On 21 March 1960 the South African police opened fire on a crowd of black protesters who were part of political campaign organized by the Pan African Congress (PAC) against pass laws. It is estimated that 69 people were killed on that day in the township of Sharpeville. This horrific event is commonly known as Sharpeville Massacre .

Sharpeville massacre was the turning point in the history of political resistance to Apartheid in South Africa. Since 1994, 21 March is Human Rights Day in South Africa. March 21 is also the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in memory of the massacre.

Every March 21st, Rethabile posts his own poem to remember Sharpeville massacre. His Sharpeville poem for this year is posted on Black Looks:

the day king walked
from selma to montgomery,
the tops of trees shook
as in a forest, and shivered
for this man who had crossed a line
of centuries in the south, but
even more south, we worried for our lot,
resolved as we were to break you,
but you to put us with our ancestors.
of course there have never been questions:
why shoot them in the back? why shoot them?
why shoot? why? but our name got its shrine
where the children now gather,
for sixty-nine of us lay on the street
on that day in march sixty. as others
filled hospitals and covered cell-floors
with clenched bodies, dachau
was completed, stowe published her book,
alcatraz was shut down for good, and
we moved from non-whites
to non-carriers of passbooks.
© Rethabile Masilo

He also posts a poem by South African political activist and poet Dennis Brutus. It is titled, “A Poem About Sharpeville”:

What is important
about Sharpeville
is not that seventy died:
nor even that they were shot in the back
retreating, unarmed, defenseless
and certainly not
the heavy caliber slug
that tore through a mother’s back
and ripped through the child in her arms
killing it
Remember Sharpeville
bullet-in-the-back day
Because it epitomized oppression
and the nature of society
more clearly than anything else;
it was the classic event
Nowhere is racial dominance
more clearly defined
nowhere the will to oppress
more clearly demonstrated
what the world whispers
apartheid with snarling guns
the blood lust after
South Africa spills in the dust
Remember Sharpeville
Remember bullet-in-the-back day
And remember the unquenchable will for freedom
Remember the dead
and be glad.
© Dennis Brutus

Travel Blog Portfolio wishes all South Africans a safe and peaceful Human Rights day and ask them to learn more about Sharpeville Day.

How could such atrocities happen and no one is punished?, asks Sokari Ekine:

It’s been a long time coming, but change is gonna come, sang Sam Cooke about America. He could have been singing about South Africa, or the world, even. For what is baffling is how Sharpeville 1960, Soweto 1976, King’s and X’s murders, the Civil Rights movement, Mandela’s 27 years in jail, not to mention the thousands tortured and killed in South Africa, and tortured and lynched in America, what is baffling is how these have not entered the minds of all and instructed them on the evils of discrimination and segregation in all its forms. That is truly baffling to me.

It is also amazingly stunning that all these things happened and almost no one got punished for it, no international hunt for the wrong-doers, no motivation to see them “brought to justice,” as George Bush the son would say about so many who had committed so less. Today is a day to remember and to know why it should be remembered

Alpha Christian discusses the link between Good Friday, Human Rights Day and Sharpeville Day:

In a recent column in the Beeld, Nico Botha, deals with this anomaly where the Good Friday falls on the same date as the Human Rights Day, or, even better, the commemoration of Sharpeville Day. For many the debate was whether we will loose a public holiday as workers.

Where are we to find the key to link Good Friday to the significance of today, Human Rights day, Sharpeville day ?
I believe the little dialogue between Jesus and Pilate helps us to start to understand this link.

Michael Trapido remembers this day in his post on Thought Leader titled Sharpeville Redux and a Bit More:

On that fateful day a group of between 5 000 and 7 000 people converged on the local police station in the township of Sharpeville, offering themselves up for arrest for not carrying their pass books.

As the large crowd gathered the atmosphere was peaceful and festive with less than 20 police officers in the station at the start of the protest. Police and military tried using low-flying jet fighters in an attempt disperse the crowd without success.

