Tag: Obituary

April 12, 2021

Ramsey Clark: A Life Well Lived for the People of the World

Samarra Iraq 1996, Ramsey Clark visiting pharmaceutical plant. Photo: Bill Hackwell

Yesterday (April 10) Ramsey Clark died at the age of 93 in New York, and today justice and peace loving people and movements in the US and around the world are in mourning for a man who stood up and fought tirelessly in support of justice, equality and against his country’s drive for endless wars.

Ramsey Clark, the son of a Supreme Court Justice, was a lawyer who began an 8 year career in the US Justice Department in 1961 where he helped draft the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, becoming the US Attorney General in 1967. During this time he took on the establishment by banning wire tapping of progressive movements, calling for the abolition of capital punishment and banning federal executions.

Ramsey could have easily remained in the ruling class circles he was born into but once outside of the US government he became a voice against its policies that could not be ignored. He chose instead to become a beacon of unequivocal support for the people of the world going to literally more than 100 countries on fact finding missions and leading humanitarian delegations. He flew tirelessly to countries being targeted by the Pentagon sometimes even as the bombs were beginning to fall.

Sanctions as a Weapon of War

It is almost impossible to list all the countries and peoples that Ramsey Clark stood up for but perhaps his role in helping to expose the 12 years (between the first Gulf War to the full scale attack in 2003) of sanctions against Iraq is the most illustrative one in showing the cruelty of the slow misery and death that sanctions cause. During that time, Ramsey went to Iraq over and over again to document just how horrific it was. In February 1996, I had the honor of accompanying him as the photographer on a delegation to document on the ground evidence for a report being compiled by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization that was claiming that 567,000 Iraqi children had died as a consequence of the draconian economic sanctions being applied in just 5 years. We went from empty hospital to empty hospital where doctors informed us that children were dying from preventable dysentery because they could not even get or produce simple hydration tablets and that diseases that had been eliminated were re appearing because of the conditions. Prior to the war Iraq had the most modern medical system in the Middle East. We witnessed a pharmaceutical factory that lay dormant because they could not get material needed to make medicine. Sewage flowed into the Tigris River through bombed out sanitation plants that could get no spare parts to get them running again. It was obvious everywhere we went, from government officials to people on the street the level of respect and love that people in Iraq and throughout the Middle East for that matter had for Ramsey.

Today the US has sanctions leveled at over 20 countries for the crime of insisting on their independence. Ramsey Clark was opposed to all sanctions and said, “The lawlessness and cruelty of death-dealing sanctions must be recognized as genocide and a crime against humanity and must be prohibited.”

Support for Self Determination in Latin America

Over the years Ramsey played a significant role by leading delegations and participating in events throughout Latin America and the Caribbean including against the US-financed Contras during the Reagan years, to meeting with Hugo Chavez as leader of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, the Zapatistas in Chiapas and support for the FMLN in El Salvador.

Ramsey actively opposed the over 60-year blockade of Cuba and called for the closure of the illegally occupied US naval base at Guantanamo and returning the land to the Cuban People. He involved himself in the struggle to send Elian Gonzalez home with his father and the prolonged campaign to free the Cuban 5 from US prisons. In recognition for his endearing and unwavering support Ramsey was awarded the Order of Solidarity granted by the State Council of the Republic of Cuba in November 2013 in Holguin by the mothers of the five Cuban heroes.

Today, Cuban President Miguel-Diaz Canel Bermudez tweeted, “We mourn the death of
Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General. Honest and supportive, he joined us in crucial battles and was critical of the great injustices committed by his country in the world. Cuba pays grateful tribute to him.”

Fernando Gonzalez, President of the Institute of Friendship with the People (ICAP) added, “Ramsey was a sincere and faithful friend of Cuba. We share common ideals with regard to civil and human rights and the defense of just causes like Palestine… Cuba will never forget a friend as loyal as Ramsey Clark”.

Today on facebook, anti war activist Brian Willson said from Nicaragua something that rings true to many of us about what a role model Ramsey Clark was. He was just that for a generation of activists, always speaking truth to power, calm and humble, but with unrelenting conviction.

Ramsey Clark Presente!
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English

Bill Hackwell is an organizer with the International Committee for Peace Justice and Dignity and an editor for the English edition of Resumen Latinoamericano. Read other articles by Bill.

