Wimal: I’m the man, child and punishment

 Mar 26, 2017

The court rejected the bail application filed on behalf of former minister Wimal Weerawansa on March 24. He remains in remand custody over a charge of having misused state money by renting vehicles at the expense of the Housing, Construction, Engineering Services and Public Amenities Ministry of which he was the minister during the previous regime and giving the same for use by his relatives and friends.

The resultant loss caused to the state is estimated at Rs. 91.6 million.

Although he was remanded on such a charge, from the beginning Wimal had been trying to gain political and publicity mileage out of his incarceration, by using the opportunity for a media hype and saying that he would remain firm even if sent to hundreds of prisons and that he would write books and do painting from his prison cell. His intention was to obtain bail within a few days and become the hero among the Rajapaksa-loyalist joint opposition. However, that is yet to happen.

Whenever he sees a microphone, Wimal turns into a Mike Tyson, and he has been overrating the power of his mouth which has thus far brought him the luxuries and everything else he has. It is on that basis that he represented himself at court, without any lawyer’s support, to seek bail. However, a bail application should be able to submit to court on the due legal basis to obtain bail, and the power of his mouth will not count a court.

He claims to be such a brave fellow who had danced the devil in front of the UN office in Colombo and challenged, while speaking in Sinhala only, the world powers, but since the day he has been sent behind bars, he had been using the mental state of his daughter for his bail request. The hundreds of prisons talk was forgotten. The request from the court was to compassionately consider his daughter’s mental stress.

Then began his fasting. The entire country knows about his fasting and no one took much notice. Within half a day into his fasting, his followers announced Wimal’s condition was serious. His party declared that his daughter too, has refused food and that she has been hospitalized. On the following day he sought bail, asking the court to consider the condition of his daughter. The court decided that since his daughter was not under the court’s custody, her actions carry no influence, and also because he faces a charge of misuse of public property.

Wimal is entirely a media hype. Therefore, no one takes notice about the news created by him. We have something to say about the parents’ love for their children which he tries to make use of here. Lasantha Wickrematunge who was brutally murdered in the road in broad daylight too, was a father. Then, Wimal did not speak about Lasantha’s children’s tears. Godfather of the Rajapaksa killer gang, Gotabhaya asked from the media with a smile as to who Lasantha was, and inquired as to why the media was so concerned about one Lasantha, when so many people die in the country. Then, Lasantha’s children were not considered children, and their mentality was of no concern for those in the then regime. Prageeth Ekneligoda, who was made to disappear, too was a father. Not stopping at making him to disappear, henchmen of the government declared that he was in hiding in France and leveled insults on his family. No one worried about the mental condition of his children. Wimal and others were saying that inquiring into the missing would be a hunting down of the war heroes. They did not care about the children’s right to know what fate befell their father, and even appearing on behalf of that right was considered by Wimal as being traitorous.

Kugan Murugananthan, who was made to disappear during the corrupt Rajapaksa regime that distributed vehicles among relatives and cronies at state expense, too, was a father. The stooges of the Rajapaksa regime did not care about the tears of his daughter. Thousands of such examples can be given. But, today, it is a matter for concern when Wimal says he is fasting and his daughter too, refuses to eat. For the Rajapaksa gang and their stooges, children mean their children only. Others’ children do not matter, like the arrest and the gunning down of the 12 year old son of Prabhakaran.

If the case here is the love of children and loving children, what Wimal should do is not giving news to the world by claiming that he was fasting, but stop his fasting. That is because ‘The King’ who was there to make Wimal drink king coconut water then, has told the media that he would not go this time. Wimal may be fighting with all his might to bring Mahinda back to power, but even Mahinda is not concerned by Wimal’s fasting, because he too, knows that Wimal is the origin of lies. If his concern is his child, what Wimal should do is stop his fasting. Then, his daughter too, would start eating. If he is trying to sacrifice his daughter’s health in order to obtain bail, what is he trying to prove? He is accused of a misuse of public money, and accused over having taken part in any national struggle. He should get an experienced lawyer to make his case before the court to seek bail. But, his mean politics and the know-all attitude will result in the suffering of his own children, irrespective of whether it is real or not. It appears that he has punished his own daughter for his having used public money to distribute vehicles to his relatives and friends. Wimal should stop using the fasting which the people use as a collective means of fighting for their rights. This is the second instance. The first instance was – Lemon Puff.

