One night on a sidewalk in Kuala Lumpur I happened upon two men having
some drinks. One of them I knew and had spent a lot of time with.
He was the fish deliveryman for a small shop in the neighborhood. This
neighborhood is known as Brickfields, and is one of Kuala Lumpur’s oldest. The other man, I came to find out, was the
deliveryman’s old friend who was born and raised in the neighborhood,
interestingly right next to the building where my mother grew up. He seemed to
be far drunker, and after talking to him for some time it became apparent why.
This man was a member of Kuala Lumpur’s team responsible with carrying out the state's secretive shoot-to-kill program. He
told me that he waited on standby until he got a call about a marked target.
Upon approaching the target on a motorcycle, he would put a black hood over his face and
commit extrajudicial murder. Like clockwork, he always returned not home, but to his childhood neighborhood to get drunk after doing what he was paid to do. He told me that so
far he had killed five people in his neighborhood. Beyond this, I couldn’t get
much out of him about the subject other than his frustration with having corrupt bosses and the fact that he hated his job. He wanted to change the subject.
What I witnessed was a direct contradiction to a statement
made around August 21, 2013 by Malaysia’s Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri
Khalid Abu Bakar when confronted about the shooting of five suspected gang
members in the city of Penang. However, in October Home Minister Datuk Seri Dr.
Ahmad Zahid Hamidi made an off-handed remark that police should take a “shoot
first” approach with members of organized crime such as gangsters. Many human rights workers have
argued that such a remark validates the existence of a secretive program whose
apparatus and process of actualizing extrajudicial killings are kept from the
public.
On another night, a friend of mine tried calling me asking if I could keep her company. She wasn’t able to sleep because she
knew that the police might come at any time to take her away for her crimes - according to a conveniently resurfaced law originating from colonial times - of
poverty and homelessness. According to the government, Christine is not 'clean' enough for KL and if caught, she could be sent to a detention center without legal counsel. To illustrate briefly where she resides, down the road from my luxury condominium in
Brickfields is a classy restaurant with its own website and uniformed waiters.
Tucked in the alleyway behind this restaurant there is a tiny gate that opens
up to an even smaller pitch-black hallway. After a few feet are narrow stairs
leading up to small rooms where laborers stay. Using a bag filled with all of
her possessions as a pillow, my friend Christine stays underneath these stairs
every night pretending to sleep while holding a knife for protection.
Christine, a Portuguese Creole lady from the historic Malaysian port city of Malacca, has
been living in Brickfields for almost two decades and did not have to worry
about a not having a home until recently when her partner Shanta – a poor Tamil
man descended from Indian indentured rubber tappers – was detained. Of the
several races in Malaysia, Indians – especially those descended from rubber
estate workers – have been historically marginalized in many ways reminiscent of Apartheid or Jim Crow. While regrettably not discussed further (due to space),
please do note this aspect and that this story has a perverse racial dimension of oppression that I may hopefully get into in a later post, but is profoundly related to how things play out. Shanta has been detained for
six months after testing positive for cannabis – a drug that should be
legalized according to the well regarded 2011 United Nations report on drug
criminalization. However, his detention was peculiar. He was initially released
but asked to report back to sign some documents. Later, Christine became
seriously ill. The couple called the office to notify that Shanta was unable to
report back in time, to which they ambiguously responded, “Just leave it as it
is.” A few weeks later Shanta was arrested and sent to rehabilitation.
Christine tried to see her partner at the drug enforcement office (ADK) before
he was sent away, but had to leave as soon as officers started harassing her. In all the commotion she was only able to catch a glimpse of Shanta’s black eye in the distance. Witnesses claim that the
arresting officer hit Shanta in the face after he asked the officer what charge he was being
arrested for.
Shanta grew up exactly where my apartment now stands and has
called Brickfields home his entire life. He used to work as a security guard
for the luxury condominiums on my (his) street as they were being constructed.
Working long nights, his meager wage of 40 Malaysian Ringgit (about $13) a day
was not enough to sustain himself in his own neighborhood. As Kuala Lumpur and
Brickfields modernized, Shanta and his boyhood friends found it harder to live
meaningfully. To make ends meet, several tenants of a Brickfields apartment
building (who were recently forced out to make way for another development)
would give the couple their secondhand items to sell to working people in the
area. To feed themselves, Christine and Shanta were essentially recycling. In
doing so, they gave Brickfields’ working people a chance at purchasing
affordable goods as living costs rapidly increased. Shanta’s detention without
a proper explanation from the authorities has left Christine defenseless. Many
of her belongings and items reserved for selling have been robbed. Waiting in
the dark corner under the stairs, she both anticipates and fears the arrival of three things:
thieves, heavy rain, and the authorities sworn to serve and protect the city. Christine is but one story of what remains in the dark crevices of a city that will once again host the annual World Class Sustainable Cities Conference, where special workshops - co-hosted by reputed organizations such as the UN - will aim to train the world's city leaders on urban sustainable development.
