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8th edition

The right to the city

august 2014

contexto

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Index

#editorial

#illustration

#Brazil

Shameful, expensive and exclusionary

FLM – Elisa Building

#international

Hafrada, the palestinian “apartheid”

A defiant revolution

All (or the little I know) about Hamas

#opinion

Negligence and disregard: the atrocities in the urban mobility works in Belo Horizonte

#proseandpoetry

#photocontext

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The elections are approaching and, in

Brazil, is more than necessary to evaluate

what must and what must not be part of

our political project for the country. In this

evaluation, we include aspects of Brazil to be

widely criticized and, of course, the analysis

of proposed improvements.

In this edition of Contexto Magazine, you will

find reflections on the Palestinian issue and

details on Hamas, and find an article written

by a young Syrian about the silence of the

international community facing the conflict

that has been happening for three years.

You’ll find pieces about urban mobility issues

and the housing policy and analyze many

problems that should be mentioned during

the elections in October. You will also find the

poems written by Farah Chamma, Palestinian

who lives in Arab Emirates, and gives a sample

of her talent and the construction of identity.

In the illustrations, the work of Carol Rossetti

and her feminist approach.

Again, we appreciate the support of the

determined team that worked to get

everything done this month and write many

articles and materials. In this last month,

Contexto Magazine featured debates on

reproductive rights and abortion, involving

Jarid Arraes, as well as a conversation about

Palestine and the most recent operation in

Gaza, with members of FFIPP-Brazil. We also

thank Qatar Foundation International and its

support for the project from the beginning.

Seja bem-vindo à Contexto! Welcome! Ahlan wa sahlan!

Analyze

Priscila BelliniEditor in Chief

#editorial

The Team

Editor in Chief

Priscila Bellini

Journalists

Abeedah DiabDafne BragaIsabelle RuminJames A.Matheus MoreiraRaphael Lagnado

Poetry

Farah Chamma

Illustration

Carol Rossetti

Design

Fernanda Tottero

Photography

Larah Camargo

Translation

Priscila BelliniJoão Victor Pereira

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Carol rossetti

is a feminist illustrator

from Minas Gerais, Brazil.

#illustration

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#Brazil

Shameful, expensive and exclusionary

Mobility is the key to the sociability of the people in a city. It enables their access to the most important resources, such as education, occupation, health and culture. Thus, the right to the city is one of the major prerequisites to the constitution of the modern societies, and that goes beyond the transportation matter. Permitting that people are denied their access to urban mobility means excluding them from their right to the city.

The first of many problems regarding the public transportation in São Paulo is the long distance townspeople need to travel to make it to their jobs, public service, schools or museums. Transportation should not be a matter in itself, but a mean of getting from a place to another. For years, public authorities and property speculation together

produced a pendular movement of the workforce, by creating housing units for the poor in the outskirts of town. As long as this lasts, people will have to put up with heavy traffic during rush-hours, crowded buses, trains and subways and two to three hours round trips from home to work and from work to home. The ineffectiveness of this system leads to people choosing private transportation over public one, as it offers greater comfort and safety.

São Paulo grants fluidity to private cars. They congest the streets, are responsible for seventy percent of the air pollution, strike and kill two people a day and account for enormous social spending. According to Denatran, São Paulo’s traffic department, the city vehicles’ fleet is estimated as of five

Despite Sao Paulo’s public transportation being the reason why countless mass demonstrations went off in June, 2013, the issue is still being addressed as a problem

of the big cities instead of a right of the people

By Isabelle Rumin

Anonymous Brasil

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million since june, every one of them carrying no more than two people on the inside. A bus could transport ten times the same amount of people. What is lacking is the democratization of road space, which is limited. There has been plenty of investment in the construction of bridges and avenues and overpasses that usually do not allow the transit of pedestrians, cyclists or even buses – but no large investments in public transportation.

T h e i n v e s t m e n t o f t h e s t a t e government in the expansion of the metropolitan railway to the peripheries of the city are also little. In the train lines projects to be completed until 2020, the West side of town is privileged. The future users of the unfinished Line 6 - Orange of the metro system, for example, are not going to be the people living in social-economically vulnerable neighbourhoods, but well-assisted social groups that already have access to the public transportation system. On the East side, the only working lines are the ones that run along the Radial driveway, leaving the other portions of this zone to be served only by a poor bus system, despite the East side population of four million. That is more people than the entire population of Uruguay. Brazilian public transportation is administrated in a restrained demand regime. The soon to be Line 15 – Silver, which will connect the villages of Vila Prudente and Cidade Tiradentes, is expected not to work properly, as its monorail capacity is inferior to the metro system one.

Line 3 – Red served more than one million people a day, back in 2012, according to the metro workers union. It is also the line that suffers the most from system failures, which have increased lately. Statistic data released by the

metro company show that, in 2009, there used to be a serious failure in the metro system every six days, each one of them taking about six minutes to be worked out. This year, this happens every three days. In the train system, major breakdowns happen every ten days.

Some reasons could explain why this increase happened: network growth, trains overusing, expanding users’ demand that lead to overcrowding and greater risk of accidents. Incidents such as falls onto the subway tracks could be prevented by the installation of platform screen doors, as the ones there are in the Vila Matilde metro station – which still do not work after four years they have been set up. If the screen doors were a reality in all the network stops, tragedies as the one in which Maria da Conceição de Oliveira was pushed off the Sé station platform onto the tracks due to overcrowding would never have happened.

Metro corruption endangers its usersThe Federal Prosecution Department

required the metro company a copy of the bidding documents regarding the procurement procedure for fixing and restoration of the trains in its K fleet since 2012. In february, the K07 train’s door sprang open en route, forcing the whole system to halt during rush hours. Passengers in the rail cars behind it were trapped inside for about thirty minutes, and were left there with no further information or any working air conditioning whatsoever. It was one of São Paulo’s hottest summer days and some users started to feel dizzy. The emergency buttons were pressed and the windows pushed open. Passengers walked along the tracks and the system had to be de-energized. Some users

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were beaten by metro guards and trains were riot-damaged. Many people felt ill and needed medical assistance.

The following day, state governor Mr Alckmin stated that the metro users involved in the riot were “vandals”. He said the confusion went off because of a “overwhelmed few” that were “inciting people into jumping onto the tracks”, apparently neglecting this might have been the users’ response to expensive fares and the precariousness of the metro system.

The K07 train is the same one that derailed last August at Barra Funda train station. Employees who witnessed the incident pointed out that things could have gone worse, as some of the cars might have stumbled. The company never disclosed what or who really caused the accident, which was a demand of employees and users, who wanted to be aware of what sort of risks they are exposed to when using the metro system on a daily basis. The K fleet, formed by seven trains only, suffered 696 failures in a month – 300 hundreds of which involving the K07

train. “Every and each day, the number of accidents and malfunctions in the metro system rises. Instead of purchasing new trains, the company would rather repair the old ones. That’s extremely pricey. If new trains had been bought, if would have been cheaper”, the metro workers union press agent, Rogério Malaquias, told Contexto.