Israeli bombs from the view of a Gaza ambulance crew

Abu Marzouk in Mohamed Jabaly’s Ambulance.

A scene from Mahdi Fleifel’s A Man Returned.

Nora Parr-25 March 2017

Gruff and skeptical, Abu Marzouq clearly does not want to be filmed. The ambulance driver is the reluctant protagonist of the first feature-length documentary by Gaza-based filmmaker Mohamed Jabaly.

Ambulance follows a crew of paramedics led by Abu Marzouq during Israel’s 2014 bombardment of Gaza. The documentary, featured in the BBC Arabic Film Festival 2017 currently underway in London, is at once highly reflective and rough, unadulterated.

Drawn from dozens of hours of footage recorded at innumerable sites of catastrophe, Ambulance unfolds in the same chronology as the war. This is no narrative that would be recognizable in a nightly newscast. Instead of answering circular and often problematic questions of who started what, Jabaly answers unasked questions, and shows the physical, psychological and social impacts of war.

Ambulance begins with a list of statistics: 51 days, 18,000 homes destroyed, 500,000 people displaced.

In Jabaly’s film these figures are given meaningful redefinitions. No longer an abstract number, “destroyed homes” become the bodies pulled out from beneath collapsed cement, and the anguished faces of family members as they learn the news that loved ones have been crushed.

“They’re all gone”

For Gaza’s emergency workers, the violence is personal. In one poignant scene, in the thick of bombardment, one of the young paramedics gets a call. Following protocol, he asks: how many in the house, can they move, who is missing. He hangs up and reports: “My uncle’s house was destroyed with 12 people inside.”

Sitting next to the camera, he says a prayer and leans back into the ambulance seat. His face melts and grief takes over: “They’re all gone.”

As ambulance crews rush to the Shujaiya neighborhood of Gaza City, viewers see displacement not as a fact, but as a process. The area was under intense shelling as its residents emerged from their homes into the streets to flee certain death, carrying mattresses, plastic bags, children. Here, the ambulance crew provided reassurance, transporting those too frail or distraught to make the journey to the city center.

The desire to bring better understanding to what happened in Gaza is what prompted Jabaly to make the film in the first place.

Having previously filmed at the government-run hospital in Gaza City, Jabaly was called in by a colleague on the first day of the attack. He recorded in the emergency room as the dead and injured poured through the doors.

By the end of the day he had permission from the hospital director to ride with one of the ambulances for the duration of what would be seven weeks of devastating bombardment.

What emerges from Jabaly’s film most clearly is the heroic aid provided by the paramedics. The crew and their driver give shelter to fleeing families, emotional support to terrified kids, first aid to the wounded, and bodies to lean on for relatives struck down with grief.

Abu Marzouq, having worked through the major Israeli offensives in 2008 and 2012, is a silent leader who supports his crew and leads them deftly through a disintegrating landscape. As he slowly warms to the glass eye of Jabaly’s camera, he instructs the filmmaker where to look, what to see.

When Abu Marzouq is injured, his team is shaken. The crew had driven into an area with reported shelling, not realizing that the violence was ongoing. There are loud bangs and the camera goes dark. The next scenes show Abu Marzouq being treated in hospital, taken there in the very ambulance which he uses to save others. He is pale and shaken, but refuses to go home after he is stitched up. His shift is not yet done.

Violence of waiting

For Jabaly, bearing witness to the devastation gave him agency to make the aftereffects of war visible. But filming other aspects of the violence he found impossible.

“I missed a lot of footage,” Jabaly explained to The Electronic Intifada.

While accompanying a crew distributing aid to displaced families in makeshift shelters, “I couldn’t film,” he said. The waiting families reminded him too much of his own suffocating experience during Israeli onslaughts in 2008 and 2012, and the agonizing anticipation of an unknown end.

The violence of waiting comes out in an altogether different way through a new short documentary by Mahdi Fleifel (A World Not Ours), another BBC Arabic festival selection.

In A Man Returned, a glassy-eyed heroin addict prepares a new home in Lebanon’s Ein al-Hilweh refugee camp for the woman he will marry. “We have to make the impossible possible,” he tells her, his face cast in the light of a mobile phone.