Newcastle University professor Stephen Graham argues in his
book Cities Under Siege: The New Military
Urbanism that “Fundamental to the new military urbanism is the paradigmatic
shift that renders cities’ communal and private spaces, as well as their
infrastructure – along with their civilian populations – a source of targets
and threats” (XIII) My friends’ stories are examples of how this “source of targets
and threats” is segregated according to their perceived challenge to the
neoliberal urban landscape. Regardless of whether it was conscious or out of
necessity, Christine and Shanta found ways to operate in spite of, rather than submit to, the formal politico-economic
structure and its related urban spatial configurations, metabolisms, and
rhythms. For this, they paid the price, and have endured criminalization under the categories
of vagrancy and drug use for years. My drunk companion's victims were instantly murdered. Similarly, speaking on the growing trend of criminalizing threats to neoliberal order around the
world, Graham goes on to say:
Instead of legal or human
rights and legal systems based on universal citizenship, these emerging
security politics are founded on the profiling of individuals, places,
behaviours, associations, and groups. Such practices assign these subjects risk
categories based on their perceived association with violence, disruption or
resistance against the dominant geographical orders sustaining global,
neoliberal capitalism. (p. XV)
These "security politics" play out in extremely troubling and highly undemocratic ways, all at the behest of capitulating and expanding neoliberal capitalism. Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’ refers to a state
in which one’s existence “can be sacrificed at any time by a colonial power
that maintains the right to kill with impunity but has withdrawn all moral,
political or human responsibilities from the population.” In this sense, an
individual’s status renders him or her outside of the law, yet in that
state of exclusion is actually forced under the law in a singular manner – the
right to be harmed. Proximate to Agamben’s ‘bare life’, I would argue that in the contemporary city, lives
are deemed expendable through a variety of
mechanisms that expose them to outright eradication under extreme
conditions of structural violence, and more often than not immediate and murderous violence. Certain
lives are deemed expendable under shoot-to-kill pretenses, while others such as
Shanta engage in lifestyles that render their bodies expendable and completely
removed from the spectrum of protections allotted to human beings from legal
counsel to basic rights.
Habitat 3 possesses an implicit agenda that has very telling
amendments to previous policies and discourses related to topics linked with
global urbanization. That is to say, there are many examples of how Habitat 3
intends to place emphasis on localizing urban sustainability agendas with an
emphasis on optimizing participation among stakeholders often left out of
development discussions, policymaking, and implementations. This includes local
organizations, private enterprises, councils, neighborhood associations,
community members, etc. While the manner in which this is to be carried out in
diverse and contested urban spaces remains ambiguous and similar historic efforts have
had unaddressed problems, this push is nonetheless fascinating in its emphasis
on the ‘right to the city’ as well as democratic and public participation.
Kerwin Datu and Naik Lashermes of The Global Urbanist have
addressed some vital gaps in the Habitat 3 agenda related to the fact that it
must account for routine conflict in urban areas.
The conflict they refer to is in its most basic form political conflict, where
spaces consist of stakeholders that often have conflicting agendas
related to urban, sustainable, and community development. To address these
gaps, they have followed up with recommendations on how conflict can be
addressed through possible mechanisms that emphasize democratization,
accountability, and proper monitoring to ensure historic and current forms of
discrimination are avoided.
I would like to emphasize that there is another even more
troubling dimension of urban conflict that is far more of a growing trend than
is recognized in discourses on urban community-based and
participatory action (ex. see: Local Agenda 21). As Stephen Graham illustrates in
his 400-page analysis, this trend is the global militarization of the urban
landscapes. Returning to the notion of prima facie political conflict discussed
earlier, we must first ask how are we to truly actualize agendas of urban sustainable development
when – as Datu and Lashermes point out – our urban landscapes come from
inherent processes of discrimination and conflict? Now, adding militarization into the
equation, historically discriminated populations, as well as newfound “threats”
to the neoliberal capitalist apparatus, are discriminated in
ways that render them expendable under even more extreme, direct, material, and life threatening forms of conflict. Do the Christines and Shantas
of New York, Manila, and Lagos have any chance at contributing to a "democratic" and "participatory" initiative in their neighborhoods when their existence has only been made visible in order to mark them for eradication?
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