D e n u n c i a t i o n s o f e m b e z z l i n g involving the metro company started to come to light last year. According to an insider, the embezzlement would be done two different ways: through the overbilling of the contracts, which would be settled among all the participants prior to the bidding process, or through the outsourcing of public services. The fraud are alleged to have taken place during Mr Serra, Mr Covas and Mr Alckmin terms ahead of the São Paulo government, from 1990 to 2000. The As fraudes teriam acontecido durante os governos de Mario Covas, José Serra e Geraldo Alckmin, em São Paulo, nos anos 1990 e 2000. The Federal Prosecution Department has requested the stoppage of 98 trains’ repairment.

Jornal GGN

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The city administration pushes private transportation but slips by shutting bus lines down

The city hall set about adressing the public transportation issue in São Paulo. Aiming the goal of increasing the average speed of public buses from 14 km/h to 25km/h, public administration means to implement 150km of bus lanes, 150km of exclusive lanes and 400km of cycleways, which will replace car parking places in the streets and avenues of the town.

Right after the bus-fare increase was halted by demonstrations last june, the city administration carried out a reassignment of the existing bus lines, by shutting some of them down, in order to make the system more efficient and logical. However, an investigation by the APÉ – a mobility studies group –, showed that the reorganization of lines has caused trouble, mainly in the outskirts of town. People living in the “Fundão” community, near the M’Boi Mirim driveway, for example, used to have access to shuttle service from the periphery to the downtown. Their only option now is to make a transfer in the overcrowded bus terminal Jardim Angela, and then head downtown.

The whole point of the venture is to build a trunk and feeder mobility system. This kind of system leads to the necessity of transfers in long-distance trips. In order to reach efficiency, it requires that bus lanes, bus stops and major terminals are all well-functioning. Transfers should be made in a quick, comfortable and safe way. When this is not a reality, all the trunk and feeder system does is discourage people to use public transportation, which becomes uneasier and more time consuming. The implementation of this system aiming exclusively the

optimization of operational duties, rather than users demand, disfavors even more the peripheral areas. The matter is not the system itself, or even the reassignment of lines, but the cost-reduction logic that permeates it, rather than an efficiency logic that would grant users with a better working public bus system. The necessity of a system that benefits users over company owners is the reason why countless social movements struggle for decent transportation, which does not work as na exclusionary device.

From 2011 to 2012, bus companies in São Paulo increased their profits by 2,000%. According to the the city Transportation Regulation Agency, SPTrans, the average profit of companies in this sector in São Paulo is 400 million reais a year (around 175 million dollars), a third more than the national average. The data was provided by the National Urban Transportation Agency, NTU, that is formed by 538 companies around Brazil. Meanwhile, 7,5 million people across the country struggle to make use of public transportation because of expensive fares. Data collected by the Institute of Applied Economic Research, IPEA, from 2003 to 2009 in eleven metropolitan areas in Brazil show that the use of public transportation accounts for 13,5% of the spending of the poorest 10% in Brazil. There are no information regarding this issue in São Paulo specifically.

Public transportation should be a matter of social politics. At first, it might strike as odd the idea of transportation wholly funded by the government. When interviewed by Contexto, the great majority of people (93%) would appreciate public transportation to be free. When we switched the question and asked them about a free fare, which is the Free Fare Movement’s demand, this percentage

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dropped to 79%. This still accounts for the vast majority, but it shows how the movement’s principle has yet to be comprehended by the general people.

“The Free Fare Movement (MPL, in Portuguese) believes that both the transportation and the mobility problems dwell in the conception that transportation is a marketed product. Overcrowding, the shutting down of bus lines, the preference for private vehicles over public transport at nights, it all boils down to the logic of profit.” In an interview to Contexto, Monique Clio, who is part of the MPL, cleared out how would a free fare work and why is it the best option to the general population. “The Free Fare is the gratuity of public transportation to everyone. That is the only way transportation can actually be public, non-exclusionary and transformative of the market logic that surrounds the sector. A free fare would guarantee that people can really enjoy and coordinate what they are entitled to, as citizens”.

The current fare is already funded by public investment. The government budget depends on the collection of taxes paid by the population. When public authorities invest in private transportation, those with low income end up paying the bill twice. When metro and bus users pay fares, what they are doing is paying twice for the same service, which is malfunctioning as a matter of fact. Free fare does not mean actual free transportation, but means transportation that is funded by taxpaying instead, and therefore does not need to be charged once more.

We are used to paying to move around, but this should be a public service. The same way education and garbage

collection are. A fundamental right, that allows and ensures the acess to other rights. Is it logical to imagine taxpayers having to pay an extra free everytime their litter needs to be collected? Of course it is not.

How would the Free Fare be funded by the government

Free Fare needs to be funded by a public transportation budget, that would be seeded by taxes progressively collected by the IPTU, the Brazilian land value tax. This would mean that the people funding the fares are the ones benefitting from it. This way, businesses – who mostly profit from public transportation – would have to pay the bill, instead of leaving it to their employees. The Free Fare would also contribute to traffic reduction, pollution control, cost-cutting in the maintenance of parks and driveways; and would even boost general health and improve sociability among townspeople.

Furthermore, by making it possible that millions of people have access to essential services, real prosperity opportunities are created, which may lead to economical growth and social development that would benefit all the population.

Nowadays, the poor pay the most. That is a political guideline: benefitting ones over others. This can change. This city is made of people, and these people make this city; they are the ones who move it daily, culturally and economically; they are the ones who make São Paulo the town it is. Urban mobility must once and for all be taken as a fundamental, living part of this city, and ultimately be a reality to its inhabitants.

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FLM – Elisa Building By Matheus Moreira

Stirring times have struck Brazil this year, as a wave of mass demonstrations went off all across the country. The demonstrations emerged both as spontaneous Anti-World Cup protests as well as protests against Brazil’s deficit of housing units, the later scripted and called by the Homeless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Teto - MTST, in Portuguese), a shack-dwellers’ movement whose leaders have struggled in the streets for thirty days now.

Their demands for housing for the poor are not new and have been intensified over the years. In São Paulo, a major Brazilian city, there are inumerous smaller groups that fight side to side to MTST, such as the the Frente de Luta por Moradia (FLM).

In 2003, the FLM movement staged three squatters’ occupations in São Paulo, which launched a project that would

articulate all the urban social movements for housing into one major group. It has been through the practice of self-managed mutirões that the movement has provided poor families with housing, electricity and basic sanitation.

