From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: happening in Delhi, and that we did not have to buy an expensive plane ticket and worry about a rapidly dwindling set of dollar bills. So, the cost factor being brought into this argument is doubly perverse. You cannot argue first, that the event is colonialist and then that it would be better if the 'ex-colonized' such as us were kept out of it by holding it in some place geographically near to where you are, where we would never try and catch a flight to unless someone was paying for the ticket. We think it reveals some foresight on the part of the organizers to actually have platforms dispersed in four continents, so that people get a chance to participate even if they don't buy expensive plane tickets. As for your suggestion that the event have better online dissemination strategies, we agree that a discussion list for the platforms, as well as a more imaginative form of web presence on the part of Documenta XI would have helped. (Incidentally, the website - www.documenta.de - has begun to stream the Vienna presentations and the responses on their web site, with the Delhi ones to follow.) 3. The institutional setting of the location of Platform 2 in Delhi - The India Habitat Centre This has been addressed in the introductory remarks prior to the discussion of point 1. 4. The paucity of local participation This charge is not backed by any material evidence. There were five Indian featured panelists out of a total of twenty presentations from four continents. That means 25% of the featured presenters were Indians. The majority of Chairpersons and moderators were from India. And there was no paucity of Indian discussants after each of the presentations. For someone who was not present to pass judgement over the quantity of local participation in the event is very strange. 5. The lack of local back up and research What organizational problems may or may not have occurred due to the quality and level of local institutional back up and research is for the organisers of the event and the curatorial team to judge. We can say that we personally were contacted and met in New Delhi by a researcher working to assist the curatorial team as far back as the January 2000. We also know that this researcher met and had discussions with many other artists and practitioners in Delhi and other parts of India. We were pleasantly surprised to see the curatorial team well briefed about the local scene here, as a result of this and other inputs. 6. . The lack of attention to local concerns - and to the " the spiritual dimension of truth which underpins india's identity even today" At least four of the presentations, by Urvashi Butalia, Dilip Simeon, Shahid Amin and Rustom Bharucha - were specifically addressing difficult and contentious episodes in recent Indian history. By this count, India and concerns that could be called local in New Delhi got top billing. There have been reservations expressed in the discussion about the event on this list about the fact that many of the speakers from outside did not do more than offer a token obeisance to the specificities of history, society and culture in this part of the world. This is a general malaise, and has to do with the self-obsessive nature of much of intellectual production, due to which people are reluctant to productively engage with those elements of experience or discourse that are not immediately available to them. This is more of a problem in the west than it is in intellectual circles in India. Indian intellectuals happen to know more about Europe and North America, than most European and North American Intellectuals know about India. This 'asymmetry of ignorance' that has to do with a skewed intimacy with European intellectual culture and the English language is one of those legacies of colonialism which contributes to the ascent of the Indian intellectual in a global market of ideas. He/she is and is able to appear in some ways far more sophisticated. However, the average Indian intellectual would be just as ignorant or unaware of matters pertaining to Africa, or Latin America, or West, Central and Southeast Asia or even Australia. Intellectuals in India are often pleasantly surprised by how well his/her African counterpart knows the history of Indian cinema, (because of the long history of the hegemony of Indian popular cinema in Africa) but would be hard put to speak about any of the many African cinema cultures with any degree of knowledge or understanding. This is an instance of a never ending chain of the 'asymmetry of ignorance'. As for "the spiritual dimension of truth which underpins india's identity even today", we find any normative statements about 'India's Identity' flawed by their inherent essentialism. To claim, for or on behalf of any culture, greater or lesser reservoirs of 'spirituality' or 'reason' or 'aesthetic sensitivity' is to do violence to the complex and contradictory nature of cultural history. It is also to posit, what in our opinion is, always a false boundary. We have never been able to get a satisfactory answer to the question as to where the boundaries of India's identity lie, and where the boundary of a non-Indian, or western identity begins. with warm regards Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta) -- Shuddhabrata Sengupta SARAI:The New Media Initiative Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road Delhi 110 054 India Phone : (00 91 11) 3960040 From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: happening in Delhi, and that we did not have to buy an expensive plane ticket and worry about a rapidly dwindling set of dollar bills. So, the cost factor being brought into this argument is doubly perverse. You cannot argue first, that the event is colonialist and then that it would be better if the 'ex-colonized' such as us were kept out of it by holding it in some place geographically near to where you are, where we would never try and catch a flight to unless someone was paying for the ticket. We think it reveals some foresight on the part of the organizers to actually have platforms dispersed in four continents, so that people get a chance to participate even if they don't buy expensive plane tickets. As for your suggestion that the event have better online dissemination strategies, we agree that a discussion list for the platforms, as well as a more imaginative form of web presence on the part of Documenta XI would have helped. (Incidentally, the website - www.documenta.de - has begun to stream the Vienna presentations and the responses on their web site, with the Delhi ones to follow.) 3. The institutional setting of the location of Platform 2 in Delhi - The India Habitat Centre This has been addressed in the introductory remarks prior to the discussion of point 1. 4. The paucity of local participation This charge is not backed by any material evidence. There were five Indian featured panelists out of a total of twenty presentations from four continents. That means 25% of the featured presenters were Indians. The majority of Chairpersons and moderators were from India. And there was no paucity of Indian discussants after each of the presentations. For someone who was not present to pass judgement over the quantity of local participation in the event is very strange. 5. The lack of local back up and research What organizational problems may or may not have occurred due to the quality and level of local institutional back up and research is for the organisers of the event and the curatorial team to judge. We can say that we personally were contacted and met in New Delhi by a researcher working to assist the curatorial team as far back as the January 2000. We also know that this researcher met and had discussions with many other artists and practitioners in Delhi and other parts of India. We were pleasantly surprised to see the curatorial team well briefed about the local scene here, as a result of this and other inputs. 6. . The lack of attention to local concerns - and to the " the spiritual dimension of truth which underpins india's identity even today" At least four of the presentations, by Urvashi Butalia, Dilip Simeon, Shahid Amin and Rustom Bharucha - were specifically addressing difficult and contentious episodes in recent Indian history. By this count, India and concerns that could be called local in New Delhi got top billing. There have been reservations expressed in the discussion about the event on this list about the fact that many of the speakers from outside did not do more than offer a token obeisance to the specificities of history, society and culture in this part of the world. This is a general malaise, and has to do with the self-obsessive nature of much of intellectual production, due to which people are reluctant to productively engage with those elements of experience or discourse that are not immediately available to them. This is more of a problem in the west than it is in intellectual circles in India. Indian intellectuals happen to know more about Europe and North America, than most European and North American Intellectuals know about India. This 'asymmetry of ignorance' that has to do with a skewed intimacy with European intellectual culture and the English language is one of those legacies of colonialism which contributes to the ascent of the Indian intellectual in a global market of ideas. He/she is and is able to appear in some ways far more sophisticated. However, the average Indian intellectual would be just as ignorant or unaware of matters pertaining to Africa, or Latin America, or West, Central and Southeast Asia or even Australia. Intellectuals in India are often pleasantly surprised by how well his/her African counterpart knows the history of Indian cinema, (because of the long history of the hegemony of Indian popular cinema in Africa) but would be hard put to speak about any of the many African cinema cultures with any degree of knowledge or understanding. This is an instance of a never ending chain of the 'asymmetry of ignorance'. As for "the spiritual dimension of truth which underpins india's identity even today", we find any normative statements about 'India's Identity' flawed by their inherent essentialism. To claim, for or on behalf of any culture, greater or lesser reservoirs of 'spirituality' or 'reason' or 'aesthetic sensitivity' is to do violence to the complex and contradictory nature of cultural history. It is also to posit, what in our opinion is, always a false boundary. We have never been able to get a satisfactory answer to the question as to where the boundaries of India's identity lie, and where the boundary of a non-Indian, or western identity begins. with warm regards Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta) -- Shuddhabrata Sengupta SARAI:The New Media Initiative Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road Delhi 110 054 India Phone : (00 91 11) 3960040 From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: When I read Catherine David�s texts before I came to see the documenta, I had already gotten the impression that she was resisting works from the other parts of the world. She had used two or three terms like �I�m not interested in culture shopping,� or �I�m not going to have an ethnic feast,� and had said that works from other cultures appear in Europe as exotic or even as neocolonial if they are not contextualized. I was not sure whether this was a defense mechanism, or if she was really thinking these things. After having had some dialogs with her, I think that this is just part of a general preoccupation, so I�m more respectful now of her position. David does seem to have one very strong inclination as an art historian and art critic, which is to contextualize historically. She does not want to show any art object, even a Western object, without making sure that its historicity is apparent in some way. It must be available to the viewer and sufficiently contextualized either by supporting information or by supporting works. I�m basically very sympathetic to this curatorial position. The other preoccupation she has is trying to resist commodification, reification, as it is occurring in the Western art market. I think that the reification of the art object is not the only way that reification takes place, and I did comment upon this to her. Reification cannot be avoided: whatever is put out in an exhibition like the documenta is already reified, and the documenta itself is the most reified art event of Europe or of the world (it has private sponsors, and is seen everywhere as an advertising image, etc.). There is no way to overcome that. One can, however, try to resist it by keeping the documenta from becoming an art festival for the galleries, and I think David has done that. In relation to the �100 Days 100 Guests� program, I raised the question as to whether the exchange through discourse isn�t too easy of a way out. It has of course its advantages: people use a similar code in discourse, which allows 100 guests from everywhere to communicate, and allows a general audience to listen and make sense of it all. However, discourse and intellectual life are also prone to a certain degree of commodification. It is an easy packet to get Geeta Kapur, Gayatri Spivak, and Edward Sa�to Kassel. I see it as a problem that one encapsulates entire cultures by expelling their art works while at the same time including their discourses. It�s like substituing an easily transportable commodity for one which is more difficult and more expensive to install. I think that David�s point of view is that, though a piece of art may sit in the exhibition and look like an exotic object, by the very nature of the people she invites, issues will be raised, the documenta, its concept, and the Euro-American situation may be critiqued, so that contextualizing and historicising is already taking place. I think this is a fair assumption. One statement which she clearly made in the introduction to the shortguide, is that in the art of many non-Western cultures there are local modernities, but not what one might call advanced or avantgarde works. The dynamic, she says, is in other forms of expression: in cinema, theater, literature, music, and in the oral traditions. There are cases in which this is true. For instance she has said that in Iran, cinema is the most advanced art form, and we all seem to have the same impression. But I wouldn�t say that this is true for India, for Indonesia, Korea, nor the Philippines, because I know that in these countries, the visual arts have a very definite positioning within the cultural complex. The same is true for Singapore and Thailand, and certainly South Africa (where David took Kentridge from), has one of the most vital visual art scenes. And Cuba�s, as we know, is one of the most advanced in South America, in terms not only of the production of art, but having become the point of convergence for the Latin American avantgarde. I have actually had quite a lot of problems with this assumption. Even though she wants to open up the critical discourse on art, she is still protecting the nature of the art object as it has developed in the West. Also, she is more comfortable addressing the other arts, where strong intervention from her is not required. She is interested in cinema, but she is not a curator of film. Literature, music, and theatre are not her fields either, so she isn�t held responsible when she says there is a greater dynamic in these areas. It is easier for her to protect a certain ground where she is very particular in what she wants to show. David is very stringent and has a clear idea of where the avantgarde comes out of modernity. She has narrowed it down from the general historical avantgarde to what she calles �critical art.� This is a critical intervention into the avantgarde itself. She understands very clearly the ways in which artists have intervened in, disrupted, and interrogated urban lives, society, and contemporary history, artistic positions commonly found in Europe and the USA, and to an extent in Latin America. She is much more confident and convinced about these, and the �rest� she is literally seeing as simply the rest. In response to her comment that there exists �elsewhere� some other dynamic, I said to her that she is speaking as though it is an abstract dynamic. I believe this is a shortcut, and not a real investigation of the cultures involved. One of the reasons for her position, is that in these other art forms, (music, performing arts, cinema, etc.), the axis between the traditional form and the popular, urban form is more easily located. And that is what usually interests the Western intellectual, critic or curator. One thing I would like to add is that, though I come from India, I�m no longer interesed in repeatedly telling European curators that they must include Asian art in their exhibitions. There is a certain kind of parallel developement of regions now, and that�s for the best. I�m not saying that regionalism is important; what I�m saying is that there are parallel expositions and parallel discourses, and it�s not necessary to have everything come to Europe or go to America. If it happens, then good: it means that there is a greater balance of exchange, that a new form of internationalism is developing. On the other hand, it doesn�t seem to trouble me very much anymore. One can now be sure that there will be something in Kwangju, or in Queensland, or in Johannesburg. Sao Paulo has always had an interesting viewpoint. I would not be very concerned that the documenta X doesn�t have more Asian or African artists. Of course, it would have been a more complete understanding of contemporary art, and if she is interested in the historical avantgarde then she should have taken into account the historical avantgarde in different parts of the world. If she means to present just the Euro-American avantgarde with supplementary discourses, it remains just one point of view, and she and other curators will have to go elsewhere to see what�s happening in the world. If David said that she was going to present a resume of contemporary culture, this is not represented by the actual exhibition. But, if she claims to be interested in the deconstruction of cultural practices through very rapid (and often destructive) processes of urban acculturation, then I think that she has made her point. In my mind, she has created a phenomenology of urban culture in the European-American context, concentrated (if you have noticed the works) on negative species, on species of destruction and death, of abuse and marginilization of peoples and populations in Western cultures. There is definetely a point of view on which she is putting a critical edge. However, the objects she recognizes come out of the Western avantgarde. She doesn�t seem to recognize other objects, or when she does recognize them, she fears that they are �exotic.� To some degree, as a European curator she makes a very exclusive choice in the matter, and that choice is based on criteria that come out of Western modernism. How radically she makes her choices, or whatever cutting edge she tries to give the exhibition, she is still in an exclusionary mode rather than in an inclusive one. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: To the casual observer, Microsoft seems to have changed its ways. Closer inspection shows that it remains a heavy-handed monopolist THREE things have changed for Microsoft, the world�s biggest software company, since it was declared an �abusive monopolist� and ordered to be split in two by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson last year. After an appeals-court hearing in February, which went well for the company, the threat of break-up seems to have receded. Second, Microsoft has devised a new strategy, called .NET, under which it will try to recast itself as a provider of Internet-based software services rather than PC-based products, and thus grab a large share of the potentially vast new market for �web services�. And third, even though its profits and share price have held up far better than they have at technology companies that depend on hardware sales or telecoms-equipment orders, Microsoft has been doing its best to seem to have abandoned its old monopolistic behaviour. It is not that Microsoft admits any wrongdoing in its antitrust case, you understand. But it has twigged that good behaviour may undermine Judge Jackson�s contention that it is predatory and untrustworthy�and might encourage the appeals court to overturn his ruling. Playing well with others also fits with Microsoft�s new software strategy, which, unusually, depends heavily on open (rather than proprietary) standards and on co-operation with other software makers. So has Microsoft really become a kinder, gentler company? There is some evidence that it has. Take, for instance, its long-standing opposition to �open-source� software, in which the source code revealing a program�s inner workings is made freely available. Microsoft has only ever made its own source code available to a handful of close allies. Last month, however, the firm announced that it would grant around 1,000 of its largest corporate customers access to 95% of the source code of its Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems. Unlike true open-source software, whose openness means that bugs can be more easily found and fixed, the Windows source code will be made available only on condition that it is not modified. Even so, it will help large firms to ensure that their own software works smoothly with Windows. Another area in which Microsoft seems to have taken a step towards the co-operative, open approach of the Internet is in the development of new standards for web services, which have such quirky names as XML, SOAP, UDDI and WSDL. Microsoft is generally deemed to have been a well-behaved participant in the standard-setting process�in marked contrast to the old Microsoft, which often produced its own incompatible versions of industry standards. This time around, says David Winer, an independent software engineer who is working on the SOAP standard, the company seems to have realised that the emergence of unified standards is in its own best interests. That does not necessarily mean that Microsoft is a willing convert, however. �I think the world changed, and it�s sucking them along with it,� says Mr Winer. In order to convince its rivals that it really does want their products to work together, Microsoft recently hired Dan�l Lewin to act as its ambassador to Silicon Valley, where he has worked for 25 years at several firms, including Apple and NeXT. Mr Lewin insists that, when it comes to interoperability with other firms� products and embracing open standards, Microsoft has changed. �This is a fundamental movement,� he says. Another sign of change is Microsoft�s new advertising campaign, in which the company�s usual po-facedness is replaced by a more humorous approach, including a hitherto unseen ability to laugh at itself. One ad pokes fun at Clippy, the annoying paperclip character that pops up to provide help to users of Office, and jokes that the XP in Office XP, the latest version of the software, stands for �ex-paperclip�. For a company that never normally admits mistakes and championed the use of the word �issue� in place of �bug�, this is quite a change. No laughing matter Yet despite all this, there are good reasons to be sceptical about Microsoft�s intentions (or even ability) to reform itself. Granting limited access to the Windows source code, for example, may help to soften Microsoft�s image, but it is a far cry from embracing the open-source model. Microsoft has falsely portrayed itself as the champion of open standards in the past, notably during its �browser war� with Netscape, only to revert to its old tactics later. Might the company not simply be waiting for XML, SOAP and the other new standards to take off, ask its critics, before hijacking them by creating its own proprietary versions? Such fears were heightened last month when Microsoft announced a batch of services, codenamed HailStorm, that form part of its .NET strategy. Just as Windows provides PC programmers with access to basic functions, such as drawing on the screen or accessing the network, HailStorm will provide similar �building block� functions (e-mail, instant messaging and so on) for programmers to incorporate into the software for their web-based services. The idea is that users will sign up with Microsoft for HailStorm services and pay a monthly fee; this will enable them to use web services that rely on HailStorm�s building blocks. Microsoft hopes that this will make .NET an attractive platform for programmers, and thus encourage them to adopt .NET rather than the approach based on Java, a programming language that is being promoted by Microsoft�s rivals, chief among them Sun Microsystems. Already, American Express, eBay, Expedia and Groove Networks have all announced plans to build .NET web services using HailStorm. What is worrying, however, is that HailStorm will be closely integrated with Windows XP, the next version of Windows, so that once a user has logged into Windows no further action is required to make use of HailStorm services. Indeed, the log-on and registration systems for Windows XP and HailStorm will be the same. Microsoft will, in other words, be able to turn millions of Windows users into HailStorm users, and to offer programmers an enormous potential audience for .NET web services. Similarly, by funnelling millions of users into HailStorm from HotMail and MSN, its Internet properties, Microsoft may be able to sign up as many as 100m HailStorm users by the end of 2003. The firm thus has a golden opportunity to exploit the dominance of Windows to ensure that .NET takes off. It is, as one analyst puts it, �vintage Microsoft�. The company is up to its old tricks in other ways, too. Windows XP contains several new functions, including media-playback and remote-troubleshooting features, that previously required the purchase of additional software. Makers of such software may now face the same fate as Netscape�Microsoft can extinguish them whenever it chooses. Windows XP also includes the latest version of Microsoft�s music and video player, Windows Media Player 8, which will not work with previous versions of Windows. As well as encouraging users to switch to Windows XP, it contains a new music-compression format called WMA, which is being positioned as an alternative to the popular MP3 format. Microsoft argues, with good reason, that WMA has several technical advantages over MP3, including smaller file-sizes; but the fact remains that Microsoft is using the clout of Windows to promote its own playback software and music format. The parallels with the Netscape case, in which Microsoft used Windows to promote its web browser, are ominously clear. In short, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, if Microsoft has changed at all, it has done so only superficially. Inside the software industry�s 800-pound gorilla, the heart of an incorrigible monopolist beats still. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: June 26, 2001 Freelancers Win in Case of Work Kept in Databases By LINDA GREENHOUSE WASHINGTON, June 25 � The Supreme Court ruled today that a group of newspaper and magazine publishers infringed the copyrights of freelance contributors by making their articles accessible without permission in electronic databases after publication. As a result, the publishers, including The New York Times, face the prospect of paying substantial damages to the six freelancers who brought the lawsuit in 1993 and perhaps to thousands of others who have joined in three class-action lawsuits against providers of electronic databases, which the court also found liable for copyright infringement today. The court did not rule today on a remedy for the violation that it found in a 7-to-2 majority opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The case now returns to Federal District Court in Manhattan. In a 1999 ruling against the publishers, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit did not address the remedy issue. There are a number of unresolved questions that were not part of the Supreme Court case and that may take months or years to resolve, lawyers involved in the case said today. The Times and the other publishers, Time Inc. and Newsday, had warned the Supreme Court that a finding of liability would lead them to remove freelance contributions from the databases, a threat that the court appeared to have found something of an irritant. "Speculation about future harms is no basis for this court to shrink authorial rights," Justice Ginsburg said. Referring to the licensing arrangements that are commonly used to apportion royalties in the music industry, she said the parties to the case "may draw on numerous models for distributing copyrighted words and remunerating authors for their distribution." Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company and publisher of The Times, said today that the company "will now undertake the difficult and sad process of removing significant portions from its electronic historical archive." He added, "Unfortunately, today's decision means that everyone loses." The Times Company said in a statement that freelance writers who wanted their articles to remain in the electronic archives should notify the company. Since the mid-1990's, The Times and most other publishers that use freelance work have required authors to waive their electronic republication rights. For that reason, the decision today has little prospective importance in terms of changing current industry practice. But liability for past infringement could be considerable, depending in part on how the lower courts deal with complex statute of limitations issues. It is not clear, for example, whether there has been a new infringement each time a freelance article has been made available for viewing on a user's computer screen. Jonathan Tasini, president of the National Writers Union and the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, said in a statement, "Now it's time for the media industry to pay creators their fair share and let's sit down and negotiate over this today." In 1993, the union, which has 7,000 members, set up a "publication rights clearinghouse" through which writers can register their work and publishers can track copyright ownership and payment obligations. The case, New York Times Company v. Tasini, No. 00-201, dealt only with freelance work; publishers own the copyright on articles produced by staff members. The three publishers in the case license their contents to Lexis/Nexis, an electronic database by which individual articles are retrieved in a text-only format. The Times has a separate arrangement with another defendant in the case, University Microfilms International, which reproduces Times material in other electronic formats that also result in the display of individual articles. It was this feature � that what the electronic user retrieves, views or downloads is an individual article, divorced from its original context � that was most significant for the court's legal analysis. The case called on the court to interpret a section of the Copyright Act of 1976 that gives newspapers and magazines, which hold a collective copyright in the entirety of each issue, the right also to publish "any revision of that collective work." The question for the court was whether the electronic version was a revision or something else, in which case the copyright on individual articles would revert to any freelance contributors who had not agreed to give up that right. The publishers argued that the electronic versions were simply a technologically more sophisticated version of the printed issues that should be seen as a mere "revision" under the "media-neutral" approach of the Copyright Act. In a dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens, who was joined by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, said there was nothing more to the case than that. "Neither the conversion of the print publishers' collective works from printed to electronic form, nor the transmission of those electronic versions of the collective works to the electronic databases, nor even the actions of the electronic databases once they receive those electronic versions does anything to deprive those electronic versions of their status as mere `revisions' of the original collective works," Justice Stevens said. But Justice Ginsburg's majority opinion said the publishers' "encompassing construction" of their republication privilege was "unacceptable." She said the massive database, encompassing many published issues, "no more constitutes a `revision' of each constituent edition than a 400-page novel quoting a sonnet in passing would represent a `revision' of that poem." The electronic databases are not simply modern versions of old-fashioned microfilm, Justice Ginsburg said. Even though a microfilm roll combines multiple editions, "the user first encounters the article in context," she said, in contrast to someone calling up an article on their computer, where individual articles appear "disconnected from their original context." She said the principle of media neutrality "should protect the authors' rights in the individual articles to the extent those articles are now presented individually, outside the collective work context, within the databases' new media." The court may soon have a chance to expand on the role of context that Justice Ginsburg emphasized. National Geographic said today that it would soon file an appeal to the Supreme Court from a ruling by the federal appeals court in Atlanta, which said that a 30-disc CD-ROM set that reproduced every page of every issue of the magazine was a new work rather than a revision, even though each article appeared in its original context. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Cracking the Code of Online Censorship By JENNIFER 8. LEE EVERY year the Electronic Frontier Foundation hands out its Pioneer Awards to people who have played crucial roles in the history of technology. Recipients have included visionaries like Ivan Sutherland, creator of some of the first computer graphics programs; Douglas C. Engelbart, an inventor of the mouse; and Linus Torvalds, inventor of the popular Linux operating system. This year one of the three winners was Seth Finkelstein, an activist who decrypts filtering programs, the software used by private companies, libraries and schools to block out undesirable sites. As a founder of the Censorware Project, an anti-filtering advocacy group, Mr. Finkelstein has influenced public debate and legal decisions, including a First Amendment case on filtering policy at a public library in Virginia. But most people have probably never heard of him, and until recently that is the way Mr. Finkelstein, a reclusive 36-year-old computer programmer, wanted it. Over the last six years he has spent hundreds of hours decrypting the blacklists of popular Web filtering programs like Cyber Patrol and X-Gear. Most filters work by sending out programs that comb the Web for banned words and then produce a list of Web sites containing those words. Those sites are compiled into the closely guarded blacklists that Mr. Finkelstein tries to uncover. But don't call him a hacker. He gets prickly when he hears that word. Instead he describes himself as a civil-libertarian software engineer. Mr. Finkelstein contends that filtering is not only inherently flawed but that in many cases it even acts as a deliberate censor. Many of the Web sites on the blacklists � feminist sites, gay and lesbian information sites, health sites and religious sites � are more political than pornographic in nature. "This is inevitable," Mr. Finkelstein said. "Once you give censors free rein, they go after sex. They go after sex education. They go after feminism. They go after gay rights." The makers of filtering software say that criticism of their products' accuracy is old news and they are addressing the problems. "Technology evolves," said Susan Getgood, vice president for home and education markets at SurfControl, a maker of Web and e- mail filtering products. "It is a long way from the Model T to the BMW Z3 and a long way from the early days of filtering to the products on the market today." But Mr. Finkelstein argues that even if filters were free of political bias, they would block some sites in error because they cannot understand context. Most of the software no longer mistakenly blocks sites involving breast cancer or chicken breast recipes, but much of the blocking remains problematic nonetheless. Mr. Finkelstein said he was now analyzing a list that blocked the National Institutes of Health's Spanish-language site on diabetes. The Spanish word hora, which means hour and is used often on the page, also happens to be a Swedish word for prostitute. "Computers are extremely stupid," he said. "Talk to any computer scientists, not the marketing people. They'll tell you artificial intelligence cannot determine context." Mr. Finkelstein grew up in the Bronx, where his interest in cryptography was fostered by Sherlock Holmes tales and newspaper cryptograms. He studied mathematics and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the goal of becoming a theoretical physicist. When he was rejected by all the top graduate physics programs, he said, he turned to computer programming as a job that paid the bills. But he finds that his technical skills have more meaning in urgent social debates. Mr. Finkelstein said he began cracking the filtering blacklists in 1995 because he was concerned about how the software was being promoted as an alternative to government censorship. "There was a big social campaign among civil libertarians to talk up and tout censorware as both a legal and social argument against government censorship," he said. "While I did not oppose the legal argument, I thought strongly that the social campaign was a huge mistake.` To crack a filter, Mr. Finkelstein engages in a dance of decryption that is part mathematics, part intuition and part brute force. In 1998, his blend of technical skills and political convictions helped the American Civil Liberties Union win a federal lawsuit challenging the library Internet filtering policy in Loudoun County, Va., on First Amendment grounds. Among the sites that the organization said the library blocked was an informative site on safe sex and the American Association of University Women's Maryland site. A federal judge ruled against the library. The A.C.L.U. and the American Library Association have also filed suits challenging the Children's Internet Protection Act, passed by Congress last year. The law requires that libraries receiving federal financing and discounts for Internet service under certain federal statutes must install filtering software. Mr. Finkelstein's work exposes him to the threat of legal action, too. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act generally forbids the circumvention of digital encryptions, although one of the exemptions granted by the Librarian of Congress is for the decryption of blacklists, largely because of Mr. Finkelstein's lobbying. But even if decrypting the blacklists may be legal, releasing them to the public may not be, since they are a form of intellectual property. He said his concerns about the potential for legal trouble were validated when two computer programmers who posted a program that could circumvent Cyber Patrol were sued by Mattel, which was then the parent company of the software's maker. In a settlement last year the programmers agreed to stop posting it on the Web. So Mr. Finkelstein had until recently worked relatively anonymously from his cluttered apartment in Cambridge, Mass., passing his information to journalists, lawyers and other activists to publicize. Much of his work involves analyzing and documenting incongruities in filtering software. In a report on SmartFilter that he wrote a couple of years ago, for example, Mr. Finkelstein pointed out that it blocked WrestlePages ("The best source for wrestling news"); MotoWorld.com, a motorcycle sport magazine produced by ESPN; and Affirmation: Gay and Lesbian Mormons, a support site. Company officials at Secure Computing (news/quote), which makes SmartFilter, declined to be interviewed about the software but released a statement. "It is not technology such as SmartFilter that makes the rules; it is organizations themselves," it said. Mr. Finkelstein is particularly annoyed that language translation sites are blocked simply because they can circumvent filters. Visitors to a language translation site can enter the Web address of a banned site and then see a translation at a different address. "It shows that censorware is about control, not filtering," he said. So Mr. Finkelstein intends to continue decrypting, as he scoffs at claims that computer technology is close to acquiring the contextual intelligence needed to identify inappropriate sites. "It will be a phenomenal advance," he said of contextual ability. "They will get the equivalent of a Nobel Prize. They will not be selling it in a tawdry program for a couple of hundred dollars." From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: "The best guide yet on a subject of central importance to anyone interested in the future of media, and the growing marriage between art and science....The collection is historically significant, given that nobody has ever woven together the different threads, thoughts and impulses that become multimedia, a new form both of media and culture.... The book flows skillfully from one idea to the next, each section building on the one that preceded it." - Jon Katz, Slashdot "In the Norton Anthology tradition, Packer and Jordan bring together seminal contributions that artists and scientists have made to the field of computer-human interaction... An evocative whirlwind tour through 100 years of work... Excellent..." - S. Joy Mountford, Wired "[MULTIMEDIA is] a key source book in the field of art, science and technology. This book is excellent in all respects." - Annick Bureaud, Leonardo Digital Reviews "Readers interested in the history of multimedia should be enthralled by this collection of hard-to-find essays.... A remarkable blending of past and present, these essays remind us that today's wondrous inventions didn't just spring into existence out of nothingness." - Booklist MULTIMEDIA: FROM WAGNER TO VIRTUAL REALITY Table of Contents Foreword by William Gibson Overture by Randall Packer and Ken Jordan I. Integration 1. Richard Wagner, "Outlines of the Artwork of the Future" 2. F. T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra, Emilio Settimelli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla, Remo Chiti, "The Futurist Cinema" 3. L�l�holy-Nagy, "Theater, Circus, Variety" 4. Richard Higgins, "Intermedia" 5. Billy Kl�"The Great Northeastern Power Failure" 6. Nam June Paik, "Cybernated Art" and "Art and Satellite" II. Interactivity 7. Norbert Wiener, "Cybernetics in History" 8. J.C.R. Licklider, "Man-Computer Symbiosis" 9. Douglas Engelbart, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" 10. John Cage, "Diary: Audience 1966" 11. Roy Ascott, "Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision" 12. Myron Krueger, "Responsive Environments" 13. Alan Kay, "User Interface: A Personal View" III. Hypermedia 14. Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" 15. Ted Nelson, excerpt from Computer Lib/Dream Machines 16. Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, "Personal Dynamic Media" 17. Marc Canter, "The New Workstation: CD ROM Authoring Systems" 18. Tim Berners-Lee, "Information Management: A Proposal" 19. George Landow and Paul Delany, "Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies: The State of the Art" IV. Immersion 20. Morton Heilig, "The Cinema of the Future" 21. Ivan Sutherland, "The Ultimate Display" 22. Scott Fisher, "Virtual Interface Environments" 23. William Gibson, "Academy Leader" 24. Marcos Novak, "Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace" 25. Daniel Sandin, Thomas DeFanti, and Carolina Cruz-Neira, "A Room with a View" V. Narrativity 26. William Burroughs, "The Future of the Novel" 27. Allan Kaprow, "Untitled Guidelines for Happenings" 28. Bill Viola, "Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?" 29. Lynn Hershman, "The Fantasy Beyond Control" 30. Roy Ascott, "Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?" 31. Pavel Curtis, "Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities" 32. Pierre L�, "The Art and Architecture of Cyberspace" -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: is the technical-programming team and the other is composed of media practitioners and researchers. While the techie team has taken apart the hardware to explain how it all works and have ensured that the Linux operating system and various free software that are being used are running smoothly, the team of old and new media practitioners have imparted a variety of skills. These include a knowledge and facility with the software of course, but also and very importantly, the opening out of modes of narrative and reflection upon one's experiences and environment. So there were sessions in which photographs were analysed, stories written singly and collaboratively, sounds recorded, soundscapes developed, the economic and social layers within the basti unpeeled, and so on. The software and the media tools that were available were: drawing sheets, crayons, simple audio recorders, an instamatic camera, a scanner, and GIMP and Star Office on a Gnome desktop with innumerable games! (now Audacity - a sound editing software - has also been added) This process that we all went through was exciting and fulfilling for all of us - participants and practitioners, but during this we faced a number of what can be termed as problems as far as appropriate technology is concerned. The games that the participants played, even though very useful in making them comfortable with the keyboard and great fun, were unable to speak to them of their personal experience of mobility, space and time. Basically there were no familiar cultural referents in the design. The even bigger problem was that in the process of learning text, image and sound editing, their descriptions and understanding of an experience became fragmented. The software began to take over the complex web of imagination, and began to direct them in fairly unidirectional ways. This is because it expects of you to represent your experience, or your space, in only one media at a time. The mode in which they described their experience of space and time of their everyday routine, was a complex web of images, sounds and narrations. These narrations, in the speaking and in the writing, portrayed different levels of intensities. The chaos and the immediacy of the spoken narration was brought into order in the act of writing. For example, if the spoken text describing a road accident gave a very visualized rendering of the incident with a complex soundscape, the written text would be not only much more ordered, but it would also bring in the self of the writer in very direct ways. In that sense, the registers of representation would change with the media of narration. But the fact is that if one is to truly "experience" the narrative of the incident as an audience, it would best emerge when all the narrations are made available to us. And this probably holds true for the creator as well. It can be argued that this fragmentation will lessen once there is a greater facility with using software, or by using specifically multi media software, like Director for example. Personally, as someone who has been educated as a filmmaker and has worked as one, and thus comfortable in thinking about sound, image and text in connected ways, I still find my work on a computer unable to become adequately woven together. And where software like Director is concerned, we cannot use it as we are working on configurations for the community which are low-cost, as also inspired and informed by the free software model. This is very pertinent as community media labs cannot afford to buy expensive software - as a matter of fact we have also been working on finding out low-cost hardware solutions as well - nor can they be pirated as NASSCOM, India's software 'police' organisation, is working overtime to ensure that. But more importantly, we feel that the ideas that invigorate the free software model: sharing, collaboration, open distribution and modification, are ideas that are part of the philosophical basis of the CyberMohalla project. Although here I must add that there is one worrying aspect of much of the software design that is happening within the free software model - too often it merely replicates what proprietary software does, and does not seek a fundamentally different perceptual experience of the software. The argument for this is obvious - there is need to prove that free software can do it as well - but it can still lead to a stilling of newer experiential models of software, newer understandings of interfaces. Yet another problem: It seemed to us that the collaborative nature of describing a collective experience or space that the participants were very comfortable with in oral renditions began to get very individuated. In the normal course of the day, while they would share all their other resources - such as food, transport money etc. - they would not share their files. I cannot definitely say that this is due to the ways software makes you relate to them, but we are wondering if that may have a role to play. After all, in all their oral narratives, many voices jostled together to express an experience� So when we media practitioners began to discuss this with the programmers, we started thinking about "what are the different possible software structures that can emerge from this problem?" The conceptual derivative that has emerged for us - by which creativity and expressivity can be adequately addressed - is the notion of "interlinked media", where image, sound and text (spoken and written) are seen as part of an unravelable web within the narration of an experience. This is the primary experience from which the Coding Collaboration note emerged, and here the terms of collaboration are not between programmers and other programmers but between programmers and participants, programmers and practitioners. The participants here, and in this case completely marginal to the digital wave (sometimes conceptualized as those on the other side of the digital divide), have given rise to an enigmatic problem. The response to this problem could give rise to technological modifications which are unexpected. -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Finally, Kiran walked in and told the most remarkable story of all. From her classroom they could not see what was going on, their windows didn' t face the WTC. But they saw people running in the streets. When she announced to the class of 13-year-olds that perhaps it was an accident since the cause was unknown, one kid pointed out that it was 9:30 in the morning, it was two separate incidents, it was obviously on purpose. Another said maybe it was the Puerto Ricans from Vieques (that' s the island where the US Navy practices bombing and the site of recent protests). When Kiran left the class to go to the other side of the building to see for herself she saw one of the one of the towers come down. Fellow teachers were talking about attacks on the Pentagon and in Pittsburgh. A parent came screaming down the hall: the planes are coming, the planes are coming. from www.chalomumbai.com --------------------------------- Terrorist Attacks on U.S. - How can you help? Donate cash, emergency relief information inYahoo! News. --0-1889309596-1000408402=:6625 Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
On Tuesday, September 11
 By: Rehan Ansari
 September 13,2001

I woke up this morning to an absolutely gorgeous blue day outside my window in Brooklyn, New York and hysterical voices over the television. As I got out of my room, a housemate, Mark, walked in and said the World Trade Center Towers were burning and one of them had collapsed. I went with him to the television screaming in his room and within minutes saw the other twin tower give way. The event on the screen was so filmi, it didn't register.

The doorbell rang frantically. It was Gabriel, a young woman asking for Heidi, another housemate. They both work for the mayor's office and September 11 being municipal election day, they were supervising polling booths and assigned Wall St. She had seen the WTC burning and had immediately started moving away from the area. She walked from Fulton Street in the financial district over the Brooklyn Bridge to this house in Fort Greene in Brooklyn (a walk that should been an hour-long stroll in normal circumstances).

She was intensely worried that Heidi had not come back nor phoned her safety. Since the time she had left the area, the 110 storey buildings had essentially collapsed on everybody on Wall St.
After letting a cup of tea compose me, I walked out of the house to a nearby park which gives a panoramic view of south Manhattan from across the East River. It was still a perfectly blue sky and the Fort Greene neighbourhood, a remarkable example of mid 19th century domestic architecture, as beautiful as ever. The highest point in the park has The Martyr' s Monument, a symbolic tomb of 11,500 men who died on British prison ships during the Revolutionary War. From the vantage point of the monument I saw a huge plume of black and brown smoke rising from where the WTC stood. The plume was going straight up in the air.

I went back to the house to call everybody that I knew who was working in Manhattan. As I got in another co-worker of Heidi showed up, sweating profusely and covered with soot, asking if she made it back. We went inside and Chazz told me of the scene at the Brooklyn Bridge: people walking in unbroken numbers from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Paper was flying everywhere, burnt currency and, most of all, legal-sized paper. He swore some of the ash that was falling was human remains. He also asked where I was from. When I told him I was from Pakistan in New York for the summer he said, gently, that the xenophobia is going to begin and I better keep my face and accent from the streets. By the end of the day, with the media painting a picture in the face of unclaimed responsibility - somehow bin Ladin's operatives were more and more visible to surveillance and leaving trails everywhere as the day progressed, whereas they were invisible over the course of the planning of this incredible operation - I had shaved off my beard.

From the dark clouds of irresponsible statements over the course of the day, including those of news anchors Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and ex general Schwarzkopf, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani' s shone through. He said no vigilante justice would be tolerated. Heidi finally called but there was little relief as one other housemate, Kiran, a school teacher in Chinatown had still not been heard of. Two friends who worked on Wall St called. Devi, who worked in the next building from WTC, spoke of the sky going black, smoke filled elevator shafts and having been evacuated wearing gas masks. Her husband Sameer spoke about watching the planes crash into WTC from his office where he was conducting a morning meeting.

