In 2012, photographer and videographer Roshdi Sarraj (Twitter|Instagram) co-founded Ain Media with Yaser Murtaja (Instagram). Both used up-close and drone-mounted cameras to document the life of the everyday life, wartime suffering, and protest movements of Gaza. I became aware of Murtaja and Ain Media’s remarkable work through his last piece, documentary coverage of The Great March of Return, celebrated on this blog as the world’s most daring protest. In footage shot for an envisioned documentary, Murtaja captured the collective organizing, on-site medical care, patient journalism, and defiant risk-taking that made the protest possible.
And he was killed for that journalism, shot by an Israeli sniper beside his collaborator Roshdi Sarraj.
Violent death cast a shadow over multiple social movements in Bolivia during the third calendar year of President Luis Arce. Deliberate killings came in clashes over land, mining, and the planned census, claiming eight lives, while tear gas detonated in a student meeting led to a stampede in which five were killed. A government bureaucrat who exposed a major corruption scandal died of years of mistreatment in prison. A motorcyclist was killed by a wire strung as part of a road blockade. And a brutal stabbing killed another participant in road blockades. Altogether, fifteen Bolivians lost their lives in or around Bolivia’s often charged movement conflicts.
The deadly events were as follows:
La Estrella land clash, March 19: Intercultural farmers had moved on March 12 to occupy lands on the “La Estrella” ranch, owned by Jacob Ostreicher and subject to claims of money laundering in a 2011 case that attracted international attention. These land occupiers were attacked on March 19 by armed people, either farmworkers or hired attackers presumibly sponsored by in-country landowner Claudia Liliana Rodríguez. (Ostreicher remains in exile.) The attackers confronted the Intercultural squatters around 22:00, shooting rockets and firing firearms. Franklin Delgadillo, son of Intercultural leader Ricardo Delgadillo, was shot and killed. The Interculturales maintained a multiday blockade demanding justice afterwards. Police arrested at least nine people for the killing in March 2022.
Death of imprisoned Indigenous Fund official, April 19: Marco Antonio Aramayo, the former director of Bolivia’s Fondo Indígena, died in custody following seven years of detention under an abusive avalanche of investigations in a scandal he himself brought to light. The Fondo Indígena, which Aramayo headed from 2013 to 2015, was intended to provide independent funding to indigenous communities for development and self-representation. Aramayo denounced in 2016 that the Fund was instead used by Minister Nemesia Achacolla as a slush fund during an election year. While many have been accused of corrupt acts, Aramayo has borne the highest weight of prosecutions (over 250 investigations begun); he was convicted and sentenced to 5 years in 2017. ITEI, a Bolivian organization that supports victims of torture and state violence, issued a statement: Aramayo’s “death is the tragic conclusion of a series of violations of [his] fundamental rights,” “which affect [him] and also affect people deprived of liberty in general.” According to the ITEI, which has provided medical and psychological attention to him since 2017, police and penal authorities tortured Aramayo physically with beatings and stress positions; biologically by depriving him of food, water, or medicine; psychologically with threats, extortion, insults, and humiliation. Aramayo was repeatedly required to travel to attend new cases across the country, with the final one filed two weeks before his death. Exhausted from his ordeal, Aramayo died of multiple organ failure, aggravated by diabetes and hypertension. While police announced an investigation into his death, his legal representative denounced that no actions had been taken three weeks later.
Potosí university stampede, May 9: A nightmarish stampede ensued at Potosí’s Tomás Frías University after a tear gas grenade was set off during an indoor meeting to convene university federation elections. Some five thousand students were reportedly in the coliseum. Many were injured in the rush to flee, including four who were killed that day and one more who died on June 15. Reportedly two of the dead were mothers who leave behind children. Six were sent to intensive care. Between 71 and 83 were wounded. The tragedy was apparently amplified by the locking of the main exit doors. Bolivian student politics operates in close coordination with national political parities and is often highly contentious. The tragedy also put attention on student leaders who maintain student status over decades and accumulate patronage and power in on-campus political organization.Four students, at least two of them involved in student politics, have been arrested in connection with the gas release and its deadly consequences. The Minister of Justice names Manfred Flores Canaza as the “principal and material author” of the crime.