The statement is heartwarming until its context is revealed. Abu Eyad, the real-life childhood friend of Fleifel, had recently returned from Greece with a drug addiction.

Having undergone the perilous Mediterranean journey via smuggling boat in search of a better life, Abu Eyad returned to the camp with no better prospects than when he escaped – or perhaps worse. Leaving his wedding party to make a drug sale, making the impossible possible seems far away indeed.

Fleifel’s “man returned” is the third in a series of documentaries following Abu Eyad, each tracking a so far failed attempt at ending the violence of waiting that seems an eternal part of life in Ein al-Hilweh, the most populous Palestinian camp in Lebanon.

Then They Said: Refugee, another short documentary featured in the BBC festival, follows Fadi, a Palestinian activist, as he leads a theater and dance group in Dheisheh refugee camp adjacent to the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem.

Fadi works to get youth off the streets and into a space where they can deal with their grief. Art, here, commemorates friends and neighbors killed or imprisoned by Israeli forces.

In its UK premiere, the feature-length documentary Roshmia portrays the seemingly inevitable destruction of the home of two elderly refugees for a new highway. The couple face another displacement, decades after they settled in a Haifa valley in the wake of the mass displacement of Palestinians during the establishment of Israel in 1948.

Whether seen through Fleifel’s documentary gaze, in Salim Abu Jabal’s quiet and eloquently shot portrait of an elderly couple in today’s Israel, or Ambulance’s raw and visceral footage of Gaza, the reverberations of violence pervade all corners of life, from the wedding celebration to the Gaza morgue.

Nora Parr is Lecturer in Comparative Literature and English at King’s College London.

War, drugs and addicts: How qat is big business in conflict-torn Yemen

Yemenis are increasingly turning to the drug, which has surged in price, in an attempt to cope with the violence pounding their country

Users chewing qat at a house in Taiz in March 2017 (Nasser al-Sakkaf/MEE)--A bundle of qar is sold in a London before the UK government banned the drug in 2014 (AFP)

A qat farmer tends to his crop in Yemen in March 2017 (Nasser al-Sakkaf/MEE)--A qat market in Aden: sales have been blamed for causing traffic jams (AFP)

Nasser al-Sakkaf-Sunday 26 March 2017

TAIZ, Yemen - Before war came, Khalid Omar was only an occasional user of qat, sitting around with friends and chewing its narcotic leaves.

Then he lost his well-paid job with an oil company in Shabwa province. In 2015 he lost his younger brother amid shelling in Taiz city.

'When I buy qat, I don't just buy leaves and shoots but happiness, which is the purpose for everyone in life'

- Khalid Omar, qat addict

Finally he succumbed to qat and lost his dignity. Now Omar is unemployed, reliant on charitable handouts and barely able to pay for clothes or food for his four children. If he is lucky, he works as a labourer on a construction site for two days each week: his daily wage is YR3,000 ($12), of which a third goes towards paying for qat.

"When I compare today with my life before the war, I want to kill myself," he told Middle East Eye. "Suffering surrounds me from all sides.

"My mother is an old woman who needs money and medicines for diabetes. My children need money and food. And then I have to help my two nephews."

The only escape, as Omar sees it, is to chew qat. "When I chew qat, I forget all of this suffering and my mind begin to think about imaginary things. Qat annihilates all suffering.

"I did not use to be a qat addict, but the current bad situation has forced me into this as I cannot provide my family with all their needs. Qat helps me to live hours of happiness with my friends.

Omar chews qat for eight hours a day or four hours if he happens to be working. When not at work he consumes it at friends' houses.

"I sit with my friends and every day I get to know new friends. Qat helps us to build relationships with others," he said.

"When I buy qat, I don't just buy leaves and shoots but happiness, which is the purpose for everyone in life."

Qat: A social drug

For centuries, qat has been a feature of life in the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa as well as related communities around the world. It is legal in Yemen and other countries in the region; it is banned in the UK, US and elsewhere.

It is an evergreen shrub, and chewing its sweet leaves and shoots acts as a relaxant. Long-term users report that they occasionally experience visions.

