On the morning of 6th August, Reza Rasaei, a 34 year old Kurdish political prisoner and one of the detainees of the Jina Uprising, was executed after enduring months of imprisonment and torture. This state murder, along with the execution of 23 other prisoners during the week prior, occurred at a time when the Islamic Republic of Iran is in the middle of its most acute foreign political-military tensions, especially following the assassination of Hamas’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.
The occurrence of these executions at this moment, in addition to the issuance of the death sentence for two women political prisoners (Sharifeh Mohammadi and Pakhshan Azizi), is part of a mass murder campaign that has seen the execution of more than 200 other prisoners since the 21st of March 2024 alone (the first day of the Iranian calendar). In 2023, at least 853 persons were executed, about 300 more than in 2022. This accelerated campaign of state killings shows that for the rulers of the Islamic Republic, the main battleground is inside the country, where the regime faces a huge mass of oppressed and angry people. The execution of prisoners, whether political or “non-political”, is actually a tool to intimidate and terrorize this “dangerous crowd”.
A day following Rasaei’s execution, 29 other prisoners were executed in two prisons in Karaj, a city in north-central Iran. On the same day in the women’s section of Evin prison in Tehran, prisoners who held a sit-in in protest of Rasaei’s execution were brutally attacked. Some were physically hurt so badly by the prison guards (amongst them Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Narges Mohammadi) that they had to be treated in hospital.
While the Islamic Republic, in spite of the hype, treats its foreign opponents as always with huge caution (so much so that it even informs them in advance and in detail of its performative military strikes), it does not recognize any limitations or considerations when confronting actual and potential opponents inside the country. This is because the rulers of the regime think that the balance of power in the domestic arena is in their favor (unlike in the foreign arena), and also because, based on their long experience in international politics, they know only too well that they will not be held accountable to any body at the international level for even the most heinous killings and atrocities they commit inside the country. This impunity rests on a core tenant of the international power system — an unwritten custom that dictates non-interference of governments in each other’s “internal affairs”. The effect of this has been that the rulers of Iran and other dictatorial regimes have a green light to attempt to completely suppress their own “citizens”, which would also be an “optimal” solution for the global powers to outsource the maintenance of the dominant order to the dictator regimes.
In the domestic sphere, the regime also hopes that the long-term practice of suffocating voices through maximum repression will still work, so they attempt to control the consequences of oppression and repression with more oppression and repression, via intimidation. This is why, for example, in recent years, we start our mornings every day with news of fresh executions.
Having said that, the situation described above is not as static as it seems. Under the shell of suppression, there exists a flow of resistance. Continuous executions are actually a state-tool of intimidation to curb these resistances. Some visible examples of this resistance-flow (despite the intensification of state repression) are: the stands by justice-seekers (families of those killed by the state), daily and civil resistance of women*, frequent strikes and protests of workers (including retirees, teachers, nurses, industrial workers, oil and gas workers, etc.), the resistance of the marginalized and oppressed nationalities ( Kurds, Baloch, Ahwazi and others), environmental protests, and also the continuation of the resistance of prisoners in dozens of prisons across Iran. The noteworthy point is that, at least in the current phase, the intimidation function of increasing executions has not been as effective as the rulers had expected. For example, parallel to the increase in executions, the range of the prisoners participating in the hunger-strike of the “Tuesdays of No to Execution” campaign in Iranian prisons has expanded (as I write, it is the twenty-eighth week of this campaign).
Furthermore, even if the rulers of Iran’s Islamic system have forgotten the fate of their former political relatives, such as Omar al-Bashir (of Sudan), they are now fearfully witnessing how the anger and determination of the oppressed in Bangladesh has marked a humiliating fate for another one of their political relatives.
It is for all of those reasons that for the rulers of the Islamic Republic, the main battlefield has always been inside the country; that is, their “main enemy” or the main obstacle to the expansion of their absolute power has been the oppressed, angry and desperate masses. The confidence of the rulers in recognizing this main enemy, and their ruthless determination in advancing this fateful battle, is due to the knowledge they have, more than anyone else, of the depth of the multiple crises they have created during the life of their sinister political system. These crises are so deep that even if they (presumably) want to, they can not provide any ointment to reduce the suffering and anger of the masses. In addition, the successive waves of mass uprisings in Iran since December 2017 have revealed the extent of the gap and antagonism between the state and the oppressed.
Therefore, the Iranian rulers’ awareness of the irreversibility of the path they have taken is the main theme of their “political realism”. This “ruling realism” has determined the main strategy of their governance beyond the ideological and religious sediments of the past. Based on this “realistic” strategy, the main goal of the Islamic Republic is nothing but maintaining the survival of its political system, under any conditions and at any cost. This goal partly explains why the Islamic Republic has increasingly embraced militarism, especially in the last two decades, and has so tightly mixed its capitalist economy, domestic politics, and foreign policy with militarism.
