Have you heard of the ‘Baltagiya’?
Although
Hillary Clinton and other big names in the Obama administration as well
as certain pundits in the big media houses in that country who presume
they can defined the world for all and Sunday feign surprise at the
recent political upheavals in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak’s brutality was no
secret to his victims or to those who are not ready purchases of
Washington-birthed propaganda. The signs of tyranny are irrepressible
and trend emerges when democracy is absent in spirit or structure,
silencing is deafening, abduction follows abduction, torture becomes
commonplace and death finds a voice in the strength of numbers. Details,
though, are slow late-coming residents of ‘whole picture’. I knew about
Hosni Mubarak, I didn’t know about the ‘Baltagiya’.
I am sure Hillary was less ignorant. So too the US State Department
Deputy Spokesman Robert Wade and others who find salve for wounds
suffered domestically by ranting, raving and talking down to the rest of
the world. They would have known who or what ‘Baltagiya’ was because
they were willing and joyful approvers. They needed Mubarak.
Political landscape
I, on the other hand, had no clue. Some kind of Egyptian dish, I
would have thought. Baltagiya means ‘gangs of armed thugs’. I knew about
these; just didn’t know the local term. The phenomenon was widespread in
that country. On February 2, 2011, however, the local name grabbed
global headlines. When Mubarak unleashed the ‘Baltagiya’ on protesting
Egyptians it was simply a matter of the underground erupting through
social crust and sitting pretty on the political landscape, naked and
unashamed. That which was hidden, was now apparent. The unofficial had
become official. ‘It seemed a culture of brutality and violence had
exchanged the torture cells for the streets’, Leela Jacinto reported.
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‘Baltagiya,’ according to Issandr El Amrani, a Cairo-based political
analyst and writer, “might be gangs, police informants or unemployed
youths that can be hired or just poor people who are paid off.” Over a
period of three decades, Mubarak put to work close to two million
people, including police informants, who have effectively formed a
parallel force tasked with quelling dissent at the local level. I didn’t
know what it was called and the name did not matter much to the
Egyptians. What matters is the Uncle Sam would have known but chose to
look the other way. This is why Clinton’s moral posturing regarding the
protests sound even more hollow than what she generally utters.
Human qualities
It is not unusual for regimes to defer in favour of informal
mechanisms of coercion when they lose ideological sway, suffer
popularity decline etc. Some States have such mechanisms in place in
terms of back-up-plan prerogative. Those who think torture doesn’t
happen in the USA, ought to read up on how that country dealt with the
Black Panther Movement or, more recently, the ‘Black Block’ anarchists
who terrified Bill Clinton in November 1999 and April 2000, in Seattle
and Washington, respectively.
Let me relate a small story that will indicate how meticulous the
United States of America is when it comes to dealing with threat.
In the year 2001, as part of a series of articles about experiences
in that country, titled ‘Sketchbook USA’, I wrote about my teachers and
friends. I mentioned those who I considered to be endowed with brilliant
minds and exceptional human qualities. Among them was Prof Geoff Waite
of the German Studies Department. I described him as the only
card-carrying member of the Communist Party. That was metaphor,
obviously. It differentiated him from other leftist academics high on
talk and low on action and lower still when it came to dealing with
fellow human beings. How could Geoff be a card-carrying member of a
non-existent entity? And yet, this innocent and honest description,
written in a Sunday paper in a country located at the other end of the
world, was picked up and relayed to the relevant authorities in the USA,
I later found out.
The ‘feds’ had checked him out in Ithaca, interrogated him. Geoff
believed and might still believe that I had screwed him up. He was an
exceptional mind, a scholar so meticulous that he was struggling to
complete the work he had dedicated his life to, a treatise on the German
philosopher, Heideggar, which (he had been) working on for the past 20
years’.
It might still be unfinished, for Geoff would put student and
teaching before his own research and writing. Well, the US Baltagiya,
still un-surfaced (unlike in Egypt) were certainly thorough, wouldn’t
you say?
US military custody
He had nothing to hide, but he could have done without that little
visit, totally unwarranted and absolutely antithetical to the kind of
rhetoric Washington spits out all the time.
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Actually, the USA has been smart enough to write Baltagiyasism into
law. So it’s official and not underground. This doesn’t mean that the
unofficial does not happen. This is a country that goes to war at the
drop of a hat or rather at the threat of a drop of oil spilling and
thinks nothing of snuffing out half a million lives (of brown people,
yes).
Here’s a snippet. There’s an Iraqi photojournalist who was arrested
in September 2008 because he was considered “a threat to the security of
Iraq and coalition forces” by US and Iraqi Forces. He was working for
multiple agencies including Reuters at the time of his arrest. An Iraqi
court concluded on November 30, 2008 that there is no evidence against
him and ordered him released from US military custody.
The US military refused to release him. He was released only a year
ago, almost to the day (February 10, 2010). That’s a ‘known’.
There are countless unknowns in the world of US Baltagiyism. If you
are interested only in journalists, there are at least 14 of them being
held without due process for long periods in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Guantanamo Bay. Sixteen were killed by US fire in Iraq alone.
The people of Egypt countered the ‘Baltagiya’ with the only weapons
at their disposal. Themselves. Hands and hearts. That’s something
tyrannies find hard to handle. It happens. Sooner or later.
A good lesson and one which I am sure Barack Obama and the corporate
thugs on whose behalf he runs that country of contradictions would do
well to learn.
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