Brazil’s first experiences with this sort of self-managed task group was in 1983, during Mário Covas mandate, in which the government would give away soil and building material so that families could build their own houses. The iniciative was continued in the Jânio Quadros administration and later was consolidated with the election of Luiza Erundina, currently a São Paulo representative in the house of deputies of the National Congress of Brazil. Ahead of the city hall from 1986 and 1993, Ms Erundina’s stablishment of the self-managed mutirões as a public policy made possible that 10,500 housing units

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were built and distributed to families in São Paulo, according to the FLM movement.

One of the occupations staged by FLM is the Edifício Elisa unit, in the west portion of town, right across Faria Lima subway station. The squattering of the building, one of the oldest in the neighbourhood, has been headed by Maria Arlete de Almeida since 2010. The seven-story building contains fifteen common use spaces and thirty-four rooms.

A hundred and twenty five people currently reside the building. Arlete says it makes her glad to see the rooms always crowded with people: “We are a community. There are fifteen people living in my home”. The occupation is administrated by the Associação de Movimento Moradia Digna (AMMD), which was created by Arlete herself and is one of the groups that compose the unified FLM movement.

When it was squattered in 2010, the Elisa Building had been abandoned and left unoccupied for eight years already. Although she had not been involed in any shack-dwellers’ movement for a while by that time, Arlete decided to get back on track leading the occupation of this Teodoro Sampaio Street-based building. However, when a construction company showed up at her door to claim ownage of the building, things got complicated. She sought for property documents in local register offices that could prove the veracity of the forms presented by the head constructor, but did not find anything.

“Bogus! This document is false and made up. Everytime I tell local news about its unlwafulness, however, they seem to

forget to mention the word “false” in their headlines”, states Arlete overwhelmingly, regarding the press unwillingness to help the movement.

She remembers how this all came to be. It was back when her partner in the housing movement, Adão, made up his mind about charging the occupants with rent for their staying. After quarreling with him and stating her disagreement on that matter, she moved away to the countryside and temporarily abandoned the housing movement.

The man later contacted her and claimed to have sold the building to a construction company, and asked for her help to expel the families from Edifício Elisa.

An eviction order has been served on the people living there and is due to October. The AMMD organization alongside the FLM movement are trying to overcome what is the fourth eviction notice to the building by seeking an interim order to keep the occupation going until all the families in this unit have been registered by the city’s housing department and allocated in government housing programs.

Besides carrying out legal arrangements, the leader says she participated in a hearing with the mayor of São Paulo, Mr Haddad, to discuss the best way of securing these families with their rights. She says she does not fear the new eviction order and states she has legal ways of proving the forgery of the documents submitted by the construction company.

Property speculation – onerousgranting of the right to build and urban infrastructuring

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The struggle of housing movements, such as the MTST, against property speculation is necessary. Whereas private capital investment in the construction of buildings does not contribute in any way to the infrastructural improvement of where a business is being carried out, public investments in urbanistic infrastructure and accessibility do so. Therefore, it should not be fair that a real property can have its market value increased and its owner’s profit expanded due to governmental acts, instead of the business’ own private investments.

The government has sought ways of lowering the effect of infrastructural investments in real property speculation and consequent overvaluing, as these result in rent adjustment and increasement in general cost of living, which lead to the fleeing of low income families to the peripheries of cities. This represents the underspending of public investments. One of the government measures regarding this issue is the

Onerous Granting of the Right to Build, a program that allows partial compensation of the public funds spent in revitalization of the surroundings of a building.

The Onerous Granting works basically as the construction company’s financial response to government investments, allowing an enterprise to make use of a larger portion of land than it is entitled to, provided that it financially rewards the city for that.

The problem with property speculation is that the money raised through the granting project cannot be used by the city in infrastructure undertakings, maintaining therefore the overvaluing of the regions where revitalization and verticalization projects have taken place, and the subsequent devaluation of more populated areas of the outskirts of the city (which makes verticalization hard). According to article 31 of the City Statute, that refers to paragraphs first to ninth of article 26 in the same law, the funds raised through the Onerous Granting

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should be invested in the following areas:

I – land regularization;II – execution of housing programs and projects of social interest;III – constituion of land reserve;IV – planning and channeling of urban expansion;V – implementation of common use urban equipments;VI – creation of public leisure areas and green áreas; VII – stablishment of conservation and protection units in environmental interest areas;VIII – protection of historical, cultural and environmental interest áreas;

The new PDE and the ZEISThe new Major Strategic Plan (Plano

Diretor Estratégico – PDE, in portuguese), enacted by São Paulo’s mayor Fernando Haddad on July, 31,

O novo Plano Diretor Estratégico (PDE), sancionado pelo prefeito da cidade de São Paulo Fernando Haddad em 31 e julho deste ano, faz São Paulo, segundo o próprio prefeito, entrar finalmente no século XXI.

The new plan’s guidelines bring about changes in the matter of land use regulation and land occupation of the surroundings in the downtown area, by implementing public policies that prioritize public transportation over individual transportation, thus addressing the issue of urban mobility.

Furthermore, the new PDE represents an achievement in the struggle for decent housing for the poor, as it regulates the implementation of the Special Zones of Social Interest project (ZEIS, in Portuguese) and the Social Renting

program, the later being responsible for helping families pay rent. Firstly stablished in the downtown area, these programs bring low income families closer to the inner portions of town and therefore to the public transportation system, which allows them to move faster and have acess to the commercial center.

The Special Zones of Social Interest are demarcated areas in the city used for different purposes, such as urban reform, land regularization and more importantly the Housing Projects of Social Interest (HIS, in Portuguese), which is a housing program made for families with income equal to or lower than six minimum wages.

These Special Zones include, according to the decree no. 44,667, dated april 26th, 2004: slums, tenements, housing units in precarious situations, irregular housing units and land plots occupied by low income families, construction sites in poor state, unoccupied plots of land and misused urban land.

Apart from these two items, the PDE also changed aspects of the Onerous Granting, in a way that construction companies should now pay extra fees for each parking lot they are willing to add to a building blueprint that has already been drawn.

The Major Strategic Plan also expects that housing units of social interest are built next to or in the same land of new enterprises; however, according to urbanist Raquel Rolnik, in an interview with El País, this has been highly neglected by construction companies, making it possible that, through the advent of the Onerous Granting, they pay their way into “not having the poor living in their land”.

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Hafrada, the palestinian “apartheid”

Among all the controversies regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict debate, which have been recently highlighted by the resurgence of the friction between Israel and the Hamas administration in the Operation Protective Edge, one of the most disagreeable ones refers to the accusation that Israel is stalling an apartheid regime in relation to the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories and even in Israel itself – emulating the original Apartheid (an Afrikaans word literally meaning “apart-hood”), which was enforced through legislation by the white elite class on black and indian people.