As a result the police set up Saracen armoured vehicles in a line facing the protesters and, at 13:15, incredibly, opened fire on the crowd.

He continues:

The official casualties were 69 people killed, including 8 women and 10 children, with more than 180 injured.

To date the worst case of police insanity in the history of this country.

As a result there followed a spontaneous uprising among black South Africans with demonstrations, protest marches, strikes, and riots taking place throughout the country.

This led to the government declaring a state of emergency on March 30 1960, which saw more than 18 000 people detained.

Texas In Africa notes that Sharpeville was the first major turning point in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and that the massacre led to the militarisation of the anti-apartheid movement:

The rest of the world started to question the regime's racist policies much more openly; South Africa left the commonwealth a year later.

It also provoked the militarization of the anti-apartheid movement. The ANC's militant wing, MK (Umkhonto wa Sizwe) and Poqo, the military wing of the PAC, both formed soon after the massacre. The next thirty years were marked with horrific acts of violence before - to almost everyone's surprise - the evil of apartheid ended peacefully.

Five years later to the day, American civil rights protesters led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. began marching from Selma to Montgomery. The attempt by 600 marchers to do the same thing three weeks earlier culminated in Bloody Sunday, an attack by local and state law enforcement officials. With a protective order from a federal judge, five times as many marchers turned out for the March 21 walk. A few months later, LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act, which effectively ended the last vestiges of legal discrimination in the south.

My students (whom, you will remember, are almost all black men) sometimes debate the question: “Are you a Malcolm or a Martin?” What they mean by this is, “Is social change best achieved through peaceful means (as MLK carried out his work) or violent means (as Malcolm X advocated)?”

I cannot even begin to claim to be qualified to answer this question. If we look at political history, it's clear that MLK's nonviolent methods worked to restore voting rights and some degree of social equality for American minorities, and they worked relatively quickly. MK and Poqo's violent methods certainly also had an effect on the apartheid regime, although the struggle was very long and ultimately did not end because of violence but rather because of economic turmoil and Mandela's willingness to negotiate a peaceful settlement with de Klerk. But nothing approaching true equality of economic opportunity has happened for the vast majority of blacks in either country.

Abioye discusses the international dimension of Sharpeville Day:

In 1966 the General Assembly of the UN proclaimed March 21, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The UN called on the international community to redouble its efforts to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination. The Canadian government and various institutions in Canada including Carleton University and the University of Toronto, colluded with the white supremacist apartheid government of South Africa by refusing to
divest and continuing to trade with the government and South African companies.

South Africa Good News has posted a statement from Nelson Mandela Foundation:

March 21, 2010, marks 50 years since 69 unarmed protestors were killed by South African police outside a police station in Sharpeville, south of Johannesburg.

Nelson Mandela burning his pass on March 28, 1960, in protest to the atrocities at SharpevilleWhen commemorating Human Rights day, during his presidency, Nelson Mandela said: “21 March is South African Human Rights Day. It is a day which, more than many others, captures the essence of the struggle of the South African people and the soul of our non-racial democracy. March 21 is the day on which we remember and sing praises to those who perished in the name of democracy and human dignity. It is also a day on which we reflect and assess the progress we are making in enshrining basic human rights and values.”

Austin Heap, the programmer from California, explains how he created Haystack, the software that broke the grip of Iran's censors after the disputed 2009 election

If you imagined a computer hacker with the know-how to topple governments, you might well picture someone who looks a lot like Austin Heap. He's a 26-year-old programmer from San Francisco with long wavy hair, wearing jeans, T-shirt and aviator sunglasses the morning we meet. He is also the creator of a piece of software called Haystack, which was a key technology used by Iranians to disseminate information outside the country in the protests that followed the disputed election result in June 2009, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unconvincingly triumphed against three challengers.

The Iranian government already filtered its citizens' email and Skype conversations, but in the aftermath of the election, such censorship was increased in an attempt to identify dissidents who were using the web to organise and communicate with each other and with the outside world.