Tinguipaya clash, May 15: Two men died in fratricidal violence in the town of Tinguipaya, Potosí. The brawl between differently organized Indigenous people—ayllus vs. campesinos—followed a visit by Vice President Choquehuanca and involved stones, sticks, slingshots, and rockets. Ironically, Choquehuanca’s speech, marking the opening of a political training school, had called for cross-cultural unity and fearless speech. The cause of the conflict remains totally disputed: national MAS-IPSP official attributed it to a local land conflict, while some local figures and opposition politicians blamed internal partisan disputes within the MAS-IPSP linked to the local mayor. Police attempting to investigate the incident had difficulty entering the area in the following days.
Chiñijo land clash, June 23: On June 23 a confrontation over land ownership in the community of Tamiplaya Tolapampa in Chiñijo, Sorata resulted in the beating deaths of two local campesinos and injury to an additional five. A group of 60 land-grabbers, hired and led by Gabriel Callisaya Toledo, Mario Luque, and Genaro Quito attacked the community in attempt to take their land, intimidating them with dynamite, dogs, and firearms. The General Secretary of Chiñijo, Susana Silva, claimed that Sorata police refused to provide assistance or to remove the bodies of the victims and only arrived at the on the 26th. Communities members protested by taking the victims’ bodies to Sorata in a protest march in order to demand justice. The community members possessed a resolution from the National Institue of Agrarian Reform (INRA) that recognized their right to the property and instructed the police to forcefully evict unlawful occupants.
Mapiri mining cooperatives clash, June 24: A group of expelled members of the Hijos de Pueblo gold mining cooperative attacked the cooperative in the community of Charobamba, Mapiri, in an attempt to regain leadership. A local teacher, Faustino Nestor Maqui Chambi, was killed when he was hit in the head by a stone, causing him to fall from his boat and drown. Police arrested 7 or 8 of the agressors, but their convoy was attacked in Aguada while transporting the arrested persons to La Paz and one the arrestees escaped.
Santa Cruz census strike, deaths on October 22, November 9 and 10: The Santa Cruz Civic Movement mounted a 36-day department-wide strike in protest of the delay of the Census to 2024, and demanding it be held in 2023. Clash between supporters of Santa Cruz general strike and those attempting to open blockades. During an October 22 clash on the Amistad bridge that connects Santa Cruz with Brazil, a municipal employee of Arroyo Concepción, Julio Pablo Taborga, suffered injuries from blows to his head. He was transported to a hospital in Puerto Quijarro where his death was recorded early the next morning. According to Taborga’s wife, he was demonstrating against the blockade when supporters of the strike arrived with dynamite and homemade bombs and began to beat him. Video of the confrontation appeared to show victim succumbing to tear gas rather than a beating. The Santa Cruz Civic Committee released a statement blaming the MAS for the conflict. Eduardo Arancibia Barrancos was killed in the early morning of November 9 while driving a motorcycle to work. He attempted to drive through a blockade point in the Tres Lagunas neigborhood of Santa Cruz. He did not notice that a coaxial cable was stretched across the road between two poles. This cable cut through his upper neck as he drove, causing his death. Police arested five men who were maintaining the blockade point. Overning on November 11, a group of four or five people attacked two men who were maintaining a blockade in the Barrio Latino of the Los Lotes zone of Santa Cruz. The attackers assaulted Jairo Montero, 21, and José Eduardo Sosa, 28, with knives, leaving Montero hospitalized with criticall injuries and Eduardo Sosa dead. The Sosa’s heart was reportedly cut out of his chest by the attackers. Two of the attackers were arrested on November 15.
Introducing Ultimate Consequences, presented as video-on-demand at AAA 2022.
This presentation introduces Ultimate Consequences, a quantitative and qualitative database, unique in its depth and completeness of coverage, of all conflict deaths in Bolivia since October 1982, a period of largely elected governments and political dynamism. The country’s 1977–82 return to democracy, 1985 general strikes, 2000–2005 antineoliberal protest wave, and its political crises in 2006–2008 and 2019–2020 each exemplify the ability of mass disruptive protest to remake national politics. The database enables comparative analysis across twelve presidential administrations, four episodes where protesters successfully sought the end of a presidential term, and 192 protest events in 17 domains of conflict. Due to the number of lethal events in the study period, the dataset is both large enough for quantitative research that analyzes patterns and small enough for qualitative, journalistic, and historical examination of the individual deaths involved. To serve these multiple purposes, we are coding information such as individuals’ relation to a specific social movement, protest campaign, cause of death, responsible parties, and location, and writing detailed narrative descriptions about major events. The presentation introduces the open data format of the database and the R-based tools to explore it.