This article was posted on Sunday, April 11th, 2021 at 7:26pm and is filed under Activism, Iraq, Justice, Obituary.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

April 10, 2021

When Prince Philip Became a Monument

The student from Ghana was insistent. “I want to meet him.” The stubborn, well-attired fool, groomed and keen to make a good impression, was attending the Senate House ceremony in Cambridge for honorary awardees. He was not the only one. In attendance on this warm June day in 2006 were a gaggle of rascals, well-wishers and rogues. This was gawking made respectable.

The awardees were justifiably brilliant. There were the establishment birds of paradise: the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, a man who soporifically charmed; and the Bank of England governor, Mervyn King. The mad cat mathematician’s contribution was also honoured in the form of string theorist Edward Witten of Princeton. Honorary doctorates in law were also conferred upon educator Charles Vest and writer Njabulo Ndebele. Ahmed Zewail scooped the honorary doctorate in science and novelist Margaret Drabble the honorary doctorate in letters.

The ceremony was softly coated in formal Latin, the awards themselves granted to the bright and the brightest, the hall acting as a brace of history. But it was the Duke of Edinburgh who, as ever, managed to cut through what would have otherwise been a stuffy gathering with his immemorial manner. Cambridge University’s chancellor turned up to preside, and, his cloak train held by the unfortunate subaltern, appeared like a decorated reptile, gown merged with body.

The reception – for that is what many there had hoped to get a hack at — saw Prince Philip make his various social sorties. These had the usual devastating air about them. Old mocking remarks about colonies; jabs of casual racism garnished with a mock innocence. Andrew O’Hagan of the London Review of Books was not wrong to observe that his questions would often lie “somewhere between existential brilliance and intergalactic dunce-hood.” To the student from Ghana, who sauntered up to him expecting a nugget of revelation, he said this: “I say, are you still a colony of ours?”

The Prince Philip treasury is laden with such remarks, the sort that inspired other family members such his grandson Prince Harry while enraging commentators such as Hamid Dabashi. To a Scottish driving instructor, the Duke of Edinburgh inquired how it was possible to “keep the booze long enough to pass the test.” To an Australian Aboriginal: “Still throwing spears?” To a group of British students on a royal visit to China: “If you stay here much longer you’ll all be slitty-eyed.”

A national treasure? A petrified disgrace? For Dabashi, very much the latter, with one redeeming feature. “He is not faking it,” railed the Columbia University professor of Iranian studies in 2017. “This is who he is — and the long panoply of his racist, sexist, elitist, misogynistic, class-privileged and unhinged prejudices is a mobile museum of European bigotry on display.”

A man such as the Duke of Edinburgh operated in a different dimension, distanced from revolutionary tremor and social evolution, even as the country he presided over with Queen Elizabeth II changed. To expect such a man to evolve with an institution created before an understanding of genetics was hope defiant of experience. He was expected to remain in the putty of permanent infantilism — at least on some level, more role than man. Accepting monarchy is accepting a condition of long service, and the Westminster model demands that the sovereign reigns but does not rule. And that role was reserved for Prince Philip’s wife, Queen Elizabeth.

So much came to massaging him into roles he did not want, and situations he would have thought peculiar. A man condemned to opening buildings most of his life is bound to get tetchy at some point, strapped to concrete, pillars and boredom. Presiding over the opening of structures can risk turning you into a monument, a biped structure condemned to endless ceremonies of tenured stiffness. Naturally, he had to assume the role of consort as robot, breaking occasionally into performance, his sparkles of misguided human observations rippling through the institutional straitjacket.

The role of service can be deforming. The Duke of Edinburgh Awards is touted as an example of “Prince Philip’s belief in the infinite potential of young people”. The Royal had a rather different view of it: the awards were not to be celebrated as some deep, insightful contribution to society. It was simply something to do. At points, he seemed to have strange attacks of modesty. On one occasion, he admitted that his greatest speech involved the utterance of a few words: “I declare open the Olympic Games of Melbourne, celebrating the sixteenth Olympiad of the modern era.”

In the biography of the queen mother by William Shawcross, we find a note written by a newly married Prince Philip to his mother-in-law, touching in so far as it shows an awareness of role and position. “Lilibet is the only ‘thing’ in this world which is absolutely real to me and my ambition is to weld the two of us into a new combined existence that will not only be able to withstand the shocks directed at us but will also have a positive existence for the good.”

