Episode 56: The Protests - Algeria One Year Later

While it might seem like an obscure topic due to scant coverage in the Western press, a quick review of the facts makes it clear that we ignore Algeria at our peril. First of all, it’s Africa’s biggest country by land mass, and home to a population larger than Canada’s. It’s also home to Africa’s largest company, state owned oil giant Sonatrach, a major exporter of fuel to Western Europe. We dive deeper into the nuances and into the layered intrigues that define Algeria’s history, and what’s been happening since popular protests removed longtime ruler Abdelaziz Bouteflika from power almost exactly one year ago.

We speak with Mehdi Kaci, an Algerian American activist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Mehdi recently returned to Algeria to see how things have unfolded since the ouster of Bouteflika.

Episode 54: The Protests - Chile

In mid-October, 2019 protests broke out in Santiago, and spread across the nation in what quickly became the largest display of civil unrest in Chile since the Pinochet dictatorship. While the proximate cause was a modest raise in Santiago’s metro fares, it’s been clear from the outset that the protests are concerned with larger structural issues, chief among them being Chile’s decades-old commitment to laissez-faire capitalist policies that have seen the privatization of large sectors of the economy, including public utilities and services such as water and roads, and a two-tier system for healthcare and education have also underscored the large chasm between classes. And finally, the state’s privately managed pension system (designed by the president’s brother, Jose Piñera), has been a focal point with its notoriously poor payout structure. While the pension system’s administrators manage to pull in decent profits the system has left Chilean pensioners struggling to survive.

On October 25th an estimated 1.2 million people took to the streets of Santiago demanding Sebastian Piñera’s resignation. While a number of his cabinet ministers were forced to resign, Piñera - a billionaire who made his fortune bringing credit card companies to Chile under the Pinochet regime- remains in office. The protests have been characterized by violence with scores of metro stations burned, looting and vandalism, and petrol bombs. Piñera called a state of emergency on October 19th, which resulted in street patrols by the armed forces and the militarized Carabiñeros. Hundreds of human rights abuse cases have been reported by individuals, human rights organizations, and medical professionals, including at least 19 deaths, arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture, sexual assault in police custody, and what appears to be the systematic misuse of rubber bullets and non-lethal projectiles to intentionally maim and blind protestors.

Today we speak with three guests: American filmmaker and journalist Joshua Tucker, Chilean social researcher Lorena Ortiz, and Chilean sociologist and professor Conrado Soto Karelovic.

Left-to-right: Lorena Ortiz, Joshua Tucker, Conrado Soto Karelovic, and Lorena Ortiz. Photos are property of the subjects.

Veins of Resistance (Official Trailer) from joshuatreetucker on Vimeo.

Episode 38: Hong Kong Protests - Local Perspectives

In June more than 2 million Hong Kong residents took to the streets to protest a proposed law that could see residents of the global financial center subject to extradition and criminal prosecution in China, undercutting the delicate "one country, two systems" policy that was to remain in place for 50 years after the 1997 handover from the British. Today, on the anniversary of the handover, the protestors stormed and occupied the Hong Kong legislature.

For this show we speak with two guests: a professor of cultural studies in Hong Kong whose research focuses on youth activism, and an anonymous guest from Hong Kong who returned to participate in the protests in June.

Photo credit Nextvoyage on Pexels

Episode 36: Sudan- Massacre in Khartoum (Part 2 of 2)

This segment of our two-part interview with Dahlia Al Roubi was recorded on Tuesday, June 4th, the day after the current government crackdown began against protestors in Khartoum. As of this episode roughly 100 people have been killed by government forces, with reports that scores of bodies have been dumped into the Nile. As of June 6th, Sudan’s membership in the African Union has been revoked. Sudan’s military council has suspended talks with protestors and unilaterally called for elections to be held within 9 months.

The forces spearheading this apparent massacre appear to be the RSF or “Rapid Support Forces”, led by Mohamed "Hemeti" Hamdan Dagalo. The RSF are a re-branded iteration of the Janjaweed militias that were charged with carrying out the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region. They’ve since been absorbed into the Sudanese military structure and given the stamp of governmental legitimacy, but they are essentially trained for one purpose and it appears that this purpose has now been turned on the protestors and the people of Khartoum. Incidentally the RSF forces are also being used as mercenaries by the Saudis in their war on Yemen.

Episode 35: Sudan: Women in Revolution (1 of 2)

For this first part of a two-part conversation, we talk to Sudanese activist Dahlia Al Roubi about what it was like growing up under the regime of recently deposed dictator Omar Al Bashir, how the current revolution swept Sudan, starting in December of last year, the challenges of weighing the purity of revolutionary principles against the practical constraints of time and competing interests, and about the role of women who took a leading role in the street protests but who now appear to be left out of the negotiations.

Dahlia and I recorded this first part of our interview on May 21st, before the current wave of violence was unleashed by the transitional military government on protestors and civilians in Khartoum. However we decided to include this conversation to claim some small space in the historical record, a space for what the Sudanese people were aspiring to as recently as Sunday evening. And we’re including it as a reminder that Syria also had this moment, and Egypt as well, and that while violence and a return to despotism might define the moment it’s important to ask ourselves where Western governments positioned themselves during the grassroots efforts to push these countries towards freedom.

Part two of our discussion provides a short update about the violence that has been unleashed by government forces in recent days, in particularly the RSF (Rapid Support Forces) formerly known as the Janjaweed.