRADE

today’s money), for ‘loss of property’.

Slavery devastated the continent, causing depopulation and wars and instability, while the loss of tens of millions of men stunted agricultural production, leading to underdevelopment. Just 20 years after America abolished slavery in 1865, the ‘scramble for Africa’ began and by the early 20th century the vast majority of the entire continent was colonised – and looted – by European powers.

TRADE AND WAR exported around the world.

The British came in, smashed their thumbs and broke their looms, imposed tariffs and duties on their cloth and began flooding the world with manufactured cloth, the products of the dark and satanic mills of Victorian England,” said Tharoor.

“That meant the weavers became beggars and India went from being a world famous exporter of finished cloth to an importer. India’s share of the world economy when the British arrived on its shores [1600] was 23%, by the time it left [1947] it was down to less than 4%. Why? Because India was governed for the benefit of Britain,” explained the author of Inglorious Empire, a sobering account of the British Empire in India.

© B riti sh Li b ra r y

We could explain that our empire’s vision of free © Juliu s Cruickshank/ Wiki med ia trade was built on protectionism, with tariffs and duties imposed according to British interests and enforced by military might and naval supremacy. Looting – a Hindi word for ransacking – raw materials, labour and food, better describes the extractive and exploitative character of Britain’s empire.

Britain’s history of ‘free’ trade is a fantasy. The reality is a long, dark history of putting profit before people. It's something which continues today, with the UK supplying billions of pounds of arms to Saudi Arabia that have been used to bomb civilians in Yemen and have contributed to a humanitarian crisis where an estimated 85,000 children have died from starvation.

WEAVERS TO BEGGARS In a 2015 address to the Oxford Union, Indian MP and historian, Shashi Tharoor outlined how India’s world renowned textiles industry was dismantled by Britain.

“Britain’s industrial revolution was premised on the deindustrialisation of India. For example, the handloom weavers, whose products were

TRADING IN HUMANS However, it’s the transatlantic slave trade that is the most shocking example of the British Empire’s sacrificing of black lives at the altar of profit. Between 15 million and 20 million Africans were shackled and forcibly transported from West Africa to the Caribbean, central America and South America. When Britain abolished its trade in human beings in 1833, 245 years after it began, the government compensated British slave owners £20 million (£17 billion in

The mid-19th century Opium Wars capture how Britain’s ‘free trade’ crusade overwhelmingly served Britain’s interest. Britain declared war on China to protect the eyewatering revenues of its merchants who monopolised the lucrative opium trade. The East India Company forced desperate farmers in India to grow poppies (when they could be growing food to sell and eat), ran vast opium processing factories and the trade with China, where millions were ravaged by opium addiction.

When Britain’s warships defeated China in 1842, China was forced to accept free trade, including the damaging, morally bankrupt trade in opium. This is a glimpse of what British ‘free trade’ looked like and why it’s deeply troubling to see it and empire being lauded by politicians.

Colonialism and its free trade zealotry established the framework of globalised neoliberalism today, with inequality and pillaging of the global south its defining traits.

EMPIRE STATE OF MIND Since the sun set on empire, Britain has failed to have a meaningful and open discussion about it and how it’s shaped the world today, whether migration in Britain, the slave trade, free trade, its marauding nature, the Opium Wars, concentration camps in South Africa, the Partitions of Ireland,

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TRADE describe Britain’s stance as “we want Palestine and India, or why regions of your business, we don’t want your West Africa were known as the gold people”. coast, ivory coast, grain coast and slave coast (as 20-year-old rapper, EDUCATION, EDUCATION, Dave, notes in his track 'Black').

EDUCATION Instead our institutions display an Education would help to redress the empire state of mind – it’s evident in impact of the colonial propaganda the treatment of Windrush citizens, project, Operation Legacy, which British citizens illegally turfed out systematically destroyed millions because of their of empire skin colour, the documents, Since the sun set Foreign Office’s and is surely a recent recruitment on empire, Britain contributing drive with adverts factor in a near asking, “Fancy has failed to have majority of Britons an African a meaningful and saying empire adventure?”, and was a good a racist criminal open discussion thing in public justice system. about it and how polling today.