Since capitalism, despite the diversity of its local and regional children, is a global system, the imperialist mechanisms supporting this system also operate on a global scale. This is how – for instance – the glorious revolution of the Sudanese peoples, in the absence of global solidarity, has been surrounded by global and regional powers and is caught in a “war of the generals“, with the aim of destroying its revolutionary surpluses in famine, mass displacement and mass killing.
The current and nascent political revolution in Bangladesh reminds us, however, once again, that revolution is a manifestation of the “realism of the oppressed” — that there is no other way to freedom. This is, in itself, an emancipatory realism, even though its transformative power can only be realized through deepening the revolution and solidarity of the oppressed on a global scale.
The following article has been submitted to GPAC by the ‘Safety4Harvey’ collective. The article describes the harsh and discriminatory prison conditions experienced by Vickreman Harvey Chettiar, who is an autistic Singaporean Tamil intersex transgender woman imprisoned in Singapore.
*Content Warning: Descriptions of sexual violence*
Vickreman Harvey Chettiar (Harvey) is an autistic Singaporean Tamil intersex transgender woman. She currently faces 12 criminal charges, many of which are the result of frame-ups, which is a story better traversed elsewhere. Regardless, she has the right to mount her defense to these twelve charges without having to compromise her own defense. Harvey had attempted but failed to attend multiple court dates due to medically significant panic attacks relating to past sexual trauma inflicted on her in the court building, and every instance of which led to her hospitalization. One of these instances led to her bail being revoked, along with her eventual arrest and remand in a male prison unit.
This article shall serve as documentation of the gross and unjust damage inflicted on Harvey in prison so far in pre-trial detention, and the prison’s utter insensitivity to the needs and rights of transgender people as well as the infirm, two positions which Harvey could be said to epitomize in one person. We demand Harvey’s immediate release on bail.
Road to remand
Harvey’s trial was originally scheduled for 5-7 March 2024. As Harvey’s bailor Carissa had witnessed and consequently called an ambulance, she collapsed and lost consciousness in the morning of the first day of the trial, due to shame from realizing she had, while intoxicated, threatened her fellow women including District Judge Teoh Ai Lin in prior email and electronic form submissions, which are the substance of her 5th to 7th charges, and panic over having to face District Judge Teoh, who would preside over her trial, after having made such threats. Harvey was conveyed by ambulance to National University Hospital, where she was hospitalized for the whole duration of the trial. For this, she later came to be served the first of her two “abscondment” charges.
The hospitalization forced the trial dates to be vacated, and the prosecution later filed an Application for Revocation of Bail, leading to a series of Bail Revocation Hearings. Curiously, District Judge Teoh continued to preside over the Hearings, even though she was the “victim” of the offenses in Harvey’s 5th to 7th charges. Harvey’s lawyer at the time, Chia Ti Lik, also did not pick up on this or apply for Teoh’s recusal on such grounds, despite being a trained lawyer.
Harvey was scheduled to have her second Bail Revocation Hearing on 22 March 2024. In anticipation of sitting in the dock at the State Courts, she experienced flashbacks of the physical and sexual violence inflicted on her by security officers during a previous arraignment at the basement of State Courts Tower on 5 May 2023, which is detailed in https://bit.ly/notomaleremand. This caused a wave of panic attacks which caused her to depart late for the Hearing. While on her way to the Hearing with Carissa, the Court had her bail revoked and a Warrant of Arrest issued against her. She alighted at a neighboring building to use the washroom and made an attempt to voluntarily surrender herself to the Court, but experienced another wave of flashbacks and consequent panic attacks, leaving her collapsed on the floor and unable to get up for over two hours. Eventually, an ambulance was called and she was sent to Singapore General Hospital, where she was warded until 26 March 2024. For this, she came to be served the second of her two “abscondment” charges.
Since then, Harvey made several more attempts to voluntarily surrender herself to the Court, but these were also not successful due to onset of anxiety/panic attacks.
The Warrant of Arrest came to be executed and Harvey arrested on 5 April 2024. She was remanded for pre-trial detention to Changi Prison Complex on 6 April 2024, and has remained there since.
Since then, Harvey has endured traumatizing and damaging conditions in prison, hitting especially hard at her status as a trans woman in a male prison environment, and at her physical infirmities.
On 14 June 2024, Harvey’s community and chosen family wrote and signed a Plea for Prosecutorial Compassion, to ask the prosecution to grant her bail. The Plea can be read at https://tinyurl.com/2hj66ky2. It documents the harsh conditions Harvey is enduring in prison.