Finally, Kiran walked in and told the most remarkable story of all. From her classroom they could not see what was going on, their windows didn' t face the WTC. But they saw people running in the streets. When she announced to the class of 13-year-olds that perhaps it was an accident since the cause was unknown, one kid pointed out that it was 9:30 in the morning, it was two separate incidents, it was obviously on purpose. Another said maybe it was the Puerto Ricans from Vieques (that' s the island where the US Navy practices bombing and the site of recent protests). When Kiran left the class to go to the other side of the building to see for herself she saw one of the one of the towers come down. Fellow teachers were talking about attacks on the Pentagon and in Pittsburgh. A parent came screaming down the hall: the planes are coming, the planes are coming.

from www.chalomumbai.com


Terrorist Attacks on U.S. - How can you help?
Donate cash, emergency relief information in Yahoo! News. --0-1889309596-1000408402=:6625-- From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: STATEMENT BY THE FORUM OF INDIAN LEFTISTS ON THE EVENTS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 We, the members of the Forum of Indian Leftists, deeply grieve the human loss sustained in the attacks on New York City and Washington of September 11, 2001. Our deepest condolences go out to the friends and loved ones of those who were killed or injured. We see these actions not as an attack on America alone, but as an assault on humanity in general. As citizens of the world, we unequivocally condemn these acts of horrific and unconscionable violence. We call on all those who deplore such acts to act now to prevent the proliferation of hatred, retribution, and war. We condemn the precipitous drive to put the world on a war footing against an as yet unconfirmed assailant--a move that can only compound the already immense human tragedy we have witnessed. We reiterate our belief that violence is not the solution to violence, nor can it provide a solution to longstanding political problems anywhere in the globe. It is of critical importance to stand united at this moment and denounce all acts of violence against civilians, whether by terrorists, the state, or our fellow civilians. A cycle of violence can only be broken if we work to create alternatives to violent retaliation. In the words of M.K. Gandhi, "An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind." Therefore we stand together to demand in the loudest possible voice that the US state not retaliate with violence, and in the same voice to condemn any attempts to undermine civilian life and democratic freedoms in New York City, Washington, and elsewhere in the USA. As a group with a particular stake in working for peace and justice in India and its fellow South Asian nations, we are especially distressed by certain responses to this tragedy from within India. At a time when the world must stand together in unity and find ways toward peace and justice for all, we condemn polarizing and opportunistic statements from members of the Indian government and sections of the Indian press suggesting that certain nation-states such as India, Israel, and the USA must band together against others such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. We do not believe that advocating retribution against the scapegoat of "Islamic Fundamentalism" reflects the rational, democratic, non-violent, and tolerant values espoused by the majority of the Indian people. We call on the Indian government to respond to this calamity in a way that befits these values, and to stand firm against demands for uncritical support and abetment of acts of vengeance. As ordinary citizens, groups, and governments reflect and deliberate upon their responses to this terrible tragedy, we hope that all nations and peoples will use this opportunity to abandon the pursuit of intolerance, repression, and hatred in favor of reconciliation, solidarity, and reconstruction. In this moment of grief and mourning, let us proclaim our commitment to working towards peace and justice everywhere in the world. ======== 8. Subject: Statement of solidarity for the victims of wanton violence in the USA Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 Organization: South Asia Forum for Human Rights [ Kathmandu, Nepal ] Statement of solidarity for the victims of wanton violence in the USA We the members of South Asia Forum for Human Rights express our anguish and shock over the criminal attacks against innocent people in the United States of America. We express our most sincere sympathy to the victims and families and people of the United States of America. The manner in which these acts of violence were perpetrated by unknown actors or agencies leave no room for doubt about their utter disregard for human life. The use of civilian aircrafts full of innocent travellers as a weapon to strike at buildings housing thousands of people adds a new chapter to the book of horrors that the sickness of the human mind is capable of conceiving.The fact that these violent acts were carried out inside the United States, targeting the biggest commercial centre and the most secure military command centre, shows that today no nation, however powerful and security conscious, is safe from such attacks. Justice demands that the perpetrators of these heinous crime againt innocent persons be found and punished. The world community should assist the United States in this task. However, we would appeal to the USA and other governments that in their search for the perpetrators of these crimes, governments should be careful about the methods they apply. They should use law and established forms of legal investigation to bring the perpetrators to justice. We caution against the use of force, illegal means and methods and indiscriminate unilateral military retaliation, which unfortunately, has been done by powerful western states in the past. Such actions destroy the people's faith in rule of law and justice and cause more innocent deaths. It also perpetuates the cycle of recrimination, revenge and terrorism. We appeal to the leaders of the world governments, particularly the west to strive for a just social and political world order which alone can remove the sense of injustice and discrimination that motivates desperate people to perpetrate such acts of violence against innocent peoples. ______ #9. 13 September 2001 President George W Bush President of the United States of America. Dear Mr President, I am submitting to you condolences on behalf of concerned scholars, writers, human rights activists and others - Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Swedes, British, Americans and others - expressing our deep sympathies on the very sad loss of innocent American and other lives on 11 September 2001 in various US cities as a result of a terrible terrorist slaughter. Dr. Ishtiaq Ahmed Campaign Organizer Associate Professor Department of Political Science Stockholm University SWEDEN. SOUTH ASIANS AND OTHER PEACE-LOVING PEOPLE OF THE WORLD CONDEMN TERRORIST ATTACKS AGAINST INNOCENT PEOPLE IN US CITIES The terrorist outrage against innocent men, women and children in various US cities on 11 September 2001 is feared to have claimed several thousand lives and inflicted injuries to even more people. Crimes against innocent people are crimes against all humanity and the perpetrators of these grotesque crimes should be brought to justice. At the same time, it is important that the Government of the United States does not fall prey to the same sort of perverted psychology that drives fanatics to perpetuate terrorist acts against innocent people. Military retaliation and revenge can result in grievous injury to innocent lives in areas suspected of harbouring suspects. Just as civilized governments are not deterred by dastardly acts of terror similarly victims of indiscriminate revenge attacks cannot accept that they should be punished for crimes they have not committed. It is therefore important that no action is taken without proper investigation and identification of the culprits. It is imperative that the terrorists involved in the present crime and others all over the world are denied safe haven everywhere, and the whole world community works together to exclude and isolate such barbarians and they are brought to justice. In the longer run one has to consider in a rational and dispassionate manner what drives people to such acts of utter desperation. Unless those causes are removed the spectre of violence will continue to loom large over the horizons the world over. Therefore it is important that justice is provided to all. It is now, more than ever before, necessary to examine seriously the non-violent alternative provided by Mahatma Gandhi and effectively employed by Dr Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the world to challenge and defeat forces representing brute might. 1. Ishtiaq Ahmed Associate Professor of Political Science Stockholm University I support this statement: 2. Dr Ajaz Anwar Lahore, Pakistan. 3. Prof. Hassan Gardezi Ontario, Canada. 4. Harsh Kapoor France. 5. Prof. Asghar Ali Engineer Centre for the Study of Secularism in Society Mumbai, India. 6. Prof. Pervez Hoodbhoy Islamabad, Pakistan 7.Michele Micheletti Associate Professor of Political Science Stockholm University 8.Anil Viakara CEO, Invenio Technologies Cambridge, Massachussetts USA: 9. Rafi Khawaja Software Quality Engineering LifeScan, Inc., Milpitas, CA (408) 942 5754 10. Gulzar Ahmed USA. 11. Prof. Bilal Hashmi USA. 12. Group Captain (rtd), Cecil Chaudhry St. Anthony's High School Lahore, Pakistan. 13. Ameek A. Ponda Sullivan & Worcester LLP One Post Office Square Boston, Massachusetts 02109 14. Dr. Leo Rebello, Senator-Minister for India of the International Parliament for Safety and Peace Bombay 15. Dr. Partha S. Ghosh Director Indian Council of Social Science Research P.O.Box 10528 Aruna Asaf Ali Marg New Delhi-110067 16. Kripa Sundar, Ph.D. Software Engineer USA. 17. Sharmila Gopinathan Software Engineer Boston, USA 18. Pritam Singh Brookes Oxford University UK. 19. J. Sri Raman Convenor Journalists Against Nuclear Weapons & Movement Against Nuclear Weapons Chennai India 20.. Razia Malik, USA 21. Ameek Ponda USA. 22. Robin Khundkar, USA 23. Pritam K. Rohila, Keizer, OR, USA 24. Mustafa Hussain Knastebakken 151.1. DK-2750 Ballerup, Danmark 25. Kaushik Thakrar Business Development Manager Egroupe AB. 26. Colonel Brian Cloughley Writer UK. 27. Prof. Susan M. Akram Associate Professor Boston University School of Law (for identification purposes only). 28. Ilyas Khan Campaigner against Child Labour and Peace Activist, Sweden. 29. Sain Sucha, Writer and publisher, Sweden. 30. Dr Babar Mumtaz Reader, UK. 31. Prof. Bj�Beckman Department of Political Science Stockholm University. 32. Dr Henrik Berglund Researcher and Teacher Department of Political Science Stockholm University. 33. Dr Ghazala Anwar Lecturer, University of Canterbury Christchurch, New Zealand. 34. Geoffrey Cook, Vice Chair East Bay, Sanctuary Covenant Berkeley, California U.S.A. 35. Abul Fazal Mahmud Pakistan. 36. SM & Asha Shahed, Los Angeles, USA. 37. Syeda Khundkar USA. 38. Dr. Zafar Iqbal Health Science Specialist Washington, DC, USA 39. Nuzaira Azam Journalist, USA 40. SM & Asha Shahed, Los Angeles, USA. 41. Fr. Joe Mangalam SJ Movement for Secular Democracy Ahmedabad 42. Sukla Sen India. 43. Prof. A.H. Nayyar Department of Physics Islamabad, Pakistan. 44. T.N.GOPALAN JOURNALIST, CHENNAI, INDIA 4/A PRAJWAL SQUARE, ELANGO NAGAR ANNEXE VIRUGAMPAKKAM CHENNAI 600 092. 45. Ammu Abraham, Women's Centre, Bombay, India. 46. Khalid Lakhani, Chief Executive Officer Rabico, Karachi, Pakistan. 47. R.ARUL, Secretary, PASUMAI THAAYAGAM, PASUMAI THAAYAGAM (Green Mother Land), No. 9,(old No: 5) Lynwood Lane, Mahalingapuram, CHENNAI -600 034, India. 48. Dr. Yahya Hassan Bajwa (Member World Conference on Religion and Peace/Peace Education Standing Commission / TransCommunication - Baden - Switzerland. 49. Dr. Khalid Duran; Editor, Transislam Magazine; Provisional President, IbnKhaldun Society. 50. Prof. Paul Wallace Dept. of Political Science University of Missouri, USA. 51. Prakash N. Shah Editor, Nirikshak ( views fortnightly ) Convener, Movement for Secular Democracy. �Prakash� B/H Navrangpura Postoffice, Ahmedabad �380 009 India. 52. Dr Ajay K Mehra Director Centre for Public Affairs New Delhi, India. 53. Dr Inayatullah Islamabad, Pakistan. 54. Dr Pramod Kumar Director Institute for Development and Communication (IDC) Chandigarh, India. 55. Welay Songur Doctoral Student Department of Political Science Stockholm University, Sweden. 56. Riaz Cheema B.A. LL.B Solna, Sweden. 57. Prof. Vikram Vyas The Ajit Foundation, Jaipur, India. 58. Prof. Satish Saberwal Professor Emiritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi, India. 59. Prof. Khushi Muhammad Khan Hamburg, Germany. 60. Magnus Lembke Doctoral Student Department of Political Science Stockholm University Sweden. ========= 10. > >>RAWA statement on the terrorist attacks in the US >> >>The people of Afghanistan have nothing to do with Osama and his accomplices >>On September 11, 2001 the world was stunned with the horrific >>terrorist attacks on the United States. RAWA stands with the rest of >>the world in expressing our sorrow and condemnation for this >>barbaric act of violence and terror. RAWA had already warned that >>the United States should not support the most treacherous, most >>criminal, most anti-democracy and anti-women Islamic fundamentalist >>parties because after both the Jehadi and the Taliban have committed >>every possible type of heinous crimes against our people, they would >>feel no shame in committing such crimes against the American people >>whom they consider "infidel". In order to gain and maintain their >>power, these barbaric criminals are ready to turn easily to any >>criminal force. >> >>But unfortunately we must say that it was the government of the >>United States who supported Pakistani dictator Gen. Zia-ul Haq in >>creating thousands of religious schools from which the germs of >>Taliban emerged. In the similar way, as is clear to all, Osama Bin >>Laden has been the blue-eyed boy of CIA. But what is more painful is >>that American politicians have not drawn a lesson from their >>pro-fundamentalist policies in our country and are still supporting >>this or that fundamentalist band or leader. In our opinion any kind >>of support to the fundamentalist Taliban and Jehadies is actually >>trampling democratic, women's rights and human rights values. >> >>If it is established that the suspects of the terrorist attacks are >>outside the US, our constant claim that fundamentalist terrorists >>would devour their creators, is proved once more. >> >>The US government should consider the root cause of this terrible >>event, which has not been the first and will not be the last one >>too. The US should stop supporting Afghan terrorists and their >>supporters once and for all. >> >>Now that the Taliban and Osama are the prime suspects by the US >>officials after the criminal attacks, will the US subject >>Afghanistan to a military attack similar to the one in 1998 and kill >>thousands of innocent Afghans for the crimes committed by the >>Taliban and Osama? Does the US think that through such attacks, with >>thousands of deprived, poor and innocent people of Afghanistan as >>its victims, will be able to wipe out the root-cause of terrorism, >>or will it spread terrorism even to a larger scale? >> >>From our point of view a vast and indiscriminate military attacks on >>a country that has been facing permanent disasters for more than two >>decades will not be a matter of pride. We don't think such an attack >>would be the expression of the will of the American people. >> >>The US government and people should know that there is a vast >>difference between the poor and devastated people of Afghanistan and >>the terrorist Jehadi and Taliban criminals. >> >>While we once again announce our solidarity and deep sorrow with the >>people of the US, we also believe that attacking Afghanistan and >>killing its most ruined and destitute people will not in any way >>decrease the grief of the American people. We sincerely hope that >>the great American people could DIFFERENTIATE between the people of >>Afghanistan and a handful of fundamentalist terrorists. Our hearts >>go out to the people of the US. >> >>Down with terrorism! >> >>Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) >>September 14, 2001 >> >> ====== 11. 17th September, 2001. PRESS RELEASE The Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) condemns the indiscriminate mass murder perpetrated in the USA on 11 September, 2001 using hijacked passenger aircraft as weapons. CNDP joins the world in expressing its heartfelt condolences to the bereaved families and the American people. There can be no justification for mass murder committed either by stateless fanatical groups or by states. This is the reason that the peace movement, all over the world, opposes weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. September 11 has shown that mass murder today does not need sophisticated technology. Such barbaric activity poisons all peace processes, and sets back all efforts at disarmament. This crime also shows that neither nuclear weapons nor defence shields (NMD/TMD) provide any additional 'security'. There will be forces in the United States government and elsewhere calling for retaliatory strikes and reprisals. Any response that does not distinguish between perpetrators and innocent people will be no different from the barbaric acts of 11th September that have drawn justified worldwide condemnation. It is also necessary to distinguish between the acts of terrorism and the causes driving it. Addressing only terrorist acts will not stop the current spiral of violence. Negotiated and just settlements of various conflicts around the world are the only long term guarantees for peace and against terrorism. It appears that the United States, is now preparing for unilateral action in Afghanistan. CNDP strongly believes that any such action should only be under the aegis of the UN. CNDP believes that India should not be a party to such unilateral US action and, deplores the Vajpayee government's willingness to compromise India's sovereignty. (sd/) (Prabir Purkayastha) (Praful Bidwai) ======== 12. The Dalai Lama's message to President George Bush 12 September, 2001 Your Excellency, I am deeply shocked by the terrorist attacks that took place involving four apparently hijacked aircrafts and the immense devastation these caused. It is a terrible tragedy that so many innocent lives have been lost and it seems unbelievable that anyone would choose to target the world trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington D.C. We are deeply saddened. On behalf of the Tibetan people I would like to convey our deepest condolence and solidarity with the American people during this painful time. Our prayers go out to the many who have lost their lives, those who have been injured and the many more who have been traumatized by this senseless act of violence. I am attending a special prayer for the United States and it's people at our main temple today. I am confident that the United States as a great and powerful nation will be able to overcome this present tragedy. The American people have shown their resilience, courage and determination when faced with such difficult and sad situation. It may seem presumptuous on my part, but I personally believe we need to think seriously whether a violent action is the right thing to do and in the greater interest of the nation and people in the long run. I believe violence will only increase the cycle of violence. But how do we deal with hatred and anger, which are often the root causes of such senseless violence? This is a very difficult question, especially when it concerns a nation and we have certain fixed conceptions of how to deal with such attacks. I am sure that you will make the right decision. With my prayers and good wishes The Dalai Lama ========== 13. >MEDIA STATEMENT >Contact: William R. Pace +1 917-214-5535 > or Jayne Stoyles +1 212-687-2176 > >U.S TRAGEDY HIGHLIGHTS NEED FOR >AN INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT > >New York, July 2001 >On behalf of the more than 1000 members of the NGO Coalition for the >International Criminal Court, we wish to express our horror and shock over >the criminal attacks perpetrated yesterday against innocent people in the >USA. > >We express our most sincere sympathy to the victims, their families and the >people of the United States of America. We are also thinking of the many >people affected every day by terrorism, genocide, crimes against humanity >and other atrocities in all parts of the world. > >As has been stated by USA authorities, this catastrophe represents a >massive failure of USA intelligence and national defense. The inability of >the most powerful nation, with the greatest resources, to prevent such a >crime reinforces the need for enhanced cooperation throughout the >international community in outlawing, investigating and prosecuting these >most serious crimes - which is what the International Criminal Court will >do. > >This horrific crime clearly demonstrates the need for a fundamentally >strengthened system of international criminal justice. The International >Criminal Court is expected to be established in 2002-2003 after entry into >force of the Rome Statute of the ICC. It will be permanent and >independent and will prosecute individuals who commit genocide, war crimes, >and crimes against humanity. > >Though the international community has not been able to agree on the >definition of the crime of international terrorism, it is our unanimous >opinion that yesterday's acts of terrorism were crimes against humanity - >the murder of hundreds if not thousands of innocent civilians. > >We appeal to the government of the US and its allies to focus on bringing >the perpetrators to justice and warn against indiscriminate military >retaliation. Such retaliation has been the response to past terrorist >attacks - it is not only illegal but has been ineffective and will >inevitably result in more deaths and a cycle of recrimination, revenge and >terrorism. This cannot be the response of a civilized nation hoping to put >an end to this kind of violence. > >The world community must join together in condemning this terrorist crime >against humanity and join in using national and international laws in >bringing those responsible to justice. > >Note: The Rome Statute was adopted by a vote of 120-7 on July 17, 1998. >It has been signed by 139 nations and ratified by 37. The Rome Statute >will enter into force after 60 nations have ratified the treaty. > > > >+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ >Jayne Stoyles >Program Director >NGO Coalition for an International Criminal Court > >777 U.N. Plaza 12th Floor >New York, NY 10017 >U.S.A. >Phone 212 687 2176 Fax 212 599 1332 >Email cicc1 at iccnow.org >Web http://www.iccnow.org > >+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ > ====== 14. > >Human Rights Watch Response to Attacks on the U.S. >Civilian Life Must Be Respected > >(New York, September 12, 2001) -- We profoundly condemn yesterday's cruel >attacks in the United States and express our condolences to the victims and > This was an assault not merely on one nation or one >people, but on principles of respect for civilian life cherished by all > We urge all governments to unite to investigate this crime, to >prevent its recurrence, and to bring to justice those who are responsible. > >Last night, President Bush said that the United States "will make no >distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who > Yet distinctions must be made: between the guilty and the >innocent; between the perpetrators and the civilians who may surround them; >between those who commit atrocities and those who may simply share their >religious beliefs, ethnicity or national origin. People committed to justice >and law and human rights must never descend to the level of the perpetrators > That is the most important distinction of all. > >There are people and governments in the world who believe that in the > But that is also the > Whatever the response to this outrage, it must not > Rather, it must uphold the principles that came under > That is >the way to deny the perpetrators of this crime their ultimate victory. > From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime. Our nation has been put on notice, we're not immune from attack. We will take defensive measures against terrorism to protect Americans. Today, dozens of federal departments and agencies, as well as state and local governments, have responsibilities affecting homeland security. These efforts must be coordinated at the highest level. So tonight, I announce the creation of a Cabinet-level position reporting directly to me, the Office of Homeland Security. And tonight, I also announce a distinguished American to lead this effort, to strengthen American security: a military veteran, an effective governor, a true patriot, a trusted friend, Pennsylvania's Tom Ridge. He will lead, oversee and coordinate a comprehensive national strategy to safeguard our country against terrorism and respond to any attacks that may come. These measures are essential. The only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it and destroy it where it grows. Many will be involved in this effort, from FBI agents, to intelligence operatives, to the reservists we have called to active duty. All deserve our thanks, and all have our prayers. And tonight a few miles from the damaged Pentagon, I have a message for our military: Be ready. I have called the armed forces to alert, and there is a reason. The hour is coming when America will act, and you will make us proud. This is not, however, just America's fight. And what is at stake is not just America's freedom. This is the world's fight. This is civilization's fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom. We ask every nation to join us. We will ask and we will need the help of police forces, intelligence services and banking systems around the world. The United States is grateful that many nations and many international organizations have already responded with sympathy and with support - nations from Latin America, to Asia, to Africa, to Europe, to the Islamic world. Perhaps the NATO charter reflects best the attitude of the world: An attack on one is an attack on all. The civilized world is rallying to America's side. They understand that if this terror goes unpunished, their own cities, their own citizens may be next. Terror unanswered cannot only bring down buildings, it can threaten the stability of legitimate governments. And you know what? We're not going to allow it. Americans are asking, ''What is expected of us?'' I ask you to live your lives and hug your children. I know many citizens have fears tonight, and I ask you to be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat. I ask you to uphold the values of America and remember why so many have come here. We're in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them. No one should be singled out for unfair treatment or unkind words because of their ethnic background or religious faith. I ask you to continue to support the victims of this tragedy with your contributions. Those who want to give can go to a central source of information, libertyunites.org, to find the names of groups providing direct help in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The thousands of FBI agents who are now at work in this investigation may need your cooperation, and I ask you to give it. I ask for your patience with the delays and inconveniences that may accompany tighter security and for your patience in what will be a long struggle. I ask your continued participation and confidence in the American economy. Terrorists attacked a symbol of American prosperity; they did not touch its source. America is successful because of the hard work and creativity and enterprise of our people. These were the true strengths of our economy before Sept. 11, and they are our strengths today. And finally, please continue praying for the victims of terror and their families, for those in uniform and for our great country. Prayer has comforted us in sorrow and will help strengthen us for the journey ahead. Tonight I thank my fellow Americans for what you have already done and for what you will do. And ladies and gentlemen of the Congress, I thank you, their representatives, for what you have already done and for what we will do together. Tonight we face new and sudden national challenges. We will come together to improve air safety, to dramatically expand the number of air marshals on domestic flights and take new measures to prevent hijacking. We will come together to promote stability and keep our airlines flying with direct assistance during this emergency. We will come together to give law enforcement the additional tools it needs to track down terror here at home. We will come together to strengthen our intelligence capabilities to know the plans of terrorists before they act and to find them before they strike. We will come together to take active steps that strengthen America's economy and put our people back to work. Tonight, we welcome two leaders who embody the extraordinary spirit of all New Yorkers, Gov. George Pataki and Mayor Rudolf Giuliani. As a symbol of America's resolve, my administration will work with Congress and these two leaders to show the world that we will rebuild New York City. After all that has just passed, all the lives taken and all the possibilities and hopes that died with them, it is natural to wonder if America's future is one of fear. Some speak of an age of terror. I know there are struggles ahead and dangers to face. But this country will define our times, not be defined by them. As long as the United States of America is determined and strong, this will not be an age of terror. This will be an age of liberty here and across the world. Great harm has been done to us. We have suffered great loss. And in our grief and anger, we have found our mission and our moment. Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom, the great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time, now depends on us. Our nation, this generation, will lift the dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail. It is my hope that in the months and years ahead life will return almost to normal. We'll go back to our lives and routines, and that is good. Even grief recedes with time and grace. But our resolve must not pass. Each of us will remember what happened that day and to whom it happened. We will remember the moment the news came, where we were and what we were doing. Some will remember an image of a fire or story or rescue. Some will carry memories of a face and a voice gone forever. And I will carry this. It is the police shield of a man named George Howard, who died at the World Trade Center trying to save others. It was given to me by his mom, Arlene, as a proud memorial to her son. It is my reminder of lives that ended and a task that does not end. I will not forget the wound to our country and those who inflicted it. I will not yield, I will not rest, I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people. The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them. Fellow citizens, we'll meet violence with patient justice, assured of the rightness of our cause and confident of the victories to come. In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom, and may he watch over the United States of America. Thank you. __________________________________________________ Terrorist Attacks on U.S. - How can you help? Donate cash, emergency relief information http://dailynews.yahoo.com/fc/US/Emergency_Information/ From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: 1952). 49 years ago. The right to make war, like the right to strike, but in a far higher degree, is very dangerous in a world governed by scientific technique. Neither can be simply abolished, since that would open the road to tyranny. But in each case it must be recognised that groups cannot, in the name of freedom, justly claim the right to inflict great injuries upon others. As regards war, the principle of unrestricted national sovereignty, cherished by liberals in the nineteenth century and by the Kremlin in the present day, must be abandoned. Means must be found of subjecting the relations of nations to the rule of law, so that a single nation will no longer be, as at present, the judge in its own cause. If this is not done, the world will quickly return to barbarism. In that case, scientific technique will disappear along with science, and men will be able to go on being quarrelsome because their quarrels will no longer do much harm. It is, however, just possible that mankind may prefer to survive and prosper rather than to perish in misery, and, if so, national liberty will have to be effectively restrained. [...] The atom bomb, and still more the hydrogen bomb, have caused new fears, involving new doubts as to the effects of science on human life. Some eminent authorities, including Einstein, have pointed out that there is a danger of the extinction of all life on this planet. I do not myself think that this will happen in the next war, but I think it may well happen in the next but one, if that is allowed to occur. If this expectation is correct, we have to choose within the next fifty years or so between two alternatives. Either we must allow the human race to exterminate itself, or we must forgo certain liberties which are very dear to us, more especially the liberty to kill foreigners whenever we feel so disposed. I think it probable that mankind will choose its own extermination as the preferable alternative. The choice will be made, of course, by persuading ourselves that it is not being made, since (so militarists on both sides will say) the victory of the right is certain without risk of universal disaster. We are perhaps living in the last age of man, and, if so, it is to science that he will owe his extinction. If, however, the human race decides to let itself go on living, it will have to make very drastic changes in its ways of thinking, feeling and behaving. We must learn not to say: 'Never! better death than dishonour!' We must learn to submit to law, even when imposed by aliens whom we hate and despise, and whom we believe to be blind to all considerations of righteousness. Consider some concrete examples. Jews and Arabs will have to agree to submit to arbitration; if the award goes against the Jews, the President of the United States will have to ensure the victory of the party to which he is opposed, since, if he supports the international authority, he will lose the Jewish vote in new York State. On the other hand, if the award goes in favour of the Jews, the Mohammedan world will be indignant, and will be supported by all other malcontents. Or, to take another instance, Eire, will demand the right to oppress the Protestants of Ulster, and on this issue the United States will support Eire while Britain will support Ulster. Could an international authority survive such a dissension? Again: India and Pakistan cannot agree about Kashmir, therefore one of them must support Russia and the other the United States. It will be obvious to anyone who is an interested party in one of these disputes that the issue is far more important than the continuance of life on our planet. The hope that the human race will allow itself to survive is therefore somewhat slender. But if human life *is* to continue in spite of science, mankind will have to learn a discipline of the passions which, in the past, has not been necessary. Men will have to submit to the law, even when they think the law unjust and iniquitous. Nations which are persuaded that they are only demanding the barest justice will have to acquiesce when this demand is denied the by the neutral authority. I do not say that this is easy; I do not prophesy that it will happen; I say only that if it does not happen the human race will perish , and will perish as a result of science. A clear choice must be made within fifty years, the choice between Reason and Death. And by 'Reason' I mean willingness to submit to law as declared by an international authority. I fear that mankind may choose Death. I hope I am mistaken. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email alerts & NEW webcam video instant messaging with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: the face of overwhelming grief. But there is also a growing moral revulsion and perhaps an understandable expression of the need for vengeance. Even as some people unfairly, even preposterously, become the victims of this newest hatred, the American President has promised revenge. Can anything be wrong with hating ruthless strategists who achieve their political goals by the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians? How can it be wrong for a woman to hate the rapist who has permanently scarred her, or for victims to hate leaders or organisers of mobs that lynched them? At issue here is not the feeling of an intense desire to hurt others in order to gain advantage for oneself. Of course, malicious hatred is obnoxious. But those who hate the perpetrators of the carnage on September 11are not driven by malice or spite. Hating the wrong-doer is not morally inappropriate. If so, it must be morally permissible to desire to hurt the wrong-doer. It is extremely abnormal if self-respecting persons do not experience righteous anger, even hatred towards those who have wronged them.There must be some room in our moral topography for what the philosopher, Jeffrie Murphy calls retributive hatred. Yet it may not be wise or morally appropriate for victims to act on these feelings. It is imprudent because retaliatory action sparks off escalating cycles of revenge and reciprocal violence. Retaliation by the US and counter retaliation will almost certainly plunge the entire world into greater suffering, pain, vulnerability and insecurity. Revenge can unleash even greater tragedies. How do we make sure that today's victims do not become tomorrow's perpetrators of much worse? What if the original motive of revenge unravels an unappeasable thirst for violence? If lessons of history teach us anything at all, it is that the barbaric acts of one group solicit equally barbaric acts from others. No matter on whom the first blow was struck, if our aim is to terminate barbarism, then, it must be stalled now, suddenly, and abruptly. In the shifting sands of the complex ethic at work here, the entire moral advantage rests with victims of the immediate crime. If the vision that generally motivates them is to come good eventually, it is best, all things considered, to forgo the temptation to act on retributive hatred and feelings of vengeance. Retribution, not revenge To restrain vengeful motives is wise for another reason. Undoubtedly, the massacre on the East coast is motivated by the desire to question the economic, political and cultural supremacy of the USA in a radically unequal world. If and when the mightiest nation in the world retaliates, it will not be to grant equal status to offenders. It is rather more likely that, by a massive display of strength, they will be shoved further back in their less than equal place. The not so hidden text of American retaliation will be an abject lesson to all to never again dare American supremacy. Will it surprise anyone if a disproportionate and symbolic show of force to maim and crush the enemy flows from the very same motive of vengeance? It is true, of course, that some acts of revenge are the wellspring of equality and refute claims of supremacy by wrong-doers. However, the spectacular show of violence on September 11 and in the days to come is likely to reveal a different,warped logic of alternating claims of superiority. We need retribution for sure, but not revenge. In the days to come, we must not be forced to witness ghost towns in other parts of the world with more terror-stricken faces, choked voices, desperately crying for help. American might must be restrained, perpetrators must be brought to book in an international court of justice and tried for crimes against humanity, our common humanity. This would just be a beginning. To set a larger process of reconciliation in motion, the messages of marginalised collectives hidden under the gruesome rubble of Tuesday's destruction must be decoded and discussed by moderates from all over the world. Only by properly understanding the social, cultural and spiritual basis of self-respect in our troubled times can we ever begin to address the problems violently thrown at us on September 11. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: bones the sole remains, eerily beautiful in asymmetry, as if a new work of abstract art had been erected in a public space. Elsewhere, you see the transformation of institutions: The New School and New York University are missing persons' centers. A� movie house is now a rest shelter, a Burger King a first-aid center, a Brooks Brothers� clothing store a body parts morgue, a record shop a haven for stranded animals.� Libraries are counseling centers. Ice rinks are morgues. A bank is now a supply depot: in the first four days, it distributed 11,000 respirators and 25,000 pairs of protective gloves and suits. Nearby, a mobile medical unit housed in a Macdonald's has administered 70,000 tetanus shots. The brain tries to process the numbers: "only" 50,000 tons of debris had been cleared by yesterday, out of 1.2 million tons. The medical examiner's office has readied up to 20,000 DNA tests for unidentifiable cadaver parts. At all times, night and day, a minimum of 1000 people live and work on the site. Such numbers daze the mind. It's the details--fragile, individual--that melt numbness into grief. An anklet with "Joyleen" engraved on it--found on an ankle. Just that: an ankle. A pair of hands--one brown, one white\clasped together. Just that. No wrists. A burly welder who drove from Ohio to help, saying softly, "We're working in a cemetery. I'm standing in--not on, in--a graveyard."� Each lamppost, storefront, scaffolding, mailbox, is plastered with homemade photocopied posters, a racial/ethnic rainbow of faces and names: death the great leveler, not only of the financial CEOs--their images usually formal, white, male, older, with suit-and-tie--but the mailroom workers, receptionists, waiters. You pass enough of the MISSING posters and the faces, names, descriptions become familiar. The Albanian window-cleaner guy with the bushy eyebrows. The teenage Mexican dishwasher who had an American flag tattoo. The janitor's assistant who'd emigrated from Ethiopia. The Italian-American grandfather who was a doughnut-cart tender. The 23-year-old Chinese American junior pastry chef at the Windows on the World restaurant who'd gone in early that day so she could prep a business breakfast for 500. The� firefighter who'd posed jauntily wearing his green shamrock necktie. The dapper African-American midlevel manager with a small gold ring in his ear who handled "minority affairs" for one of the companies. The middle-aged secretary laughing up at the camera from her wheelchair. The maintenance worker with a Polish name, holding his newborn baby. Most of the faces are smiling; most of the shots are family photos;� many are recent wedding pictures. . . . I have little national patriotism, but I do have a passion for New York, partly for our gritty, secular energy of endurance, and because the world does come here: 80 countries had offices in the Twin Towers; 62 countries lost citizens in the catastrophe; an estimated 300 of our British cousins died, either in the planes or the buildings. My personal comfort is found not in ceremonies or prayer services but in watching the plain, truly heroic (a word usually misused) work of ordinary New Yorkers we take for granted every day, who have risen to this moment unpretentiously, too busy even to notice they're expressing the splendor of the human spirit: firefighters, medical aides, nurses, ER doctors, police officers, sanitation workers, construction-workers, ambulance drivers, structural engineers, crane operators, rescue worker "tunnel rats" . . . Meanwhile, across the US, the rhetoric of retaliation is in full-throated roar. Flag sales are up. Gun sales are up. Some radio stations have banned playing John Lennon's song, "Imagine." Despite appeals from all officials (even Bush), mosques are being attacked, firebombed; Arab Americans are hiding their children indoors; two murders in Arizona have already been categorized as hate crimes--one victim a Lebanese-American man and one a Sikh man who died merely for wearing a turban. (Need I say that there were not nationwide attacks against white Christian males after Timothy McVeigh was apprehended for the Oklahoma City bombing?) Last Thursday, right-wing televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (our home-grown American Taliban leaders) appeared on Robertson's TV show "The 700 Club," where Falwell blamed "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists and the gays and lesbians ... the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way" and groups "who have tried to secularize America" for what occurred in New York. Robertson� replied, "I totally concur." After even the Bush White House called the remarks "inappropriate," Falwell apologized (though he did not take back his sentiments); Robertson hasn't even apologized. (The program is carried by the Fox Family� Channel, recently purchased by the Walt Disney Company--in case you'd like to register a protest.) The sirens have lessened. But the drums have started. Funeral drums. War drums. A State of Emergency, with a call-up of 50,000 reservists to active duty. The Justice Department is seeking increased authority for wider surveillance, broader detention powers, wiretapping of persons (not, as previously, just phone numbers), and stringent press restrictions on military reporting. And the petitions have begun. For justice but not vengeance. For a reasoned response but against escalating retaliatory violence. For vigilance about civil liberties. For the rights of innocent Muslim Americans.� For �bombing� Afghanistan with food and medical parcels, NOT firepower. There will be the expectable peace marches, vigils, rallies. . . . One member of the House of Representatives--Barbara Lee, Democrat of California, an African American woman--lodged the sole vote in both houses of� Congress against giving Bush broadened powers for a war response, saying she didn't believe� a massive military campaign would stop terrorism. (She could use letters of support: email her, if you wish, at >>barbara.lee at mail.house.gov<<.) Those of us who have access to the media have been trying to get a different voice out. But ours are complex messages with long-term solutions--and this is a moment when people yearn for simplicity and short-term, facile answers. Still, I urge all of you to write letters to the editors of newspapers, call in to talk radio shows, and, for those of you who have media access--as activists,�community leaders, elected or appointed officials, academic experts, whatever--to do as many interviews and TV programs as you can. Use the tool of the Internet. Talk about the root causes of terrorism, about the need to diminish this daily climate of patriarchal violence surrounding us in its state-sanctioned normalcy; the need to recognize people's despair over ever being heard short of committing such dramatic, murderous acts; the need to address a desperation that becomes chronic after generations of suffering; the need to arouse that most subversive of emotions--empathy--for "the other";� the need to eliminate hideous economic and political injustices, to reject all tribal/ethnic hatreds and fears, to repudiate religious fundamentalisms of every kind. Especially talk about the need to understand that we must expose the mystique of violence, separate it from how we conceive of excitement, eroticism, and� "manhood";� the need to comprehend that violence differs in degree but is related in kind, that it� thrivesalong a spectrum, as do its effects--from the battered child and raped woman who live in fear to an entire populace living in fear. Meanwhile, we cry and cry and cry. I don't even know who my tears are for anymore, because I keep seeing ghosts, I keep hearing echoes. The world's sympathy moves me deeply. Yet I hear echoes dying into silence: the world averting its attention from Rwanda�s screams . . . Ground Zero is a huge mass grave. And I think: Bosnia. Uganda. More than 6300 people are missing and presumed dead (not even counting the Washington and Pennsylvania deaths). The TV anchors choke up: civilians, they say, my god, civilians. And I see ghosts. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Dresden. Vietnam. I watch the mask-covered mouths and noses on the street turn into the faces of Tokyo citizens who wear such masks every day against toxic pollution. I watch the scared eyes become the fearful eyes of women forced to wear the hajib or chodor or burka against their will . . . I stare at the missing posters' photos and think of the Mothers of the Disappeared, circling the plazas in Argentina. And I see the ghosts of other faces. In photographs on the walls of Holocaust museums. In newspaper clippings from Haiti. In chronicles from Cambodia . . . I worry for people who've lost their homes near the site, though I see how superbly social-service agencies are trying to meet their immediate and longer-term needs. But I see ghosts: the perpetually homeless who sleep on city streets, whose needs are never addressed. . . . I watch normally unflappable New Yorkers flinch at loud noises, parents panic when their kids are late from school. And I see my Israeli feminist friends like Yvonne, who�ve lived with this dread for decades and still (even yesterday) stubbornly issue petitions insisting on peace. . . . I watch sophisticates sob openly in the street, people who've lost workplaces, who don't know where their next paycheck will come from, who fear a contaminated water or food supply, who are afraid for their sons in the army, who are unnerved by security checkpoints, who are in mourning, who are wounded, who feel humiliated, outraged. And I see my friends like Zuhira� in the refugee camps of Gaza or West Bank, Palestinian women who have lived in precisely that same emotional condition--for four generations. Last weekend, many Manhattanites left town to visit concerned families, try to normalize, get away for a break. As they streamed out of the city, I saw ghosts of other travelers: hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees streaming toward their country's borders in what is to them habitual terror, trying to escape a drought-sucked country so war-devastated there's nothing left to bomb, a country with 50,000 disabled orphans and two million widows whose sole livelihood is begging; where the life expectancy of men is 42 and women 40; where women hunch in secret whispering lessons to girl children forbidden to go to school, women who risk death by beheading--for teaching a child to read. The ghosts stretch out their hands. Now you know, they weep, gesturing at the carefree, insulated, indifferent, golden innocence that was my country's safety, arrogance, and pride. Why should it take such horror to make you see? the echoes sigh, Oh please do you finally see? This is calamity. And opportunity. The United States--what so many of you call America--could choose now to begin to understand the world. And join it. Or not. For now my window still displays no flag, my lapel sports no red-white-and-blue ribbon. Instead, I weep for a city and a world. Instead, I cling to a different loyalty, affirming my un-flag, my un-anthem, my un-prayer--the defiant un-pledge of a madwoman who also had mere words as her only tools in a time of ignorance and carnage, Virginia Woolf: "As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world." If this is treason, may I be worthy of it. In mourning--and in absurd, tenacious hope, Robin Morgan September 18, 2001 New York City Robin Morgan is an award-winning writer, feminist leader, political theorist, journalist, and activist. She has published 17 books, including six of poetry, two of fiction, and the now-classic anthologies SISTERHOOD IS POWERFUL (Random House/Vintage Books, 1970), and SISTERHOOD IS GLOBAL (Doubleday/Anchor, l984; Feminist Press edition 1996), and her own acclaimed THE DEMON LOVER; ON THE SEXUALITY OF TERRORISM (Norton, 1989). Her newest book of poetry is A HOT JANUARY: POEMS 1996-1999 (Norton, 1999), and her memoir, SATURDAY'S CHILD was recently published (Norton, December 2000). From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: ENTERPRISE CREW SPLIT OVER VIOLATING PRIME DIRECTIVE, INTERVENING TO SAVE EARTH FROM ITSELF Star Fleet Strictly Forbids Meddling, But Christ, Just Look at the Place In Stationary Orbit (SatireWire.com) � Disturbed by ruthless terrorist attacks and talk of war, the crew of the starship Enterprise, which has been stealthily orbiting Earth since August, is reportedly torn over whether to violate Star Fleet's Prime Directive and intervene in Earth affairs, or gather for drinks in the forward observation lounge and watch the planet go to shit. According to Enterprise Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, the crew is evenly split between Earth-born personnel who believe they have an obligation to quell the recent violence and bring lasting peace to their home world, and non-Earth-born personnel, who point out that Picard didn't lift a finger when Boral II self-destructed, so what's so special about this place? "Hey, we let most of the Boralans die. We wouldn't help the Klingon's in their civil war. What's the big deal here?" said Guinan, the ship's lounge hostess and a native of El-Auria. "Besides, every time we do intervene, we leave the inhabitants more screwed up than they were before." "How could we possibly make the people on this planet more screwed up?" countered Earth-born First Officer Will Riker. "They think golf is a sport!" According to the Prime Directive, "the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal cultural evolution is considered sacred, and no Star Fleet personnel may interfere with the healthy development of alien life and culture." While officers are honor-bound to uphold it, Earth-born Ensign Wesley Crusher argued the Enterprise has broken the rules before. "Gee, this could be just like Episode 141, where Data tries to save the life of that little girl whose planet is gonna blow up, or Episode 109, where Capt. Picard interfered to save my life because I broke one of the Edo's laws," said Crusher. "I mean, look, it's really cool to sit up here in our sexless spandex uniforms, downing Klavorian Synth-Ale and pretending we're not all running the Caligula program on the Holodeck, but the people of Earth are gearing up to, like, kill each other. "I know we're not supposed to mess with the 'healthy development' of other cultures,' but this is not fuckin' healthy," he added. "I disagree," answered Lt. Cmdr. Worf, a Klingon. "I am not of Earth, but some differences can only be solved through violence. Truly, I fail to understand why the humans from this planet's Western Hemisphere have not already attacked the humans from the Eastern Hemisphere. Or perhaps I have that backwards. This planet keeps spinning in an annoying way." "Exactly, Mr. Worf," said Earth-born Capt. Picard. "It is ever-changing. East becomes West, West becomes East, right becomes wrong. We should be patient. After all, on whose behalf do we intercede?" "God, you are so French," mumbled Riker. "I say we... we attack them all!" said Worf. "This way there is no confusion." "Dude, are you sure you're not from Earth?" asked Crusher. At press time, Capt. Picard had yet to make a decision, but he is expected to rely heavily on ship's counselor Deanna Troi, a telepathic Betazoid who said the planet below was a roiling sea of emotions. "I sense great hostility, fear and sadness among the people," she announced. "But I also sense something else, something even stronger. It is... It is..." "Love?" interrupted the android, Cmdr. Data. "No, it is relief. There is widespread relief that there now may be no more Die Hard movies." Copyright � 2001, SatireWire. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Anyway, the :// part is an 'emoticon' representing a man with a strip of sticky tape across his mouth. -R. Douglas, alt.sysadmin.recovery --------------------------------------------------------------------- From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: This is not Islam any more than the Ku Klux Klan is Christianity. No concessions can be made to either mindset which have more in common with one another than they do with the religions they claim to represent. To argue, as many Arabs and Muslims are doing today (and not a few liberal Western voices), that 'Americans should ask themselves why they are so hated in the world' is to make such a concession; it is to provide a justification, however unwittingly, for this kind of warped mindset. The thinking is the same as the 'linkage' dreamed up by Saddam Hussein when he tried to get the Arab world to believe that he had occupied Kuwait in 1990 in order to liberate Palestine. The difference being that if the argument was intellectually vacuous then, it is a thousand times more so now. Worse than being wrong, however, it is morally bankrupt, to say nothing of being counterproductive. For every attempt to 'rationalise' or 'explain' the new anti-Americanism rampant in so much of the Muslim and Arab worlds bolsters the project of the perpetrators of the heinous act of 11 September, which is to blur the lines that separate their sect of a few hundred people from hundreds of millions of peace-loving Muslims and Arabs. But it is now up to Arabs and Muslims to draw the line that separates them from the Osama bin Ladens of this world just as it was up to Americans to excoriate, isolate, outlaw, imprison and eventually root out the members of the Klan from their midst. Mercifully, the very same Western leaders who are preparing for the coming 'War Against Terrorism' are trying hard, and genuinely, to say their efforts are not directed at Muslims and Arab or Muslim culture. Constantly, they are being seen with Muslim clerics and visiting mosques. That is all for the good. But it is not enough to turn the tide of public opinion which will increasingly need and want to know who is 'the other' in this coming war. Terrorism is a tactic, after all, not a side. Usage of the word 'war', however understandable, was a strategic mistake by the American President. For like the wars on drugs or poverty it inculcates expectations at the risk of showing few results. The problem is deeper than bin Laden and his associates, and will not end with their demise. As I wrote in Cruelty and Silence, citing the 1930s Iraqi alter ego of Tom Lehrer, Aziz Ali, Da' illi beena, minna wa feena: 'The disease that is in us, is from us and within us.' Against this kind of enemy the West can do nothing. We have to do it ourselves. Muslims and Arabs have to be on the front lines of a new kind of war, one that is worth waging for their own salvation and in their own souls. And that, as good out-of-fashion Muslim scholars will tell you, is the true meaning of jihad, a meaning that has been hijacked by terrorists and suicide bombers and all those who applaud or find excuses for them. To exorcise what they have done in our name is the civilisational challenge of the twenty-first century for every Arab and Muslim in the world today. � Kanan Makiya. The author, who was born in Iraq, now teaches in the US. His books include Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World and the forthcoming The Rock. --------------------------------- Do You Yahoo!? Get your free Yahoo! address at Yahoo! Mail: UK or IE. --0-986985521-1002681838=:10397 Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

 Fighting Islam's Ku Klux Klan

The Muslim world cannot forever attribute all its ills to the Great Satan, America, writes the Iraqi dissident, Kanan Makiya

Kanan Makiya
Sunday October 7, 2001
The Observer

The Arab and Muslim worlds suddenly find themselves facing a civilisational challenge such as they have not had to face since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. For, in the years to come, the greatest price of the madness that was unleashed upon New York and Washington on 11 September will be borne by them and by all individuals of Arab or Muslim origin, wherever they might live in the world.

I am not talking about the next war in Afghanistan or greatly redoubled efforts to hunt down Muslim and Arab terrorists from Boston and Hamburg to Cairo and Karachi. The price I am talking about is not paid in blood or by being the victim of the kinds of humiliating slurs and racist attacks that are everywhere on the rise in the West. It is the much greater price brought about by continuing to wallow in the sense of one's own victimhood to the point of losing the essentially universal idea of human dignity and worth that is the only true measure of civility.

Arab and Muslim resentment at the West is grounded in many grievances, some legitimate, others less so. Without question, the West has blundered in its dealings with the Arab world. The United States has in recent years behaved unjustly towards the Palestinians. The Allied victory in the Gulf War of 1990-1991 was a lost opportunity to rectify this record, to show that the West, and the United States in particular, was capable of reaching out the hand of friendship and support to the peoples of the Arab world, to their democrats and civil libertarians, not merely to a host of tyrannical and unrepresentative regimes.

Like Germans after the First World War, Arabs felt they deserved a different lot after the Gulf War. They thought of themselves as having tried to change the ways they did politics in the past, and got nowhere. Palestinian living standards have actually declined since the Oslo accord in 1993, and Iraqi society (much less its polity and economy) is in a state of steady disintegration. So Arabs grew more resentful and angry at the West than at any other time in modern Arab history. This resentment can be felt everywhere; it has taken root in the most Westernised sections of the Arab population, among businessmen and students of science and engineering, and even among the sons of the mega-rich like Osama bin Laden.

However, grievances alone do not explain the apocalyptic act of fury that was unleashed upon New York and Washington. Arabs and Muslims need today to face up to the fact that their resentment at America has long since become unmoored from any rational underpinnings it might once have had; like the anti-Semitism of the interwar years, it is today steeped in deeply embedded conspiratorial patterns of thought rooted in profound ignorance of how a society and a polity like the United States, much less Israel, functions.

Attribution of all of the ills of one's own world to either the great Satan, America, or the little Satan, Israel, has been the driving force of Arab politics since 1967. As a powerful undercurrent of Arab culture and politics, it has been around much longer than that. After 1967, however, it became the legitimising cement upon which such murderous regimes as Saddam Hussein's Iraq were built.

From the hands of secular Arab nationalists, anti-Americanism was passed on to religious zealots. In 1979, it fused with anti-Shah sentiments to become the animating force of the Iranian revolution and, with that seminal event, major sections of the Islamic movement. Today, it has become a murderous brew of passions fuelled by paranoia and frustration.

In the five-page letter left in a suitcase in the car-park of Boston's airport, this passage, giving guidance to the hijackers in case they should meet resistance from a passenger, appears: 'If God grants any one of you a slaughter, you should perform it as an offering on behalf of your father and mother, for they are owed by you. Do not disagree among yourselves, but listen and obey. If you slaughter, you should plunder those you slaughter, for that is a sanctioned custom of the Prophet's, on the condition that you do not get occupied with the plunder so that you would leave what is more important, such as paying attention to the enemy, his treachery and attacks. That is because such action is very harmful [to the mission].'

This is not Islam any more than the Ku Klux Klan is Christianity. No concessions can be made to either mindset which have more in common with one another than they do with the religions they claim to represent.

To argue, as many Arabs and Muslims are doing today (and not a few liberal Western voices), that 'Americans should ask themselves why they are so hated in the world' is to make such a concession; it is to provide a justification, however unwittingly, for this kind of warped mindset. The thinking is the same as the 'linkage' dreamed up by Saddam Hussein when he tried to get the Arab world to believe that he had occupied Kuwait in 1990 in order to liberate Palestine. The difference being that if the argument was intellectually vacuous then, it is a thousand times more so now.

Worse than being wrong, however, it is morally bankrupt, to say nothing of being counterproductive. For every attempt to 'rationalise' or 'explain' the new anti-Americanism rampant in so much of the Muslim and Arab worlds bolsters the project of the perpetrators of the heinous act of 11 September, which is to blur the lines that separate their sect of a few hundred people from hundreds of millions of peace-loving Muslims and Arabs.