This mindset is Teaching damaging trade it’s shaped the empire in schools talks: today Indian and universities world today. companies own from myriad Jaguar, Land perspectives is not only a necessity to Rover and Tetley, and thousands of unpick the empire fantasies inherent steel workers' jobs in Port Talbot are in Britain’s national character, but in the hands of Indian multinational because nearly one in ten giant Tata. And yet sources close to people in Britain has trade talks between India and the UK

heritage in places Britain plundered; it is our collective history.

There are grassroots initiatives doing this work and stimulating muchneeded discussion and analysis of empire, such as the decolonising movement in universities, Colonial Countryside and Our Migration Story. In time we might see the end of empire nostalgia being used to sell us stuff, such as Marks & Spencer ‘Empire Pie’ and Gourmet Burger Kitchen ‘Old Colonial Burger’, and slave auction worksheets being used in a secondary school.

Brexit may have bored us to tears, but it’s revealed 21st century Britain is haunted by the ghosts of empire and rather than being used to Make Britain Great Again, surely they need to be laid to rest.

Rahul Verma is a writer and editor with a strong interest in migration and empire.

Rahul established the Twitter account Everyday_Empire to catalogue the myriad, weird ways in which empire is glorified in Britain today.

The Prime Minister hailing free trade in Bahrain in December 2016.

© REUTERS/Hamad I Mohammed

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Reclaim our futu ce Now activism Justi Get involved with Global

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Global Justice Now ally the root causes of the climate darity tice Now helps Trade union branches, local soli Being a member of Global Jus branches and issues, but have organisations, political par ty make a difference on all these se who a step further? There Peace and Justice groups are among tho you considered taking things local ally of Global in our activist have already signed up as a are lots of ways to get involved active in one of Justice Now. If you’re already net work. why not sign it up to these types of organisations, See 1. Join a local group our Internationalist Net work? es typ nt ere diff of nalist-network Ou r local groups organi se lots w.globaljustice.org.uk/internatio ww ir the ngs to lobbyi ng of activities, from film screeni ring 4. Come to our na tional ga the er and engagi ng MP, to join ing protes ts togeth Birmingham for cam paigns. Find On Saturday 8 June we’ll be in their local com mu nity with our M, which is open r you at our national gathering. Our AG out if there’s a local group nea the morning, then act-local-g roup to all members, takes place in ww w.g lobaljustice.org.uk/cont knowledgeable in the afternoon we’ll hear from wa nt to get still you but t, isn’ re the if And ing Gyekye Tanoh international speakers, includ tea m and we’ll involved, contact the activis m and Pia Eberhardt (Third World Net work, Ghana) wo rks for you: t tha ing eth som to you ct dire ry, Brussels). It’s a (Corporate Europe Observato baljustice.org.uk 020 782 0 490 0 or activis m@ glo way to find out public conference and a great rk two gns for global 2. Join our climate justice ne more about the latest campai in rly ula eting reg economic justice.

A group of activis ts is now me ng gni pai vents cam ate See www.globaljustice.org.uk/e our London office to take clim . ner ban tice Now forward under the Glo bal Jus

what’s Global Justice Now at 50: rsa ry of Glo bal Nex t yea r it’s the 50th ann ive rld Develo pment Jus tice Now (originally the Wo to put together Movement), and we’re loo king of our movement an exh ibition to tell the sto ry 1970. since it wa s first establ ished in mo ries about the So, if you have sta nd- out me ng with us over hig hs and lows of cam paigni get in touch. Fro m the last five decades, please und, to the sto ry old leaflet s you have lying aro

your highlight?

h you r MP or of you r first protes t, meeting wit ds about inju stice, experience of cha ngi ng min we’d love to hea r from you.

Now, Write to us at Global Jus tice , email 66 Offley Roa d, London SW9 0LS k or pho ne on offleyroad @globaljustice.org.u 020 782 0 490 0.

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GLOBAL MOVEMENTS

Decolonising our movements Many of the racial, economic and social injustices we see today are rooted in empire’s legacy. It’s only through decolonising our minds, our institutions and our movements that we’ll be able to create a truly just and equal world, writes NONHLANHLA MAKUYANA. I am a migrant woman from Zimbabwe, a country which formed part of the British Empire until its independence in 1980. A country whose natural resources were plundered, land and people stolen and where tyrannical neo-colonial leaders continue to deny Zimbabweans justice after colonialism. There are over a million displaced Zimbabweans across the world today, fleeing a country caught in the continuing legacies of colonialism and empire.

