A few notes on the Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners meeting

What I witnessed yesterday at the Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners meeting was a disgrace and an affront to democracy.

In a packed house, as citizen after citizen rose to voice to their opposition to the city's collaboration with the Trump administration's nakedly racist policies targeting immigrants, Muslims and others - and to express that there are now whole communities in Miami that are living in fear - the speakers were consistently cut off and silenced by Commissioner Esteban L. Bovo, Jr., who presided over the meeting with the glittering arrogance of colonial proconsul addressing his imperial subjects. 

As voter after voter spoke - some removed from the Chamber by Bovo even though they were no way being disruptive, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez ignored the proceedings entirely, standing off to one side laughing and joking with his cronies. The dynamic finally erupted into a walkout and protest by many of those assembled (including me).

For those interested who would like to see video confirmation of my story, I posted three videos of the meeting and the aftermath that I took with my phone here.

The Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners has clearly forgotten who they work, so I suggest from here on out we remind them, not just on voting day but at every meeting henceforth. They work for us, the city of Miami, and we always have been and remain a city and a county of immigrants and a refuge for the persecuted, all the stronger for our diversity. 

This will not pass. Ni un paso atrás.

A few photos from the Democratic Republic of Congo

RIGHTS: In South Africa, Zimbabwean Refugees Find Sanctuary and Contempt

RIGHTS: In South Africa, Zimbabwean Refugees Find Sanctuary and Contempt

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

JOHANNESBURG, May 4, 2008 (IPS) - As the autumn sun sets over South Africa's most populous city, the halls of downtown Johannesburg's Central Methodist Mission fill with weary figures, many far from home, seeking solace within its walls.

On every spare inch of space on the floors and narrow staircase of the mission -- and on the pavement outside -- the destitute curl up to find shelter as best they can from the chill wind that moves between the tall buildings in this city. Mixed in among them every night are hundreds of refugees from South Africa's northern neighbour, Zimbabwe, who have fled their country's slow-motion economic and political implosion.

"We sleep outside in the streets. Sometimes we spend days without eating anything; we spend weeks without working," says Owen Muchanyo, a 23-year-old secondary school teacher of mathematics and science from Chitungwiza, a town south of Zimbabwe's capital, Harare.

He has been in South Africa for three months. "It's better to sleep on the streets, where my life is somewhat safe, than to sleep in a house when my life is in danger."

Read the full article here.

"We Mustn't Think as South Africans That We Have Won the Day": An interview with Paul Verryn

"We Mustn't Think as South Africans That We Have Won the Day": An interview with Paul Verryn

Inter Press Service

JOHANNESBURG, May 4, 2008 (IPS) - Bishop Paul Verryn, who directs the Central Methodist Mission in Johannesburg, South Africa, has long been on the frontlines of the country's political struggles.

Born in 1952 in the capital city of Pretoria, Verryn came of age during the most contentious days of the fight against apartheid. After completing military training, he entered the ministry, working in the Eastern Cape Province for 11 years.

Verryn's experiences there as the chairman of the Detainees Parents' Support Committee -- which sought to aid the thousands of South Africans detained without trial at the time -- and the murder of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko while in police custody in August 1977 served as something of a political awakening for the young cleric.

Transferred to the sprawling black settlement of Soweto in Johannesburg in 1987, Verryn has continued to live there until this day.

His criticism of the powerful continued with the advent of democracy in South Africa; many recall his tearful testimony before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1997 regarding the involvement of Winnie Mandela, former wife of anti-apartheid hero and then South African president Nelson Mandela, in the kidnapping and murder of Stompie Moeketsi.

The 14-year-old anti-apartheid activist was seized from Verryn's Soweto mission by Mrs Mandela's bodyguards in 1988, and his battered body later found in a ditch. Winnie Mandela was eventually convicted of involvement in Moeketsi's kidnapping.

Today, as director of the Central Methodist Mission, Verryn has taken up another cause: the plight of immigrants to South Africa from Zimbabwe, a country that has been blighted by political violence and economic degeneration in recent years. Having thrown open the doors of his mission to these new arrivals, he saw the building raided in a controversial police action earlier this year, but has refused stop providing shelter and assistance to the Zimbabweans as they stream southward.

IPS correspondent Michael Deibert sat down with Verryn to hear his thoughts on how the mission was meeting this and other challenges.

Read the full article here.

The ghost of the St. Louis sails through the Negev

In 1939, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States of America, denied permission to the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner, to land in Florida after being refused entrance into Cuba. The St. Louis had as its cargo nearly a thousand Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe, the majority of them German. Later refused entry into Canada, as well, the ship returned to Europe. Though 288 passengers disembarked in England, 619 people found themselves back in continental Europe as the Holocaust commenced and a dark night that would last six long years for European Jewry descended.

Today, in Sudan’s Darfur region, a crisis that initially centered around the Sudanese government's response to two non-Arab rebel groups waging war against the Arab regime in Khartoum has since grown in intensity and scope into a conflict that has claimed an estimated 200,000 lives, mainly civilians, since 2003. Sudanese military and government-aligned Janjaweed militia forces are accused of carrying out war crimes against the civilian population in the region, while the rebel groups themselves have splintered and re-formed with dizzying speed and in an ever-shifting array of alliances. In March of this year alone, Janjaweed forces crossing into neighboring Chad were said to have killed up to 400 people. Many human rights groups have charged that what the government of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashiral is doing in Darfur constitutes a genocide against the region’s non-Arab population.

On Sunday, it was announced that Israel, founded by people like those who had been turned away aboard the MS St. Louis, would henceforth be turning away all refugees from Darfur attempting to cross into the country via its southern border with Egypt. Israel began implementing this policy by expelling 50 Sudanese asylum seekers yesterday. This is in direct violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 which states that a nation “shall not treat as enemy aliens exclusively on the basis of their nationality de jure of an enemy State, refugees who do not, in fact, enjoy the protection of any government.”

Could any Israeli politician stand up and reasonably argue that the refugees huddled on the ground near Nitzana enjoy the protection of the Sudanese state, which has historically been hostile to Israel?

One is glad to to see Israeli human rights organizations such as the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and the Hotline for Migrant Workers, as well as student activists, protesting these moves of their government, apparently taken with almost no historical memory of the experiences of persecuted peoples in mind. They might likewise do well to study that advice of the Talmud Yerushalmi, which suggests that "he who saves a single life, saves the entire world."

For more information on the crisis in Darfur, please visit the websites of the Save Darfur coalition in the United States or the website for the Collectif Urgence Darfour here in France.