But it is now up to Arabs and Muslims to draw the line that separates them from the Osama bin Ladens of this world just as it was up to Americans to excoriate, isolate, outlaw, imprison and eventually root out the members of the Klan from their midst. Mercifully, the very same Western leaders who are preparing for the coming 'War Against Terrorism' are trying hard, and genuinely, to say their efforts are not directed at Muslims and Arab or Muslim culture. Constantly, they are being seen with Muslim clerics and visiting mosques. That is all for the good.

But it is not enough to turn the tide of public opinion which will increasingly need and want to know who is 'the other' in this coming war. Terrorism is a tactic, after all, not a side. Usage of the word 'war', however understandable, was a strategic mistake by the American President. For like the wars on drugs or poverty it inculcates expectations at the risk of showing few results. The problem is deeper than bin Laden and his associates, and will not end with their demise. As I wrote in Cruelty and Silence, citing the 1930s Iraqi alter ego of Tom Lehrer, Aziz Ali, Da' illi beena, minna wa feena: 'The disease that is in us, is from us and within us.' Against this kind of enemy the West can do nothing. We have to do it ourselves.

Muslims and Arabs have to be on the front lines of a new kind of war, one that is worth waging for their own salvation and in their own souls. And that, as good out-of-fashion Muslim scholars will tell you, is the true meaning of jihad, a meaning that has been hijacked by terrorists and suicide bombers and all those who applaud or find excuses for them. To exorcise what they have done in our name is the civilisational challenge of the twenty-first century for every Arab and Muslim in the world today.

� Kanan Makiya. The author, who was born in Iraq, now teaches in the US. His books include Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World and the forthcoming The Rock.


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--0-986985521-1002681838=:10397-- From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: This is not Islam any more than the Ku Klux Klan is Christianity. No concessions can be made to either mindset which have more in common with one another than they do with the religions they claim to represent. To argue, as many Arabs and Muslims are doing today (and not a few liberal Western voices), that 'Americans should ask themselves why they are so hated in the world' is to make such a concession; it is to provide a justification, however unwittingly, for this kind of warped mindset. The thinking is the same as the 'linkage' dreamed up by Saddam Hussein when he tried to get the Arab world to believe that he had occupied Kuwait in 1990 in order to liberate Palestine. The difference being that if the argument was intellectually vacuous then, it is a thousand times more so now. Worse than being wrong, however, it is morally bankrupt, to say nothing of being counterproductive. For every attempt to 'rationalise' or 'explain' the new anti-Americanism rampant in so much of the Muslim and Arab worlds bolsters the project of the perpetrators of the heinous act of 11 September, which is to blur the lines that separate their sect of a few hundred people from hundreds of millions of peace-loving Muslims and Arabs. But it is now up to Arabs and Muslims to draw the line that separates them from the Osama bin Ladens of this world just as it was up to Americans to excoriate, isolate, outlaw, imprison and eventually root out the members of the Klan from their midst. Mercifully, the very same Western leaders who are preparing for the coming 'War Against Terrorism' are trying hard, and genuinely, to say their efforts are not directed at Muslims and Arab or Muslim culture. Constantly, they are being seen with Muslim clerics and visiting mosques. That is all for the good. But it is not enough to turn the tide of public opinion which will increasingly need and want to know who is 'the other' in this coming war. Terrorism is a tactic, after all, not a side. Usage of the word 'war', however understandable, was a strategic mistake by the American President. For like the wars on drugs or poverty it inculcates expectations at the risk of showing few results. The problem is deeper than bin Laden and his associates, and will not end with their demise. As I wrote in Cruelty and Silence, citing the 1930s Iraqi alter ego of Tom Lehrer, Aziz Ali, Da' illi beena, minna wa feena: 'The disease that is in us, is from us and within us.' Against this kind of enemy the West can do nothing. We have to do it ourselves. Muslims and Arabs have to be on the front lines of a new kind of war, one that is worth waging for their own salvation and in their own souls. And that, as good out-of-fashion Muslim scholars will tell you, is the true meaning of jihad, a meaning that has been hijacked by terrorists and suicide bombers and all those who applaud or find excuses for them. To exorcise what they have done in our name is the civilisational challenge of the twenty-first century for every Arab and Muslim in the world today. � Kanan Makiya. The author, who was born in Iraq, now teaches in the US. His books include Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World and the forthcoming The Rock. --------------------------------- Do You Yahoo!? Get your free Yahoo! address at Yahoo! Mail: UK or IE. --0-63968674-1002681915=:10453 Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Fighting Islam's Ku Klux Klan

The Muslim world cannot forever attribute all its ills to the Great Satan, America, writes the Iraqi dissident, Kanan Makiya

Kanan Makiya
Sunday October 7, 2001
The Observer

The Arab and Muslim worlds suddenly find themselves facing a civilisational challenge such as they have not had to face since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. For, in the years to come, the greatest price of the madness that was unleashed upon New York and Washington on 11 September will be borne by them and by all individuals of Arab or Muslim origin, wherever they might live in the world.

I am not talking about the next war in Afghanistan or greatly redoubled efforts to hunt down Muslim and Arab terrorists from Boston and Hamburg to Cairo and Karachi. The price I am talking about is not paid in blood or by being the victim of the kinds of humiliating slurs and racist attacks that are everywhere on the rise in the West. It is the much greater price brought about by continuing to wallow in the sense of one's own victimhood to the point of losing the essentially universal idea of human dignity and worth that is the only true measure of civility.

Arab and Muslim resentment at the West is grounded in many grievances, some legitimate, others less so. Without question, the West has blundered in its dealings with the Arab world. The United States has in recent years behaved unjustly towards the Palestinians. The Allied victory in the Gulf War of 1990-1991 was a lost opportunity to rectify this record, to show that the West, and the United States in particular, was capable of reaching out the hand of friendship and support to the peoples of the Arab world, to their democrats and civil libertarians, not merely to a host of tyrannical and unrepresentative regimes.

Like Germans after the First World War, Arabs felt they deserved a different lot after the Gulf War. They thought of themselves as having tried to change the ways they did politics in the past, and got nowhere. Palestinian living standards have actually declined since the Oslo accord in 1993, and Iraqi society (much less its polity and economy) is in a state of steady disintegration. So Arabs grew more resentful and angry at the West than at any other time in modern Arab history. This resentment can be felt everywhere; it has taken root in the most Westernised sections of the Arab population, among businessmen and students of science and engineering, and even among the sons of the mega-rich like Osama bin Laden.

However, grievances alone do not explain the apocalyptic act of fury that was unleashed upon New York and Washington. Arabs and Muslims need today to face up to the fact that their resentment at America has long since become unmoored from any rational underpinnings it might once have had; like the anti-Semitism of the interwar years, it is today steeped in deeply embedded conspiratorial patterns of thought rooted in profound ignorance of how a society and a polity like the United States, much less Israel, functions.

Attribution of all of the ills of one's own world to either the great Satan, America, or the little Satan, Israel, has been the driving force of Arab politics since 1967. As a powerful undercurrent of Arab culture and politics, it has been around much longer than that. After 1967, however, it became the legitimising cement upon which such murderous regimes as Saddam Hussein's Iraq were built.

From the hands of secular Arab nationalists, anti-Americanism was passed on to religious zealots. In 1979, it fused with anti-Shah sentiments to become the animating force of the Iranian revolution and, with that seminal event, major sections of the Islamic movement. Today, it has become a murderous brew of passions fuelled by paranoia and frustration.

In the five-page letter left in a suitcase in the car-park of Boston's airport, this passage, giving guidance to the hijackers in case they should meet resistance from a passenger, appears: 'If God grants any one of you a slaughter, you should perform it as an offering on behalf of your father and mother, for they are owed by you. Do not disagree among yourselves, but listen and obey. If you slaughter, you should plunder those you slaughter, for that is a sanctioned custom of the Prophet's, on the condition that you do not get occupied with the plunder so that you would leave what is more important, such as paying attention to the enemy, his treachery and attacks. That is because such action is very harmful [to the mission].'

This is not Islam any more than the Ku Klux Klan is Christianity. No concessions can be made to either mindset which have more in common with one another than they do with the religions they claim to represent.

To argue, as many Arabs and Muslims are doing today (and not a few liberal Western voices), that 'Americans should ask themselves why they are so hated in the world' is to make such a concession; it is to provide a justification, however unwittingly, for this kind of warped mindset. The thinking is the same as the 'linkage' dreamed up by Saddam Hussein when he tried to get the Arab world to believe that he had occupied Kuwait in 1990 in order to liberate Palestine. The difference being that if the argument was intellectually vacuous then, it is a thousand times more so now.

Worse than being wrong, however, it is morally bankrupt, to say nothing of being counterproductive. For every attempt to 'rationalise' or 'explain' the new anti-Americanism rampant in so much of the Muslim and Arab worlds bolsters the project of the perpetrators of the heinous act of 11 September, which is to blur the lines that separate their sect of a few hundred people from hundreds of millions of peace-loving Muslims and Arabs.

But it is now up to Arabs and Muslims to draw the line that separates them from the Osama bin Ladens of this world just as it was up to Americans to excoriate, isolate, outlaw, imprison and eventually root out the members of the Klan from their midst. Mercifully, the very same Western leaders who are preparing for the coming 'War Against Terrorism' are trying hard, and genuinely, to say their efforts are not directed at Muslims and Arab or Muslim culture. Constantly, they are being seen with Muslim clerics and visiting mosques. That is all for the good.

But it is not enough to turn the tide of public opinion which will increasingly need and want to know who is 'the other' in this coming war. Terrorism is a tactic, after all, not a side. Usage of the word 'war', however understandable, was a strategic mistake by the American President. For like the wars on drugs or poverty it inculcates expectations at the risk of showing few results. The problem is deeper than bin Laden and his associates, and will not end with their demise. As I wrote in Cruelty and Silence, citing the 1930s Iraqi alter ego of Tom Lehrer, Aziz Ali, Da' illi beena, minna wa feena: 'The disease that is in us, is from us and within us.' Against this kind of enemy the West can do nothing. We have to do it ourselves.

Muslims and Arabs have to be on the front lines of a new kind of war, one that is worth waging for their own salvation and in their own souls. And that, as good out-of-fashion Muslim scholars will tell you, is the true meaning of jihad, a meaning that has been hijacked by terrorists and suicide bombers and all those who applaud or find excuses for them. To exorcise what they have done in our name is the civilisational challenge of the twenty-first century for every Arab and Muslim in the world today.

� Kanan Makiya. The author, who was born in Iraq, now teaches in the US. His books include Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World and the forthcoming The Rock.


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--0-63968674-1002681915=:10453-- From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Saying it with white Arjun Seluja, is a fashion designer who divides his time between Delhi and New York. He was dismayed to find a building with flags in all its windows. "In Chelsea, Rehan, in Chelsea." In a gay bar, also in Chelsea, a white man stepped on his toe to make a point. "In a gay bar, Rehan!" Arjun is also horrified by what he saw happen to the New York fashion week after September 11. All of haute couture worked to change their lines. They chose to work exclusively in white. I walked into a magazine office in midtown the other day and noticed the secretary was frantically searching on the Internet. She told me she was looking for bin Laden's zodiac sign. These are strange signs of the coming of a strange prophet. A prince, a prophet Of Bush and Osama who do you think is the prophet? Both are talking about the war between good and evil. Both claim God is on their side. Bush talks from the capital of the empire, the Rome of our time, and Osama is a man living in the middle of the desert. A prince who has given up on the princely life and lives in the poorest country in the world. He also speaks poetically. The US should vacate the Arabian peninsula, the life of a Palestinian should be as peaceful as that of an American (at the risk of sounding redundant this means that we are all equal) and that the US must stop supporting the client states of Arabia and Egypt. A perfect rhyme. A racial profiling of Osama would be the same as many a Judaeo Christian prophet, who is in the service of a wrathful god. I think if Osama didn't look so damn Middle Eastern, had the blonde hair and blue eyes of a Christmas pageant Jesus, Bush might dream about negotiation. God knows there are few creative ideas in the Muslim world. No new ideas about democracy, no new news on despotism and no revolution in gender relations. The last time the Iranians had a new idea was when they threw out the West. That was almost 25 years ago. Now bin Laden has a new idea: throw the political west out of the Middle East. This is an idea in a land parched for one. It has the poetry of justice. This is why every western reporter is hearing this from the mouth of his or her Egyptian, Arabian and, even, Pakistani interviewee. Storm clouds of change My father and I had the ritual of going to the same prayer ground for the Id ki namaaz in Karachi. We were always late, so when I was four, he would pick me up chuckling "mulla bol para" and start running. The other thing I remember from then, and is true to this day, is how in the prayer there was talk of the freedom of the Palestinians and Kashmiris. I remember the names of these causes when I didn't know what they stood for. My father introduced me to the Israeli conflict. He took the side of the Israelis. Against the unending retrogressiveness of the Arabian Peninsula he was also for the Israelis for their back to the wall, preemptive, survival against all odds. I think he recognised the kinship as his family had escaped the teeth of the Delhi riots and had clawed their way out of Jacob Lines, a notorious refugee colony of Karachi. As for Kashmir, I got sick of it having realised that everything in Pakistan is mortgaged to it. It is very discomforting to recognise in the video messages of Osama his determination to change the status quo because, well, it's been so for too long. --------------------------------- Do You Yahoo!? Make a great connection at Yahoo! Personals. --------------------------------- Do You Yahoo!? Make a great connection at Yahoo! Personals. --0-921072927-1002902506=:61576 Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii

 
Osama - the high priest!
 By: Rehan Ansari
 October 11,2001

Before the fortress like walls of a monastery in Manhattan, a Rastafarian was chanting O-sama, O-sama... Only the two desis in the lineup of tourists laughed at the sight.

The Cloisters is an unused monastery on the northern tip of Manhattan, around 200th street. It is open to the public as a park and a museum. It seems a brainchild of an American capitalist from the pages of P G Wodehouse. Buy a British castle and have it transported brick by brick to New York. It is most authentic, and together with the herb gardens, gives the feeling of Europe and old civilisation. From the heights of the monastery you can see the Hudson valley and in the other direction New York.

From the shadows of the monastery I can hear the chants of Osama.

Saying it with white
Arjun Seluja, is a fashion designer who divides his time between Delhi and New York. He was dismayed to find a building with flags in all its windows. "In Chelsea, Rehan, in Chelsea."

In a gay bar, also in Chelsea, a white man stepped on his toe to make a point. "In a gay bar, Rehan!"

Arjun is also horrified by what he saw happen to the New York fashion week after September 11. All of haute couture worked to change their lines. They chose to work exclusively in white.

I walked into a magazine office in midtown the other day and noticed the secretary was frantically searching on the Internet. She told me she was looking for bin Laden's zodiac sign.

These are strange signs of the coming of a strange prophet.

A prince, a prophet
Of Bush and Osama who do you think is the prophet? Both are talking about the war between good and evil. Both claim God is on their side. Bush talks from the capital of the empire, the Rome of our time, and Osama is a man living in the middle of the desert. A prince who has given up on the princely life and lives in the poorest country in the world. He also speaks poetically.

The US should vacate the Arabian peninsula, the life of a Palestinian should be as peaceful as that of an American (at the risk of sounding redundant this means that we are all equal) and that the US must stop supporting the client states of Arabia and Egypt. A perfect rhyme.

A racial profiling of Osama would be the same as many a Judaeo Christian prophet, who is in the service of a wrathful god. I think if Osama didn't look so damn Middle Eastern, had the blonde hair and blue eyes of a Christmas pageant Jesus, Bush might dream about negotiation.

God knows there are few creative ideas in the Muslim world. No new ideas about democracy, no new news on despotism and no revolution in gender relations. The last time the Iranians had a new idea was when they threw out the West. That was almost 25 years ago. Now bin Laden has a new idea: throw the political west out of the Middle East. This is an idea in a land parched for one. It has the poetry of justice. This is why every western reporter is hearing this from the mouth of his or her Egyptian, Arabian and, even, Pakistani interviewee.

Storm clouds of change
My father and I had the ritual of going to the same prayer ground for the Id ki namaaz in Karachi. We were always late, so when I was four, he would pick me up chuckling "mulla bol para" and start running. The other thing I remember from then, and is true to this day, is how in the prayer there was talk of the freedom of the Palestinians and Kashmiris.

I remember the names of these causes when I didn't know what they stood for. My father introduced me to the Israeli conflict. He took the side of the Israelis. Against the unending retrogressiveness of the Arabian Peninsula he was also for the Israelis for their back to the wall, preemptive, survival against all odds.

I think he recognised the kinship as his family had escaped the teeth of the Delhi riots and had clawed their way out of Jacob Lines, a notorious refugee colony of Karachi. As for Kashmir, I got sick of it having realised that everything in Pakistan is mortgaged to it.

It is very discomforting to recognise in the video messages of Osama his determination to change the status quo because, well, it's been so for too long.



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Make a great connection at Yahoo! Personals.