Qat earns three times the revenue of any other crop in Yemen: it can be harvested as many as four times a year

It is everywhere in Yemen. Qat earns three times the revenue of any other crop and it can be harvested as many as four times a year.

It has become more prevalent during the past half-century, spreading from society's elite to become a focal point of social and business life. Qat is chewed by all ages, and it varies in price and quality (like other drugs, a bad supply can be disturbing for users). Users are mostly men. Bundles of qat are even given to a bride's family during weddings.

Since the civil war began in 2015, many Yemenis has stopped buying luxury items, given that even basic commodities are hard to come by. But qat users have not stopped chewing, and their numbers, according to anecdotal evidence, have increased. There was precious little help for addicts before the war, a situation that has worsened now.

Ahmed Sami, 25, graduated in computer sciences from Taiz University but the war stopped him finding work. When the clashes neared his neighbourhood in Taiz city, Sami returned to his home village 40km away in al-Mawaset district.

The quiet of village life frustrated him, so for the first time he started to chew qat with relatives.

"Around the world, young people have work to do, but the war makes us dependent on other people,” he told MEE, "and this is difficult for us."

After only 15 minutes of chewing qat, users report that the mind starts to wander; they become more talkative, then fall silent.

'If I stopped chewing qat, I would be like a crazy man in the street'

- Ahmed Sami, qat addict

By the next morning, the effect has worn off and addicts are confronted with whatever pain – usually related to the war – made them take qat in the first place. So they try and buy some more as soon as possible.

Long-term effects range from decayed teeth and depression to hallucinations and damage to the heart and kidneys.

"If I stopped chewing qat, I would be like a crazy man in the street," said Sami. "But qat helps me look forward to a good future. Even if it takes me into an imaginary life, it is still enough to make me optimistic."

The environmental cost of qat

Qat is profitable, if not for its users. War has forced the closure of many of Yemen's business and factories: qat is one of the few sources of income.

Qat can earn up to three times the revenue of any other crop. 

Qat seller Hilmi al-Yousofi said that he now earns more than his daily income of YR5,000 ($25) before the war.

"Although there are new qat sellers who joined this trade amid the war, I earn more than before the war," he said.

Qat traders pay a tax on their qat to whichever side controls their region, be it the Houthi rebels or pro-government forces.

"I pay YR1000 ($4) every day for the pro-government forces and some other traders pay more and some less," Yousofi said. "It depends on the quantity of qat that we have."

'If people do not chew qat, then they will use forbidden drugs and the consequences will be worse'

- Khalid Abdul Nasser, qat farmer

But the profitability brings with it violence. In Taiz, there have been clashes between rival rebel groups as to who should collect qat taxes. One incident at the al-Quba qat market left two qat users dead and several others injured.

Khalid Abdul Nasser, a farmer in al-Ghail village, 50km from Taiz city, told MEE that during the past two years, he had earned more money than ever – so began to plant more trees.

"We used to have both qat and coffee trees in our farms," he said. “But during the last two years we pulled out coffee trees and planted qat instead as we can earn more than three times the revenue."

That focus on qat comes at an environmental and humanitarian cost. Qat trees consume far more water than fruit trees, but have now replaced them in several parts of Yemen even at a time of food shortages in the country.

In Yemen's northern provinces, farmers are drilling so many unlicensed wells to irrigate the thirsty trees that engineers sometimes have to drill around 1,500 meters before reaching the water. Abdul Nasser has his own well that he uses to irrigate his trees.

But the farmers care neither for the war-time emergency nor the related economic crisis. Instead, they regard qat farming as a legal occupation, keeping users away from drugs which are forbidden in Islam.

"If people do not chew qat, then they will use forbidden drugs and the consequences will be worse," said Nasser.

Governments have tried restrictions before, not least in south Yemen when it united with the north in 1990.

In May 2016, authorities in Aden prohibited the sale of qat, but protests followed and within a few weeks the ban crumbled.

'War is the main reason for all this suffering'

Omar's use of qat has earned him the disapproval of relatives.

One told MEE on condition of anonymity: "All of us chew qat, but we are reasonable and we provide our families with all needs and then buy qat. But he does not provide his family with anything and spends all what he gets to buy qat."