Gender dysphoria and sexual suffering
As a transgender woman, Harvey was remanded to the male section of the prison, while being segregated from male inmates. Despite the segregation, she has been experiencing severe sexual traumas on a daily basis, exacerbated by her having been sexually traumatized by men since the age of ten, something she did not choose to experience and which no person should ever have to experience even once, let alone repeatedly.
During prison intake, Harvey, who has the intersex condition Klinefelter syndrome, was found to have testosterone levels lower than typical male levels. She was thus given 3 weekly Depo-Testosterone injections on 12, 19, and 26 April, until the prison was able to verify her gender dysphoria diagnosis with her clinic. The injections caused Harvey to grow more body hair than ever before, which subsequent feminizing hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has not seemed to be able to reverse. Her voice also further broke. All this is highly dysphoric for Harvey.
The view of a cell from the security camera at nighttime, showing squat toilet, shower, and modesty wall.Still taken from “How Tough Is Singapore Prison Life? | Inside Maximum Security – Part 1/4 | CNA Documentary” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJqRPycWUDg
As part of the male prison environment, Harvey has to perform her bodily functions and maintain her personal hygiene in front of a security camera which is monitored by male prison officers as part of their professional duties. This is triggering to Harvey as a survivor of multiple sexual assaults committed against her by men, and she sobs quietly when she sits on the commode every night to shower. There is also a viewport on Harvey’s cell door which may be opened at any time by male prison officers as well as authorized male inmates, even while she is performing her bodily functions or maintaining her personal hygiene. A modesty wall in the cell does not fully enclose the toilet/shower area or block it from view of the cell or door viewport.
Viewport on prison cell door. Note that the modesty wall is not tall enough to completely block the shower area. Still taken from “How Tough Is Singapore Prison Life? | Inside Maximum Security – Part 1/4 | CNA Documentary” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJqRPycWUDg
Despite being segregated from male inmates, Harvey is for virtually all intents and purposes treated by prison staff and prison policies as if she were a cisgender man. All prison officers, save for one, have consistently misgendered her throughout her incarceration. She is lawfully strip-searched by male prison officers during every out-of-cell movement, and these strip-searches cannot be refused or she would incur a prison offense charge. While the male prison officers have objectively remained professional in carrying out the strip-searches, Harvey subjectively experiences each strip-search as a fresh sexual assault as the strip-searches are carried out by men. Any resistance to having to strip in front of male prison guards by her as a female remandee would be treated with suspicion accorded to a male remandee resisting such searches instead, and would become the basis for such male prison guards to be authorized to use force to carry out and complete the searches. Such use of force would place her in an extremely uncomfortable and distressing position and force her to have to resist even harder to prevent these male prison guards from violating her gender dignity and sexual safety. This creates the conditions for further stacks of charges of criminal and internal prison offenses to be brought against Harvey, inciting further punishment against her. This would create a vicious cycle of traumatization, resistance, and more charges.
Facial shaving is only allowed during yard time. However, as participation in yard time involves an out-of-cell movement, it also requires being subject to a strip-search by male prison officers. Harvey has thus opted out of yard time and thus been generally unable to shave her face, and the resultant facial hair growth is causing her severe gender dysphoria. The prison officers have occasionally allowed her to shave her facial hair in her cell, but this has only been on a few irregular occasions. Consequently, Harvey has been publicly displayed with facial hair in open Court via video-link, which piles on additional extreme dysphoria.
Soon after the Plea was released, the prison psychiatrist assessed Harvey. The psychiatrist deemed her to not be transgender because she “does not exhibit any of the traits of deference to men expected of women, but instead has consistently demonstrated psychotic male behavior”, and so they have consequently revoked her gender identity disorder diagnosis and instead diagnosed her with body dysmorphic disorder and adjustment disorder with psychosis. The misogyny is baffling, and speaks for itself. Needless to say, the prison has since stopped giving her HRT. Bail is more precious to a transgender woman than her life itself; as unlike for a man for whom being on bail is a matter of his liberty, for a transgender woman it is her sanity and sexual dignity.
Infirmity and autism
Harvey’s condition of myasthenia makes her unable to walk or stand for long. This physical disability is not catered for in prison, other than them providing her with a commode to aid her use of the squat toilet and wall-embedded shower-head in her cell. The prison cell has no grab-bars or other disability-friendly features.
On at least ten occasions so far when she lacked sufficient strength to pull herself to the toilet and onto the commode in time, she has ended up wetting herself and sitting in the puddle of urine for hours until she has rested enough to change into another set of clothes. This has also caused prison offence charges to be served to her for not maintaining hygiene/grooming standards, without regard for her circumstances.
