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@dubbydacious
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The Pink Chaddi CampaignPosted by Brannon Cullum in Arrest and Harrasment, Asia, Build Awareness , Free, Very Wired, Mobilize, Social Networking, Facebook
THE CHALLENGE
In late January 2009, a group of 40 activists from right-wing Hindu group Sri Ram Sena attacked women and men hanging out in a pub in the Indian city of Mangalore. They were upset with the women for engaging in behavior they found immoral, claiming that the girls were disrepecting traditional Indian values. Video of the event went viral across India, sparking outrage among many at the attack on innocent women.
Pramod Muthalik, the group’s founder, praised the attack, stating, “Whoever has done this has done a good job. Girls going to pubs is not acceptable. So, whatever the Sena members did was right. You are highlighting this small incident to malign the BJP government in the state.”
Following the attack, the Sri Ram Sena announced plans to target couples out celebrating Valentines Day, threatening to forcibly marry off unmarried couples seen in public places.
How could women and men react to this right-wing group attempts at “moral policing” and take a stand before future attacks?
THE PLAYERS
Upon learning of the incident, a group of young women formed the Consortium of Pub-going, Loose, and Forward Women. One of the group’s organizers, Nisha Susan, said started the group as a faintly bitter joke.” The name of the group was tongue-in-cheek, but their cause wasn’t. They wanted to stand up for women’s rights. Nisha says, “Our fundamental rights are not to be taken away, like gifts with strings.”
THE TOOLS AND TACTICS
The group used both traditional and online tactics to voice their discontent. First, a Facebook group was created and Indians quickly began joining. Within one week, the group had grown to over 40,000 members. The organizers then invited all members to take part offline by sending pink underwear (known as chaddis) to Pramod Muthalik, sharing the office’s address and setting up collection points. “Chaddi” became the focus of the campaign because “khaki-shorts-wearing RSS cadres are often derisively called “chaddi wallahs” (chaddi wearers).”
Why chaddis? As Nisha recalls, “Chaddi is a childish word for underwear and slang for right-wing hardliner....It amused us to embrace the worst slurs, to send pretty packages of intimate garments to men who say they hate us."
Check out the video below of a pile of pink chaddis ready to be sent to Muthalik:
Nisha described her reaction to the welcome response the group received from many supporters:
"Did we anticipate the response we got? No. Within a day of starting the campaign we had 500 odd members. In a week we hit 40,000. From Puerto Rico to Singapore, from Chennai to Ahmedabad, from Guwahati to Amritsar, people wrote to us, how do I send my chaddis? But by then the campaign had gone offline. Elderly men and women, schoolchildren, middle-aged housewives, gravelly-voiced big men from Bihar who did not quite want to say the word chaddi aloud called us. The Sene called us on the numbers we had helpfully left online demanding, “Who is your leader?” How satisfying it was to say that we had none. How satisfying that young people offered their homes as collection points, bravely allowing their addresses to be published online. How satisfying that the crazies and conspiracy theorists were outnumbered ten to one by hilarious stories. Were you the one who told us that a famous Bollywood lyricist had written a song for the gulabi chaddi? Or were you the one who sent us the Amul ads featuring the pink chaddi? Or were you one of the Mumbai housewives gravely posing with underwear? Or the biker who created a miniature pink chaddi to tie on your handlebars?"They also called for groups of women to crowd pubs on Valentine’s Day to show support for the victims of the January attack. Members also shared their photos of pink chaddis to the group’s page.
THE STUMBLING BLOCKS
The Pink Chaddi campaign provides some good lessons about the opportunities and risks taken when using Facebook as an organizing platform.
First, the organizers found that once the Facebook group reached 5,000 members, they could no longer send messages to all of the group members (this is a Facebook control in place to reduce spam). They were limited to communicating with the group via the page’s discussion board and wall, which they didn’t find as effective as direct messages.
