16 Sep
A Foreign Perspective, News and Analyses
English Online International Newspapers
Nearly all of these are English-edition daily newspapers. These sites have interesting editorials and essays, and many have links to other good news sources. We try to limit this list to those sites which are regularly updated, reliable, with a high percentage of “up” time.
Recommended:
Irish Examiner>>
France 24>>
Spiegel>>
The Age>>
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Irish people holidaying overseas often hear the comment: “Oh, you’re Irish.”
It is almost always freighted with contrasting possibilities.
The speaker, hearing English spoken, may be glad that the person talking in English is Irish rather than British or American.
But, nine times out of 10, no matter where in the world the speaker hails from, they have at best a positive view of the Irish, and at worst a neutral view, not least because we, as a nation, haven’t left scars on them or their country of origin. We don’t have much of a history of invading or colonising.
That’s perhaps why, when, just a week ago, the head of the Church of England publicly prostrated himself in penitence over the massacre at Amritsar in India in 1919, Ireland hardly noticed. We had damn all to do with the Raj and felt no culpability for the way the British treated millions of Indians they turned into fan-wielding servants.
We believed we could not be held accountable for some historic atrocity.
Except that one of the two key men involved in the atrocity was Irish, and the other had the strongest connections with this country. One was educated in Cork, the other came from Tipperary.
To this day, an Irish name evokes a shudder in India: that of Michael O’Dwyer, who never in the two decades following the carnage expressed anything but the approbation of it and the man who directed it, Reginald Dyer.
At the time of Amritsar, the UK was apprehensive of another Indian Mutiny. Apprehensive to the point of paranoia, because it would have taken a rancid case of paranoia to see as dangerous a dusty walled garden full of Amritsarinhabitants gathered to discuss the threat posed by revolutionaries. The agenda for the meeting expressed concern about actions“deleterious to the British government”.
In addition to those wanting to discuss such serious matters,as the day progressed, the garden filled up with pilgrims on their way back from the Golden Temple, looking for somewhere to sit down and eat, somewhere their children could safely play.
The problem was that Brigadier General Dyer was so rigid a character that he couldn’t trust his own eyes. Instead of registering the self-evident harmlessness of roughly 5,000 unarmed civilians, his concern was that he had issued a proclamation that meetings of more than four men were banned, and by God, he was going to ensure the natives paid attention to that proclamation.
He said afterward that if he had been able to get his armoured cars through the procession of people headed for the dusty garden, he would have equipped his men with machine guns — machine guns being more efficient at mowing down the unarmed innocent.
As it was, he blocked the entrance, marched his men into the garden, ordered them into firing positions, told them to aim into the mass of those present, not overhead, and instructed them to open fire. They did. Bullets ploughed into men, women, and children.
Desperate to escape, some of those as yet unwounded tried, with the help of family members, to get over the wall to the outside. The bullet holes still to be seen in that wall testify to their failure. Several hundred (according to British records) died; more than a thousand (according to Indian accounts)perished.
The Brigadier General’s report described the incident as a successful dispersion of a mob. The truth was that he trapped 5,000 people who only a lunatic would regard as a mob and gave them no chance to disperse.
No warning was given. None of those present were told to prove their innocent intent by leaving the area — not that they could have left, given the armoured cars making the gates impassable.
Brigadier General Reginald Dyer.
They were assassinated without cause or conscience. Dyer then ignored the wounded and provided them with no medical help: “It was not my job. Hospitals were open, and they could have gone there.”
Within two days, Michael O’Dwyer, the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, declared martial law, pausing only to instruct the building of gallows in public places so the populace could see what was in store for them if they challenged the military men who now governed their every move.
O’Dwyer devoted the rest of his life to justifying what Dyer had done. But then, he had been raised with a generational reverence for the authority of the British Empire and a matching contempt for revolutionaries back home in Ireland.