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Make a great connection at Yahoo! Personals. --0-921072927-1002902506=:61576-- From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: A new and different page. One daughter of the Punjab did scream You covered our walls with your laments.' Millions of daughters weep today And call out to Waris Shah: 'Arise you chronicler of our inner pain And look now at your Punjab; The forests are littered with corpses And blood flows down the Chenab.' Kashmir is the unfinished business of Partition. The agreement to divide the subcontinent had entailed referendums and elections in the Muslim majority segments of British India. In the North-West Frontier Province, which was 90 per cent Muslim, the Muslim League had defeated the anti-Partition forces led by Ghaffar Khan. It did so by intimidation, chicanery and selective violence. The Muslim League never won a free election there again and Ghaffar Khan spent much of the rest of his life - he died in the 1980s - in a Pakistani prison accused of treason. His defeat seemed to prove that secular Muslim leaders, despite their popularity, were powerless against the confessional tide. Would Sheikh Abdullah be able to preserve a united Kashmir? In constitutional terms, Kashmir was a 'princely state', which meant that the Maharaja had the legal right to choose whether to accede to India or to Pakistan. In cases where the ruler did not share the faith of a large majority of his population it was assumed he would nevertheless go along with the wishes of the people. In Hyderabad and Junagadh - Hindu majority, Muslim royals - the rulers wobbled, but finally chose India. Jinnah began to woo the Maharaja of Kashmir in the hope that he would decide in favour of Pakistan. This enraged Sheikh Abdullah. Hari Singh vacillated. Kashmir's accession wa st 1947 and the Union Jack was lowered for the last time. Independence. There were now two armies in the subcontinent, each commanded by a British officer and with a very large proportion of British officers in the senior ranks. Lord Mountbatten, the Governor-General of India, and Field Marshal Auchinleck, the Joint Commander-in-Chief of both armies, made it lear to Jinnah that the use of force in Kashmir would not be tolerated. If it was attempted, Britain would withdraw every British officer from the Pakistan Army. Pakistan backed down. The League's traditional toadying to the British played a part in this decision, but there were other factors: Britain exercised a great deal of economic leverage; Mountbatten's authority was resented but could not be ignored; Pakistan's civil servants hadn't yet much self-confidence. And, unknown to his people, Jinnah was dying of tuberculosis. Besides, Pakistan's first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, an upper-class refugee from India, was not in any sense a rebel. He had worked too closely with the departing colonial power to want to thwart it. He had no feel for the politics of the regions that now comprised Pakistan and he didn't get on with the Muslim landlords who dominated the League in the Punjab. They wanted to run the country and would soon have him killed, but not just yet. Meanwhile, something had to be done about Kashmir. There was unrest in the Army and even secular politicians felt that Kashmir, as a Muslim state, should form part of Pakistan. The Maharaja had begun to negotiate secretly with India and a desperate Jinnah decided to authorise a military operation in defiance of the British High Command. Pakistan would advance into Kashmir and seize Srinagar. Jinnah nominated a younger colleague from the Punjab, Sardar Shaukat Hyat Khan, to take charge of the operation. Shaukat had served as a captain during the war and spent several months in an Italian POW camp. On his return he had resigned his commission and joined the Muslim League. He was one of its mo devoted to Jinnah, extremely hostile to Liaquat, whom he regarded as an arriviste, and keen to earn the title of 'Lion of the Punjab' that was occasionally chanted in his honour at public meetings. An effete and vainglorious figure, easily swayed by flattery, Shaukat was a chocolate-cream soldier. It was the unexpected death of his father, the elected Prime Minister of the old Punjab, that had brought him to prominence. He was not one of those people who rise above their own shortcomings in a crisis. I knew him well: he was my uncle. To his credit, however, he argued against the use of irregulars and wanted the operation to be restricted to retired or serving military personnel. He was overruled by the Prime Minister, who insisted that his loud-mouthed prot�, Khurshid Anwar, take part in the operation. Anwar, against all military advice, enlisted Pathan tribesman in the cause of jihad. Two extremely able brigadiers, Akbar Khan and Sher Khan from the 6/13th Frontier Force Regiment ('Piffers' to old India hands), were selected to lead the assault. The invasion was fixed for 9 September 1947, but it had to be delayed for two weeks: Khurshid Anwar had chosen the same day to get married and wanted to go on a brief honeymoon. In the meantime, thanks to Anwar's lack of discretion, a senior Pakistani officer, Brigadier Iftikhar, heard what was going on and passed the news to General Messervy, the C-in-C of the Pakistan Army. He immediately informed Auchinleck, who passed the information to Mountbatten, who passed it to the new Indian Government. Using the planned invasion as a pretext, the Congress sent Nehru's deputy, Sardar Patel, to pressure the Maharaja into acceding to India, while Mountbatten ordered Indian Army units to prepare for an emergency airlift to Srinagar. Back in Rawalpindi, Anwar had returned from his honeymoon and the invasion began. The key objective was to take Srinagar, occupy the airport and secure it against the Indians. Within a week the Maharaja's army had collapsed. Hari Singh fled to h h Regiment of the Indian Army had by now reached Srinagar, but was desperately waiting for reinforcements and didn't enter the town. The Pathan tribesman under Khurshid Anwar's command halted after reaching Baramulla, only an hour's bus ride from Srinagar, and refused to go any further. Here they embarked on a three-day binge, looting houses, assaulting Muslims and Hindus alike, raping men and women and stealing money from the Kashmir Treasury. The local cinema was transformed into a rape centre; a group of Pathans invaded St Joseph's Convent, where they raped and killed four nuns, including the Mother Superior, and shot dead a European couple sheltering there. News of the atrocities spread, turning large numbers of Kashmiris against their would-be liberators. When they finally reached Srinagar, the Pathans were so intent on pillaging the shops and bazaars that they overlooked the airport, already occupied by the Sikhs. The Maharaja meanwhile signed the accession papers in favour of India and demanded help to repel the invasion. India airlifted troops and began to drive the Pakistanis back. Sporadic fighting continued until India appealed to the UN Security Council, which organised a ceasefire and a Line of Control (LOC) demarcating Indian and Pakistan-held territory.* Kashmir, too, was now partitioned. The leaders of the Kashmir Muslim Conference shifted to Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, leaving Sheikh Abdullah in control of the valley itself. If Abdullah, too, had favoured Pakistan, there wouldn't have been much that the Indian troops could have done about it. But he regarded the Muslim League as a reactionary organisation and rightly feared that if Kashmir became part of Pakistan, the Punjabi landlords who dominated the Muslim League would stand in the way of any social or political reforms. He decided to back the Indian military presence, provided the Kashmiris were allowed to determine their own future. At a mass rally in Srinagar, Nehru, with Abdullah at his side, publicly promised as much ointed Prime Minister of an Emergency Administration. When the Maharaja expressed nervousness about this, Nehru wrote to him, insisting that there was no alternative: 'The only person who can deliver the goods in Kashmir is Abdullah. I have a high opinion of his integrity and his general balance of mind. He may make any number of mistakes in minor matters, but I think he is likely to be right in regard to major decisions. No satisfactory way out can be found in Kashmir except through him.' In 1944 the National Conference had approved a constitution for an independent Kashmir, which began: We the people of Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh and the Frontier regions, including Poonch and Chenani districts, commonly known as Jammu and Kashmir State, in order to perfect our union in the fullest equality and self-determination, to raise ourselves and our children for ever from the abyss of oppression and poverty, degradation and superstition, from medieval darkness and ignorance, into the sunlit valleys of plenty, ruled by freedom, science and honest toil, in worthy participation of the historic resurgence of the peoples of the East, and the working masses of the world, and in determination to make this our country a dazzling gem on the snowy bosom of Asia, do propose and propound the following constitution of our state . . . But the 1947-48 war had made independence impossible, and Article 370 of the Indian Constitution recognised only Kashmir's 'special status'. True, the Maharaja was replaced by his son, Karan Singh, who became the non-hereditary head of state, but it was a disappointed Abdullah who now sat down to play chess with the politicians from Delhi. He knew that most of them, apart from Gandhi and Nehru, would like to eat him alive. For the moment, though, they needed him. Since the split with the confessional element in the Jammu and Kashmir Conference, Abdullah had moved to the left. As the elected Chief Minister of Kashmir he pushed through a set of major reforms, the most important of which was the 'la n, which destroyed the power of the landlords, most of whom were Muslims. They were allowed to keep a maximum of 20 acres, provided they worked on the land themselves: 188,775 acres were transferred to 153,399 peasants, while the Government organised collective farming on 90,000 acres. A law was passed prohibiting the sale of land to non-Kashmiris, thus preserving the basic topography of the region. Dozens of new schools and four hospitals were built, and a university was founded in Srinagar with perhaps the most beautiful location of any campus in the world. These reforms were regarded as Communist-inspired in the United States, where they were used to build support for America's new ally, Pakistan. A classic example of US propaganda is Danger in Kashmir, written by Josef Korbel. Korbel had been a Czech UN representative in Kashmir before he defected to Washington. His book was published by Princeton in 1954, and in the second edition, in 1966, Korbel acknowledged the 'substantial help' of several scholars, including Mrs Madeleine Albright of the Russian Institute at Columbia University - his daughter. In 1948 the National Conference had backed 'provisional accession' to India, on condition Kashmir was accepted as an autonomous republic with only defence, foreign affairs and communications conceded to the centre. A small but influential minority, made up of the Dogra nobility and the Kashmiri Pandits, fearful of losing their privileges, began to campaign against Kashmir's special status. In India proper, they were backed by the ultra-right Jan Sangh (which in its current reincarnation as the Bharatiya Janata Party heads the coalition Government in New Delhi). The Jan Sangh provided funds and volunteers for agitation against the Kashmir Government. Abdullah, who had gone out of his way to integrate non-Muslims at every level of the Administration, was enraged. His position hardened. At a public meeting in the enemy stronghold of Jammu on 10 April 1952, he made it clear that he was not willing to surrender K Many Kashmiris are apprehensive as to what will happen to them and their position if, for instance, something happens to Pandit Nehru. We do not know. As realists, we Kashmiris have to provide for all eventualities . . . If there is a resurgence of communalism in India how are we to convince the Muslims of Kashmir that India does not intend to swallow up Kashmir? Abdullah was mistaken only in his belief that Nehru would protect them. When the Indian Prime Minister visited Srinagar in May 1953 he spent a week trying to cajole his friend into accepting a permanent settlement on Delhi's terms: if a secular democracy was to be preserved in India, Kashmir had to be part of it. Nehru pleaded. Abdullah wasn't convinced: Muslims were a large minority in India even if Kashmiris weren't included. He felt that Nehru shouldn't be putting pressure on him but on politicians inside the Congress who were susceptible to the chauvinistic demands of the Jan Sangh. TThree months later, Nehru gave in to the chauvinists and authorised what was effectively a coup in Kashmir. Sheikh Abdullah was dismissed by Karan Singh and one of his lieutenants, Bakhshi Ghulam Mohammed, was sworn in as Chief Minister. Abdullah was accused of being in contact with Pakistani intelligence and arrested. Kashmir erupted. A general strike began which was to last for twenty days. There were several thousand arrests and Indian troops repeatedly opened fire on demonstrators. The National Conference claimed that more than a thousand people were killed: official statistics record 60 deaths. An underground War Council, organised by Akbar Jehan, orchestrated demonstrations by women in Srinagar, Baramulla and Sopore. The unrest subsided after a month, but now Kashmiris were even more suspicious of India. The situation was no happier in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, which had the additional disadvantage of being made up of the least attractive part of the old state, a barren moonscape. Appalling living conditions gave rise to large-scale economic migratio s live in Birmingham and Bradford than in Mirpur or Muzaffarabad. An Islamist Kashmiri sits in the House of Lords as a new Labour peer; another Kashmiri is the Tory candidate for Bolton East. Sheikh Abdullah, detained for four years without trial, was released without warning one cold morning in January 1958. Declining the offer of government transport, he hired a taxi and was driven to Srinagar. Within days he was drawing huge crowds at meetings all over the country, which he used to remind Nehru of the promise he had made in 1947. 'Why did you go back on your word, Panditji?' Abdullah would ask, and the crowds would echo the question. By spring, he had been arrested again. This time the Indian Government, using British colonial legislation, began to prepare a conspiracy case against him, his wife and several other nationalist leaders. Nehru vetoed Akbar Jehan's inclusion: her popularity made it inadvisable. The conspiracy trial began in 1959 and lasted more than a year. In 1962 the special magistrate transferred the case to a higher court with the recommendation that the accused be tried under sections of the Indian penal code for which the punishment was either death or life imprisonment. In December 1963, with the higher court still considering the conspiracy charges, the single hair of the Prophet's head was stolen from the Hazrat Bal shrine in Srinagar. Its theft created uproar: an Action Committee was set up and the country was paralysed by a general strike and mass demonstrations. A distraught Nehru ordered that the strand of hair be found - and it was, within a week. But was it the real thing? The Action Committee called on religious leaders to inspect it. Faqir Mirak Shah, regarded as 'the holiest of the holy men', announced that it was genuine. The crisis abated. Nehru concluded that a lasting solution had to be found to the problem of Kashmir. He had the conspiracy case against Abdullah dropped, and the Lion of Kashmir was released after six years in prison. A million people lined the streets to necessity of ending hostilities between India and Pakistan. Kashmir troubled Nehru's conscience. He met Abdullah in Delhi and told him that he wanted the problem of Kashmir resolved in his lifetime. He suggested that Abdullah visit Pakistan and sound out its leader, General Ayub Khan. If Pakistan was ready to accept a solution proposed by Abdullah, then Nehru would, too. For a start, India was prepared to allow free movement of goods and people across the ceasefire line. Abdullah flew to Pakistan in an optimistic mood. After a series of conversations with Ayub Khan he felt progress was being made. On 27 May 1964, he reached Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, and was cheered by a large crowd. He was addressing a press conference when a colleague rushed in to inform him that All India Radio had just announced Nehru's death. Sheikh Abdullah broke down and wept. He cancelled all his engagements and, accompanied by Pakistan's Foreign Minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, flew back to Delhi to attend his old friend's funeral. Fearing that there would be no peaceful solution without Nehru, Abdullah travelled around the world, trying to get international support, and was received in several capitals with the honours accorded a visiting head of state. His meeting with the Chinese Prime Minister Zhou En Lai ('Chew and Lie' in the ultra-patriotic sections of the Indian press) created a furore in India. And so, on his return, Abdullah was imprisoned again. This time he and his wife were sent to prisons far away from Kashmir. The response was the usual: strikes, demonstrations, arrests and a few deaths. Encouraged by this, the military regime in Pakistan despatched several platoons of irregulars in September 1965, hoping to spark off an uprising. As usual, they had misjudged the situation. The unrest was not an expresion of pro-Pakistan sentiments. The Pakistan Army crossed the Line of Control, aiming to cut Kashmir off from the rest of India. The Military High Command was confident. On the eve of t ted Field Marshal Ayub Khan had boasted that they might even be able to take Amritsar - the Indian town closest to Lahore - as a bargaining chip. A senior officer present (another of my uncles) muttered loudly: 'Give him a few more whiskies and we'll take Delhi as well.' The Indian Army, caught by surprise, suffered serious reverses. They responded dramatically by crossing the Pakistan border near Lahore. Had the war continued, the city would have fallen, but Ayub Khan appealed to Washington for support. Washington asked Moscow to bring pressure on India and a peace agreement was signed in Tashkent under the watchful eye of Alexei Kosygin. The war had been Bhutto's idea. Ayub Khan, publicly humiliated at home and abroad, sacked his Foreign Minister. Bhutto had always been the most awkward member of the Government and, embarrassed at having to serve under a general, he had ratcheted up his nationalist rhetoric. Government ministers, fearing trouble, tended to avoid the universities, but a few years before this, in 1962, Bhutto had decided to address a student meeting on Kashmir at the Punjab University in Lahore, at which I was present. He spoke eloquently enough, but we were more concerned with domestic politics. We began to talk to each other. He was offended. He stopped in mid-flow and glared at us aggressively. 'What the hell do you want? I'll answer your questions.' I raised my hand. 'We're all in favour of a democratic referendum in Kashmir,' I began, 'but we would like one in Pakistan as well. Why should anybody take you seriously on democracy in Kashmir when it doesn't exist here?' He glared at me angrily, but wouldn't be drawn, pointing out that he had only agreed to speak on Kashmir. At this point the meeting erupted, with everyone demanding a reply and chanting slogans. At one point Bhutto took off his jacket and challenged a heckler to a boxing match outside. This was greeted with jeers and the meeting came to an abrupt halt. That night Bhutto cursed us roundly as one drained whisky glass after a an affectation he had picked up during an official trip to Moscow. Many months later he told me that the encounter had made him realise how powerful the students were. A week after Bhutto's dismissal in spring 1966 - by which time I was a student in the UK - I received a phone call from J.A. Rahim, Pakistan's Ambassador to France. He needed to see me in Paris the next day. He would pay my return ticket and offered the bribe of a 'sensational lunch'. An Embassy chauffeur picked me up at Orly and drove me to the restaurant. His Excellency, a cultured Bengali in his late fifties, greeted me with a conspiratorial warmth, which was surprising since we had never met. Halfway through the hors-d'oeuvres he lowered his voice and asked: 'Don't you think the time has come to get rid of the Field Marshal?' Concealing my surprise, not to mention fear, I asked him to elaborate. He raised his hand above the table, pointed two fingers at me and pulled an imaginary trigger. He wanted me to help organise Ayub Khan's assassination. My instinctive reaction was to forget the main course and leave. How could this be anything other than a set-up? Rahim ordered another bottle of Ch�au Latour, courtesy of the Pakistan Government. I pointed out the danger of removing an individual military leader while leaving the institution intact. In any case, I added, it would be difficult for me to organise the assassination from Oxford. He glared at me. 'Drastic action is needed,' he said, 'and you're just trying to avoid the issue. The Army is enfeebled after this wretched war. Everyone is fed up. Remove him and anything is possible. I'm surprised at you. I don't expect you to do it yourself. One of your uncles is always boasting about the hereditary assassins in your villages who've acted for your family in the past.' I tried to talk about Kashmir but Rahim wasn't interested. 'Kashmir,' he said, 'is irrelevant. It's the dictatorship we're after.' A week later, Rahim resigned his ambassadorship. A few months after that he turned up in Lo moned me to the Dorchester. I had heard that Bhutto was depressed, but there was no trace of it that day. Conscious of the shortness of life, he was the sort of man who was determined that it should flash by with brilliance, romance and verve. He could also be silly, arrogant, childish and vindictive - defects which cost him his life. At one point, when Rahim was out of the room, I began to describe our lunch in Paris, but Bhutto already knew about it. He laughed and insisted that Rahim had just been testing me. Then he whispered: 'When you met Rahim in Paris did he introduce you to his new mistress?' I shook my head regretfully. 'I'm told she's very pretty and very young. He's hiding her from me. I was hoping you might have . . . ' Rahim came back with a bulky typescript. It was the manifesto of the Pakistan People's Party, which he had drafted on Bhutto's instructions. 'Go into the next room, read it carefully and tell me what you think,' Bhutto ordered. 'I want you to become a founding member.' I was halfway through it when the author walked in with an apologetic smile. 'Bhutto wants to be alone. He's booked a call to Geneva. Did you know he's got a Japanese mistress there? Have you met her?' I shook my head. 'He's hiding her from me,' Rahim said. 'I wonder why.' I finished reading the manifesto. It was strong on anti-imperialist rhetoric, self-determination for Kashmir, land reform, nationalisation of industry, but far too soft on religion. I couldn't associate myself with a party that wasn't 100 per cent secular and Rahim smiled in agreement, but Bhutto was angry and denounced us both. Later that evening, during dinner, I asked why he had embroiled the country in an unwinnable war. The reply was breathtaking. 'It was the only way to weaken the bloody dictatorship. The regime will crack wide open soon.' Subsequent events appeared to vindicate Bhutto's judgment. In 1968 a prolonged uprising of students and workers finally toppled it. The traditional parties on the Left had not grasped the importanc ning, but Bhutto put himself at the head of the revolt, promised that after the people's victory, they would 'dress the generals in skirts and parade them through the streets like performing monkeys', and prospered politically. When I met him in Karachi in August 1969, he was in ebullient mood. The stopgap dictator had promised a general election and he was sure his party would win. Once again he mocked me for refusing to join. 'There are only two ways: mine or Che Guevara's. Are you planning to start a guerrilla war in the mountains of Baluchistan?' Bhutto scored an amazing triumph in the 1970 election, but only in West Pakistan. In what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh the nationalist leader Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and his Awami League won virtually every seat. Since 60 per cent of the population lived in East Pakistan, Mujib gained an overall majority in the National Assembly and expected to become Prime Minister. The Punjabi elite refused to hand over power and instead arrested him. General Yahya ('fuck-fuck' in Lahori Punjabi) Khan attempted to crush the Bengalis, and Bhutto, desperate for power, supported him. It was his most shameful hour. A Bangladeshi Government-in-Exile was set up in neighbouring Calcutta. Millions of refugees poured into the Indian province of West Bengal and, finally, at the request of the Bengali leaders in exile, the Indian Army moved into East Pakistan to be greeted by the population as liberators. Pakistan surrendered and Bangladesh was born. Bhutto came to power in a truncated Pakistan, but the old game was over: in 1972, at the Indian hill resort of Simla, he agreed to the status quo in Kashmir and in return got back the 90,000 soldiers who had been captured after the fall of Dhaka in what had been East Pakistan. In Kashmir every political group, with the exception of the confessional Jamaat-i-Islami, was shocked by the brutalities inflicted on fellow Muslims in Bengal. Had a referendum been held at this point, a majority would have opted to remain within the refused to take the risk. Pakistan's reputation continued to sink when its third military dictator, a Washington implant called Zia-ul-Haq, executed Bhutto in 1979 after a rigged trial. A large rally in Srinagar turned into a prayer meeting for the dead leader. Sheikh Abdullah (released from prison on grounds of ill-health in the mid-1970s) had made his peace with Delhi and was again appointed Chief Minister in 1977, courtesy of Mrs Gandhi, who forced Congress yes-men in the Kashmir Assembly, themselves elected by dubious means, to switch sides and vote for him. The change-over was calm: Kashmiris were pleased at Abdullah's return, but mindful of the fact that Mrs Gandhi was calling the tune. Abdullah seemed stale and tired, his time in prison had affected both his health and his politics. He now mimicked other subcontinental potentates by attempting to create a political dynasty. It's said that Akbar Jehan insisted he do so and that he was too old and weak to resist. At a big rally in Srinagar he named his oldest son, Farooq Abdullah - an amiable doctor, fond of wine and fornication, but not very bright - as his successor. As he lay dying in 1982, Sheikh Abdullah told an old friend of a dream that had haunted him for the past thirty years. 'I am still a young man. I'm dressed as a bridegroom. I'm on horseback. My bridal party leaves our home with all the fanfare. We head in the direction of the bride's house. But when I arrive she's not there. She's never there. Then I wake up.' The missing bride, so it has alway seemed to me, was Nehru. Abdullah had never fully recovered from his betrayal. In 1984 I asked Indira Gandhi about India's loss of nerve over Kashmir. She didn't offer any explanation for the failure to hold a referendum and agreed that 1979 might have been the time to take the risk, but, she reminded me with a smile, 'I was not in power that year. If I had been Prime Minister,' she added, 'I would not have let them hang Bhutto next door.' When I met Sheikh Abdullah's son at a conclave o parties in Calcutta, he was scathing about Delhi's failures, but still convinced that a referendum would not go Pakistan's way. 'She's getting too old,' he said about Mrs Gandhi. 'Look at me. Who am I? In Indian terms a nobody. A provincial politician. If she had left me alone there would have been no problems. Her Congressmen in Kashmir were bitter at having been defeated so they began to agitate, but for what? For power which the electorate had denied them. I met Mrs Gandhi a number of times to assure her that we were loyal, intended to remain so and wanted friendly relations with the centre. Her paranoia was such that she wanted one to be totally servile. That was impossible. So she gave the Kashmir Congress the green light to disrupt our Government's functioning. It was she who made me a national leader. I would have been far happier left alone in our lovely Kashmir. ' When I passed this on to her, Mrs Gandhi snorted derisively. 'Yes, yes, I know that's what he says. He said similar things to me, but he acts differently. Tells too many lies. The boy is totally untrustworthy.' Meanwhile her 'sources' had informed her that Pakistan was preparing a military invasion of Kashmir. Could this be so? I doubted it. General Zia-ul-Haq was brutal and vicious, but he wasn't an idiot. He knew that to provoke India would be fatal. In addition, the Pakistan Army was busy fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. To open a second front in Kashmir would be the height of irrationality. 'I'm surprised at you,' she said. 'You of all people believe that generals are rational human beings?' 'There is a difference between irrationality and suicide,' I said. She smiled, but didn't reply. Then, to demonstrate the inadequacies of the military mind, she described how after Pakistan's surrender in Bangladesh, her generals had wanted to continue the war against West Pakistan, to 'finish off the enemy'. She overruled them and ordered a ceasefire. Her point was that in India the Army was firmly under civilian control, but in P unto itself. Later that evening - I was staying in Delhi - I received a phone call from a civil servant. 'I believe you had a very interesting discussion with the PM. We have an informal discussion club meeting tomorrow and would love you to come and talk to us.' The members of the club were civil servants, intelligence operatives and journalists from both the US and Soviet lobbies. They tried to convince me that I was wrong, that the Pakistani generals were planning an attack. After two hours of argument and counter-argument I began to tire. 'Listen,' I said, 'if you lot are preparing a pre-emptive strike against Zia or the nuclear reactor in Kahuta, that's your decision. You might even win support in Sind and Baluchistan, but don't expect the world to believe you acted in response to Pakistani aggression. It's simply not credible at the moment.' The meeting came to an end. Back in London I described these events to Bhutto's daughter, Benazir. 'Why did you deny that Zia was planning to invade Kashmir?' she interrupted. Four months later Mrs Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. A civil servant I met in Delhi the following year told me they had evidence linking the assassins with Sikh training camps in Pakistan set up with US assistance with a view to destabilising the Indian Government. He was sure the US had decided to eliminate Mrs Gandhi in order to prevent a strike against Pakistan that would have derailed the West's operation in Afghanistan. Bhutto certainly believed that Washington had orchestrated the coup which toppled him. He smuggled out a testament from his death-cell which included Kissinger's threat to 'make a horrible example' of him unless he desisted on the nuclear question. Many people in Bangladesh still insist that the CIA, using the Saudis as a conduit, was responsible for Mujib's downfall. Mujib's daughter Haseena, currently Prime Minister of Bangladesh, was out of the country and thus the only member of the family to survive. The US may or may not have been involved, but it space of a decade three populist politicians, each hostile to US interests in the region, had been eliminated. After the break-up of 1971, Pakistan appeared to lose interest in Kashmir and South Asia as a whole. A young and ambitious State Department official visited the country in 1980, a year after Bhutto's execution, and advised Zia to look towards the petrodollar surplus being accumulated by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Pakistan's large army was well positioned to guarantee the status quo in the Gulf. The Arabs would pay the bill. Francis Fukuyama's position paper, 'The Security of Pakistan: A Trip Report', was taken very seriously by the military dictatorship. Officers and soldiers were despatched to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi to strengthen internal security. Salaries were much higher there and a posting to the Gulf was much sought after. Pakistan also exported carefully selected prostitutes, recruited from elite women's colleges. Islamic solidarity recognised no bounds. With Islamabad's attention elsewhere, the Indian Government could have reached an amicable settlement in Kashmir. But during the 1980s India interfered in the region with increasing ferocity, dismissing elected governments, imposing states of emergency, alternating soft and hard governors. Delhi's favourite despot, Jagmohan, was responsible for the suppression of the ultra-secular Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front and the imprisonment and torture of its leader, Maqbool Bhat. Young Kashmiri men were arrested, tortured and killed by Indian soldiers; women of all ages were abused and raped. The aim was to break the will of the people, but instead many young men now took up arms without bothering where they came from. I had met Bhat in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir in the early 1970s. He seemed equally hostile to Islamabad and New Delhi and determined to remake a Kashmir that was not a helpless dependant of either. He was a great admirer of Che Guevara and when I talked to him, in the euphoric aftermath of the 1969 uprising in Pakistan t yub Khan, he was dreaming of a quick victory in Kashmir. When I suggested that the rickety enthusiasm of a tiny minority was not enough, he reminded me that every revolutionary group (Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria) had started off as a minority. The Indian authorities arrested Bhat in 1976, and charging him with the murder of a policeman, sentenced him to death. He was kept in prison as a bargaining counter until 1984, when he was executed in response to the kidnapping and murder of an Indian diplomat by Kashmiri militants in Birmingham. The vacuum he left would soon be filled by the men with beards, infiltrated, armed and funded by Pakistan. By the late 1990s, after years of intra-Muslim factional violence, Afghanistan had come under the control of the Taliban - themselves funded, armed and sustained by the Pakistan Army. Pakistan itself was in the grip of corrupt politicians, and sectarian infighting was claiming dozens of lives each month. In India, the Congress Party had lost its hold on national politics, paving the way for the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In Kashmir the number of armed Islamist groups multiplied as more and more veterans of the Afghan war came across the border to continue their fight for supremacy there. The main rivals were the indigenous Hizbul Mujahideen and the Pakistani-sponsored and armed Lashkar-i-Tayyaba and Harkatul Mujahideen.� The groups killed each other's militants, kidnapped Western tourists, drove Kashmiri Hindus out of regions where they had lived for centuries, punished Kashmiri Muslims who remained stubbornly secular and occasionally knocked off a few Indian soldiers and officials. Each group was willing when convenient to make terms with Delhi rather than combine with other groups to inflict punishment on the Indian Government. Governor Jagmohan responded by making it as hard as he could for these Muslim groups to find new recruits. Night-long house-to-house searches became a part of everyday life. Young men were abducted by Indian soldiers, never to g memoirs, Frozen Turbulence, Jagmohan explained: 'Obviously, I could not walk barefoot in a valley full of scorpions. I could leave nothing to chance.' The result of his policy was to win support for the gunmen. Kashmir was ruled, more or less unhappily, by Delhi until 1996, when Farooq Abdullah came back to power - most of the other parties boycotted the elections. Since then his collaboration with the BJP has destroyed his remaining reputation and if a free election were permitted, his career as a politician would soon be over. The Indian and Pakistani Armies are among the largest in the world. In September 1998, the Pakistani High Command decided to test Indian border defences in the virtually undefended Kargil-Drass region, a Himalayan wasteland 14,000 feet above sea-level where Kashmir meets Pakistan and China. The region is one of mountain ridges and deep valleys, with temperatures averaging -20�c; it is also an area colonised by wild yellow roses, which bloom for a month each summer; the petals are eaten by villagers, who believe the rose nourishes the body and heals the soul. Most of the villagers are Shiite Muslims or Buddhists who live quiet, harmonious lives, sharing, among other things, an aversion to the Sunni fundamentalist imports from next door. The Pakistani Army, wholeheartedly backed by Nawaz Sharif's Government, crossed the Line of Control accompanied, just as it had been in 1947 and 1965, by soldiers disguised as irregulars and Lashkar-i-Tayyaba contingents, and occupied several ridges and villages. The Indian Army moved troops to the area from Srinagar and artillery duels became a daily nightmare for the locals. Why had Pakistan embarked on an adventure of such obvious strategic futility? There was no possibility of triumphant entrances by victorious generals or politicians. Most Pakistani citizens, other than the Islamists, knew very little about what was happening in the mountains. Nor were they particularly interested in the fate of Kashmir. The real reasons for the war were ide aeed, the head mullah of the Lashkar, told Pamela Constable of the Washington Post: 'Revenge is our religious duty. We beat the Russian superpower in Afghanistan; we can beat the Indian forces too. We fight with the help of Allah, and once we start jihad, no force can withstand us.' His argument was echoed by Pakistani officials. The Indians weren't as powerful as the Russians and since they no longer possessed a nuclear monopoly in the region there was no danger that a limited war would escalate. Second, and more important, Pakistan's actions would internationalise the conflict and bring the United States 'on side', as in Afghanistan and the Balkans. In the war-zone itself, India suffered initial reverses, then brought in more troops, helicopter gunships and fighter jets and began to bomb Pakistani installations across the border. If Nato could overfly borders without any legal sanction, so could they. By May 1999, as the yellow roses were about to bloom, the Indian Army had retaken most of the ridges it had lost. A month later its forces were poised to cross the Line of Control. Pakistan's political leaders panicked and, falling back on an old habit, made a desperate appeal to the White House. A US general was sent to Pakistan to have a quiet word with the military, and Nawaz Sharif was summoned to the White House. Clinton told him to withdraw all his troops, as well as the fundamentalists, from the territory they had occupied. Nothing was promised in return. No pressure on India. No money for Pakistan. Sharif capitulated. His Information Minister, Mushahid Hussain, had told the press just before the Washington visit that 'we did not start insurgency in Kashmir which is populous [sic], spontaneous and indigenous and we cannot stop it.' But they did. The dispute had indeed been internationalised, though not exactly as Pakistan had wanted. With China as the main enemy, Washington had dumped on Pakistan and was leaning heavily in India's direction. In private, Sharif told the Americans that he supported a d had resisted the Kargil war, but had been outmanoeuvred by the Army. The lie went down well in Washington and Delhi, but angered the Pakistani High Command. When he got home, Sharif hatched a plan to replace the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Pervaiz Musharraf, with one of his placemen, General Khwaja Ziaudin, Head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), regarded by many as the 'invisible government'. Sharif's brother Shahbaz made an unpublicised visit to Washington with Ziaudin in tow in order to get approval for Ziaudin's appointment. The two men were received at the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA and made many rash promises. On 11 October 2000, while Musharraf was on his way back from a three-day official visit to Sri Lanka, Nawaz Sharif announced his dismissal and Ziaudin's promotion. The authorities at Karachi airport were instructed to divert the General's plane to a tiny airstrip in the interior of Sind, where he would be taken into custody. But the Army refused to accept Ziaudin's authority and the Karachi commander occupied the airport and ordered the plane to land. Musharraf was received with full military protocol. The Army commander in the capital arrested the Sharif brothers and General Ziaudin. This was the first coup d'�t carried out in the face of explicit American instructions to the contrary: in a statement issued three days before these events, Clinton had warned against a military takeover. In Pakistan the fall of the Sharif brothers was celebrated on the streets of every city. Musharraf pledged to wipe out corruption, restore standards in public life and, in an unguarded interview, stressed his affinity with Kemal Ataturk, the founder of secular Turkey. No restrictions were placed on the press or political parties. Nearly two years later, Musharraf's early anti-corruption zeal has dissipated. The fiercely incorruptible General Amjad was transferred from the Accountability Bureau to a military command in Karachi: he had amassed evidence revealing extensive corruptio try. Supreme Court judges were for sale to the highest bidder (defence lawyers asked clients for six-figure sums as the 'judge's fee', payable before a trial began); many senior civil servants were on the payroll of big business and the narco-barons; businessmen pocketed bank loans worth billions of rupees; senior military officers had succumbed to bribery. Amjad insisted to no avail that the new regime clean up the Armed Forces. Unless retired and serving officers were tried, sentenced and punished, he believed, Pakistan would remain a failed state, dependent on foreign handouts and a black economy fuelled by narco-profits. His transfer shows that he lost this battle. Many people in Pakistan had assumed that Musharraf would disarm the Islamists and restore a semblance of law and order in the big cities. Here, too, the regime has made little progress, because it underestimated Islamist penetration of the Army. In Lahore last December, I was told about a disturbing incident. The Indians had informed their Pakistani counterparts that one of the peaks in Kargil-Drass was still occupied by Pakistani soldiers, contrary to the ceasefire agreement. A senior officer went to investigate and ordered the captain in charge of the peak to return to the Pakistani side of the Line of Control. The captain accused his senior officer and the military High Command of betraying the Islamist cause, and shot the officer dead. The Islamist officer was finally disarmed, tried by a secret court-martial and executed. If, as is widely agreed, between 25 and 30 per cent of the Army are Islamists, its reluctance to act against the jihadis is understandable: it is nervous of provoking a civil war. Musharraf has a serious problem - and it's not just his problem. The fundamentalists' boast that in ten years' time they will control the Army and hence Pakistan conjures a deadly image: an Islamist finger on the nuclear trigger. This is what has concentrated minds in Washington, Delhi and Beijing, but so far with little to show for it. Nei urs the cause of Kashmiri independence. Nor does Beijing, worried about the ramifications in Tibet. And yet independence is what the Kashmiri people appear to want. In the valley itself, Farooq Abdullah and his BJP chums, backed by Karan Singh, are plotting a Balkanisation of the province, dividing it into eight units along religio-ethnic lines. The J&K Liberation Front meanwhile has published a map showing their favoured boundaries for an independent Kashmir, made up of territory currently occupied by India, Pakistan and China. Hashim Qureshi, one of the leaders of the organisation, told me that they did not want all the paraphernalia of a modern state. They weren't interested in having an army. They would be happy for their frontiers to be guaranteed by China, India and Pakistan, so that Kashmir, the cause of three wars, could become a secular, multicultural paradise, open to citizens of both India and Pakistan. At the moment it is a noble, but utopian hope. The political landscape is exceptionally bleak. (A pamphlet issued by a Jihadi group in Pakistan a few weeks ago calls for donations to fund the struggle: the total launch-fee for a jihad is Rs140,000; the price of a Kalashnikov is given as Rs20,000; a single bullet is Rs35; a Kenwood wireless is Rs28,000.) The chapter of South Asian history that opened with the Partition of 1947 needs to be closed. There are now three large states in the region: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, with a combined population of well over a billion people. One out of every five people in the world lives in South Asia. Economic and political logic dictates the formation of a South Asia Union, a voluntary confederation of republics. Within such a framework, Kashmir could be guaranteed complete autonomy by both India and Pakistan. Shared sovereignty must be better than none at all. The US likes to play the role of supreme arbiter, but its solutions always serve its own interests. It would make more sense for the South Asian states and other regional powers such as China to nd speak to each other directly. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: epressed. In order to say � as Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi did, controversially, this month - whether any one culture is superior to another, parameters have to be established. A culture can be described objectively - these people behave like this; believe in spirits or in a single divine being that pervades the whole of nature; meet in family clans according to these rules; consider it beautiful to pierce their noses with rings (this could be a description of western youth culture); consider pork to be impure; circumcise themselves; raise dogs for the pot on public holidays or, as the English and Americans still say of the French, eat frogs. Obviously, the anthropologist knows that objectivity is always limited by many factors. The criteria of judgment depend on our own roots, preferences,habits, passions, our system of values. For example: do we consider that the prolonging of the average life span from 40 to 80 years is worthwhile? I personally believe so, but many mystics could tell me that, between a glutton who lives for 80 years and Saint Luigi Gonzaga, who only survived for 23, it was the latter who had the fuller life. Do we believe that technological development, the expansion of trade, and faster transport is worthwhile? Many think so, and judge our technological civilisation as superior. But, within the western world itself, there are those who primarily wish to live in harmony with an uncorrupted environment,and are willing to relinquish air travel, cars and refrigerators, to weave baskets and travel on foot from one village to another, as long as the ozone hole isn�t there. So in order to define one culture as better than another, it is not enough to describe it (as the anthropologist does), but it is advisable to have recourse to a system of values which we do not feel we can relinquish. Only at this point can we say that our culture is better, for us. How absolute is the parameter of technological development? Pakistan has the atom bomb, not Italy. So is Italy an infe e respect the Islamic world by being reminded that it has given us men like Avicenna (who was actually born in Buchara, not far from Afghanistan) and Averroes, as well as Al-Kindi, Avenpace, Avicebron, Ibn Tufayl, or that great historian of the 14th century Ibn Khaldoun, whom the west considers as the father of the social sciences.The Arabs of Spain cultivated geography, astronomy, mathematics or medicine when the Christian world was lagging far behind in those subjects. We might recall that those Arabs of Spain were fairly tolerant of Christians and Jews, while we gave rise to the ghettoes, and that Saladin, when he reconquered Jerusalem, was more merciful to the Christians than the Christians had been to the Saracens when they took over Jerusalem. All very true, but in the Islamic world there are fundamentalist and theocratic regimes today which the Christians do not tolerate, and Bin Laden was not merciful to New York. The Taliban destroyed the great stone Buddhas with their cannon: conversely, the French carried out the St Bartholomew�s day massacre, but this gives no one the right to say they are barbarians today. History is a two-edged sword. The Turks were impalers (and that�s bad) but the orthodox Byzantines put out the eyes of their dangerous relatives and the Catholics burned Giordano Bruno; Saracen pirates did many wicked things,but the buccaneers of his British majesty set fire to the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean; Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are ferocious enemies of western civilisation, but within western civilisation there were men like Hitler and Stalin. No, the problem of parameters is not set within history, but in our times.One of the praiseworthy aspects of western culture (free and pluralistic,and these are values which we consider basic and essential) is that it has been long held that the same person can employ different parameters which may be mutually contradictory on different matters. For example, the prolonging of life is considered good, and atmospheric pollution bad, that maybe in big laboratories where they study how to prolong life, there might be power systems which themselves produce pollution. Western culture has developed the capacity to freely lay bare its own contradictions. Maybe they remain unresolved, but they are well known and admitted: how can we manage some positive globalisation while avoiding the risks and injustices that follow; how can we prolong life for the millions of Africans dying of Aids (while at the same time prolonging our own lives) without accepting a planetary economy which causes people to die of hunger and Aids, and makes us eat polluted food? But it is just this criticism of parameters, pursued and encouraged by the west, that makes us understand how delicate the matter is. Is it just and proper to protect bank secrets? Many people think so. But if this secrecy allows terrorists to keep their accounts in the City of London then is this defence of so-called privacy a positive value or a doubtful one? We are always calling our parameters into question. The western world does so to such an extent as to allow its own citizens to turn down technological development and become Buddhists, or go and live in communities where no tyres are used, not even for horse-drawn carts. The west has decided to channel money and effort into studying other customs and practices, but no one has really given other people the chance to study western customs and practices, except at schools maintained by white expatriates, or by allowing the rich from other cultures to study in Oxford or Paris. What happens then is that they return home to organize fundamentalist movements, because they feel solidarity with those of their compatriots who lack the opportunity for such education. An international organisation called Transcultura has been campaigning for an �alternative anthropology� for some years. It has taken African researchers, who have never been to the west before, to describe provincial France and society in Bologna. Both sides started to take a ge look at each other, and some interesting discussions took place. At present, three Chinese - a philosopher, an anthropologist and an artist - are completing a Marco Polo voyage in reverse, culminating in a conference in Brussels in November. Imagine Muslim fundamentalists being invited to research Christian fundamentalism (not the Catholics this time, but American Protestants, more fanatical than ayatollahs, who try to expunge all reference to Darwin from schools). In my opinion the anthropological study of other people�s fundamentalism leads to a better understanding of one�s own. Let them come and study our concept of holy war (I could commend many interesting texts to them, including some quite recent ones). They might then take a more critical view of the idea of holy war back home. We are a pluralist civilisation because we allow mosques to be built in our countries, and we are not going to stop simply because Christian missionaries are thrown into prison in Kabul. If we did so, we too would become Taliban. The parameter of tolerating diversity is certainly one of the strongest and least open to argument. We consider our culture mature because it can tolerate diversity, and those who share our culture, while rejecting diversity to be uncivilised, period. We hope that, if we allow mosques in our countries, one day there will be Christian churches in their countries, or at least Buddhas won�t get blown up there. If we believe we have got our parameters right, that is. But there is a great deal of confusion. Funny things happen these days. It seems that defending western values has become a rightwing prerogative, while the Left, as ever, is pro-Islamic. Now, apart from the pro-third world, pro-Arab stance of some rightwing and Catholic activist circles, and so on, this ignores a historical phenomenon which is there for all to see. The defence of scientific values, of technological development and modern western culture in general, has always been characteristic of secular andprogressive political circ ommunist regimes have relied on an ideology of technological and scientific progress. The 1848 Communist Manifesto opens with a dispassionate eulogy on the expansion of the bourgeoisie. Marx does not say it is necessary to change direction and go over to Asian means of production. He merely says that the proletariat must learn to master these values and successes. Conversely it has always been reactionary thought (in the best sense of the word), at least starting from the rejection of the French revolution, which has opposed the secular ideology of progress and propounded a return to traditional values. Only a few neo-Nazi groups have a mythical notion of the west and would be ready to slit the throats of all Muslims at Stonehenge.The more serious traditionalist thinkers have always looked to Islam as a source of alternative spirituality, in addition to the rites and myths of primitive peoples and the teachings of Buddhism. They have always made a point of reminding us that we are not superior, but impoverished by our ideology of progress, and that we must seek the truth among the Sufi mystics or the whirling dervishes. Thus a strange dichotomy is now opening on the right. But perhaps it is only a sign that, at times of great bewilderment (such as the present), no one knows quite where they stand any more. But it is at times of bewilderment that the weapon of analysis and criticism comes into its own, to be applied to our own superstitions and those of others. � La Repubblica From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: > > > by Ayeda > > > 10. Friendly troops > > 9. Silent majority > > 8. Taliban moderates > > 7. Humanitarian aid > > 6. Military control > > 5. Stable Afghan government > > 4. Mid-East peace > > 3. American diplomacy > > 2. Indian intelligence > > 1. Front-line reporting (as in: in front of the > Marriott) > > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at > http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Make a great connection at Yahoo! Personals. http://personals.yahoo.com From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: http://india.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=242 > Chomsky's programme in India > by Ravi 8:27am Mon Nov 5 '01 > ravia_ravia at yahoo.com > > Noam Chomsky is in India on a > three-week visit, and will be > speaking in Delhi, Kolkata, > Chennai and > Thiruvananthapuram. And then in Lahore and Islamabad. > Noam and Carol Chomsky are in India on a three > week > visit, after which they will visit Pakistan. Noam > Chomsky has a number of public lectures in India. A > schedule of his main public engagements on this > November 2001 visit to India and Pakistan is > included at the end. > > Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor at the > Massachusetts > Institute of Technology (MIT). Renowned scholar, > path-breaker in linguistics, philosopher, media critic, > political analyst, author of many books, winner of > many awards and prizes. ``Arguably the most > important intellectual alive'' and ``perhaps the > clearest voice of dissent in American history'' (The > New York Times). > > Schedule of Noam Chomsky's main public > engagements in India and Pakistan, November 2001: ... > Nov 5 -- Lecture, ``Militarism, Democracy and > People's Right to Information,'' organised by the > National Campaign for the Peoples' Right to > Information. Venue: Delhi School of Economics, > Delhi. > > Nov 10 -- Lecture, ``September 11 and its > Aftermath: Where is the World Heading?'' > sponsored by Frontline and Media Development > Foundation (MDF) and supported by 22 > representative organisations. > Venue: Music Academy auditorium, Chennai. > > Nov 11 -- Lecture, ``Globalisation and Human > Survival: The Challenges After the 11th of > September,'' organised by E.M.S. Academy Trust. > Venue: EMS Academy, Thiruvanthapuram. > > Nov 20 -- Lecture, ``September 11 and Its > Aftermath: Where is the World Heading?'' Venue: > Science City Auditorium, Kolkata. Chief Minister > Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee presides. > > Nov 22 -- Special Convocation at University of > Calcutta for the award of Degree of Doctor of > Literature (Honoris Causa) to Noam Chomsky. > Venue: Centenary Hall, University of Calcutta, > Kolkata. > > Nov 24 -- 3rd Eqbal Ahmad Distinguished Lecture, > ``Searching for Universal Human Values: Prospects, > Limits, Barriers.'' Venue: > Khorshed Mahal, Avari Hotel, Lahore. > > Nov 26 -- 4th Eqbal Ahmad Distinguished Lecture, > ``Our Endangered Species,'' Venue: The National > Library, Islamabad. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Afghans are racing to catch up from a five-year time warp. The radical Islamic rulers banned everything from kite-flying to women walking too loudly. Listening to nonreligious music was forbidden as well. Taliban roadblocks across the country were festooned with tangled strands of shiny black magnetic tape, ripped from confiscated video and music cassettes. Those who are providing the new window on the world can barely keep up with the public appetite for once-forbidden fruit. Take Gholam Farouk, a TV and stereo salesman who has the smile of a born conspirator. In his shop today, there is standing room only as customers jostle to buy TVs, VCRs, and satellite dishes. Before Northern Alliance rebels took control of the city Nov. 13, his entire stock was hidden in a secret warehouse. Only simple radios lined the shelves. Even those were enough to bring an agent of the Taliban's vice ministry to his narrow doorway earlier this year. "You should burn everything in your shop," Mr. Farouk says he was told. "Then you should burn me with it," he retorted, initially denying the existence of his warehouse. The Taliban eventually forced him to divulge his stash: Inside they found 18 televisions, 22 video players, a video camera, and eight satellite dishes. Farouk was held in jail for 15 days. After he got out, he replenished his stock. And the moment he learned that the Taliban had fled last week, he emptied the warehouse into the shop. The crush of people asking for prices all day, he says, made his head hurt. "There were many Pakistanis and Arabs [with the Taliban], who wanted to keep us in the dark. They didn't want to show their faces," says Ismatollah Hairan, a customer in the shop. "TV is good for children and for everybody, because we can see what is happening in the world." The cultural restrictions imposed by the Taliban - and the quiet opposition to it - were not limited to the airwaves. Mahboub Sharifi secretly collected 500 videocassettes which he rented to friends. "We had shelves at home with secret places carved out behind, where we kept the tapes," Mr. Sharifi says. "It was a miracle that I was never caught." Today, his inventory lines one wall of his shop. The latest James Bond film, "The World is Not Enough," and other Hollywood releases, are outnumbered by Indian titles with alluring women on the covers. They share space with sugary fruit-juice boxes, detergent, and cans of Pepsi Cola. His co-conspirators were a number of Pakistani travel agents who ferried videos, and even the Taliban themselves, whom he says he bribed at checkpoints. Business is booming. Sharifi rents 40 to 50 tapes per night, he says, at about 50 cents each. But cash wasn't the only reason he began this line of work. "I was so bored, and there were so many like me - we couldn't do anything we wanted," Sharifi says, as customers outside his shop eyeball film posters. "I needed money, but it was against the Taliban. That's why we did it." Change is evident almost everywhere in Kabul. Afghan TV began broadcasting again on Monday, with women newsreaders returning to the airwaves (the Taliban had banned women from work outside the home) wearing only headscarves, not the previously required head-to-toe burqas. Not even a Harry Potter premi� in New York or London could match the enthusiasm of crowds outside the Bakhtar Cinema in downtown Kabul this week. Rioting broke out Monday when the theater opened. In the first three days, some 3,000 people have crammed the dusty hallways and big auditorium of the cinema - lending an odorous air of suffocation as Afghan and Indian films played scratchily on the big screen. "People love the cinema very much, and we were very sad and depressed during these five years," says Hossein Ahmadi, the ticket taker who hid five of the movie "pie tins" in his own home. His eyes twinkle at the thought of the return of his celluloid heroes. The building was one of 17 cinemas in the city that have been locked for half a decade. Now, a long string of bikes owned by moviegoers are lined up outside. Guards at the entrance frisk every ticketholder. Numbers are issued, and patrons must handover brass knuckles, switchblades, radios - even Kalashnikov assault rifles - at the door. Upstairs, the projector clatters with the sound of the silver screen era; projectionist Mohamed Yassin - until days ago, selling trousers and shirts on the street - is back at his old job. "Many people love to watch films; we don't have any other amusements," he says, rewinding the movies manually, "dusting" the film as it pulls through his fingers. "This is the place people come to have fun." But as Afghans crowd into the dark cavern of the theater - eager to escape the harsh realities of their nation after two decades of war - what is it they choose to watch? An Afghan-made film called "Horouj" ("Offensive") - about mujahideen fighters on the battlefront. Copyright � 2001 The Christian Science Monitor. -- From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Kashmir was conquered by an Afghan ruler in 1752.Mughal,Afghan,Sikh and Dogra rule are all equally and deeply resented in Kashmir. Yet another name which comes up in connection to Kashmir is that of Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah ? Kashmir�s tallest political leader, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah organized and then split the Muslim opposition to Dogra rule-the Muslim Conference. Abdullah split Muslim Conference to form National Conference which in turn espoused secular, democratic politics and forged close ties with the nationalist struggle in India.Many Leftists in Kashmir joined National Conference.The CPI (then united) sees in Kashmir,"the launcing pad for socialism in South Asia". What is the Naya Kashmir Manifesto ? Is it like the Communist Manifesto ? Well, the spirit is the same. National Conference adopted the Naya Kashmir Manifesto in 1942.It envisaged radical social change. Abdullah launched a Quit Kashmir movement in 1946. Was it like the Quit India movement ? More of an anti-feudal struggle, Quit Kashmir movement drew its inspiration from the Quit India movement .Sheikh Abdullah declared that �Quit Kashmir is not a question of revolt. It is a matter of right.� The struggle carried on upto 1947.This struggle has been brilliantly documented by Pandit Prem Nath Bazaz in Frredom Struggle in Kashmir. That again brings us to 1947 ? Hari Singh, to save his throne toyed with the idea of an independent Kashmir. By August 1947,a �standstill agreement� between the Maharaja and Pakistan put Kashmir�s Post and Telegraph services and the supply of essential commodities under Pakistan. But the Maharaja acceded to India ? Whether Maharaja acted hastily isn't too clear but he had no choice. Revolt in Poonch had brought in tribal invaders from Pakistan's North West.The communal situation in Jammu had further complicated matters.By late October,the tribal invaders had closed in on Srinagar.Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession to India on 26 October 1947(there is a serious controversy over t airlifted from Delhi held back the raiders and this led to the first Indo-Pak war over Kashmir. And the outcome of this war? UN intervention.United Nations brokered the Ceasefire that left two-thirds of Jammu and Kashmir with India and the rest with Pakistan. That settled it then. The Indian Jammu and Kashmir becomes an integral part of India.Isn�t it ? Things were far more complicated than that. Pandit Nehru, the then Prime Minister of India, didn�t want what he called forced unions. India wanted the accession to be ratified by the people of Jammu and Kashmir with a referendum held under international auspices. In an address to the nation on 3rd November, 1947, Pandit Nehru said, "We have declared that the fate of Kashmir is ultimately to be decided by the people. That pledge we have given not only to the people of Kashmir but to the world. We will not and cannot back out of it". You imply Plebiscite ? India�s and Pakistan�s commitment to the idea of a referendum or Plebiscite led the United Nations Commission on India and Pakistan to adopt resolutions of August 13,1948 on Kashmir that envisaged plebiscite in J&K.Now these are the UN Resolutions on Kashmir. Wasn�t there any plebiscite ? No. Partly because both India and Pakistan had serious doubts on their chances. What is the Article 370 ? The Instrument of Accession limited the accession to defence, foreign affairs and communications. India�s Constituent Assembly inserted a special provision in the Indian Constitution, Article 306A,that allowed for such autonomy to J&K- even this was supposed to be �an interim system�. This is the pre-1953 status of J&K. Article 306A later on became Article 370 which didn�t CONFER any status on J&K but CONFIRMED the status which the State already enjoyed. If plebiscite didn�t happen, then�? Sheikh Abdullah was frustrated by the deadlock over Kashmir .This led Abdullah to form the Constituent Assembly of J&K in 1951 for which the National Conference won all 75 seats unopposed. THIS Constitue ly, the representative character of which has been questioned, ratified Kashmir�s accession to India and enshrined Article 306A as Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. This came to be known as the Delhi Agreement. Why then was Sheikh Abdullah arrested in 1953 ? Sheikh Abdullah was believed to be seriously thinking of an independent Kashmir. Though there was flimsy evidence ,Sheikh was arrested in 1953.Sheikh�s meetings with Adlai Stevenson and the US ambassador Loy Henderson had created enough suspicion. Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad who was installed in his place accused Sheikh Abdullah of trying to set up another Korea in Kashmir and argued for closer union to India. Sheikh Abdullah was detained under the Kashmir Conspiracy Case. And yes, why is Lal Chowk called so ? Lal Chowk is named after Red Square. There was a strong Kashmiri Left movement in `40s and `50s.The anti-feudal struggle in Kashmir was imbued with socialist ideals that led to radical Land Reforms in 1950. Why did India go back on its commitment on plebiscite ? This happened in 1954 when Pakistan joined an American military alliance and India announced that Kashmir�s accession to India is final and the elections to the Constituent Assembly should be considered surrogate for plebiscite. When Khruschev, the then General Secretary of the CPSU visited Kashmir, Kashmir was refered to as � one of the states of India�. But the incorporation of J&K was officially declared to be complete on 26 January 1957.Thus the 1949 Ceasefire line became the de facto border between India and Pakistan dividing Kashmir. So what did the Sheikh and his friends do ? Mirza Afzal Begh, a close confidante of Sheikh, formed the Plebiscite Front that campaigned for a plebiscite to settle the Kashmir problem. What about Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad ? Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad was Shiekh Abdullah�s lieutenant until 1953. Bakshi, G M Sadiq and Begh were Sheikh Abdullah�s closest associates and leaders of the National Conference. Bakshi deposed Sheikh for maneuv Kashmir and succeeded in passing a resolution in the J&K Constituent Assembly that declared Kashmir to be an integral part of India. Bakshi gave an effective but corrupt administration. Weren�t there any elections in Kashmir ? In 1957 Bakshi�s party won the elections,43 of the seats unopposed .Again in 1972,Bakshi�s party won 70 seats. Both the elections were widely believed to be rigged. The only reasonably fair elections in Kashmir were held in 1977 in which Sheikh Abdullah won a landslide victory. In 1967,the Congress party won the elections by getting 118 nomination papers cancelled. In 1964,the Constitution of J&K was amended-the Prime Minister of J&K was now to be the Chief Minister and the President was replaced by a Governor to be appointed by the Centre. The Sadiq faction of the National Conference became the local Congress. And the Plebiscite Front ? Many leaders of the Kashmiri secessionism became associated with politics when Sheikh Abdullah was sent to prison in 1953. Wasn�t there any popular protest by Kashmiris ? Of course. All this was to later explode in an angry outburst that had a discernible anti-India tenor in 1963 over the theft of the hair of Prophet Muhammad from the Hazratbal mosque at Srinagar . This came to be known as the Moe-Muqaddas agitation. It galvanized Kashmiri masses into political agitation. Finally Sheikh Abdullah was released. The Moe-Muqaddas agitation was interpreted by Pakistan as pro-Pakistan sentiment and encouraged them to attack Kashmir in 1965. Why was Sheikh Abdullah released ? Nehru urged Sheikh to travel to Pakistan to push for a lasting solution to the Kashmir problem. It was believed that Nehru wanted Abdullah to suggest a confederation between India, Pakistan and Kashmir. Did Sheikh Abdullah travel to Pakistan ? Sheikh Abdullah and Mirza Afzal Begh traveled to Pakistan on 24 May,1964. But the Sheikh�s deliberations in Pakistan were hastily aborted by Nehru�s demise on May 27, 1964. And then? Jayaprakash Narain, the res er visited Pakistan. Lal Bahadur Shastri and Ayub Khan met in Karachi yet there was no end to the stalemate over Kashmir. Any other protests in Kashmir ? Kashmir was relatively calm but the extension of Article 356 and 357 that gave the Union government of India powers to impose President�s rule in J&K sparked off protests. And Sheikh Abdullah? Abdullah traveled to London and Algiers. Abdullah�s meeting with the Chinese Prime Minister Chou En Lai angered New Delhi. Abdullah�s passport was cancelled by India. Sheikh rejected the offer of a Pakistani passport only to be arrested on his return .The Valley burst out in protest as the Lion of Kashmir was incarcerated in Kodaikanal , Tamil Nadu. What about the 1965 War between India and Pakistan on Kashmir ? Or the Operation Gibraltar. Between June and August 1965 there was Pakistani infiltration in Kashmir. It was believed by Pakistan that Kashmiris will join the infiltrators and Pakistan Army will intervene to free Kashmir. However, Kashmiris didn�t side with the infiltrators. A full-fledged India-Pakistan war broke out in 1965. And what happened? A Ceasefire was announced on 13 September ,1965 to end a war which was never formally declared. Both India and Pakistan were frustrated by Western intervention and Soviet Union moved to help India and Pakistan reach an agreement. Ayub and Shastri met in Tashkent. �The Tashkent Declaration� of 10 January,1966 underplays Kashmir. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the then Foreign Minister of Pakistan, saw it as a sellout on Kashmir and was forced to resign. The Plebiscite Front-what about them? The Plebiscite Front decided to contest the local elections in 1969 and was all set to participate in the State elections.It was then that Plebiscite Front was banned by India in 1971. Isn�t 1971 the year of yet another Indo-Pak war? The war is preceded by the Ganga Hijacking. An Indian Airlines plane called Ganga is hijacked to Lahore by two Kashmiris. Before India responds to the hijackers' demands the passen are set free by the hijackers and the plane is set on fire. The Ganga hijacking is mired in controversy. All these events renew hostility between India and Pakistan while accusations and counteraccusations are hurled. And then we witnessed another Indo-Pak war �Though the war wasn�t fought on Kashmir, did it have any effect on the Kashmir problem? It demoralized the Kashmiri leadership as they thought that after its triumph in the war India won�t relent to a compromise on Kashmir. What is the Simla Agreement? Simla Agreement is the agreement between the then Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and the then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, signed on 2nd July 1972 which formally ended the 1971 war. It envisages a peaceful relationship between the two countries which is sought to be governed by the principal of bilateralism .The Simla Agreement has been brought into play by India to rule out any third party intervention on Kashmir as well as to soft-pedal the Kashmir issue even as Pakistan takes it to mean that Kashmir can be settled through bilateral negotiations. How did the Kashmiri leadership react to these developments ? They reacted with their own �compromise� on Kashmir. Sheikh signed an accord on November 13, 1974 with Indira Gandhi which came to be known as the Beg- Parthasarthy Accord or the Kashmir Accord of 1975.Sheikh Abdullah became Chief Minister but at the cost of huge and unpopular concessions to the Centre. And then Sheikh Abdullah remained Chief Minister? Until Sheikh died in 1982.Farooq Abdullah, Sheikh�s son, took over. Farooq�s National Conference swept the polls in 1984. Why then was Farooq Abdullah dismissed in 1984 ? Farooq Abdullah was �punished� by Indira Gandhi. Farooq had organized a conclave of Opposition parties in Srinagar which angered Mrs.Gandhi enough to engineer the split in National Conference that brought Farooq�s brother-in-law G M Shah as Chief Minister. Farooq�s dismissal is mired in controversy. Ironically this was the first t olitics had attempted to connect itself to India�s national politics. How long did G M Shah stay as Chief Minister? G M Shah�s rule was quite unpopular �the State government resorted to curfews to quell opposition. Jagmohan , the then governor of J&K, took over from Shah as Governor�s rule was imposed in J&K. And Farooq Abdullah? Farooq Abdullah was elbowed into an alliance by the Congress(I) government at the Centre. National Conference-Congress(I) alliance faced Muslim United Front-the Muslim Opposition that also comprised the secessionists in an election in 1987. The keenly contested election ended in widespread rigging to bring back Farooq into power. For Kashmiris the NC- Congress(I) alliance gave the impression of a sellout and revived memories of 1975 Kashmir Accord which had �defanged� the Lion of Kashmir,Sheikh Abdullah. National Conference brutally suppressed the secessionists .The �unholy alliance� and the State repression built the legitimacy for the armed rebellion. Many in the Opposition felt betrayed by India. Like who? Like Syed Salahudin, the Supreme Commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen, who �lost� the Amirakadal Constituency in Srinagar to National Conference in the 1987 State Assembly elections. Many of the militant leaders of the 1990s had participated in the 1987 election campaign of the Muslim United Front. So that brings us close to the Kashmir Uprising in early 1990? It formally begins with the JKLF�s sporadic acts of violence in 1988 and 1989.1990 becomes the year of the Kashmiri Uprising against the Indian State. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Kashmir was conquered by an Afghan ruler in 1752.Mughal,Afghan,Sikh and Dogra rule are all equally and deeply resented in Kashmir. Yet another name which comes up in connection to Kashmir is that of Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah ? Kashmir�s tallest political leader, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah organized and then split the Muslim opposition to Dogra rule-the Muslim Conference. Abdullah split Muslim Conference to form National Conference which in turn espoused secular, democratic politics and forged close ties with the nationalist struggle in India.Many Leftists in Kashmir joined National Conference.The CPI (then united) sees in Kashmir,"the launcing pad for socialism in South Asia". What is the Naya Kashmir Manifesto ? Is it like the Communist Manifesto ? Well, the spirit is the same. National Conference adopted the Naya Kashmir Manifesto in 1942.It envisaged radical social change. Abdullah launched a Quit Kashmir movement in 1946. Was it like the Quit India movement ? More of an anti-feudal struggle, Quit Kashmir movement drew its inspiration from the Quit India movement .Sheikh Abdullah declared that �Quit Kashmir is not a question of revolt. It is a matter of right.� The struggle carried on upto 1947.This struggle has been brilliantly documented by Pandit Prem Nath Bazaz in Frredom Struggle in Kashmir. That again brings us to 1947 ? Hari Singh, to save his throne toyed with the idea of an independent Kashmir. By August 1947,a �standstill agreement� between the Maharaja and Pakistan put Kashmir�s Post and Telegraph services and the supply of essential commodities under Pakistan. But the Maharaja acceded to India ? Whether Maharaja acted hastily isn't too clear but he had no choice. Revolt in Poonch had brought in tribal invaders from Pakistan's North West.The communal situation in Jammu had further complicated matters.By late October,the tribal invaders had closed in on Srinagar.Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession to India on 26 October 1947(there is a serious controversy over t airlifted from Delhi held back the raiders and this led to the first Indo-Pak war over Kashmir. And the outcome of this war? UN intervention.United Nations brokered the Ceasefire that left two-thirds of Jammu and Kashmir with India and the rest with Pakistan. That settled it then. The Indian Jammu and Kashmir becomes an integral part of India.Isn�t it ? Things were far more complicated than that. Pandit Nehru, the then Prime Minister of India, didn�t want what he called forced unions. India wanted the accession to be ratified by the people of Jammu and Kashmir with a referendum held under international auspices. In an address to the nation on 3rd November, 1947, Pandit Nehru said, "We have declared that the fate of Kashmir is ultimately to be decided by the people. That pledge we have given not only to the people of Kashmir but to the world. We will not and cannot back out of it". You imply Plebiscite ? India�s and Pakistan�s commitment to the idea of a referendum or Plebiscite led the United Nations Commission on India and Pakistan to adopt resolutions of August 13,1948 on Kashmir that envisaged plebiscite in J&K.Now these are the UN Resolutions on Kashmir. Wasn�t there any plebiscite ? No. Partly because both India and Pakistan had serious doubts on their chances. What is the Article 370 ? The Instrument of Accession limited the accession to defence, foreign affairs and communications. India�s Constituent Assembly inserted a special provision in the Indian Constitution, Article 306A,that allowed for such autonomy to J&K- even this was supposed to be �an interim system�. This is the pre-1953 status of J&K. Article 306A later on became Article 370 which didn�t CONFER any status on J&K but CONFIRMED the status which the State already enjoyed. If plebiscite didn�t happen, then�? Sheikh Abdullah was frustrated by the deadlock over Kashmir .This led Abdullah to form the Constituent Assembly of J&K in 1951 for which the National Conference won all 75 seats unopposed. THIS Constitue ly, the representative character of which has been questioned, ratified Kashmir�s accession to India and enshrined Article 306A as Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. This came to be known as the Delhi Agreement. Why then was Sheikh Abdullah arrested in 1953 ? Sheikh Abdullah was believed to be seriously thinking of an independent Kashmir. Though there was flimsy evidence ,Sheikh was arrested in 1953.Sheikh�s meetings with Adlai Stevenson and the US ambassador Loy Henderson had created enough suspicion. Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad who was installed in his place accused Sheikh Abdullah of trying to set up another Korea in Kashmir and argued for closer union to India. Sheikh Abdullah was detained under the Kashmir Conspiracy Case. And yes, why is Lal Chowk called so ? Lal Chowk is named after Red Square. There was a strong Kashmiri Left movement in `40s and `50s.The anti-feudal struggle in Kashmir was imbued with socialist ideals that led to radical Land Reforms in 1950. Why did India go back on its commitment on plebiscite ? This happened in 1954 when Pakistan joined an American military alliance and India announced that Kashmir�s accession to India is final and the elections to the Constituent Assembly should be considered surrogate for plebiscite. When Khruschev, the then General Secretary of the CPSU visited Kashmir, Kashmir was refered to as � one of the states of India�. But the incorporation of J&K was officially declared to be complete on 26 January 1957.Thus the 1949 Ceasefire line became the de facto border between India and Pakistan dividing Kashmir. So what did the Sheikh and his friends do ? Mirza Afzal Begh, a close confidante of Sheikh, formed the Plebiscite Front that campaigned for a plebiscite to settle the Kashmir problem. What about Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad ? Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad was Shiekh Abdullah�s lieutenant until 1953. Bakshi, G M Sadiq and Begh were Sheikh Abdullah�s closest associates and leaders of the National Conference. Bakshi deposed Sheikh for maneuv Kashmir and succeeded in passing a resolution in the J&K Constituent Assembly that declared Kashmir to be an integral part of India. Bakshi gave an effective but corrupt administration. Weren�t there any elections in Kashmir ? In 1957 Bakshi�s party won the elections,43 of the seats unopposed .Again in 1972,Bakshi�s party won 70 seats. Both the elections were widely believed to be rigged. The only reasonably fair elections in Kashmir were held in 1977 in which Sheikh Abdullah won a landslide victory. In 1967,the Congress party won the elections by getting 118 nomination papers cancelled. In 1964,the Constitution of J&K was amended-the Prime Minister of J&K was now to be the Chief Minister and the President was replaced by a Governor to be appointed by the Centre. The Sadiq faction of the National Conference became the local Congress. And the Plebiscite Front ? Many leaders of the Kashmiri secessionism became associated with politics when Sheikh Abdullah was sent to prison in 1953. Wasn�t there any popular protest by Kashmiris ? Of course. All this was to later explode in an angry outburst that had a discernible anti-India tenor in 1963 over the theft of the hair of Prophet Muhammad from the Hazratbal mosque at Srinagar . This came to be known as the Moe-Muqaddas agitation. It galvanized Kashmiri masses into political agitation. Finally Sheikh Abdullah was released. The Moe-Muqaddas agitation was interpreted by Pakistan as pro-Pakistan sentiment and encouraged them to attack Kashmir in 1965. Why was Sheikh Abdullah released ? Nehru urged Sheikh to travel to Pakistan to push for a lasting solution to the Kashmir problem. It was believed that Nehru wanted Abdullah to suggest a confederation between India, Pakistan and Kashmir. Did Sheikh Abdullah travel to Pakistan ? Sheikh Abdullah and Mirza Afzal Begh traveled to Pakistan on 24 May,1964. But the Sheikh�s deliberations in Pakistan were hastily aborted by Nehru�s demise on May 27, 1964. And then? Jayaprakash Narain, the res er visited Pakistan. Lal Bahadur Shastri and Ayub Khan met in Karachi yet there was no end to the stalemate over Kashmir. Any other protests in Kashmir ? Kashmir was relatively calm but the extension of Article 356 and 357 that gave the Union government of India powers to impose President�s rule in J&K sparked off protests. And Sheikh Abdullah? Abdullah traveled to London and Algiers. Abdullah�s meeting with the Chinese Prime Minister Chou En Lai angered New Delhi. Abdullah�s passport was cancelled by India. Sheikh rejected the offer of a Pakistani passport only to be arrested on his return .The Valley burst out in protest as the Lion of Kashmir was incarcerated in Kodaikanal , Tamil Nadu. What about the 1965 War between India and Pakistan on Kashmir ? Or the Operation Gibraltar. Between June and August 1965 there was Pakistani infiltration in Kashmir. It was believed by Pakistan that Kashmiris will join the infiltrators and Pakistan Army will intervene to free Kashmir. However, Kashmiris didn�t side with the infiltrators. A full-fledged India-Pakistan war broke out in 1965. And what happened? A Ceasefire was announced on 13 September ,1965 to end a war which was never formally declared. Both India and Pakistan were frustrated by Western intervention and Soviet Union moved to help India and Pakistan reach an agreement. Ayub and Shastri met in Tashkent. �The Tashkent Declaration� of 10 January,1966 underplays Kashmir. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the then Foreign Minister of Pakistan, saw it as a sellout on Kashmir and was forced to resign. The Plebiscite Front-what about them? The Plebiscite Front decided to contest the local elections in 1969 and was all set to participate in the State elections.It was then that Plebiscite Front was banned by India in 1971. Isn�t 1971 the year of yet another Indo-Pak war? The war is preceded by the Ganga Hijacking. An Indian Airlines plane called Ganga is hijacked to Lahore by two Kashmiris. Before India responds to the hijackers' demands the passen are set free by the hijackers and the plane is set on fire. The Ganga hijacking is mired in controversy. All these events renew hostility between India and Pakistan while accusations and counteraccusations are hurled. And then we witnessed another Indo-Pak war �Though the war wasn�t fought on Kashmir, did it have any effect on the Kashmir problem? It demoralized the Kashmiri leadership as they thought that after its triumph in the war India won�t relent to a compromise on Kashmir. What is the Simla Agreement? Simla Agreement is the agreement between the then Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and the then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, signed on 2nd July 1972 which formally ended the 1971 war. It envisages a peaceful relationship between the two countries which is sought to be governed by the principal of bilateralism .The Simla Agreement has been brought into play by India to rule out any third party intervention on Kashmir as well as to soft-pedal the Kashmir issue even as Pakistan takes it to mean that Kashmir can be settled through bilateral negotiations. How did the Kashmiri leadership react to these developments ? They reacted with their own �compromise� on Kashmir. Sheikh signed an accord on November 13, 1974 with Indira Gandhi which came to be known as the Beg- Parthasarthy Accord or the Kashmir Accord of 1975.Sheikh Abdullah became Chief Minister but at the cost of huge and unpopular concessions to the Centre. And then Sheikh Abdullah remained Chief Minister? Until Sheikh died in 1982.Farooq Abdullah, Sheikh�s son, took over. Farooq�s National Conference swept the polls in 1984. Why then was Farooq Abdullah dismissed in 1984 ? Farooq Abdullah was �punished� by Indira Gandhi. Farooq had organized a conclave of Opposition parties in Srinagar which angered Mrs.Gandhi enough to engineer the split in National Conference that brought Farooq�s brother-in-law G M Shah as Chief Minister. Farooq�s dismissal is mired in controversy. Ironically this was the first t olitics had attempted to connect itself to India�s national politics. How long did G M Shah stay as Chief Minister? G M Shah�s rule was quite unpopular �the State government resorted to curfews to quell opposition. Jagmohan , the then governor of J&K, took over from Shah as Governor�s rule was imposed in J&K. And Farooq Abdullah? Farooq Abdullah was elbowed into an alliance by the Congress(I) government at the Centre. National Conference-Congress(I) alliance faced Muslim United Front-the Muslim Opposition that also comprised the secessionists in an election in 1987. The keenly contested election ended in widespread rigging to bring back Farooq into power. For Kashmiris the NC- Congress(I) alliance gave the impression of a sellout and revived memories of 1975 Kashmir Accord which had �defanged� the Lion of Kashmir,Sheikh Abdullah. National Conference brutally suppressed the secessionists .The �unholy alliance� and the State repression built the legitimacy for the armed rebellion. Many in the Opposition felt betrayed by India. Like who? Like Syed Salahudin, the Supreme Commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen, who �lost� the Amirakadal Constituency in Srinagar to National Conference in the 1987 State Assembly elections. Many of the militant leaders of the 1990s had participated in the 1987 election campaign of the Muslim United Front. So that brings us close to the Kashmir Uprising in early 1990? It formally begins with the JKLF�s sporadic acts of violence in 1988 and 1989.1990 becomes the year of the Kashmiri Uprising against the Indian State. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: THESSALONIKI FILM FESTIVAL Will the last person to leave the country please turn out all the lights... Fatmir Ko�s Tirana Year Zero (2001) Andrew James Horton The quip about the last person leaving the country turning the lights off may be ancient, but the problem of emigration seems more relevant than ever in the world. And no less so in Albania, whose economic plight�the legacy of isolation, the collapsed pyramid schemes, the looting of arms depots, the weight of hosting a refugee crisis during NATO's Kosovo campaign�led to around a million people emigrating from a country of just four million in order to seek their fortunes elsewhere. It would be hard, then, for an Albanian film set in the present to avoid the topic of emigration and how the country's inhabitants view the opulence of cities such as Paris, Milan and New York. Fatmir Ko�s Tirana Year Zero (2001), which earlier this month won the main prize in the international competition at the 42nd Thessaloniki film festival, goes further than that and has these subjects at its core, and the director describes the film as "a call to the Albanian people not to abandon their native land." Love amidst the chaos The action starts in Tirana in 1997, just after the infamous collapse of the pyramid scheme. Niku is a 23-year-old without much purpose in life. He scrapes together an income doing odd jobs with a decrepit truck, which he has a strange attachment to, as it was given to him by his father. Despite the repeated nagging of his parents, he doesn't seem to have any real drive to find a steady job. His girlfriend, Klara, is rather different and only sees a viable future outside Albania. This point of view perplexes Niku, who has lived in Italy for a short while but returned, disillusioned with life abroad. Climate of paranoia: the ever-present gun casts a shadow over society Klara, though, finds an opportunity to leave for Paris with a sculptor, thus giving hope to her rather naive dreams of becoming a model. K erscored by one of Niku's neighbours whose daughter sends him back a television bought with money she has earned from prostitution. Klara's departure troubles Niku, and he takes his truck on a aimless tour, meeting a variety of odd characters, including a neo-hippy from Berlin (played by arch-arthouse actor Lars Rudolph, who has recently played in films by Tom Tykwer and B� Tarr) and a French journalist who's been robbed of everything except her camcorder. The Albania he explores is corrupt, chaotic, violent and self-contradictory, but despite everything (even losing his beloved truck) he can still see no reason to leave. A black mark on Albania's good name? For a film which has such a clearly stated and apparently propagandistic agenda, Tirana Year Zero is a remarkably impartial and non-programmatic film. Ko�does very little to present his protagonist with a reason for staying, and the film is nothing but brutally frank about the state of Albania today. As Ko�explained at a press conference in Thessaloniki, the inspiration came for the project came when he asked various people he knew why they professed a desire to leave for the West. None of them could give a concrete answer why they wanted to be in another country. Tirana Year Zero gets its potency from the fact it presents plenty of reasons for leaving Albania, but none for actually arriving anywhere else. The legacy of the past imposing on the present The film, however, caused something of a scandal when it premiered in Albania (on 26 October), and he was widely accused by the media of blackening the country's name. As Ko�told a press conference at Thessaloniki: "it was shocking for most people, they didn't want to accept it." Ko�also insisted that his view of the country was accurate, saying that "I didn't invent anything�I found it," before elaborating that all the incidents portrayed in the film were based on true stories, either ones he had witnessed, that friends had told him or he had read about in newspapers. Lead actor N u, as he is in his real life a shoe salesman (making him one of many non-professionals in the film) who once lived in Italy. The fact that young people responded to the Tirana Year Zero very well during its two-week run in Tirana suggests more that Ko�s observational eye is not at fault and that some sections of Albanian society simply don't want to look at themselves in the mirror. For all the negativity in Tirana Year Zero, Ko�remains a man clearly in love with his country. The cinematography (by Austrian Heinzi Brander) places stunning, sun-drenched mountains behind the decaying tower blocks, and, even when referring to the country's darkest moments, Ko�talks about "a pleasant chaos" and emphasises that "life is very funny, it's really funny"�an attitude clearly visible in the film. He also insists that during the last few years things have got much better and that a lot of those who left are now returning. He even speaks glowingly of the country's role as a bridge between East and West, and�using those buzzwords of modern Western liberalism�as a multi-cultural and multi-denominational country with a rich cultural heritage. A symbol of our times Tirana Year Zero is not just a film for Albanians, though, as its selection to play in competition at Venice this August and its main prize from Thessaloniki testify. The film will also be released in France in December this year. Hints at reasons for the film's popularity can be gained from a press conference held by the international jury at Thessaloniki before the results were announced (and, indeed, before they had seen all the competition films). Following on from comments by jury member Pawel Pawlikowski�currently enjoying international fame due to his own film tale of someone seeking a better life abroad, The Last Resort (2001)�regarding the dominance of immigration as a theme at this year's festival, fellow jury member Eduardo Antin pointed out that four of the jury's seven members lived in a country they were not born in. Yannis Kokkos went to say that besides people being brave enough to live abroad, there are those that lose their bearings even in their own country. In this cultural context, it is hardly surprising that the jury warmed so much to Ko�s film and its exploration of feelings towards ones homeland against the lure of a richer life abroad. The irony, of course, is that it is Albania's seemingly eternal state of marginalisation, lack of self-confidence and insignificance on the global stage that makes it such a potent and universal symbol of our nervous and insecure times and have attracted our attention to it. Perhaps it is not surprising that Tirana Year Zero is just one of two Albanian films to have attracted the acclaim of festival selection committees and juries this year, the other being Gjergj Xhuvani's Slogans Albania: Atypical and yet also typical? (2001), which showed as part of the Director's Fortnight at Cannes this year and won the main prize at FilmFestival Cottbus. For a country that only produces a handful of films a year, this is an incredible success rate for 2001. All eyes are, therefore, on the Albanian film industry to see if it can continue with this success. Ko�is certainly ready for the challenge: he is currently working on a documentary on the history of 20th-century Albania and is about to start on a screen adaptation of Chronicle of the Stone City by Ismail Kadare, Albania's most famous author. Film buffs everywhere will be watching to see if the resulting anti-war comedy will capture the spirit of our age as successfully as Tirana Year Zero seems to have done. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Kurdish guerrillas in Northern Iraq at the end of the Gulf War, Dr. Jonathan Kaplan has saved (and lost) lives in the remotest corners of the world under the most extreme conditions. Now he delivers The Dressing Station, a brilliant and often harrowing narrative that reveals the crucial work of field doctors all over the world, and the devastating realities of the zones of conflict in which they operate. Dr. Jonathan Kaplan has been a hospital surgeon, a ship's physician, an air-ambulance doctor, and a trauma surgeon. He has worked in locations as diverse as England, Burma, Eritrea, the Amazon, Mozambique, and the United States. He has operated on wounded straight off the battlefield, treated obscure tropical disease, and helped victims of corporate stress and industrial poisoning. Whether running medical research programs in high-tech laboratories or caring for children wasted by famine and war, he has seen his skills used and sometimes abused. A pivotal lesson early in his career was the experience of a friend and medical colleague who had been required to save the life of a prisoner so that he could be subjected to torture. It anticipated the doctor's greatest challenge -- to maintain his humanity even when that option does not seem possible. Dr. Jonathan Kaplan's life in medicine has been one of unforgettable adventure and tragedy. The Dressing Station provides a haunting insight into the nature of human violence, the shattering contradictions of war, and the complicated role of medicine in the modern world. "An enthralling look into the craft of a surgeon." -- Jennifer Crocker, The Cape Times (Capetown, South Africa) ------------- The Dressing Station: A Surgeon's Odyssey http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/biography/0,6121,563963,00.html If there's a sure-fire vision of hell on earth, it can be found in an underequipped and understaffed hospital in Africa or elsewhere in the developing world just after a massacre or an epidemic. Most journalists and television crews spend as little time as they can in such places, collecting the facts and pictures they need before retreating from the stench and the misery. It's hard to forget the clinic in Zambia that was so overwhelmed with those dying of Aids that almost all the patients were crammed on the floor, with their relatives fighting over the beds whenever a death allowed one to become vacant. Jonathan Kaplan has worked in such clinics across the world, but he was able to provide help. As well as a journalist he is a trained surgeon, and has used his skills to take him to both war zones and tourists' haunts. He has had an odd, varied and colourful life, and this is an odd, varied and colourful autobiography. It is a bloody wartime travelogue, a layman's guide to surgery (not for the squeamish), and an analysis and description of a wide range of different medical lifestyles. It's also a potted history of the politics of the different countries and conflicts he has visited, and a vehicle both for his best after-dinner medical stories and for his often angry thoughts and fears on medicine, morality and mortality. It's not easy to keep the right balance between so many disparate elements and styles, but - for the first quarter of the book at least - Kaplan manages astonishingly well. Stories of a white boy growing up and studying in apartheid-era South Africa are combined with vivid and compelling first-hand reports of anti-apartheid demonstrations and the police brutality used to counter them. There are graphic, detailed descriptions of the resulting injuries that he was called on to treat. Working as a doctor in the townships gave him a close-up view of the workings and realities of apartheid and the moral dilemmas confronted by doctors asked to patch up the "victims of preventable suffering". Kaplan's solution was to flee to England, rather than be called up for national service in South Africa's increasingly bloody border campaigns. He became an exile and a wanderer, with a detached, bemused and often horrified view of what he found. He observed the intricate politics of the British medical establishment and the decline of the NHS in the Thatcher era; his analysis is balanced against a wince-making explanation of how to carry out a vasectomy, or a poignant and painfully honest confession of the mistakes he made that led to a patient's death. Moving to the US, he casts an equally cool and critical eye over the workings of commercial medicine, the deals that are made between medical research and big business, and the practice of slaughtering pigs so that first-year students can gain a little surgical experience. Subsequently he moves to a war zone, operating on wounded Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq in the period between the ending of the Gulf war and the establishment of "safe havens". His descriptions of life under fire in a squalid makeshift field hospital are among the best passages in the book. So far, very good indeed. But Kaplan keeps on travelling, and his life and writing both begin to drift. There's a mildly amusing but over-long section dealing with his time as a ship's doctor on a cruise liner in the South China Seas, where he treated typhoid, alcoholic passengers and crew members with VD. There's his experience working with an unhappy film crew in Mozambique, his more interesting adventures with the opium warlords in Burma, and - for yet more contrast - a stint accompanying sick passengers around the world for a travel-insurance concern. He takes on an assignment to research mercury-poisoning cases in South Africa for the late, lamented World In Action . At this point, Kaplan seems to have become more interested in investigative journalism than surgery. The final section, dealing with Kaplan's unexpected return to the front line in the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, at last re-captures the immediacy, originality and sense of horror in the opening chapters. His conclusion from all this is: "It was among the world's wounded that I had found the essence of humanity, without disguise; an exile, I had found a home in the suffering of bodies." To which one could unkindly ask why he then moved on, yet again, to treat the mental problems of the rich overachievers of London. After all that travelling and all those stories, it seems that the moral dilemmas Kaplan faced as a young doctor have never been fully resolved. ------------- Without frontiers http://www.mg.co.za/mg/art/music/menu-music.htm South African surgeon Jonathan Kaplan�s experiences around the world have added up to a fascinating book. Jane Rosenthal met him in Cape Town onathan Kaplan, travelling surgeon, journalist, film-maker � and now author of The Dressing Station (Picador) � is disarmingly uncertain as to whether he has done anything useful with his life. And meeting him is quite a surprise. He is slight, younger looking than his 47 years, has a lot of floppy dark hair and doesn�t look like someone who�d cope with battlefield surgery or similar crises. I�d gone to the interview thinking, �This guy is just too cool to be true.� Prepared to be unimpressed, I was won over by his simplicity and his seriousness. The Dressing Station is fascinating yet disturbing reading. Fascinating because Kaplan has a real gift for describing medical detail in a clear and comprehensible way � enlightening for those of us unlikely ever to wield a scalpel � and disturbing because it ruffles that complacent ignorance in which we continue our lives while there is so much suffering, bloodletting and conflict on the planet. And as to why anyone would go off to where it�s all happening if they didn�t have to � well, the answer is not really provided in this book. Kaplan is as reticent about his own personal life as he is discreet about the privacy of his patients. He begins his book thus: �I grew up with the expectation that I would serve.� Yet he gives the impression that he feels he has led a privileged and indulgent life, in the sense that he has been able to use medicine as a way to see the world. He has even, he says, made choices out of whim or to escape a personal situation. Friends and colleagues are now ensconced in the medical hierarchies of Western medicine; he says they are �financially secure to a staggering degree�, and have �chosen wisely�. He denies emphatically that he means this ironically � �These are friends of mine� � but adds that he has better dinner-party stories. And so he should have. After training at the University of Cape Town, in London and in New York, his work in the past 10 years has taken him to Kurdistan (in the early Nineties), Mozambique refugee camps, and last year, Eritrea, among others. As a film-maker he has investigated mercury pollution in Brazil and South Africa. At times he has worked as a ship�s doctor and an aeromedical physician. To all of this he has brought not only his knowledge and skill, but also considerable thoughtfulness. His training in London, he recalls in the book at it nears an end, �had been a constant process of eroding certainties. First to go had been security: life was tremblingly insecure; death, easy and close.� Love and repose had also, at that stage, eluded him Asked whether he had ever regained these, he says, �I think I have gained a certain equanimity through accumulated experience. I�ll try and do the best I can in situations, [but] the broader view is that I won�t always be successful and that I cannot excoriate myself for the places where I have failed.� He also shows the reader the inside of situations we see glossed over on TV news. His take on aid organisations and interventionists such as M�cins sans Fronti�s is lucid and disillusioning. In Mozambique, for example, he speaks of a �plague of altruism� in which the main beneficiaries are often the aid organisations rather than the refugees and deslocados. And he�s aware that he himself is part of the questionable intervention when he goes into these situations. He confesses that he enjoys the �exhilaration, the free-fall rush into unpredictability�, and that he would find it difficult to go back into the routine of ordinary hospital work. The book was originally commissioned by a publisher who knew Kaplan had done some writing and journalism, and had heard some of his stories from a third party. Writing the book was quite gruelling in parts � he had to go back to journals he had kept while out in the field. He had written them purely for himself, �as a means of recording intense experiences and as a way of encapsulating all the frustrations, anger, often fear, that I felt,� forcing him to re-live things �that I hadn�t any memory of experiencing and had quite clearly suppressed.� At the very end of the interview, he produced the journal that he�d kept while in Eritrea: a modest A5, but closely written and interspersed with watercolour sketches and other memorabilia, in itself an extraordinary artefact. This daily record-keeping has surely contributed to the elegance of the writing and sense of reality in this examination of suffering and how we deal with it on the broader battlefield of life. He concludes his account with a chapter on occupational health in which he makes it clear that not even the wealthy and corporately powerful are exempt. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Dawn, 24/12/01 By Khalid Hasan Alexander Evans, a young English academic who has been working on Kashmir for several years and could well be one of the best-informed men in the West on the subject, wrote after September 11 that militant groups in Kashmir would come under sharp pressure in the coming months to cull their ranks of Osama bin Laden supporters. That seems already to be happening. He wondered what direction the uprising that began in 1989 would now take. Noting that it was and had remained "exclusively Muslim", Evans argued that while it was a Muslim revolt against Indian rule, it was not necessarily an "Islamic" revolt when it began. In my view, the "Islamization" of the movement, when it came, was a mistake as it guaranteed that the support available to the long Kashmiri struggle for self-determination in many parts of the world would be lost. After some heady successes which saw the Indian military force humbled, the control of the movement increasingly shifted to those who had agendas that went beyond Kashmir. They saw Kashmir as part of a larger crusade against a large assemblage of enemies, among them, the nebulous entity called 'The West' and the "infidel" forces of "disbelief" dedicated to the destruction of Islam. Thus the movement in Kashmir took a course different from the one the peaceful marchers to the UN office in Srinagar who had been fired upon in 1989 had intended. India took full advantage of this, arguing that what it was facing in Kashmir was not a popular, indigenous uprising but a fundamentalist, terrorist-inspired insurrection. This plea fell on many sympathetic ears in western capitals. It even received a positive hearing from many Muslim governments who had their own reasons to fear the onset of "jihad". For instance, Osama bin Laden's principal target was his own country's government and the ruling house of Saud. Though he broadened his agenda as time passed, the Saudi monarchy and its policies remained his main motivation for th Sudan, then Afghanistan. Coming back to Kashmir, in Evans's view, a "brutally effective Indian counter-insurgency with scant regard for human rights decimated the first generation of militants" with the "young romantics" making way for a more "professional group of fighters". The arrival of the "guest militants" on the scene modified the nature and objective of the Kashmiri struggle. Today, as the war in Afghanistan winds down and the destruction of the Taliban receives its lethal finishing touches, the focus will shift to Kashmir. The commitment of guest militants is ideological, not mercenary. But the ideology that fires them has the whole world arrayed against it now. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban have in that sense done the greatest disservice to both Islam and to the causes which sought inspiration from it. Prof. Anwar Syed, whose reaction I sought, said he found Evans's view "optimistic". Evans believes that an end to militancy in Kashmir will strengthen Pakistan's hand. "It would also, for once, empower Kashmiris, whose voice could not be dismissed as that of a small gun-ridden minority. India, instead of condemning the proxy war it sees in Kashmir, would have to grapple with the real underlying issue... And without militancy rendering Pakistan's pleas for international action on Kashmir suspect, there could be scope for renewed UN involvement in the Kashmir issue. If Pakistan was to end covert support for militancy, India would face intense US pressure to offer something by way of return." A few years ago, the admirable British academic Alistair Lamb who, Yusuf Buch once said, had "put every Kashmiri in his debt", called for a fresh look at Kashmir since the two sides were so bogged down in history and so convinced of the merit of their positions that they could have no meeting point. He argued that the "liberation" of Kashmir "really means doing something about the Vale", as the "bulk of the remaining Muslim-majority bits of the old state has in one way or another already been 'liberate "unitary plebiscite" as laid down in the UN resolutions which, people tend to forget, are advisory, not mandatory. Lamb wrote, "It is unlikely in the extreme ... that any unitary plebiscite can now be implemented in the state ... In this rather restricted sense, the United Nations resolutions of 1948 plus the UNCIP resolution of 1949 are indeed obsolete ... If they cannot be implemented through Indo-Pakistani cooperation, no one else is going to enforce them." ...According to Lamb, the Cease-fire Line will need to be extended to the Chinese border to end the Siachen conflict which will mean India accepting the 1963 Sino-Pakistan boundary agreement. Lamb wrote that if the Valley was to become autonomous with India and Pakistan guaranteeing its autonomy and sharing or dividing responsibility for defence, external relations etc., perhaps a mutually acceptable arrangement could be worked out. He said a settlement was possible if certain conditions were met. First, Indian and Pakistani leaders must genuinely wish to find a settlement. Pakistan, though "lacking the arrogant assertion of absolute right" like India, should realize that the demand for a "unitary plebiscite ... is hardly conducive to compromise", nor is there any "international enthusiasm" for such a course. Lamb suggested that Pakistan should drop its claim to the "clearly non-Muslim" areas of the state and India should accept the Pakistani position in the Northern Areas which would "reduce the dispute in territorial terms to Azad Kashmir and the Vale". No settlement should involve the direct transfer of sovereign territory from one side to the other, he stressed. That would leave Azad Kashmir and the Vale which might be declared "autonomous regions, each with its internal self-government but with defence and external relations in the hands of Pakistan in the case of Azad Kashmir and India in the case of the Vale" with both sides agreeing as to the degree of their military presence. The Indo-Pak agreement, he proposed, could be sup ented by an agreement between Azad Kashmir and the Vale defining a "special relationship". Local elections could be held to ratify the arrangement. He called it the "Andorra solution", that being the region between France and Spain which rests under the protection of both but is internally autonomous. Both India and Pakistan, Lamb wrote, "must be prepared to waive established concepts about the nature of the dispute ... and replace economic polemic with a basis of fact derived from a careful examination of what, as far as can be ascertained, actually happened ... They must be prepared to accept the legitimacy of the interest in the dispute of the other party, or parties, a process which is in practice rather more difficult than it at first might sound ... There must be informed debate. It is not necessary for everyone to agree with everyone else about every single point. It is essential, however, that all aspects of the problem be questioned and re-examined." That this advice comes from probably the best friend the Kashmiri people have in the West, we must remain mindful of. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: R Ministers plan criminal evidence shake-up Proposals in leaked Home Office papers include the disclosure of past convictions to juries Alan Travis, home affairs editor Guardian Thursday December 27, 2001 Major changes in the rules of evidence in criminal trials, including the use of hearsay evidence, bad character and witness statements, are to be unveiled by ministers as part of an overhaul of the courts and sentencing. Internal leaked Home Office papers also confirm a plan to introduce the disclosure of relevant past convictions to juries under its reform of the rules of criminal evidence in a white paper this April. "Legislating in this area is a clear priority for the Prime Minister. [Lord Justice] Auld recommends a general review of rules of evidence, based on the principle of trusting fact finders to give relevant evidence the weight it deserves," say the official papers. The papers say the review must be finished by February so that legislation can proceed in 2002/2003. Lord Justice Auld was responsible for the government's inquiry into the criminal courts system. The papers also reveal that Lord Justice Auld's proposal to set up a new youth court - with a judge and two magistrates - to try all grave cases against young defendants may prove "highly controversial". The civil servants say it will mean "the end of public jury trial for 16- to 17-year-olds". The papers also confirm that ministers plan to restrict a defendant's right to choose trial by judge and jury in some cases. The civil servants warn that plans to replace crown courts and magistrates courts with a new three-tiered unified criminal court will prove "highly controversial" because the new intermediate tier will mean defendants in more cases also losing the right to trial by judge and jury. Some estimates claim that the number of jury trials could fall by as much as 70%. Ministers will weigh up the proposals in February and March, with legislation to be introduced next autumn in a massive 400-clause bill. The shake-up had been postponed to make way for the new anti-terrorist measures. The civil servants warn that the reform of the rules of evidence may prove as controversial as the jury trial changes. In Labour's election manifesto the government said the rules of evidence failed to "trust the good sense of judges and jurors". The Whitehall papers admit that plans to make hearsay evidence generally admissible in court as well as witness statements "are likely to cause controversy and will need careful consideration." Other major court reforms, such as restricting jury trial, extending prosecution rights of appeal and reforming the double jeopardy law, are to be published in a draft bill in advance "because they are controversial and would benefit from pre-legislative scrutiny". Home Office civil servants have told ministers that such "advance drafting" of changes in the law on criminal evidence is "inadvisable for practical and tactical reasons." On allowing hearsay evidence to be generally admissible the government may go against the Law Commission's approach. The leaked papers make clear that Tony Blair, in a letter dated 24 September 2001, had indicated to ministers that he supported the different approach put forward by Lord Justice Auld which "would make hearsay generally admissible subject to the principle of best evidence." Home Office staff also admit that plans to reveal past convictions to juries are backed by Mr Blair who has indicated that juries should be told of a bad character where relevant. Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers, said the reforms would change the face of criminal justice. "The huge loss of jury trials will lead to a higher rate of conviction and therefore more people in custody. Currently half of those put before a jury are acquitted compared with less than 10% before magistrates," he said. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: are bits of iron rods left over or cut from such iron rods as are sunk into the ground to make a bit of private property. (Call it what you will...let's call it Haeppie Villa!). These bits of iron rods arrive, usually in a cyclecart cycler huffing. The cycler stops and gets down in front of a solid iron gate built into what seems a complete wall of naked brick. The road into which the cyclecart has turned is a narrow one. In fact it is not so much a road as a lane. No, no. It is not a lane. It is an alley. Huge crude blocks of cement stretch into the distance. Walls of houses, naked-brick walls meet unconcertingly in the distance. One notices that these naked-brick houses are often huge mansions walled-up 15 wall rising feet in the air. One notices a maze of brickwork, constructions. Windows grilled-up, verandahs protruding blocking the light in the alley-way. One notices spots of lurid colour -- just a saree hanging -- and big wagon-like vehicles. The cycler, meanwhile, knocks on the iron gates, which open and swallow the cycler and the cart. Soon after, an empty cart careens out of the alleyway. Meanwhile, inside the iron gates the work has begun, which will produce much smoke and smell but about which nobody dares to complain. Inside, are being produced Billi Gates' talons. Iron rods melted and pared to a sharp point. Imagine the heat needed to do that. Imagine the smoke. If you can, imagine tuberculosis, Ye Olde Disease. Billi Gates' 1000 talons reach out into the night, protecting. Buttressing. Fortressing. Smugly Billi Gates sharpens his 1000 talons. None shall escape Billi Gates. Nobody can. Everything, now, is shut up. The gates have closed, so that a continuous fence comes up enclosing a bit of the city turning that bit into a closed fortress. Inside the fortress, houses breathe. Inside the houses, people breathe. (They also snore, but that's allowed.) It is night quite late. Street-lights shine indifferently through tree-leaves. You are walking through a half-light blanket mist in silence punctuated by the whirr of ACs and the glow of lamps. You reach Billi Gate. Biili Gate sniggers and refuses to open. You implore Billi Gates. You have to go home, you say. "Against procedure," Billi Gates says, frowning. "It is after 10 p m." After 10 pm nowadays, Delhi breaks up into bits. This megapolis becomes bits of fortresses. There was a time when "Delhi" signified the walled city. Today, Delhi has become the city of fence-ins after 10 p m. This city today is layer after layer of fence protecting after 10 pm. In the cultural history of this city, which remains to be exhaustively studied, fences began to come around colonies and city spaces precisely in the period in which exclusivity became once more much-sought-after cultural capital Exclusivity is a logic of difference and otherness. Painstakingly, Delhi has nurtured this logic. Difference and Otherness characterise Delhi's history in the last 15 years like never before. (But that's how Delhi always was, is it?) At night Delhi fractures. These gates get closed. These miles of Billi Gates. All over Delhi, spaces become fortresses. Why has the "fortressing" mentality so "colonised" Delhi? What does it mean to accept, in the name of civility, getting fortressed-in every night? Billi Gates smiles smugly closing sharpening talon waiting for hapless intruder. ________________________________________________________________________ Looking for a job? Visit Yahoo! India Careers Visit http://in.careers.yahoo.com From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Creativity optimises in the form of sign boards in the streets of Delhi. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: post, a small boy running at the crossing trying to throw in as many pamphlets as possible inside the speeding cars. Or the boys doing rounds of colonies each day with pamphelets or the innumerous junk mail anouncing the arrival of the post man. It could be the back side of a public bus or the tyre cover of two wheeler. It can also be the small neon posters inside the buses or the bathrooms of the theatres. It can be just anything. Had the safety of the citizens of Delhi not been in question the skyline of Delhi would by now have been redefined by hoardings advertising tyres, T.V. serials, food, shoes, clothes, electronics all in the air ready to be plucked. With the inception of the law on the hoardings came in the wave of the brightly lit hoardings on the bus stops. Suddenly the Delhi commuters had the comfort of a clean bus stand with sitting arrangements. by the night these same welcoming stands beckoned one even more by the brightly lit hoarding on the top. The company advertising had to maintain the stand. This is not the end of the story . Did one ever wonder where all the electricity came from. After all in a state where power cuts are a reality of every days life these brightly lit stands did generate some curiosity. Sure enough all was not well. It was only a matter of few steps from these stands that one had the not so nice answers. Big generators were found near the stands generating electricity and harmful gases. Not to worry the advertisers will not die in this state. The Municipal Committee of Delhi has yet again a brain wave. All the dustbins and the public unirels have been auctioned to differeent companies for maintainance. In return the companies are free to utilise the space available for campaigning thier messages. _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx ------------------------------------------------------- From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Kavita Singh School of Arts and Aesthetics JNU From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Bwo Russell Coker/ HippiesfromHell discussion list) ----- Forwarded message from Michael Moore ----- Subject: Police Raid Booksigning for Stupid White Men Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2002 16:27:03 -0500 Police Raid, Shut Down My Booksigning in San Diego Dear Friends, It's a few minutes before midnight, on Friday night on 3/8/2002. I'm in San Diego, and I have just escaped being arrested by the San Diego police. This book tour keeps getting more surreal, but the last hour has been unlike anything I have yet seen. I have come to San Diego to speak at an event organized for my book ("Stupid White Men"). The event is being held at a middle school in an auditorium that seats about 800 people. I have spent the week in California, pretty much at my own expense. Weeks ago, the publisher informed me that they would not be sending me to this state if they had to pay to get me there. So I called up my friends at "Politically Incorrect" and asked if they could book me on the show and bring me out there. They were more than happy to help out. I can't believe the crap this show has had to endure because its host one night, early on in "America's NEW War" had the guts to state the truth as he saw it. Now advertisers have dropped like flies, affiliates in DC, Columbus, and other cities have canceled the program, and ABC seems eager to deep-six the whole hour it shares with "Nightline." But, for now, they have come to my aid, and I am grateful. In the past six days, I have spoken to 15 separate mobs of people. I don't know what other word to use because, quite simply, wherever I go, there is this unbelievable pandemonium. Every day, every night, hundreds -- or thousands -- jam themselves into halls, arenas, churches, auditoriums to listen to me talk about my book and whatever else is struggling to make its way through my brain. Forget about standing room only -- these venues look more like breathing room only. A clever fire marshal could have made a small fortune tailing me across this state. As I look out at the crowds of humans doing their best to impersonate sardines, I worry not that some deranged person may shout "Fire!" but rather that someone may belt out, "There's an extra six inches over here by the radiator!" I have visited the most out-of-the-way places in California and, no matter where I go or how right-wing the congressman is that represents their district, all sorts of people are desperate to get inside to be with the thousands of others who want to be part of "United We Stand Against the Thief-in-Chief." Grass Valley, Hayward, San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Ukiah, Arcata, Berkeley, Westwood, East L.A., Koreatown (L.A.) -- I wish all of you could see what I have seen. In every town, at every stop, huge throngs of Americans who are sick and tired of the silence that has been demanded of them, lest they be thought of as "unpatriotic" should they dare to question the actions of George W. Bush and company. That's what this tour is all about. It's time to come out and start acting like Americans again. And then there was San Diego. Over a thousand people are packed inside the 800-seat auditorium. Outside, another thousand people are on the lawn trying to get in. The traffic on the street is tied up and the stream of San Diegoans keeps filing up the sidewalk. I tell the organizers that I am going to spend a half-hour outside here speaking to the people who cannot get in. They are, after all, like me -- slackers who are habitually late. The crowd outdoors is wired and jazzed that they are being honored for being tardy. Then I go inside, give my usual talk, and begin to sign books. There's a 90-year-old lady whose granddaughter has driven her down from Orange County. There's a union organizer from the antiunion San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper who announces that his grandfather was a sit-down striker with my uncle back in 1937 in Flint. Some punk-poet kid tries to finish me off for good by offering me two Krispy Kreme donuts. Hundreds line up to have their books, their "Awful Truth" DVDs and, in one case, an Iron Maiden jean jacket, signed. I am told that we are getting close to the time when we will have to leave the school, as it has only been rented until 11pm. That is not good. Hundreds are still in line. I don't think any of these signings this week have been over before midnight. Somewhere around 11:30pm, I hear a commotion at the back of the auditorium. I see people start to scatter. The San Diego police are coming down the aisle, their large flashlights out (the auditorium lights are still on, so we all understand the implied "other" use of these instruments). The police are telling everyone to "VACATE THESE PREMISES IMMEDIATELY OR YOU WILL ALL BE ARRESTED!" I cannot believe what I am hearing. "YOU WILL NOT RECEIVE ANOTHER WARNING. LEAVE NOW -- OR FACE ARREST!" The cops approach the stage where I am signing the books. People are visibly frightened -- and about half the book-line bolts toward the doors. I stand up and speak to the officers. "I am the author of this book," I tell them politely. "These people are only here to get a book and all I am doing is signing them. We will be done shortly." "I don't care who you are," they reply. "We have received a call from the school district and we have been told to remove you. You were supposed to be out of here at 11:00pm." We had apparently violated our curfew. "C'mon guys, you can't be serious," I said. "Are you saying that you are going to arrest me for signing people's books, and arrest the people who are here because they want to read this book?" "I don't care what you are doing -- this is your last warning. I am ready to arrest you and everyone else." "Who is your superior?" I ask. "I'm it. Only the Chief is above me at night, and I am not going to wake him up. This has already gone through many channels. We are here because this has already gone through many people in the last half-hour, people in authority, and the decision has been made to clear you out of here or arrest you." I have never been arrested, strange as that may seem. I could not believe that, of all I have done, all I have stood for over the years, that it has come down to this -- and I was about to be hauled away for autographing books! "OK," I said. "We'll leave." I then mumbled something about the last time I checked, this was still the United States of America -- even if we were just five miles away from where it ends. They escorted me and the few remaining souls out of the building. The brave lady who was the owner of the independent bookstore and who was there selling my book, leaned over and whispered to me, "I am willing to go to jail for this if you want me to." Ya gotta hand it to the independent bookstores -- they've been through hell lately, so much so that they are now ready to be led away in handcuffs! I walked outside and about 40 people ask me if I would still sign their books in the dark of the parking lot. A girl gets out her pocket flashlight. A guy runs over and turns on his headlights. I remark that it feels like we're in some sort of banana republic or East Berlin, secretly meeting so we can have our little book gathering. "Sign quick, Mike, here come the police!" I finish the last book and hop in my sister's car. She remembers to give me a plaque that had been presented to me in abstentia (while I was outside talking to the people who couldn't get in). It was from the city councilwoman from the area of San Diego we were in. It read "Official Proclamation: City of San Diego Declares -- March 9, 2002, 'Michael Moore Day.'" "Maybe we should have shown this to the cops, " she says. We drive to her house where I catch four hours sleep before I get up and head for Denver. Yours, Michael Moore Author Filmmaker NonEvildoer mmflint at aol.com StupidWhiteMen at aol.com www.michaelmoore.com PS. I have heard from so many of you about how hard it is to find my book in the bookstores. It's true -- the book does not exist in most stores. Yet it is #1 in most cities across the country on the bestseller lists. I don't get it. HarperCollins has been very slow to print books and get them out there. Why this is, I do not know. No doubt they have been caught by surprise with the overwhelming response to the book. You can't really blame them -- they thought the "president" had an 80% approval rating. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Militants are buried in Srinagar's many martyrs' cemeteries, some of them large adjuncts to regular graveyards, others crammed into small corners across the city. They are crowded with almost identical concrete gravestones, covered in Arabic inscriptions in green lettering. A few bear English place names�"Birmingham" was one I noted�an indication of Kashmir's appeal to disaffected Western-born Muslims looking for a cause. But exactly what that cause was, beyond the single word azad, was unclear. As I looked at the gravestones in one of the smaller cemeteries near Dal Gate one day, a group of boys gathered around me and laboriously translated the inscriptions. They were eager to show me significant graves�Islamic warriors from faraway countries, or men whose spectacular deaths had stuck in their memories. They pointed out professionals�lawyers, teachers, doctors�and men who had died under torture. They called all the dead "martyrs," but they couldn't always tell me what they had died for�whether they were martyrs to Kashmiri independence, or to the union with Pakistan, or simply to Islam. One grave that was pointed out to me belonged to Aafaq Ahmed Shah, who, at the age of eighteen, had become briefly famous for inaugurating a new phase of the militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed's war, that of the suicide bomber. I had earlier visited his family in the old city. His mother had opened the door and stood on the doorstep looking at me. She was a small, middle-aged woman with dar , and she knew, before I explained, what I had come for. She remained immobile, tears flowing down her face, reluctant, it seemed, either to turn me away or to admit me to what she knew would be a painful rehearsal of her grief. Still sobbing, she let me in, and I sat on the floor of a freezing room, waiting for her husband to return from the market. Mohammed Yusuf Shah was a thin, elderly man, a retired college teacher, dressed in a brown pheran. He settled beside me as his wife brought blankets and fire baskets and poured us cups of chai from a thermos flask. "My son was nearly nineteen years old," Mohammed said. "He wanted to be a doctor. There's a photograph of him"�he waved his hand vaguely�"somewhere, wearing a stethoscope." He made no move to get it, as though already discouraged by the effort. His wife had begun to cry again. "Mysterious are the ways of God," he said. There had been no warning that his son would join the militants. "He willed it. He did it. That is all. He was a good, silent, obedient boy. He was my son, but, more than that, he was my friend. He was here, dawn to dusk, every day, day and night." On March 25, 2000, the boy disappeared. The family searched for him, fruitlessly. Three days later, he telephoned. "Father, I left," he said, and hung up. On April 19th, dressed in an Army uniform and carrying an Army I.D., Aafaq tried to ram his car through a heavily fortified gate of the Army's XV Corps headquarters, near his home. The car exploded after a soldier started firing at it. Five soldiers were injured; only one person was killed�Aafaq, who was blown to pieces. The family read of his death in the newspapers. I found another family of a young martyr in a village some thirty miles outside Srinagar. We drove along long straight roads lined with tall poplars, past fields of saffron that were just showing a first flush of green shoots, past empty paddy fields, waiting to be planted. The village itself was along a muddy track, buried among trees, peaceful in the chilly morning. "Ignora evil" was carefully painted on the wall of the village school. I sat on the floor of the family's small living room as villagers crowded in, competing to tell the story of Nazir Ahmed Khan. "Nazir was in the tenth class," a young neighbor told me, and also wanted to be a doctor. "His hobbies were gardening, photography, and cricket." Nazir's elder brother, Mohadin, drove a taxi to support the family. There was a skirmish in a nearby village, and the Army appeared at the door, convinced that Mohadin had driven a wounded terrorist to the hospital. Mohadin was not at home, but Nazir and his father were. They were interrogated, but the soldiers were not satisfied, and the father and son were both beaten, and then their limbs were held over a fire. Afterward, Nazir ran away. "He could not bear being tortured for no reason," the neighbor said. He had gone to join the militants. Mohadin was summoned to the Army barracks, and he, too, was tortured and then imprisoned. The family sold the taxi to bribe the Army for his release; it was their only asset. And then Nazir was killed. I went to see where he had died. We drove back to the main road, past a sign that read, "Our job is to make everybody see the beauty of Kashmir," then turned down a muddy track to the village. We inched along the narrow streets until a villager pointed to the house: the roof at one end had collapsed, and its supporting wall was a pile of rubble. I scrambled up the slippery lane and pushed open the ramshackle corrugated-iron gate. A small crowd followed me in. The boy had joined two other militants, and the three of them, the villagers told me, were hiding in this house. An informer told the Army. The cordon search lasted for three days and three nights, and the entire village was made to squat in the cold on the recreation ground. Fire baskets and the old men's woollen hats were confiscated. Ten thousand soldiers came, I was told. I said that ten thousand soldiers is a very large number. The villagers insisted. Cornered, the militants gave f them fired on the soldiers from an upper room�and the Army ordered seven villagers to walk up to the house and put two explosive devices inside. Everyone knew that the villagers wouldn't be harmed. It was, they said, a frequently used tactic. "The militants don't fire on civilians," a villager explained. "If you refuse to do it, the Army shoots you." The villagers got out before the devices were detonated. Nazir was eighteen, and had been a militant for a week. Later this year, there will be elections in Kashmir�the opportunity, in principle, for the people to express their political will. But, after years of vote rigging and intermittent direct rule, Kashmiris have lost their faith in India's secular democracy. For the politicians in the loose coalition of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, there is no point in even standing. To do so would require their swearing an oath of allegiance to the Indian state, which they do not wish to honor. And, at the very least, they want an autonomy that they believe India's current government�dominated by the Bharatiya Janata Party, an organization with an aggressively pro-Hindu ideology�will never grant. On February 12th, the Hurriyat announced that it would boycott the Indian elections and hold an election of its own�to choose representatives who will sit at a negotiating table with India and Pakistan. But India is not going to give up Kashmir, and the negotiations have no hope of succeeding. President Musharraf, too, has called for negotiations, and on February 6th the U.N. Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, offered to mediate. For Musharraf, negotiations could be the key to his survival. He has declared his wish to make Pakistan a more secular state, attempting to dismantle the networks of Islamic extremists who, for the past twenty years, have systematically infiltrated Pakistan's government, Army, and, especially, its intelligence services, the I.S.I. These people are viscerally opposed to Musharraf's ambition. If he is to succeed�if, at the very least, he is to put a t for cross-border Islamic terror�he needs to show that the cause of the indigenous Kashmiri struggle has not been abandoned. India, meanwhile, has not taken up the offers for negotiations. In Kashmir, an end to the struggle seems ever more remote. Nazir, like Aafaq, had joined the ranks of the martyrs in a war that has lost its way, a war that now feeds on itself�each act of violence generating a new response that generates more recruits. For some of the valley's young men, it can seem as though there were little else to do�the war is their occupation. The Kashmiriyat is now a forlorn memory, and has been replaced by the cult of the gun. The people of the valley believe they are trapped in a war without end, in which anyone can become a victim. Tens of thousands have died. Scarcely a family in the valley is untouched. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: al surveillance and electronic space in which our most intimate thoughts can= be charted. In this world, what few protections were afforded those who sta= nd in opposition to the status quo are lost, snatched back by systems of pol= icing -- local, national and global -- bent on breaking all but the tamest f= orms of resistance.