The project draws on journalistic, advocacy, and scholarly sources to comprehensively document all deaths in political conflict, including those not readily categorizable as human rights violations. The project also seeks to ask more intimate, and cultural, questions about the role of risk, violence, sacrifice, and loss in transformative social change. As the database reveals, Bolivian protest can involve intense risk, privation, self-sacrifice, and either enduring or inflicting violence. Bolivian social movement traditions include proclamations of fearlessness and vows to carry on their struggles “until the ultimate consequences,” that is, to persist in collective measures and to refuse to be deterred by deadly state violence. These movements invoke a history of indigenous uprisings, labor militancy, and state massacres in narrating their own histories.
The dataset offers a grounded view on such questions as: What practices and political choices result in some presidencies being far less violent than others? What is the relative importance of different forms of political violence, from repression of protest to guerrilla movements to fratricidal disputes among movements? Which movements have succeeded despite deadly repression? This presentation introduces a new tool for social scientists, oral historians, and human rights advocates to use in answering these and other questions.
Orlando Gutiérrez Luna, executive secretary of Bolivia’s celebrated miners’ union, the Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia (FSTMB) has died after suffering a severe assault on October 21, shortly after the electoral victory of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS-IPSP) party. A senior union leader, a potential MAS-IPSP senate candidate for La Paz (until his candidacy was refused) by electoral authorities, and reportedly the planned Minister of Mining under the incoming Arce government, Gutiérrez was the target of numerous death threats. During a time of protests against the MAS-IPSP election victory, Gutiérrez was badly beaten, though his family and comrades have not disclosed any major details of the attack.
The FSTMB responded to the attack with a statement saying:
“This grave attack, executed as a form of vengeance, perpetrated by the fascist right, by the so-called ‘pititas,’ [by] platforms, contracting ‘hired killers’ and ‘street thugs’ to assassinate the executive of the FSTMB for the mere act of speaking the truth; but, thanks to God, at this moment, despite this attempted homicide, he remains alive.” (FSTMB, 23 Oct 2020)
** The FSTMB leadership has distanced itself from this allegation; see update below **
Gutiérrez was treated at the Cemes clinic and visited by comrades. He reportedly suffered trauma to the parietal lobe of his brain.
His death was reported on October 28, but responsibility for it remains vague and unconfirmed. The Departmental Prosecutor of La Paz opened a homicide investigation later in the day. Reportedly, prior attempts to access him by investigators were rebuffed. The Defensoría del Pueblo has called for investigation and clarification of the circumstances of the attack on Gutiérrez.
Given the imminent transfer of power to a MAS-IPSP national government on November 8, the threats from political opponents against him, and the recent investigations of him for organizing pro-election blockades in July and August, it is perhaps not shocking that Gutiérrez’s comrades worked to delay an investigation. But the lack of any detailed narrative makes it impossible to verify their allegations of responsibility for his death.
Regardless of the circumstances of his death, the 36-year-old union leader is being remembered for his remarkable political leadership, his oratory on behalf of both the FSTMB union and the MAS-IPSP, and his calls for a time of peace following Bolivia’s traumatic last year.
Since 2015, I have been working systematically to compile a database of people who lost their lives in the course of Bolivian conflict, though I had been collecting detailed on a variety of deadly post-2000 events for years before that. Never before this year, however have I had the responsibility of adding so many new, present-day entries to database: at least 35 people died in the conflicts that followed the October 20 election and the November 10 overthrow of Evo Morales. November alone proved to be the bloodiest month in sixteen years, and the third deadliest month of the democratic era. And it is thanks to the database that I can make simple factual statements like those.
The database enumerates individual deaths in Bolivian political conflict since 1982, the end of military rule in the country. It is compiled by myself and a research assistant based on multiple sources, including media reports, governmental, intergovernmental, and private human rights reports, and use of the research literature on political conflict. The dataset now includes nearly all of the deaths identified by a Permanent Assembly of Human Rights-Bolivia (APDHB) study of deaths from 1988 to 2003, and a study of the coca conflict from 1982 to 2005 (Navarro Miranda 2006; Llorenti 2009; Salazar Ortuño 2008). Unlike prior compilations by human rights organizations, however, this database includes a variety of qualitative variables designed to understand how and why the deaths occurred and what policies and patterns underpin them.