In addition, since 5 April 2024, Harvey’s knees have no longer been able to support her physical body weight. She can no longer stand up on her own and now needs a wheelchair, which is not provided for use inside the prison cell itself, giving her no choice but to humiliatingly crawl on the floor of her prison cell. Her various pre-existing ailments such as osteoporosis and sarcopenia have been severely exacerbated in enduring the physical conditions of the prison cell.
Harvey only has access to basic medical care 9-to-5 on weekdays, not round-the-clock medical care as asserted by Prosecution. This basic medical care still remains subject to unusual limitations such as being denied cough syrup when she has the common cold as it may be addictive, and being denied her long-standing prescription of 10 milligrams of diazepam nightly to treat her anxiety.
The standard prison attire of thin white t-shirt and brown shorts with no undergarments, along with the thin straw mat provided for Harvey to sleep on the concrete floor of the cell, provide barely any cushioning, and have over a prolonged period taken their toll on her limbs, shoulders, and especially her skinny back. After 33 years of smoothness, patches of skin on her back, torso and forearms have become rough and uneven, in addition to heat rashes caused by heat and humidity in the cell. Harvey estimates the ambient temperature in the cell to be 34-42 degrees Celsius (93-108 degrees Fahrenheit).
Many of these sensory effects are especially intensified for her as an autistic person with heightened sensory processing compared to a neurotypical person, which causes her to experience more intensely the resultant damaging effects from the sum total of these already-damaging experiences of daily agonizing sexual humiliation and the consequent loss of her sexual dignity, physical discomfort and bodily degeneration, and other psychological trauma including permanent, irreversible damage.
Irreversible damage
Some time after the release of the Plea for Prosecutorial Compassion, Harvey underwent a medical review. It revealed the devastating, lasting consequences that the prison environment has inflicted on her body.
Prior to being remanded, Harvey had been carefully managing her diet to manage her health. She had kept her cholesterol intake low for the past 15 years, but the high-cholesterol diet in prison has caused visceral fat to accumulate around her organs, which will be tough to reverse. She had been substituting salt with monosodium glutamate (MSG), but the high-salt diet in prison has damaged her kidneys such that she is irreversibly unable to take spironolactone, an anti-androgen for her HRT. The prison diet has also wrecked her digestion and given her difficulty with yeast, so she can no longer consume bake goods, such as bread, as she used to.
Meanwhile, the heated air in her prison cell that she breathes in daily has aggravated her pre-existing heart issues. Her heart is thus irreversibly damaged, not just preventing her from being able to take cyproterone acetate, another common HRT anti-androgen, but also preventing her from being able to undergo general anesthesia as it would cause her heart to stop. This is dangerous in general as it precludes one from undergoing any potentially needed life-saving surgeries that require general anesthesia, but for Harvey is particularly damaging as this permanently precludes her from undergoing many forms of gender-affirming surgeries.
Finally, the prison enforces a “male calorie intake” on Harvey, and not finishing her food is not an option because they will force-feed her if so. This has caused Harvey to gain 11kg of weight. If she does not lose this weight and return to her pre-incarceration range, her heart is estimated by the prison doctor to have another 10 to 15 years of functioning, after which there could be fatal complications. When asked how she is supposed to lose this extra weight she never wanted to put on, the prison doctor had no answer.
In fact, on 15 July 2024, Harvey was rushed to the Changi General Hospital’s Angiographies Unit after her heart started acting up, and has since been brought back. It is not clear how much longer her heart will last under the current prison conditions.
The prison is currently looking to put Harvey in a punishment cell for 14 days, and subject her to 9 strokes of the cane (which women are exempt from in Singapore), as punishment for resisting strip-searches. This can happen anytime from 30 July onward, and Harvey would only be informed right before it happens with no advance warning. For Harvey, caning would involve exposing her buttocks to a male prison officer, and that combined with the caning itself would be highly reminiscent of the sexual violence she experienced on 5 May 2023, where among other things, male security officers manhandled her buttocks to the point of digital penetration of her anus during a strip-search.
Furthermore, caning is a lawful sanction, so in arguing against granting Harvey bail on the grounds of infirmity, the prosecution will likely argue that the infirmities described here only arose as a result of the caning.
Conclusion
Harvey’s experience exemplifies how prisons do not rehabilitate or reform, but rather deepen cycles of harm and trauma. Prison has taken from Harvey her dignity, health, current and future medical transition, and even lifespan, giving her in return lasting trauma that will take decades to overcome. All this damage has been done in pre-trial detention before any sentence has been passed, while the continuing daily traumas impede Harvey from mounting a clear-headed defense. She is being treated as guilty until proven innocent. To call this justice would be a gross perversion.
Vickreman Harvey Chettiar must be given bail and released immediately.