Such attacks on liberty are, needless to say, not new. Entire systems of ec= onomic and political domination have been built upon policing at once extrao= rdinarily violent and intrusive. Among these, one might cite the very system= on which the country we live in was founded. From the arrival of the first = slave ship at Jamestown Harbor in 1619 to the contemporary streets of our la= rgest cities, from the era of Jim Crow lynchings to the beating of Rodney Ki= ng and the killing of Amadou Diallo, the United States has been a place of v= iolence meted out at the hands of a few bent on controlling and silencing th= e many.  

Once, men and women of African descent, in this land, were deemed 3/5th of = a human being; today, so many men of African heritage -- one in every ten= -- are behind bars or otherwise ensnared in the criminal justice jugger= naut**  that one can legitimately speak of a genocide under way. In Atl= anta, Detroit, Los Angeles, women and men of Native American, Latino and, in= creasingly, Asian heritage are questioned, arrested, incarcerated at rates i= n no way commensurate with their representation in the population at large. = Post 9/11, over a thousand Arab men are in US jails, still waiting to be cha= rged with a crime; in many cases, their own families have not been told wher= e they are.

Elsewhere too, state violence has broken and continues to break lives, spir= its, entire peoples. Violent repression was the cornerstone of the colonial = project, in Africa and Asia alike.  Patrice Lumumba of Congo, murdered = by Belgian-trained gunmen mere months after his country gained independence;= Ruben Um Nyobe, heartbeat of Cameroon’s struggle for self-determinati= on, killed in a French ambush in 1958;  Steve Biko, beaten to death by = South African police in 1977... Theirs are but the best known names -- a pal= try few “history” deigns to recall among those of hundreds upon = hundreds of thousands who died, many resisting, killed by authorities in pow= er only because they had the means to destroy.

In Europe, as the industrial age emerged, workers died by the thousands. In= Napoleonic Paris, boulevards were cut through the city in wide swaths to ma= ke the task of shooting discontented factory hands easier, should they take = to the streets en masse. As the 19th century drew to a close, in the UK and = US, strikers seeking better wages were clubbed and shot. In the wake of a Ma= y Day protest that brought 80,000 workers to Chicago’s Michigan Avenue= , police violence exploded. Within days, eight men were arrested.  A &n= bsp;trial was held, centering on a bomb all agreed none of those indicted ha= d planted. Five of the men were sentenced to death; the three others were re= manded to prison for life.

One would like to think that such excesses are a thing of the past. They ar= e not:

ABNER LOUIMA

AMADOU DIALLO (1)

LUC BENOIT BASILEKIN (2)

SUSANA GOMEZ, RONALD RAUL RAMOS (3)

SEATTLE, QUEBEC CITY, GENOA (4)

SEOUL, JAKARTA, BRISBANE (5)

JOHANNESBURG, PARIS (6)

BULGARIA, ALGERIA (7)

VIRGINIA (8)

(1) THREE YEARS AGO, A GUINEAN IMMIGRANT NAMED AM= ADOU DIALLO WAS STRUCK DOWN IN A HAIL OF BULLETS FIRED BY NEW YORK CITY POLI= CE. HE WAS REACHING FOR IDENTIFICATION; THE OFFICERS ASSUMED HE WAS REACHING= FOR A GUN. THEY FIRED FORTY-ONE BULLETS. NINETEEN HIT THE TARGET.

(2) IN FEBRUARY 2001, THE GOVERNMENT OF CAMEROON INSTITUTED THE OPER= ATIONAL COMMAND, A PARAMILITARY TASK FORCE BRINGING TOGETHER MEMBERS OF THE = LOCAL AND NATIONAL POLICE AND THE ARMY. THE C.O.’S OFFICIAL PURPOSE WA= S TO END A CRIME WAVE IN THE CITY OF DOUALA; IT WAS MEANT IN FACT TO BRING T= O HEEL SECTORS OF THE POPULATION OPPOSED TO THE REPRESSIVE RULE OF THE GOVER= NING PARTY. IN ITS FIRST SIX MONTHS, THE C.O. PERPETRATED 500 EXTRA-JUDICIAL= EXECUTIONS; BY YEAR’S END, 1000 PEOPLE HAD DIED.  ONE OF THE FIR= ST WAS LUC BENOIT BASILEKIN.