Supporters of this theory signalize the situation in the West Bank, which shows extreme discrepancy between the economic situation of the Palestinian villages in the B and C areas (under partial or complete israeli control) and the Israeli settlements, protected by the army and fostered by government policies and Israel’s private companies; the checkpoints in the heart of the territory, which get in the way of the movement’s liberty, to the point where there are separate roads for Israeli settlers and Palestinians.

Critics who find fault in the use of the term “apartheid” remark the

By Raphael Lagnado

#international

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differences between Israel and South Africa: Palestinian-israeli citizens (only in the 1948 territories), for exemple, possess nominal equality and civil rights; there are Palestinians serving in the IDF and members of the Knesset, the Israeli legislative committee, etc. Some would say that describing Israel’s policy as apartheid-like diminishes and disrespects the memory of the victims of the segregation system.

Even though Israel and its allies’ disclaim any kind of segregation form practiced upon its jew-israeli and arab-palestinian population, the great majority of Israel policies regarding the West Bank and East Jerusalem can be framed in the

scope of a Hebrew term – surprisingly originated in Israel’s academic and political establishment and spread by the formulators of its defense policies –; the word hafrada, that literally translates into “segregation”, “separation” in English. Pro-Palestinian activists, like the Israeli-american Jeff Halper, from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition (ICAHD), argues that the term hafrada’s likeness to the concept of Apartheid allows it to keenly depict “Israel’s political attitude towards the Palestinian people in Occupied Territories”.

The term started gaining its political and paradigmatic dimension and penetrating the vocabularies of authorities and

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civilians in the nineties, through the papers of Haifa University’s professor Daniel “Dan” Schueftan, and because of some “defense policies” enforced by then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, such as the Israel-Gaza barrier. The word could also be found in political campaigns, always carrying a positive connotation, as in the one that elected prime minister Ehud Barak, in 1999. It said “We are here and they are there”. At that time, it was not clear where exactly “here” and “there” were. Also in 2001, Ariel Sharon promised to provide Israelis with “peace and safety” by creating a “hafrada as wide and large as planet Earth”.

In 2002, the hafrada started to associate with the idea, fostered by Mr Sharon, of “unilateral disengagement” (originally “Hafrada Chad Tzdadit”), which encompassed the construction of the border barrier (originally “Geder HaHafradá”). The wall runs along the Green Line, separating Israel from the Occuppied Territories; along the West Bank, keeping in the Israeli side major settlements, such as Gush Etzion and Ariel, and leaving outside, in the Palestinian side, cities as Qalqilyah and Bethlehem. The border is currently being extended.

The original name of the iniciative, “the separation plan”, was changed to “disengagement plan”, because, as Mr Sharon claimed himself, “separation sounded bad, particularly in English, because it evoked Apartheid”. The disengagement plan was officially adopted by Israel in 2005, and represented a critical strategy for the advance and normalization of the West Bank occupation. It has been and

keeps on being executed unilaterally, that is, imposed without the consent of Palestinian National Authority (PNA) or its population. Part of the plan includes, as one should wonder, cessions of land; all the Israeli settlements in the poor Gaza Strip were forcedly brought down, and its nine thousand settlers were evacuated or left the territory voluntarily. Elections were called for PNA in 2006, resulting in the tight win of the Islamist Hamas over laic and moderate Fatah, a victory which has not been recognized by Israel, the United States, the Europpean Union nor most of the west, all of whom have imposed economic sanctions to the Palestinian Authority.

Tensions between both factions were deepened resulting in the Batlle of Gaza in 2007, in which Hamas defeated Fatah in a minor civil war and established total control over the small portion of land. Fatah, in turn, kept control of the West Bank’s Area A. The long-term results of this tension can be seen in the latest news.

Dr Schueftan, in an interview to The Jerusalem Report in 2005, after the official adoption of the Disengagement Plan, stated that the program represented solely the first step of a “wider historical process” and that the “underlying characteristic” of the disengagement is not that it will bring off peace, but that it will halt “endless terror”.

What is the importance of the hafrada term in the context of the Operation Protective Edge? For starters, I strongly believe Israel is not going to militarily reoccupy the Gaza Strip, even if they have ways of doing it. In addition to the fact that the Hamas-Fatah opposition is favorable to the execution of the Disengagement

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Plan, the Hamas administration still allows the territory relative freedom, keeping it from other radical groups, like the Islamic Jihad Movement.

A restoration of the pre-2005 situation would come out as extremely costy to Israel, and that goes the opposite way of the disengagement, which aimed a low-cost stable occupation. As part of the long-term hafrada program, it is expected the establishment of an independent Palestinian State in the most densely populated regions (Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jericho, Jenin, Nablus, part of Hebron, etc). It is pertinent to wonder, though: in which extent would such area be really independent? An administrative authority operating inside the boundaries of a discontinued portion of land (the Area A) and whose sole autonomy source is the

State of Israel, which did not negociate its economic “freedom”, but rather imposed it. be really independent. Once again, the resemblance with the Bantustans from South Africa is worrying.

The biology professor Eitan Harel, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told Le Monde Diplomatique in 1996: “The dream of a Greater Israel has been replaced by the reality of a small Israel. What matters to people is to live better here, and if you ask them what they wish for and wait for, the majority response is: hafrada, separation.”

While the hafrada fenomenum stands for the giving up of a Greater Israel, it also represents the consolidation of Israeli presence in the West Bank – and, more troublingly, some would say, the end of the Two-state solution paradigm.

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A defiant revolution By Abeedah Diab

2011 bore witness to the uprising against the fascist and dictatorial government in Syria. This fearless fight for freedom proved to the world that for whatever it was worth, Syrians were going to get their dignity that they deserved as human beings.

But that cost has been unnecessarily high. And the inaction of the international community is largely to blame.The detriments of global apathy towards the suffering of the Syrian people have resulted in grave consequences for humanity, ranging from the displacement of 10 million civilians, to the death of 200,000+ people. Reasons being given by society as a whole to justify the

former are not only superficial, but also disrespectful to those who took it the streets in hopes of accumulating the fundamental freedoms that they were promised by the world (or at least, by the United Nations).

In response to the ill-treatment and torture of the young schoolboys who painted anti-government graffiti on the walls of their school in Dara’a (a city located in the suburbs of Damascus) inspired by the Arab Spring, peaceful protests blossomed all over Syria demanding for immediate reforms. Reforms to ensure that the people’s inherited right to free speech would not be stripped from them. Reforms to ensure

demotix.com

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that the people would not be dictated, rather, respected. Reforms to ensure that the people are not voiceless in Syria.