The following speech is by GPAC member Sara Abbas and was read out at a demonstration in Cologne, Germany on Staurday June 1st. Organised by Sudan AG Rhineland, the demonstration marked the 5th anniversary of the Qiyada Massacre in Khartoum on June 3rd, 2019, and the violent dispersal of the sit-in in front of the Military General Command.
I want to start by paying the deepest respect to the martyrs of Sudan’s three revolutions of 1964, 1985 and 2018.
I want to also pay my respect to the revolutionary women and girls of Sudan, who defied so much to organize in every place and space. I want to especially pay respect to the women and girls from South Sudan, Nuba Mountains, Blue Nile and Darfur, who were bombed out of their homes and their lands and who have been at the forefront of confronting state violence for decades.
I want to greet as well all those from Sudan at the demo, and to wish them strength in these painful times.
Greetings and love especially to our siblings from Palestine, Kurdistan, Tigray, Syria, Ukraine, Iran and everywhere else where people continue to stand up in the face of genocide and mass murder. Greetings to allies in Germany who see that what is happening to us in places like Sudan and Palestine is directly related to what is being done right here, in Europe. Europe continues to cut deals with mass murderers, to kill our siblings at its borders, to loot our resources, to blackmail us into cycles of escalating debt, and to tell billions of people across the world that all they can hope for, if they’re lucky, is to stay alive.
I won‘t speak much about June 3rd, 2019, except to say that it’s a day carved in blood forever in Sudanese history. A few weeks following that day, on June 30th, and despite the horror and internet blackout— millions came out on the streets across Sudan to say: there’s no turning back; the revolution continues. This took a stunning amount of local organizing and networking across locales, and would not have been possible without years of building structures capable of it. Sudan’s December Revolution is a testament to the power of sustained grassroots organizing. Its tools, tactics, vision, structures and evolution should be studied across movements, as should its lessons and failures.
The devastating war we see today in Sudan, which began in April of last year, is part of a long and bloody cycle of conflict. The extension of the war last year to other areas, including the capital city, Khartoum, is rapidly shrinking whatever safe spaces or means of livelihood were left. It is the workers, the poor, the small-scale farmers, the landless, the refugees, the displaced mothers and children living in shelters and camps, who are suffering the most. Sudan is in the grip of a catastrophic hunger crisis. In parts of the country and in some camps for the displaced, people are reduced to eating their seeds instead of planting them, to swallowing mud to feel full, to chewing toxic leaves from trees. The world as usual is desensitized to Black suffering, especially African suffering, and we see this too today in relation to what is happening in the D.R. Congo.
A few months before this war started, the neighborhood resistance committees had published what they call “the charter for the establishment of people power”. This came after months of local work across the country, from which a shared vision of how people can govern themselves crystallized. It is not a coincidence that this war started soon after. It is a counter-revolutionary war, meant to redirect energy from building alternative structures, to raw, basic, desperate survival.
At this moment in time, the counter-revolution is very much winning in Sudan, and the future of the revolutionary project is really unclear. The war is deepening, and the matrix of national and international interests fueling the fighting, is growing.
Defending the revolution right now means supporting the mutual aid initiatives. It means defending refugees’ right to cross borders without barriers or violence. It means pressuring for a ceasefire and an immediate end to the killing. It means rejecting false agreements based on secret negotiations in fancy hotels far away. It means defending revolutionaries and activists from repression by all sides. It means resisting the call to pit ethnicities against one another, or to pick a side to back. It means most of all to organize locally to raise the voices of those rejecting militarism, not just in Sudan but in Germany, in Palestine and elsewhere.
Since 2019, the German state has tried to bring so-called stability to Sudan by centering the military and promoting a civilian elite to share power with it. Germany is most interested in continuing to have a friendly face in power in Khartoum, one that can help it stop migration by any means. You should resist this and back the revolution’s demands of bottom up civilian rule, demilitarization and justice.
Before I end, I want to take a moment to remember your comrade and mine, Nuisha, who passed away suddenly here in Cologne in March. Nuisha, who fled Iran in 1980 following the Islamist counter-revolution there, was a committed anarchist, a courageous human being and steadfast ally to many struggles, including the Sudanese Revolution. May she rest in power and may we keep up her legacy.
A genocide is taking place in Palestine. It’s the culmination of more than 75 years of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population. The Israeli killing machine has caused a vertiginous level of violence and destruction in Gaza. It also generated an unprecedented wave of global solidarity with Palestine. It’s certainly the most consequential anti-war movement since 2003 when people around the world opposed the US war in Iraq. Everywhere, people are demanding an immediate ceasefire and justice for Palestine.
