Amnesty International Group 22 Pasadena/Caltech News
Volume XXII Number 6, June 2014
UPCOMING EVENTS
Thursday, June 26, 7:30 PM. Monthly
Meeting. We meet at the Caltech Y, Tyson
House, 505 S. Wilson Ave., Pasadena. (This is
just south of the corner with San Pasqual.
Signs will be posted.) We will be planning our
activities for the summer. Please join us!
Refreshments provided.
Tuesday, July 8, 7:30 PM. Letter writing
meeting at Caltech Athenaeum, corner of Hill
and California in Pasadena. In the summer we
meet outdoors at the "Rath al Fresco," on the
lawn behind the building. This informal
gathering is a great way for newcomers to get
acquainted with Amnesty
Sunday, July 20, 6:30 PM. Rights Readers
Human Rights Book Discussion group. This
month we read "How to get Filthy Rich in
Rising Asia" by Mohsin Hamid.
COORDINATOR'S CORNER
Hi All
What's been happening with Group 22 lately?
Some members we haven't seen in awhile have
come back, which is great.
Rob and I, Joyce and Veronica attended the 25th
(I can't believe it's been that long) anniversary
dinner of Tiananmen Square at Almansor Court
in Alhambra in late May. The indefatigable Ann
Lau was there, of course, as well as many other
activists, both Asian and non.
Wishing all a restful and relaxing summer. I am
working 3 weeks to pay to attend the National
School Nurse conference in San Antonio, Texas.
Con Carino,
Kathy
RIGHTS READERS
Human Rights Book Discussion Group
Keep up with Rights Readers at
http://rightsreaders.blogspot.com
Next Rights Readers meeting:
Sunday, July 20, 6:30 PM
Vroman's Bookstore
695 E. Colorado, Pasadena
Book Review
Yes Man
Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in
Rising Asia
By PARUL SEHGAL
Published: March 29, 2013
"How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia" begins
under a bed. With you - yes, you - under a
bed. Once you quit cowering, you'll be the hero
of this novel written in the second person,
although there's nothing remotely heroic about
you at the moment; you're so sick you can
scarcely speak. The only remedy at hand is a
large white radish, which your mother cooks up
in a foul brew.
Courage. You'll live and what's more, you're
only seven steps from getting Filthy Rich,
according to the narrator. (You're also nine steps
from ruin, but we'll address that in a minute.)
The marriage of these two curiously compatible
genres - self-help and the old-fashioned
bildungsroman - is just one of the pleasures of
Mohsin Hamid's shrewd and slippery new
novel, a rags-to-riches story that works on a
head-splitting number of levels. It's a love story
and a study of seismic social change. It parodies
a get-rich-quick book and gestures to a new
direction for the novel, all in prose so pure and
purposeful it passes straight into the
bloodstream. It intoxicates.
But back to the radish. It saves you - or was it
perhaps something more numinous? Luck has
already begun clearing your path. "There are
forks in the road to wealth that have nothing to
do with choice or desire or effort, forks that have
to do with chance, and in your case, the order of
your birth is one of these," the narrator
congratulates you. You're a third-born son.
Third born means you're spared from going to
work immediately (like your elder brother) or
being married off (like your sister, who at
puberty is "marked for entry"). Third born
means you're not "a tiny skeleton in a small
grave at the base of a tree," like your youngest
sibling. Third born means you stay in school.
Even your illness is a blessing; it persuades your
father to move the family to the city - Step 1 in
getting Filthy Rich - and it's the point where
the story of the individual debouches into the
narrative of the nation. "You embody one of the
great changes of your time," Hamid writes.
"Where once your clan was innumerable, not
infinite but of a large number not readily
known, now there are five of you. Five. The
fingers on one hand, the toes on one foot, a
minuscule aggregation when compared with
shoals of fish or flocks of birds or indeed tribes
of humans. In the history of the evolution of the
family, you and the millions of other migrants
like you represent an ongoing proliferation of
the nuclear. It is an explosive transformation."
