Goodbye and Good Riddance2023 – The past year has certainly been an “annus horribilis” that puts 1992 into shame in that respect and it ends with an ongoing genocide on a scale that would have been unimaginable before the development of recent weapons as well as unthinkable.
Today’s post is a baker’s dozen of images I took in the first two months of the year, January and February 2023 at some of the twenty-seven events I photographed then. It isn’t a collection of my “best photographs”, though I’ve tried to pick some of the more succesful I’ve taken. All these (and many others) are still online in my Facebook albums and most if not all available for editorial use from Alamy. They are displayed in date order.
If you want to find out more about any of the events you can find the albums with more of my pictures on Facebook. More from later in 2023 in another post.
Olympic Park, Barts and Food Poverty. On Wednesday 16 April 2014 there were two events in the evening I wanted to photograph, the first in Whitechapel and another in Westminster. It was a fine Spring day and I decided to go out much earlier and take a long walk around the former Olympic site, much of which had just been opened to the public ten days earlier.
Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park Panoramics – Stratford
My walk got of to a poor start, as I followed the large signs in Stratford Station to the park and found myself hopelessly lost.
I retraced my steps and went through where I thought I had probably missed a turning and walked though Stratford Westfield past many shops I would never feel any desire to enter.
Emerging on the other side I could still find no way into the Park, keeping coming up to areas still blocked by fencing.
Google Maps wasn’t much help. Streetview, claimed to work on some streets in the area, “but actually carries out what seems a fairly random translocation to some varied London locations. All of them seemed more interesting than the actual topography I had found myself facing on the ground.”
Eventually I managed to access the park, though it didn’t seem much like a park to me. As I wrote back then, “It gives the impression that as little has been spent and done as possible post the Olympics and it largely remains a series of routes to the Olympic stadium, ready for the mass tramping feet of West Ham fans, though some might favour more direct routes. It is a complete contrast to what might be expected of a new park for – and there is a good example of one just a couple of miles away in Thames Barrier Park.”
It has improved a little in the nine years since this visit, but still in many areas seems more desert than park, and my conclusion that it was “a rather bleak area, enlivened occasionally by the odd art work” still seems apt for much of the area.
Of course I was comparing it to the same area before the Olympics, which I had often wandered and enjoyed, and had been a more exciting and much wilder area. Of course a part of its attraction had been its relative isolation and the new park will attract hugely greater numbers to its various attractions. The local schools were on holiday and there were areas in which children were playing which for various reasons don’t feature in my pictures.
Barts cuts Health Advocacy & Interpreting – Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel
From Stratford Marsh and Pudding Mill Lane Station it was a short journey to Whitechapel, with just a short walk in the middle from Bow Church DLR to Bow Road on the District Line.
The Royal London Hospital at Whitechapel is run by the Barts Health trust, who were proposing to make drastic cuts in advocacy and interpreting services.
The hospital is in the centre of a multiethnic community of great deprivation and need, a community desperate for an increase in these services,with an ageing population many of whom speak and understand little English but are now in much greater need of health care.
I was there to photograph the handing over of a petition by GPs and other health professionals as well as members of various parts of the BME community, including Somalis, Bangladeshis and Chinese. The Mayor of Tower Hamlets backed the campaign and had sent apologies and a representative to express his support, and a Labour councillor gave support from the Labour group.
The removal of the services at GP surgeries and community and hospital services would mean the loss of around 11 full-time Bengali/Sylheti Health Advocates and the languages affected would include Somali, Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi, Tamil and French.
Bart’s Health Trust has huge financial problems because of the huge PFI debt incurred in the building of the sorely needed new hospital in front of which we were meeting, with continuing huge payments that mean that they have been unable to fully use the new building and have cut other vital services. PFI was always a mistake and the civil servants who negotiated the terms were no match for the skilled and highly paid operators for the developers who ended up with terms that were hugely favourable to them – and which changes in the financial conditions since then have made even more so.
The hospital tried to restrict the publicity for the event, although they had agreed to accept the petition, they wanted to do so in private. Hospital security staff tried to stop most of those present from witnessing the handover, and to prevent photography, but without success.
End Hunger Fast Vigil against Food Poverty – Old Palace Yard
Over 600 leaders from all major Christian denominations, including 47 bishops had earlier in the day called for urgent government action on food poverty, and earlier in the month thousands had taken part in a 24 hour day of fasting, praying and reflecting on the hunger in the one of the world’s richest countries came to the vigil.
On 16th April, ‘End Hunger Fast’ campaigners held a vigil outside Parliament, lighting candles and breaking bread together.
Earlier in the day figures from the Trussell Trust and independent food banks had been released showing that one million food parcels were handed out over the previoUs year as the safety net for the poor and vulnerable in Britain was crumbling.