Then, the Facebook group was hacked repeatedly in March and April. Hackers renamed the page “A good bong is a dead bong” and added racist slurs and death threats in its description. Rather than get to the bottom of who was hacking the page, Facebook suspended both Nisha Susan’s and the group’s pages/accounts. Several new groups then sprung up impersonating the original one. Facebook’s support staff wasn’t particularly helpful either and it took months to sort out the issues.
While the hacking came after the campaign had already launched and the bulk of their activities had already been completed, it still highlights the perils that can come with using a Facebook page to organize a campaign.
THE OUTCOME
The Pink Chaddi campaign took a stab at bringing the issue of what Indian culture means to different individuals and generations to the forefront. Nisha reflected, “Many of us feel isolated in our unhappiness with right-wing groups of any religion disrupting our way of life. This campaign was aimed to protest the climate of fear being created by right wing groups in Mangalore. And to an extent we have succeeded in creating a dent — giving people a sense of hope.”
Over 2,000 pink chaddis were sent to Muthalik, leaving him embarassed by the ridicule. Days before Valentine’s Day, Muthalik called off his threat of Valentine's Day violence. He and his supporters were placed in preventive custody by the state government.
Indian bloggers and journalists had a wide range of reactions to the campaign, with some supportive of the aims of the group while others writing that while the attacks were not justified, many women have been undermining traditional values by going out to pubs.
The campaign also attracted mainstream media attention around the world.
In the video below, a number of women debate the merits of the campaign on Indian television.
Delhi-based social media guru Gaurav Mishra shared what he believes to be three important lessons from the campaign:
Lesson 1: Build your campaign around the zeitgeist, or the social, cultural and political ethos of your identified target group. Then, give it a humorous or irreverent tweak to help it stick.Lesson 2: Build virality into your campaign. Choose a compelling message that users want to share. Then, use a platform that makes it easy for them to share the message.Lesson 3: Design your campaign to translate online engagement into offline action. Use modularity and granularity to make it easy to take collective action by breaking it down into smaller individual actions that can be taken independently.The campaign leadership also helped organize participants for a “Take back the night” rally and the blog was also used for women to share reports of attacks and what people can do if they are victims of violence.
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Data collected with Gephi Graph Streaming. This is a preliminary result of the network of retweets with the hashtag #jan25 at February 11 2011, at the time of the announcement of Mubarak's resignation. If you retweeted someone, or has been retweeted, it is possible that your username is in this network.
@Bentalwadi: In #Bahrain they did not cut the Internet or close Facebook, but were smarter and started a Media war. #FSI2012
— A Chen (@achen852)
@Bentalwadi: We envision a state that separates religion from the state - no Bahraini would ever live in an Islamic state. #FSI2012
— A Chen (@achen852)
Bahrain: An island kingdom in the Arabian Gulf where the Shia Muslim majority are ruled by a family from the Sunni minority. Where people fighting for democratic rights broke the barriers of fear, only to find themselves alone and crushed.
This is their story and Al Jazeera is their witness - the only TV journalists who remained to follow their journey of hope to the carnage that followed.
This is the Arab revolution that was abandoned by the Arabs, forsaken by the West and forgotten by the world.
Editor's note: This documentary recently won the Award for Best International Television and the Grand Prize at the Robert F.Kennedy Journalism Awards, The Amnesty International Media Award, a Gold Nymphe (Nymphe d'Or) for Best Documentary at the Montecarlo Television Festival, the Foreign Press Association Documentary of the Year award in London, the George Polk Award for Excellence in Journalism and the Scripps Howard Jack R. Howard Award for Television Reporting.
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video by Mati Milstein
nesa'iyéh / نسائيه (a woman thing) is the photographic documentation of a new generation of radical Palestinian activists who stand out from their society in the most distinct way: they are women. Photographed by Mati Milstein and curated by Saher Saman, the exhibit opens June 15, 2012 at marji gallery & contemporary projects, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States.