You ascend smoothly, going from DVD rental
delivery boy to young entrepreneur with a
bottled water business that thrives "to the sound
of the city's great whooshing thirst," goaded on
by the narrator's edicts ("Learn From a Master,"
"Don't Fall in Love"), which grow steadily more
sinister ("Be Prepared to Use Violence"). You
marry but remain besotted with a girl from the
neighborhood identified as "the pretty girl,"
now working as a model and making her own
hazardous climb.
Like his compatriot, the Pakistani novelist
Mohammed Hanif, author of "Our Lady of Alice
Bhatti," Hamid creates characters who enact the
life of the nation. But where Hanif (a former
fighter pilot) favors broad burlesques - a
literature of parody and attack - Hamid (a
former brand consultant) is politic and deeply
ironic. He grew up in Pakistan and America,
with stints in Milan and Manila (where our
families were friends). He's alert to the dread
and distrust with which America and the
Muslim world regard each other. He's never
merely telling a story, he's pitting his story
against prevailing narratives about Pakistan, the
roots of radicalization, the unevenness of
economic growth. Hence his penchant for
directly addressing the reader - all three of his
novels make extravagant use of the second
person.
"I'm a political animal," Hamid told the Book
Review in an interview last year. "How the pack
hunts, shares its food, tends its wounded -
these things matter to me." There's no better
description of what he strives to capture in this
book. Where Virginia Woolf attends to the inner
lives of her most peripheral characters, Hamid
gives every extra a history of violence and a
lurid financial back story; he revels in the dream
deferred, the loan denied, the fingers lost to
creditors. A technician helping perfect the water
purification technology is conjured in a few
swift strokes: "He is a bicycle mechanic by
background, untrained in the nuances of
business, which is why he works for you, and
also because, as the father of a trio of little girls
and the youngest son of a freelance bricklayer
who died of exposure sleeping rough at too
advanced an age, he values a steady income."
By supplanting the traditional role of choice in
the novel with chance, by defining characters by
their modes of survival rather than their
personalities, he puts powerlessness at the
center of his story. And by turning from his cast
of terrestrial drones to the aerial drones silently
monitoring their progress, he signals to
powerlessness on a global scale.
Cleverly, Hamid sets "How to Get Filthy Rich in
Rising Asia" in an unnamed country, stripping
away almost every signifier save a few that
suggest we are in Pakistan. No mangoes, no
mullahs, no preconceived notions.
Defamiliarizing Pakistan also obviates another
criticism. "Although globalization is universally
acknowledged as one of the most pressing
issues of our time, it has usually proved a poor
subject for fiction," the writer Siddhartha Deb
observes. Too many books exhibit "an endless
fascination for pop-culture trivia,
poststructuralist meta-theories and self-
referential irony." With only a few props - an
assault rifle, a packet of milk, a white radish -
and only the slightest tinge of tear gas in the air,
the novel feels mythic, eternal rather than
frenetic. And the bare stage is the best showcase
for the narrator's one-man show.
Hamid, like Kazuo Ishiguro, specializes in
voices in transition, split at the root, straining for
cultivation and tripping over clumsy
constructions. This narrator speaks to us in two
tongues, in self-help's slick banalities and the
bewilderment of the striver. He's magnificently
fraudulent and full of uses; he swoops in to do
exposition, pans away to turn prophetic or play
sociologist ("You witness a passage of time that
outstrips its chronological equivalent. Just as
when headed into the mountains a quick shift in
altitude can vault one from subtropical jungle to
semi-arctic tundra, so too can a few hours on a
bus from rural remoteness to urban centrality
appear to span millennia"). He can be chilling
and chummy, and very hard to shake. Some of
the book's more serious sections, on mortality,
say, are imbued with a vestigial phoniness, and
a self-referential ode to storytelling has the soul-
lessness of a TED talk. It's a shame; Hamid is a
stronger, stranger writer than that.