O’Dwyer was one of a family of 14 children, so it is, perhaps, unsurprising that the O’Dwyers were Catholic. They were well-to-do landowners who farmed in the shadow of the Galtees. Michael was the sixth child born to Margaret and John O’Dwyer, and adored the two of them, writing admiringly of his father’s unselfish devotion to his clan and his hospitality to others.
Of his mother, he wrote: “She kept the family together in her own loving, unobtrusive and efficient manner till all were launched in the world or provided for at home, no easy task in those days of agricultural depression.”
Michael, like the rest of his family, was raised to high expectations and set out to fulfill them. He was a man untroubled by uncertainty or doubt, for 20 years defending if not promoting the actions of his military in Amritsar.
Indeed, he was at a triumphalist event in a Westminster hall on the night when an Indian named Udham Singh shot him dead. An eponymous biography of the “patient assassin” by Anita Anand, published earlier this year, points out that he had waited for 20 years to avenge Amritsar.
No apology was ever forthcoming for the massacre. When Queen Elizabeth II of Britain laid a wreath at the site of the massacre 20 years ago, Prince Philip described Indian estimates of those who died as “vastly exaggerated”.
On his visit as British prime minister, David Cameron, writing in the visitors’ book, managed to ascribe eternal virtue to the UK while vaguely acknowledging that Amritsar might not have been itsfinest hour.
“We must never forget what happened here,” he wrote. “And in remembering we must ensure that the United Kingdom stands up for the right of peaceful protest around the world.”
Theresa May didn’t even go that far. She expressed regret for the terrible thing that had happened, as if that terrible thing had been an unowned climate event like a hurricane.
We in Ireland have hardly registered the Amritsar massacre. Maybe we should. Maybe we should apologise for an emigrant, who a hundred years ago approved multiple murder. Because that’s the truth of Michael O’Dwyer.Despite a privileged background, a Jesuit education, and enormous pride in tracing his family back to Brian Boru’s time, this man saw nothing wrong in exterminating hundreds of unarmed and entrapped civilians he considered to threaten the Raj, despite the fact that some were babies and several were in their 80s.
His command soaked the garden at Amritsar with the blood of innocents. And he never regretted it.
Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2019 finalists – in pictures
The photography competition is a global, online and free-to-enter showcase of light-hearted images of the Earth’s most amazing wildlife. It aims to highlight the importance of wildlife conservation, working with its partner the Born Free Foundation
Jim Hedge
To be or not to be
Photograph: Txema Garcia/Comedy Wildlife Photo Awards 2019
Laid Back Chimp!
Photograph: Thomas D Mangelsen/Comedy Wildlife Photo Awards 2019
Warning! Territory marking, follow at your own risk
Photograph: Tilakra Nagaraj/Comedy Wildlife Photo Awards 2019
Read Full Article>>
Promising student Carliton Maina was shot by the police in Nairobi. His mother believes he was murdered. As part of The Guardian’s special focus on Kibera, we met residents of Africa’s largest slum to explore their deep distrust of the police and find out what Maina’s, and other recent deaths, can tell us about the dramatic rise in extrajudicial killings across Kenya.
Dr Vatwani has spent three decades reuniting patients with mental health problems with their families
Anne Pinto-Rodrigues
Walls of the Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundation’s residential treatment facility, covered with pictures of reunited patients. Photograph: Anne Pinto-Rodrigues/The Guardian
To the horror of the watching doctors, a young man on a Mumbai street picked up a broken coconut shell, scooped up dirty gutter water with it, and drank.
“I still recall the scene vividly,” says 61-year-old Mumbai psychiatrist Dr Bharat Vatwani. “My wife, Smitha – also a psychiatrist – and I, watched from across the street.”
Shocked by what they had just witnessed, the couple took the young man to their new private clinic and began treating him for schizophrenia. For Vatwani it was the beginning of a three-decade-long commitment to treating the “wandering” of India – mentally ill people left to roam on city streets – and reuniting them with their families.