Women activists are one of the most powerful instruments for civil disobedience especially in #Palestine http://t.co/DhGEz2wm #FSI2012
— Ramzi Jaber (@RamziJaber)
Leymah Gbowee is a Liberian activist who led a women’s peace movement that helped bring an end to her country’s long civil war, a story depicted in the film Pray the Devil Back to Hell. In this excerpt from her new book, Gbowee tells the story of how she first managed to get a meeting with the warlord/President Charles Taylor.
The morning of the eleventh, the steps of city hall were a sea of white. There were hundreds of women there, maybe as many as a thousand. Some of the city’s religious leaders turned out as well. Taylor supporters and soldiers mixed through the crowd, and local media was everywhere. Emotion ran high as women stood to testify what the war had done to their lives, and I got a little afraid that WIPNET would lose control of the gathering. As the Liberian proverb says, “Sudden rain brings the sheep and goat under the same shed.” There were women here who’d lost children and were filled with rage, women who were political radicals interested only in ousting Taylor, and women who were just drunk.
Our demands were nonpartisan, simple and clear: the government and rebels had to declare an immediate and unconditional cease-fire; the government and rebels had to talk; and we wanted an intervention force deployed and sent to Liberia.
“In the past, we were silent,” I told the crowd. “But after being killed, raped, dehumanized and infected with diseases, and watching our children and families destroyed, war has taught us that the future lies in saying no to violence and yes to peace! We will not relent until peace prevails!”
The women erupted. “Peace! Peace!”
The president never arrived, and perhaps that day it was a good thing — in his presence, our shouts might have escalated to boos, and there was no telling what his guards would have done. We later learned that they’d been told to flog us if we marched in the streets. We gave Taylor three days to respond to our demands. If there was no answer in that time, we told the women, we were going to stage a sitdown.
Taylor didn’t respond, and we moved ahead.
The move was a deliberate provocation. Taylor had said no one would embarrass him, so we would do just that — in an action so dramatic and public it would make the demands of Liberia’s women impossible to ignore.
In a short amount of time, we planned things meticulously: WIPNET meetings ran round the clock and when I finally lay down to sleep, slogans ran through my head. The site we chose was the field near the fish market where I used to play soccer and kickball. It was large enough to hold a crowd and right on Tubman Boulevard, a place that almost every Monrovian went by at least once a day. Charles Taylor passed it twice, as he traveled to and from Capitol Hill. We had to make sure the protest focused on peace, not politics, so we’d only allow the nonpartisan posters and placards that we made ourselves. We’d only permit nonviolent protest. Everyone was to wear white, to signify peace: white T-shirts with the WIPNET logo, white hair ties. Liberian women love to dress up, but we’d come to the field completely bare of makeup and jewelry, in the kind of “sackcloth and ashes” described in the Book of Esther, where the heroic queen stands up to save her people from extermination. And to make sure our message stayed on target, we would have only one spokesperson, one public face.
As coordinator of WIPNET, it would be me.
Was what we were about to do dangerous? Opposing Charles Taylor always was extremely dangerous. His Special Security Service and the Anti-Terrorist Unit, run by his son Chuckie, took opponents to a military base prison in the center of the country, where they were tortured and killed. There were stories of prison cells behind the Executive Mansion, where girls were raped. But to me, there was no choice. When I dreamed at night, it was of struggling to climb a rugged hill or swerving through endless blockades on the highway. When I looked back on my life, I saw my lost childhood.Every night, I walked past my kids’ empty bedrooms. With the new round of fighting, all of us would be brought close to death again.
There was something else that was hard for me to put into words. The women of Liberia had been taken to our physical, psychological and spiritual limits. But over the last few months, we had discovered a new source of power and strength: each other. We’d been pushed to the wall and had only two options: give up or join up to fight back. Giving up wasn’t an option. Peace was the only way we could survive. We would fight to bring it.
