Heathrow protest reaches its climax as peaceful protest turns to clashes with riot police

By Jerome Taylor
Published, The Independent: 20 August 2007

Geoff Lamb had to shout to be heard over the ever-present drone of the police helicopter yesterday afternoon. The 63-year-old former petro-physicist had worked for more than 40 years in the oil industry, but yesterday he was marching next to a banner that read: "It's your great-grandchildren's planet too - stop wrecking it for them"
"I've spent a lifetime on the wrong side of the fence,'' he said. "We need to radically alter the way we live our lives. Our environment is being utterly ruined and yet it's business as usual.''
Flanked by a phalanx of police officers, Geoff's group of Aberdeenshire protesters were on the move. They, like hundreds of others from all over the country, had come to take part in the climax of the Climate Camp, 24 hours of direct action at Heathrow. After a week of occupying a barren stretch of scrubland bordering the northern edge of Britain's busiest airport, a motley collection of environmentalists, veteran campaigners, local residents and part-time activists had gathered to make their point more forcefully than ever before.
Their mission: to highlight the link between global warming and aviation emissions - and to do it with posters, banners and a healthy dose of purposeful rebellion.
As promised, yesterday's protest involved more than just marching and shouting. The organisers of the camp had always said they expected those gathered between the villages of Harlington, Sipson and Harmondsworth to take part in direct action. They are, after all, the three places that would be wiped off the map if Heathrow's owners, BAA, go ahead with plans to build a third runway.
Just talking about climate change, the camp's inhabitants argued, was not going to make people or the Government listen, and if they had to break the law in order to make the world take the issue seriously enough, they would. Simple as that.
The protest plan was straightforward. At midday, a column of marchers made up predominantly of local residents would head through the village of Sipson and symbolically mark out the route that a third runway would take were it one day to carve through their homes.
Those wishing to take part in direct action, meanwhile, were encouraged to walk to the headquarters of BAA, a nondescript block of offices that lies to the north of Heathrow's perimeter fence, and blockade it. The residents' protest would then join them there and stop anyone going in or out of the offices for the next 24 hours. But the police were taking no chances. Waiting for the protesters at BAA were about 1,500 officers.
Phil Sutton, a resident of Harlington for more than 40 years, was one of those on the first march to highlight where the third runway would go. If BAA gets the go-ahead to build that runway, he and his disabled wife will have to move. "A lot of people say we shouldn't complain, that if you don't want to be moved you shouldn't live next to an airport. But not everyone had a choice. I've lived here since 1963 and my wife has lived here all her life," he said.
But would he be willing to break the law to highlight his case? "Why not? We've been taken for a ride long enough. We've protested peacefully for years against the expansion of Heathrow and it's made no difference. We've been forced to resort to direct action. I just hope no one gets hurt.''
For the early part of the afternoon, the atmosphere in the residents' protest was cordial and at times even jovial. Although one 21-year-old man was arrested for an assault on a police officer, according to the Metropolitan Police, the march was markedly non-confrontational. Police said there had been just three arrests in total - one other for carrying Class A drugs and another for going equipped to cause criminal damage.
Protesters laughed and joked with their police escorts even as they were penned in on Sipson Road for more than an hour. Children dressed in carefully constructed, brightly-coloured costumes marched alongside their parents, who walked next to heavily pierced hippies. Sipson had probably never seen such a varied crowd. Even Daniel Hooper, aka the legendary environmental campaigner Swampy, was reported to be in attendance.
But by two o'clock a very different crowd had emerged from the camp's tent. Heading south towards the BAA offices and Heathrow Airport itself a second column of between 200 to 300 activists left the camp and began walking across a field. Here were the protesters that organisers had promised would blockade BAA at all costs and it was not long before the police helicopter returned and circled overhead.
For much of the next two hours, protesters fought pitched battles with riot and mounted police in waist-high brushland as they tried to make their way towards their target. Communicating by text message and radio, the protesters tried to find a way through the police lines. Many were forced back by police batons and at least one woman could be seen nursing a bleeding head wound.
Yvonne Deeney, a 20-year-old protester who claimed she had been beaten by police, said: "We were standing peacefully next to the fence and then suddenly the police came on to the field to push us back. We were trying to talk to them but they were having none of it.''
Police officers on site said they were unable to let anyone leave the field as protesters doing so would be trespassing on private property.
Although the majority of activists were successfully beaten back, small splinter groups were able to make it through the police cordon and by late afternoon there were reports that a sizeable number had made it to the BAA car park.
Organisers of the march claimed the day had been a resounding success, despite critics' assertions that the turnout - thought to be about 1,400 - had proved a disappointment. Gary Dyer, one of the camp's spokesmen, said: "We're a medium-sized industrial economy. We could be a great test case.. Most campaigns are about more. The suffragettes wanted more of a voice, the civil rights movement was asking for more equality. Climate change is a slightly strange cause because we are asking for less and that's a real psychological challenge.''
To the relief of holiday-makers, fears that flights would be delayed proved unfounded. The protest at Heathrow is planned to continue until noon today.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/transport/article2878784.ece