Witness the final reversal. The book ends with
you, the hero, in your eighth decade, a Gatsby
we never knew: an old man in a hotel room,
trying to remember to take your medicines
regularly. And as it turns out, there is still
something left to learn, something more vital
than how to get Filthy Rich. You teach us how to
lose. How to relinquish health and hope; how to
surrender assets to thieving relatives and one's
children to America. "Slough off your wealth,
like an animal molting in the autumn," Hamid
writes. Look up the pretty girls of your youth.
Find someone to play cards with. "Have an exit
strategy."
Parul Sehgal is an editor at the Book Review.
A version of this review appears in print on March
31, 2013, on page BR9 of the Sunday Book Review
with the headline: Yes Man.
(The New York Times)
Author Biography
Mohsin Hamid is the author of the novels Moth
Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and How to
Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia; and the
forthcoming essay collection Discontent and Its
Civilizations. His award-winning fiction has been
featured on bestseller lists, adapted for the
cinema, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize,
and translated into over 30 languages. His
essays and short stories have appeared in the
New York Times, the Guardian, the New
Yorker, Granta, and many other publications.
Born in 1971 in Lahore, he has spent about half
his life there and much of the rest in London,
New York, and California.
PRISONER OF CONSCIENCE
Gao Zhisheng
by Joyce Wolf
We're counting down the days until the
scheduled August release of imprisoned human
rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng. According to a
June 20 article from Radio Free Asia, Gao is
supposed to be freed from remote Shaya Prison
in northwestern China on August 7.
"Jailed human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, one
of China's highest-profile dissidents, is
scheduled to complete his three-year prison
term at a remote jail in China's northwestern
region of Xinjiang in early August, amid
concerns by some activists that the authorities
will keep him under extrajudicial detention even
after that. The family of Gao, who has defended
clients in politically sensitive cases and spoken
out on behalf of members of the banned Falun
Gong spiritual movement, have been told that
his term in Shaya Prison would end on Aug. 7."
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/lawy
er-06202014150012.html
Gao Zhisheng has been permitted only two
visits from family members while detained in
Shaya Prison. There has been no contact at all
since the second visit in January 2013, and the
family has no information about his state of
health. The RFA article includes a quote from
his brother, Gao Zhiyi: "No one knows the real
situation ... we have had no news at all."
RFA reports that Beijing activist Hu Jia is not
very optimistic: " 'Gao Zhisheng will be stripped
of his political rights for at least one year even if
he is released, so he may be held under
surveillance or have limited freedom,' Hu said.
'He may be sent back to his hometown in
northern Shaanxi province, or he may be sent
back to Beijing via Urumqi; any of these things
could happen.' "
In Group 22's May newsletter we quoted from
the review issued by Amnesty International's
China Team: "It is unclear what will happen to
Gao Zhisheng after his release, and it is
therefore vital that there is sustained pressure
on the Chinese authorities in the lead-up to this
date." We're trying to do our bit. We mailed a
petition to President Xi Jinping with 47
signatures, most collected at the Tiananmen
commemorative lunch, thanks to Tracy Gore.
Copies of the petition are also being mailed to
Premier Le Kequiang, Minister of State Security
Gen Huichang, Minister of Public Security Guo
Shengkun, and Ambassador Cui Tienkai in
Washington DC.
Please join Group 22 in the sustained effort on
behalf of Gao Zhisheng. Go to the Group 22
page for Gao Zhisheng, choose one or more of
the suggested officials to write to, and follow the
guidelines.
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~aigp22/GaoPOC
/GaoZhisheng.html, or just type 'amnesty
caltech gao' into your browser's search box.
Thank you!
SECURITY WITH HUMAN
RIGHTS
by Robert Adams
"Iraq's Crisis: 3 Quick Points for U.S.