I designed the database to both catalog the lethal consequences of participation in social movements and political activism, and to assess responsibility, accountability, and impunity for violent deaths. All deaths are significant as signs of the price that has been paid to seek social change. Some deaths are also significant as elements of repression or violence for which someone might ultimately be held accountable. Rather than begin by asking, “Is this death someone’s fault?,” we are coding each death according to multiple factors that enable us to extract different subsets of the overall database for different purposes. We estimate there were 550 to 580 deaths associated with Bolivian political conflict from October 1982 until the current crisis. As of October 2019, the project had identified 530 of these deaths, including those of 496 named individuals.
Through this process, I have become familiar with reading multiple and conflicting reports, evaluating official denials (we have created a data column for such denials), collecting narrative accounts, coding what we can based on the information, and signaling remaining questions. One thing that I have learned through this process is that making informed judgements, rather than marking all disputed facts with some kind of asterisk, is absolutely foundational to being able to do comparative work. It was with that experience that I spent time over the past month reading and processing reports of Bolivia’s deadly November.
This blog post presents Part I of this analysis, which describes the deadly events involved and explains some of my coding decisions in assessing responsibility for them. A second part will put the 2019 into comparative perspective against other periods covered by the database.
Who killed and who died in the 2019 crisis?
This table (click to expand) shows my initial analysis of the affiliations of the victims and perpetrators of violence and other deadly incidents during October and November. Overall, thirty-five people died in the conflict, including two people killed in their attempts to avoid violence against them.
Crisis deaths and affiliations of victims and perpetrators.Deaths during the crisis and their causes.
Below, I break down the events involved and describe what we know about who was responsible for and who suffered these deaths.
Forty-six years ago, the underground magazine Ramparts used its cover to draw attention to near impossibility of holding police accountable for killing African Americans. Thanks to #BlackLivesMatter and video evidence, arresting police for murder is now thinkable. But will there ever be a murder conviction?
Bolivia’s Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office (Defensor del Pueblo) reports that 2012 was another busy year for social conflict in Bolivia. The office compiled a list of 500 political disputes that were the subject of protests or direct actions since January 1. (coverage: Erbol). The year is the deadliest in the country’s political life since 2008 with eight people losing their lives in these conflicts. Six of them died from violence by state forces; by my count, this is the most people killed by police responses to political actions in any one year since Evo Morales took power in January 2006.*
Those who died in 2012 were as follows:
Abel Rocha Bustamante, 27, and Michael Sosa, 23. Shot by police in the January Yapacaní conflict. (This blog’s coverage: 1|2)
Eliseo Rojas, 22. Reportedly electrocuted on a fence while attempting to storm police barracks during the Yapacaní conflict.
José Mamani Mamani, protester in Mallku Khota mining dispute, died of bullet wounds to the neck apparently fired by police on July 5.
Ambrosio Gonzáles, 45. Died from a police bullet during the July 31 operation to retake the Caranda gas plant, in Buenavista, Santa Cruz, which was seized by protesters demanding that a roadway and bridge be built.
FSTMB member Héctor Choque. Killed by an explosion of dynamite during fratricidal protests in La Paz between his union of mining employees and cooperative miners over the disposition of the Mallku Khota mine following its nationalization.
Óscar Omar Cruz Mallku, 17, dead from a gunshot, and Oscar Ricardo Gómez Bertón, 27, dead from wounds after a police raid on illegal used car sellers in Challapata, Oruro faced public resistance by the sellers.
*Police killed four protesters in 2007 and 2010. If one excludes the October 2012 Challapata event as a confrontation with criminal entrepreneurs during a raid, then all three years have the same number of police killings in political situations.
