In Burma (as I recently noted here) hip-hop has become a vehicle for dissent against the military junta. A new article in the Global Post profiles Generation Wave (GW), one well-known group of young Burmese activists who are using this music to stoke resistance.

GW itself was formed after the “Saffron Revolution” in September 2007 when rising fuel prices provoked thousands of monks to take to the streets in protest. Civilians joined the movement, but the military junta cracked down, leaving hundreds dead and thousands imprisoned.

Following the crackdown, a group of protesters, who had been friends since high school, started GW as a way to inspire new activists inside Myanmar. Having analyzed revolutions worldwide and the opposition movement in their country they decided to focus on non-violent resistance.

In two and half years, the group has carried out what they call “action campaigns” almost every week. Their main activities include anti-government graffiti in busy places, handing out pamphlets and writing and distributing political music.

In the music video (above) for their new song “Never Give Up,” which includes images of Aung San Suu Kyi and monks protesting in the streets, Generation Wave members 9KT and MK rap with masks on to conceal their identities. In one scene, to represent the 30 members of the group have have been arrested, the pair are singing behind bars. As 9KT explains:

“We are trying to tell the government, even if they imprison us they cannot stop us fighting for freedom; we will always carry on.”

“We are telling the people that they shouldn’t give up,” he said. “Burmese youth can’t be afraid of the Burmese junta, they need to fight for freedom in our country.”

While there is seemingly little socially-conscious hip-hop in the US these days, oppressed people around the world – from Palestine to Burma – are still utilizing rap to challenge the injustices they face.

The Guardian recently took a fascinating look at how this art form is being used in Burma, where the military regime censors and controls everything, as a form of nonviolent resistance.

Burma has a history of revolutionary music. Traditional protest songs, known as thangyat, were once used to air grievances, both small, against neighbours, and large, against authority. Following the 1988 student uprising, however, the music was banned outright by the ruling military junta.

But hip-hop’s fluid lyrics wrapped in rhymes and youthful argot make it a perfect modern format for subtly spreading an anti-authoritarian message.

One of the most popular and outspoken hip-hop artists is 29-year-old Thxa Soe. On his most recent album, three-quarters of the songs, with titles like “Water, Electricity, Please Come Back,” were banned.

And there are others in Burma finding an outlet for dissent in music. A group known as Generation Wave, its exact membership unknown, secretly records and distributes anti-government albums across the country, dropping them at the tea shops that are the social hubs for Burma’s underground political network.

They write songs such as Wake Up, a call for young people to join the pro-democracy movement, and Khwin Pyu Dot May (Please Excuse Me), the story of a young man asking his mother’s permission to join the struggle.

As I read this, I couldn’t help but feel sad that hip-hop has been so commercialized and co-opted by the mainstream in the US. Given the many crises we face, rap could and should serve as a powerful vehicle for dissent here as well. Unfortunately, there seems to be little new protest music – hip-hop or otherwise – that really speaks to our predicament.

• The streets of Qom, Iran’s holy city and the center of its religious life, filled with tens of thousands of mourners on Sunday. They came both to honor a founding father of modern Iran, Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, and to protest the government he had come to oppose.

• More than 3,000 female Burmese workers at a bra factory in Tak’s Mae Sot district again went on strike on Monday over an assault on two of an employee’s relatives by four security officers.

• In New York City, students left school early on Monday in a walk-out to protest the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s plan to stop giving students free Metrocards. The youngsters left school at 2 pm and gathered in front of the MTA’s headquarters to demand that the agency find a way to fill its $400 million budget shortfall that won’t force students to pay to commute to city schools.

• Some 300 municipal staff began a sit-in at the Town Hall in Alcoy, Spain on Monday against the local government’s decision to sack nine workers, saying they will remain there until this afternoon.

• Over 5,000 indigenous, Afro-Colombian and farming community members are occupying the community center of Piñuña Negro in the department of Putumayo, Colombia. A crowd of all ages has gathered at the highest government office in the area—the Police Inspector’s office—to demand negotiations with local and national government representatives and an end to military and paramilitary harassment and coca eradication programs that are causing thousands of residents to be displaced.

