A day after Ahed and Nariman Tamimi’s release from prison on Sunday, media outlets, friends, and activists continued to flood the family in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. Despite a decision not to permit one-on-one interviews, since Tuesday morning reporters from major international media outlets have stood in a giant tent outside the home, waiting to interview Ahed.
The questions have been nearly identical: how was prison? How does it feel to come home? What is your message to the Palestinian people? What are your plans for the future? Yet very few have shown interest in Ahed’s mother, Nariman, who was arrested hours after her daughter, and who also spent eight months in prison. On Sunday the two were released, but not before they were held for hours in a Israel Prison Service facility and then an IDF jeep, where they had their eyes covered until they were finally set free at the entrance to their village. I was the first to interview Nariman following her release.
On the day of their arrest, as Ahed and her cousin Nur confronted the IDF soldiers who entered the Tamimi family’s yard, Nariman decided to turn on the camera and live stream the incident on Facebook. “I began broadcasting so that everyone can see what happened here,” Nariman says as we sit in her yard. Between questions she gets up to welcome the guests who continue to stream in at all hours of the day.
“If you take a regular video, people will say it is staged, that it’s a lie. But when it happens live it is reality,” she adds. When I ask her about the prosecution’s claim that the live stream was meant to urge more people to come confront soldiers, she says that Nabi Saleh is so small that there is “no need for live broadcasts to let people know that the army has invaded the village.”
I first met Nariman in 2009, when the villagers of Nabi Saleh began demonstrating against the takeover of their spring by the settlers of nearby Halamish. Nariman and her husband Bassem were among the organizers of the protests; their children — including Ahed — took part as well, a decision that has led to criticism. “The soldiers invade the houses and streets during the day and night anyway, so at least the children don’t have wait at home in fear,” she told me back then. Nariman, who leads the weekly marches from the village to the spring, is one of the most determined activists I have ever met in the West Bank. Her various arrests (four in total), the incitement against her family, the death of her brother Rushdi — who was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in 2012 — have not stopped her from resisting the occupation.
“This wasn’t the first time I used Facebook Live,” she says, “but I never thought it would turn into such a big story.” The incident took place on a Friday, but Ahed was only arrested four days later — following pressure by the Israeli Right — by soldiers equipped with cameras. Nariman herself was arrested a few hours later as she arrived at the Sha’ar Binyamin police station. “They arrested Ahed at 3 a.m., I was arrested later that day. I didn’t see a thing on the news and I knew nothing. Our phones were with the police. Only when I came to the court (for her remand extension – O.Z.) and saw many people did I understand that this became a big deal.”
In jail, Nariman was horrified to discover that her family was being described as terrorists by the Israeli media. On Sunday, hours after they were released from prison, the Tamimi family held a press conference during which Ahed said that she would refuse to give interviews to Israeli news outlets, following the hostile coverage toward her family since the arrests. “After the arrests, there was a report on Jana (Ahed’s family member, who many have called ‘the youngest journalist in the world,’ and who reports from the village – O.Z.). The people in the studio called her ‘the second Ahed Tamimi’ and said that we raise terrorists without giving us the right to present our side. So why should I speak to them?” Ahed said during the press conference.
Until they signed their respective plea bargains in March, Ahed and Nariman’s trials were held at Ofer Military Court in the West Bank. In the meantime, they were held at the security wing for women at Hasharon Prison. As part of the plea bargain, Nariman was convicted of incitement. “Every single thing I publish on social media can be considered incitement,” she says, “they printed out a copy of my Facebook profile picture after I changed it to a photo of Rushdi.”
Since their release, Ahed and Nariman have been speaking out about the situation of Palestinian women in Israeli prisons. “The occupation treats men and women the same in prison. There is a head count in the morning, and at 10:30 we are allowed to walk around the ward for an hour. After that we are put back in our rooms until 2:30 when we are allowed to walk around until five,” Nariman tells me. Her room was built to hold four, although at times up to six women were living in her room, forcing some to sleep on mattresses on the floor. “The room was very small. We cooked together on an electric stove, and every two or three weeks we would have a large dinner for all the women.”