An article by George Lakey is circulating around the Internet* under the headline, “The More Violence, The Less Revolution.” While title is a quotation from 1930s radical Bart de Ligt, the thrust of the piece is to read Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s large-scale study Why Civil Resistance Works (website) under this headline. Chenoweth and Stephan do make a serious and wide-ranging attempt to measure the outcomes of tactical choices made by movements, and both their data and conclusions should be read widely among people interested in changing their societies. Chenoweth and Stephan’s expansive category of civil resistance is actually one that spans across existing internal debates in the Occupy Movement (and earlier generations of tactical debates in the global justice movement and elsewhere). Vitally, their analysis of what conditions make civil resistance successful can help us focus our tactical conversations in a very productive direction.**
George Lakey, while an opponent of both violent tactics and property destruction, issued a strong rejoinder to Chris Hedges’ The Cancer in Occupy, arguing: “The issue of the appropriateness of property destruction and/or violence is, like any other aspect of community organizing, not settled by blanket statements or posturing but by getting in there and dialoguing, over and over again. Advocates of nonviolent action need to learn from the Civil Rights movement and the field of community organizing in this way—there really aren’t any shortcuts.” Lakey has developed a nuanced, historically informed position on nonviolence. His strategic approach to thinking about nonviolence that has been surprisingly contagious internationally. And Lakey is willing to have difficult conversations with people who profoundly disagree with him, to his credit.
However, Lakey’s headline and overall argument are a misreading of Chenoweth and Stephan. This rankles me both as a social scientist (quibble ahead) and as a student of/participant in freedom struggles. First, the quibble: Why Civil Resistance Works and related studies divide all struggles into “nonviolent” (like the first Intifada, Lavalas against the Duvaliers in Haiti, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and the Defiance Campaign in South Africa) and “violent” (like the Mexican, Chinese, Algerian, and Iranian Revolutions). 0 for “nonviolent,” 1 for “violent.” (Incidentally, I think my four examples on each side of the “nonviolent”/”violent” categorization is a fairly good representation of successful cases, biased towards things anyone reading this blog would probably recognize. A complete list is in the Methodological Appendix [pdf] they posted online.) A dichotomous variable (definition) cannot be used to produce the more x, the less y statements. Ever.
Okay, so the real problem here is the made plain by the wide, wide variety of things crammed into the nonviolent category,‡ including nearly all of the tactical patterns Lakey and those citing this study through him are most likely to rail against inside of movements: confronting police with bricks and stones (Intifada), building burning barricades in the streets (Defiance campaign), yielding the moral high ground by defending against violence rather than showcasing differences in suffering. Both such militant, but ultimately civil revolutions and nearly pacifist mobilizations like Solidarity in Poland or the Velvet Revolution have much to teach us about how to resist.
The wave of anti-mining protests in the Puno Region of Peru reached day 50 today. Yesterday, June 24, was a particularly dramatic day, however: the Peruvian government announced that it will annul the mining concession for the proposed Santa Ana silver mine in Huacullani District, near the Bolivian border southeast of Puno; other protesters took over the Manco Capac airport in Juliaca, north of Puno, only to be shot with live ammunition by police. These were both very important events in the seven-week-long protests. But they were also the two kinds of events that the English-language press steps in to cover: economic loss to Western corporations and deadly violence. If it bleeds, it leads is a key phrase for journalism, but if it bites the bottom line, it makes the business pages is just as important.
Unfortunately, the coincidence of these two newsworthy events led a string of English-language outlets to treat one as causing the other. In fact, there is quite a bit of separation: the Santa Ana mine was the lead issue for the primarily Natural Resources Defense Front of the Southern Zone of Puno (Frente de Defensa de los Recursos Naturales de la Zona Sur de Puno), which joined forces with National Confederation of Peruvian Communities Affeted by Mining (Spanish: Confederación Nacional de Comunidades del Perú Afectadas por la Minería; Conami). The Defense Front, a predominantly Aymara organization, is based near the border and had organized an earlier regional general strike against the Santa Ana Mine in April. It joined forces with the largely Quechua Conami for a larger regional protest from May 7 to June 1. When protests resumed after the victory of Ollanta Humala, new forces got involved, many but not all also concerned with mining elsewhere in the Puno Region. These include protests in Carabaya province [the Puno region has 13 provinces, divided in 107 districts] against mining concessions and the Inambari hydroelectric power plant; protests in Melgar, Juli, and Sandia over local mines; and Azángaro (whose capital is Juliaca) demanding decontamination of the Ramis river from pollution caused by small-scale mining. Outside of the Defense Front, most peasants in these regions are Quechua-speakers, not Aymaras.
The story is the strike wave, which has rippled across the region. And the other surprising story is the willingness of the government to deal openly with the strikers: even in May, substantial concessions were granted to the protests (including a 12-month delay in the Santa Ana mine and a regional commission to study all mining in southern Puno Region). The possibilities of protest and the limits of resource extraction are being rewritten in Peru. However, it didn’t bleed, so it didn’t lead. Indeed, for English-reading outsiders, it didn’t even get covered. Blame this on editors and the priorities of understaffed media organizations.