Instead of adhering to the foundations of democracy and universal human rights (that the Ba’ath party was supposedly founded upon), Bashar Al-Assad began a brutal crackdown on the non-violent rebellions. These desperate acts to stay in power quickly transformed into massacres, rapes, electrocutions, and other sorts of unimaginable torture. That was when the Syrian people decided that they were not going to stay paralyzed by the fear stitched into them by the Assad regime. Thus, the dignified revolution against oppression and tyranny begun.

After 8 months of wholly peaceful protests and the government retaliating violently with sniper bullets, the first armed opposition group emerged. The Free Syrian Army (FSA) consisted of defected soldiers from the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and locals who decided that the arbitrary executions and merciless bombings had to be challenged and come to an end.

Today, the conflict has escalated into one that is home to an array of opposition groups, foreign military presence, and armed militias with intentions to hijack and misframe the basis upon which the Syrian revolution stands upon. Hezbollah, the extremist group based in Lebanon, has been notorious for fighting alongside the SAA to attack innocent civilians. Countries including Russia, China, and Iran are currently arming the Syrian government with weapons to destroy and terrorize Syria—one of their notable accomplishments being the chemical

weapons massacre (which occurred last August) that took the lives of around 1500 people. Extremist groups like ISIS/L (Islamic State of Iraq and Sham/Levant) claim to be fighting Assad whilst they simultaneously occupy liberated Aleppo and commit horrendous acts not only in the name of the revolution, but also religion. Opposition groups across Syria are growing rapidly in number and are finding it difficult to unite, due to the lack of international assistance in that matter.

Meanwhile, it is estimated that 200,000 people have been killed solely because of snipers and artillery shells (and the like)—this does not take in account those undocumented who lost their lives due to; detention; rape; starvation; execution; lack of medical supplies; it’s an endless list. 10 million (which, to put things into perspective, is almost half of the population before the crisis) Syrians have been forced into exile—either inside Syria or in neighboring countries—half of them being children. This means that for four years, children have been stripped of the right to education. This means that for four years, children have been stripped of the right to grow up with a family. This means that for four years, children have been stripped of having a place to call home.

The refugee epidemic is also taking a toll on the hosting countries. Historically and presently speaking, the nations surrounding Syria are frequently in some sort of civil turmoil, and the burden of hosting asylum seekers ignites even more socio-economic problems. In addition, the current facilities being provided to the refugees are merely livable and inadequate to be able to support and

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meet the needs of women who have been raped, men who are unable to provide for their families, and children suffering from PTSD.

Where is the world in the midst of all of this?

The question posed above is lingering in the mind of the little boy in besieged Yarmouk who just lost his father because of the lack of medical supplies. The answer is simple. The world is here, but resolutions are being vetoed. Assad is still in power. Geopolitics is valued more than humanity—the only thing that connects us as people living on this vast planet.

The United Nations has proved itself to be nothing more than a platform of empty promises and fake apologies by people who were supposed to show us the importance of brotherhood and equality. Condemnations of Assad and his regime are a rarity, and his ‘resistance against Western Imperialism’ is applauded by those who we thought were advocates for inalienable human rights. With resolutions in the Security Council continuously failing to pass because of Russia and China’s interests prized highly over Syrians accumulating the fundamental freedoms they were promised by the world, we are surely doomed to a place of division and inequality.

Kosovo.Rwanda.Guatemala.Global apathy has had its fair share of detriments in the past, yet somehow we are all still willing to turn a blind eye to issues that are capable of wiping out an entire generation of children.It’s a truism that the Syrian people have been betrayed by the international community by being stripped from their right to live. However, knowing that the truth will always prevail and remembering the boys who painted revolutionary slogans is the driving force of the Syrian resistance. Long live the people, and long live the dignified revolution.

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Since its foundation in 1987, Hamas was created as a self-proclaimed “Palestinian n a t i o n a l l i b e r a t i o n m o v e m e n t ” , Islam being its “ideological frame of reference”. The movement, which holds deeply conservative positions on issues such as the free market and sexual liberation, rapidly popularity over Palestinian organizations of secular and leftist ideologies. However, Hamas and Hezbollah, both Islamist organizations, are the only mass organizations in the Middle East that continue to resist Israel and the US. It is important to understand how Hamas came to occupy this position in order to understand how its policies will influence the region and efforts to free Palestine.

All (or the little I know) about Hamas By James A.

The history of Hamas is inseparable from that of the most popular and widespread Islamist trend in the Arab world; the Muslim Brotherhood, founded by the Egyptian schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna in 1928. At that time, Egypt was nominally independent, but effectively under British control; British troops had suppressed a popular anti-colonial uprising in 1919 and consolidated their power in the region. Liberal nationalists of the Wafd party, which was mainly comprised of landowners and industrialists, sought to win more power from Britain while discouraging any mass mobilizations that might challenge their economic position. The Muslim Brotherhood, on the other

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hand, responded to imperial domination and social inequality by arguing for a return to the perceived principles of the early Islamic community. Hamas is fundamentally a continuation of this tradition.

The idea of an Islamic community, morally reinvigorated and able to repel the colonial powers, appealed to particular social groups. The Muslim Brotherhood emerged from the context of economic pressures on the old middle classes and the development of a new middle class of teachers, civil servants, engineers and so on, funding its petty bourgeois cadres with donations from landowners and industrialists in order to spread an Islamic revivalist message among the dispossessed of the cities, often recent arrivals from those in the countryside (which already had closer ties to Islamic revival movements). Charitable foundations and hospitals were particularly useful in this strategy. Hamas in Gaza, growing out of the Muslim Brotherhood in neighboring Egypt, has followed the same pattern. Much of Hamas’s funding comes from Palestinian businessmen and from large Gulf-based capitalists.

The predominant influence of the Egyptian Brotherhood derives from the territorial situation of Palestine between 1948 and 1967, when the West Bank was annexed to Jordan and Gaza came under Egyptian administration. Brotherhood volunteers fought against the establishment and expansion of Israel in 1948, but they did not enter into the armed struggle and rapidly accepted the new status quo of the Palestinian

Territory. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a Palestinian spiritual leader who became an activist in the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood after dedicating his early life to Islamic scholarship in Cairo, preached and performed charitable work in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the 1960s, both of which were seized by Israeli forces following the 1967 Six-Day War.

The Israeli occupation of Gaza after the 1967 Six Day War did not alter Yassin’s focus on religious revivalism. Secular organizations such as Fatah and, later on, the avowedly Marxist Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, took up the resistance to the occupation; the Muslim Brotherhood did not. In 1973, he established al-Mujamma’ al-Islami (the Islamic Center) to coordinate the Brotherhood’s political activities in Gaza; the Brothers and the Islamic Center gained prestige as it offered the social welfare and healthcare services that the Israeli occupiers were unwilling to provide.