(3) IN APRIL 1996 IN GUATEMALA CITY, SUSANA GOMEZ WAS RAPED B= Y TWO NATIONAL POLICE OFFICERS; SHE WAS SIXTEEN YEARS OLD. IN SEPTEMBER 1996= , RONALD RAUL RAMOS WAS SHOT AND KILLED BY A TREASURY POLICE OFFICER; HE TOO= WAS SIXTEEN. MORE THAN TEN OTHER STREET CHILDREN WERE MURDERED THAT YEAR, L= IKELY BY POLICE. TWELVE MONTHS LATER, NONE OF THE PERPETRATORS IN THESE CASE= S HAD BEEN APPREHENDED.

(4) IN SEATTLE, QUEBEC CITY AND GENOA, OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS, UNAR= MED WOMEN, MEN AND CHILDREN CALLING FOR A MORE MEASURED APPROACH TO GLOBALIZ= ATION THAN HAS BEEN PROPOSED BY SUCH BODIES AS THE WTO AND WORLD BANK WERE A= TTACKED BY POLICE WIELDING BATONS, RUBBER BULLETS, WATER CANONS AND TEAR GAS= . SIMILAR VIOLENCE GREETED UNARMED PROTESTERS AT MAY DAY RALLIES THROUGHOUT = ASIA AND THE PACIFIC IN 2001, FROM SIDNEY AND BRISBANE TO KARACHI, SEOUL AND= JAKARTA.

(5) IN FEBRUARY 2002, A COLONY OF SQUATTERS WAS VIOLENTLY DISPERSED = IN CENTRAL JOHANNESBURG. THE POLICE LEVELED THE INHABITANTS’ MAKESHIFT= HOMES AND DESTROYED THEIR BELONGINGS. THE SQUATTERS WERE MADE TO BOARD BUSE= S AND WERE DRIVEN OUT OF THE CITY, WHERE THEY WERE UNCEREMONIOUSLY DUMPED, M= ILES FROM FRIENDS AND FAMILY. THE METHODS EMPLOYED IN THIS DISPERSAL WERE SI= MILAR TO THOSE USED IN FORCED REMOVALS OF THE APARTHEID ERA.

(6) ON SUNDAY OCTOBER 17, 1961, ALGERIANS LIVING IN PARIS ORGANIZED = A PEACEFUL MARCH TO PROTEST A CURFEW ON PERSONS OF ARAB DESCENT. THE POLICE = MOVED IN. THEIR COMMANDER WAS MAURICE PAPON, WHO DURING WWII HAD OVERSEEN TH= E REMOVAL OF 1560 FRENCH JEWS TO GERMAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS. TWO HUNDRED UNA= RMED ALGERIANS WERE SHOT, BLUDGEONED AND DROWNED.  PAPON REMAINS FREE. =  DAILY, FOR NO REASON BUT THE COLOR OF THEIR SKIN, PERSONS OF NORTH AFR= ICAN DESCENT ARE DETAINED, ARRESTED, BEATEN AND SHOT ON FRENCH STREETS.

(7) SINCE 1994, RACIALLY MOTIVATED VIOLENCE AGAINST ROMA GYPSIES IN = BULGARIA HAS INCREASED DRAMATICALLY. MUCH OF THIS VIOLENCE IS PERPETRATED BY= POLICE AND PRIVATE SECURITY FIRMS. IN THE COURSE OF ONE WEEK, IN APRIL 2001= , EIGHTY YOUNG PEOPLE WERE KILLED BY THE POLICE IN KABYLIA, IN NORTH-EASTERN= ALGERIA.  ALL WERE MEMBERS OF THE MINORITY BERBER ETHNIC GROUP.

(8) ON MARCH 1, 1999, A SEVERED HEAD WAS FOUND IN A RICHMOND, VA PAR= K.  THE VICTIM WAS A GAY MAN. THE PARK HAD BEEN THE SITE FOR SEVERAL MO= NTHS OF A POLICE “STING”:  UNDERCOVER OFFICERS HAD BEEN APP= ROACHING GAY MEN, PROPOSING SEX, THEN PROMPTLY ARRESTING THOSE WHO SHOWED IN= TEREST. THE ARRESTS WERE WIDELY REPORTED. THE PUBLICITY GIVEN THEM MAY WELL = HAVE ENCOURAGED THE MURDERER.  WHY THE MANY PLAINCLOTHES OFFICERS PRESE= NT IN THE PARK ON THE NIGHT OF THE MURDER FAILED TO SEE ANYTHING IS ANYONE&#= 8217;S GUESS.

IN CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA, IN NORTH AFRICA AND EUROPE, AMNESTY INTERNATI= ONAL AND THE INTERNATIONAL GAY AND LESBIAN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION REPORT CA= SE AFTER CASE OF RAPE, TORTURE AND MURDER INVOLVING TRANSGENDER AND BISEXUAL= , LESBIAN AND GAY PERSONS, ALL TOO OFTEN BY POLICE.

From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Posted on Tuesday, March 12, 2002 by Doc Searls In a bizarre move that requires a bazaar response, the U.S. Copyright Office plans to price Webcasters off the Net and replace the creative commons with a content pumping system for Big Media. Are you ready to lose Internet Radio? Well, get ready, because that's exactly what will happen if the Copyright Office carries out its current interpretation of the DMCA. For context, let's go back a couple weeks to when I wrote about some of the radio flowers blossoming on the creative commons we call the Net. Here's a bouquet: * KFJC * KPIG * RadioParadise * SmoothJazz * WUNC * WCPE * Radio FG * URGent * Beiruit Nights * Radio Free Klezmer * Radiostorm Hip-Hop/R&B * BassDrive * Cyberspace Sonata * Digitally Imported Radio * Factory188 * FlareSOUND I've also written about our friends at KPIG and Radio Paradise, where Bill Goldsmith has been making the most of open-source methods and software to give this young industry what it needs to grow and even make a little money along the way. When you tune into his stations (and to many of the others listed above), you're literally listening to Linux. What we're seeing with Internet Radio, even more than we saw with Napster, is the music market's workaround of a grotesquely obsolete regulatory environment where big-time broadcasting has grown safely protected from accountability to its own users. Today the AM and FM bands are populated almost entirely by a strange breed of immense mutant advertising-fed cattle that seem to reproduce only by cloning. Drive through four cities hitting your radio's SCAN button, and you'll find at least four different "Good Times, Great Oldies" stations playing the same playlist of 200 songs. And that's just the tip of the shitberg. Simply put, Internet Radio is what happens when Demand gets the power to Supply. It's nothing more complicated than The Market at work. But the regulators and their bizarre beneficiaries have no idea what a real market is, and they are lined up with bulldozers, ready to replace nature's own music marketplace with a new Net-enhanced version of the plumbing system we call The Media. They started with the DMCA, and their latest bulldozer is something called CARP, the Copyright Arbitration and Royalty Panel. After meeting in secret for the last several months, CARP issued a report on February 20 "recommending rates and terms for the statutory license for eligible nonsubscription services to perform sound recordings publicly by means of digital audio transmissions ("webcasting") under 17 U.S.C. �114..." etc. Specifically, CARP wants to charge very steeply--punitively--for broadcasting music on the Net. KPIG lays out the issues as kindly as they can: Independent webcasters such as KPIG are facing a grave threat to our existence. It may be an evil conspiracy on the part of the big record companies and corporate webcasters, or - more likely - it's just a dumb mistake. In either case, KPIG could soon be liable for huge music usage fees ($5,000 - $10,000 per month) that would make it impossible for us to stay online. The effect will be to outlaw webcasting, something the big broadcasters will never miss because it's a pain in their butts anyway. The DMCA anchors a strategic vector for these people, and it's not hard to see where it's pointing. How long before the Library of Congress (which is behind CARP, by the way), in cahoots with some new industry-led enforcement body, starts crawling the Web looking for matches between quoted and copyrighted text and busting individuals for violations? How long before free speech starts costing you? (And not just Dmitry.) Webcasting is just the first species marked for destruction. Whether this is an evil plot, a dumb bureaucracy at work or both, the effects are the same: the destruction of the Net as a commons and its replacement with a plumbing system for the distribution of "content" (a word hardly used in a shipping context before Big Media got all drooly over The Promise of The Net). So what can we do, beyond what the EFF and other friends are already up to? In my most recent SuitWatch newsletter, I called for two courses of action: One is to do everything we can to draw a distinction between the place-based concepts on which the Net and the Web were based (and which drive expressions like "address", "site", "home" and "location") and the plumbing-based concepts by which the both regulators and Big Media want to redefine the Net (and which drive expressions like "content", "deliver", "move" and "distribute"). I think Larry Lessig and the Creative Commons folk (who will have a high profile at the upcoming O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference) are doing a good job at framing that one up. But we need to build on the Commons concept; just being conscious about language will help. Look at it this way: * We have the advantage if we talk about the Net as a place. * They have the advantage if we talk about the Net as a plumbing system for shipping content. (And make no mistake, it is a death-match between the two, one fought in our own minds as well as out in the social environment we call The Marketplace.) The other is to march on Washington*. I know that's very 60s and retro, but sometimes you just have to get physical. You have to deliver the missing clues, in person, to elected representatives and the regulators they employ. What better place to do that than on the nation's home commons? For a little motivation on that one, let's revisit the First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Congress made exactly that kind of law with DMCA, and it needs to repealed. Let's show these guys there's nothing bizarre about democracy at work but, instead, something very bazaar. It's hard to imagine a more peaceable assembly than one that's nothing more than a real market doing its real job. *Or we could take a train, webcasting live music along the way, stopping to perform and have fun at venues along the way. Whatever it takes. Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal and a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. The opinions he expresses here are his own. -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Dear friends, Though I have been on the reader list for quite some time, I have never posted anything on it. Today I feel the acute need to spread the word around. With reference to what is happening in Gujarat, some of us who are part of the Delhi Network of Women Journalists (an informal group essentially) have felt the need to organise and channelise some relief material to the victims of the state sponsored pogrom. Now some people and organisations have been identified and I request members on this reading list to pitch in with whatever they can. Now what one learns is that the support structures of the minority community there have collapsed as they themselves have been affected, hence there is this added need and who else can respond but the secular amongst the majority community. I am sure almost all of you would agree with the need to send relief and hence I am mentioning some addresses where money or material relief could be sent. The Fatehpuri Masjid is in Chandni Chowk and journalists with the India Abroad News Service have already got into action and despatched clothes etc to there to be sent to Gujarat.. Regards, Rajalakshmi. Cheques/drafts can be made in the name of any of the following: i.St Xavier's Social Service Society, Ac No 01100050714, SBI, Main Branch (0301)Bhadra, Ahmedabad, 380 001. ii.Gujarat Education Society (Attn Fr Cedri Prakash), c/o Prashant, P.O. Box 4002, Ahmedabad 380 009. iii.Hazrat Shah e Alam Rahat Camp, Rasoolabad, Ahmedabad. Tel 079-5324901, Fax 5394850, run by Moin Shakir and Munnaf, recognised by the government. iv.Relief is also being organised by the Imam of Fatehpuri Masjid near Jama Masjid - clothes, medicines etc. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: al surveillance and electronic space in which our most intimate thoughts can= be charted. In this world, what few protections were afforded those who sta= nd in opposition to the status quo are lost, snatched back by systems of pol= icing -- local, national and global -- bent on breaking all but the tamest f= orms of resistance.

Such attacks on liberty are, needless to say, not new. Entire systems of ec= onomic and political domination have been built upon policing at once extrao= rdinarily violent and intrusive. Among these, one might cite the very system= on which the country we live in was founded. From the arrival of the first = slave ship at Jamestown Harbor in 1619 to the contemporary streets of our la= rgest cities, from the era of Jim Crow lynchings to the beating of Rodney Ki= ng and the killing of Amadou Diallo, the United States has been a place of v= iolence meted out at the hands of a few bent on controlling and silencing th= e many.  

Once, men and women of African descent, in this land, were deemed 3/5th of = a human being; today, so many men of African heritage -- one in every ten= -- are behind bars or otherwise ensnared in the criminal justice jugger= naut**  that one can legitimately speak of a genocide under way. In Atl= anta, Detroit, Los Angeles, women and men of Native American, Latino and, in= creasingly, Asian heritage are questioned, arrested, incarcerated at rates i= n no way commensurate with their representation in the population at large. = Post 9/11, over a thousand Arab men are in US jails, still waiting to be cha= rged with a crime; in many cases, their own families have not been told wher= e they are.

Elsewhere too, state violence has broken and continues to break lives, spir= its, entire peoples. Violent repression was the cornerstone of the colonial = project, in Africa and Asia alike.  Patrice Lumumba of Congo, murdered = by Belgian-trained gunmen mere months after his country gained independence;= Ruben Um Nyobe, heartbeat of Cameroon’s struggle for self-determinati= on, killed in a French ambush in 1958;  Steve Biko, beaten to death by = South African police in 1977... Theirs are but the best known names -- a pal= try few “history” deigns to recall among those of hundreds upon = hundreds of thousands who died, many resisting, killed by authorities in pow= er only because they had the means to destroy.

In Europe, as the industrial age emerged, workers died by the thousands. In= Napoleonic Paris, boulevards were cut through the city in wide swaths to ma= ke the task of shooting discontented factory hands easier, should they take = to the streets en masse. As the 19th century drew to a close, in the UK and = US, strikers seeking better wages were clubbed and shot. In the wake of a Ma= y Day protest that brought 80,000 workers to Chicago’s Michigan Avenue= , police violence exploded. Within days, eight men were arrested.  A &n= bsp;trial was held, centering on a bomb all agreed none of those indicted ha= d planted. Five of the men were sentenced to death; the three others were re= manded to prison for life.

One would like to think that such excesses are a thing of the past. They ar= e not:

ABNER LOUIMA

AMADOU DIALLO (1)

LUC BENOIT BASILEKIN (2)

SUSANA GOMEZ, RONALD RAUL RAMOS (3)

SEATTLE, QUEBEC CITY, GENOA (4)

SEOUL, JAKARTA, BRISBANE (5)

JOHANNESBURG, PARIS (6)

BULGARIA, ALGERIA (7)

VIRGINIA (8)

(1) THREE YEARS AGO, A GUINEAN IMMIGRANT NAMED AM= ADOU DIALLO WAS STRUCK DOWN IN A HAIL OF BULLETS FIRED BY NEW YORK CITY POLI= CE. HE WAS REACHING FOR IDENTIFICATION; THE OFFICERS ASSUMED HE WAS REACHING= FOR A GUN. THEY FIRED FORTY-ONE BULLETS. NINETEEN HIT THE TARGET.

(2) IN FEBRUARY 2001, THE GOVERNMENT OF CAMEROON INSTITUTED THE OPER= ATIONAL COMMAND, A PARAMILITARY TASK FORCE BRINGING TOGETHER MEMBERS OF THE = LOCAL AND NATIONAL POLICE AND THE ARMY. THE C.O.’S OFFICIAL PURPOSE WA= S TO END A CRIME WAVE IN THE CITY OF DOUALA; IT WAS MEANT IN FACT TO BRING T= O HEEL SECTORS OF THE POPULATION OPPOSED TO THE REPRESSIVE RULE OF THE GOVER= NING PARTY. IN ITS FIRST SIX MONTHS, THE C.O. PERPETRATED 500 EXTRA-JUDICIAL= EXECUTIONS; BY YEAR’S END, 1000 PEOPLE HAD DIED.  ONE OF THE FIR= ST WAS LUC BENOIT BASILEKIN.

(3) IN APRIL 1996 IN GUATEMALA CITY, SUSANA GOMEZ WAS RAPED B= Y TWO NATIONAL POLICE OFFICERS; SHE WAS SIXTEEN YEARS OLD. IN SEPTEMBER 1996= , RONALD RAUL RAMOS WAS SHOT AND KILLED BY A TREASURY POLICE OFFICER; HE TOO= WAS SIXTEEN. MORE THAN TEN OTHER STREET CHILDREN WERE MURDERED THAT YEAR, L= IKELY BY POLICE. TWELVE MONTHS LATER, NONE OF THE PERPETRATORS IN THESE CASE= S HAD BEEN APPREHENDED.

(4) IN SEATTLE, QUEBEC CITY AND GENOA, OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS, UNAR= MED WOMEN, MEN AND CHILDREN CALLING FOR A MORE MEASURED APPROACH TO GLOBALIZ= ATION THAN HAS BEEN PROPOSED BY SUCH BODIES AS THE WTO AND WORLD BANK WERE A= TTACKED BY POLICE WIELDING BATONS, RUBBER BULLETS, WATER CANONS AND TEAR GAS= . SIMILAR VIOLENCE GREETED UNARMED PROTESTERS AT MAY DAY RALLIES THROUGHOUT = ASIA AND THE PACIFIC IN 2001, FROM SIDNEY AND BRISBANE TO KARACHI, SEOUL AND= JAKARTA.

(5) IN FEBRUARY 2002, A COLONY OF SQUATTERS WAS VIOLENTLY DISPERSED = IN CENTRAL JOHANNESBURG. THE POLICE LEVELED THE INHABITANTS’ MAKESHIFT= HOMES AND DESTROYED THEIR BELONGINGS. THE SQUATTERS WERE MADE TO BOARD BUSE= S AND WERE DRIVEN OUT OF THE CITY, WHERE THEY WERE UNCEREMONIOUSLY DUMPED, M= ILES FROM FRIENDS AND FAMILY. THE METHODS EMPLOYED IN THIS DISPERSAL WERE SI= MILAR TO THOSE USED IN FORCED REMOVALS OF THE APARTHEID ERA.

(6) ON SUNDAY OCTOBER 17, 1961, ALGERIANS LIVING IN PARIS ORGANIZED = A PEACEFUL MARCH TO PROTEST A CURFEW ON PERSONS OF ARAB DESCENT. THE POLICE = MOVED IN. THEIR COMMANDER WAS MAURICE PAPON, WHO DURING WWII HAD OVERSEEN TH= E REMOVAL OF 1560 FRENCH JEWS TO GERMAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS. TWO HUNDRED UNA= RMED ALGERIANS WERE SHOT, BLUDGEONED AND DROWNED.  PAPON REMAINS FREE. =  DAILY, FOR NO REASON BUT THE COLOR OF THEIR SKIN, PERSONS OF NORTH AFR= ICAN DESCENT ARE DETAINED, ARRESTED, BEATEN AND SHOT ON FRENCH STREETS.

(7) SINCE 1994, RACIALLY MOTIVATED VIOLENCE AGAINST ROMA GYPSIES IN = BULGARIA HAS INCREASED DRAMATICALLY. MUCH OF THIS VIOLENCE IS PERPETRATED BY= POLICE AND PRIVATE SECURITY FIRMS. IN THE COURSE OF ONE WEEK, IN APRIL 2001= , EIGHTY YOUNG PEOPLE WERE KILLED BY THE POLICE IN KABYLIA, IN NORTH-EASTERN= ALGERIA.  ALL WERE MEMBERS OF THE MINORITY BERBER ETHNIC GROUP.

(8) ON MARCH 1, 1999, A SEVERED HEAD WAS FOUND IN A RICHMOND, VA PAR= K.  THE VICTIM WAS A GAY MAN. THE PARK HAD BEEN THE SITE FOR SEVERAL MO= NTHS OF A POLICE “STING”:  UNDERCOVER OFFICERS HAD BEEN APP= ROACHING GAY MEN, PROPOSING SEX, THEN PROMPTLY ARRESTING THOSE WHO SHOWED IN= TEREST. THE ARRESTS WERE WIDELY REPORTED. THE PUBLICITY GIVEN THEM MAY WELL = HAVE ENCOURAGED THE MURDERER.  WHY THE MANY PLAINCLOTHES OFFICERS PRESE= NT IN THE PARK ON THE NIGHT OF THE MURDER FAILED TO SEE ANYTHING IS ANYONE&#= 8217;S GUESS.

IN CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA, IN NORTH AFRICA AND EUROPE, AMNESTY INTERNATI= ONAL AND THE INTERNATIONAL GAY AND LESBIAN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION REPORT CA= SE AFTER CASE OF RAPE, TORTURE AND MURDER INVOLVING TRANSGENDER AND BISEXUAL= , LESBIAN AND GAY PERSONS, ALL TOO OFTEN BY POLICE.

From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: And where you walk? Partition hots? Think of blind spots. Is it the hole Seen from the pole? Partition pangs? Come, see the gangs. Nostalgic words are making swords. Your fantasy, posited from the centre of cultural understanding, is unheimlich. Desired and dreaded. I read it as a drive lodged in your heart, which also tears Gujarat. You posit, Jyotsna, a "leaning-on" (anaclesis/anhelung). your outpouring. I am not sure: has "intersubjectivity" become such a fetish in America that it actually, coldly, evokes the reduction of regions of being to an incapacity to re-memory? The Partition is a hole into which has flowed, and still irresolvably flows, the excesses of passion. (Constructed in the first place; made by the "men" who "fought" for Independence. Today, narcissistically reproduced in a "national" un-official army that does not care a jot for religion or spirituality but believes that the future belongs to it, must belong to it.) The ethic of a "responsibility to otherness" is passe, after America-Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, Gujarat-India. Stop effetely deconstructing, stop believing that language is world-disclosing. If you must act via language, switch your ethic. Consider the "responsibility to act". Start reconstructing. You are in the "omphalos" of the contemporary world. You can. But of course your capacity to coordinate action is reduced to the "racialized, patriarchal politics" of tenure. Take some classes in India. Why don't you come back to India and teach children some english? They need it, to get good jobs. Take on some classes in India. Why don't you come back to India and teach children some alternative ideology? They need it, to get the job you've now got. ________________________________________________________________________ For live cricket scores download Yahoo! Score Tracker at: http://in.sports.yahoo.com/cricket/tracker.html From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: (1) L K Advani (or, mum's the word) (2) Ariel Sharon (or, hum's the word) (3) George Bush (or, cum's the word) ________________________________________________________________________ For live cricket scores download Yahoo! Score Tracker at: http://in.sports.yahoo.com/cricket/tracker.html From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: So why is it, you think, that Jordan�s annexation of the West Bank and Egypt�s annexation of the Gaza Strip from 1949-67 didn�t trigger any emotions in the Palestinians who lived in those territories? Why is it that not once, in all of those 18 years, was there even a sentence of indignation uttered by the Palestinians or by their "liberation" organization about the injustice done to the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip? Why did other Arab states say nothing about it? You know why. And this means that the terror against Israel has always been, and still is, caused by something other than Israelis being on any kind of "territory." I�ll give you six hints about what the real cause is connected to: Hint #1: Hitler formulated the Final Solution because of it. Hint #2: it has something to do with why Israel cannot be found on a map in Palestinian geography classes. It�s also connected to why Palestinian textbooks teach Palestinian children that Jews are evil thieves who have taken Arab land and who must therefore be killed. The textbooks also tell the kiddies that suicide bombing is what Allah loves most, since that noble and holy activity is the most effective way of murdering Jews and "liberating" Palestine. Hint #3: it�s why the Palestinian Authority has published the Arabic translation of Mein Kampf, and why that tract has reached number six on its best-seller list. Hint #4: It is connected to why, in 1960, when the Israelis captured Adolph Eichmann, the government-run Saudi Arabian newspaper ran a story headlined: "Arrest Of Eichmann, Who Had The Honor Of Killing Six Million Jews." Hint #5: it has something to do with the great honor and respect that is bestowed in the Middle East upon anyone who succeeds in killing Jews. For instance, if you blow yourself up along with some innocent Jewish mothers and babies, your picture will be plastered on posters throughout your hometown. Your family will acquire a revered place in society and will also receive $25,000 in American currency from Saddam Hussein. You, meanwhile, will get to fulfill all of your wildest and repressed sexual fantasies with 72 virgins in heaven. Hint #6: the whole matter is related to why Hashemi Rafsanjani, the eminent representative of "Iranian moderation," has boasted that once the Muslim world gets a hold of nuclear weapons, which he assures will be very soon, the Jewish "question" will be solved forever. Now that you know what the real cause of Palestinian terror is, make sure to always deny it. Instead, consistently maintain to others that it is the result of Israelis being on "Palestinian territory." Tip #3 � Ignore the words of Palestinians. When you make your arguments for the Palestinian right to a homeland, always make sure to emphasize that the Palestinians acknowledge the right of Israel to exist. To make sure this works effectively, never mention, or ever even think about, what the Palestinians actually say themselves. For instance, never talk about the Palestinian Covenant of 1968, because it embodies the philosophical principles of the Palestinians themselves and says things that would shatter the foundation to all of your arguments. For instance, Article 19 affirms that, "The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of Israel is fundamentally null and void, whatever time has elapsed, because it is contrary to the wish of the people of Palestine and its natural right to its homeland." Article 15 states that, "The liberation of Palestine, from the Arab viewpoint, is a national duty to repulse the Zionist, Imperialist invasion from the great Arab homeland and to purge the Zionist presence from Palestine." Also ignore Articles 20 and 22, because they reject even the historical and religious ties of Jews to the Holy Land itself. And that is precisely why Palestinian children are yet to find the state of Israel on any maps in their geography classes. You also shouldn�t worry that Arafat has never repudiated the Articles in the Palestinian Covenant of 1968. This explains why, when speaking English to Western audiences, he always talks about how he acknowledges the right of Israel to exist. But when he speaks Arabic to Arab audiences, he does little else but boast about his successes in working toward the Palestinians� most ambitious goal: to destroy the state of Israel. One only has to briefly listen to the Arab media, mosque sermons, and classroom and cafe conversations to gauge that this disposition represents a wide consensus in Arab society in general and in Palestinian society in particular. Thus, when you are trying to persuade someone about the good intentions of Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, and how they accept the existence of Israel, never mention what the Palestinians themselves talk about. You should most definitely stay away from the subject of the 1968 Palestinian Covenant, because this could cause you problems. If someone else brings it up, change topics immediately. Tip #4 � Imagine that Palestinians were, and are better off without Israel and the Israeli "occupation." You should be constantly angry about the suffering of Palestinians and be convinced that it is the fault of Israel. Palestinian suffering should always be equated with Israeli responsibility. These two notions must be inseparable in your mind. Palestinian suffering is definitely not the fault of Arafat or of all the Arab states � even though they have done everything in their power to make sure that the Palestinians do not receive a homeland. That�s right. So try not to reflect too much on why the Palestinians of the West Bank are barred from becoming citizens in the Arab world. When the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian administration, for instance, the Palestinians there were denied Egyptian citizenship and thereby remained stateless. This is exactly why the Palestinians are known as "refugees." The Arabs love their Palestinian brothers. It�s just that, well, they love them from a distance. In any case, you should try your hardest to convince yourself that the Palestinians� life under the Israeli "occupation" is the worst experience of any people under any regime in the history of the human race. The first step to believing this notion is to ignore the fact that Palestinians are much worse off in occupied Lebanon, where they are denied basic rights to employment, healthcare and government services �- unlike the Palestinians in Israel and in the "occupied" territories. You should also avoid the subject of how Kuwait ethnically cleansed all Palestinians (about 300,000 of them) just a decade ago, and how Jordanians slaughtered thousands of them after the 1967 war. Try to imagine that all of this isn�t very relevant. And neither is the fact that the world community never said too much about these Arab atrocities. It�s okay when Muslim Arabs practice genocide against Palestinians. It�s only wrong when the Israelis oppress Palestinians in the effort to defend themselves from terror. You also shouldn�t stress yourself about the racism against Arabs that this whole double standard implies. Indeed, by holding Jews up to a higher moral accountability than Arabs, the view that lets Arabs off the hook for oppressing their own brethren implies a civilizational inferiority to them -- and a civilizational superiority to Jews. But don�t think through this too much. You might get depressed after realizing that, deep down, just like a Leftist despises the "underclass" people for whom he purports to speak, so too you have smug contempt for the Arabs that you believe you represent in your self-alienated imagination. The key, in general, is that you should just avoid the whole issue of how the Jews have treated the Palestinians much better than the Arabs have. It is also a very good idea for you to ignore the fact that Israel has given birth to an Arab citizenry inside Israel of more than one million people. This way you won�t have to wonder how it is that, as Israeli citizens, Arabs have more rights, privileges and opportunities than the citizens of any Arab state in the Middle East. Unlike their Arab brothers and sisters, Arab citizens in Israel vote in free elections and are themselves elected to the Israeli parliament. In other words, the only place where Arabs know democracy and a high standard of living is in a Jewish nation. This is a hard pill to swallow for a person like you, who aspires to demonize Israel and to glorify the Arab world as the embodiment of true democracy and stupendous progress in world civilization. So what you have to do is visualize images of how Israel is the most evil nation on the face of the earth and how Arabs and Palestinians have endured unspeakable suffering because of it. Tip #5 � Imagine that Israel controls the "occupied" territories for some bizarre, vague and sinister reason. That�s right: imagine that Israel controls the "occupied" territories because Jews have nothing better to do than to inflict pain. They think it�s in their interest to trigger terrorism against themselves, as well as to ignite the hatred of a large portion of the world�s population. With great moral indignation, you should say things like, "the Israelis need to get out of the occupied territories." Say this as if it is a really easy, simple and safe thing for the Israelis to do. Never consider that the Israeli "occupation" of the territories in question might actually not be the greatest crime in world history. It might also not deserve immediate rectification. Sometimes land is confiscated when aggressive and terrorist states repeatedly attack their neighbors -- and lose. But this should not be your concern. What should be your concern is to say things that make Israel look as if it controls areas like the West Bank because Israelis need to fill the void of no longer being allowed to sacrifice and eat gentile babies in their religious rituals. Tip #6 � Say that Arafat isn�t a terrorist. You should always say things like: "One man�s terrorist is another man�s freedom-fighter." After that, say things like, "Arafat is a freedom-fighter." You must always ignore that Arafat has provided sanctuary and support to Palestinian suicide bombers and terrorists of all stripes. Be very open-minded about how he has personally endorsed suicide bombings rhetorically and celebrated the cult of "martyrdom" and other forms of homicide. And always make sure to announce things like, "Arafat has imprisoned militants." When you say this, don�t worry that the Palestinian "jails" that Arafat places "militants" in are notorious for their bars in the front and revolving doors at the back. Just tell people that Arafat is really trying to get terrorism under control. Don�t lose any sleep over the fact that explosives of the specific type used by Palestinian suicide bombers have been found in Palestinian police stations all over the "occupied" territories. Also don�t concern yourself with the fact that 500 Palestinians were just recently arrested in and around Arafat's compound and that dozens of them were on Israel's lists of most-wanted terrorists. Arafat was obviously still trying his best to track these people down. The reason he couldn�t find them was that they were cleverly hiding in his office while he was desperately patrolling the West Bank looking for them. And by all means, deny to others, as well as to yourself, that connections between the Palestinian Authority and international Islamic terror organizations, including al-Qaeda, have now been established beyond any reasonable doubt. If you accept this reality, then your whole belief system will come crashing down. Just look really sure of yourself and say things like, "Arafat isn�t a terrorist. He is a freedom fighter." Tip #7 � Imagine that Arafat has the interests of his own people in mind. This is the key to being an effective apologist for Arafat. You must always tell people that your hero truly cares about his own people �- even though the history of his every move negates the possibility of this being the case. A person that truly wanted the best for the Palestinian people would have embraced an offer that accepted 95% of the Palestinians� negotiating demands and would have given the Palestinians their own sovereign state in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, more than 90 percent of the West Bank, and a capital in Jerusalem. That�s what Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat in 2000. But Arafat rejected the proposal, demanding, instead, the flooding of Israel with millions of Palestinians. He knew, as Israelis did, that such a development would destroy Israel as a Jewish state. Arafat shrewdly understood that Israel could not, and would not, engage in self-destruction and this is how he succeeded in his main objective: to avoid the creation of a new Arab state and to annihilate the only Jewish one. That�s what the "Palestinian uprising," after all, is really all about. It is obvious, therefore, why Arafat has consistently stifled all Israeli efforts to improve the prosperity of the Palestinian people. He wants his people to bleed in misery and destitution. That way their suffering can be exploited in the Arabs� suicide wars against Israel. Now the key for you, therefore, is to deny the obvious. You know that the "Palestinian problem" is far more useful to Arafat than its solution will ever be. Arafat knows that peace with Jews is his own political suicide at best �- and his own death warrant at worst. What you have to do is look people in the eyes as honestly as you can and say things like, "Arafat is really trying to help his people." Say this as if you yourself have been talking to Arafat and that he tells you things that he wouldn�t confide in most people. Tip #8 � Say that Arab terrorism has nothing to do with jealousy. It is absolutely crucial that you consistently tell anyone you talk to that Israel is vehemently hated by the Arabs because of something that Israel has done to the Arabs. Never consider what the Arabs of the Middle East would do with all of their time if there were no Israel. Never suspect that Middle Eastern Arabs spend such an inordinate amount of their daily life hating a nation that takes up 1% of land in the Middle East because they might have a little problem with envy and jealousy. It might not be the easiest thing for Arabs to reconcile themselves with the reality that their culture has yet to produce one prosperous, functional and democratic society. Yet they see that the Jews have accomplished exactly that � in a tiny piece of land that was a desert fifty years ago. Indeed, the Jews have built the most powerful economy and the only industrial and democratic nation in the entire Middle East. This is a very painful truth for Middle Eastern Arabs to accept. So as an Arafat apologist, your job is to completely ignore this phenomenon. You must fantasize that when Arabs jump up and down with ferocious rage for hours on end every day screaming "Death to Israel," that the solution to their rage is definitely not to get a job, let alone a life of any kind. The solution lies in the Jews smartening up and stopping being so evil. If they did that, then obviously Arabs would find better things to do then spend ten hours a day, seven days a week, hollering at the top of their lungs and foaming at their mouths in the middle of the barren deserts that they have lived in for centuries. You see: Arabs don�t fail in making progress because of any serious pathology in their personal lives and culture. No, they mope around in long robes and headscarves in medieval societies because of what the Jews are doing to the Palestinians. And yes, ok, these same Arabs never lifted a finger or mouthed a word of protest when the Palestinians received much harsher treatment from Arabs. But don�t think this through. Actually, if anyone ever points this out to you, just say that the Arabs did protest the persecution of the Palestinians by other Arabs but that the Western press just didn�t report it. Tip #9 � Say it�s in Israel�s interest to pursue "peace". You should constantly say that it is in Israel�s interest to pursue "peace," even though all of the evidence suggests the exact opposite. More Israelis have died from terrorism since the signing of Oslo in 1993 than in the four decades before it. There have been more than 80 suicide bombings against Israel since the "peace process" began. Before Oslo, suicide bombings were almost non-existent. Each new atrocity against Israelis since 1993, meanwhile, has been hailed by the Palestinian media and the Palestinian Authority that controls it. You should ignore facts such as these and make it a daily habit to say things like, "The Israelis should really try to make peace with Arafat. It�s in their interest." Tip #10 � Shed yourself of any integrity you might have ever had. In order for you to practice the previous nine tips successfully, you need to make sure that you rid yourself of any personal dignity or integrity that might ever have been a part of your character and personality. You have to be absolutely shameless and live by absolutely no ethical or moral standard of any kind. Otherwise you will not be able to lie to others, and to yourself, the way I instruct you to. Arafat supporters have done it effectively before you. But now you can do it the best. Be the best liar you can be. That way, you might yet become the best Arafat apologist on earth. You can do it! Jamie Glazov holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He is the author of 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist and of Canadian Policy Toward Khruschev�s Soviet Union ( McGill-Queens University Press, 2002). Born in the U.S.S.R., Jamie is the son of prominent Soviet dissidents, and now resides in Vancouver, Canada. He writes the Dr. Progressive advice column for angst-ridden leftists at EnterStageRight.com. Email him at jglazov at rogers.com. --------------------------------- Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - online filing with TurboTax --0-567383480-1018603657=:54661 Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii http://www.frontpagemag.com/columnists/glazov/2002/glazov04-11-02.htm


Ten Tips on How to Be an Arafat Apologist
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 11, 2002
By: Jamie Glazov

WITH ALL OF THE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE that has now confirmed, beyond any reasonable doubt, Arafat�s terrorist connections and duplicitous behavior vis-�is Israel, it has become impossible for Arafat�s apologists to make any legitimate excuses for their hero.  I know a number of academics and writers that have become extremely depressed because of this situation.  Having based their entire lives and professional careers on blaming Israel for any and every sparrow that fell from the sky, they have now lost the will to live.  I feel sorry for these pathetic people.

I have decided to come forward to help the individuals who want to continue championing Yasser Arafat but simply don�t know how.

Seeing that I have dedicated most of my adult life to observing and dissecting the psychotic mindset that it takes to blame Israel for the conflict in Palestine, I know exactly what it takes to be an Arafat supporter.  Even in these difficult times, I can teach an individual how to effectively defend Arafat and the Palestinian Authority �- even if the entire charade is filled with specious nonsense and lies.

I have created ten tips on how to be an Arafat apologist.  They come with an easy to follow step-by-step guide.  All you have to do is fertilize your personal dedication to anti-Semitism and then simply allow yourself to become as delusional as humanly possible.

The video infomercial for these tips should be coming out next month on television stations across the United States.  Meanwhile, here is the basic outline for all those Jew-haters who have dedicated their lives to blaming Israel for every Arab terrorist act but thought that doing so was no longer possible:

Tip #1 � Imagine that the Palestinians are fighting for a homeland that was taken away from them by the evil Jews.

That�s right.  The foundation to becoming and remaining a faithful pro-Arafat enthusiast is to intoxicate yourself with the belief that the Palestinians actually once owned a homeland that was, in turn, stolen by the greedy and parasitic Jews.

While trying to convince yourself of this fantasy, ignore the historical fact that the Palestine Mandate was never a nation, let alone even a political entity of any kind.  It was a "mandate" that was created by the British from the remnants of the Turkish Empire after World War I.  10% of it was given to the Jews and 90% was given to the Palestinian Arabs.

The key here is that you should never worry about where 90% of Palestine actually is.  Just obsess with the miniscule tiny bit of land that the Israelis "occupy" now.  It�s not important that this land was never officially "owned" by anyone in the first place.

You should also never reflect on whether all of your rage and hatred on this issue is proportional to the fact that Israel consists of 1% of the land in the Middle East.

Just get really angry that Israel is on territory that you think should be given to the Palestinians.  And because you think this, then it automatically makes it right and historically correct.

You should never wonder how your moral indignation on this issue fits with your complete indifference to the fact that Jordan occupies 80% of the land that made up the original Palestine Mandate.  So if you really cared about the Palestinians, you would obviously be focusing your energy on protesting the crime being perpetrated by the Jordanians against the Palestinians.  But the key here is that, well, deep down, you don�t really care about the Palestinians -� and neither should you.  You must never admit this, but the Palestinians are only there for you to cynically exploit as pawns in your contributory effort to finish off what Adolph Hitler started.

That�s right.  You know what I�m talking about.  And even the Palestinians are in on this with you.  I mean, think about it: if the Palestinians themselves really cared about getting a homeland, don�t you think that they would be screaming about -- and fighting for -- the land that Jordan occupies?  Don�t you think it is somewhat curious that Jordan has never, even for a second, been the target of a Palestine liberation movement?

Don�t you think it is a little bit curious that, in 1948, the Palestinian Arabs rejected an international resolution that would have established a Palestinian state, and instead focused all of their energies on destroying the new Jewish state?

You�re starting to get the picture now, right?

So be a smart and clever Arafat apologist.  The overall objective of your life should be facilitating the killing of Jews and destroying the state of Israel.  The last thing you should be doing is worrying about the Palestinians.  At the same time, however, in terms of what you actually say in public, you must always discuss the Middle East "problem" on the assumption that you are agonizing over the Palestinians� plight and how their entire "homeland" somehow lies in tiny little Israel.

It is also a very good idea that you always refer to the myth of how the Jews "stole" the Palestinian "homeland" in passing, because then it makes its reality appear to be a given.  You can�t believe how effective this ploy can be, especially in the midst of people who know nothing about Middle East history.

So believe in yourself and just do it!

Tip #2 � Never question the cause of Palestinian terror.

Every time that a Palestinian blows himself up along with innocent Jewish civilians, including babies in carriages, you should shake your head in despair and say things like, "That poor Palestinian.  But he simply had no choice.  The Israelis have pushed his people beyond their means."

You should always say things like this with a tone that implies that the "Israeli occupation" is the most oppressive reality in the world.  Say things like, "The Israelis are doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to them."  Follow this up with sentences like, "The Jews have obviously forced the Palestinians into terrorism."

When you mouth these slogans, make sure to have a serious and sincere look on your face, otherwise the asininity of what you are saying might become more easily discernable.  Maintaining a sober facial expression can be made easier if you convince yourself that the wars of 1973 and 1967 are irrelevant to the subject at hand.

Before Israel was attacked in 1973, it occupied less of the land that is now in dispute, and before 1967, it occupied none of it.  In other words, the Arab terror that was unleashed against Israel in 1967 had nothing to do with the Israeli "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza Strip because the "occupation" did not exist.

From 1949-1967, Jordan had occupied the West Bank while Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip.  But instead of the Arabs using terror against Egypt and Jordan to get them off of the Palestinians� "land,", an Arab war of terror against Israel was launched in 1967.  Israel won that war and grabbed both the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a security measure.

So why is it, you think, that Jordan�s annexation of the West Bank and Egypt�s annexation of the Gaza Strip from 1949-67 didn�t trigger any emotions in the Palestinians who lived in those territories?  Why is it that not once, in all of those 18 years, was there even a sentence of indignation uttered by the Palestinians or by their "liberation" organization about the injustice done to the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip?  Why did other Arab states say nothing about it?

You know why.  And this means that the terror against Israel has always been, and still is, caused by something other than Israelis being on any kind of "territory."  I�ll give you six hints about what the real cause is connected to:

Hint #1: Hitler formulated the Final Solution because of it.

Hint #2: it has something to do with why Israel cannot be found on a map in Palestinian geography classes.  It�s also connected to why Palestinian textbooks teach Palestinian children that Jews are evil thieves who have taken Arab land and who must therefore be killed.  The textbooks also tell the kiddies that suicide bombing is what Allah loves most, since that noble and holy activity is the most effective way of murdering Jews and "liberating" Palestine.

Hint #3: it�s why the Palestinian Authority has published the Arabic translation of Mein Kampf, and why that tract has reached number six on its best-seller list.

Hint #4: It is connected to why, in 1960, when the Israelis captured Adolph Eichmann, the government-run Saudi Arabian newspaper ran a story headlined: "Arrest Of Eichmann, Who Had The Honor Of Killing Six Million Jews."

Hint #5: it has something to do with the great honor and respect that is bestowed in the Middle East upon anyone who succeeds in killing Jews.  For instance, if you blow yourself up along with some innocent Jewish mothers and babies, your picture will be plastered on posters throughout your hometown.  Your family will acquire a revered place in society and will also receive $25,000 in American currency from Saddam Hussein.  You, meanwhile, will get to fulfill all of your wildest and repressed sexual fantasies with 72 virgins in heaven.

Hint #6: the whole matter is related to why Hashemi Rafsanjani, the eminent representative of "Iranian moderation," has boasted that once the Muslim world gets a hold of nuclear weapons, which he assures will be very soon, the Jewish "question" will be solved forever.

Now that you know what the real cause of Palestinian terror is, make sure to always deny it.  Instead, consistently maintain to others that it is the result of Israelis being on "Palestinian territory."

Tip #3 � Ignore the words of Palestinians.

When you make your arguments for the Palestinian right to a homeland, always make sure to emphasize that the Palestinians acknowledge the right of Israel to exist.  To make sure this works effectively, never mention, or ever even think about, what the Palestinians actually say themselves.

For instance, never talk about the Palestinian Covenant of 1968, because it embodies the philosophical principles of the Palestinians themselves and says things that would shatter the foundation to all of your arguments.  For instance, Article 19 affirms that, "The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of Israel is fundamentally null and void, whatever time has elapsed, because it is contrary to the wish of the people of Palestine and its natural right to its homeland."

Article 15 states that, "The liberation of Palestine, from the Arab viewpoint, is a national duty to repulse the Zionist, Imperialist invasion from the great Arab homeland and to purge the Zionist presence from Palestine."

Also ignore Articles 20 and 22, because they reject even the historical and religious ties of Jews to the Holy Land itself.  And that is precisely why Palestinian children are yet to find the state of Israel on any maps in their geography classes.

You also shouldn�t worry that Arafat has never repudiated the Articles in the Palestinian Covenant of 1968.  This explains why, when speaking English to Western audiences, he always talks about how he acknowledges the right of Israel to exist.  But when he speaks Arabic to Arab audiences, he does little else but boast about his successes in working toward the Palestinians� most ambitious goal: to destroy the state of Israel.  One only has to briefly listen to the Arab media, mosque sermons, and classroom and cafe conversations to gauge that this disposition represents a wide consensus in Arab society in general and in Palestinian society in particular.

Thus, when you are trying to persuade someone about the good intentions of Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, and how they accept the existence of Israel, never mention what the Palestinians themselves talk about.  You should most definitely stay away from the subject of the 1968 Palestinian Covenant, because this could cause you problems.  If someone else brings it up, change topics immediately.

Tip #4 � Imagine that Palestinians were, and are better off without Israel and the Israeli "occupation."

You should be constantly angry about the suffering of Palestinians and be convinced that it is the fault of Israel.  Palestinian suffering should always be equated with Israeli responsibility.  These two notions must be inseparable in your mind.

Palestinian suffering is definitely not the fault of Arafat or of all the Arab states � even though they have done everything in their power to make sure that the Palestinians do not receive a homeland.

That�s right.  So try not to reflect too much on why the Palestinians of the West Bank are barred from becoming citizens in the Arab world.  When the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian administration, for instance, the Palestinians there were denied Egyptian citizenship and thereby remained stateless.  This is exactly why the Palestinians are known as "refugees."

The Arabs love their Palestinian brothers.  It�s just that, well, they love them from a distance.

In any case, you should try your hardest to convince yourself that the Palestinians� life under the Israeli "occupation" is the worst experience of any people under any regime in the history of the human race.  The first step to believing this notion is to ignore the fact that Palestinians are much worse off in occupied Lebanon, where they are denied basic rights to employment, healthcare and government services �- unlike the Palestinians in Israel and in the "occupied" territories.

