Parents and children occupy the South Bank Centre over JCB’s complicity in ethnic cleansing

Protesters gathered for a unique day of action against British bulldozer manufacturer JCB. It was over the company’s complicity in the projects of ethnic cleansing across Palestine, India, and Kashmir.

Parents 4 Palestine and the Stop JCB Demolitions Campaign mobilised for the series of creative protests at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, in London. This was to call out the its sponsorship agreement with JCB.

JCB: complicit in human rights violations across Palestine, India, and Kashmir

On Saturday 22 March, the two groups came together in a series of powerful acts of creative resistance.

Using art, crafts, and poetry, families and children learnt about resistance to occupation, dispossession, and home demolitions:

JCB is responsible for the demolition of homes, water sources, schools and places of worship in Palestine, India and Kashmir. They made connections between the struggles in each, and JCB’s murderous role. And to illustrate how rebuilding is a form of resistance, they built a model Palestinian village.

Alongside this, they focused on the JCB branded Lift at the site. They highlighted it as a disturbing reminder of the blood money sponsoring the South Bank Centre and the Royal Festival Hall:

The Lift which connects to the World Poetry Library on the 5th floor tries to portray JCB as a poetry – and fun-loving benefactor and educator of children. Meanwhile countless children are being traumatised, made homeless and destitute, and some are dying, as a direct result of its activities in Palestine, India and Kashmir.

JCB’s owner, billionaire Lord Anthony Bamford, a major donor to the Conservative Party, is reaping huge profits from this displacement, destruction of livelihoods, and death.

Poems of resistance

Outside the National Poetry Library, protesters read out poems of resistance from Palestine, India, and Kashmir. They did so in solidarity with the ongoing struggle against JCB’s role in landgrab and ethnic cleansing.

These included poems by:

• Rashad Abu Sakhilah, who, at 23, was the youngest poet in Palestine to publish a book of poetry. Rashad was killed in cold blood by Israeli forces. His compilation titled Letters of the Earth has been described as “the heartbeat of Palestine”.
• GN Saibaba, a 90% disabled professor of English, human rights activist and poet who wrote about the struggles of India’s oppressed and marginalised. Saibaba died soon after he was finally released following nearly a decade of incarceration in the Modi regime’s monstrous solitary Anda cell in the notorious Nagpur prison.
• Asiya Zahoor, a Kashmiri poet and filmmaker whose collection Serpents Under My Veil was written in the period after August 2019 when the Indian government revoked Kashmir’s limited autonomy and intensified repression and violent military occupation.

The South Bank Centre’s so-called ‘Singing Lift’

Protesters set out the clear demand that the Southbank Centre must immediately end JCB sponsorship.

On top of this, it demanded all traces of JCB branding to be removed from the so-called ‘Singing Lift’. Instead, they called for the lift to be named after Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who Israeli forces murdered.

A copy of the book Letters of the Earth by Rashad Abu Sakhilah, the youngest published poet in Palestine, will be presented to the National Poetry Library and must be accepted and given due importance.

JCB’s murderous activities

While Israel violates the ceasefire agreement and resumes its genocide in Gaza, Israeli military and Zionist settlers are using JCB bulldozers daily for the ongoing demolition of Palestinian communities in the West Bank. JCB has long been a key supplier of machinery used in the Israeli state’s systemic violations of human rights. It operates through its sole dealer, the Israeli company Comasco, which holds contracts with Israel’s Ministry of Defence.

Meanwhile, in India, JCB’s bulldozers have become symbols of the Hindu supremacist Narendra Modi government’s ethnic cleansing of Muslims. The government sanctions the demolition of homes and places of worship, often without notice, both randomly or to punish people who disagree with the government. Hasina Bi, a 56 year old widow from the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh testified:

Everyone at home was asleep that noon, from the fatigue of fasting for Ramzan. Suddenly we heard a lot of commotion outside. We came out and saw four or five JCB machines coming towards our house. The machines directly attacked our house.

The situation in Kashmir bears striking similarities as well. In one of the most militarised zones on earth, where the Indian army acts with total impunity, the army uses JCB bulldozers for demolition drives in the name of development. They ignore ownership documents and destroy homes. Houses of non-BJP leaders are singled out for demolition.

JCB: an ‘obscene symbol of destruction’ and ‘blood money’

The Stop JCB Demolitions Campaign is also filing a complaint with the UK National Contact Point, under the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct, alleging JCB UK’s failure to take necessary actions to address the adverse human rights impacts resulting from the use of its heavy machinery products in “punitive demolitions” in India.

Stop JCB Demolitions Campaign said:

Visitors to the South Bank trying to reach the poetry library are confronted with an obscene symbol of the destruction of homes and lives in Palestine, India and Kashmir – a JCB sponsored and branded Lift. This has no place in an institution dedicated to enjoying and celebrating the arts. Shamefully the Southbank Centre is taking JCB’s blood money as sponsorship. This must end.

Parents 4 Palestine commented:

As parents who regularly visit the Southbank Centre with our children and enjoy its rich programme of activities we strongly believe that it should be a space free of discrimination. We recognise the traumatising effect of the JCB branding on families from Palestine and those who have been made aware of JCB’s role in Israel’s ongoing violent ethnic cleansing of Palestine. As we watch helplessly as Israel resumes its genocide in Gaza, we hope that Southbank will heed our call by disassociating itself from JCB and honouring communities which are facing erasure and genocide, from Palestine to India and Kashmir. By taking a stand the Southbank can help build real solidarity and a better world for all.

Feature image via Stop JCB Demolitions Campaign/Parents 4 Palestine