This panel proposes an abolitonist lens to examine the history of settler colonialism, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, as well as the creative struggles of Palestinians. It explores the connections between US and European imperialisms and the Israeli colonial project. The panelists will analyze the role of the Israeli prison and security industrial complexes in maintaining and reinforcing the colonial geography of Palestine. Finally the panelists will discuss the abolitionist present and the possibility for a decolonial future in Palestine.
Panelists
Linda Quiquivix is a geographer and works on and with Palestine/ians and Latin American Indigenous communities. She is working on a book project about decolonial Palestine and maps.
Amr Saedeldin is a political scientist from Palestine who does popular education with Syrian and Palestinian communities in Lebanon. He recently published a book about DBS.
Sai Englert has a degree in development studies and works primarily on the zionist labor movement. He recently published a book about Settler Colonialism.
Date: December 1st at 3pm Boston time, 8pm London time, 10pm Palestine time.
Sponsors: JVP – Pittsburgh, SJP Emerson, Global Prison Abolition Coalition, The Global Campaign for Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution, DSA Boston, Muslim CounterPublics Lab
Atefeh Rangriz is a writer and activist in Iran who was arrested in 2019 during a May 1st International Workers Day public gathering in Tehran, and was sent to the notorious Gharchak women’s prison.
Rangriz launched a hunger strike on October 18 to protest her prolonged detention and abuse in prison as well as the harassment of her family. In a statement during her hunger strike she expressed “I will turn my body into a weapon against all the oppression we’ve been through”. She received 11 years prison sentence but was able to secure her own release on bail.
On September 10th, 2023, as part of the wave of mass arrests ahead of the anniversary of Jina Amini’s death in custody by the state, Rangriz was re-arrested and was sent to Shahrud prison.
Since October 18th Rangriz has begun another round of hunger strike. This time her hunger strike has coincided with Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Below is a the transcription of her audio solidarity message to the people of Gaza and the broader Palestinian liberation movement:
“For Palestine, us, and our resistance. Oh, Palestine, occupied county, land of the olive trees and winds of resistance. I write to you even though my hands are tied. We learned about resistance from you a long time ago. [We learned] That resistance is life and never ending. And we have continued, and will continue, this path in the Jin, Jiyan, Azadi revolution. Oh, people of Palestine who are bombarded with fire. We will neither forgive nor forget. We are, and will remain, seekers of justice.
Yes, we know very well that in occupied lands, our fire is a fire of joyful rebellion and fire of Shakarimis*, fire of ‘yes’ to life and ‘no’ to everything that is reactionary, and burning it. Our fire is a ‘no’ to everything that cuts life’s umbilical cord. But their fire is the fire of genocide, child murder, atrocity, prosecution, war and execution.
Yes, they are the ones who belittle our message, who draw their swords to spill our blood. Oh, Gazan child, our scream for your blood is not different from our scream against those who have our blood on their hands. But since I believe that resistance is life, I know that the day will come that our lands will be liberated, and we will still scream at them and tell them to go live and die anywhere else, but not among us. The time has come for them to leave us alone because we have a lot to do and must start doing what we’ve been prevented from doing. Here we have the history and the sound of first cries at birth. Here we have today and the future, and our world and our destinies. We will tell them to get lost from our lands, from our land and our sky, our bread and our scars, our everything and our memories.
Long live Palestine. Long live everyday resistance.
Shahrud Prison, October 20, 2023”
* Nika Shakarami is a 16 years old martyr of the Jin Jiyan Azadi uprising in Iran who went missing on September 10 during street protests. Her dead body was found at a morgue in a police station 10 days later.
GPAC has been part of this solidarity campaign, and will be coordinating followup work on building alliances against enforced disappearances in Pakistan in the future. Please get in touch for more information on [email protected].
Note: Sammi Baloch, the General Secretary of the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons and the daughter of Dr Deen Mohammad Baloch, will mark 14 years since her father was forcibly disappeared by Pakistani security forces on 28 June 2023. Read her personal appeal for solidarity on this link.
ON THE 14TH ANNIVERSARY OF DR DEEN MOHAMMAD’S DISAPPEARANCE We sign this letter in solidarity with Sammi Baloch and her search for her father, Dr Deen Mohammad, who was forcibly disappeared in the middle of the night by Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps. On 28 June 2023, Sammi will mark 14 years since her father was abducted from a hospital. While on night duty, he was brutally beaten, blind-folded, hand-cuffed, and thrown into a military vehicle to never be seen again…(continue reading)
It’s been almost two months since the massive fire in Burundi’s Gitega central prison on 7 December 2021, which killed at least 38 prisoners and injured 69 others. To this date, no proper investigation has taken place by the Burundian government of what caused the fire, and the actions of the prison administration.The numbers and names of the dead and injured are unclear.
