South African newspaper blacks out front page in censorship protest

By Dilip -

A leading South African newspaper has blacked out several columns in its latest issue, echoing censorship of the apartheid era, after being threatened with criminal prosecution by a presidential aide. The weekly Mail & Guardian wasforced to pull a front page storyabout Mac Maharaj's possible involvement in a shady arms deal. Maharaj, a former Robben Island prisoner who helped smuggle out Nelson Mandela's autobiography, is now spokesman for president Jacob Zuma.
The newspaper said it received a legal letter from him just before its Thursday evening deadline, warning that its journalists could face prosecution, carrying up to 15 years in jail, if it published details of a police investigation into a mid-1990s arms deal that led to convictions of other government officials for bribery.
Mail & Guardian
Maharaj's legal firm argued the paper had acquired documents unlawfully, citing an act that makes it an offence to disclose evidence gathered in camera. "In the name of press freedom, the M&G arrogates to itself the 'right' to break the law that has been on our statute books since 1998," Maharaj claimed, accusing the paper of seeking "to hide its complicity in criminal acts by raising the spectre of a threat to media freedom and invoking fears of censorship".
Maharaj's letter warned of "the consequences the use of unlawfully and illegally obtained information had on a publication such as the News of the World." The anti-apartheid stalwart did not make any comment about any involvement in the tainted arms deal. The 30bn rand (£19bn) contracts to buy European military equipment has been described as the "original sin" of South Africa's young democracy. Zuma himself was implicated but not convicted.
The Mail & Guardian is considering legal options. 

Popular posts from this blog

The Unreality of Wasseypur: Javed Iqbal

By Dilip -
The ending of the film was shown properly,’ speak unanimous voices, the well-known folklore of Wasseypur, Dhanbad, ‘Gangster Shafiq Khan was really gunned down at the Topchachi petrol pump like it was shown in the first part of the film.’ ‘That’s how it’s done in Dhanbad.’ And there are long lists of assassinations and murders in Dhanbad. MLA Gurdas Chaterjee of the Marxist Co-ordination Committee was gunned down on the highway. Superintendent of Police Randhir Verma was murdered by dacoits during a botched bank robbery. Santosen Gupta of the Forward Bloc was gunned down. Mukul Dev of the RJD was murdered. S K Rai, a union leader is murdered. Samin Khan, a gangster, gets bail and leaves court and is shot to death, while still in the custody of the police. Sakel Dev Singh of the coal mafia is killed at the bypass; his brother who works with him, is killed at Shakti chowk, gunned down by an AK47. Manoj Singh alias Dabloo from Matkuria village, who allegedly terrorised the Muslims of Was...
Read more

History Archive: Communist Party of India's resolution on Pakistan and National Unity, September 1942

By Dilip -
Pakistan and National Unity is an important position paper of the Communist Party of India, and a far-reaching text in the history of the Indian communist movement. The resolution dated September 19, 1942 contains an outline of the CPI's support for what it called the 'just essence of the Pakistan demand'; and the Report by Gangadhar Adhikari is a detailed explanation of the resolution. The resolution was confirmed by the First Congress of the CPI in May 1943.  Its arguments may be contrasted with the pamphlet titled Who Rules Pakistan? published in Bombay in August 1948, as a 'Communist Party publication' - and is one of the earliest position documents of the Communist Party of Pakistan.  The document is titled File CPI-31/1942 ; and forms part of the P.C. Joshi Archives at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The text of the resolution and report is also available in the book entitled Remembering Dr  Gangadhar Adhikari: Selections from Writings, Part 2 ; e...
Read more

Pakistan's First Law & Labour Minister, Jogendra Nath Mandal's Resignation Letter, October 1950

By Dilip -
Mr. J.N. Mandal, Minister for Law and Labour, Government of Pakistan On 8th October, 1950 My Dear Prime Minister, It is with a heavy heart and a sense of utter frustration at the failure of my life-long mission to uplift the backward Hindu masses of East Bengal that I feel compelled to tender resignation of my membership of your Cabinet . It is proper that I should set forth in detail the reasons, which have prompted me to take this decision in this important juncture of the history of Indo-Pakistan Sub-continent. (1)  Before I narrate the remote and immediate causes of my resignation, it may be useful to give a short background of important events that have taken place during the period of my co-operation with the League, Having been approached by a few prominent League leaders of Bengal in February 1943, I agreed to work with them in the Bengal Legislative Assembly. After the fall of the Fazlul Haque Ministry in March 1943, with a party of 21 Scheduled Caste M.L.As,...
Read more

The Almond Trees by Albert Camus (1940)

By Dilip -
Image
'Do you know', Napoleon once said to Fontanes, 'what astounds me most about the world?  The impotence of force to establish anything.  There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind.  In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind' Conquerors, you see, are sometimes melancholy.  They have to pay some price for so much vainglory. But what a hundred years ago was true of the sword is no longer true today of the tank. Conquerors have made progress, and the dismal silence of places without intelligence has been established for years at a time in a lacerated Europe. At the time of the hideous wars of Flanders, Dutch painters could still perhaps paint the cockerels in their farmyards. The Hundred Years War has likewise been forgotten, and yet the prayers of Silesian mystics still linger in some hearts. But today, things have changed; the painter and the monk have been drafted - we are one with the world.  The mind has lost that regal certai...
Read more

Book review: Thirteen Months in China: A Subaltern Indian and the Colonial World

By Dilip -
Anand A. Yang, Kamal Sheel, Ranjana Sheel: Thirteen Months in China: A Subaltern Indian and the Colonial World.  New Delhi, 2017 Reviewed by Emily Whewell  Printable Version:  http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=53231 Thirteen Months in China  is an annotated translation of Gadadhar Singh’s 1902 self-published book,  Chῑn Me Terah Mᾱs , a British Indian soldier’s perspective and experience in China during the Boxer Uprising. The Boxer Uprising at the turn of the twentieth century was a key moment in Sino-foreign relations. The rebellion ended with the suppression of the anti-foreign Boxers and the liberation of the foreign legations by a military force comprising of eight foreign nations. This “International Expedition” included British forces, with the majority of British soldiers belonging to Indian regiments. The uprising’s suppression also came at a cost to lives, homes, and livelihoods. Singh’s account gives an insight into how one ...
Read more

Ben Marks - The Mao Mango Cult of 1968 and the Rise of China's Working Class

By Dilip -
For 2,000 years, the peach was the iconic fruit of China, an auspicious symbol of good health and a long life. But from August of 1968 until roughly the fall of the following year, the mango was China’s most revered produce item, whose meaning was unwittingly bestowed upon it by none other than Mao Zedong. Now an  exhibition  about the mango’s short-lived sanctification has opened at Museum Reitberg in Zurich, Switzerland. Continuing through June 16, 2013, the show is organized around more than 60 Mao-era mango items—from Mao mango medallions to textiles bearing mango imagery—donated to the museum by scholar and author Alfreda Murck, who also edited the exhibition’s  catalog  and will be speaking at the  Capital Literary Festival  in Beijing on March 2, 2013. The circumstances leading to the mango’s prominence as a symbol of the working class have their roots in 1958, when Mao Zedong instituted a series of agricultural and industrial reforms...
Read more

Karl Marx: Letter to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America; 1865

By Dilip -
Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America Presented to U.S. Ambassador Charles Adams January 28, 1865 The workingmen of Europe... consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.  Sir: We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.  From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense ...
Read more