A tech wunderkind originally from Ohio, Heap developed Haystack to open up social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, giving voices on the streets a platform, and people in the west a window into a closed-down state. He's now the executive director of the Censorship Research Centre in San Francisco, a non-profit organisation founded with his colleague Daniel Colascione to provide anti-censorship education, outreach, and technology for free to those who need it most.

What is Haystack and how does it work?

Haystack is a piece of software that someone in Iran runs on his or her computer. It does two things: first, it encrypts all of the data; second it hides that data inside normal traffic so it looks like you're visiting innocuous sites. Daniel and I developed Haystack by looking at how the regime was using technology to filter the internet, and figured out the best strategy to get around it.

Why did you decide to take on the regime?

I remember the day of the election, sitting around watching Twitter, watching what was going on, reading the election results and thinking, that looks weird. Then I realised that the internet censorship had stepped up more than normal. I thought, hey, I can set up a few proxies and help a few people out. While I'm at it, why not post instructions online so other people could use their computers to get around the government filtering.

Imagine what you can do if you can watch someone's internet connection: you can watch them log into GMail, you can watch them log into Facebook, you can see who they're talking to, you can intercept messages. That's why the encryption part of Haystack was really important. It had to start on the user's side, on their computers. Then it makes its way through the government filters.

Were you politically motivated?

No. I just remember sitting there watching the election results thinking, why are they violently reacting to people who were voting? It's not like they were just jailing people; they were killing people in the streets – people who had a different opinion, people who wanted to share their stories and voice what they thought was right. It shocked me that someone would retaliate in such an inhumane way, and for someone to use the internet as a tool of oppression, as a tool to stop dialogue.

I gather that according to US law, it was illegal to export Haystack to Iran, simply because it would flout Iranian laws – but it did virally make its way onto Iranian computers...

I'll never forget the first person who got a copy of Haystack and sent me a screenshot of Twitter. All of a sudden, the internet was open again. Haystack also allowed people to make Skype calls back to their families securely. It allowed people to send GMail without worrying that someone would try to steal their password or monitor their communication. It gave them a layer of protection that allowed the random person to be a citizen journalist and to do so without the risk of persecution, jail or torture.

Is there content that shouldn't be spread around the web?

The internet is used for anything from drug trafficking to human trafficking. That's completely wrong. But when you decide that you're going to support an open internet, you have to open all of it. You can't go down this slippery slope of saying what's right and what's wrong. Who is this panel of people who's going to say this is OK, this is not OK? Outside the obvious things that are human rights violations, free speech is free speech.

Isn't that a very American point of view?

I don't think [Haystack] has anything to do with American ideology. I think that if you look at what the UN has listed as basic human rights, one of those is the ability to freely and openly communicate. No one should ever have to stop and say, "Can I be this? Can I think this? Can I say this?" It's what we as people deserve.

Who are your greatest critics?

I don't even know where to start. I have a whole fan club of people who hate me. There's clearly been opposition by the Iranian government. They recently passed a law that makes it illegal to use software or proxies that evade the censorship that they've imposed. They're detractor number one.

In my day-to-day life I meet people who don't support what I do. One of the most shocking examples was when someone came up to me and said, "Don't you get that Ahmadinejad is our Obama?" That took me back.

After Google announced it was leaving China, the Chinese government said that US-originated systems that opened up the governmental web blockades – such as Haystack - were acts of terrorism. Are you a terrorist?

It's interesting. There are a lot of things that they [China] do and pursue, a lot of laws that I don't feel anyone should observe. They have a long history of jailing dissidents and people who republish old cartoons. They pick and choose how to enforce laws and they come up with laws that frankly I would consider an act of terrorism of mankind. Maybe we should agree that we're both the same kind of threat, but to one another.

Hilary Clinton made a speech recently that outlined the US State Department's policy on web freedom. She argued that there was no place for censorship. What's the relationship now between the US government and Haystack?