In prison, Nariman took advantage of her time and studied alongside Ahed for the Palestinian matriculation exam. Now, after their release and with a matriculation certificate in hand, Nariman intends to study at university. “In prison they tried to close our classroom,” she says, “but the prisoners’ spokeswoman told those in charge that we will continue to study no matter what.” The issue reached the warden, who permitted the women to continue studying.
Nariman is well aware of her family’s image in the Israeli mainstream, yet she insists on passing on a message to the public on the other side of the wall. “I say to everyone, use your head and search for the truth. You’ll be able to find it. They know that Ahed is not a terrorist. If we wanted to be terrorists, we would be the exact opposite of who we are. It is easy to be a terrorist or a murderer, it is much harder to pursue peace,” she says emphatically, “if I were a terrorist, I wouldn’t be able to talk to you, but I consider you my friend and my brother.”
She then turns to the international community, to whom she wants to send a different message: “The international community must do for the Palestinian struggle what it did for the Israelis and the Jews after the Holocaust when they were given a state that wasn’t theirs. Now it is time to return the land to the people to whom it belongs. You (the international community – O.Z.) brought these people here and created the hostility between us. Now you must put an end to it. Just like in South Africa when there was first international pressure followed by a solution. We need international pressure.”
— source https://972mag.com/it-is-easy-to-be-a-terrorist-its-much-harder-to-pursue-peace/137007/ by Oren Ziv. August 1, 2018
==========================================
The poor are the guinea pigs for immature financial technologies
Vimla Devi is a poor widow who lives in Kodakel village of Khunti district in Jharkhand. In a short video circulated recently on Twitter, she explains how she has been running from pillar to post for months to find out what happened to her pension. When she enquires at the block or district offices, she is told that her pension is being paid regularly every month. Her bank statement, however, suggests that the monthly payment of Rs 600 stopped after September 2017.
It turns out that Vimla’s money is going to an Airtel wallet she knows nothing about, or rather knew nothing about until a team from Jharkhand’s right to food campaign looked into the matter on May 27, 2018. With some effort, her money can probably be retrieved from the wallet. But thousands of other people like her in Jharkhand who are also being swindled by Airtel may not be so lucky. The victims include not only pensioners but also other recipients of the so-called ‘direct benefit transfer’ payments.
When Vimla’s testimony was tweeted, one puzzled reader asked – “How can pension money be sent to an Airtel wallet?” The question shows that even the educated middle class knows little about the pathologies of the Aadhaar Payments Bridge System. Indeed, the credit for this goof-up, so to speak, goes not only to Airtel but also to the APBS and its progenitors, the Unique Identification Authority of India and the National Payments Corporation of India.
The goof-up begins with the opening of an Airtel wallet behind the customer’s back. This happens, or rather used to happen, as follows. One way of buying an Airtel SIM card is to use Aadhaar-based biometric authentication to identify yourself. This enables Airtel to access your demographic information from the UIDAI’s Central Identities Data Repository. In the process, apparently, you ‘consented’ to the opening of an Aadhaar-linked Airtel wallet. Perhaps this was actually optional: according to one account, consent took the form of clicking on a box in a pop-up window. The fact remains that many people exercised that option without knowing it or meaning to. Did you check the details of the ‘terms and conditions’ last time you ticked boxes to buy a SIM card or make a payment online? I doubt it.
So far so bad. But how did Vimla’s pension end up in that stealth wallet? That is where the APBS comes in. The wizards of APBS want Aadhaar to become a “financial address”, as the UIDAI puts it. Today, if I want to send you money by electronic bank transfer, I need your name, account number, and IFSC code. And if you change your bank account, I will need the new details. With APBS, your Aadhaar number will suffice – if your bank account is linked with Aadhaar, APBS will find it wherever it is (using the ‘NPCI mapper’).