Hip-hop showdown: Is the battle between Kanye West and 50 Cent just a publicity stunt?

(Photo: vibe.com)

Kanye West and 50 Cent are both best-selling rap artists - but the similarities end there. One is from the suburbs, the other from the streets. And, as they prepare to release their new albums on the same day next month, the mutual antagonism is growing. But is it all a publicity stunt?

By Jerome Taylor
Published, The Independent: 14 August 2007

50 Cent has never been a one to mince his words. Even before he was a multiplatinum-selling rap star, complete with the obligatory footwear line, sprawling mansion and autobiographical movie, the Queens-bred rapper was renowned on the underground New York scene as a man who had perfected the so-called Art of Beef.
Otherwise known as trashing a fellow artist (be it their ability to rap, wear the correct industry approved clothes or score with the opposite sex) "beefing" is practically a hip-hop rite of passage and, from the start, 50 Cent was a gifted, and somewhat foolhardy, natural.
In early 2000, while still a young rapper virtually unknown outside his small circle of local fans, 50 Cent stormed on to the New York scene with the underground track "How to Rob", a tongue-in-cheek instruction manual detailing how best to mug some of the industry's most successful stars, including Jay-Z, the Wu-Tang Clan and Nas. They responded in kind by attacking the cheeky upstart in their own tracks and the rest, as they say, is history.
As a recipe for generating publicity and notoriety beefing has worked every time for hip-hop artists, and none more so than for 50 Cent - a man with almost as many aliases as someone on the FBI's most-wanted list (Fitty and Five-0 being just two). But now the rap star has taken beefing to a whole new level by opening up a new and unusual feud with Kanye West, the only hip-hop artist who could steal his thunder, when they simultaneously release new albums on 11 September.
Hip-hop fans were stunned over the weekend when 50 Cent made the unusual announcement that he would quit rapping if West's Graduation sells more copies than his own upcoming album, Curtis. In an interview with the hip-hop website Sohh.com on Friday, 50 Cent attacked supporters of West, who is himself a highly acclaimed platinum-selling artist, but generally regarded as likely to sell fewer records next month.
"They would like to see Kanye West give me a problem because I've worked myself into a space where I've become the favourite," he said "Everybody roots against the underdog when he goes against the favourite. Put it like this, let's raise the stakes. If Kanye West sells more records than 50 Cent on September 11, I'll no longer write music. I'll write music and work with my other artists, but I won't put out any more solo albums."
Hip-hop's biggest showdown for years will pit two characters from distinctly different backgrounds and many are billing it as the music world's latest class war, the 21st-century equivalent to the Beatles v the Rolling Stones, or Blur against Oasis.
On one side is 50 Cent, a multi-platinum artist who survived on the streets of New York by dealing crack cocaine at the age of 12 and whose music praises the thuggish urban gang culture into which he was born. On the other is West, the critically acclaimed, born-again Christian from middle-class Chicago suburbia who fought off the macho gang culture surrounding hip-hop to revolutionise the way people listen to rap.
Since the announcement, websites and blogs across cyberspace have been packed with fans debating which of the two mega-stars will outsell the other, and whether 50 Cent would actually stick to his promise to quit rapping if West wins.
The simultaneous release of new albums from two of the rap world's best-selling and most talented artists was already being hailed as the mother of all contemporary music battles. But the New Yorker's vow to turn his back on what he does best has raised the stakes to a whole new level.
When 50 Cent and Kanye West released their debut albums in 2003 and 2004 respectively, both critics and fans lauded what was then a much-needed fresh input of raw talent into the increasingly staid US hip-hop scene.
The former's album, Get Rich or Die Tryin', became the fastest selling solo album in US history, shifting 872,000 copies in the first four days of its release. Alongside his second offering, The Massacre, he has since gone on to become one of the world's best selling hip-hop artists, shifting nearly 20 million records worldwide.
West's triple-platinum 2004 debut, The College Dropout, meanwhile, stunned critics and fans for its sheer originality, topping all the major critics' polls and earning 10 Grammy nominations. His second release, Late Registration, sold 600,000 copies in the first week alone and picked up a further three Grammys.
The perception that West is the critically acclaimed rap revolutionary while his rival simply sells lots of records appears to have been the major impetus behind 50 Cent's latest attack. "The people who give out trophies, pick [Kanye] because he's safe," he said. "But my projects have been making a way bigger impression ... by actually selling. That's an indication of the public's interest.