There were a number of speeches before a sharing of bread in a minute of silence before eating to reflect on the problem faced by those who cannot afford food. CanDles were then lit (with some difficulty because a a stiff breeze) for another period of silent contemplation before the final address by End Hunger Fast media spokesperson Keith Hebden. He was then going without food for 40 days and 40 nights to draw attention to food poverty, and stressed the importance of getting politicians to take action on the issue.
Algeria, BDS and Kenya: The three protests I covered on Saturday 12th April 2014 were all about activities in other countries, though the first was calling on UK consumers to take action by boycotting goods produced in illegally occupied Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.
Don’t Buy Sodastream at John Lewis – Oxford St
Supporters of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign were handing out flyers in a regular fortnightly protest outside John Lewis, urging people not to buy SodaStream products which were then being made in illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.
The protests are a part of the BDS campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions of Israeli products called for by Palestinian civil society, particularly aimed at products which are made in the illegally occupied settlements.
The Financial Times had recently commented that the “status of the settlements is clear in international law even if Israel chooses to ignore this and expand its colonisation of Palestinian land, while ostensibly negotiating on the creation of a Palestinian state.” Sodastream makes some of its dispensers in Ma’ale Adumim, a large Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank. Trade with these illegal settlements is illegal under international law.
Sodastream claim that they promote peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews by employing around 500 Palestinians, but the FT pointed out “The way to create Palestinian jobs is to end the occupation and let Palestinians build those foundations – not to build “bridges to peace” on other people’s land without their permission.”
A former Sodastreamn worker there claims that most Palestinians working for Sodastream support the boycott “because they are against [Israel’s] occupation. But they cannot afford to personally boycott work opportunities.” The company was reported to be trying to set up a new factory inside Israel rather than the occupied territories which would mainly employ Israeli Arabs. In 2015 as a result of protests such as this one, Sodastream moved production from Ma’ale Adumim in the occupied West Bank to Lehavim in Israel proper. The company, which had been founded in the UK in 1903 but relaunched in 1998 was bought by PepsiCo in 2018.
Before the establishment of the state of Israel, Palestinians (including Druze & Bedouins) owned 92% of the land, while Jews owned about 8%. The UN awarded Israel 54% of the land, though a fairly large part of this was empty desert. In the 1948 war, Israel took another 24%. In 1967 Israel occupied all of Palestine and with further settlements and the building of the separation wall since then only the Gaza strip and around 40% of the occupied West Bank remains under Palestinian control.
Against the Electoral Masquerade in Algeria – Algerian Embassy, Riding House St
This protest in London came as presidential elections were about to begin in Algeria, electing President Bouteflika for his fourth term since 1999.
The Algeria Solidarity Campaign say these elections are a huge scam and they are “more convinced than ever that the upcoming elections will be neither free and fair, nor transparent. They will certainly not result in the election of a legitimate President, representative of the wishes of the people.”
Their campaign called “for a massive boycott and/or abstention from voting and its full rejection of the ‘Presidential poll’, as it deems it to be a mere spectacle meant to maintain and cloak its authoritarian and corrupt rule in electoral legitimacy.”
The turnout in the election was low at 51.7%, and as low as 20% in some regions, and around 10% of votes were blank or invalid. But of those who voted, 81.5% were for Bouteflika. Ill health meant he made few public appearances in his fourth term and he resigned in April 2019 after months of mass protests, dying two years later.
Somali Refugees mistreated in Kenya – Kenya High Commission, Portland Place
Members of the Somali community protested outside the Kenyan Embassy against the mistreatment of Somali refugees at the Kasarani Concentration Camp in Kenya. They called for the ICC to investigate the crimes being committed there.
According to Reuters, the Kenyan authorities arrested more than 1,000 Somalis in mass arrests in a Somali dominated suburb of Nairobi following terrorist attacks by the Somali militant Islamic group al Shabaab. Almost 4000 were arrested and more than a thousand were held in the Kasarani sports stadium. Human Rights Watch reported many were held in packed and filthy police station cells and they saw “police whipping, beating, and verbally abusing detainees. There have been numerous credible accounts of Kenyan security forces extorting money and beating people during the arrests and in detention.”
Access to the Kasarani camp by invesigators and reporters was severely restricted, and the few people allowed access “were not able to freely interview detainees in the stadium.”
The arrests followed a number of earlier incidents reported by Human Rights Watch when “Kenyan police in Nairobi tortured, raped, and otherwise abused and arbitrarily detained at least 1,000 refugees, including women and children, between mid-November 2012 and late January 2013, following grenade and other attacks.”
Kenya still hosts large numbers of refugees from other African countries, including around 287,000 Somalis in a total of 520,000 refugees and asylum seekers.