Sheikh Yassin had carefully built up a power base in the Islamic Centre of Gaza, at new mosques and the university, which had begun to admit more rural and conservative students. Majd, a militia-like offshoot of the Islamic Centre, emerged, fighting the left and bullying people into greater religious observance. An armed structure of sorts was thus already in place before the first intifada and (a Palestinian uprising against Israeli control of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem). However, it was only with the outbreak of that popular uprising in

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December 1987 that Hamas was officially formed (as the political branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza). Hamas refused to join the PLO during the intifada but carried out essentially the same acts of resistance. The new organization conceived of itself as primarily a national liberation movement, albeit one which proposed “Islam” as the solution to the crisis of Palestinian nationalism. Hamas published its official charter in 1988, moving decidedly away from the Brotherhood’s ethos of nonviolence.

The charter of the new movement insisted upon the Palestinians’ claim to their entire homeland, including that part which became Israel in 1948, and considers Judaism a kindred monotheism to be protected by Islamic rule, but also repeats anti-Semitic claptrap found in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Even though Hamas leaders have since abandoned these ideas and their original authors have long passed out of influence, such passages must be understood not as the result of any ingrained Arab or Islamic anti-Semitism, but rather as a symptom of dangerous pol i t ical confusion among those Palestinians who have only encountered Israelis and Jews as agents of an oppressive colonial project. This confusion can only be effectively challenged from a standpoint that supports resistance to that oppression. To do otherwise is to permit or encourage the identification of opposition to anti-Semitism with Zionism, restricting the debate to this false dualism.

Hamas’s primary appeal lay not in its charter, whatever the contents of that

document. Rather, Palestinians were drawn to Hamas’s rejection of the PLO’s proposed compromise with Israel on a two-state solution. The PLO’s Tangiers Declaration of 1988 and Jordan’s renunciation of any claim to the West Bank offered recognition to Israel in return for ending the intifada. That compromise was particularly unpalatable to the Gazan population, the majority of which were (and are) refugees who would be denied any prospect of return to their homes under a two-state deal with Israel. The newly created Hamas denounced the maneuvers of the PLO leadership in attempting to participate in (ultimately fruitless) negotiations at Madrid. Nonetheless, they remained financially and politically weaker than Fatah and the PLO. The balance turned in Hamas’s favor as the PLO became identified with the slow surrender of Palestinian rights in the “peace process” that followed the intifada.

The peace process (also known as the Oslo process because of the role played by Norwegian mediators) comprised a series of agreements between the PLO and Israel. The first of these was the Declaration of Principles signed on the White House lawn in 1993. The main principle declared was that the Palestinians “recognize” Israel in 78 percent of the land of historic Palestine. The PLO believed that this meant Israel would withdraw gradually from the remaining 22 percent occupied in 1967: the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israel conceived of a phased withdrawal but one in which it would retain control of settlements and roads. Although

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Arafat and the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist, Israel merely recognized the PLO’s competence to negotiate. The agreements postponed the issues of borders, refugees, Jerusalem and sett lements unti l final talks. This maneuver allowed Israel not only to maintain but to expand the occupation in the form of checkpoints and settlements. The number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip increased by 50 percent in the period of the Oslo negotiations between 1993 and 2000. A Palestinian Authority (PA) was also established, which would have an elected legislature and president, but with jurisdiction only over the most populous Palestinian areas, the rest remaining under Israeli or joint control.

Hamas opposed the Oslo accords from the start and throughout. They insisted on the Palestinian claim to all of historic Palestine and the right of refugees to return. They also denounced the PLO leaders who returned to run the PA and crassly enrich themselves in the manner of other Arab rulers. Hamas refused to participate in elections at this time, not because they rejected democratic procedures, but because they refused to legitimate Oslo. It was a shrewd decision. As the Oslo process faltered, the PA became more and more irrelevant. Hamas did not (and does not) reject the effective principle of a two-state solution. All of its major figures have stated their willingness to sign a generation-long ceasefire, provided that Israel withdraws its troops and settlers behind the 1967 border. The malleability of religious language allows Hamas to

preserve the image of fighting for all of historic Palestine, but, in practice, the ceasefire offer means recognition of Israel. Hamas was not prepared, however, to renounce military resistance until such an agreement was achieved. Thus Hamas launched a series of suicide attacks on Israeli targets throughout the Oslo negotiations, the first of these being carried out in revenge for the Hebron massacre of 1994, when an Israeli settler reservist killed 40 worshippers at a Mosque in Hebron (where the tombs of Abraham and Sarah are said to be located).

H a m a s ’ s p o s i t i o n w a s f u r t h e r vindicated by the collapse of the Oslo process and the eruption of the second intifada in 2000. Israel’s tactical errors – such as the botched assassination attempt on Khaled Mesh’al, a major Hamas leader in Jordan, or the exiling of hundreds of Hamas cadres to Hizbollah’s Southern Lebanese stronghold – contributed to the movement’s rise. The main reason for this rise, however, was political. The second intifada reflected Palestinian anger at a peace process that had only made their lives worse. Hamas was identified with the resistance to that process. The intifada brought Hamas and Fatah closer as their cadres fought a common enemy. Yet the continual Israeli assaults on Palestinian political and physical infrastructure, particularly the Israeli offensive on the urban centers in the spring of 2004, mostly weakened Fatah, who had embedded themselves deeply in those structures. At the titular head of the Palestinian political structure stood Yasser Arafat, who retained (or

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regained) his prestige as the leader of the Palestinian resistance. Arafat’s death in November 2004 deprived Fatah of their greatest remaining claim to hegemony over the Palestinian struggle. His replacement, Mahmoud Abbas, appeared keener than ever to compromise with Israel.

While Abbas scuttled after the pointless initiatives of George W Bush’s successor to the Oslo process, the “road map”, Hamas achieved the only withdrawal of Israeli settlements from Palestinian land: when Israeli troops and colonial settlers left Gaza in July 2005. It is true that the territory remained besieged by Israeli air, land and sea power.

The withdrawal had the intention of ridding the Israeli state of a large and restive Arab population in order to better retain the colonies in the West Bank. The Gaza withdrawal, as such, formed an integral part of “a new Israeli defense concept” of unilateral separation behind a “hard border”. This doctrine seeks to

render the Palestinians’ physical presence politically meaningless. The Hasbará Wall that physically cuts Palestinian communities off from one another is a literally concrete manifestation of this strategy. Yet Israel would not have withdrawn the settlements if the benefits of occupying Gaza outweighed the costs. Unfortunately, it was necessary for Hamas to raise the costs of the occupation for the Israelis to withdraw.

For nearly 30 years the Palestinians had been convinced that compromise with Israel was the route to regaining at least some of their land; Israel’s continued land grab proved that there would be no compromise with Israel. This, in turn, legitimized Hamas’s resistance, like that of Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, as the only effective rout to end military occupation. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled

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on the West Bank (whilst only 8,000 had been withdrawn from Gaza), further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state.

Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice, and it chose land. Even though Israel’s settlers were withdrawn, Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air prison. From this point on, the Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs on the inhabitants of this prison.

Hamas’s success in forcing the Israeli withdrawal of 2005 opened the way to the “earthquake” of the movement’s electoral victory in the Palestinian legislative council elections in January 2006. Hamas decided to drop its boycott of this Oslo institution because the Oslo accords were plainly dead. Their electoral platform, the Change and Reform list, won 60 percent of the popular vote in Palestine. Even though “Change and reform” is a vacuous slogan, any Fatah candidate uttering it would have been ridiculed, so firmly was Fatah they identified with stasis and reaction. Fatah and Abbas were not only unable to mount effective resistance to Israel, but were also identified with corruption, collaboration and mismanagement at every level; their campaign in the legislative elections was heavily supported by Israel and the US, but the effort was in vain.

After Hamas’ victory at the polls, the Israeli cabinet refused to recognize the new legislature and declared that

it would never negotiate with “any Palestinian administration even part of which is composed of an armed terrorist organization that calls for the destruction of the state of Israel”. Fatah stripped ministries of equipment and refused to cooperate with Hamas ministers. The Palestinian presidency was at armed odds with the legislative body and the cabinet. Fatah militias received Jordanian and US training and funds, but the plan to get rid of Hamas in the summer of 2007 backfired badly on its perpetrators. Hamas fighters were able to drive Fatah underground and out of Gaza; the opposite held true in the West Bank.

The blockade of exports and most imports into Gaza, enforced since the failed Fatah coup of 2007, is an ongoing act of slow and brutal collective punishment punctuated by acts of intense exemplary violence aimed at terrifying the population. As a result, according to the UN, the formal economy in Gaza has “collapsed”: more than 70% of the population live on less than a dollar a day, over 75% depend on food aid and more than 60% lack daily access to water. Even with the strikes and the blockade, Hamas still proved impossible to dislodge; it seemed that Israel was going to have to deal with Hamas. The prospect of recognizing Hamas as a negotiating partner, and therefore of entering a dialogue leading to the lifting of the blockade, lay behind the Israeli assault on Gaza (Operation Cast Lead) at the end of 2008.

A s ix-month truce was agreed between Hamas and Israel in June 2008.

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Hamas held the renewal of this lull to be conditional on the lifting of the blockade. The head of Shin Bet, the Israeli internal intelligence force, told a cabinet meeting prior to Cast Lead that Hamas was “interested in continuing the truce, but wants to improve its terms…it wants us to lift the siege, stop attacks, and extend the truce to include [the West Bank]”.

Hamas was not destroyed despite the ferocity of Operation Cast Lead, but the war did devastate the already ramshackle infrastructure of the territory. According to the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, half of the 1,387 Palestinians killed were civilians. Israel, of course, did guarantee an even more overwhelming military supremacy over Gaza and Palestinians, yet it was unable to use that military supremacy to achieve its political aim of toppling Hamas — even over a malnourished people whose territory it entirely controls from land, sea and air. Indeed, Hamas achieved recognition as the representative of the Palestinians in an Arab summit convened in Qatar during the war. Israel’s inability to use overwhelming firepower and air supremacy to effect political change undermines the “Dahiya doctrine” that has come to underpin Israeli strategy. Named after the Beirut suburbs (dahiya) that suffered it in 2006, this doctrine applies “disproportionate force” to any area Israel considers a security threat. Yet the use of absurdly savage force produces diminishing returns for Israel; during the last Gaza wars, Israel was unable to use its military superiority to get its preferred outcome, and this might be the case again today.

To use one of Netanyahu’s favorite metaphors, Hamas’s redline has always been the lifting of the blockade. This is achievable but only through a sustained campaign of popular pressure, especially in Israel’s Western backers. A long-term solution is unlikely because Israel’s idea of security is premised on the maintenance of a “Jewish state” that excludes the Palestinians. So long as the Palestinians exist and resist, that “security” cannot be realized. Internal Israeli opposition and, especially, the increasing disquiet among diaspora Jewish communities are devoutly to be encouraged.

Hamas, needless to say, is not a socialist or working class organization and it certainly does not offer a vision of universal human emancipation. Like the PLO before it, Hamas avoids any challenge to the Arab regimes. Hamas are committed to fighting the occupation and establishing a Palestinian state, but they are very concerned to ensure that this struggle does not extend to the exercise of popular power that may pass beyond these goals. Within the confines of Palestine itself they can defy Israel’s military machine, but not defeat it. The impact of nearly two generations of occupation, siege and exclusion from the colonial economy make the prospect of an internal, South-African-style transition unlikely.

Israeli spokespeople claim they have no choice but to blockade Gaza because Hamas is an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organization that does not recognize Israel’s right to exist. Since Israel’s “right to exist” implies the denial of the right of Palestinians to return to

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their homeland on a basis of equality with Israeli Jews, one might wonder why Hamas, or anyone committed to the idea of racial equality, is obliged to recognize it. Nonetheless, the objection is false. For almost the two decades of its existence, Hamas has called for a generation-long ceasefire, a hudna, which implies “de facto” recognition of the State of Israeli in its 1967 borders, provided Israel withdraws to those borders and removes its settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Khaled Meshaal, lider of Hamas since 2004, spoke clearly on the issue in 2009, almost five years ago:

“Khaled Meshaal, 53 years old, said in a 90-minute interview at Hamas’s Syrian headquarters that his political party and military wing would commit to an immediate reciprocal cease-fire with Israel. […] He also said his organization would accept and respect a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders as part of a broader peace agreement with Israel; provided Israeli negotiators accept the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees and the establishment of a capital for the Palestinian state in East Jerusalem. […] Mr. Meshaal said Hamas wouldn’t be an obstacle to peace. “We along with other Palestinian factions in consensus agreed upon accepting a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines,” Mr. Meshaal said. This is the national program. This is our program. This is a position we stand by and respect.” (Here)

To be sure, Hamas is not an innocent party in this conflict. Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the

downtrodden, the desperate: terror. But no amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their resistance and they kept firing their rockets. There is simply no military solution to the conflict between the two communities. The problem with Israel’s concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to the other community. The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 10, 20, or even 30 years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002: it involves concessions and compromises.

In the current war, Israel accused the political faction of kidnapping and murdering three settlers near Hebron without producing a shred of evidence. Four weeks and almost 1000 lives later on either side, Israel has not yet produced any evidence demonstrating Hamas’s

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involvement. During ten days after the murders, Israel carried out Operation Brother’s Keeper in the West Bank, arresting approximately 800 Palestinians without warrants, charges or trials, killing at least nine civilians and raiding nearly 1,300 residential, commercial and public buildings. It was these Israeli provocations that precipitated Hamas’ rocket firing into Israel.