"How many people are interested enough to go spend $16 (£8) on a CD? I sold 1.1. million records in four days and I didn't get one trophy for The Massacre, for the entire album, then release Get Rich Or Die Tryin' as a soundtrack, sell 3 million records of the soundtrack and soundtracks are harder to sell than solo albums ... and then, no trophies for the soundtracks. I don't get trophies, I get cheques, he gets the trophies. But how you gon' give him a trophy now when he comes out the same time I come out? And I'm just all over his ass. You gon' clearly see the favouritism. He's gonna still get the trophies."
But is 50 Cent's animosity for real, or was his announcement a cleverly crafted media stunt to garner as much publicity in time for the release of his new album? After all, both artists were very much spotted and supported by the same people who helped launch both their careers.
"There's a lot of clever PR going on here," says Hatie Collins, the editor of NWD magazine, one of the UK's best-selling hip-hop publications. "It's a tradition in hip-hop that if you want to sell a new album then you come out and take a pop at another artist. Kanye and Fitty are friends, I think Kanye's even got a track coming out on 50's upcoming album."
Apart from their single-parent backgrounds and long struggle to get into the industry, 50 Cent and West have very little in common. The early life of Curtis James Jackson III, the man who would later be known as 50 Cent, was virtually a blueprint for the endemic violence that has plagued America's inner-city poor for decades.
Forced on to the streets after his drug dealer mother was murdered when he was aged just eight, 50 Cent quickly learnt that the only way to get out of the urban poverty he had been born into was to make money, fast. (His stage name, 50 Cent, is a reference to the way the star survived the streets of New York through providing for himself "by any means"). The quickest way to make cash in the drug-infested inner suburbs of 1980s New York was to sell crack cocaine. At the age of 12 he became a dealer.
While 50 Cent was dodging rival dealers and police officers as a teenager, Kanye Omari West was attending the Polaris High School in Oak Lawn, Illinois. His mother, a teacher, had moved there after divorcing the singer's father, a former Black Panther, and the young singer enjoyed the type of American suburban idyll that his rival could perhaps have only dreamed of.
After dropping out of art college, West looked to a career in hip-hop and soon found himself producing tracks for top artists such as Jay-Z, The Game and Alicia Keys. But while Kanye's middle-class background allowed him to jump into the hip-hop scene as a producer, many felt he would be hard pressed to gain the legitimacy needed to be a rapper on stage in an industry that lionised gang culture and violence.
Both 50 Cent and West, for instance, cite near-death experiences as events that forced them to turn their lives around, but whereas Kanye's was a near- fatal car crash, the way 50 Cent cheated death was by miraculously surviving being shot nine times at point-blank range. In the world of hip-hop, being shot is simply sexier than crashing a car.
"We all grew up street guys who had to do whatever we had to do to get by," said Jay-Z in an interview with Time magazine in 2005. "Then there's Kanye, who to my knowledge has never hustled a day in his life."
But then fans of West's music and style would say that the rap star had never been about hustling in the first place. In contrast to most of his contemporaries, West has resolutely distanced himself from the violence, misogyny and homophobia that is often endemic in modern popular hip-hop. Where 50 Cent's lyrics largely revolve around the hip-hop mainstays of guns, sex and drugs, West brought criticism and scepticism to his own industry and culture.
"Kanye never really tried to be a gangster," says Hattie Collins. "He always questioned why anyone would want to be part of that ethos. When he came on to the scene you knew it was hip-hop, but with lyrics that were different and original."
On the upcoming showdown between their two albums, West has remained noticeably non-combative. His only comment so far has been deliberately conciliatory, simply stating: "When my album drops and 50's drops, you're gonna get a lot of good music at the same time."
But in an industry where feuds have often spilled out into open warfare between rival rap stars, is it not a little dangerous to start a rivalry between two of the hottest properties on the hip-hop scene at the moment? "Feuds are simply a great way to generate publicity," says Collins. "I admit they can get a little sinister when it comes to hip-hop, but with 50 and Kanye its pretty much a clever PR stunt dreamed up by the record labels."
But whether the rivalry is real or not, bosses at both the artists' record labels will undoubtedly be licking their lips at the prospect of a showdown between the two people that have arguably done more to revolutionise hip-hop music and widen its appeal in the past five years than any of their other contemporaries. And suggestions that the feud is class based will only help grease the already well-oiled publicity machine.