From the Old Road house, it was a short walk to the field near the fish market. On the morning of April 14, I woke before dawn and made my way in the dark. I was the first one there. As the sky got lighter, I looked around anxiously. For the protest to succeed, we needed at least a few hundred women. Finally, one group arrived. Then another. The sun rose. And then I heard the sound of diesel engines and up the road toward me came a line of buses. Mixed in were trucks — trucks full of
women. There were a hundred on the field . . . three hundred . . . five hundred . . . a thousand.I started to cry and to pray. The women kept coming. Fifteen hundred . . . We asked where they were from and learned that some government agencies had taken the day off. NGOs with women’s programs had required their staffs to join us. University students and female professors were there. More than two thousand women were on the field now. Market women. Displaced women from the camps. Some of them had been walking for hours and wore clothing so old it barely looked white. One woman had used a curtain for a hair tie because she didn’t have anything else.
WIPNET workers handed out T-shirts and placards and gathered the women to sit for peace. After a while, we got word that Charles Taylor had left his home and would be driving by. It was the hour when anyone on the road was expected to turn away or risk being shot. No one actively made the decision, but the women rose, walked to the roadside and faced the president’s convoy holding a huge banner: the women of liberia want peace! now!
Taylor slowed but didn’t stop. I knew that he’d seen us — all of us. We sat again. By noon it was ninety degrees; by four it was over a hundred. We ran out of water and I had to fetch more from home. We sang. People passing by stared. At the end of the afternoon, Taylor’s convoy went by again. We were still out there with our signs. We had started something too big to stop. We would see this through to the end.
The three days we had given Taylor to respond came and went. When we heard nothing, we gathered outside Parliament. The president didn’t acknowledge us and we returned to the field. We met at dawn and always started the day with prayers.
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want . . .
In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful
Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds . . .When another three days had passed, we notified the press that Taylor’s time was up, and returned to Parliament, filling the parking lot so no one could get in or out. It was pouring that day, and we stood in the rain, not moving, as our clothes clung to us and our signs ran and tore. Local media were filming and photographing, and the Speaker of Parliament came outside, embarrassed by the spectacle. He told the security guards to move some cars so we could stand under a shelter. We refused to move.
“Who’s the leader of this group?” he asked. I stepped forward. “Why are you using these women for your personal interests?”
I was enraged. “If anyone is using anyone, it is you! You are all using the people of Liberia for your own selfish gains!”
Once again, we publicly declared that Taylor had three days to meet with us. “We will continue to sit in the sun and in the rain until we hear from the president!” As we returned to the field, women from the street joined us.
Once again, we sat. The movement we called the “Mass Action for Peace” would later appear to be a spontaneous uprising. It was prompted by emotion — by women’s exhaustion and desperation — but there was nothing spontaneous about it; managing a huge daily public protest was a complicated task and we planned every move we made. The women from CWI and Muslim Women for Peace were responsible for the day-to-day activities on the field. If they said it was time to sing,
we sang. We also formed committees to handle different jobs, such as finding buses to bring women to the protest from the internally displaced persons camps.Every night a core of us, the WIPNET 21, met at the office and spent hours going over what had happened that day. Later still, when that meeting was done, a smaller number stayed behind, Vaiba, Asatu, Sugars, talking even more. We all had our roles. I was the strategist and coordinator of our actions; I talked to the media and got everyone fired up about continuing to fight. Vaiba liked to stay in the background and never expressed an opinion until the small group of us were alone, but she had a keen eye for which of our strategies had worked and which hadn’t, and didn’t hesitate to tell us. Cerue was brilliant at handling finances. Grace, so quiet and shabby when she first joined us, had started dressing better and speaking up more. Passion for the work shone in her face. She had planning skills and a fearlessness that no one had ever tapped. If you gave her letters to deliver, she would get them where they had to go, even if she had to walk there. If you needed to assemble a crowd of women, she would find them—she would talk to anyone.
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help
My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth . . .
In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful . . .
Guide us on a straight path,
The path of those whom Thou has favored;
Not of those who earn Thine anger nor of those who go astray.Dawn to dusk, twelve hours. We passed the time in different ways. Sometimes women would dance. Sometimes they would preach. The slogan of our action was a simple one: “We want peace, no more war.” The women on the field turned the chant into a song:
We want peace, no more war.