• Hundreds of Palestinian citizens on Monday evening participated in a sit-in organized by Hamas Movement near Salahuddin terminal on the Palestinian-Egyptian borders in protest at the building of a steel wall on Gaza borders.

• A protest at the New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZX) on Monday drew attention to the contribution of the New Zealand business to climate change. A sit-in occurred, blocking the entrance to the building, and police arrested nine activists. The protest featured ‘Radical Cheerleaders’, a samba band, and around 80 diverse protestors.

• The Islamabad Bar Association (IBA) on Saturday protested near Sihala police training college in Islamabad to urge the government to expel the US private security company Blackwater, which lawyers said was operating inside Sihala college.

About 150 migrant children left to survive on their own in Greece have gone on a hunger strike to protest their imprisonment on a Greek island where conditions have been described as “abominable” by one European human rights body.

• Burmese activists on Monday held a protest rally against the secret visit to Japan by Htay Oo, Secretary of the pro-junta civilian organization – the Union Solidarity and Development Association – outside the hotel where he is staying.

• About 50,000 people in the Baltic states marked the twentieth anniversary of the ‘Baltic Way’ – when two million people formed a human chain to protest against Soviet rule – with a relay along the original 678km route that runs through Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.

• Residents have held a round-the-clock vigil for the last month and sat-in near local government offices to protest the construction of a high-speed rail link between Shanghai and the nearby city of Hangzhou that they say will run too close to their apartments.

• A musician, simply identified as “Yellow King” collapsed on Tuesday in Lagos during a hunger-strike rally to protest activities of pirates in Nigeria, which was organised by coalition of musicians at the National Theatre.

• A group of senior lawyers resorted to a day’s token hunger strike in front of the Aurangabad Bench of the Bombay High Court on Thursday to protest against the alleged caste bias in appointment of government pleaders at the court.

• International climate activists floated two roof tops in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool early Thursday afternoon in anticipation of the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. One of the roofs read, “HELP,” the other, “The Water Is Rising.” The 30 ft. banner behind the roofs declared, “Prevent the Next Katrina, Restore the Gulf, Stop Global Warming.”

• In Egypt, the Tanta Flax and Oils Company strikers demonstrated on Wednesday in front of the Gharbeia Governorate HQ, denouncing privatization and the Governor’s collusion with the Saudi investor.

Protesters banging on pots and pans in Santiago, Chile in 1983.

“When citizens of oppressive governments can’t protest, how do they show their discontent?” asks Zeynep Memecan at Newsweek last week. A few creative examples of what people have done under such circumstances are then offered, including one which caught me off guard. She writes of a protest in Chile against “Marxist” President Salvador Allende in December 1971 where thousands beat on pots and pans in the streets of Santiago to protest “widespread food shortages” and “acts of violence in the country.” In what seems to be an approving tone, Memecan concludes by saying that “these elite women were very influential in creating an unstable political moment that eventually led to a military coup by Augusto Pinochet in 1973.”

There is no mention of the fact that many of Chile’s problems while Allende was president were due to meddling by the U.S. government. In Killing Hope, William Blum documents in extensive detail Washington’s campaign to destabilize the Chilean government. For example, it was later revealed that  only days after Allende was elected, President Nixon ordered CIA Director Richard Helms to “make the economy scream” in Chile, and for starters offered $10,000,000 for the task.  (Here is an excerpt from that chapter, which unfortunately does not include the many useful footnotes that he provides in the book.)

Also not mentioned by Memecan is the reign of terror that Chileans lived through as a result of the coup in 1973. The raw numbers are shocking. According to Naomi Klein, “more than 3,200 people were disappeared or executed, at least 80,000 were imprisoned, and 200,000 fled the country for political reasons” during Pinochet’s 17-year rule.

But what I found most problematic about this article was that Memecan chose this example at all, especially when she could have highlighted a very similar protest that happened more than a decade later against Pinochet. On May 11, 1983, people throughout Santiago beat on their pots and pans as a symbolic act of resistance and solidarity, which helped spark the courageous nonviolent movement that eventually brought an end to the dictatorship.