http://arts.independent.co.uk/music/news/article2861743.ece

The miracle of Rwanda: How one refugee's remarkable story is being told on the Edinburgh stage

Immaculée Ilibagiza is a latter-day Anne Frank. The daughter of two devout Catholic Tutsis, she was a prime target for the Hutu death squads who brought their genocidal terror to the African country in 1994. She survived, hidden for three months in the sweltering heat of a tiny bathroom. Now her remarkable story is being told on the Edinburgh stage.

By Jerome Taylor
Published,The Independent: 11 August 2007

The man who came closest to killing Immaculée Ilibagiza never knew how near he had got to his prey. He was a machete-wielding member of the Interahamwe, the Hutu death squads that prowled the length and breadth of Rwanda during the country's brutal genocide looking for what they called "cockroaches", those members of the Tutsi tribe they had sworn to destroy.
Ms Ilibagiza was in hiding. For 91 days she and seven other Tutsi women were crammed into a stiflingly hot bathroom as the orgy of looting, rape and murder that swept through the country in 1994 raged outside. Ms Ilibagiza, the daughter of two prominent Catholic Tutsi teachers, was a prized target. As they teetered on the edge of destruction the only thing stopping their would-be killers from finding the women was a single wardrobe that had been placed over the door to the toilet.
"I heard a guy saying he'd already killed 499 Tutsis and that he was determined to make me the 500th," says Ms Ilibagiza, now 37. She has since moved to New York and has two of her own children. "He was standing just behind the door when he said it. These people were our neighbours, people who just weeks earlier used to be our friends. "
Her story, simultaneously harrowing and uplifting, is the Rwandan equivalent of The Diary of Anne Frank - a remarkable account of how, against all odds, people can survive in the most inhumane conditions as the violence of man crashes down around them and how, through forgiveness, even the most horrendous experiences can lead to redemption.
But unlike the young German-Jewish author, who was eventually found by the Nazis and died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp just weeks before its liberation, Ms Ilibagiza lived to tell her tale. Her book, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, has gone on to sell more than 250,000 copies around the world and she is feted by world leaders, church groups and charities as a highly inspirational speaker. But what makes Ms Ilibagiza's experience truly stand out, as terrifying and anguished as it is, is the way she has learnt to forgive the people that destroyed her family and country.
Now the story of her agonising three months in hiding has been turned into a one-woman play and this week it is showing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as part of a world tour.
For 100 deadly days in the spring of 1994, Rwanda experienced a genocide of near unimaginable savagery. Anyone who knew the country at the time said the outbreak of violence was predictable - Hutus and Tutsis had had a long history of enmity and warring - but very few were prepared for the sheer level of barbarity reached.
On 6 April 1994, three days after Immaculée and her family had celebrated Easter together in their ancestral village of Mataba, an aeroplane carrying Rwanda's Hutu President, Juvénal Habyarimana, was shot down. Habyarimana had incensed Hutu extremists by ending a long civil war with the Tutsis and his death gave them a pretext for starting a highly organised, systematic campaign to rid their country's minority Tutsis.
"Within 10 minutes [of Habyarimana's death] the whole country changed," recalls Ms Ilibagiza. "Everyone hid in their houses just listening to the radio."
The violence began almost immediately. The international community looked away as the 10 Belgian peacekeepers that had been assigned to watch over Rwanda were shot dead and then turned its back as more than one million Tutsis and pro-Tutsi Hutus were exterminated. Men were usually hacked to death with a machete. For women, the method was most often gang rape and then the machete.
A more brutal realisation of the evil that men do could hardly be imagined but, as with many of humanity's darkest chapters, the Rwandan genocide also produced extraordinary tales of individual heroism and survival.
It was not long before Mataba, an ethnically mixed village in the western district of Kiyube, found itself caught up in the maelstrom. Fearing that his daughter would be raped if caught by Hutu militiamen, Ms Ilibagiza's father sent her to hide in a nearby house owned by the Rev Simeon Nzabahimana who, despite being a Hutu, risked his life to hide her and seven other women.
So secret was the women's hiding place that the priest's family were not even told about it in case they were threatened or tempted into revealing its whereabouts.