Our children are dying — we want peace.
We are tired suffering — we want peace.
We are tired running — we want peace.About a week after our trip to Parliament, the Speaker came to where I sat on the field. “I have a message,” he said. “Come to the Executive Mansion on April twenty-third. President Taylor will see you.”
Excerpted from Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War, by Leymah Gbowee. Available from Beast Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2011.
The activist was detained for speaking at a Shiite rally calling for government reform and has not been seen since. He had sought to promote unity among the nation's majority Shiites and Sunnis.
Demonstrators are seen in a traffic mirror in Manama, Bahrains capital.… (Caren Firouz, Reuters )
Reporting from Manama, Bahrain — Mohamed Albuflasa was different from everyone else taking the stage on the second day of Bahrain's protests. He was a Sunni Muslim.
The 34-year-old Salafist favored government reform, and he believed he should speak at the rally to promote unity among the country's Shiite Muslim majority and Sunnis at Manama's Pearl Square.
Within hours, a security agency had detained him, and he has not been seen since. Even as hundreds of political prisoners were freed this week by King Hamed ibn Isa Khalifa, Albuflasa remains jailed and his whereabouts a mystery.
"Mohamed's speech was meant to reduce the fire going on where people create differences between Shiites and Sunnis. He was there to show there is no difference between them. We are all Bahraini," his brother, Rashid, told The Times this week. "He is not against the royal family and government."
Bahrain's popular uprising had been motivated by a wish for democratic reforms, including a stronger parliament and a crackdown on corruption. The goals are shared by all, but the fact that the protests originated from the island's Shiite majority has frightened many of Bahrain's Sunnis.
The royal family has played on the Sunni Arab world's fears of Iran's Shiite theocracy to hold off on sharing power in Bahrain, analysts and rights activists say.
"The protesters and bloggers over nearly a decade now have made a conscious effort to downplay sectarianism in their rhetoric and demands, focusing on democracy, human rights, accountability, corruption," said Marc Lynch, the head of the Middle East studies program at George Washington University. "The regime has always tried to play the [Sunni-Shiite] card to delegitimize those demands."
The ability to divide the population has helped the few thousand-strong-member Khalifa clan preserve its privileged status. Bahrain's powerful neighbor, Saudi Arabia, has also viewed the state as a bulwark against the spread of Iranian influence. If the Shiites gain greater power in Bahrain, similar demands for reform could be made in the oil-rich Saudi province of Dhahran, which is largely Shiite.
The demonstrations in Pearl Square have been burdened by the history between the two communities: brutal repression of Shiite demonstrations for greater rights over four decades; deep-seated Sunni anxiety over losing power; and searing memories of Islamist Iran's threat to sow revolution across the Middle East.
Ibrahim Sharif, a Sunni who heads the liberal Waad party and who supports the demonstrations, bemoaned the fact that those shouting slogans against the king in the square are tone-deaf to the Sunni community. He also worried that Saudi Arabia could try to sabotage the mass protest movement.
"In Saudi, there is not one decision maker, there are hundreds who can take matters into their own hands," Sharif said, adding that he thought the toppling of leaders from Cairo to Tunis had unnerved the two desert kingdoms.
"If [reform] can jump from Tunis to Egypt, then it can jump the Saudi-Bahrain causeway," he said. He worried that a covert group — whether from Saudi Arabia or Bahrain's royal family — might try to spark violence and discredit the protest movement, which until now has practiced nonviolence.
Most Sunnis, in reaction to Pearl Square, have now rallied around the government-sanctioned National Unity coalition, headed by the Sunni cleric Sheik Abdel Latif Mahmoud. On Tuesday, the cleric hosted tens of thousands at a pro-government rally.
In his speech that day, Mahmoud made it clear that his followers believed in dialogue and government reforms. But even as he called for conciliatory measures, including the release of political prisoners, others at his rally accused the demonstrators in Pearl Square of wanting to create an Iranian satellite state.