Decolonising is a movement. It helps make sense of stories, like mine, that are all too often erased from our shared understanding of the atrocities of empire. It is vital for transformative social change today. In reclaiming silenced narratives, we’re able to tackle systemic and structural problems with a historical understanding of empire. Rather than maintaining power imbalances that continue to exist because of the legacy of empire, our movements must push for transformational change. Decolonising can be a tool to achieve this.

INDEPENDENCE ISN’T ENOUGH Slavery may have been abolished and countries in the global south may have been made independent between the 1950s and 1980s, but the colonial mindset has not ended with empire. Leaders and thinkers from the global south such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o didn’t see independence as enough to end the oppressive systems left in place by colonialism. They emphasised the continuity of colonial legacies and the need to dismantle them across all spheres

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of life in an effort to ensure justice for all. This led to a worldwide movement to decolonise; to challenge the colonial mindset and the continued legitimisation of institutional racism in our universities, workplaces and institutions at large.

We live in a country in which our own government Rather than tells warped stories of Britain’s maintaining power empire and involvement in slavery, tweeting in 2018: imbalances that ‘surprising #FridayFact. Millions of you helped end the slave continue to exist trade through your taxes’. Yet because of the when slavery was abolished, it was slave owners who were legacy of empire, compensated with taxpayers’ our movements money, while at the centre of abolition were black radicals must push for who fought for their freedom. transformational By decolonising just this tweet, we can begin to examine change. Decolonising the institutions that enable can be a tool to inequality in the UK today. We learn, for example, that the achieve this. economy is racist – predicated on historic systems of the oppression of black people.

Colonial legacies continue to uphold white privilege whilst maintaining the structural disadvantage of black people in our economy. This harsh and unequal Opposite: Students cheer as the statue of of British system is further emphasised with the reality imperialist Cecil Rhodes is of racial disadvantage today where BAME removed from the University of Cape Town in South (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) families Africa in April 2015, a major earn nearly £9,000 a year less than their moment in the global decolonising movement.

GLOBAL MOVEMENTS white British counterparts. Slavery and empire built the British economy, yet that economy is designed to disadvantage them. The behaviour of institutions is structural and rooted in Britain’s imperial past: rooted in white supremacy, elitism and patriarchy. By contextualising institutions within the history of empire, we are able to see the intersecting nature of structural disadvantage for many people of colour today.

What does decolonising look like?

The movement to decolonise is a global one. It has many different faces and tactics for change, down to the differing ways that colonialism has left its footprint across the world.

In South Africa the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) are fighting for land expropriation without compensation. Colonial legacies have meant that 72% of the nation’s private farmland is owned by white people who make up 9% of the population. EFF are decolonising land ownership by pointing out that white farmers should not be compensated for stolen land during colonialism, stating that would be “rewarding murderers”.

In the US, Black Americans are organising against the harsh economic exclusion faced by black people – a legacy of slavery characterised by a lack of jobs, living wages and workers' rights. Initiatives like Cooperation Jackson are looking to the long history of cooperatives and other forms of worker-owned enterprises from the African community to create communityowned cooperatives. They have created jobs to build communities previously neglected by the state, in doing so continuing the struggle for self-determination, economic justice and democratic rights for the marginalised.

In the UK, students are decolonising the education system, pointing to the absence of stories from the global south in curricula.

Last December Reroot.ED, the youth-led campaign to decolonise secondary school education, occupied Parliament Square to deliver a teach-out. Young people brought

their stories to the session in order to address racial injustice in England.

A lot can be gained through decolonising the lasting effects of empire in all aspects of British society.

Through a collective confrontation of Britain’s colonial past, we can learn a lot about the ways in which structural racism is written into institutions and how this racism is legitimised by the colonial mindset and its centring of white privilege. In fighting for a just world, decolonising should be our primary tool as it gets to the core of inequality in the UK and internationally, making sure justice is for all and not just those who’ve structurally benefited from the legacies of colonialism.

Nonhlanhla Makuyana is a facilitator, organiser and artist with a passion for reclaiming erased histories of marginalised peoples as central to transformative social change.

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IN PICTURES

Jallianwala Bagh: 100 years on

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An exhibition in Manchester is marking the 100th anniversary of the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, which has come to symbolise the brutality of the British Empire. Words by RADHIKA PATEL.