"It was a room measuring three feet by four feet, a small bathroom really," says Ms Ilibagiza. "It didn't even have a sink, just a toilet sunk into the ground. There was a door on to the next room and at night we could sometimes go there to lie down. But only at night." For the next three months the women sat in terror as the Interahamwe went from house to house butchering Mataba's Tutsi population. They could hear the screams of their relatives as the men were cut down and the women raped before being butchered.
Ms Ilibagiza's father had already survived two civil wars and believed he could try and reason with the Interahamwe. Witnesses say he was shot dead by a man called Felicien before he could even open his mouth. The same man then went on to slaughter her mother, Rose, and her elder brother, Damascene. A second brother was also cut down sometime later. The only immediate relative of Ms Ilibagiza to survive the genocide other than herself was her third brother, Aimable, who fortunate enough to be studying in Senegal at the time of the genocide. He has chosen to remain in his country of birth and works as a vet.
Convinced they would never see their families again, waiting for the death squads to storm into the filthy white tiled room at any moment, the women sat for days on end in total silence, only daring to communicate by sign language. At 5ft 9in Ms Ilibagiza was one of the tallest and within days her body was covered in sores from being unable to move properly.
Privacy and cleanliness were forgotten. The toilet could only be flushed when the neighbour next door did so and there was rarely enough paper for the women's menstrual periods. After a week lice were crawling in their clothes and hair.
Despite the crippling pain of being largely unable to move, Ms Ilibagiza says the women stoically accepted their lot. "When you realise that someone is next door waiting to kill you, you can do anything," she remembers. "You can put up with any hardship. We never complained."
Initially, as the violence raged around her, so to did Ms Ilibagiza's heart. She admits that in the first few weeks of her captivity it was difficult to feel anything but hate for the people who had killed her family and destroyed her life. As desperation set in she turned to her rosary, the last thing her father had given her before she went into hiding, and prayed to God. Inside her prison, surrounded by squalor, misery and mourning, Ms Ilibagiza decided to forgive the people who had murdered her family.
"The day I truly understood what forgiveness meant was while I was hiding in that room," she says. "It was like a light turning on in my mind and I made a choice. If I gave up on humanity I would die inside. I'd no longer be able to trust anybody.
"I kept thinking of Christ on the cross and his words, 'Forgive them father they know not what they do'. I knew there was no way my family's killers could understand the magnitude of what they were doing."
By the time the women left their hiding place and made it to a refugee camp that was run by French peacekeepers, Ms Ilibagiza's weight had plummeted from 8 stone 3 pounds to just 4 stone 9 pounds. Mr Nzabahimana, the man who had hidden them, was killed during the dying days of the genocide for sheltering Tutsis.
By late summer the killing had finally died down and Ms Ilibagiza decided to test how far her forgiveness could go. She found her father's killer in a nearby prison. The tables had been turned. Now he was imprisoned, filthy and terrified but the first words he heard from the woman who had come to see him were: "I forgive you."
"He couldn't look at me, he looked down and was so ashamed," said Ms Ilibagiza. "Something changed in his heart. I hope it's made him realise the gravity of what he's done. Like me he had a beautiful family and home but one day he decided to go out and kill."
This ability to forgive such atrocities was what inspired Leslie Lewis Sword, an American actress who came to know Ms Ilibagiza after attending one of her lectures, to dramatise her life. "Her message is forgiveness," Sword said earlier this week. "She has found a way to move on after these unbearable hardships. It gives hope for Darfur, for Zimbabwe too. People are taking a look at these things too and asking what is happening there."
The play itself, Miracle in Rwanda, in which Sword plays all the parts including Ms Ilibagiza, her family and an Interahamwe leader, has received lavish praise in the US press and is currently making a world tour. Her performances at Edinburgh have sold out each night.
Ms Ilibagiza, meanwhile, hopes her fellow Rwandans will follow her approach and look towards reconciling their differences rather than look for retribution. "The happiness you get from being able to forgive someone is beyond any apology," she says. "I think Rwanda will recover. It could take hundreds of years but it will recover."