You should also avoid the subject of how Kuwait ethnically cleansed all Palestinians (about 300,000 of them) just a decade ago, and how Jordanians slaughtered thousands of them after the 1967 war.

Try to imagine that all of this isn�t very relevant.  And neither is the fact that the world community never said too much about these Arab atrocities.  It�s okay when Muslim Arabs practice genocide against Palestinians.  It�s only wrong when the Israelis oppress Palestinians in the effort to defend themselves from terror.

You also shouldn�t stress yourself about the racism against Arabs that this whole double standard implies.  Indeed, by holding Jews up to a higher moral accountability than Arabs, the view that lets Arabs off the hook for oppressing their own brethren implies a civilizational inferiority to them -- and a civilizational superiority to Jews.  But don�t think through this too much.  You might get depressed after realizing that, deep down, just like a Leftist despises the "underclass" people for whom he purports to speak, so too you have smug contempt for the Arabs that you believe you represent in your self-alienated imagination.

The key, in general, is that you should just avoid the whole issue of how the Jews have treated the Palestinians much better than the Arabs have.

It is also a very good idea for you to ignore the fact that Israel has given birth to an Arab citizenry inside Israel of more than one million people.  This way you won�t have to wonder how it is that, as Israeli citizens, Arabs have more rights, privileges and opportunities than the citizens of any Arab state in the Middle East.  Unlike their Arab brothers and sisters, Arab citizens in Israel vote in free elections and are themselves elected to the Israeli parliament.  In other words, the only place where Arabs know democracy and a high standard of living is in a Jewish nation.

This is a hard pill to swallow for a person like you, who aspires to demonize Israel and to glorify the Arab world as the embodiment of true democracy and stupendous progress in world civilization.

So what you have to do is visualize images of how Israel is the most evil nation on the face of the earth and how Arabs and Palestinians have endured unspeakable suffering because of it.

Tip #5 � Imagine that Israel controls the "occupied" territories for some bizarre, vague and sinister reason.

That�s right: imagine that Israel controls the "occupied" territories because Jews have nothing better to do than to inflict pain.  They think it�s in their interest to trigger terrorism against themselves, as well as to ignite the hatred of a large portion of the world�s population.

With great moral indignation, you should say things like, "the Israelis need to get out of the occupied territories."  Say this as if it is a really easy, simple and safe thing for the Israelis to do.

Never consider that the Israeli "occupation" of the territories in question might actually not be the greatest crime in world history.  It might also not deserve immediate rectification.  Sometimes land is confiscated when aggressive and terrorist states repeatedly attack their neighbors -- and lose.

But this should not be your concern.

What should be your concern is to say things that make Israel look as if it controls areas like the West Bank because Israelis need to fill the void of no longer being allowed to sacrifice and eat gentile babies in their religious rituals.

Tip #6 � Say that Arafat isn�t a terrorist.

You should always say things like: "One man�s terrorist is another man�s freedom-fighter."  After that, say things like, "Arafat is a freedom-fighter."

You must always ignore that Arafat has provided sanctuary and support to Palestinian suicide bombers and terrorists of all stripes.  Be very open-minded about how he has personally endorsed suicide bombings rhetorically and celebrated the cult of "martyrdom" and other forms of homicide.

And always make sure to announce things like, "Arafat has imprisoned militants."  When you say this, don�t worry that the Palestinian "jails" that Arafat places "militants" in are notorious for their bars in the front and revolving doors at the back.  Just tell people that Arafat is really trying to get terrorism under control.

Don�t lose any sleep over the fact that explosives of the specific type used by Palestinian suicide bombers have been found in Palestinian police stations all over the "occupied" territories.  Also don�t concern yourself with the fact that 500 Palestinians were just recently arrested in and around Arafat's compound and that dozens of them were on Israel's lists of most-wanted terrorists.  Arafat was obviously still trying his best to track these people down.  The reason he couldn�t find them was that they were cleverly hiding in his office while he was desperately patrolling the West Bank looking for them.

And by all means, deny to others, as well as to yourself, that connections between the Palestinian Authority and international Islamic terror organizations, including al-Qaeda, have now been established beyond any reasonable doubt.  If you accept this reality, then your whole belief system will come crashing down.

Just look really sure of yourself and say things like, "Arafat isn�t a terrorist.  He is a freedom fighter."

Tip #7 � Imagine that Arafat has the interests of his own people in mind.

This is the key to being an effective apologist for Arafat.  You must always tell people that your hero truly cares about his own people �- even though the history of his every move negates the possibility of this being the case.

A person that truly wanted the best for the Palestinian people would have embraced an offer that accepted 95% of the Palestinians� negotiating demands and would have given the Palestinians their own sovereign state in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, more than 90 percent of the West Bank, and a capital in Jerusalem.  That�s what Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat in 2000.  But Arafat rejected the proposal, demanding, instead, the flooding of Israel with millions of Palestinians.  He knew, as Israelis did, that such a development would destroy Israel as a Jewish state.

Arafat shrewdly understood that Israel could not, and would not, engage in self-destruction and this is how he succeeded in his main objective: to avoid the creation of a new Arab state and to annihilate the only Jewish one.  That�s what the "Palestinian uprising," after all, is really all about.

It is obvious, therefore, why Arafat has consistently stifled all Israeli efforts to improve the prosperity of the Palestinian people.  He wants his people to bleed in misery and destitution.  That way their suffering can be exploited in the Arabs� suicide wars against Israel.

Now the key for you, therefore, is to deny the obvious.

You know that the "Palestinian problem" is far more useful to Arafat than its solution will ever be.  Arafat knows that peace with Jews is his own political suicide at best �- and his own death warrant at worst.

What you have to do is look people in the eyes as honestly as you can and say things like, "Arafat is really trying to help his people."  Say this as if you yourself have been talking to Arafat and that he tells you things that he wouldn�t confide in most people.

Tip #8 � Say that Arab terrorism has nothing to do with jealousy.

It is absolutely crucial that you consistently tell anyone you talk to that Israel is vehemently hated by the Arabs because of something that Israel has done to the Arabs.

Never consider what the Arabs of the Middle East would do with all of their time if there were no Israel.

Never suspect that Middle Eastern Arabs spend such an inordinate amount of their daily life hating a nation that takes up 1% of land in the Middle East because they might have a little problem with envy and jealousy.

It might not be the easiest thing for Arabs to reconcile themselves with the reality that their culture has yet to produce one prosperous, functional and democratic society.  Yet they see that the Jews have accomplished exactly that � in a tiny piece of land that was a desert fifty years ago.  Indeed, the Jews have built the most powerful economy and the only industrial and democratic nation in the entire Middle East.

This is a very painful truth for Middle Eastern Arabs to accept.  So as an Arafat apologist, your job is to completely ignore this phenomenon.  You must fantasize that when Arabs jump up and down with ferocious rage for hours on end every day screaming "Death to Israel," that the solution to their rage is definitely not to get a job, let alone a life of any kind.  The solution lies in the Jews smartening up and stopping being so evil.  If they did that, then obviously Arabs would find better things to do then spend ten hours a day, seven days a week, hollering at the top of their lungs and foaming at their mouths in the middle of the barren deserts that they have lived in for centuries.

You see: Arabs don�t fail in making progress because of any serious pathology in their personal lives and culture.  No, they mope around in long robes and headscarves in medieval societies because of what the Jews are doing to the Palestinians.  And yes, ok, these same Arabs never lifted a finger or mouthed a word of protest when the Palestinians received much harsher treatment from Arabs.  But don�t think this through.  Actually, if anyone ever points this out to you, just say that the Arabs did protest the persecution of the Palestinians by other Arabs but that the Western press just didn�t report it.

Tip #9 � Say it�s in Israel�s interest to pursue "peace".

You should constantly say that it is in Israel�s interest to pursue "peace," even though all of the evidence suggests the exact opposite.  More Israelis have died from terrorism since the signing of Oslo in 1993 than in the four decades before it.  There have been more than 80 suicide bombings against Israel since the "peace process" began.  Before Oslo, suicide bombings were almost non-existent.  Each new atrocity against Israelis since 1993, meanwhile, has been hailed by the Palestinian media and the Palestinian Authority that controls it.

You should ignore facts such as these and make it a daily habit to say things like, "The Israelis should really try to make peace with Arafat.  It�s in their interest."

Tip #10 � Shed yourself of any integrity you might have ever had.

In order for you to practice the previous nine tips successfully, you need to make sure that you rid yourself of any personal dignity or integrity that might ever have been a part of your character and personality.  You have to be absolutely shameless and live by absolutely no ethical or moral standard of any kind.  Otherwise you will not be able to lie to others, and to yourself, the way I instruct you to.  Arafat supporters have done it effectively before you.  But now you can do it the best.  Be the best liar you can be.  That way, you might yet become the best Arafat apologist on earth.  You can do it!

Jamie Glazov holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He is the author of 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist and of Canadian Policy Toward Khruschev�s Soviet Union ( McGill-Queens University Press, 2002). Born in the U.S.S.R., Jamie is the son of prominent Soviet dissidents, and now resides in Vancouver, Canada. He writes the Dr. Progressive advice column for angst-ridden leftists at EnterStageRight.com.  Email him at jglazov at rogers.com.


Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - online filing with TurboTax --0-567383480-1018603657=:54661-- From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: To the north, Damascus in Syria and Beirut in Lebanon are both only about 150 miles away and could be struck by near-supersonic Israeli jets less than 10 minutes after they cross northern Israel�s border. The Suez Canal is only about 200 miles from Jerusalem and far less distance from Israeli airfields. Cairo is about 250 miles from Jerusalem. But the real doomsday target in Egypt is the Aswan High Dam only 550 miles from King David�s city. If blown open with nuclear weapons, it would release the immense reservoir of Lake Nasser and unleash a flood of biblical proportions that would destroy almost everything and everyone in Cairo and all along Egypt�s Nile Valley. Tripoli on the far side of madman Col. Muammar al-Qadhafi�s Libya is 1,300 miles from Jerusalem. But the Israeli Air Force has already demonstrated its ability, as Aharon Lapidot puts it, to "strike silent, strike far" by rescuing hostages in Entebbe, Uganda, and by hitting PLO headquarters in Tunisia, just over 1,500 miles west of Jerusalem on the North African coastline beyond the shores of Tripoli. Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein rules Iraq deluded by his belief that he is the Nebuchadnezzar of a new Assyrian Empire, is less than 600 miles from Jerusalem. In 1981 Israeli aircraft preemptively destroyed the Osirak reactor being built near Baghdad, thereby keeping nuclear weapons out of this madman�s hands. Israelis could easily strike Baghdad again, this time with nuclear weapons of their own. Even distant Tehran and the Ayatollahs of Iran sit less than 1,000 miles from Jerusalem, scarcely more than the distance from Los Angeles to Denver. Jericho-2 missiles could be goosed to get there within minutes, and at full throttle Israeli jets could have mushroom clouds sprouting above Tehran in little more than an hour�.or maybe less. Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, is about 850 miles from Jerusalem and could be destroyed before its princes got into their holes, if Israel so desired. All Persian Gulf oilfields could also be sent to heaven in glowing smoke and radioactive flame, thereby turning whatever Arabs survived back into the Bedouin goatherds they had been before oil was discovered or needed by a modern world. But the ultimate doomsday target, of course, would be Mecca � the mystical center of Islam towards which devout Muslims bow in prayer five times each day. Come doomsday, as a last gesture Israel could vaporize the Black Stone, the Kaaba, the burial place of the Prophet Mohammed and all of Mecca. Thereafter Muslims could bow daily towards a place resembling Arizona�s Meteor Crater. The moral of this story: ultimately the Palestinians can never win everything they want. They need to compromise and make peace. Even if they could destroy Israel, to do so would destroy them, too, as well as the surrounding Islamic nations that support them. But Israel also needs to recognize that, sooner or later, Muslim nations will acquire their own weapons of mass destruction. Unless a way to peace can be found, one morning 20 or 30 years from now Israelis will awaken to 50,000 nuclear cruise missiles saturating their defenses and eradicating the Jewish State. What looked like stalemate will within minutes of retaliation then turn into mutual checkmate, mutual assured destruction. As the saying goes: an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Mr. Ponte hosts a national radio talk show Saturdays 6-9 PM Eastern Time (3-6 PM Pacific Time) that can be heard on 213 station and via TalkAmerica.com. The show�s live call-in number is (888) 822-8255. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader�s Digest. Click here to send him a message. --------------------------------- Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - online filing with TurboTax --0-1419986499-1018603745=:93321 Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
 
The Other "Suicide Bombers"
By: Lowell Ponte
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 12, 2002

IN CHESS, THE BEST PLAYERS ARE ABLE to think ahead, recognizing the consequences that their next move could have 10, 20 or 30 moves later. Both sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict urgently need to consult with the geopolitical equivalent of such chess grandmasters.

The apparent goal of Palestinian extremists, for example, is to push Israel into the sea and take back 100 percent of its land. We can infer this because Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat 95 percent of everything the Palestinian leader demanded, but an uncompromising Arafat rejected this and re-ignited Intifada violence against the Jewish state.

What are the chances of Palestinians and the Arab nations winning by such violent tactics and all-or-nothing strategy? Zero, a chess master ought to tell them, and here is why.

If pushed to the sea�s edge, millions of Israelis would indeed flee to nations such as the United States wise enough to welcome those with their talents and intelligence.

But millions of Israelis would remain, and in a last-ditch stand they would fight to the death. This happened almost 2,000 years ago atop Masada, the Dead Sea mountaintop fortress where Jews took their own lives (technically not by suicide, but killed by a few who by lot had been picked to carry this sin) rather than surrender to Roman soldiers.

Today Israeli paratroopers and other soldiers go to this fortress and take an oath: "Masada shall not fall again." Psychologists describe the determination never to surrender of many Israelis as the "Masada Complex."

These remaining Jews, if pushed to the brink of annihilation, could and perhaps would take steps that would make today�s Palestinian "suicide bombers" look trivial by comparison.

If Israel loses, neither the Palestinians nor any unfriendly nation within 2,000 miles would "win." Israel could take them all down with it. Israel could turn the entire Middle East into a smoking, radioactive hole in the ground. Israel could blast fertility out of the Fertile Crescent and leave the barren region clicking hot for hundreds of years. This might not be Biblical Armageddon, but it would be a reasonable facsimile.

At its Dimona 150-Megawatt heavy-water nuclear reactor, Israel for more than three decades has been creating and reprocessing Plutonium. Israel on July 13, 1998, acknowledged that it has "built a nuclear option not in order to have a Hiroshima but an Oslo [Peace Accord]."

Most defense analysts estimate the number of Israeli nuclear weapons at up to 200, and one calculates that the Jewish State might possess up to 400 such weapons. Israel might also have manufactured a small number of H-bombs, thermonuclear explosives.

Israel has many delivery systems for these nuclear weapons. To mention only a few: 50 or so home-made Jericho-2 missiles reportedly can deliver a 2,200 pound payload to targets at least 900 miles away. Israel has been developing a Jericho-3 missile using space rocket Shavit technologies that can strike 2,900 miles away with the same 2,200 pound nuclear payload.

Israel already, according to MSNBC, possesses "25 nuclear capable F-15Es [and] about 80 older F-4 Phantoms." To understand what this means, an F-15E or Israel�s variant F-15I has a ferry range of up to 3,450 miles without refueling and can carry a payload weighing 23,000 pounds. The aging F-4E (not to mention Israel�s F-4/2000s) has a ferry range of about 1,550 miles and can carry a 16,000-pound payload.

Combat capability calculations are not based on the ferry range of aircraft, which replaces some weapon payload with extra fuel tanks. We instead assume that pilots fly out to a target and need fuel to return. But Israeli Kamikazis flying a one-way doomsday mission can expend all their fuel to reach a target. They could reach targets 80-90 percent of ferry range away with a compact nuclear weapon. Israel also can use FAST packs and other techniques to boost potential range, speed or payload.

In such a doomsday scenario, in fact, almost any of Israel�s hundreds and hundreds of aircraft could be used to deliver nuclear weapons if pilots were willing to become martyrs for their Jewish faith or nation.

Americans come from a big country. Those who have never visited the Middle East usually fail to understand its smaller scale. To envision the above doomsday scenario, consider some distances.

From the hills of Jerusalem at night, you see the skyglow from nearby Amman, Jordan.

To the north, Damascus in Syria and Beirut in Lebanon are both only about 150 miles away and could be struck by near-supersonic Israeli jets less than 10 minutes after they cross northern Israel�s border.

The Suez Canal is only about 200 miles from Jerusalem and far less distance from Israeli airfields. Cairo is about 250 miles from Jerusalem. But the real doomsday target in Egypt is the Aswan High Dam only 550 miles from King David�s city. If blown open with nuclear weapons, it would release the immense reservoir of Lake Nasser and unleash a flood of biblical proportions that would destroy almost everything and everyone in Cairo and all along Egypt�s Nile Valley.

Tripoli on the far side of madman Col. Muammar al-Qadhafi�s Libya is 1,300 miles from Jerusalem. But the Israeli Air Force has already demonstrated its ability, as Aharon Lapidot puts it, to "strike silent, strike far" by rescuing hostages in Entebbe, Uganda, and by hitting PLO headquarters in Tunisia, just over 1,500 miles west of Jerusalem on the North African coastline beyond the shores of Tripoli.

Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein rules Iraq deluded by his belief that he is the Nebuchadnezzar of a new Assyrian Empire, is less than 600 miles from Jerusalem. In 1981 Israeli aircraft preemptively destroyed the Osirak reactor being built near Baghdad, thereby keeping nuclear weapons out of this madman�s hands. Israelis could easily strike Baghdad again, this time with nuclear weapons of their own.

Even distant Tehran and the Ayatollahs of Iran sit less than 1,000 miles from Jerusalem, scarcely more than the distance from Los Angeles to Denver. Jericho-2 missiles could be goosed to get there within minutes, and at full throttle Israeli jets could have mushroom clouds sprouting above Tehran in little more than an hour�.or maybe less.

Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, is about 850 miles from Jerusalem and could be destroyed before its princes got into their holes, if Israel so desired. All Persian Gulf oilfields could also be sent to heaven in glowing smoke and radioactive flame, thereby turning whatever Arabs survived back into the Bedouin goatherds they had been before oil was discovered or needed by a modern world.

But the ultimate doomsday target, of course, would be Mecca � the mystical center of Islam towards which devout Muslims bow in prayer five times each day. Come doomsday, as a last gesture Israel could vaporize the Black Stone, the Kaaba, the burial place of the Prophet Mohammed and all of Mecca. Thereafter Muslims could bow daily towards a place resembling Arizona�s Meteor Crater.

The moral of this story: ultimately the Palestinians can never win everything they want. They need to compromise and make peace. Even if they could destroy Israel, to do so would destroy them, too, as well as the surrounding Islamic nations that support them.

But Israel also needs to recognize that, sooner or later, Muslim nations will acquire their own weapons of mass destruction. Unless a way to peace can be found, one morning 20 or 30 years from now Israelis will awaken to 50,000 nuclear cruise missiles saturating their defenses and eradicating the Jewish State. What looked like stalemate will within minutes of retaliation then turn into mutual checkmate, mutual assured destruction. As the saying goes: an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

Mr. Ponte hosts a national radio talk show Saturdays 6-9 PM Eastern Time (3-6 PM Pacific Time) that can be heard on 213 station and via TalkAmerica.com. The show�s live call-in number is (888) 822-8255. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader�s Digest. Click here to send him a message.


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Yahoo! Tax Center - online filing with TurboTax --0-1419986499-1018603745=:93321-- From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: short story 'Letter from the Year 1920'. For that story does indeed = speak about the 'clock rhythms' of Bosnia's religious communities, and = its title also includes the year which so enthused Mr Glotz. The story = was not written in 1920, but shortly after World War II - in 1947, if I = remember correctly. This is the beginning of the Second Yugoslavia, a = time in which politics (but also common sense, for Heaven's sake) = demanded not just of literature, but of all human activities, that they = should articulate the fatal danger of glorifying differences or reducing = all relations between the Yugoslav peoples to a mere sum of differences: = a time when the foundations of a new unity were being laid. (The nature = of that unity - and how unfortunate it was that the unity was not of a = different kind - is a theme for another occasion.) 1920 was the first = year of the First Yugoslavia. Knowledge of the basic facts of Andric's = biography and the basic elements of his literary technique would have = sufficed for an intelligent reader to realise why Andric placed this = year in the title of his story. As any such reader would have = understood, it was a covert polemic against the new regime's conviction = that it represented a point of rupture; that with it had begun a = qualitatively new era; that it had made possible the leap from zero to = one - i.e. from non-existence to existence. I cannot, unfortunately, = explain here all the implications of the fact that the story 'Letter = from the Year 1920' was written immediately after World War II. I = mention this fact only to illustrate yet again how well informed Mr = Glotz is; how capable he is of reading and of understanding what he = reads. He sees a year in the title, and assumes that the text was = written in that year. He reads the word 'Letter' in the title, and = assumes that the text is indeed a letter. He reads the sentence: 'That = difference is always akin to hatred', and assumes that this is lived = experience and the author's final judgement.=20 Peter Glotz has the right to be ill educated, but as a career politician = he does not have the right to be ill informed. He ought to know to what = genre the text he quotes belongs; he ought to know that Knin does not = have 800,000 inhabitants; he ought to know that Slovenes have a separate = language. It would be desirable, though not obligatory, for him to know = what I shall now explain to him, without any ironical intention. = So-called fabulative literary forms contain also text spoken by their = characters. In order to be able to understand fully these textual = passages, and the work as a whole, we must take into account which = character, at which moment, and for which purpose, is speaking what we = are reading. When I say 'which character', I am thinking of his fate in = the text, his personality, his momentary situation, his relationship to = the character he is addressing, etc. (in other words, all that the = concept of character implies). In texts of this kind, statements never = refer directly to reality outside the work. So it would be wrong to = conclude that Goethe was a necrophiliac, though his character in the = drama Faust did show certain predilections for the deceased Helen. All = this, and much more, has been explained by a man (now unfortunately = dead) called Aristotle: you can find out about all these confusing = matters from his work 'The Art of Poetry'.=20 This short lesson means that the statements in 'the letter' allegedly = 'quoted' from the story 'A Letter from the Year 1920' cannot be ascribed = to Andric. They can be understood only if it is also understood that = they were 'written' by a character (of what kind? with what fate? at = what moment?), on the basis of experience acquired at a time 'prior to = the establishment of unity'; and that he is addressing them, in a = certain psychological situation (of what kind?), to somebody (to whom?). = A story cannot be quoted as a source of political information -even high = political functionaries should know this much. Bertrand Russell once = suggested that schools should teach how to read newspapers with = suspicion. After the experience I have acquired during my year of exile = of how literature is read, I would suggest an even stranger subject that = would be called Basic Theories of Literature.=20 Or are we, in fact, dealing with something quite different? It is = possible that even Peter Glotz would be bewildered if I were to make = judgements about the Thirty Years' War on the basis of Kleist's Michael = Kohlhaas (even though the story's subtitle says it is 'From an Old = Chronicle'). But that is quite another matter, of course: do I have the = right to behave like Peter Glotz?! (Thank the Lord, to be frank, that I = do not have that right.) And just where do I get the crazy idea from, = that somebody so powerful has to be correct towards Bosnia and even = accept that literature is written there which has to be read as = literature? Or are we not dealing with something completely different: = i.e. with a type of thought in which we are imprisoned, and which is = precisely our experience of the world and ourselves in that world = (rather than just a mere technology of cerebral labour)?=20 I think this is indeed what we are dealing with: a type of thought that = determines us as closely and inescapably as our own skin. I do not = believe that Enzensberger would willingly laugh at his own verses, nor = do I believe that Peter Glotz would willingly make people who are able = to think logically laugh at his expertise. I do not believe that they = refuse to know anything about what they teach to humanity. I believe = that they fail to know it - because they are prevented by a model of = thought that determines their very ability to know.=20 I believe that the basic principles of this type of thought are revealed = very clearly in the examples I have given above, demonstrating what kind = of thought we are dealing with. Those basic principles are: 1. what I do = not understand does not exist; 2. the Other is not actually real, the = Other is my notion of him; 3. everything which is not I - which I have = not adopted and made part of my image of the world - is, and can be, = only an object; 4. naked mechanistic power is the sole criterion of = truth, goodness and beauty. These principles and this type of thought we = know very well from the European tradition. They created the foundations = and alibis for Europe's colonial conquests, articulating the truth that = the English had to conquer India in order to civilise it, and that North = American Indians and Australian Aborigines were thrilled to bits = (literally to bits) by similar civilising missions. They have created a = spiritual ambience in which it is normal to produce nuclear weapons, and = to conduct the most morbid genetic experiments as innocently as if = selling Christmas cards. In other words, they have expunged ethics and = metaphysics as irrelevant, since God and ethics stubbornly refuse to be = mechanical phenomena. They have articulated the concept of ethical = neutrality, ascribing it first to the exact sciences and then to all = other human activities.=20 I do not, of course, think that Messrs Enzensberger and Glotz are = responsible for all that I have described here, nor have I described it = on their account. But, demonstrating precisely this type of thought, = they spoke about something which constitutes my fate, so concerns me = deeply. Bewildered, worried and dismayed I tried to understand what was = going on, because I had believed that multiculturalism, openness and = polyphony had freed Europe from vulgar-mechanical thought. I really did = think that, in the new Europe, only a minority believed they possessed = more truth, goodness and beauty because they had more money and weapons; = and that because they have more money and weapons they can decide about = life and death. Believing that Europe had articulated the concept of a = unity higher than the mechanical one, I asked myself if I were mad = because I remembered my life the way I had lived it, and thought about = my home in the way I did. This is why I felt the need, indeed the = necessity, to question myself about what others were explaining to me = about me. Messrs Enzensberger and Glotz were not accidentally chosen - = they are very characteristic. They are, in fact, part of the = Establishment, as are so many of those who try to tell me how I lived. = Karl May was an outsider, just as many of those who treat me as a real = person are. Was Karl May able to talk about us Indians with so much = affection and understanding precisely because he was an outsider, or did = he remain an outsider because he loved and understood us Indians?=20 ------=_NextPart_000_0011_01C1EDEC.38EB6420 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Friends,
Apropos the earlier discussion on = Karahasan, and=20 the situation in Bosnia, I'd like to share the following article with = the list.=20
 
Rehan might be intrigued to know that = many viewers=20 of 'Hey Ram' left at the interval, an unusual case of audience control = over the=20 reception of a film.
 
I'm not sure which RSS shakhas Shuddha = is referring=20 to. The tokenist appropriation of the "Mahatma" never fooled anyone, = least of=20 all intelligent Marxists  seeking to understand the fascination = with=20 fascism amongst the middle classes, whose rejection and fear of their = own past=20 rarely permitted an investigation of the seductive power of fascist=20 rhetoric/imagery, until recently. There is still a minor Mein Kampf cult = to be=20 found in the university, for example. And the Hindu right has always = blamed=20 Gandhi for the xyz crores that were transferred to Pakistan, (essential = given=20 the absence of an adequate infrastructure) in the face of = opposition from=20 both Hindu nationalists and the bania lobby within the Congress. = That's why=20 he was killed, and the same logic is being invoked today (the finishing = of the=20 Partition agenda of the Hindu right) to justify the eviction of Muslims = from=20 properties in Gujarat, and the destruction of Sufi dargahs across the = state.=20 There are many flaws within Gandhian thought and idealism, but let's get = the=20 facts straight before leaping to preordained conclusions. 'Hindus aur = Musalman=20 mein samas hona chahiye', wrote G. , attempting = to create the=20 space for a generative grammar of intercommunity relations . Today his = followers=20 are being threatened by the mobs in his own state, an impossibility if = there was=20 such an ideological convergence as Farzana tries to establish. Mallika = Sarabhai=20 has already left, along with many Muslim families, and the=20 Sarvodayites/Gandhians are under siege as never before-- cf. the = Sabarmati=20 showdown, the fascist intolerance of resistance to the NBA. This has = little to=20 do with religious differences, really; it's an expression of a modern = form of=20 violence internalised by the self and projected onto the other, = combined=20 with a profound cultural erasure. Unfortunately, some dimwitted leftists = seem to=20 suffer from the same syndrome. No wonder Kamal Hasan was practically = hustled out=20 of the Nehru Museum Library!
 
Such a shock to learn of Nishit Saran's = death. I'm=20 sure the list shares the grief and sorrow of his friends and family-- we = join=20 Monica in conveying our condolences to them.
 
Rgds,
Tarun
 

Europe's Wild East

or what Europe's failure to understand Bosnia says about Europe

Dzevad Karahasan

When I was small, my mother often went to = hospital=20 leaving me in the care of our neighbour Marica, who I should make clear = - given=20 the times in which we live - is a Catholic and Croat. Marica would = always fetch=20 from our house the cooking pots in which to cook for me, and literally = every=20 time she would explain to me that I could not eat with her children, = because=20 they ate pork. 'That's a sin for your people, and if I were to let you = eat it in=20 my house the sin would fall on my soul', she would say. I believe I got = the=20 information about not eating pork from my mother, but I am quite certain = it is=20 to Marica that I owe my acceptance of that information with feeling and=20 experience, something that is deeper and stronger than rational = knowledge.=20

My father was a Communist, so we used to celebrate religious holidays = almost=20 in secret - we celebrated them while pretending not to. The celebration = was=20 reduced to two quite recognisable elements: cake-baking and a visit from = our=20 family friend Brother Klemo, Guardian of the Monastery at Duvno. If = mother had=20 made a pile of cakes and Brother Klemo came to visit - it was Bajram. If = only=20 one of these things happened, then it was some festive occasion but = definitely=20 not Bajram. The way you could tell that the holiday was being = celebrated,=20 unseemly though it may be, was the combination of cakes with Brother = Klemo's=20 visit.=20

Brother Klemo and other Catholic friends who visited us at Bajram = would=20 pretend that they had simply dropped in, father too would pretend that = our=20 friends had come by quite accidentally, while mother would not pretend = but would=20 bring out the cakes. I did not pretend either but looked forward to = these visits=20 - each new visit meant new cakes also for me. Something similar would = happen=20 during Catholic holidays: we would visit friends, father would pretend = we had=20 just dropped in, while mother would openly offer best wishes and I would = openly=20 eat whatever was offered.=20

I spent 22 years in Sarajevo and came to know quite well not only its = daily=20 life, but also what I would term its 'local mythology': i.e. the = combination of=20 untested beliefs firmly held by all who feel themselves to be the city's = true=20 inhabitants. The key components of this local mythology were: the little = Orthodox church in Bascarsija has one of the world's richest museums of = Orthodox=20 art; the Bey's mosque has one of the world's richest collections of = carpets; the=20 church of St Anthony on Bistrik is so large and beautiful because our=20 Franciscans managed to carry the day against the Austro- Hungarian = authorities,=20 who were none too fond of Franciscans. Each of these places, of course, = was=20 linked with countless legendary or true anecdotes, of the kind which = make up any=20 local mythology in a city dear to its inhabitants. It is important = nowdays to=20 stress that these stories from the local mythology were told - and pride = in the=20 holy places was shared - equally by people of all confessions. Muslims,=20 Catholics and Jews took as much pride as the Orthodox did in the = Orthodox=20 church's fantastic collection, just as the church of St Anthony simply = belonged=20 to us all.=20

Almost all the Bajrams I celebrated in Sarajevo I celebrated with = Mile Baric=20 and Ivan Bubalo, professors at the city's Faculty of Franciscan = Theology. To=20 Enes Karic, professor at the Faculty of Islamic Theology, I was = introduced by=20 our common friend Rada Ivekovic from Zagreb, whom I would describe as by = confession a writer and intellectual. Other professors from the Faculty = of=20 Islamic Theology I met at the Faculty of Franciscan Theology, while = celebrating=20 Catholic religious holidays.=20

That is how things were until recently - until 1990. Then the people = in=20 Belgrade discovered that Serbs were endangered everywhere in the world,=20 especially in Bosnia, and 'intellectual missions' made their appearance, = bent on=20 'saving endangered Serbdom' by separating the Orthodox segment from = other=20 segments of daily life. Without much success, to tell the truth, since = the local=20 mythologies adopted during centuries of common life simply proved = stronger than=20 the new ideologies. That is why the new ideologues decided to continue = politics=20 by other means: in April 1992 military attacks on Bosnia began, = conducted by the=20 Yugoslav People's Army, which re-invented itself as the 'Army of = Yugoslavia' or=20 'Serb Army' or whatever its name is now.=20

I spent one year of the war in Sarajevo in a building in which lived: = 11=20 Bosniaks (Moslem faith), 7 Serbs (Orthodox faith), 5 Croats (Catholic = faith),=20 and two people born in so-called mixed marriages so that it is difficult = to=20 define their religion in 'pure categories'. We spent that year running = to the=20 cellar together, sharing water and food, giving to and stealing from = each other,=20 quarrelling about our place in the queue when collecting rainwater at = the=20 downpipe from a gutter. We also spent that year convincing each other = that we=20 were bound to win, since there were too many of us to disappear without = a trace.=20

After a year of such life I left Sarajevo and Bosnia, because I felt = useless.=20 The final-year students got their degrees, but I found it impossible to = organise=20 lectures for the rest. The hospital where I was helping got itself so = well=20 organised that every attempt to help on my part proved useless. I became = just=20 one hunger extra, one fear extra, and one water- drinker extra, in a = city in=20 which there was a surfeit of hunger and fear, but a deficit of water. So = I went=20 away, first to Austria, then to Germany, then further on to the free and = fortunate world of Western Europe.=20

I arrived in the free and fortunate world and began to feel = bewildered, so=20 that now, after spending a year in that world, I have come seriously to = ask=20 myself and others whether I really existed; whether I really experienced = what I=20 remember; whether I am a wicked liar and mystifier falsifying my forty = years of=20 life, or perhaps a pitiful patient who believes he remembers something = that=20 naturally did not happen, because it could not have happened. I have = learned=20 that we in Bosnia were victims not of a crazed chauvinism - which = managed to=20 find a use for a huge decapitated army, when this was in search of a = state and a=20 leader willing to employ it - but of our own nature. I have learned that = the=20 Bosnia in which I reached (optimistically speaking) my middle age does = not exist=20 and never did. I have learned much that has bewildered me and led me to = ask=20 painful questions about myself. This is because I have learned these new = and=20 bewildering things from people who rightly think of themselves as being = somebody=20 in contemporary European thought; and if you come from the Balkans - and = from=20 poor Bosnia, at that - then you care about European thought, especially = the=20 current which gives expression to so-called contemporary Europe.=20

The reflections on my fate (since it is my own fate too that is at = stake: I=20 am no ideologue and cannot raise myself above the individual's fate, = especially=20 when it is my own) which so painfully troubled me are undoubtedly an = important=20 contribution to contemporary European thought, not only because of the = influence=20 which this kind of thinking has on so-called public opinion, but also = because of=20 its ability to articulate clearly and simply certain concepts, ideas and = images=20 and offer them as the self-consciousness of a period and culture. This = is why I=20 have the need and obligation to reflect a little, in the company of = witnesses,=20 on certain characteristic statements in which this type of thinking is = almost=20 paradigmatically expressed. Not, in other words, just because these = statements=20 about my personal experience run directly contrary to my own, but above = all=20 because I consider the authors of these statements to be important = people, and=20 because I consider the type of thinking manifested in their statements = very=20 significant for what calls itself contemporary European thought.=20

The well-known German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, for example, = believes=20 that what is happening in Yugoslavia is a civil war among wild tribes. = Now=20 Enzensberger has inherited, through no merit of his own, a magnificent = culture;=20 he has also inherited, through no fault of his own, National- Socialist=20 barbarism. Since the heir inherits both the real wealth and the bad = debts,=20 Enzensberger, in order to be able to inherit with full legality Hoffmann = and=20 Kleist, Goethe and Schiller, must accept within the terms of his = inheritance=20 also Himmler. When I say inheritance I mean knowledge, understanding, = mastery -=20 i.e. cultural tradition in all possible senses. As a serious poet and a = serious=20 intellectual, Enzensberger inherits only what is legally his.=20

How then, in view of all this, is it possible for him not to = recognise what=20 has been happening in Yugoslavia since 1988, i.e. since the time when = the regime=20 still in power in Serbia clearly formulated its fundamental positions? = The basic=20 fund of information (newspaper reports, at least) was sufficient for a=20 knowledgeable person to recognise everything and understand it. = Paraphrasing one=20 of Enzensberger's own poems, I can perfectly describe and define what = has been=20 happening in the Balkans since 1988: namely, that was when everybody = began to=20 speak Cyrillic. Yes, the Cyrillic script in post-1988 Serbia was = precisely what=20 the Gothic script was in the Reich, at the time which Enzensberger = describes as=20 the time when people spoke Gothic.=20

It was long ago, of course, when Enzensberger wrote that poem, very = long ago,=20 yet - how is it possible that he fails to recognise in reality his own = verses?=20 Or is it reality that is the problem? What I have squandered so many of = my years=20 upon - is that reality for the German poet?=20

The time when everybody spoke Cyrillic began with the public = proclamation of=20 a programme basically reducible to three tenets: 1. all Serbs must live = in the=20 same state; 2. Serbia is wherever there are Serbs; 3. Serbia has the = right to=20 use all means, including military force, to defend the interests of = Serbs=20 wherever they are endangered, and it is the Serbian government that = decides=20 where this is the case. This programme, i.e. the right to a political = programme=20 of such a kind, is based on the idea that the Serbs are a heavenly = people - a=20 view which, although not formally adopted by the government, is = constantly=20 present in all public media and can be heard expressed at mass meetings = by even=20 the highest government representatives.=20

Does this remind you of anything? The heavens are high, are they not? = So a=20 heavenly people, if only in a technical sense, must have something to do = with a=20 higher race. In order to earn the right to read Meister Eckhart, = Enzensberger=20 must certainly have read the almost identical programme of the state in = which=20 long ago Gothic was spoken. And yet he believes that Serbia, under the=20 government which proclaimed this programme, is waging exclusively civil = wars!=20 Does he believe that the military conflicts in Czechoslovakia in the = 1930s, when=20 the people who spoke Gothic were defending the interests of their = conationals,=20 must have been a civil war - one of those civil wars to which the = inhabitants of=20 Czechoslovakia were extraordinarily prone?=20

With regard to what is happening in Bosnia, I think first of all of = certain=20 characteristic fates, since I have actually experienced the whole of = this=20 tragedy through a few characteristic fates. The fate, say, of the two = old people=20 from the neighbouring building whose son Jasmin was torn apart by a = grenade in=20 our yard in July 1992, and whose daughter was imprisoned from the start = of the=20 war in a Serb concentration camp for the insemination of women. The fate = of=20 little Amina, whose parents were killed before her eyes, while she was = wounded=20 in the knee. The fate of that lovely young man Samir, who was in the = city with=20 his mother while his father was targeting them both from the hills = above. From=20 the great men whose heir Hans Magnus Enzensberger is, and among others = from=20 Lessing, I have learned that individual people have fates, while great=20 collectivities have a history - and that literature is concerned with = fates. I=20 know this because I have learned it from the German classics. How is it = possible=20 that the German poet Enzensberger, who has absorbed German classical = literature=20 along with the smells of his family home - absorbed it in the same way = that the=20 link between darkness and sleep is absorbed - how is it possible that = any poet,=20 of any kind whatsoever, does not know that for a writer the human fate = is of the=20 truest interest (he was a contemporary of B=F6ll's, after all, and may = even have=20 known him)? The poet Enzensberger does know this, he knows it just as = well as he=20 knows the second law of thermodynamics. But to know it from inside, in = the way=20 in which writers know it (the way B=F6ll knew it), it would be necessary = to feel,=20 in relation to the concrete war, the link between that war and the = individual=20 fate. In order to feel this, however, it is necessary to feel that 'out = there'=20 is real and happening to people, since only real people can have fates. = Which=20 means that 'out there' are not tribes, but Amina, Jasmin and Samir. = Which means=20 that it is all actually happening to us, and not to someone in some = exotic 'out=20 there' which by definition is not real...=20

I believe this is the problem. Enzensberger is undoubtedly a poet, = and it is=20 terribly important to me to believe that he is just as undoubtedly a = person with=20 good intentions. He would undoubtedly view everything happening in the = Balkans=20 through the prism of the Cyrillic script, the pseudo-mythical image of a = heavenly people and the fate of Jasmin's parents - if only he could feel = that it=20 was all happening in the real world. In the real world, however, we see, = recognise and understand what our culture and the way of thinking we = have=20 absorbed shows us -allows us to see. One type of thinking (which was = dominant in=20 Europe in the second half of the last century) does not allow anything = 'out=20 there' to be recognised as real, since everything outside Europe is = exotic.=20 Western Europe is reality, everything else is exoticism and, in the = exotic 'out=20 there', no fates, people or reality exist.=20

The same type of thinking, but in a caricaturally simplified version, = is=20 represented by the prominent politician, commentator and - alas! - = official=20 Balkan expert, Peter Glotz. The life and thought of this eminent person = are=20 worthy of attention, since the mechanism of a certain type of thinking - = the=20 'technology' of a certain type of intellectual labour - can be grasped = very well=20 in his case, precisely because it is demonstrated very clearly thanks to = its=20 caricatural reduction to the basic form. A few random examples will = perhaps=20 suffice to illustrate the type of thinking with which I am concerned = here, and=20 which still appears to play a central role in what might be called = European=20 thought.=20

The text 'Wer Kampfen will, soll vortreten' (Die Zeit, = 15.1.1993) is=20 a veritable treasure-house of statements exhibiting the mechanism and=20 characteristics of this type of thought, in all their nakedness. At the = very=20 beginning of the text, the author Glotz treats with irony (indeed = mockery) the=20 decision of the German Minister of Posts to resign from the government, = because=20 of the latter's passivity towards 'Southeastern Europe'. Mr Glotz bases = his=20 irony on a number of facts: 1. the minister who has resigned is a = technocrat; 2.=20 he is a sinologist by training; 3. he is not an expert on Southeastern = Europe.=20 So the man is a figure of fun if he feels human responsibility for a = tragedy he=20 has witnessed (if only indirectly), and feels sympathy for the people = affected=20 by it, although he is not an expert on the region in which the tragedy = is=20 occurring. As a sinologist he has the right to feel compassion for the = Chinese,=20 and to feel a human sense of responsibility (in Kant's meaning) for what = happens=20 in China; but compassion for the Bosnians he must relinquish to = Balkanologists=20 (since we have no Bosnologists).=20

I, poor sinner, must confess that at first I was dumbfounded by the=20 monstrosity of this logic; that I wanted to run away from the free and = fortunate=20 world in which people think like this; that I longed painfully for my = primitive=20 world, in which we felt sorry for the misfortune of others - highly=20 unprofessionally but from the heart. At the same time, overwhelmed by = fear as I=20 was, I tried to decipher why what I had read and found so terrifying = seemed also=20 familiar. And eventually I realised that it seemed familiar because I = recognised=20 the matrix of thought: because, in learning about scientific socialism = and other=20 benefits of progressive mankind, I had come to know rather well the type = of=20 thought to which Mr Glotz's statement belongs. This is the caricatural = variant=20 of rationalism known as scientific optimism or scientism, a = pseudo-religious=20 relationship towards the exact sciences. It is the thought which = scientifically=20 proved that the victory of socialism was inevitable; the thought which=20 established a scientific aesthetic, and measured the value of music by = the=20 intensity of glandular reaction to it; the thought which established by=20 scientific methods that South- American Indians were human beings, so = could be=20 given the sacrament of christening (the same would be established = somewhat later=20 for Negroes); the thought which divinised objective, positive, = measurable and=20 transferable (hence, mechanical) Knowledge; the thought which abolished = God, but=20 did not manage to amputate religious experience - so put Knowledge in = God's=20 place.=20

However, it is the destiny of followers to be a parody of those they = follow.=20 What does Sacred Knowledge about the Balkans look like, in the case of = Balkan=20 expert Peter Glotz? Recalling Ranke, Mr Glotz insists that Croats, Serbs = and=20 Dalmatians are a single people, and that Slovenes, Croats and Serbs = speak the=20 same language. I am not a linguist so cannot argue with Mr Glotz with = the aid of=20 Knowledge, but can speak only of my own experience and feelings. These = tell me,=20 for example, that for a long time now the Slovenes have spoken their own = language, which is not like any other language in the world; and that = they would=20 like to keep it for a while longer, if Mr Glotz will permit them to do = so. Of=20 the other peoples who all speak the same language, linguists could say = more than=20 me.=20

At another point in the same text, Peter Glotz first bewildered, then = deeply=20 saddened me. In response to Reichstag deputy Hermann Wendel, Peter Glotz = asserts=20 that the Yugoslavs are one people. He bewildered me because on that = theme I=20 cannot speak - I am so ignorant that I simply do not have a position. I = know=20 that the links between the communities in this area are rather strong = and=20 numerous. I know that, in any highly complex structure, stressing the=20 differences between the parts seems as dangerous as stressing the = structure's=20 unity (I know this from literature). I know that a maniacal insistence = on unity=20 destroyed the First Yugoslavia and provoked a conflict between its = communities=20 during World War II. I know that the maniacal insistence on differences = which I=20 have witnessed also strikes me as dangerous, because honouring and = preserving=20 differences with respect to your neighbour provincializes, imprisons and = exhausts the active energies of your community. I know all that, and it = is what=20 I think. But I really do not know where the border lies, before which = two=20 communities constitute a single people and after which they become two = different=20 peoples.=20