However, when things got interesting for the newswires, they assigned the story, apparently to reporters far from the scene. And the results juxtaposed the shootings in Juliaca and the victory in Chuquito Province in ways that distort the truth:
Associated Press, “Peru cancels mine after 6 killed in clash” somehow fails to mention the demands of protesters in Juliaca, and gives the false impression that the clash led to the concession.
Agence France-Presse, “Peru halts Canada mining operations amid protests“: “Peru suspended a Canadian company’s mining project in the south of the country on Saturday following intense negotiations in the wake of deadly protests by mostly indigenous anti-mining activists, authorities said.” “In the wake of” is fuzzy talk for afterwards without committing to a connection. In fact, the negotiations preceded the deadly violence, with a commitment to annul the Santa Ana mine being made verbally to the Defense Front on Wednesday and Thursday, with confirmation on Saturday. As discussed above, anti-mining protesters in Juliaca have other demands. Later in the article, “Protests have since spread to the provinces of Azangaro, Melgar and now the city of Juliaca.” Juliaca is the capital of Azangaro, and protests occurred there in late May, as well as early June. Nonetheless, AFP did some homework; this is spot on: “They then expanded to include opposition to other area mines, and now include opposition to the Inambari project, an ambitious plan to damn several Andean rivers and build what would become one of the largest hydroelectric power plants in South America.”
Voice of America, “3 Killed in Peru Airport Clash“: Contributes one fact: the result of a hospital phone call to Juliaca (“A doctor said the three people killed died from gunshot wounds Friday at Manco Capac airport in the city of Juliaca in Puno state.”), but mis-identifies the protesters as Aymara Indians—0.28% of Azángaro Province is Aymara. The hospital workers, through no fault of their own, understated the death toll by half.
Reporting like this is far less effective than paying translators to read the local press (Los Andesin Puno has been among the most comprehensive; see their chronology) and fact-check one against the other. If you’re reporting on these issues, I’d really like to know your process and point you in the direction of reliable background information. Seriously, where are you and what do you read?
Credit where credit is due: Reuters got the story right, noting “On Friday, hours before the deadly clash at the airport, Garcia’s cabinet revoked the license of Canadian mining firm Bear Creek in a bid to persuade locals residents to end protests that have dragged on for more than a month.”
Update, June 5: The International Federation of Journalists is calling for an inquiry into Cevdet Kılıçlar’s killing and the shooting of Indonesian cameraman Sura Fachrizaz. The investigation would also consider the treatment of all journalists on the flotilla and the confiscation of their pictures, cameras, and computers.
Update: IHH (the German acronym is the circulating one) has posted a photo album of Cevdet Kılıçlar (it appears to be pictures of him, rather than by him, but I don’t read Turkish) to its Facebook page. I’ve included his picture below now.
Original post: Onboard the Mavi Marmara, the largest ship of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, at least nine passengers were killed. Witness reports and forensic evidence now suggest that at least one of those killed was documenting the raid and not participating the clashes between Israeli commandos and passengers that came along with it. Turkish journalist Cevdet Kılıçlar was shot in the forehead at close range, the bullet ripping away the back of his skull. Kevin Ovenden, a British activist onboard and eyewitness, has stated that Kılıçlar was filming at the time and has his camera held to his eye.
Kılıçlar worked for the Taraf, and Selam and Milli newspapers in Turkey. For the flotilla, he was employed by boat organizer, the Human Rights and Freedoms (İHH) Humanitarian Help Foundation, as part of its press staff. He was one of sixty journalists on the flotilla.
Relatives mourn over Cevdet's coffin Photo:Bulent Kilic/AFP
Cevdet Kılıçlar was 38. He leaves behind a grieving widow, Derya, and two children. He was also a gifted photographer, as you can see from his flickr page from a recent trip to Baku, Azerbaijan.
I draw three things from this sad news. First, the tragedy in Gaza has crossed the “it could have be me” threshhold, and I am sadder and more angry than before because of it. Second, the manner of this death as described by Ovenden, can be nothing other than murder. Third, the complete Israeli seizure of photographic evidence from those onboard is an even more serious than before; the grounds for a complete, independent, international investigation lie in part in what the Israelis have taken and may choose to destroy.
Carwil without Borders 