As the patient recovered, he began to speak in English and recall bits of information about his family. This enabled Vatwani to locate his kin in the south-eastern state of Andhra Pradesh, a significant distance from Mumbai. “We realised then, that there was no organisation in Mumbai, or for that matter in India, which rehabilitated wandering mentally ill people,” Vatwani says. This incident, which occurred more than 30 years ago, was a turning point in the lives of the psychiatrists.
According to a 2015-16 survey commissioned by India’s government, nearly 15% of Indian adults suffer from some form of mental illness. This translates to more than 180 million people in the country, though only a minuscule number have access to the necessary medical facilities. There is a severe shortage of psychiatrists, especially in rural areas. According to Vatwani, “Over 80% of the government hospitals in India do not have a psychiatrist. One of the main reasons being that many Indian psychiatrists prefer to move abroad, for better prospects. There are less than 4,000 practising psychiatrists in a nation of over a billion people!”
Of the people who do have access to professional help, very few are willing to seek it. Mental illness continues to be largely a taboo subject in India.
Soon after the first reunion, in 1988, Vatwani and his wife, Dr Smitha Vatwani, set up the Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundation. The word “shraddha”, which comes from Sanskrit, means “devotion’”. The foundation has been dedicated to rehabilitating wandering mentally ill people and reuniting them post-recovery with their loved ones.
Vatwani in the process of locating the hometown of a patient. Photograph: Anne Pinto-Rodrigues/The Guardian
“85% of the people we pick up from the streets suffer from schizophrenia. I shudder to think of what they must have endured out there, especially the women. They are wandering in all kinds of severe weather – sick, hungry and invisible to the world,” Vatwani says.
After the Shraddha team has picked up a mentally disturbed person, she or he is taken to the residential treatment centre in Karjat, on the outskirts of Mumbai. Vatwani says: “Our medical treatment is coupled with kindness and empathy, which the patient rarely experienced on the streets. Depending on the severity of the illness, the person will spend anywhere between two to three months at the centre.”
Once Vatwani has certified a patient as ready to go home, a social worker who speaks the same language (or a close dialect) as the patient accompanies them home. Recognising the Herculean efforts of Shraddha’s committed team of social workers, Vatwani says: “Sometimes, patients’ families live in the most remote corners of the country and finding them requires some serious deductive work by the team. Often, we have to get the local police involved to locate the relatives.”
Even after the reunion, the patient’s treatment continues as the foundation regularly sends medication to their home.
Shraddha’s rate of reuniting patients with their relatives is a staggering 95%, with more than 8,000 reunions to date, Vatwani says. Some patients have been separated from their families for years, even for decades. Inderjeet Ghai, a 70-year-old from the northern state of Punjab, was reunited with his kin, nearly 54 years after he had gone missing.
Many of the recovered patients have successfully reintegrated into society, with several going on to have jobs and careers. Gangadhar Vinode, 47, who was brought together with his relatives in 1991, after a three-month stay at Shraddha, is today a successful real estate developer in the neighbouring city of Pune.
“In seven out of 10 [reunions], the relatives are overjoyed at having their missing family member back. Occasionally, in the case of female patients, relatives are hesitant to accept them as they are concerned about what people around them will say. In such situations, the accompanying social worker will explain the importance of having the family’s support and involvement, for the patient’s recovery. We’ve mostly had successful [reunions],” says Vatwani.
For his decades of service to this vulnerable section of society, in 2018 Vatwani received the Magsaysay award, widely recognised as Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel prize. “Given the scale of the mental health problem in the country, my contribution is insignificant,” says Vatwani. Despite his humility, however, the award has brought much needed global attention to the cause of wandering mentally ill people, and mental health in general.
“Anyone can be afflicted by a mental illness and end up wandering the streets,” Vatwani says. “Depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, addiction and other neuroses are so common nowadays. People suffering from these problems need as much love and support as those suffering from a physical illness.”
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