Policymakers"
By Sunjeev Bery
June 19, 2014
As the latest crisis in Iraq unfolds, here are three
basic points for U.S. policymakers to keep in
mind:
1. The protection of civilians must be a top
priority in Mosul and in every Iraqi
community facing armed conflict.
2. The Iraqi central government has an
abysmal human rights record that has left
communities scarred. Government human
rights violations have widely been seen as
a significant factor in widespread popular
discontent.
3. The U.S. government must push the Iraqi
central government to make significant
human rights reforms in order to address
long-term public discontent and
instability.
Protection of civilians must be a top priority in
Mosul and in every Iraqi community facing
armed conflict.
500,000 civilians are reported to have fled Mosul
following its takeover by one or more armed
groups that include those belonging to the
Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS). This
follows the reported displacement of close to
half a million Iraqis in Fallujah since January,
following ISIS' expulsion of Iraqi security forces
there.
ISIS armed groups, Iraqi security forces, and
other potential armed groups must avoid
repeating the violence against civilians that took
place in Fallujah. Iraqi government forces have
used indiscriminate shelling in Fallujah in the
past six months, including on hospitals and in
residential areas. There have been over 5,000
civilian deaths.
The Iraqi central government has an abysmal
human rights record that has left communities
scarred. Government human rights violations
have widely been seen as a significant factor in
widespread popular discontent.
Thousands of detainees languish in prison
without charge. Many of those who are brought
to trial are sentenced to long prison terms or to
death after unfair proceedings. In many cases,
convictions are based on "confessions" extracted
under torture.
Iraq remains one of the world's most prolific
executioners with at least 169 executed in 2013.
As with prison terms, death sentences can also
follow "confessions" extracted under torture. In
many cases, such "confessions" are televised
nationally.
Torture and other ill-treatment inside prisons
and detention centers is rife and routinely goes
unpunished.
To ensure stability in Iraq, the U.S.
government must address popular discontent
by pushing the Iraqi central government to
make significant human rights reforms.
Iraq's long-term human rights crisis can no
longer be viewed by the U.S. and other external
governments as "Iraq's problem" or an internal
matter. To ensure security and safety in Iraq,
widespread popular discontent must be
addressed by pushing the Iraqi central
government to end its terrible human rights
record.
DEATH PENALTY NEWS
By Stevi Carroll
Back In The Saddle Again
After 48 days, the death chambers of Georgia,
Missouri, and Florida resumed their state-
sanctioned murders. The attention Clayton
Lockett's execution received allowed governors,
members of boards of appeal, judges,
prosecution attorneys, elected and appointed
officials -both secular and religious, and all
Americans the opportunity to evaluate why we
either want or do not want the State, in our
name, intentionally to take another human
being's life. With the execution of Marcus
Wellons, in Georgia, on June 17 and the
executions of John Winfield, in Missouri, and
John Henry, in Florida the following day, we
Americans endorsed execution as a legal form of
punishment. Just as thoughtful people believed
the guillotine was more humane than beheading
with a sword or axe, hanging, turning on the
wheel, or burning at the stake, we in the USA
primarily support lethal injection over
electrocution, the gas chamber, hanging, and
firing squad - all available among our states that
murder for the State.
In 2008, two death row inmates filed a case that
said the three-drug protocol was inhumane; the
drugs may not work the way the executioners
believe they will and condemned inmates may
unduly suffer before they die. The two death
row inmates suggested the one-drug protocol as
an alternative. But then I guess the inmates
wanted as little trauma as possible on the way
out. I am aware this desire on the part of the
condemned inmates creates a problem for some
people. I understand. My compassion angel -
and I do not believe in real creatures called
angels - must work overtime when I consider
the crimes of which the condemned have been
found guilty. For many of us, this taxes our
ability to consider compassion. This case went
to the Supreme Court.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority
opinion. He argued, "that the standard for
deciding whether a method violated the
constitution was if it posed a 'substantial risk of
serious harm'." He also said the one-drug
protocol had its own problems since, at that time
in 2008, it had never been used.