Israel has the eleventh most powerful military in the world, certainly the strongest by far in the Middle East, and is a nuclear power that has not ratified the non-proliferation agreement. With the use of drones, F-16s and an arsenal of modern weapon technology, Israel has the ability to avoid these massive civilian casualties. But Israel has already killed at least 800 Palestinians; demolished 3,175 homes (at least a dozen with families inside); destroyed five hospitals and six clinics; partially damaged sixty-four mosques and two churches; partially to completely destroyed eight government ministries; and injured 4,620 people in the last twenty or so days. And the attack goes on.

The UN estimates that more than 74% of those killed are civilians. That is to be

expected in a population of 1.8 million where the number of Hamas members is approximately 15,000. Mainstream Israeli media outlets, however, insists that these Palestinians wanted to die, staged their own death, or were the tragic victims of Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes. In all instances, the military power is blaming the victims for their own deaths, accusing them of devaluing life and attributing this disregard to cultural bankruptcy. The numbers, however, indicate Israel’s egregious violations of human rights and humanitarian law (let us recall that Israel has the status of an Occupying Power in all of Palestine, as defined by the IV Geneva Convention, and has the legal obligation to protect the occupied civil population).

Israel cannot bomb Palestinians into submission, and it certainly cannot bomb them into peace. Maybe some day they will realize that it is necessary to talk to the Palestinians, make concessions to them, and end the military occupation that has gone on for over 50 years in order for there to be some hope for peace. Either that or they’ll have to kill them all.

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Negligence and disregard: the atrocities in the urban mobility works in Belo Horizonte

By Dafne Braga

The collapse of the Batalha dos Guararapes highway overpass in June, 3rd, which killed two and injured 22 people, shocked Brazilian people. It was unfortunately not as shocking as Neymar’s injure, but still. To people living in Belo Horizonte, however, this did not come as a surprise. Since the mobility construct ion works began, many irregularities have come to light, making a foretold tragedy out of this accident.

A Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project was created as an alternative to public transportation in Belo Horizonte, which resume itself to a medium sized rail transport and a timid bus system. That it a problem in itself, as the BRT was also a medium sized solution and the demand of the population was the creation of a comprehensive subway system that would span all the portions of town. As a complement to the BRT option, that was named MOVE in Belo Horizonte, the construction of overpasses in the Antonio Carlos and Pedro I driveways sought to solve the traffic flow matter in the inner portions of town, according to the city hall website.

These works were meant be completed prior to the World Cup, but this did not happen. Some of them, as the Guararapes and João Samaha overpasses, had its building pace visibly speeded up on the eve of the international event. During their construction, the city witnessed absurdities, which would not always gain

national repercussion but would always shock the local press.

In May, 2013, one of the MORE platforms built in the Cristiano Machado Avenue was imploded because of the miscalculation of the minimum height required for it to properly work during passengers’ disembarkment. A crater appeared in the Pedro I neighborhoods, where an overpass was being erected, earlier this year, because of authorities neglect. In 2012, many portions of town underwent a water outage because the works wrecked a major pipeline.

In addition to all of this, the City Hall disregard of these issues was outraging. In the Cristiano Machado platform incident, the lame excuse given by the mayor was that the implosion of the structure was previously intended, as it was nothing but a construction prototype. Ten days later, another 100 square meters portion of the structure was brought down because of misconstruction. A City Hall statement alleged that these would not affect the overall pricing of the works. Nonetheless, as of today, the urban mobility project budget has been surpassed by 210 million reais (approximately 90 million dollars).

When asked about the overpass tragedy, Mr Lacerda, Belo Horizonte’s mayor, showed little concern about townspeople. He said that throughout his five year administration, never had na incident like that occurred, and

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that, for that matter, “accidents do happen”. Was this accidental or the result of neglectfulness? Since 2012, the Guararapes overpass works are being looked into by the state Court of Auditors and the city Cultural Inheritance Protection Agency, under suspicion of overbilling, delays and mistakes in its execution.

Despite the ongoing investigation, this stretch of the driveway has uninterrupted flow of vehicle traffic. Besides, official examination of the sustentation pillars of the bridge showed that it was built with ten times less steel than a structure this size usually requires. This was proved

to be a conception fault, rather than an execution one, as the project presented by the City Hall demanded a smaller amount of construction material than usual.

Once again, it came as no surprise to us, the people of Belo Horizonte, who are familiar not only with the problems involving urban planning works, but also with our mayor’s lack of humanity and dishonest, insensitive statements. We are familiar with the omission of our city administration, its lame excuses, its costy public works – which ultimately serve the interests of campaign funding, rather than the citizen’s interests.

Lucas Prates

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#proseandpoetry

I am no courageous,

Fearless, valorous, gallant,

Proud, adventurous,

Selfless patriot

I am a soul in exile

Expressing my thoughts in

All languages but mine

” Hi…I am Palestinian”

” Salut…Je suis palestinienne”

I cut my mother tongue

In half

نصبت املبتد�أ و لعنت �أبو اخلرب

كرست الضمة اليت مضت ما بيننا

Palestinian poet

Rafeef Ziadeh was right when

She said

”Allow me to speak my Arab tongue

Before they occupy my language as well”

Well… to that I must add

Allow me to be the Arab

That I am

Allow me my right

To learn, to travel, to pray

Allow me to walk through any

Foreign street without having

To feel this shame

Without having to think twice

About my clothes, my face, my name

Or the visa I had to work

Day and night for the claim

Because at the end of the day

I am not the one to blame

For Bin Laden, 9/11, and all your

Other schemes and games

I am but a soul in exile

I am in no hall of fame

I have to opt to be

Someone I am not

Just to fit in your fame

Despite the agony I went through

Despite the struggles I overcame

Despite the diplomas, the degrees,

The awards I acclaim

I am still no Palestinian

No matter how many

” I love Palestine” stickers

I stick on my car

No matter how many times

I cry over Gaza

And argue over the Israeli settlements

No matter how many times

I curse the Zionists, blame the media,

And swear at the Arab leaders

I am still no Palestinian

Even if I memorize the

Names of all the Palestinian cities

Even if I recite Mahmood Darwiche’s

Poetry and draw Handala on my walls

Even as I stand here tonight

In front of you all

I am no Palestinian

�أان مش فلسطينية

And I might never ever be

And that’s exactly what

Makes the Palestinian

In me…

I am no Palestinian

Farah Chamma is a Palestinian poet who resides in the United Arab Emirates.

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Bahialarah Camargo is a photographer and studies Multimedia at Lyceum of Arts and Crafts of São Paulo.

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