Omar admitted that his wife disapproves of his qat use and that he himself knows that what he is doing is wrong. He has promised his family he will stop when he gets a proper job, but for the time being he sweet leaves are a priority in his life that he cannot live without.

"No one wants to see his family suffering,” Omar said, "but I have nothing at hand to help.

"War is the main reason for all this suffering. I hope it will stop soon, so I can resume my regular life."

Parkinson’s Law Also Applies to the Pentagon

I’m sorry that Trump did not level with Americans over financing our endless wars. Today, their costs are hidden into the ever expanding national debt, now approaching $20 trillion.

by Eric Margolis-Mar 26, 2017

( March 26, 2017, New York City, Sri Lanka Guardian) Back in the 1950’s, a British professor at the distinguished University of Malaya, C. Northcote Parkinson, observed that as the post-war Royal Navy shrank in size, its bureaucracy continued to expand.

Parkinson formulated a law that bureaucracies will naturally grow at 5-7% per annum. He also wisely added ‘Make the people sovereign and the poor will use the machinery of government to dispossess the rich.’

All bureaucracies, public and private, must be periodically forced on a diet. US President Donald Trump is, as promised, taking an axe to Washington’s dense bureaucratic undergrowth. He claims the cuts will save $2.5 trillion over ten years.

On Trump’s black list are, for example, such do-nothing government institutions as the International Fund for Ireland ($25 million); US Trade Development Agency ($55 million); Community Development Fund ($4.5 billion to buy black votes); funds for Federal office space ($864 million per annum, thank you Prof Parkinson); USDA sugar subsidy program at $14 million; $900 million for administration for the cancelled Obamacare health program; mohair subsidies ($1 million) and so on.

That’s the sensible part. Now the bad. High quality public broadcasting is to be gutted, saving $445 million. Americans will be left with sports, game shows, and soap operas. Funds for protecting the environment, a growing urgency for America, are being slashed, delighting many flat earth Republicans. Rail subsidies are cut even though decent railroads are a hallmark of civilized nations.

The State Department budget will be slashed by 28%. Some of its 70,000 employees will be let go. One must wonder what all these pencil pushers have been doing. Germany’s total active army has only 63,400 soldiers.

What we are seeing is that everything hated by President Trump and his extremist advisors has been put on the hit list. By contrast, they seem to believe that the United States is in imminent danger of invasion by scimitar-waving Muslims. By contrast, if you’re a Hillary Clinton Democrat, there are Reds lurking under every bed. The Red Peril has replaced the Yellow Peril. We are kept in a constant state of paranoia.

Trump plans to boost the defense budget – which should be called the `offence budget’ – by $54 billion to a total of $664 billion. But wait, that’s not all.

There are numerous big military spending programs, veterans’ affairs, nuclear weapons, so-called homeland security, and maintenance that take the budget up to $773 billion. Add to this paying for the ‘foreign contingency’ wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Plus hundreds of bases around the globe and ‘black programs,’ adding up to about $1 trillion annually.

The US military budget is already larger than the defense budgets of China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, South Korea, and Japan – combined.

I had dinner one night in Nice with a French navy admiral. He told me, with a melancholy look, that the US Navy’s annual budget was larger than France’s entire military budget. Russia’s military budget is around $70 billion to defend one of the world’s largest nations with NATO on one side and China on the other. That’s less than one tenth of the Pentagon’s annual budget.

It’s interesting that Trump & Co. have cut funding for US allies, culture, education, the poor, and just about everything else except the Pentagon and Israel. Not a penny was reduced from Israel’s recent grant of $38 billion in arms spending over ten years. Not a peep about this from Congress or Trump.

I’m sorry that Trump did not level with Americans over financing our endless wars. Today, their costs are hidden into the ever expanding national debt, now approaching $20 trillion.

Americans should be taxed to pay for their wars. An honest war tax would show Americans the real cost of their imperial adventures and spare their children from having to pay for such dumb wars as Afghanistan and the Mideast.

Fox News host calls on Ryan to step down, hours after Trump tweets about her show

President Trump at a rally in Nashville last week. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By John Wagner March 26 at 11:51 AM
A Fox News personality — whom President Trump had urged his supporters to watch Saturday night — called on House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) to step down, saying he had done a disservice to Trump by failing to pass a high-profile health-care bill last week.