I don't like the view that Haystack is a puppet of the US State Department, but I'm happy to see that the State Department is standing up for a free and open web. They have a long history of protecting human rights around the world and documenting abuses. This is the next step. We live in such an interconnected world. Policy makers, organisations that draft and enforce these policies need to catch up. And they are.

What's next for Austin Heap and for Haystack?

There are a lot of places around the world that are either severely censored now that could use people like me and tools such as Haystack, and they need to be addressed. That includes everywhere from Australia, which is currently dipping its toes in the censorship pool, to Egypt where there are more bloggers jailed than journalists: this is a global problem.

The way Haystack was developed was that we looked at how Iran specifically does its filtering and we came up with a method around it. If you look at what China does with their filtering, they use wildly different technology and have spent millions, hundreds of millions on their censorship. They're probably the best censors in the world. We hope to run down the list. Take on each country that has decided that it's going to try to use the internet against people.

• Iran
• Freedom of speech
• Human rights
• Software

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Die USA wollen Regime mit der Macht des weltweiten Netzes aufweichen

It's another Jacques Tardi-drawn comic! All hail Tardi! (And hey! I get to break out the Not-Safe-For-Work warning! Just so you know!)

Yesterday, I looked at an adaptation by Jacques Tardi of a book written in the 1970s. Today, we look at a comic that actually came out in the 1970s and is now back in print! It all works out!

You Are There was written by Jean-Claude Forest, who is best-known for this (well, the comic on which it was based), and drawn by Monsieur Tardi. Kim Thompson translated this sucker, and Fantagraphics published this bad bear. You will be charged no more than $26.99 for this, which isn't bad considering it's 163 big-ass pages chock full of grand Tardi art.

This is a very strange comic that doesn't completely work. Forest, channeling his inner Mark Twain, wrote in an early book edition about You Are There: "No one should see in Ici même a pamphlet, a satire on our society or the men who represent its political regime. Nor did I have any specific intention of mocking man's attachment to property. If this attachment leads to grotesque situations in this book, it does so no more than politics, law, groceries or fornication; it serves through its ramblings a story, a plot whose basis lies elsewhere and was intended, so far as I was concerned, to speak of something entirely different." If that's so, it's too bad, because You Are There works best as an absurdist critique of society and politics. It's a rambling, occasionally surreal look at a man who is crazy only because a crazy society says he is; who then is really insane? Perhaps Forest meant it as a love story, and there is a romance at its heart, but the romance is just as odd as the rest of the book, so it's unclear what, exactly, Forest was saying with this comic.

The situation is certainly interesting: Arthur There, the protagonist (and hence the title of the book) lives in a place called Mornemont, which, as we learn early on, was once a vast tract of land of which he is the sole heir. Over the decades and centuries, however, Mornemont has been subdivided into smaller plots of land, each owned by a different family. Arthur is embroiled in a lawsuit to get all the land back, but in the meantime, his one victory has given him ownership of all the walls and the gates through them. He lives in a narrow shack built on one of the walls and makes a living by charging a toll every time someone wants a gate open, gates to which he has the only keys. Throughout the book, he rarely comes down off the walls - the residents, he believes, would kill him for trespassing. His lawsuit to reclaim the rest of the land, however, continues throughout the book. In Paris, the president fears that he's going to lose the election, so he begins making plans to hole up somewhere and plan his triumphant return. Naturally, he picks Mornemont, but the reason he does is clever and changes Arthur's life quite significantly.

Ultimately, this is a story of a man fighting against the forces of conformity, as Arthur desperately tries to remain his own man. Everyone wants him to change, and even if some of the things that happen in the book are in his own mind, he clings to a dream when a lesser (or, perhaps, saner) man would have given up on them. He falls for Julie, who's the daughter of one of the couples living on "his" land, and their relationship is bumpy, to say the least. Julie is a bit crazy, too, in a different way than Arthur. She has what we might categorize as Tourette's, with no internal filters to stop her from saying whatever's on her mind or doing whatever's on her mind. Arthur's behavior is the polar opposite of Julie's, as he keeps everything inside him. This provides the very odd climax of the book, at which their personalities have switched places, to a degree. Julie believes in nothing, while Arthur believes in everything, so when they're on a row boat, about to escape from their pasts, suddenly things are different for both of them. The final image of the book, a surreal summation of events in the book, becomes a comment on what men will do to change their lives. It's not a particularly happy ending, but it is a logical ending.