One prisoner told Human Rights Watch that for nearly two hours, the prisoners were left to deal with the fire alone. Following the fire, the government buried the bodies in secret, and the families of missing prisoners, some of whom have been unable to complete the mourning rituals, have tried to get answers to no avail.
Just a few weeks before the fire took place, on 18 November 2021, the United States government lifted sanctions that were in place against Burundian officials linked to the 2015 massacre that was carried out against Burundians who opposed the then-President’s move to continue on to an unconstitutional third term — violence that led to the death of 1200 and sent 400,000 fleeing the country. The US State Department said in its press release lifting the sanctions that the “decision reflects the changed circumstances in Burundi and President Ndayishimiye’s pursuit of reforms across multiple sectors over the past year.”
An article in africanews notes that as of 26 November 2021, “Burundi’s eleven prisons held 12,878 prisoners for a capacity of 4,924, according to the prison administration.”
For the last three years, since the start of the pandemic in 2019, the globally incarcerated population held in carceral spaces of state violence has been one of the most affected demographics. From prisons to concentration camps to refugee detention centers, not only have incarcerated and detained people been made extremely vulnerable to COVID-19, their basic rights have also been violated by the authorities in the name of pandemic regulations.
The pandemic has forced prisoners to organize themselves under the deadly conditions to protect their fundamental right to life. This is why the number of hunger strikes (collective and individual) within carceral spaces has been steadily increasing globally.
On January 11th, more than 200 male prisoners at Rikers Island in New York City launched a hunger strike demanding their rights. They are protesting their inhumane treatment that has been exacerbated under the COVID-19 pandemic: unjustifiably long lockdowns, lack of timely medical treatment, lack of access to law library and common areas, limited supplies in the commissary, delayed court dates and communications, and denial of visits, including by lawyers. In a voice message sent from prison, Ervin Bowins, one of the individuals on hunger strike, condemned the denial of even basic services:
“We are on hunger strike, and we have a list of reasonable things we would like to bring to the table so that we can get things rolling, such as a law library, recreation, and mental health service, and medical stuff like that. What we are not being afforded. Mandatory, minimum standards for a human being.”
Even before the pandemic, Rikers Island jail complex was notorious for inhumane and deadly treatment of its inmates and denial of due process, and grassroots mobilization has forced the city to commit to the closing of Rikers Island by 2026. The horrific distributive consequences of racial capitalism in New York City’s prison industrial complex is reflected in the cost of over $500k per year to detain one inmate during a global pandemic. In a recent interview with BNC News (Black News Tonight) the formerly incarcerated community organizer Jerome Wright explains:
“We’re talking about people who have not been convicted of a crime, and they are being treated worse than those who have been sentenced in upstate’s prisons. It’s a staffing problem, they don’t get their medicine, there is no mental health, solitary confinement, in defiance of solitary laws being used…it’s a harrowing experience to be in there and right now it’s almost a death sentence. ”
In the same interview Dr Joy James speaks about the reason why such levels of abuse are normalized in the U.S. society and why prisoners’ collective hunger strike is where leadership and agency is:
“This is supposed to be a functioning democracy, it is maladaptive, it doesn’t conform to human rights or civil rights. And it has become part of normalizing the culture to be this indifferent. You know, if we think about it, if only white people were in power, and it was all white guards or jail union that was meting out this type of abuse, disproportionately against black people, we would register emotionally, psychologically, politically to the Antebellum era. However you want to define slavery and the 13th Amendment, you are treating people as animals, you are treating people worst than animals, no animal should be treated this way, from rotten food to feces on the floor, the intimation, the humiliation, you know, literal terror, because they are held captive? We can do better but our bureaucracies won’t unless we force them to.”
Meanwhile, in Palestine, an increasing number of prisoners are going on hunger strike as the only means to assert control over their own bodies in the colonial prisons of Israel. The most recent case is Hisham Abu Hawash, a Palestinian construction worker from the West Bank who had been arrested by the Israeli regime on October 2020 and placed under administrative detention. As Palestinian lawyer Yara Hawari writes:
“Under administrative detention, there is no time limit on how long a prisoner can remain in custody, and the “evidence” on which the arrest is based is never disclosed. Inherited from the British Mandate in Palestine, the Israeli regime often claims it uses this mechanism in a preventative way, in order to avert “future offences”. Administrative detention orders in Israel last for a maximum of six months, but can be renewed indefinitely.”
After 141 days of hunger strike, nearly five months, Abu Hawash pressured the Israeli regime to agree upon a release deal which guarantees that his detention will not be renewed. Abu Hawash is now due to be released in February.
