Video of Assange\'s Speech at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London

August 19, 2012, 12:52 pm

By ROBERT MACKEY

BBC News video of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaking to supporters from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London on Sunday.

As my colleagues Ravi Somaiya and Marc Santora report, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange addressed supporters in London on Sunday from a first floor balcony at the Ecuadorean Embassy, where he has been holed up for two months, seeking to avoid extradition to Sweden.

BBC News made video of the complete speech available online and a supporter of Mr. Assange posted a screenshot from Russian television on Twitter showing the rows of British police officers outside the embassy. Britain has promised to arrest Mr. Assange and send him to face questioning in Sweden on allegations of sexual misconduct if he leaves the embassy, even though Ecuador granted him political asylum on Thursday.

Photo of the unbelievable amount of police in front of the Ecuadorian Embassy during Julian #Assange's speech. http://t.co/tHMJlk9o

- M Cetera (@m_cetera) 19 Aug 12

The London bureau of Russia Today, the state-financed satellite news channel that broadcasts Mr. Assange's talk show, posted photographs of the two pages of prepared remarks Mr. Assange held in his hand as he spoke. A more readable form of the full speech text was published on the Web site of the Australian radio station Triple M.

During the address, Mr. Assange varied little from his prepared text, in which he made no mention of the accusations against him in Sweden, but called on the United States to “renounce its witch hunt against WikiLeaks.” Mr. Assange and his supporters cl aim that the allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against him by two Swedish women are nothing but a ploy to discredit him and make it easier for him to be extradited to the U.S. to stand trial for facilitating the leak of hundreds of thousands of secret military and diplomatic documents and video recordings.

Near the end of his speech, Mr. Assange equated his plight to those of the American Army private, Bradley Manning, who is accused of providing the classified American documents to WikiLeaks, and to political prisoners in Bahrain and Russia.

Casting himself as a victim of a global war on freedom of speech, Mr. Assange invoked the two-year jail terms imposed Friday on members of the Russian protest band Pussy Riot, and noted that Nabeel Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, was sentenced to three years in prison on Thursday (although the WikiLeaks founder incorrectly said that Mr. Rajab's term was punishment “for a tweet.” Mr. Ra jab was sentenced to three one-year terms this week for “inciting” and attending demonstrations; he was previously sentenced to three months in prison for mocking the country's prime minister in a Twitter update.) He concluded by saying: “There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response.”

BBC News also broadcast video of the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who is representing Mr. Assange, speaking to reporters outside the embassy on Sunday. Apparently reading a prepared statement, Mr. Garzón said that Mr. Assange “has always fought for truth and justice and has defended human rights and continues to do so. He demands that WikiLeaks and his own rights also be defended.”

BBC News video of the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who now represents Julian Assange, outside Ecuador's embassy in London on Sunday.

Newswallah: Long Reads Edition

By NIHARIKA MANDHANA

“Whatever be his politics, Ramdev knows how to work a crowd,” Revati Laul wrote in Tehelka magazine, as she described the scene at Delhi's Ambedkar Stadium on the last day of the yoga teacher Baba Ramdev's five-day public fast against graft and the governing Congress party. “Ramdev's appeal is a strange mix of religiosity, television fame, rustic braggadocio and OBC aspiration,” she wrote, referring to the category of castes and communities known as “Other Backward Class.”

The article, which highlighted Mr. Ramdev's ideological inconsistencies and drew attention to allegations of corruption leveled against his close aides, sought to answer a fundamental question: What makes Ramdev click with the crowds? “Ramdev was never designed to be a left-liberal intellectual's favorite,” the author explained.

For him, they don't matter. The left-liberal intelligentsia is not his constituency. Ramdev's people are the middle class from middle India. To them, his simple idiom is not his weakness, it is his strength. His appeal is among the autorickshaw drivers and traders, the ordinary schoolteachers and the pensioner homemakers, spread across small cities and semi-rural townships of northern India.

In an article titled “Murky Politics,” Frontline magazine traced the journey of Bodo politics from the tribe's first accord with the central and state governments in 1993, which gave birth to the Bodoland Autonomous Council, to the continuing communal violence in the northeastern state of Assam.

The writer, Sushanta Talukdar, wrote:

They tried to assert their territory-linked ethno-linguistic and ethno-cultural identity and clamoured for political and cultural autonomy through movements spearheaded by mass organisations as well as armed groups, with each group claiming to be their sole representative . In the course of this long journey, the Bodos developed sharp contradictions not only with various communities sharing the same territory but also among themselves, which often overshadowed their movements for autonomy.

In the Independence Day edition of the magazine India Today, Mark Tully argued against the demonization of dynastic politics in India as “feudal” and “backward.” In the article, titled “It Runs In the Family,” he wrote that dynasties appear to hold political parties together. “There must be many in the BJP who, seeing the disarray in their leaderless party, wish Atal Bihari Vajpayee had an heir,” Mr. Tully quipped. He also suggested that the vast majority of Indians did not object to political power passing from one generation to another, quoting Inder Malhotra's book “Dynasties of India and Beyond,” which said “the vocal minority's denunciation of dynasties â€" particularly loud in India and primarily directed again st the Nehru-Gandhis â€" is indeed out of sync with the basic reflex of the silent majority.”