Re: [A-List] CHINA: Property Law Denies Farmers the Good Earth

["Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 3/19/07, Henry C.K. Liu <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> This law will either have to be repealed or the CPC will have to answer
> for it by losing support from the majority of the people. This is what
> happens when the middle class get control of the government.

This news from China came out just about the same time as the news
about the CPI(M) government's police shooting peasants who were trying
to prevent their lands from being taken by the government to set up an
SEZ in West Bengal.  It's a demoralizing week for socialists
worldwide.

<http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36960>
POLITICS-INDIA:
'Neo-Liberal' Left Behind Peasants' Massacre
Praful Bidwai

NEW DELHI, Mar 16 (IPS) - By ordering police to open fire on peasants
trying to protect their land from being acquired for a Special
Economic Zone (SEZ), the communist government of West Bengal state has
indicated the crumbling away of the last bulwark in India against
neo-liberal and free market policies.

At least 15 people died and over 50 were injured by police firing on
Wednesday in Nandigram leading to serious rifts within the Left Front
coalition that is supposed to rule West Bengal but where power is
monopolised by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M).

Since the firing, Nandigram has witnessed unceasing confrontation
between the state police and CPI-M cadres, on the one hand, and local
residents organised under the banners of various political parties and
non-party groupings, on the other.

After the initial shock and fear that sent them fleeing, people
belonging to five villages in the Nandigram area, about 150 km from
West Bengal's capital Kolkata, have regrouped and are now fighting the
police and demanding to know the whereabouts of their missing
relatives.

"The people claim that the number of those killed is much higher than
the official figure of 15, and that the police and CPI-M cadres are
burying bodies under rubble and building roads and culverts over
them," said Aditi Chowdhury, a Kolkata-based social activist who has
been following developments in the area, where trouble first erupted
two-and-a-half months ago over the acquisition of land for the
construction of an SEZ.

Speaking with IPS over telephone Chowdhury said: "Thousands of armed
policemen surrounded the villages, and on many occasions they fired at
eye-level to kill. TV footage showed trucks carrying bodies with their
legs dangling out. The brutality was chilling.'' She added that state
Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's brazen defence of the firing,
as part of an attempt to restore law and order in the area, has only
occasioned more public anger.

The Nandigram events, in particular the police firing, have seriously
dented the image of the Left Front, which has ruled the state for an
uninterrupted three decades -- considered a global record in democracy
and electoral politics.

The CPI-M's main partners in the Left Front -- which includes the
Communist Party of India (CPI), the Forward Bloc, and the
Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) -- are livid and have publicly
deplored the resort to repression. They are alarmed at the blatant
contradiction between what the Left preaches at the national level,
and what it practises in the states where it is in power -- West
Bengal and to a lesser extent in southern Kerala.

<http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36939>
RIGHTS-INDIA:
Massacre of Peasants May Slow SEZ Plans
Analysis by Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Mar 15 (IPS) - It took the gruesome massacre of 15 peasants
in police firing for the provincial government of West Bengal to
suspend the forcible acquisition of farming land it wants to hand over
to an Indonesian conglomerate for development into a Special Economic
Zone (SEZ).

Trouble has been brewing in Nandigram, 150 km south of Kolkata, the
state capital, since well before Feb. 22, when the Salim Group,
Indonesia's largest conglomerate, was given approval for a 500 million
dollar investment proposal that included the SEZ in West Bengal, which
is ruled by a left-wing coalition led by the Communist Party of
India-Marxist (CPI-M).

Clashes broke out between CPI-M cadres and the villagers on Jan. 7
when it became known that the government had plans to acquire 22,000
acres of land, leaving six people dead.

In a statement issued on Jan. 9, a group of leading intellectuals and
rights activists warned: ''We are deeply concerned about the
escalating levels of violence being reported from Nandigram in West
Bengal, as a consequence of the state government's policy of land
acquisition for industrial use.''

Signatories to the statement included campaigners for people displaced
by mega-projects, internationally-known author Arundhati Roy and
prominent rights lawyer Colin Gonsalvez. It urged the formation of a
peace committee in West Bengal to ensure the cessation of hostilities
against the villagers.

''While industrial development is necessary in many parts of the
country, detailed, democratically accountable and transparent
discussions about the categories of land to be allocated for
acquisition are equally necessary prior to making a decision," the
statement said.

"The International Economic Covenant, which India has ratified, makes
prior consultation and resettlement mandatory in all cases of
displacement. The violation of human rights in the process of land
acquisition that we have recently seen in West Bengal (and a number of
other states) is completely unacceptable,'' it added.

But such sage advice was cast to the winds by the state's Chief
Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya who, bent on rapidly industrialising
West Bengal, kept insisting that the villagers were being misled by
the CPI-M's political opponents.

After Wednesday's tragic massacre, a visibly shaken Bhattacharya
announced that he had withdrawn the notification for acquisition of
land in Nandigram.
--
Yoshie