ALTAB ALI “memorial” gives TWO different years when he was murdered!

TOWER HAMLETS COUNCIL must apologise for this outrage against the memory of the victims of racist violence in the East End of London.  

ALTAB ALI “memorial” gives TWO different years when he was murdered!

ALTAB ALI “memorial” gives TWO different years when he was murdered!

TOWER HAMLETS COUNCIL must apologise for this outrage against the memory of the victims of racist violence in the East End of London.  

1810 [1800] [1730] [1630] Hrs GMT London Thursday 23 August 2012.

By © Muhammad Haque.

Altab Ali is the name of the Brick Lane London E1 area youth [aged about 24 years] who has become the central figure in the active history of the struggle for justice against racism in the East End of London. It is this potential that I had been thinking of when I chaired the first historic campaign against in the Commercial Road on the Sunday after Altab Ali was brutally murdered by a small gang of racists.

Had I not been aware of the perspective stated above, I could have allowed the anger the that filled the Grand Palais Cinema Hall to spill out into the streets and leading almost certainly to a serious act of violence with God knows what consequence/s.

Fortunately for all concerned, I had succeeded in containing the anger in that hall, as far as I could be heard by the mostly very angry and outraged Bangladeshi people who had gathered there despite it being a Sunday.

The event took place on 07 May 1978, effectively within 78 hours of the brutal murder of Altab Ali.

The gathering was held dispute the total negligence and indifference of the entirety of the then James Callaghan-fronted Labour Party.

The fact that we averted a violent end to that gathering meant that the Bangladeshi community was spared the indignity of being condemned in the UK media on Monday 08 May 1978.

Had the gathering moved to commit any of the hundreds that the most volatile of those present had wanted to carry out then the papers would have condemned US for responding to the attack on Altab Ali.

As things turned out, the later coverage by the UK mainstream media was very restrained and gave the impression that the community that the martyred Altab Ali had belonged to was as m deserving of support on objective, universal humanitarian grounds,.

Contrast that with the front-page of the London DAILY MAIL of Saturday 11 September 1993. That front page was devoted to the faces of a number of Metropolitan Policemen who had been “violently attacked” by angry demonstrators who had gathered outside the Royal London Hospital on Friday 10 September 1993 as a “vigil” for Quddus Ali.

That the community’s first spontaneous rally against the Altab Ali murder was a dignified but vocal and furious expression of outrage was a credit to all those present and backing action.

I shall later in these commentaries examine the implications of the staged response on 10 September 1993.

Our restraint on Sunday 07 May 1978 has served the argument of the community well ever since.

Yet the local Tower Hamlets Council has not shown the basic decency of respect and recognition to either the martyr himself or indeed to those of us who mobilised the political response to that outrage and violence.

This insult by Tower Hamlets Council must be withdrawn immediately and the Council must apologise to the Bangladeshi community at once. That apology must start with the Council apologising for insulting the memory of the martyr Altab Ali.

Tower Hamlets Council also must remove the two texts of the “history” about the murder of Altab Ali and the community’s response.

The first insult is that the two texts put on the so-called memorial board near the Adler Street bus stop on the Whitechapel Road are carelessly written. So much so that the date of Altab Ali’s murder is relegated to a later section and the “introduction” starts with “in 1994…”  Not 1978. The date of the murder 4th may 1978 occurs later into the texts.

The rest of the texts misrepresent the community’s response and I shall examine those one by one in this series.

But the worst insult is the variety of dates that the texts provide. The English language version, which occurs first, gives the correct date of the murder, 04 May 19

But the next language, Bangla, gives two dates when Altab Ali was murdered!

It mentions the correct date, 04 May 1978

But then it ADDS another, different year when it says Altab Ali was [also!] murdered!

It states that Altab Ali was murdered on the local elections day in 1977.

But in London there were no local elections in 1977 at all.

That the TWO years are mentioned as being Altab Ali’s years of death is bad enough.

that it was allowed to be plastered on the “memorial” committed under the “control of Tower Hamlets Council” is outrage and ignorance beyond condemnation.

[To be continued]