At the top of her show, Jeanine Pirro, host of “Justice With Judge Jeanine,” delivered a scathing commentary on Ryan’s performance in the days leading up to the decision to pull the House Republican bill to overhaul the Affordable Care Act.

[VIDEO: Ryan withdraws health-care plan amid GOP 'growing pains']

“It failed within the first 70 days of President Donald Trump’s administration, a president who made the replacement of Obamacare the hallmark of his campaign and then used valuable political capital to accomplish it,” said Pirro, placing the blame squarely on Ryan.

“Speaker Ryan, you come in with all your swagger and experience and you sell 'em a bill of goods which ends up a complete and total failure, and you allow our president in his first 100 days to come out of the box like that, based on what?” she said. “Your legislative expertise, your knowledge of the arcane ins and outs of the bill-writing process? Your relationships? What? Your drinks at the Hay-Adams with your pals?”

 Follow

Donald J. Trump 

✔@realDonaldTrump

Watch @JudgeJeanine on @FoxNews tonight at 9:00 P.M.

10:41 AM - 25 Mar 2017

 
•  9,3989,398 Retweets
 
•  44,31844,318 likes

Earlier Saturday, Trump took to Twitter to urge his followers to tune into Pirro’s show, saying: “Watch @JudgeJeanine on @FoxNews tonight at 9:00 P.M.”

In public statements since the bill’s collapse, both Trump and Vice President Pence have continued to support Ryan as speaker.

The White House did not respond Saturday night to questions about whether Trump knew what Pirro was going to say.

[Trump’s path forward only gets tougher after health-care fiasco]

On Sunday, during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” White House chief of staff Reince Priebus called Trump's tweet and Pirro's call for Ryan to step down “coincidental.”

“There is no preplanning here,” Priebus said, adding that Trump promoted Pirro's show on Twitter “because he loves Judge Jeanine” and wanted to do her a favor.

Trump “doesn't blame Paul Ryan” for the defeat of the Affordable Care Act overhaul, Priebus said. “He thinks Paul Ryan is a great speaker of the House.”

Pirro said there had been no coordination with Trump in her messaging.

“When he tweeted, ‘Watch Judge Jeanine tonight,’ he and I had absolutely no conversation, no discussion, no email, nothing,” she said.

On Sunday, a spokeswoman for Ryan said his relationship with Trump has not been damaged.

"The speaker and president talked for an hour yesterday about moving forward on the agenda, and their relationship is stronger than ever right now," AshLee Strong said.

Republicans withdrew the American Health Care Act moments before a scheduled vote on March 24, after failing to woo enough lawmakers to support it. Here are the key turning points in their fight to pass the bill. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

Opposition leader Alexei Navalny detained amid protests across Russia

Crowds gather in cities to protest against corruption in largest anti-government rallies for five years, with hundreds held

Alexei Navalny is arrested at a rally in Moscow soon after arriving at the protest. Photograph: Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

 Protesters in Moscow. Photograph: Alexander Utkin/AFP/Getty

Shaun Walker and Alec Luhn in Moscow-Sunday 26 March 2017

Hundreds of protesters have been detained by riot police in cities across Russia, as some of the largest anti-government protests in years swept the country.

The call to protest came from the opposition politician and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, who was himself detained at the Moscow demonstration. A monitoring group said at least 850 people were detained in Moscow alone, while the news agency Tass gave a figure of 500.

Police said about 7,000 people attended the Moscow rally on Sunday, though the real number may have been much higher. The crowds surged down the length of the city’s main thoroughfare, Tverskaya. A police helicopter flew overhead and thousands of riot police were on duty across the city centre.

The size and scope of the demonstrations pose a challenge to the Kremlin, a year before elections in which Vladimir Putin is expected to win another six-year term.

Soon after arriving, Navalny was bundled into a police bus, which was unable to drive away for several minutes as crowds set upon it and tried to free him. Protesters even pushed parked cars in front of the bus to stop it moving, but were later beaten away by riot police. There were isolated clashes with riot police and shouts of “shame” and “Russia will be free”.