Read the rest of this article »

Getting images and videos of protests and the violent crackdowns by government authorities that often ensue out to the wider public can be extremely important in building momentum and international solidarity for nonviolent movements. While this may generally not be difficult in western countries, when a repressive regime like the Chinese government or the military junta in Burma wants to cut off the flow of information to its citizens and the international community, such activity can be extremely dangerous for activists.

In preparation for his presentation at the Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict last week, Patrick Meier gave the most thorough run down on digital security – which he defines as “the art and science of staying safe when communicating in non-permissive environments” – that I’ve ever seen at his blog iRevolution. (He also gave a brief recap of every presentation at the conference on his site for anyone who is interested in checking out the other topics that were discussed.)

The must-read list of tactics and technologies that he provides should be extremely useful for activists trying to operate under the watch of repressive regimes. Here is a sampling of his tactical suggestions:

• Purchase your mobile phone far from where you live. Buy lower-end, simple phones that do not allow third-party applications to be installed. Higher-end ones with more functionalities carry more risk. Use cash to purchase your phone and SIM card. Avoid town centers and find small or second-hand shops as these are unlikely to have security cameras. Do not give your real details if asked; many shops do not ask for proof of ID.
• Use multiple SIM cards and multiple phones and only use pay-as-you go options; they are more expensive but required for anonymity.
• Remove the batteries from your phone if you do not want to be geo-located and keep the SIM card out of the phone when not in use and store in separate places.Use your phone while in a moving vehicle to reduces probability of geo-location.
• Keep the number of sensitive pictures on your camera to a minimum.
• Add plenty of random non-threatening pictures (not of individuals) and have these safe pictures locked so when you do a “delete all” these pictures stay on the card.
• For sharing offline, do not label storage devices (CDs, flash drives) with the true content.  If you burn a CD with an illegal video or piece of software on it, write an album label on it.

Meier then provides a detailed list of specific technologies that can help activists stay safe and keep their data more secure. Here are just a few examples:

Mobile phones

• Use CryptoSMS, SMS 007 or Kryptext to text securely (this requires java-based phones).
• Use Android Guardian as soon as it becomes available.

Digital cameras

• Use scrubbing software such as: JPEG stripper to remove the metadata (Exif data) from your pictures before you upload/email.

Read the rest of this article »

• A Burmese refugee group is walking from Fort Wayne Indiana to the United Nations to honor imprisoned Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. The group will demonstrate at the UN for two weeks in September before fasting for nine days, as they plead for the release of political prisoners.

• UC Santa Cruz students are on hunger strike to protest cuts to academic programs that attract minority students.

• A group of nine teachers and two activists in Los Angeles are on hunger strike to protest layoffs and class-size increases.

• Activist shareholders addressed Chevron’s annual shareholders’ meeting to call for an environmental record report, while hundreds gathered outside to protest the company’s notorious environmental practices in Latin America.

• Palo Alto high school students are fasting to raise awareness for global hunger

• Protests halt train to Machu Picchu for the second time in a week as farmers in Peru stage national workers strike

In response to recent incidents in London where police have deleted photos that protesters or tourists have taken on their phones, a cool new remedy has been developed. According to Boing Boing:

“GandhiCam” is an application for post-8700-series BlackBerry devices that automatically emails you (or an address you set) the images, audio, or video as it is taken, with the aim to make it easy to get the data off the device before it is confiscated or destroyed…

There are other live broadcast from phones like Qik, obviously, as well as phone-to-Flickr or email gateways, but there’s something to be said for a no-click solution.

Where governments are willing to take more drastic measures to squelch dissent, however, such technology may not prove to be useful. During the 2007 Saffron Revolution in Burma, for example, the authorities disconnected the entire country from the internet and turned off cell towers to stop the flow of information about the nonviolent uprising to the outside world. After the clampdown, the Burmese were forced to resort to accessing cell service from across the Thai border, and smuggling information out of the country the old fashioned way – on CDs and thumb drives.