Mahmoud told The Times that such views do not represent his own and urged the sides to sit down and start negotiating. However, he stressed that the king and his family need to stay in control of Bahrain's political process. "We believe … the government coming from the royal family gives security to both the Shiites and the Sunnis. The royal family are the ones who create a balance," Mahmoud said.
Despite the tensions, a few Sunnis quietly visit the rallies at Pearl Square. Khadija Hammadi, a television presenter, has been coming to the square because she believes it is the best place to campaign for her rights.
"Most Sunnis want a change in government, but they are afraid about what comes next," she said.
But the case of Albuflasa is a chilling reminder for those Sunnis who might reach out to the protesters at Pearl Square.
Some pity the fate of the young Bahraini, an Islamist who had run for parliament and won accolades for his nationalist poetry. They see him as someone who delivered a speech at the wrong place at the wrong time.
"Islamist Sunnis historically have supported the government," said human rights activist Nabeel Rajab. "That's why they won't allow this to happen. They will punish him."
Pray the Devil Back to Hell is the award-winning documentary about a group of brave and visionary women who demanded peace for Liberia, a nation torn to shreds by civil war. Contemporary interviews, archival images, and scenes of present-day Liberia are interspersed to recount their inspirational and historic achievement.
@Bentalwadi: "I don't believe that there was sectarian discrimination in #Bahrain. The issue is abt loyalty to the monarchy." #FSI2012
— A Chen (@achen852)
@Bentalwadi The sectarian division in #Bahrain is very new! Bc of the media machine that spread lies and fear to Sunnis in 2011. #FSI2012
— A Chen (@achen852)
fsi2012 women can do the unimaginable and it works #sexstrikes + locking in negotiators until peace agreement was reached #womenofLiberia
— Rumbidzai Dube (@dubbydacious)
Some uses of #digital tech by @lightbugs communication, organizing, coordinating, mobilizing, resource transfer, and documentation #fsi2012
— Jake Fitzpatrick (@JakeWFitz)
Low access to internet media is solved same way as low access to printed press in 18-19 century,One reads and tells the rest? #fsi2012
— Olena Tregub (@OlenaT)
fsi2012 the disarming effect that women have when in touch with armed forces is crucial in civil resistance.g. #EgyptianRevolution
— Rumbidzai Dube (@dubbydacious)
fsi2012 #ninosdesaperecidos another example of 'good mothers' who faced a repressive regime when all other citizens couldn't
— Rumbidzai Dube (@dubbydacious)
fsi2012 the role of the 'faithful' Aryan wives of Jewish men saved their husbands from facing death in concentration camps #Recontrasse
— Rumbidzai Dube (@dubbydacious)
@daryncambridge "#Twitter is like a giant bar. At first you just hear chatter, but after awhile you will hear conversations." #fsi2012
— Jake Fitzpatrick (@JakeWFitz)
Who decides what stories are important? Editor or common people in social media? Which mass communication model do you preffer? #fsi2012
— Olena Tregub (@OlenaT)
@daryncambridge Shift from old media to new media mirrors shift from monolithic view of power to pluralistic view of power. #fsi2012
— Jake Fitzpatrick (@JakeWFitz)
@Bentalwadi: We have a literacy rate >90% somehow. We are an educated country. Women are the first to be educated in #Bahrain! #FSI2012
— A Chen (@achen852)
@daryncambridge In conventional media, small group of ppl decide what content matters. #SocialMedia has changed the dynamic of that #fsi2012
— Jake Fitzpatrick (@JakeWFitz)
fsi2012 Mary King-the distortion in history of the role #RosaParks played is proof of the subversion of women's role in nonviolent struggle
— Rumbidzai Dube (@dubbydacious)
@Bentalwadi: "Naturalisation" of foreigners and esp. their recruitment into govt forces was a core issue of the Bahraini movement. #FSI2012
— A Chen (@achen852)
What is Internet better for: for liberation and social justice or for repression and censorship? #fsi2012
— Olena Tregub (@OlenaT)