http://arts.independent.co.uk/theatre/features/article2853824.ece

Mining giant faces tribal protest

By Jerome Taylor

Published, The Independent: 06 August 2007

Until he came to London Kumti Majhi had never worn shoes before - he had never needed to. A member of the Dongria Kondh, one of India's most traditional tribes from the forested hills in the state of Orissa, he had never had any need to put any protection on his feet.
But the tribal leader knew shoes would be needed if he was to try to halt the construction of a £400m bauxite mine on the Niyamgiri Mountain, the Dongria Kondh's homeland and a hill they worship as their god.
Since building of the mine and its adjacent alumina refinery first began in 2004 by the UK-based mining giant Vedanta Resources, a battle has raged between the FTSE-100 company on one side and environmentalists and tribal members on the other who say the mine has already caused untold misery and is an ecological disaster waiting to happen.
Last week Kumti Majhi travelled from his village to the annual general meeting of Vedanta Resources to inform shareholders of the fate of his people. Although reporters were banned from attending the AGM, The Independent spoke to Mr Majhi outside the Mayfair conference centre.
"Niyamgiri Mountain is a living god for us," said the father of four who until now had never left the state of Orissa. "It has provided us with food, water and our livelihoods for generations. Even if we have to die protecting our god we will not hesitate, we will not let it go."
On Thursday critics of the mine will finally find out whether their three-year campaign has been successful when the Indian Supreme Court sits to rule on the construction's legality. Three petitioners have brought cases against Vedanta in what could be a landmark ruling .
A Supreme Court committee has already accused Vedanta of "blatant violation" of planning and environmental guidelines. A separate report from the Wildlife Institute of India also criticised the project citing its "irreversible" impact on the environment.
Activists say the project is a threat to the environment and to the distinct culture and practices of the three Kondh tribes that for centuries have had a symbiotic relationship with their sacred mountain, foraging and hunting in some areas and eschewing other areas out of respect.
Vedanta rejected accusations that the rehabilitation of families was unsuitable and strongly defended its environmental record saying the company had abided by all environmental regulations.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2838655.ece