A profound shock was the emerging force of media scrutiny, prompting him to call it “a professional intruder”. That was, is, its job, so you could not “complain about it.” So, in front of the media, he would be able to tell the young children’s rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai that children went to school because parents wanted them out of the house. Many wearied parents would have agreed; even the youthful Malala stifled a giggle.

The river of tributes duly flowed on the announcement of his passing. Few were more suited to delivering one than Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The Prime Minister, in various previous incarnations, had merrily offended a good portion of the earth’s nations and races. “Prince Philip earned the affection of generations here in the United Kingdom, across the Commonwealth and around the world,” said the Prime Minister. “By any measure, Prince Philip lived an extraordinary life — as a naval hero in the Second World War, as the man who inspired countless young people through the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and, above all, as Her Majesty The Queen’s loyal consort.”

Not much difference was noted on the Labor side of politics. “The United Kingdom,” wrote Sir Keir Starmer, “has lost an extraordinary public servant in Prince Philip.” He noted a life marked by dedication to country, a distinguished career in the Royal Navy during conflict, and decades of service.

From outside Britain, Barack Obama was off the mark, unable to resist the urge to be modern and very contemporary. “At the Queen’s side or trailing the customary two steps behind, Prince Philip showed the world what it meant to be a supportive husband to a powerful woman.”

From the European Union, there was understanding without hyperbole. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen preferred a no-nonsense approach, expressing her sadness and extending “sincere sympathy to Her Majesty The Queen, the Royal Family and the people of the United Kingdom on this very sad day.”

During the reception of the honorary graduands that day in 2006, the strawberries being readily consumed, the champagne flowing like arteries let, Prince Philip could still muster a few remarks, speared, sharpened, and directed. He mocked those who had not been to Cambridge, geniuses who never had the chance to go to that great educational wonder in the Fens. “Is it true that there are actually a few of you who did not go to Cambridge?” To see him in motion was to see an institution within a man, bones and flesh going through tasks he did with a certain measure of irritation and resignation. The heat of battle must have been much more fun.

Image credit: ex-iskon-pleme

This article was posted on Friday, April 9th, 2021 at 7:58pm and is filed under Colonialism, Obituary, Racism, United Kingdom.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

by K.J. Noh / February 18th, 2021

Baek Ki Wan, the quiet, thoughtful, progressive conscience of South Korea, and its most impassioned, idealistic voice for reunification, passsed away on February 15th, from pneumonia at the age of 89. His last words were a message of support for a grieving mother fasting for the passing of Labor Rights Legislation and words of encouragement for the fired labor organizer, Kim Jin Suk. All intended money for funerary flowers or wreaths was requested to be spent on aiding the poor, the marginalized, the struggling. In commemoration, 16 regional memorial sites will be held across the nation as well as in the capital, Seoul. If the old saw, “the pen is mightier than the sword” has any meaning, it might well apply to Baek: his words, thoughts, and speeches have altered the course of South Korean history.

While other politicians took the limelight or the applause, Baek continued working selflessly and fluidly in and out of the shadows; both on center stage and from the sidelines, dedicating his whole life in struggle for worker’s rights, people’s rights against Capital and Empire, and for Korean reunification. He was a key pillar in the struggle against the US-installed South Korean military dictatorships, which imprisoned and tortured him multiple times–almost to the point of death. He participated in the 1960 April 19 student protests that overthrew the genocidal dictatorship of Syngman Rhee, and the anti-Japan normalization protests in 1964, where he opposed the Park Chung Hee dictatorship’s collusion and “normalization” of relations with Japan which absolved Japan of all responsibility for crimes committed during colonization (this agreement, among other things, unilaterally threw South Korean slave laborers and comfort women under the bus). Opposition to this agreement, pushed by a US eager to consolidate South Korea as a capitalist neo-colony, resulted in his arrest and torture.