The one thing you must deal with as you commence reading the book is that, even with a fairly standard narrative, Forest writes oddly. Apparitions appear for no reason. The scene shifts quickly in the middle of a page with no narrative tags to show it. Julie and Arthur often appear to be saying simply what's on their minds and not actually talking to each other. Julie's frankness about nudity and sex is unusually disconcerting (not because she likes sex and being naked, but because of the way she's so aggressive about it, especially in public). There's a strange, detached tone to the book, so even when serious things are occurring, Forest presents it absurdly, making it difficult to penetrate the author's intent (if, indeed, he had any). It's a complex work that keeps the reader at arm's length, which makes it hard to love.

Tardi, however, is stunning. The strange world of Mornemont and its walls are fully realized, with astonishing detail that makes Arthur's desires even more concrete. The warren of homes and barriers along which Arthur runs provide a surreal backdrop for Arthur's fantasies, which Tardi simply places in the panels with no preamble, integrating the hallucinations so well into the "real" that they occasionally catch us off guard. It's a beautiful evocation of how Arthur sees the world. The stolid governmental world crashes against the private lives of the politicians, a theater of fluid sexuality and vice. At the end of the book, Tardi turns the tenants of Mornemont into costumed caricatures, medieval archetypes, and fools, who attack Arthur's home because they're tired of his lawsuit. Tardi pulls out all the stops, with the army moving in and the homeowners turning riotous and the two worlds crashing together. The absurdity of Forest's script is brought to amazing life, from Arthur's odd gatekeeper outfit to Julie's unabashed sexuality - at one point she sucks her thumb, and it's a creepily erotic sight. It's a tremendous work of art, heightening the weirdness of the narrative very well.

I would recommend You Are There because it's a thoughtful look at the pressure of conformity and what drives a man mad. But it is a difficult comic, because Forest isn't interested in making too much sense, even though it's fairly easy to figure out "what happens." Tardi is fantastic and makes the book even wackier, which isn't a bad thing. I have to warn you about it, but it's definitely worth a look.

Towards the empathic civilisation
The human race is in a twilight zone between a dying civilisation on life support and an emerging one trying to find its legs. Old identities are fracturing while new identities are too fragile to grasp. To understand our situation, we need to step back and ask: what constitutes a fundamental change in the nature of civilisation? The great turning points occur when new, more complex energy regimes converge with communications revolutions, fundamentally altering human consciousness in the process.

Here's a documentary so astonishing that, for a time, I was convinced that I was being had -- that no sane filmmakers would ever attempt, much less pull off, anything this crazy. The Internet assures me that Mads Brügger and Johan Stahl's The Red Chapel, which won the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, is very real indeed: that Brügger and a pair of comedian friends really did sneak into North Korea pretending to be a pro-Socialist vaudeville troupe there to engage in cultural exchange with local schoolchildren, that they really did get most of it on tape, and that they really did escape that fascist hellhole with life and limb intact. In the process, they've made a film equal parts horrifying, exhilarating and hilarious -- an epic prank on the world's most sinister dictatorship that makes Sacha Baron Cohen look like a shrinking violet in comparison.

I have an abiding fascination with North Korea, or, as it is more affectionately known, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). I think it was Christopher Hitchens who once wrote that the reason George Orwell's writing remains relevant today is that the word "Orwellian" is the only accurate descriptor of the North Korean regime -- its complete intolerance of independent thought, the elaborate false reality painstakingly constructed for its citizens, the personality cult of the Dear Leader at its center. Never mind that, as The Red Chapel informs us, the Dear Leader is personally responsible for starving countless of his own people.

Continue reading SXSW Review: The Red Chapel

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