The sham trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Russia is rightly being protested by those who have a right to do so: Russians in Russia,
where more than a thousand people braved the batons of Kremlin
storm-troopers to decry the travesty of justice in his recent conviction
on more trumped-up charges. You do not have to warm to Khodorkovsky
himself, a former oil oligarch who fell out with the power structure
that enriched him, in order to denounce the thuggish authoritarianism
that his persecution represents. I have courageous friends among those
standing up in public against this injustice, putting their own bodies
and livelihoods on the line, and I salute them, and all those standing
with them.
There are, however, those denouncing the injustice of
the Khodorkovsky trial who have absolutely no right to do so. Prominent
among these, of course, is the Obama Administration, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the lead. Clinton, the foreign policy spokesperson for a government now raining death by drone on
hundreds of civilians inside the sovereign territory of an American
ally (among many other unjust and inhumane acts), thundered against the
Kremlin for allowing "the rule of law [to be] overshadowed by political
considerations."
The grand poo-bahs of the Potomac lined up to
condemn the Russian government for its barbaric treatment of
Khodorkovsky -- even while their own government was subjecting a
23-year-old soldier to KGB-style torture for
the "crime" of telling the truth about outrageous atrocities committed
by the American government in the course of an act of aggression that
unleashed -- and empowered -- a living hell that has left more than a
million people dead, and is still killing around 4,000 innocent civilians
every year. Hillary Clinton voted to authorize this act of
hyper-barbarism; Barack Obama has called the "surge" of death squads
and ethnic cleansing that kept the war going "an extraordinary
achievement."
The brave citizens and residents of Moscow who came
out to denounce Khodorkovsky's show trial deserve all praise for their
moral courage; but these bloodstained hacks of the Beltway have no
standing whatsoever to inveigh against the offenses of other regimes.
As the Guardian reports, Sen is a "celebrated human rights activist and medical doctor, has worked for more than three decades as a doctor in the tribal-dominated areas of the state of Chhattisgarh in central India, working for people denied many of the basic services that the state should provide, such as health and education." The people he works among are among the poorest on earth. Sen is also an avowed practitioner of non-violence, walking in the path of Gandhi.
Sen is also a leading civil rights activist, who has spoken out repeatedly and forcefully against the depredations of the state government, which has launched savage "counterterrorism" operations the Maoist movement spawned by the dire poverty. These "counterterror" methods include the creation of a deadly paramilitary force, the Salwa Judum, or "Purification Hunt.'
As Jawed Naqvi reports in Dawn, "the Judum was founded not so much to track or hunt down Maoist rebels as to clear the passage of local resistance groups to enable corporate access to Chhattisgarh's largely untapped mineral resources." Sen's chief "crime" seems to have been his vocal opposition to the state-run militia's atrocities. The official charge was that he visited an elderly prisoner who is alleged to be a Communist, and carried letters from the prison for him. As Naqvi notes, the "evidence" against Sen was threadbare, circumstantial and in some cases obviously fabricated, just as in the Khodorkovsky case.
What's more, Sen was charged under an ancient law originally imposed on India by its British colonial masters. As Kalpana Sharma notes in the Guardian:
More than 150 years ago, the British
introduced a law in India designed to check rebellious natives. In 2010
this law has been used by an independent India to check activists who
question government policy.
Section 124A of the Indian penal code
was introduced in 1870 by the British to deal with sedition. It was
later used to convict Mahatma Gandhi. ..Sen worked among the poorest and
most deprived people in India, the Adivasis. The Maoists have also
established their base in the tribal belt stretching through the heart
of India. Their concerns are similar; their strategies diametrically
opposite.
..Denied bail for two years, Sen was finally allowed
out on bail last year. On December 24, a case that on all counts was
weak and based on hearsay and circumstantial evidence, concluded. Sen
was found guilty of sedition and other charges, and sentenced to life
imprisonment.
They gave a life sentence to a man who has never raised a violent hand against the state or another human being. (He only narrowly avoided a death sentence for another charge: "waging war against the state.") A life sentence -- under a colonial law. This is the "democracy" praised by Barack Obama just a few weeks ago during a state visit to India, where he made sure to be seen paying homage to Gandhi -- whose mantle of moral courage Obama himself claimed during his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, declaring:
As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life's work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak, nothing passive, nothing naive in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.
But moral force means nothing when there is money to be made --
from the corporate exploitation of Chhattisgarh's resources or, in
Obama's case, from hawking $5 billion worth of death machinery from
America's war profiteers to the Indian government.
Protests
against Sen's sentence have broken out all over India. The injustice has
also provoked denunciations across the world. Even the imperial house
organ, the Washington Post, published a decent news story about
the case on Wednesday. (Obviously the main editors are still off
enjoying the holidays.) The article, by Emily Wax, actually provides
some good context to the Sen case, the larger machinations behind it,
and even -- gasp! -- some understanding of how generations of poverty,
despair and exploitation can give rise to an "insurgency":
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