In the 70’s he was arrested and tortured again for leading protests against the “Yushin Constitution”, the constitutional self-coup by the military dictatorship that gave the US-propped dictator Park Chung Hee powers comparable to the Meiji Emperor. He was imprisoned and tortured again in 1979 for organizing a mass protest for democracy, and then imprisoned again in 1986 for protesting the sexual torture of a student activist. In 1987, he urged the two leading progressive politicians (Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung) to unify to defeat the military candidate running for president. (They did not, and a former general held the presidency for 5 more years). He also opposed South Korean participation in the Iraq war, and was an important elder and leader in the Candlelight Protests that brought down the regime of Park Geun Hye, the daughter of the dictator who had imprisoned him in 2017. Although he was the director of the Unification Research Institute in his later years, he never relinquished his role as a revolutionary in action: even as he became sick and frail, he implored his daughter, not to put him into institutional care, “Please let me die fighting at labor sites”.

An autodidact raised in abject poverty but with dignity–his mother told him “chew sand [to stave off hunger] if you have to, but never kneel because of your poverty”–he was also an accomplished artist, writer, and poet. He penned the words to the protest song that became the anthem of the people’s movement that took down the Military dictatorship in 1989. The song itself grew out of the martyrdom of protestors at the US-enabled-and-abetted massacre in the city of Gwangju in 1980. It later became a pan-Asian protest anthem. If a single poem can be considered to have helped bring down a dictatorship, Baek’s poem is a prime candidate:

In November 24th, 1979, a large wedding ceremony was held indoors at the YMCA in Seoul. A huge, well-heeled crowd had gathered, but the bride was absent, and the groom seemed distracted. The ceremony went ahead anyway. The groom’s name was called, and at that moment, loud chanting broke out, and a proclamation was read, demanding an immediate end to military dictatorship, fundamental democratic reforms and elections, and opposition to the farcical election of the president by an unrepresentative, subservient, sycophantic electoral college.

Within minutes, the rally, announced as a wedding to throw off the authorities–the missing “bride’s” name was an anagram of “democratic government”–was dispersed by massive brute force, and the participants—including some of the most venerated activists in Korean History—were beaten, arrested, and spirited away to the Defense Security Command to be tortured. Baek Ki Wan [the organizer of the protest] was one of them.

A year later, still in jail, Baek had just been interrogated and tortured within inches of his life, and was writhing alone in a freezing prison cell. Staring up at a 15 watt light bulb in his cell, at the utter end of his rope, Baek told himself, “I can’t just die like this.” Conjuring up his last powers, he composed up a chant, a prayer, a shamanic incantation to give himself strength and to pass on to others should he die. “Moetbinari “,

Prayer for the Mountain—A Song for a Shamanic Dancer of the South was the result:

Without leaving love, or name,
a passionate vow to continue our whole lives,
The fight was brave but the banner is torn,
and though time flows,
the winding rivers know,
Comrades, until the new day comes,
Do not falter! Their voices shout out endlessly,
Rise up, rise up, a blood-coagulated cry:
I’ll go ahead, and you the living follow!

After the massacre in Gwangju, at the nadir of the Korean resistance movement, these words, whispered from Baek’s hospital bed into the ears of visitors and transcribed into a poem, were adapted and put to music. They became the basis of the “wedding song” for two Martyrs of the Gwangju democracy movement; a message of strength from the dead or dying to continue fighting.

In South Korea, at every protest gathering, at every labor action, the March of the Beloved is the anthem that is chanted with upraised fists at the beginning of each rally. It has become a pan-Asian protest song, accompanying mass movements in 7 countries.

(See here for the full history of the origins of the song ).

After the defeat of the military dictatorships, Baek continued his struggle fighting on the side of the oppressed against Capitalism, while articulating and teaching a philosophy of communalism, sharing, and love called “Nonamaegi“. He also became the most sustained, uncompromising, and passionate voice for Korean reunification and for radical change: “Unless you fundamentally change the rotten society that Capitalism has created, you cannot solve the problem. As workers, you have to understand that all Labor struggles are a struggle to fundamentally change Society.”

His passion, clarity, integrity, strength, stamina, and depth of commitment were inspirational and legendary to generations of activists His words, hummed, shouted, incanted are the soundtrack of revolution in South Korea. His last message, foreshadowed in his poems, urged the continuation of the struggle against Capital, Injustice, and Colonizing Powers.

No passing could undo his example or message:

I’ll go ahead, and you the living following!

With the neoliberal Biden administration primed to re-escalate tensions against North Korea to thwart reunification, his message to fight against Colonization and Capital becomes even more poignant and important.

*****

Slide show of his life:

Virtual memorial site: baekgiwan.net attachments area