[Pnews] The Irish Hunger Striker Who Ignited a Generation - A Prisoner’s Salute to Bobby Sands

[Prisoner News]

March 19, 2014
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/19/a-prisoners-salute-to-bobby-sands/


*The Irish Hunger Striker Who Ignited a Generation*


  A Prisoner’s Salute to Bobby Sands

by DENNIS O'HEARN

I attended a birthday party last week. It was in Ohio State 
Penitentiary, on the 60th birthday of Bobby Sands, the Irish political 
prisoner who died after 66 days on hunger strike back in 1981. He was 27 
then and he was followed to his death by nine of his comrades.

Younger people won’t remember it but anyone over fifty should remember 
how the name Bobby Sands went round the world. The New York Times 
editorialized how Bobby “bested” British Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher 
because he and his comrades showed real moral courage as they fought for 
their rights as political prisoners with nothing but their bodies, while 
she just showed vengeance and spite. When Bobby Sands ran and won 
election to British parliament, while dying on hunger strike, he won 
30,493 votes. The most Thatcher ever got was 29,697. Bobby spent the 
last five years of his life in supermax confinement: 24 hours a day, 
seven days a week, in an 8X10 foot cell. When I tell young Irish 
Americans about this they are shocked that an Irishman would be treated 
so cruelly by British jailers.

Last week I was visiting my brothers Bomani Shakur and Jason Robb. 
Bomani and Jason, along with three others, are awaiting execution for 
their parts in a prison uprising in Lucasville, Ohio in 1993. There is 
no evidence that any of the five was involved in any killings that took 
place during the uprising but they led a movement to convince prisoners 
not to inform on other prisoners regarding any events that took place 
during the uprising. Bomani and Jason were offered deals by the state of 
Ohio to get very reduced sentences if they testified against other 
prisoners but they refused to do so and chose to save their souls at the 
possible cost of their lives. As punishment, the state fabricated 
evidence of guilt and withheld evidence of their innocence and 
stage-managed a series of trials that resulted in death penalties. The 
five men remain steadfast friends and comrades. Two are white, two 
black, one Sunni Muslim.

They lived the past twenty years in supermax confinement: 23 hours a 
day, seven days a week, in an 8X10 foot cell. One hour they spend alone 
in a bigger cell, exercising. That is, until recently.

In January 2011, after reading accounts of the Irish hunger strikes of 
1980-81 and of the life of Bobby Sands, three of the men went on hunger 
strike to demand contact with each other and open visits, where they 
could touch their friends and family and break bread together with them. 
This we have been doing since the victorious end of their hunger strike, 
although Bomani and Jason remain chained to separate picnic tables 
during the visits.

Yesterday, we bought a small cake from the vending machine in the 
visiting room. Jason, who is an accomplished artist, used the crayons 
and paper from the children’s play area of the visiting room to make 
birthday cards reading “Happy Birthday Bobby” and “Always Remember.” He 
constructed a birthday candle from paper, with a “flame” on the top, to 
decorate the cake. Together we celebrated Bobby’s life and his ongoing 
contribution to freedom everywhere.

After the victorious hunger strike in Ohio, other prisoners around the 
United States read about Bobby and the Irish hunger strikers. Last year 
30,000 men in California’s prisons went on hunger strike against 
solitary confinement. They organized the strike from a small area of 
isolated confinement called the short corridor that resembles nothing so 
much as the H-Blocks at their height of inhumanity, although these men 
do not even have windows in their cells. The men who organized the 
strike are African-American, Latino, and White. According to one recent 
report the men held all kinds of lively debates in their “pod” in 
Pelican Bay State Prison, but whenever the subject of Bobby Sands and 
the Irish hunger strikes came up the talk changed. “Every time we’d 
start talking about it, we’d notice the pod going quiet—we knew people 
were listening.” The state says that they are leaders of gangs that are 
at war with each other yet they have shown the deepest comradeship. The 
hunger strike lasted some 60 days and it may resume again if rights are 
not granted.

Last month, dozens of prisoners in Menard “administrative segregation” 
(solitary) unit in the state of Illinois went on a hunger and then 
thirst strike for their rights. Again, they cited the example of Bobby 
Sands who, among others, has been responsible not only for politicizing 
large segments of the US prison population but for showing them a way 
that they can fight for their rights through nonviolent resistance.

Soon, I believe, there will be a nation-wide hunger strike in the 
prisons here to protest against the inhumane policy of long-term 
solitary isolation, which since 1983 has put tens of thousands of men 
into total solitary isolation, some of them unable to touch another 
human being for decades.

Now we hear that hundreds of undocumented migrants who are being 
detained in Tacoma in the state of Washington launched a hunger strike – 
on Bobby’s 60th birthday!

All of the Irish hunger strikers and their families, those still with us 
and those who have passed from us, can take great pride in the fact that 
their struggle continues and that their example has given hope to tens 
of thousands of men who are still being held in “concrete tombs” in the 
richest nation in the world.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BOBBY! ALWAYS REMEMBER!

/*Denis O’Hearn* is author of Nothing But an Unfinished Song: Bobby 
Sands, the Irish Hunger Striker Who Ignited a Generation 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001ULCN1W/counterpunchmaga>(Nation 
Books)./

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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