While indefinite administrative detentions have been a long-standing means of depriving Palestinians of their rights, the pandemic has made their situation even worse, with infections spreading in Israeli prisons and COVID regulations being abused by prison authorities.
As the crisis of global racial capitalism unfolds, the nation-state system is increasingly relying on prisons and mass incarceration as a strategy of crisis management and governance by force. But this also means prisons are increasingly becoming sites of resistance and liberation. Despite being confined to the harshest conditions, the global prisoner population is using their bodies to forge new revolutionary horizons and visions of emancipation.
Global Prison Abolitionist Coalition stands in solidarity with the ongoing hunger strikes on Rikers Island, in Palestine and other struggles of incarcerated people all over the world. We support their demands while emphasizing the need for the abolition of all types of carceral spaces and all the racialized and gendered structures of oppression, exploitation and domination that bring those spaces into existence. As an act of solidarity, we have started documenting various forms of resistance in prisons and other carceral spaces globally, and we invite you to contribute to our project by sharing with us instances of such struggles at [email protected].
“Among the thousands of Kurdish political prisoners in Turkish colonial prisons, Aysel Tuğluk, who has been in captivity for nearly five years, has been sick and her medical condition requires immediate release from prison, which the Turkish state continues to deny. Her friends report that Tuğluk’s medical condition got worse after the racist attacks during her mother’s funeral in Ankara. Tuğluk’s life, her ongoing imprisonment despite her medical condition, her family’s early experience with torture and death in Turkish colonial prisons, as well as her political activism against the gross human rights violations and torture targeting the Kurds in the 1990s, is one illustrative case of how prisons are central to the continuity of Turkish colonial rule on the Kurds and the historicity of the Kurdish political prisoners’ anti-colonial abolitionist struggles.
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Given the historical context of the prison system as a tool of oppression of the colonized populations and suppression of their resistance, although pragmatically tempting at times, an overemphasis on “legality” of activities and organizational affiliation of some political prisoners unintendedly reproduces state-defined bounds of “legal” politics and recognizes the criminalization of others who are involved in state-defined “illegal” politics. Instead of separating “legal” vs. “illegal” resistance, or political prisoners “deserving” and “not deserving” freedom, our focus should rather be on the role of the prison system in the criminalization and punishment of anti-systemic movements. In her several attempts to escape the various Turkish prisons throughout the 1980s, Sakine Cansız, expresses the illegitimacy of the “legal” system that was used to colonize Kurdish populations and criminalize their dissent. Although the concept of “abolition” was not used explicitly in her biographic work, a prison abolitionist politics, developed specifically around political captivity, and articulated more broadly around the illegitimacy of a colonial legal system, has been carried out for decades by the Kurdish freedom movement.”
We continue highlighting instances of prison resistance from around the world on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Attica prison rebellion.
Canada – On January 4, 2021, around 90 prisoners inside the Saskatoon Provincial Correctional Centre and Pine Grove Correctional Centre in Prince Albert began a hunger strike, demanding the resignation of Saskatchewan’s Corrections and Policing Minister Christine Tell for her failure to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks in jails. Saskatchewan also has one of the highest incarceration rates of Indigenous people, with around 75 per cent of prisoners being Indigenous. Read the letter by Cory Charles Cardinal, a indigenous prisoner justice advocate incarcerated inside the SPCC who organized the hunger strike.
Mexico – Prisoners inside Prison No. 5 (CERSS) of San Cristóbal de las Casas and No. 10 of Comitan went on hunger strike demanding care to prevent the spread of Covid infections. The hunger strikers were members of groups called The True Voice of Amate and The Voice of Indigenous People in Resistance, which also include Tsotsil prisoners. They denounced that indigenous prisoners did not only suffer constant violations of due process without but were also victims of torture.
USA – In June this year, immigrants detained by ICE at Bergen County Jail, North Jersey went on yet another hunger strike to protest the jail’s conditions and to demand that they be released on parole. In retaliation to this and other acts of protest, ICE has multiple times transferred detainees to other states, far from the detainees’ families and without properly notifying their lawyers. Thanks to the years-long commitment of the movement to end the detention of immigrants, in August this year, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed into law legislation that prohibits the state from entering into or renewing local and private contracts with ICE. As the ACLU documented, since the beginning of the pandemic, hundreds of detained immigrants have participated in a growing number of hunger strikes nationwide, seeking protection from COVID-19.
USA – In February this year, more than 100 inmates took over two units of the City Justice Center (CJC), a city-run jail in Saint Louis, Missouri, setting fire and breaking windows. It was the third protest over COVID-19 conditions inside the jail since December 2020. The inmates controlled portions of the jail for roughly six hours before law enforcement retook control. One guard was injured, and those involved were transferred out of the jail.