But there is a catch – what if you have several bank accounts? The answer, at least for now, is that APBS sends the money to whichever account was most recently linked with Aadhaar – let us call this the ‘latest Aadhaar linked account’ rule. Very few people, however, know about the LALA rule. Vimla Devi, for one, has never heard about it. Yet it is this brilliant rule that automatically diverted her pension from her Bank of India account to her Airtel wallet.
Fortunately, the victims of the Airtel scam include relatively privileged and educated people who raised the alarm bells a few months ago when their LPG subsidy started finding its way to Airtel wallets. According to media reports, Airtel was pulled up by the UIDAI and had to pay a fine of Rs 2.5 crore aside from returning Rs 190 crore to 31 lakh customers affected by the diversion of LPG subsidies. But what did not happen, evidently, is the cancellation of all Aadhaar-linked Airtel wallets. That is why people like Vimla continue to search in vain for their pension money or other cash benefits. As someone aptly commented on Twitter, “[If] unauthorised Airtel wallets are still operational… the 2.5 crore penalty paid now sounds more like a bribe than anything else.”
The Airtel scam is just one example of the hazards of the LALA rule. Because most people don’t know the rule, they often spend time and money looking for their cash benefits in the wrong place. This is especially unkind to the elderly, single women and disabled persons, for whom every visit to the bank can be an ordeal. Among other tragic victims of the LALA rule is Premni Kunwar in Garhwa district (Jharkhand), who died of hunger last year after her pension was diverted to someone else’s account because her Aadhaar number had been wrongly linked to it. Incidentally the APBS, like Airtel wallets, has a veneer of “informed consent”, but in practice, consent is a fiction, at least for people like Vimla Devi and Premni Kunwar.
Further, the LALA rule is just one of the many hurdles that are being faced today by recipients of DBT payments. The term, ‘DBT’, is a little confusing, but in practice, it seems to refer to cash benefits delivered through Aadhaar-linked bank accounts (not necessarily via APBS). To facilitate DBT, Aadhaar-linked bank accounts were opened en masse in the early days of the Jan Dhan Yojana. Many of them were unwanted or redundant accounts that were later declared “dormant” by the banks or even closed without people’s knowledge. Others were frozen because the account holder was unable to meet the ‘e-KYC’ requirements (including biometric authentication), imposed ex post. Inconsistencies among the Aadhaar database, bank records and other databases such as pension lists or job cards also affected the DBT system. All this created serious problems for DBT recipients, from pensioners and National Rural Employment Guarantee Act workers to pregnant women who are struggling to claim their maternity benefits.
One example, among others, is the problem of “rejected” NREGA wage payments. According to official data from the ministry of rural development, close to Rs 500 crore of NREGA wage payments were rejected in 2017-18, of which Rs 321 crore was still pending last May. The rejections come with all sorts of obscure error codes that local officials, let alone NREGA workers, find difficult to understand.
One of the error codes, for instance, is “inactive Aadhaar”. None seems to know what this stands for. When James Herenj, coordinator of NREGA Watch in Jharkhand, asked the UIDAI for a clarification under the Right to Information Act, the UIDAI pleaded ignorance and forwarded the query to the MoRD, where it was redirected to the Jharkhand government. Unable to clarify, the Jharkhand government helpfully suggested going back to the MoRD.
I am mentioning Jharkhand because that is where I live, but similar problems are bound to exist in other states. Depriving pensioners or NREGA workers of their meagre incomes, without putting in place effective assistance facilities, is a glaring injustice. Interestingly, the UIDAI had no difficulty in recognizing the injustice when it came to the diversion of LPG subsidy. Swift action was taken and an audit was even commissioned from PricewaterhouseCoopers. Meanwhile, poor people continue to be treated as guinea pigs for immature financial technologies. What needs auditing is not just Airtel’s antics but the entire DBT system and, especially, APBS. But with the UIDAI safely ensconced behind a thick wall of impunity, who will bell the cat?
— source telegraphindia.com by Jean Drèze Aug 03, 2018