Musa Gulusen is a well known face to anyone who shops regularly on Royal Avenue in Belfast. He has been a stallholder there for seven years. Originally from Turkey, Musa settled here 12 years ago and has a family here. Last Saturday there was a PSNI operation against unlicensed stallholders in Belfast City centre. Musa says that during this operation he was severely assaulted and racially abused by the PSNI officers taking part in the operation.

Musa says “a police officer grabbed me by the throat and he shoved me up against a wall. I was protesting and asking him why are you holding me. I was trying to tell him that I had made my application for a license to Belfast City Council. I told him the name of the person in the Council who is dealing with it. He wasn’t listening. He hit me in the face with the back part of his hand.

Then other officers came over. They forced me to the ground. They grabbed my arms up behind my back. I was yelling and yelling how sore my arm was but they were not listening. They kept pulling and my arm was in real pain. There was blood on the ground. They then half dragged me across the ground to the Land Rover and put me inside. In the Land Rover the policeman who had hit me in the face asked me my name. I said that I was in pain that I would not tell him my name as he had hit me. Other police got into the Land Rover. One of them appeared to be senior – like an inspector. He looked me straight in the face and said “Hey Kebab Boy”. All the other police in the Land Rover started laughing really hard. They just kept laughing. There were four of them. I was thinking I am 36 years old. I have lived here for twelve years, I have a British passport and they see me as if I was an animal. It was the same as if he had said to me “Hey Monkey Boy”.

After simmering along on Indymedia for a number of weeks, a dispute over the actions of legendary guerrilla commander Tom Barry and the IRA in Cork during the 1919-22 period boiled over into print in The Village, the BBC, The Irish Examiner and The Sunday Times. The controversy relates to research by historians, Meda Ryan and Brian Murphy, criticising claims first put forward by former Queens history lecturer, now Memorial University Newfoundland academic, Peter Hart.

The dispute centres mainly on two areas:

1. Peter Hart’s attempt to overturn the long held and widely accepted view that British Auxiliaries fired on and killed three IRA soldiers after the Auxiliaries had called a surrender during the Kilmichael ambush in November 1920.

2. Peter Hart’s suggestion that the post-Truce killing of Protestant males in the area surrounding Dunmanway in April 1922 was part of a sectarian war being pursued by republican forces. Point 1 is related as it formed Hart’s launching pad into his thesis that the Anglo-Irish war was in reality a squalid battle for ethnic supremacy, and that the two states in Ireland are an expression of a mutually exclusive ethnic sectarianism (except that Hart is accused of under-reporting unionist sectarianism and British responsibility for using sectarianism as a method of government in Ireland).

In other words it is suggested that Hart sees Irish politics in the context of balkanisation, rather than in the context of colonialism and imperialism.

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This Friday sees the premiere in Dublin of Six Films About Social Centres – a series of short documentaries about autonomous social centres from Belfast to Barcelona. Ideally, this screening should take place in an autonomous social centre, but Dublin has none. (A parish hall is being borrowed for the evening).

So, in a year or two will someone be able to come to Dublin and make a documentary about an autonomous social centre here? Or will fundraiser gigs, political meetings and workshops always have to take place in Teachers Clubs or the upstairs rooms of pubs? Will Food Not Bombs always be at the mercy of the weather? Will there be somewhere indoors to go after street parties?

The Indymedia centre that operated for a couple of weeks around Mayday this year gave many people a glimpse of the great use to which a disused building can be put. It reminded just how badly Dublin lacks an autonomous space.

The Six Films made by Direct Action Against Apathy, a Belfast-based collective will be screened at 8pm on Friday at the St Nicholas of Myra Parish Hall (Carman's Hall, a street running between Francis St and Thomas St Map), followed by a brief discussion, music, a raffle and a photo exhibition about social centres.

Directactionagainstapathy...numerous reports and photos of spaces.
Giros/Warzone Collective Belfast
The Story of Disco Disco.
One of numerous stories about the Magpie Squat.

I enclose comment from Ramsey Clark ex US Attorney General, who due to Judge Moran's adamant "opinion" that any evidence I brought forth relating to the US Military presence in Shannon or the war on Iraq was irrelevant, was not allowed testify at my trial. His evidence, plus that of Denis Halliday, ex Assistant General Secraetary of the UN, Dr Curtis Doebbler, Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon whistleblower, and Dr Siegwart Hosrt Guenter, the world's leading expert on Depleted Uranium, would have informed the jury greatly and put my action firmly in the context in which it was taken. Instead the jury were forced to see me as a vandal.

Dear Mary,

Your conviction is like the re-election of George W. Bush here – a cause for despair – to which we cannot yield. The Irish jury like the American voter was poorly informed and misinformed and that information largely controlled by government here/prosecutor and court there and the corporate owned media which serves economic power and glorifies war and other violence.

You performed a miracle under the circumstances in emboldening two jurors to vote for acquittal.

I am very concerned about your sentencing and must hope the Court can understand that a government that punishes people for acting, effectively and harming no living thing, on moral principle to prevent war will destroy itself.

Thanks for your courageous struggle.

Keep in touch.
Ramsey

Day of Action against Mary's Sentencing: Mary would like people who are protesting on Dec 1st to carry a flower in memory of the 100,000 Iraqi dead. Details here

Background Information on Mary's Trial / Report from Mary's Galway Supporters / Reflection on Mary's Trial from Professor Curtis Doebbler (University of Najaf, Palestine) at the Link Below

From The Newswire: After a recent Spotlight programme highlighting some of the anti-social behaviour practised by some students in the Holylands was broadcast - students organised a protest in the Holylands to tell their Mummies and Daddies that 'No we're not really misbehaving going wild and spending your money on e's and booze'. Where then would students like permanent Holyland residents to move to?

I am a Protestant woman from North Belfast, whose partner is a Catholic from the Short Strand. The Holylands is one of the only neutral working class housing executive areas available to mixed religion working class families. My neighbour was also a Protestant woman whose partner was a Catholic from the Lower Ormeau. My other neighbour was a Catholic from the Whiterock whose ex-partner is a Protestant from East Belfast. One of the other families' mother was from the Lower Falls and her ex-partner was a Protestant from Portadown. Some of the other permanent resident families are ex-students from the countryside who've setttled in the Holylands with their kids for many years.