Jallianwala Bagh 1919: Punjab under Siege runs from 11 April to 2 October 2019 at the Manchester Museum, www.museum.manchester.ac.uk. The exhibition is co-curated with the Partition Museum, Amritsar.

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© Imperial War Museum

On 13 April 1919, tens of thousands of Indians gathered at Jallianwala Bagh, a square in Amritsar, Punjab, to celebrate a religious festival and peacefully protest against new laws imposed by the British banning freedom of assembly and protest.

Troops under the command of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer blocked off exits, opened fire and massacred at least 500 unarmed men, women and children within minutes, wounding three times as many. It was a bloodbath.

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre laid bare the violence inherent in imperial conquest and the posturing that the British were ever a benign coloniser. The British had introduced repressive laws in many parts of India in fear of an increasingly unified movement for independence.

“It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd,” Dyer later wrote, “but one of producing a sufficient moral effect, from a military point of view, not only on those who were present but more specially throughout the Punjab.

There could be no question of undue severity.”

For years many people have called for formal apology. In February 2019 the House of Lords – where General Dyer was exonerated in a 1920 debate on the massacre – held a brief debate over the question. Speaker after speaker quoted Winston Churchill’s condemnation of the massacre, which he claimed was a unique event “in singular and sinister isolation” which was simply “not the British way of doing business”.

Yet if Churchill – a man who blamed the Bengal famine which killed around 2 million Indians not on his own actions but on the Indians who “breed like rabbits” – can be the figurehead of an apology, then it is not an apology worth having. It becomes a way to reaffirm the idea of Britain and empire as – predominantly – a force for good in the world.

As the debate about how to understand this event continues, the real question is: will it take another 100 years for the British government to come to terms with the true nature of its bloody empire?

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© Nehru Memorial Museum and Library

© Nehru Memorial Museum and Library

IN PICTURES

© Nehru Memorial Museum and Library

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© The Ska Vengers

© Nehru Memorial Museum and Library

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1. Scenes of Jallianwala Bagh in 1919.

Bullet holes are still visible on the walls today.

2. General Reginald Dyer, who orchestrated the massacre in 1919.

3. A poster encouraging Indians to join the British Army during World War I. Many of these men were members of Dyer’s force at Jallianwala Bagh.

Translation: “This soldier is defending Hindustan. He is protecting his home and family. The best way to help your family is to join the army.”

4. Lieutenant Governor of Punjab Michael O’Dwyer had for many years firmly opposed the Indian demand for self-governance, clamped down harshly on protests and censored the press. Having dispatched Dyer and his troops to Jallianwala Bagh, he defended Dyer’s actions as an appropriate response to what he considered to be a challenge to British authority and the menace of a mass uprising.

5. More than twenty years after the massacre, anti-colonial activist

Udham Singh travelled to London and assassinated O’Dwyer. In March 1940 he was tried and convicted of murder in Britain and hanged. “He wanted to crush the spirit of my people, so I have crushed him,” he said at the trial. “I have seen my people starving in India under the British rule. I have protested against this, it was my duty.”

6. The Ska Vengers are a New Delhi based band. This is a still from their first single which marked the anniversary of the hanging of Udham Singh, on whom the track is based.

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MIGRATION

Britain stole the Chagos Islands from my mother. Now it could deport my daughter It is nearly 50 years since the people of the Chagos Islands were forcibly removed by the British. Now their grandchildren, like JEANETTE VALENTIN’s daughter, are facing Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’.

Today, only those born on Chagos or who had a parent born there can get a British passport. So because of the deportations which ruined my mother’s life, my daughters, who have lived in the UK since 2014 but were not born here, are not entitled to British citizenship. And now they – like my mother – are facing deportation to Seychelles, a country where they would be alone, with no family support and few opportunities, as part of Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ for migrants.

la and Nesta, Jeanette Valentin and her daug hters Taniel . who are being threatened with deportation

For decades Chagossians have been demanding the right to return to our homeland. It is a shameful unresolved legacy of Empire. After 45 years of legal challenges, the Foreign Office told us in 2016 that we cannot do so. But how can it be right for the UK government to say we cannot go home and we cannot stay here in Britain either?