Justice John Paul Stevens agreed with the
decision regarding the type of drugs used for
executions, but posited this idea: "The time for a
dispassionate, impartial comparison of the
enormous costs that death penalty litigation
imposes on society with the benefits that it
produces has surely arrived." He also said that if
the question of the death penalty came before
the Supremes, he would vote to abolish it.
In the wake of Clayton Lockett's execution in
April of this year, I would like to ask Chief
Justice Roberts if what Mr. Lockett experienced
showed the signs of being a "substantial risk of
serious harm". We can recall Mr. Lockett's
executioners couldn't find a vein to insert the
needle for the IV drip. Since doctors are not
supposed to take part in executions according to
the Hippocratic oath, less-trained people do.
While the last couple of phlebotomists have
drawn my blood well from my prominent veins,
I've experienced a phlebotomist who searched
in vain for a vein while I became nauseous as I
sat on the paper-lined exam table. Third time
was the charm.
Preliminary findings from an autopsy
conducted by Dr. Joseph Cohen, a medical
examiner employed by Mr. Lockett's lawyers,
indicated that Mr. Lockett did have veins that
should have worked perfectly for an IV.
Whoever attempted to insert the needle
punctured his vein. Because veins other than
his femoral vein were available, they should
have been used. Dr. Cohen said a vein did not
blow, and he was not dehydrated. Puncture
wounds surrounded by hemorrhages showed
inept attempts to insert a needle. Additionally,
Mr. Lockett was tasered by corrections officials
during the process of moving him from his cell
to the death chamber.
September 15, 2009, Romell Broom was strapped
to the gurney in the death chamber of the
Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in
Lucasville, OH. For two and a half hours,
technicians searched for a vein into which they
could insert the IV drip needle. After an hour a
doctor with no prior experience in executions
was brought in to no avail as Mr. Broom had 18
needle thrusts into his arms. Mr. Broom's
lawyers succeeded in blocking his execution
with these questions: "If someone survives an
execution attempt, can a state legally try it
again? Or does the process itself constitute such
torture that it qualifies as unconstitutional cruel
and unusual punishment?"
Neither Oklahoma nor Ohio appear to be
efficient in dispatching the death penalty. Not
only is the death penalty expensive but could
also constitute a 'substantial risk of serious
harm'.
How To Stop A Heart by Mary DeMocker
Mary DeMocker's brother is on Arizona's death
row. Her article, "How to Stop a Heart," is her
personal revelations about our capital
punishment environment and its impact on her
life.
"How to Stop a Heart" can be found at
http://www.deathpenalty.org/article.php?id=7
46#StopAHeart.
The 2% Death Penalty
Death Penalty Focus recently released a report,
THE 2% DEATH PENALTY:
How a Minority of Counties Produce Most Death
Cases at Enormous Costs to All. Because of the
limited number of states and the limited number
of counties in those states that use the death
penalty, the death penalty has become more or
less irrelevant even as our shared tax cash
continues to be used for death penalty
prosecution by this 2%. A brief video and the
entire report are available at
http://deathpenaltyinfo.org/twopercent.
Executions
June
17 Marcus Wellons Georgia
1-drug (pentobarbital)
18 John Winfield Missouri
1-drug (pentobarbital)
18 John Henry Florida
3-drug w/midazolam hydrochloride
GROUP 22 MONTHLY LETTER COUNT
UAs 13
POC 4
Total 17
To add your letters to the total contact
aigp22@caltech.edu
Amnesty International Group 22
The Caltech Y
Mail Code C1-128
Pasadena, CA 91125
www.its.caltech.edu/~aigp22/
http://rightsreaders.blogspot.com
Amnesty International's mission is to undertake research and action focused on preventing and ending grave abuses of the
rights to physical and mental integrity, freedom of conscience and expression, and freedom from discrimination, within the
context of its work to promote all human rights.