On this theme, I can impart only some experiences and some facts = which I know=20 absolutely. I know, for example, that my father was a Communist who = fought for=20 the Second Yugoslavia passionately and quite concretely. I know that = after 1945=20 he declared himself in the census as 'nationally undefined' (i.e. = non-existent).=20 He declared himself in that way, because he did not experience as his = own any of=20 the three choices he was offered. He could declare himself nationally as = Serb,=20 as Croat, or as Yugoslav -but he stubbornly felt he was some fourth = thing. My=20 father fought for Yugoslavia and cannot have been anti-Yugoslav. There = were two=20 million people like him in Yugoslavia. Nationally, they felt they were = Bosniaks.=20 My father was born in 1917, two years before the First Yugoslavia. He = was a=20 convinced Yugoslav, yet till late in his life he had to register as = 'nationally=20 undefined': in other words, nationally non-existent.=20

I know another indisputable fact. I know that, in the course of the = current=20 war, 200,000 of those who nationally could not help feeling they were = Bosniaks=20 have been killed. They were killed solely because nationally they could = not feel=20 otherwise.=20

I know another indisputable fact. I know that in World War II, and = again in=20 the current one, very many people died feeling themselves to be Serbs, = Croats,=20 Bosniaks, Montenegrins, or Slovenes. They died mainly because they felt = that=20 way, and because they did not feel they were just Yugoslavs. I also know = that in=20 this area nine million people feel Serb, four and a half million feel = Croat, two=20 million feel Bosniak, over 600,000 feel Montenegrin... Many hundreds of=20 thousands of them have been killed and maimed, and all this could = perhaps have=20 been avoided had they felt just Yugoslav. When I realised this I felt = deeply=20 saddened. 'God', I thought, 'how much misery could have been avoided, if = people=20 had only read more of Peter Glotz and Die Zeit, for whom it is = all so=20 clear because it is all so simple!'=20

I repeat that I do not belong to those who glorify differences and = keep=20 insisting on them at the expense of similarities. I repeat that I do not = know=20 for sure what a people is, what the difference is between a people and a = nation,=20 or where the border lies after which a cultural community becomes a = people. I=20 repeat that I have never felt a strong sense of belonging to any = particular=20 community, and that I am a person with weak political convictions. = Nevertheless,=20 the aggressive self- confidence with which Peter Glotz explains all = perplexities=20 and solves all problems offends me deeply.=20

I am, at the same time, awed and highly impressed by the serene = dignity with=20 which Peter Glotz rejects any possible influence on his thought. He does = not=20 allow the Balkan people to tell him what he should think, and patiently = explains=20 to them that they are all the same. He does not permit facts to = influence his=20 thought, and refuses even to look at the map, so that in the text we are = talking=20 about he discovers that Knin has 800,000 inhabitants. For Balkan = conditions,=20 this is a metropolis. By virtue of Peter Glotz's decision, Knin becomes = the=20 third largest Balkan city!=20

Yet it all began innocently, almost lyrically - I mean my desire to = acquaint=20 myself with the life and thought of Peter Glotz. On 10 February 1994 I = was=20 watching the 'Live' programme on ZDF: a talk-show on Bosnia, ten days = before the=20 NATO ultimatum to the besiegers of Sarajevo expired. Peter Glotz, of = course, was=20 appearing on the programme, and at one point he stated (I quote): 'And = here I=20 question the idyll of a common Bosnian state' ['Und da stelle ich in = Frage die=20 Idylle des gemeinsamen bosnisches Staates']. My attention was drawn to = the word=20 'idyll'. In an essay written long ago, I attempted to explain kitsch as = a=20 signifying or mental structure in which reality is represented = (experienced)=20 either as horror or as idyll. In the idea and experience of kitsch- = sensibility,=20 the world is either like an Arnold Schwarzenneger film, all bursting = with=20 violence and horror 'in the pure state', or it is like a happy love = story=20 between a shepherdess and a shepherd. Kitsch-sensibility is not capable = of=20 understanding - hence, of articulating - a complex polyphonic structure, = which=20 exists (among other things) precisely because of the tension between the = various=20 sounds composing the structure. A serious drama, for example, in which = different=20 characters are used to articulate different perspectives, different=20 relationships, different possible ways of seeing and participating, = within a=20 single whole or in relation to a single work. Or the cultural = environment, the=20 environment of everyday life, in Bosnia: an environment constituted by = four=20 'voices', four possible ways of participating in one thing. The drama = consists=20 precisely in the tension which inevitably appears in the encounter = between=20 different views on the same thing; if the differences between these = views are=20 not preserved, the characters are lost, their autonomy and relative = completeness=20 are lost, the tension is lost. In other words, the drama is lost - to be = replaced by a kitsch- structure in which all are identical and = everything is the=20 same. Everything is either pure violence or pure goodness; people are = all either=20 more or less effective wielders of violence, or else shepherds full of = love and=20 goodness, differentiated only by gender. That is why kitsch-sensibility = cannot=20 produce a serious drama.=20

And that is why kitsch-sensibility cannot understand Bosnia. = Catholics and=20 Jews, Muslims and Orthodox, all mutually different, with their own = identities,=20 yet all together. It cannot be an idyll, because they all have their own = identities with everything implied by that. Nor does this mean they are = all=20 killing each other there in a dreadful, brutal manner, just like in a = horror=20 movie. How to explain that it is precisely the fact that each cultural = community=20 in Bosnia preserves its own identity -precisely the fact that four = voices, with=20 all their mutual differences, come together in one whole - which creates = the=20 tension upon which a unity can be established, in which the parts are = not=20 mechanically fused, yet are linked in a productive dialogue? How to = convince=20 someone that Bach did compose music, even though what he composed is = unsuitable=20 for marching, or for seducing shepherdesses? Don't bother, you can't = convince=20 somebody with kitsch-sensibility. And thank God for that.=20

The Bosnian idyll called into question by Peter Glotz drew my = attention to=20 the speaker, and sentimentally reminded me of my early works on kitsch. = I was=20 intrigued and made happy by this man who linked Bosnia and idyll. In all = my long=20 years, nothing like that had ever occurred to me - nor, so far as I = know, to=20 anybody else. For everyone, Bosnia has always been a domain of tension, = a domain=20 in which four cultural communities with their identities and their = differences=20 have built a wider community, filled with tensions, inherently = polemical, but=20 also filled with dialogue and understanding. All in all a community, a = symphonic=20 unity which is a whole, even if not a mechanical whole. A community of = the very=20 kind that has existed more or less happily (mainly less, but that is = another=20 theme) since the early 16th century: since the arrival of the Jews = expelled in=20 1492 from Spain. Never as idyll, very rarely and relatively briefly (in = World=20 War II, for example, or in the current war) as horror. So, very rarely=20 understandable to Glotz. Yes, what is now happening in Bosnia is = hellish, but=20 that does not prove Bosnia to be impossible. It proves only that fine, = complex=20 structures are fragile in the face of mechanical force. You can destroy = a brain=20 with a hammer, but you cannot destroy a hammer with a brain: that is all = that=20 the current events in Bosnia serve to prove. How to convince Glotz that = five=20 centuries last longer than three years, and that laws are based on what = lasts=20 for centuries?=20

A little later in the same programme, Mr Glotz said: 'And now I quote = today's=20 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. There Ivo Andric, the Nobel = laureate,=20 writes in 1920, i.e. quite independently from our debates today, about = the=20 rhythms of Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim and Jewish clocks - about how the = churches=20 sound there...' ['Und jetz zitiere ich dei FAZ von heute. Da schreibt = Ivo=20 Andric, der Nobelpreistr=E4ger, im Jahre 1920, also vollig unbeeinflusst = von=20 unseren heutigen Debatten , dar=FCber, wie also die Stundenrhythmen der=20 Orthodoxen, der Katholiken, der Muslime, der Juden - wie die Kirchen = dort=20 l=E4uten...']. Managing, from the thematic description and the year = mentioned by=20 the speaker, to work out what he was talking about, I realised that of = the=20 points made in Mr Glotz's statement one is certainly true, one possibly = true,=20 and all the rest untrue. It is true that Andric was a Nobel laureate, it = is=20 possibly true that Mr Glotz read FAZ on 10 February 1994, but everything = else is=20 the kind of muddle of which only a Balkan expert like Peter Glotz is = capable:=20 semi- informed about a few things, self-confident, and aggressively = ready to=20 explain something he has half-heard somewhere. What is the whole thing = about?=20

From Mr Glotz's description, the text in question could be Andric's = short=20 story 'Letter from the Year 1920'. For that story does indeed speak = about the=20 'clock rhythms' of Bosnia's religious communities, and its title also = includes=20 the year which so enthused Mr Glotz. The story was not written in 1920, = but=20 shortly after World War II - in 1947, if I remember correctly. This is = the=20 beginning of the Second Yugoslavia, a time in which politics (but also = common=20 sense, for Heaven's sake) demanded not just of literature, but of all = human=20 activities, that they should articulate the fatal danger of glorifying=20 differences or reducing all relations between the Yugoslav peoples to a = mere sum=20 of differences: a time when the foundations of a new unity were being = laid. (The=20 nature of that unity - and how unfortunate it was that the unity was not = of a=20 different kind - is a theme for another occasion.) 1920 was the first = year of=20 the First Yugoslavia. Knowledge of the basic facts of Andric's biography = and the=20 basic elements of his literary technique would have sufficed for an = intelligent=20 reader to realise why Andric placed this year in the title of his story. = As any=20 such reader would have understood, it was a covert polemic against the = new=20 regime's conviction that it represented a point of rupture; that with it = had=20 begun a qualitatively new era; that it had made possible the leap from = zero to=20 one - i.e. from non-existence to existence. I cannot, unfortunately, = explain=20 here all the implications of the fact that the story 'Letter from the = Year 1920'=20 was written immediately after World War II. I mention this fact only to=20 illustrate yet again how well informed Mr Glotz is; how capable he is of = reading=20 and of understanding what he reads. He sees a year in the title, and = assumes=20 that the text was written in that year. He reads the word 'Letter' in = the title,=20 and assumes that the text is indeed a letter. He reads the sentence: = 'That=20 difference is always akin to hatred', and assumes that this is lived = experience=20 and the author's final judgement.=20

Peter Glotz has the right to be ill educated, but as a career = politician he=20 does not have the right to be ill informed. He ought to know to what = genre the=20 text he quotes belongs; he ought to know that Knin does not have 800,000 = inhabitants; he ought to know that Slovenes have a separate language. It = would=20 be desirable, though not obligatory, for him to know what I shall now = explain to=20 him, without any ironical intention. So-called fabulative literary forms = contain=20 also text spoken by their characters. In order to be able to understand = fully=20 these textual passages, and the work as a whole, we must take into = account which=20 character, at which moment, and for which purpose, is speaking what we = are=20 reading. When I say 'which character', I am thinking of his fate in the = text,=20 his personality, his momentary situation, his relationship to the = character he=20 is addressing, etc. (in other words, all that the concept of character = implies).=20 In texts of this kind, statements never refer directly to reality = outside the=20 work. So it would be wrong to conclude that Goethe was a necrophiliac, = though=20 his character in the drama Faust did show certain predilections = for the=20 deceased Helen. All this, and much more, has been explained by a man = (now=20 unfortunately dead) called Aristotle: you can find out about all these = confusing=20 matters from his work 'The Art of Poetry'.=20

This short lesson means that the statements in 'the letter' allegedly = 'quoted' from the story 'A Letter from the Year 1920' cannot be ascribed = to=20 Andric. They can be understood only if it is also understood that they = were=20 'written' by a character (of what kind? with what fate? at what = moment?), on the=20 basis of experience acquired at a time 'prior to the establishment of = unity';=20 and that he is addressing them, in a certain psychological situation (of = what=20 kind?), to somebody (to whom?). A story cannot be quoted as a source of=20 political information -even high political functionaries should know = this much.=20 Bertrand Russell once suggested that schools should teach how to read = newspapers=20 with suspicion. After the experience I have acquired during my year of = exile of=20 how literature is read, I would suggest an even stranger subject that = would be=20 called Basic Theories of Literature.=20

Or are we, in fact, dealing with something quite different? It is = possible=20 that even Peter Glotz would be bewildered if I were to make judgements = about the=20 Thirty Years' War on the basis of Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas = (even=20 though the story's subtitle says it is 'From an Old Chronicle'). But = that is=20 quite another matter, of course: do I have the right to behave like = Peter=20 Glotz?! (Thank the Lord, to be frank, that I do not have that right.) = And just=20 where do I get the crazy idea from, that somebody so powerful has to be = correct=20 towards Bosnia and even accept that literature is written there which = has to be=20 read as literature? Or are we not dealing with something completely = different:=20 i.e. with a type of thought in which we are imprisoned, and which is = precisely=20 our experience of the world and ourselves in that world (rather than = just a mere=20 technology of cerebral labour)?=20

I think this is indeed what we are dealing with: a type of thought = that=20 determines us as closely and inescapably as our own skin. I do not = believe that=20 Enzensberger would willingly laugh at his own verses, nor do I believe = that=20 Peter Glotz would willingly make people who are able to think logically = laugh at=20 his expertise. I do not believe that they refuse to know = anything about=20 what they teach to humanity. I believe that they fail to know = it -=20 because they are prevented by a model of thought that determines their = very=20 ability to know.=20

I believe that the basic principles of this type of thought are = revealed very=20 clearly in the examples I have given above, demonstrating what kind of = thought=20 we are dealing with. Those basic principles are: 1. what I do not = understand=20 does not exist; 2. the Other is not actually real, the Other is my = notion of=20 him; 3. everything which is not I - which I have not adopted and made = part of my=20 image of the world - is, and can be, only an object; 4. naked = mechanistic power=20 is the sole criterion of truth, goodness and beauty. These principles = and this=20 type of thought we know very well from the European tradition. They = created the=20 foundations and alibis for Europe's colonial conquests, articulating the = truth=20 that the English had to conquer India in order to civilise it, and that = North=20 American Indians and Australian Aborigines were thrilled to bits = (literally to=20 bits) by similar civilising missions. They have created a spiritual = ambience in=20 which it is normal to produce nuclear weapons, and to conduct the most = morbid=20 genetic experiments as innocently as if selling Christmas cards. In = other words,=20 they have expunged ethics and metaphysics as irrelevant, since God and = ethics=20 stubbornly refuse to be mechanical phenomena. They have articulated the = concept=20 of ethical neutrality, ascribing it first to the exact sciences and then = to all=20 other human activities.=20

I do not, of course, think that Messrs Enzensberger and Glotz are = responsible=20 for all that I have described here, nor have I described it on their = account.=20 But, demonstrating precisely this type of thought, they spoke about = something=20 which constitutes my fate, so concerns me deeply. Bewildered, worried = and=20 dismayed I tried to understand what was going on, because I had believed = that=20 multiculturalism, openness and polyphony had freed Europe from = vulgar-mechanical=20 thought. I really did think that, in the new Europe, only a minority = believed=20 they possessed more truth, goodness and beauty because they had more = money and=20 weapons; and that because they have more money and weapons they can = decide about=20 life and death. Believing that Europe had articulated the concept of a = unity=20 higher than the mechanical one, I asked myself if I were mad because I=20 remembered my life the way I had lived it, and thought about my home in = the way=20 I did. This is why I felt the need, indeed the necessity, to question = myself=20 about what others were explaining to me about me. Messrs Enzensberger = and Glotz=20 were not accidentally chosen - they are very characteristic. They are, = in fact,=20 part of the Establishment, as are so many of those who try to tell me = how I=20 lived. Karl May was an outsider, just as many of those who treat me as a = real=20 person are. Was Karl May able to talk about us Indians with so much = affection=20 and understanding precisely because he was an outsider, or did he remain = an=20 outsider because he loved and understood us Indians? =

------=_NextPart_000_0011_01C1EDEC.38EB6420-- From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: brought into a mosque in which he has been worshipping Allah; and similarly a Hindu cannot tolerate that someone should destroy the temple where he has all along been worshipping Ram, Krishna, Shankara, Vishnu or Devi, and build a mosque there. Where ever these have occurred are in reality a sign of slavery (dharmika ghulaami). It would be proper for Hindus and Muslims to settle amongst themselves the disputes over these sites. Hindus should generously return with the sites of Muslims that are in their possession, similarly the religious places of Hindus that are in Muslim control should be gladly yielded to the Hindus. By this gesture, mutual enmity will be ended, and feeling of unity between Hindus and Muslims will grow, which will be a blessing for a religious country like India." (M.K. Gandhi ) Is this, in any way, substantially different from what the RSS, the VHP, the BJP have been saying ever since the Ayodhya movement began? As late as September 14, 1947, Gandhiji, while addressing a rally of RSS workers in Bhangi Colony, described himself as a 'Sanatani Hindu', applauded the discipline and idealism of the RSS, and said that an organisation which was "rooted in high ideals and public service was bound to grow from strength to strength". The report of this meeting is in the Hindu Newspaper of the 17th of September 1947. I had said in my earlier posting that the RSS in its "pratah smaran pranam" recalls a long list of people it considers Hindu Heroes. A section of the concluding part of this invocation (in Sanskrit) goes like this Dadabhi Gopabhandhu Tilako Gandhiradrita | Ramano Malaviyascha Sri Subramanya Bharati. || Here the people mentioned are - Dadabhai Naoroji, Gokhale, Tilak, Gandhi, Raman ( Dont know if this is CV Raman or Raman Maharshi) , Madan Mohan Malviy and Subramanya Baharati . This is the new and updated version. But if you examine RSS sources carefully, then you get to know that Gandhi's name was not included as an after thought. Even as early as 1946-47, when Gandhi was alive, his name was remembered along with some other living great ones; but later on, the names of the living were dropped and a new set of Stotras brought into usage. The present one is called EkAtmataa Stotra, which includes the above Sloka. Now I am not for a moment suggesting that Gandhi was a Hindu bigot above all else. I see his politics as being caught in a logic of nationalist symbolizing that necessarily requires an address to peoples 'identities' as this or that or the other. The fact that he could on occasion rise above this, as in his intransigence that India pay Pakistan its due from the state exchequer after independence or in his decisions to go to Noakhali in the thick of communal violence, is and will remain exemplary as humanist gestures, that take us momentarily away from the prison that I consider any kind of 'identity' based politics to be. But there is a pattern of a paternalistic assumption of Hindu superiority that cannot be denied in his conscious utterances. His unequivocal defence of the 'Varnashramdharma" (the basis of the Caste System) even as he mitigated against its concrete excesses, his emotional blackmail of Ambedkar vis a vis seperate electorats (whihc is a reality today) for Dalits and his insistence that people be addressed by their religious affiliations would have found ready acceptance in the sophisticated "Hindutva" of the sangh parivar today. Those who deploy Gandhi against communalism always fail, because the Sangh Parivar has its own, equally convincing, equally consistent Gandhi, and these two Gandhi's cancel each other out in a way that makes for hardly dents in edifice of communalism. I am not interested in singling out Gandhi, the entire corpus of Indian Nationalism, has Hindutva woven into it (in soft or hard terms). Thus, it is impossible to see Nehru's "Discovery of India" as anything but a revanchist latter day hindu imperialist imaginary run riot over much of South Asian history, to see Patel and Rajendra Prasad's state sanctioned re building of the Somnath Temple as anything but an anticipation of the Hiundu right's articulation of therAyodhya question, and to see Indira Gandhi's patronage of the VHP orchestrated Ekatmata Yagna in the early 1980s or to see Rajiv Gandhi calling for Ram Rajya as an initiation of an election campaing in Ayodhya as part of a pattern of consolidating a Nationalist agenda that is at base Hindu. Even the comrades, Namboodripad and Nayanar, were once pictured in CPI (M) election posters as Krishna and Arjuna in the midst of an electoral fray sometime in the late 1980s when it became necessary momentarily to eschew secular symbols and appeal a little to rising Malyali Hindu consciousness, and anyone who has spent anyone in West Bengal knows the CPI (M)s patronage of the "Vaidik Marxbad" of the erstwhile Balak Brahmachari's 'Santan Dal'. Forget "Hey Ram", take a close look at any Hindi film. In the end, nationalism, has reminded us again and again, that the hero of the movie of national life in India is a good Hindu boy, and that if you have a muslim name you either have to die saving the nation, as a necessary sacrifice, so that it can be proved that you are a good muslim, or die anyway if you are the bad muslim, when you face the Hindu hero's wrath. Somehow, I feel like seeing a different kind of movie. If there has to be an articulation of a 'secular' alternative to communal violence, I personally cannot see how it can happen, in the long term, within the framework of the ideas of nationalism, national identity, or the nation state. Cheers Shuddha From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: presented and argued as blatantly violent crimes committed against the members of the minority community. Not only these cases would stand the test of judicial procedures but would also provide justice to the victims and would lead to the penalization of the perpetrators of crime. These 100 cases could be further sub-divided into 3 categories. a. 20 major cases. By major cases what is meant is that they are gruesome in method and content where more than 50 people were massacred mercilessly. This also would include mass rape of women, b. 10 large cases. These cases are equally gruesome in nature but were killing has been less than 50. Here individual rape cases will be included, c. 70 minor cases. These cases include individual incidents. All these cases have to be prepared, presented and argued in the following manner: a. About 5 full time lawyers are to be engaged to take care of the major cases. Thus each lawyer will have only 4 cases to see through them to their logical conclusion. b. About 5 trial lawyers are to be engaged to deal with the cases on the day to day basis, c. 10 para-legal experts are to be engaged to deal with all the cases, prepare the cases, present them to the lawyers, follow them up in the court etc. Budget 1. Preparation of 100 cases 100 pages per case @ Rs. 25/- 2,50,000.00 2. Payment to 5 full time lawyers @ Rs. 10,000/- for 18 months 9,00,000.00 3. Payment to 5 trial lawyers @ Rs. 10,000/- for 12 months 6,00,000.00 4. Payment to 10 paralegal aids @ Rs. 4,000/- for 12 months 4,80,000.00 5. Travel expenses of senior lawyers 2,00,000.00 6. Research study about the cases to support the argument 2,50,000.00 7. Capital cost like computer, stationary, photocopying, telephone etc 2,50,000.00 8. Administrative and coordinating cost 2,00,000.00 Total 31,00,000.00 [Total estimated expense is thirty-one lakhs] Many people are supporting in many different ways. This is only an estimate. The actual expenses could be less. Yet an appeal is made for financial support. Legal activities will be coordinated in Ahmedabad and Delhi. Cheques should be made out in the name of St.Xavier�s Nonformal Education Society. The Legal aid cell of Aman Ekta Manch has also decided to collect financial support to take care of the Supreme court cases here. Cheques should be made out in the name of Samarthan Trust. These cheques could be reached to : The Other Media B-14 (Second Floor) Gulmohar Park New Delhi 110 049. Phone Nos. 6561743/6514847 Indian Social Institute 10 Institutional Area (Behind Sai Baba Mandir) Lodi Road New Delhi 110 003 Phone Nos. 4622379/4625015 AkhilBharat Rachanatmak Samaj & Harijan Sewak Sangh Gandhi Ashram, Kings Way Camp New Delhi 110 009 Phone No.7434514 ------------------------------------------------------- From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Tuesday, April 30, 2002 Iyyar 18, 5762 Operation Destroy the Data By Amira Hass It's a scene that is repeating itself in hundreds of Palestinian offices taken over by IDF troops for a few hours or days in the West Bank: smashed, burned and broken computer terminals heaped in piles and thrown into yards; server cabling cut, hard disks missing, disks and diskettes scattered and broken, printers and scanners broken or missing, laptops gone, telephone exchanges that disappeared or were vandalized, and paper files burned, torn, scattered, or defaced - if not taken. And it's all in rooms full of smashed furniture, torn curtains, broken windows, smashed-in doors, walls full of holes, filthy floors and soiled bathrooms. Here and there, the soldiers left obscene graffiti or letters full of hatred, but compared to the data that was destroyed or taken, the insults read like poetry. Even the overflowing toilets look more like human weakness compared to the organized vandalism reflected in the piles of smashed computers. It's not merely the expense of the hardware that has to be replaced. The loss is immeasurable in shekels or dollars. Years of information built into knowledge, time spent thinking by thousands of people working to build their civil society and their future or trying to build a private sector that would bring a sense of economic stability to their country. These are the data banks developed in Palestinian Authority institutions like the Education Ministry, the Higher Education Ministry and the Health Ministry. These are the data banks of the non-governmental organizations and research institutes devoted to developing a modern health system, modern agricultural, environmental protection and water conservation. These are the data banks of human rights organizations, banks and private commercial enterprises, infirmaries, and supermarkets. They all were clearly the targets for destruction in the military operation called Defensive Shield. The Israeli public has been spared the sights of the destruction. Here and there, a photo of some demolished office sneaks into the TV news shows. But Israeli TV news doesn't find a few seconds to report on a Palestinian woman or a child of nine who was shot dead from a distance, inside their homes, by an anonymous Israeli soldier, so how can it find time or reason to report on the crazed destruction perpetrated by a unit of soldiers in one office. The IDF has given up denying that some soldiers looted - money, jewels and video cameras - private homes. That can be explained by officers too weak to impose discipline on their soldiers and by soldiers too weak to fight material temptation. But the systematic destruction of the data banks was not a matter of personal weakness by either officers or soldiers. Let's not deceive ourselves; this was not a mission to search and destroy the terrorist infrastructure. If the forces breaking into every hard disk of every bank and clinic, commercial consultant's office or PA ministry, thought that a list of weapons or wanted men was inside the disk, all they had to do was copy the information and pass it on to the Shin Bet. If they thought incriminating evidence was hidden in the Education Ministry and the International Bank of Palestine and in a shop that rents prosthetics, the soldiers would have examined document after document, and not thrown the files on the floor without opening them. This was not a whim, or crazed vengeance, by this or that unit, nor a personal vandalistic urge of a soldier whose buddies didn't dare stop him. There was a decision made to vandalize the civic, administrative, cultural infrastructure developed by Palestinian society. Was it an explicit order or one given with a wink? Was it an order or was it the result of permission given to soldiers to do what they want? Did the order - or wink - come down from the battalion commander or from the brigadier? Was it from the headquarters of IDF forces in the West Bank or from IDF Operations? Did it come from the general in command of the Central Command or from general headquarters? Either way, the scenes of systematic destruction show how the IDF translated into the field the instructions inherent in the political echelon's policies: Israel must destroy Palestinian civil institutions, sabotaging for years to come the Palestinian goal for independence, sending all of Palestinian society backward. It's so easy and comforting to think of the entire Palestinian society as primitive, bloodthirsty terrorists, after the raw material and product of their intellectual, cultural, social and economic activity has been destroyed. That way, the Israeli public can continue to be deceived into believing that terror is a genetic problem and not a sociological and political mutation, horrific as it may be, derived from the horrors of the occupation. (BWO the Multitudes-info list/ Emmanuel Videcoq) From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: searchlights placed around the Museum�s central Square. Every eight seconds a new design is displayed as it arrives from the Internet. The designs may include participants� names and dedications, which are shown on a large screen in the Square. A web page is also produced automatically to document each participation. Participation is much appreciated, as the work does not exist without it. All the best, Rafael http://www.lozano-hemmer.com http://www.alzado.net From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: sector of today, the media landscape in East Timor has changed significantly since the withdrawal of Indonesian control in 1999. by MARNI CORDELL For almost 500 years, the East Timorese people had little experience of freedom of the press or access to uncensored information. The country was (often neglectfully) ruled by Portugal from the 1500s until 1975 and it was only toward the end of this period, after the socialist revolution in Lisbon, that the media began to critically address the issue of East Timorese independence. However, not long after the Portuguese abandoned the country in 1975, the Indonesian military invaded. During the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, the population was fed a constant and restricted diet of government controlled news and information. In the face of a media operating primarily as propaganda machine, designed and maintained to mislead the international community about what was really going on in the country, an efficient network of clandestine media emerged. The violence and destruction that was carried out by the Indonesian Military and Militia after the historical East Timorese vote for independence on August 30, 1999 left much of the country decimated. The media sector was no exception. The country was left with no functioning broadcasting or printing facilities and the offices of the only daily newspaper, Suara Timor Timur, were burnt to the ground. The Indonesian government installations that had delivered satellite television and radio programming to almost every region of the country were destroyed, and the import of media from Indonesia was also disrupted. In the aftermath of the destruction and after the withdrawal of Indonesian troops, East Timorese journalists, many recently returned from asylum in Kupang and Jakarta, were in high spirits and uniformly committed to building an independent East Timorese media. Journalists from all different backgrounds - student activists and people that had been involved with the creation of underground media, along with professional mainstream journalists - began to organise together to make this happen. In December 1999 discussions began as to how to ensure the future freedom of expression and the press in East Timor. Taking into account lessons learnt from past restrictive governments, journalists were very aware that their newly won 'freedom' would not necessarily be all-encompassing, or forever, and decided that a journalists association was needed in order to guarantee the future integrity of the media. On December 22nd, after a week of post-conflict journalism workshops, the 'Tourismo' declaration was declared - promoting independent, anti-intervened, expression in the development of a democratic and independent media - and the Timor Loro Sa'e Journalists Association (TLJA) was formed. During '99, there was an influx of new print media sources in East Timor - both daily newspapers and weekly magazines - five of which still exist. Others have not survived, mainly due to lack of funding and wages for staff. The former staff of Suara Timor Timur re-organised themselves to produce Suara Timor Lorosa'e, and the weekly tabloid Lalenok was the first and only regular print media source to be completely in the Timorese dialect, Tetum. Traditionally not a written language, Tetum is recognised as being technically 'incomplete', despite being the preferred language of most of the population. Virgilio da Silva Guterres, a founding member of TLJA who was also involved in Lalenok's production, comments on the significance of developing an all-Tetum publication: "Lalenok was very important because it was all in Tetum and one of its main aims was in order for us to train ourselves to write in Tetum, because in the past we'd never really done that. And also we hoped the publication would help to standardise the language." Independent radio also prospered during 1999. During the Indonesian occupation of East Timor a group known as Radio Mubere used a mobile transmitter to illegally broadcast information from the guerrilla independence fighters working in the mountains (Falintil) to the broader population. Radio Mubere was just one node in the complex underground information network that enabled the East Timorese population to withstand their 24-year struggle. When independence was finally won in 1999, some of those involved with Mubere initiated the first East Timorese community radio station in Dili: Radio Falintil. The name Falintil was chosen so that the clandestine history of the station would be recognised. For the population of Dili, who had experienced years of limited access, Indonesian-controlled media, the philosophy of community radio - to give voice to the voiceless - was a very welcome, if abstract, notion. There are now six community radio stations in East Timor; and bound to be more in the near future. In a country with a high degree of illiteracy, the medium is a popular one. Currently however, there are still many rural districts in the country that do not have access to a local media source. In response to this, two of the Dili-based stations: Radio Lorico Lian, and Radio Rakambiah, undertake regular 'roaming broadcasts', in which a group of volunteers take a mobile transmitter to remote villages and allow the population open access broadcasting, to talk about the issues affecting and concerning them. They also teach the local people how to use the radio equipment. A group of programmers also staged a broadcast protest recently in front of the United Nations Transitional Administration office to highlight the issues affecting the remote communities they had visited. Joey Borges, Community Radio Program Officer for Apheda in East Timor was part of the demonstration. He comments: "the government don't like us, they think we are 'radical media' but it's the community that is radical, (we are just giving them a voice.)" Borges, formerly a technician and programmer with both Radio Mubere and Radio Falintil, is currently working, together with the staff and reporters from East Timor's six community stations, to set up a national community radio association to strengthen the philosophy and practice of community radio stations throughout East Timor. Like many of the media sources initiated in �99, Radio Falintil thrived on volunteer energy for a year and a half, but has recently experienced a wane in commitment, with some technicians and reporters leaving on the basis that the station will never be able to provide them with a wage. Sadly, Lalenok also suffered post �99 from lack of volunteers, and was forced to fold a year ago. According to Guterres, two and a half years down the track, many people initially involved in media production in East Timor have now come to the realisation that they could not continue to work as volunteers forever. He comments: "We realised that in a different situation (freedom) you could not treat people in the same way. In the struggle, everyone was united and willing to do anything for nothing. They could forget their personal differences to unite. Now that there is freedom people are willing to contribute but also say: you must understand, I need something to eat. Even volunteers everywhere, they need food. That was one of the mistakes that I confess to. We were wrong to think we could work like that long term." By all accounts, the energy and human resources behind media production in East Timor has certainly receded since 1999, with many people forced to find work in other fields to support themselves. Although some of the print publications in Dili do have paid staff, they receive a minimal amount. Other media sources still struggle to survive on volunteer labour. Without welfare assistance and when living costs are high compared to incomes, volunteer work is not a luxury that many East Timorese can afford to undertake on a long-term basis. The journalist association has also hit hurdles in the last two years. Because most of those involved with initiating TLJA were also active journalists and therefore heavily focussed on creating, developing and professionally maintaining media in the first year of independence, Guterres believes they had no time to sit down and talk about the long, or even short-term, plan of the association. In January 2001, TLJA had their first congress to agree on some long-term objectives. It was at that time that differences began to emerge. Journalists from different backgrounds, all with different levels and concepts of professionalism, began to clash. This divide in interests has since resulted in the emergence of a second journalist association: the East Timor Journalists Union; which two former, founding, members of TLJA have been involved in initiating. Officially, no explanation was given for their break-off. Guterres comments on their departure: "I think its normal, it's a good sign for us that we are free to organise so no-one is forced to stay," but is clearly regretful that the human resources have been diluted even further. With obvious fatigue in his voice he states: "I think it's becoming harder to gather journalists together." On plans for the future: Guterres hopes to re-instigate Lalenok, but this time not without the funds to implement an infrastructure and ensure some staff wages. He is noticeably regretful when he talks about the publication's demise, but his eyes shine as he tells me: "I think we need some tragedies to learn, without mistakes we could not survive. When something happens like that we can learn and in the future we might�still make mistakes, but at least they'll be different ones!" The media landscape in East Timor is very much in development stages. Although TLJA are in the process of developing a training course in conjunction with the University, the country is still lacking effective means to train and support its journalists. Guidance, support and assistance is still needed on many levels in order for it to foster into the critical, independent and democratic sector that it has the very real potential to become. One can only hope, as is so often the case in development situations that the media sector in East Timor does not succumb to the many spurious funding and support sources that it is vulnerable to. Sadly, with the World Bank�s recent plans to initiate and fund a number of new community radio stations in the country, this does remain a possibility. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- www.smallvoices.org From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: 17 May 2002, New Delhi: Digital Opportunity Channel (www.digitalopportunity.org), a Web portal and online community focused on information and communications technologies for global sustainable development, launched here today on UN World Telecommunications Day. Digital Opportunity Channel is a joint initiative of OneWorld (www.oneworld.net), the online sustainable development and human rights network, and the Benton Foundation (www.benton.org), the Washington-based non-profit organization that works to realize the social benefits made possible by the public interest use of information and communications technology (ICT). The visiting Director of OneWorld International Foundation, Anuradha Vittachi, spoke about the merits of the new channel and how it will help narrow the divide between developed and developing communities. �The point is that none of us has to rely just on our own isolated efforts any more. To amplify our power, there is the blendability of the new digital technologies, the multiplying power of networks, the interdependability of human beings - and, most important of all, the boundless power of goodwill.� Coordinated from India, Digital Opportunity Channel has a special emphasis on developing countries. "Developing countries have largely been marginalized in the global dialogue on the benefits and negative impacts of digital technologies,� said Kanti Kumar, channel editor. �Our portal aims to give organizations and community leaders in the South a platform for their voice to be heard, a place where they can work together with colleagues around the world striving to develop smart strategies for using ICT to make a real and lasting difference in the lives of people living in poverty." Digital Opportunity Channel builds on OneWorld's experience of seven years in ICT for development and presents content from OneWorld's worldwide partnership of over 1250 development, human rights and environment NGOs. All these organizations are now using the Internet and other ICT to share knowledge and take action on poverty and human rights or in support of programmes that aim to meet the basic needs of the most disadvantaged peoples in the world. In the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine, UN Secretary General Kofi A. Annan has recommended OneWorld.net as one of his top Web sites, reflecting his belief that "Information and communications technologies are enormously powerful tools for development. One of the most pressing challenges is to harness this extraordinary force, spread it throughout the world, and make its benefits accessible and meaningful for all humanity, in particular the poor." The channel also brings in the invaluable experience of the Benton Foundation's Digital Divide Network (www.digitaldividenetwork.org) in building a community of practitioners, academics, policy leaders and people from ICT industries to help shape a shared responsibility in creating opportunity for all the world's people through appropriate use of emerging technologies. Benton Foundation�s Andy Carvin, co-editor of the new portal, said: "Information about how the digital divide is being addressed in the U.S. and Europe is widely available. However, until now, there has not been a place to gain a global picture and explore the viewpoints, challenges and successes of grassroots communities in around the world. With this channel we aim to fill that gap.� People without access to new information and communications technologies are increasingly excluded from education, healthcare, good governance and the ability to improve their own livelihood. The challenge is to ensure ICT no longer increases the gap between the rich and the poor but becomes an opportunity to help bring greater equality, understanding and solidarity. Digital Opportunity Channel seeks to help tackle this challenge. Available on the Web at www.digitalopportunity.org , the channel will feature news from around the globe, campaign actions, success stories, opinion pieces by leading commentators, in-depth analysis and research, events listings, a beginner's guide to digital divide issues, funding information, email digests and a dedicated search facility on ICT for development. OneWorld is funded for Digital Opportunity Channel by the UK Government Department for International Development ( www.dfid.gov.uk ) and the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Directorate General for International Co-operation www.minbuza.nl/english/ ). The Benton Foundation�s involvement in Digital Opportunity Channel is supported by the AOL Time Warner Foundation ( www.aoltimewarnerfoundation.org ) and the Markle Foundation www.markle.org ). Kanti Kumar Editor, Digital Opportunity Channel OneWorld South Asia Third Floor 17 Panchsheel Commercial Centre Panchsheel Park New Delhi 110 017 Tel: +91-11-6498791, 6498794 Fax: +91-11-6498795 Email: kanti.kumar at oneworld.net Digital Opportunity Channel: http://www.digitalopportunity.org/ OneWorld Home Page: http://www.oneworld.net/ OneWorld South Asia: http://www.oneworld.net/southasia/ --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.343 / Virus Database: 190 - Release Date: 3/22/02 ------=_NextPart_000_002E_01C20023.580E9040 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

New Digital Opportunity Web = Initiative To Elevate Voices <= /b>

From = Developing Nations<= /p>

 <= /p>

17 May 2002, New = Delhi: <= /p>

Digital Opportunity Channel (www.digitalopportunity.org), a Web = portal and online community focused on information and communications = technologies for global sustainable development, launched here today on UN World Telecommunications Day.<= /p>

 <= /p>

Digital Opportunity Channel is a joint initiative of OneWorld (www.oneworld.net), the online sustainable development and human rights network, and the Benton Foundation (www.benton.org), the = Washington-based non-profit organization that works to realize the social benefits made = possible by the public interest use of information and communications technology = (ICT). <= /p>

 <= /p>

The visiting Director of OneWorld International = Foundation, Anuradha Vittachi, spoke about the merits of the new channel and how it = will help narrow the divide between developed and developing communities. = “The point is that none of us has to rely just on our own isolated efforts any = more. To amplify our power, there is the blendability of the new digital = technologies, the multiplying power of networks, the interdependability of human = beings - and, most important of all, the boundless power of = goodwill.”

 <= /p>

Coordinated from India, Digital Opportunity Channel has a special emphasis on = developing countries.   = "Developing countries have largely been marginalized in the global dialogue on the = benefits and negative impacts of digital technologies,” said Kanti Kumar, = channel editor.  “Our portal = aims to give organizations and community leaders in the South a platform for their = voice to be heard, a place where they can work together with colleagues around = the world striving to develop smart strategies for using ICT to make a real and = lasting difference in the lives of people living in poverty." = <= /p>

 <= /p>

Digital Opportunity Channel builds on OneWorld's experience of seven years in = ICT for development and presents content from OneWorld's worldwide partnership = of over 1250 development, human rights and environment NGOs. All these = organizations are now using the Internet and other ICT to share knowledge and take = action on poverty and human rights or in support of programmes that aim to meet = the basic needs of the most disadvantaged peoples in the world. = <= /p>

 <= /p>

In = the current issue of Foreign = Policy magazine, UN Secretary General Kofi A. Annan has recommended = OneWorld.net as one of his top Web sites, reflecting his belief that "Information = and communications technologies are enormously powerful tools for = development. One of the most pressing challenges is to harness this extraordinary force, = <= /p>

spread it throughout the world, and make its benefits accessible and meaningful = for all humanity, in particular the poor."<= /p>

 <= /p>

The channel also brings in the invaluable experience of the Benton Foundation's = Digital Divide Network (www.digitaldividenetwork.org) in building a community of practitioners, academics, policy leaders and people from ICT industries = to help shape a shared responsibility in creating opportunity for all the = world's people through appropriate use of emerging technologies. = <= /p>

 <= /p>

Benton Foundation’s Andy Carvin, co-editor of the new portal, said: = "Information about how the digital divide is being addressed in the U.S. and Europe = is widely available. However, until now, there has not been a place to gain = a global picture and explore the viewpoints, challenges and successes of grassroots communities in around the world. With this channel we aim to = fill that gap.”  = <= /p>

 <= /p>

People without access to new information and communications technologies are increasingly excluded from education, healthcare, good governance and = the ability to improve their own livelihood. The challenge is to ensure ICT = no longer increases the gap between the rich and the poor but becomes an opportunity to help bring greater equality, understanding and = solidarity. Digital Opportunity Channel seeks to help tackle this = challenge.<= /p>

 <= /p>

Available on the Web at www.digitalopportunity.org, the channel will feature news from around the globe, campaign actions, = success stories, opinion pieces by leading commentators, in-depth analysis and research, events listings, a beginner's guide to digital divide issues, = funding information, email digests and a dedicated search facility on ICT for development. =

 <= /p>

OneWorld is funded for Digital = Opportunity Channel by the UK Government Department for International = Development  (www.dfid.gov.uk) and the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Directorate General for International Co-operation  = (www.minbuza.nl/english/). = The Benton Foundation’s involvement in Digital Opportunity Channel is = supported by the AOL Time Warner Foundation (www.aoltimewarnerfoundat= ion.org) and the Markle Foundation (www.markle.org).

 

Kanti Kumar<= /p>

Editor, Digital Opportunity Channel

OneWorld South Asia

Third Floor

17 Panchsheel Commercial Centre

Panchsheel Park

New Delhi 110 017

Tel: +91-11-6498791, 6498794

Fax: +91-11-6498795

Email: kanti.kumar at oneworld.net

 

Digital Opportunity Channel: http://www.digitalopportunity.org/=

OneWorld Home Page: http://www.oneworld.net/

OneWorld South Asia: http://www.oneworld.net/south= asia/

 

 <= /p>

------=_NextPart_000_002E_01C20023.580E9040-- From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: wildlife have been pushed to the brink of extinction and the North East is no exception. In the tiny state of Tripura despite the presence of legislations, a species of rare turtle is being sold openly in the markets, which the experts feel may lead to near extinction of the species in the days to come. The apathy of the wild life officials is also largely responsible for the large scale killings of the turtles which is found only in the Indian rivers. The species is called, Gangetic turtle (In Bangla - Kwatta) and scientifically called as the Trionyx gangeticus, belonging to the Sub-class Anapsida and family Chelonidae in the class Reptilia. Though called Gangetic turtles, but the species is quite prevalent in the rivers like Brahmaputra, Barak and besides in good number in the rivers of South Tripura and adjoining Bangladesh. The three main markets of Agartala viz. Maharajganj bazaar, Battala and Tulashibati bazaar have been witnessing regular sale of the turtles, whose flesh are sold at a price as high as Rs 300- 400 a kg. And if the turtles are gravid ones, the higher the prices. At an average, the three markets accounts for over 60 turtles per week. If the whole state is taken into account, the number will definitely be over hundred as the same has been recorded in Belonia, Sabroom, Udaipur besides other places in the interiors. Wild life experts feel, the ignorance of the public has been the major factor behind the killings of the species. Some believes, the heart which keeps on beating even after half an hour of the slaughter helps strengthen the weak heart. But the fallacies related to it has been taking the toll of the hapless species. This particular species of turtles was included as a Scheduled -I species way back in September 03, 1977, under the Wild Life Protection Act, 1972. Under this Act, a person is liable to be prosecuted with imprisonment and fine if found guilty of killing the scheduled animals. It is also included under the Red Data Book of International Union of Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). Most of the turtles and tortoises fall under the same category. When contacted, some says, the particular species are smuggled from the neighbouring districts of Comilla, Noakhali and Chittagong in Bangladesh and so the State Government or the Centre has nothing to do with it. But the fact is that, even it is smuggled into the state from Bangladesh it is likely to fall under another legislation called as Trade Restrictions Against Flora and Fauna in Commerce (TRAFFIC). Prof. Roy Choudhury, belonging to MBB College and also an ardent wild life activist said, though a few years back Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) had worked on it but gradually it faded away with time. As a result the species may become extinct any time if immediate measures are not taken. "What concerns the most are the way they are mercilessly butchered and brought to the markets with their legs stitched with steel wires" he observes. "Besides, the turtles are an important community in the eco-system as it occupies the summit of the food chain. A slight disturbances in the food chain may damage the entire chain of events "Prof. Choudhury observes. ________________________________________________________________________ Everything you always wanted to know about cars and bikes,now at: http://in.autos.yahoo.com/cricket/tracker.html From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=456039 Few Economist indicators are as often cited as our Big Mac index, which uses hamburger prices as an index of currency parity. In the same spirit, we wondered how the globe looks when viewed through the bottom of a Coca-Cola bottle. It turns out that fizzy mass-market stuff-ie capitalism-is good for you. Oddly, a list of the top 12 Coke consumers shows no discernible pattern-unless you see what Iceland has in common with Aruba. Probe a little deeper, however, and patterns emerge. For one, there is a loose but clear positive relationship between Coke consumption and wealth-perhaps not surprisingly. Even clearer is the relationship between cola and an index developed by the United Nations to show general quality of life (as measured by wealth, education, health and literacy). Coke consumption takes off at the upper end of the development scale. Finally, democracy goes better with Coke. Consumption rises with political freedom, as measured by Freedom House 's seven-point scale. Have a cola, North Korea Copyright � 2002 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. 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