A private members bill before parliament, tabled by Henry Smith MP, would change the law to allow the grandchildren of deported

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Chagos Islanders to access British citizenship. It would give my daughters – and thousands of Chagossians in the same position – the right to live in the UK. The Home Secretary Sajid Javid has said he’ll consider making these changes but so far has done nothing. © Jeanette Valentin

I am a British citizen, my family comes from the Chagos Islands, a set of islands in the Indian Ocean colonised by the British in 1814. In the early 1970s my family – and everyone on Chagos – were forcibly removed from the islands by the British government to make way for an American air base, Diego Garcia. My mother was given no compensation and abandoned in Seychelles, where I was born and grew up in extreme poverty.

As part of the decision to refuse us the right of return, the British government apologised for the removal of my mother’s generation from Chagos.

But if they are really sorry, they will take action to stop my children suffering the consequences today. This injustice has gone on for far too long.

Write to the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, at: www.globaljustice.org.uk/chagos Jeanette Valentin is a Chagossian and member of the UK Chagos Support Association, www.chagossupport.org.uk.

REVIEWS

Reviews INGLORIOUS EMPIRE: WHAT THE BRITISH DID TO INDIA Shashi Tharoor Penguin, 2017

BOOK OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE All About History Future Plc, 2019 (Fourth Edition) There is no better rationale for why Global Justice Now runs the campaigns we do than this ‘bookazine’, widely available on the high street.

That the British Empire is still being sold as a positive achievement, spreading language and culture around the world, points to a profound inability on the part of this country to face up to its past – and a reason why Brexit has dominated our political debate for the last 3 years.

“The incredible story of the empire that dominated the world for 500 years” is actually a tale of toxic trade relationships, big business, warfare, footloose financial interests and exploitation. We need to face up to this history, not to celebrate it, but to show why the campaign for fundamentally different global rules is so important.

Only then can we can begin to redress the damage caused by the British Empire, sadly still important to many people’s sense of identity 70 years after its collapse.

Nick Dearden

If, like me, the main thing you were taught at school about the British in India was ‘the Black Hole of Calcutta’, then this book is a vital corrective. It expands on a talk Tharoor gave in Oxford in 2015 on Britain’s vast moral debt to India for 200 years of colonialism, which to his surprise went viral.

One by one Tharoor debunks the familiar arguments used by apologists for empire to argue that what the British did to India was A Good Thing – bringing political unity, the rule of law, a common language, even railways and cricket, as part of a civilising mission. Rather, Britain looted and deliber-

ately deindustrialised India to finance its own Industrial Revolution, while its economic policies caused famines that killed 30-35 million Indians.

Above all, Tharoor skewers the myth of British exceptionalism, that somehow Britain’s empire was not as brutal as all the others. In the aftermath of Brexit, he says, “the need to temper British imperial nostalgia with postcolonial responsibility has never been greater.”

Jonathan Stevenson

RHODES MUST FALL: THE STRUGGLE TO DECOLONISE THE RACIST HEART OF EMPIRE Rhodes Must Fall Oxford ZED Books, 2018 When the Rhodes Must Fall movement began in South Africa in 2015, it made headlines. Protests focused on toppling the statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes led to a global movement to decolonise education and to end the glorified legacy of empire. These are the first-hand accounts of the students at the heart of it.

Split into three parts – the Oxford University movement, sister movements in the UK and global reflections from Palestine to West Papua – this book connects what sometimes feels like separate challenges to empire into a collective struggle to decolonise

not just our education, but our institutions as a whole.

Some of the most poignant parts are the reflections on who should lead the movement. From issues of antiblackness to the systemic shutting out of queer black women, there are critical learnings. This book is selfreflective and self-critical. And that, to me, is how we start decolonising.

Radhika Patel

nder lu p e t a r o p r o c e h t Stopping et of people and plan ork africa

third World netw h o n a T e y k e y G rope Observatory eu te ra o rp o C t d r Pia Eberha lobal Justice now G n e d r a e D k Nic Saturday 8 June 2019

Birmingham and Midland Institute 9 Margaret Street, Birmingham B3 3BS

globaljustice.org.uk/events

Images: Jiří Sedláček BY-SA 4.0; Marianna Cartaxo/Midia Ninja BY-NC-SA 2.0; Joe Brusky BY-NC 2.0. Composite design: revangeldesigns.co.uk

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