More video from the clashes around the bus with arrested protest leader @navalny inside from an hour or so ago. pic.twitter.com/k3lwh5nCJN

— Shaun Walker (@shaunwalker7) March 26, 2017

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Shaun Walker 

✔@shaunwalker7

More video from the clashes around the bus with arrested protest leader @navalny inside from an hour or so ago.

8:35 AM - 26 Mar 2017

The protests were ostensibly a demand for answers to a video made by Navalny and his team about corruption linked to the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev. The video, which alleges that Medvedev has amassed a collection of luxury mansions, yachts and vineyards, has been watched on YouTube more than 11m times. There has been no official response to the allegations except to dismiss them out of hand.

The gatherings in Moscow and most other Russian cities were denied official permission by police on a variety of pretexts. In Moscow, police moved to detain protesters who were shouting slogans or holding placards, those who were acting aggressively, or often simply at random. 

The Guardian reporter Alec Luhn was among those detained, grabbed by riot police while photographing police detaining others. Police searched him, confiscated his phone and put him in a police bus, where he was held for two hours before being driven to a police station on the outskirts of Moscow with 16 other detainees. He was told he would be charged with “participating in an unsanctioned protest”, despite repeatedly telling police he was a journalist and showing Russian foreign ministry accreditation. He was released after more than five hours in detention, after the foreign ministry intervened. 

Maxim Kryuchkov, 15, was also brought to the police station with Luhn. He said police knocked him to the ground and kicked him in the face, as he tried to hold on to a friend who was being detained. His nose looked broken and there was a cut on his neck.

Albert Komissarenko, an engineer who was passing the rally by chance, saw a man being punched by police. “I was angry and shouted, ‘shame’, and then they detained me too. They grabbed me and punched me twice in the back and pushed me into the police bus,” he said.

Komissarenko said that after his experience, he would attend the next rally as a participant. He said: “There was excessive, unfounded violence today. The regime is trying to intimidate everyone, not just those who fight against it.”

Navalny posted on Twitter: “Hi, everything is fine with me. I’m at the police station and we’re talking about the [Medvedev] film with the police. Keep up your peaceful walk, the weather is good.” His press secretary later said he was being held in prison overnight and would face a court hearing on Monday. Employees of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation were also detained at the organisation’s offices. Late in the evening, plain clothes men accompanied by police were filmed removing computers and other equipment from the offices.

Sunday’s protests were subjected to a blackout on state media, which acted as if they were not taking place. However, in a worrying sign for the Kremlin, even in dozens of smaller cities across the country several hundred people came to protest. In Vladivostok in the far east of the country, police detained a number of protesters, while in St Petersburg, several thousand gathered on Palace Square, just a fortnight after the centenary of the revolution that deposed the last tsar in 1917.

Local agencies reported that around 130 people were detained. The radio station Ekho Moskvy estimated that around 60,000 Russians in 82 different towns came out to protest.

As Russians continue to feel the pressure of a three-year economic downturn, the rampant corruption in government is a sore point for many Russians, even if Putin himself retains high approval ratings.

Sunday’s protests were some of the largest anti-government demonstrations since a wave of protests in 2011 and 2012 that followed Putin’s decision to return to the presidency after four years as prime minister, and a fraud-tinged parliamentary election. 

That protest wave culminated with a large rally on Bolotnaya Square on 6 May 2012, the day before Putin’s inauguration. The protests turned violent, police cracked down, and long trials of a number of protesters ended in prison terms.

Navalny has declared himself a candidate in next presidential elections due next March. Putin is expected to stand and win another six-year term, and sources close to the presidential administration say that after some discussion, a decision has already been taken not to allow Navalny to take part. 

Navalny has spent the past weeks travelling around the country, recruiting volunteers in the regions to help him run his campaign. During the travels, he has had to contend with supposed bomb threats at venues, frequent demonstrations meant to disrupt his gatherings and even an assault in which green fluid was tossed over his head.

“Everywhere we’ve gone there have been people trying to disrupt it or throw eggs at us, and zero coverage from local papers, but still people have come,” Navalny told the Guardian last week. A photograph from his campaign stop in the town of Saratov on Friday showed several hundred people crowded into the room to listen to Navalny.

“They understand that Putin’s support is only based on a total lack of competition, and are doing everything they can to keep us quiet,” said Navalny.