My return to the blogsphere this week, coincided with the 33
anniversary of arguably the most successful community organisations in recent
memory. On Friday, I was honoured to have been invited to D'GAF in Stratford,
to mark an occasion that drew together founders Gulshun Rehman, Ilona Aronovsky
and Herby Boudier, current staff and new volunteers like myself for the premier
of "Keeping the Fight Alive" - an independent short film by Rayna Nadeem charting
NMP's more than 3 decades on the frontline against racism and inequality, for
social justice and accountability of the state.
33 probably seems like an odd year for which to commission a
film but, as vetran campaigner Cilius Victor observed, for an organisation that
has set itself against the complacency of the status quo, it was perfectly
fitting. Indeed, as Nadeem said, when she embarked on her latest project, it
was conceived as a 5-minute promotional film that grew into something four
times as long. The NMP grew out of the racist murder of Akhtar Ali Baig. Stabbed in
the heart in broad daylight, outside East Ham station, Baig's murder became the
rallying call for a community led push-back against racial violence and the
complicity of the police and politicians in it; whether through indifference or
active participation.
The result of that indifference was their abandonment of
vulnerable communities who were forced to fend and defend themselves and yet
when they did so, they found themselves in the dock. After the police did
nothing to stop the harassment and violence against pupils going to and from
school by National Front thugs, the community organised chaperones. One day,
they arrived at the school to find a car of what turned out to be plain-clothed
police officers. National Front members were not far behind a fight broke out
and whilst the fascists were let go, the men who had been defending local
children were arrested. The Newham 7 was born. Their acquittal at the Old
Bailey, met by hundreds who had come from across the country under the NMP
banner to lend their support was a seminal moment in British history. For the
first time the law recognised that when a community is abandoned by those
charged with their care and protection, self-defence is no offence.
Nevertheless, the Newham 8 came shortly afterwards, in very similar
circumstances, charged with rioting. The NMP again swung into action and again,
the result was the same: no guilty on all charges.
Come the 90s and the NMP was continuing to expand rapidly.
Its ambitions were undiminished and it began to tackle the difficult issue of
deaths in police custody. The Project rallied behind the families, first, of Shiji
Lapite and then Ibrahima Sey
both two of the first victims of positional asphixia, being suffocated by being
restrained in a prone position in which they could not breath properly. This
was the last violent act of police brutality. Lapite had been dragged to the
ground in a neck hold and kicked in the head after police claimed he had been
"acting suspiciously". Sey had been arrested after a domestic
dispute. He complied fully with the police to the extent that he was not even
handcuffed until he arrived in the custody suite of Illford Police Station. Sey
had acute mental health needs and so, until then, he had been accompanied by a
friend. Once in custody he was told that his friend had to leave. This made him
anxious. His agitated state prompted officers to handcuff him with his hands
behind his back before being sprayed in the face with pepper spray and held
face down for 15 mins. By that time he had fallen silent and limp. Help was
called but it was too late, Sey was the first person to die in custody having
been sprayed with CS gas. In what would become an all too familiar story, both
the Police Complaints Authority (now the IPCC) and the Crown Prosecution
Service refused to take any further action. It was left to the coroner's court
to deliver any semblance of the justice that the campaign which had followed
his death demanded. His verdict: unlawful killing.
The defining case of that decade was, of course, the murder
of Stephen Lawrence and its
exposure of institutional racism an outcome that validated the experience of
BME communities from Newham to Newcastle. The NMP's support of the Lawrence
family was led by Gilly Singh Mundy, who died unexpectedly in 2007. His absence
was remarked upon several times on Friday evening and even to a new volunteer,
it was clear that the
power of his presence still resonates strongly in the Project's work.
As well as defending the rights of others the NMP have had
to negotiate their own challenges. A fire destroyed their original offices,
necessitating their move to Stratford, albeit via make shift offices in the
home of another veteran campaigner, Kevin
Blowe. When they dared to say that the police had killed Ibrahima Sey,
Newham Council, who had funded them up to that point, withdrew that money.
Current director, Estelle Du Boulay openly acknowledged that, for a short time
at least, the future of the NMP was in doubt. It was down to just one full-time
staff member. How could it possibly survive? Securing funding from the National
Lottery was necessary by holding on it grass-roots up rather than top-down
ethos it did not matter how bad things got because, as Asad Rehman, current chair of the
NMP explained, “The NMP is and always will be about people”. With only a
handful of permanent staff members it depends on volunteers to manage its
workload but it can rely on that support because, unlike other campaign
initiatives, it does not just raise an issue and then leave the community to
deal with the backlash, it is there throughout. It is the product of the
community that it serves.
Importantly though, its work transcends both racial and
geographical boundaries.* Back in the late 80s, Lee Dray, a 17 year old white
boy who had been harassed by police in Canning Town for several months until,
one day, he was viciously assaulted by a police officer. The NMP successfully co-ordinated
a campaign that resulted in a successful action against the office responsible.
However, not without Dray being charged later with assault and disturbing the
peace. This was highlighted as an example of what Boudier described as the
quiet criminalisation of young people identified as social undesirables,
whether they were young Black youths or the poor white working-class. And this was
the key point, Black or White, there was a commonality of experience that was
bigger than any racial differences, the maintenance of which only served to
benefit the divisive politics of the Right.
More recently, there have been
the campaigns for justice for the families of Jean Charles De Menezes and Ian
Tomlinson. To that you can add Mohammed Abdulkahar, and his
brother Abul Koyair, the first of whom was shot before they were both arrested
in a shambolic terror raid in Forest Gate in 2006, for which there was no evidence
to bear out the purported “specific intelligence” on which the police were acting against two
innocent men. “Back in the day, the thugs were out on the streets, it was easy
to spot a skinhead”.” “Now, we’re fighting something you can’t always see.”
This was a reference to the “War on Terror”. That fear and paranoia that is
exploited to justify an increasingly draconian approach to policing and public
order, of which the mass surveillance of the sort that saw the
Met Police attempt to “infiltrate” the NMP or the mass
arrest of anti-fascist activists resisting the continuing threat of the
National Front’s progeny, the EDL, provides just two recent examples.
To this, add the impact of the first round of legal aid cuts
in the Legal
Aid and Sentencing Act 2012, the further isolation of vulnerable
communities as designed in the
latest legal aid proposals and the desolation that will result from the
government’s austerity programme. The demands on its services will be all the
greater as these policies start to bite. I don’t know how exactly the NMP will
navigate these challenges but, one way or another they will, of that I am sure.
If the utopia of post-racialism continues to allude us then let’s hope for 33
more years of this inspirational community project. Here's to keeping the fight alive.
Nadeem’s film will be available online via the NMP website
within the next few weeks. I will add a link as soon as I can. In the meantime,
there will be local showings to mark Black History month.
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