By Karen Smits

The Mennonite religion is a branch of the Anabaptist movement of the Protestant Reformation in Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century, and originated in Friesland, a province in the Netherlands. Similar offshoots are the Amish, the Brethren and the Hutterites. Their claim for a religious life style in which the state does not interfere, their demand to pacifism and their aim to live in self-controlled communities are well-known traits for the Mennonites. Traditionally, they distance themselves from certain principles such as worldliness, in which they aspire to reject influences from the world outside their communities. Today, the level of worldliness differs per community.

The church is filled with about two hundred people; all sharing the Mennonite religion, and worldliness is reflected in the women’s outfits. The more conservative ladies wear black, and cover their hair with a scarf. Those a little less conservative wear long, flower design dresses. The most progressive attendees wear knee-length dresses, high heels (I even spot a pair of bright red pumps!) and make up. The male outfits are very plain and similar: pants and a shirt.

When the bride enters the church, dressed in white and guided by her father, the attendees stand up and grab their (film) cameras and smartphones to capture this moment. Standing in front of the church, a proud smile appears on the groom’s face: this girl is coming to Belize with him.

Often seen as antagonists by the ruling churches and governments in the countries they lived in, the Mennonites were forced to migrate several times. First, they migrated to Poland and Prussia, then to Russia, from where they moved to Canada. Once in Canada, the Mennonites could still not escape from the country’s legislation, so traditional Mennonite followers decided to move further south into the Americas. Via Mexico, a Mennonite group finally located in Belize. The Belizean government granted them access to a jungle area, and agreed not to interfere with the life style in the communities. Well-known for their agricultural skills, Mennonites nowadays lead the national market for milk, dairy products and poultry. They often visit shops and supermarkets in the cities to sell their products; they export goods, and some Mennonites travel to visit other communities. An old German dialect is spoken among Mennonites and that connects them around the world.

The groom lives in Blue Creek, once a dense jungle and now a prosperous, structured and rich Mennonite village in Belize. Blue Creek is a very progressive community in which cell phones, photo and video equipment, as well as modernized machines for their agricultural work, are highly accepted. When the groom visited his friends in a Mennonite community in Germany, he met his friend’s sister and they fell in love. Through Internet they kept in touch. Today, a year later, they stand in front of friends and family, but mostly in front of God, to promise being a good husband and excellent wife for each other.  Although the service is held in German, a language that I do not master, I get the tenor of it. And, just like many other attendees, I have my camera ready for when the rings are exchanged, and, for the kiss. Soon after this fabulous moment everyone is invited to share a lunch meal in the basement of the church.

The groom’s Mennonite church in Blue Creek knows a distinction between ‘youth’, ‘newly-weds’, and ‘marrieds’. Each group organizes its own activities that range from bible study to Sunday afternoon lunches or going for a swim in the lake. All members of the ‘youth’ category are aged between 15 and 25 years old, apart from the groom. For the past twenty years, he has been the oldest in the ‘youth’ category, because only when married one can move a category up.

During the service I realized that for outsiders, a thing like ‘a Mennonite wedding’ might sound like something exotic or bizarre. I do believe the Mennonites are a specific group in society, but today, during this ceremony, I just saw similarities. Yes, what is different is that this couple only knows each other shortly before they got married, and indeed, they have never shared a bed or house together. Yes, for their family standards they are ‘late’ for not marrying around the age of 20. Yes, the traditions of their religion are different. But, all that counts here is love.

In today’s celebrations love is reflected in everything. It’s in the warm welcome. In the best men’s tap on the shoulder of the groom, after the ring-exchange. In the tears of the bride’s mom. In three hours of speeches, songs and sketches, played after lunch. In the facial expression of the bride’s brother, who will miss his buddy now that she’s moving to Belize.

The prayers, the rings, the cake are all similar to weddings as we know them. However, today’s event is also a Mennonite ritual: today will change their lives; from today onwards they belong to the ‘newly-weds’.

Karen Smits is a PhD Candidate at the department of Organization Sciences at VU University. She  focuses on collaboration in the Panama Canal Expansion Program. For her master’s degree in Organizational Anthropology she studied Mennonite entrepreneurship and self-employment in Blue Creek, Belize.

By Martijn Dekker

The following text was presented as a column at the yearly PhD/MSR student conference of the VU Graduate School for Social Sciences, on the 23rd of September 2011.

I would like to use this opportunity to talk to you about the notion of ‘occupational hazards’.  Usually, these two words refer to dangerous situations that might occur at your workplace. Or injuries that can be caused by work-related activities.

 Interestingly enough, ‘Occupational Hazards’ is also the provisional title of my dissertation. But, since my research topic, which deals with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is all over the news every day already, and even more of late, I don’t want to bore you with that right now.  Instead, I want to briefly talk about occupational hazards in the literal sense:  about the pathologies, be they psychological or physical, a PhD or Research Master student may incur while doing his or her job. And I want to make this a personal story by zooming in on three of such pathologies I more or less suffered from and which I think may also sound familiar to some of you. These are: anxiety, guilt, and, what I would like to call, the “go it alone mentality”.

First anxiety. I want to explain how I apparently got used to working in a region where violent conflict is more likely to occur than, say, Holland, but suddenly got reminded what an intense feeling of fear feels like. And how it influenced my behavior since.

While living in the West Bank, I used to frequent weekly demonstrations against the so-called Separation Barrier or Apartheid Wall. There are many of these demonstrations but I always went to the little village of Bil’in, because a friend of mine lived there. We not only shared our frustration over the Separation Barrier but also had a common interest in soccer club Barcelona, which is why we became friends in the first place. But anyway, I’d attended the demonstration several times before and, while being there, had to seek shelter from tear gas grenades, suffered from light-headedness from tear gas inhalation, and had to run to keep from being hit by rubber-coated bullets. Because the cat-and-mouse game between the young Palestinian protesters and the equally young Israeli soldiers was exactly the same every week, it had become somewhat of a routine, a game even. Accordingly, I allowed myself to let my guard down. Until early May, that is.

As they did sometimes before, the Israeli soldiers used a new kind of weapon, with which they can fire so-called high-velocity tear gas canisters, which are roughly the size of a soda can and made from aluminum. Although they were developed to cover great distances, the soldiers often shoot them straight ahead, at approximately chest height. It’s needless to say that an aluminum canister that can reach several hundreds of yards can do a lot of damage when hitting a person in the chest or even in the head and indeed, people have been seriously injured and even killed. On that sunny afternoon in May I was running downhill with dozens of other protesters, away from the soldiers, in order to not be caught or hit by something, when I suddenly heard a loud scream. I turned around, which in itself is quite dangerous while running, and I saw a young man standing completely still, while blood came gushing out from a huge hole right in the middle of his forehead, roughly the size of a 2-euro coin. I froze, almost in mid-air, turned around, and sprinted back, to see if I could help. While I ran towards the man, I pushed back nausea as I could literally see his brains through the gaping hole. As people kept speeding past us, I grabbed his arm, together with another man, and dragged him to the ambulance, which sped him to the hospital. Moments later, after returning to the village, I stood shaking, looking at the man’s blood on my pants and shoes, and I remember thinking to myself, “this is not a game, this is not a game.” What followed could come from a movie about tough war reporters: a booze-inspired night out with two journalists in one of the more fancy hotels in Ramallah. Very cliché indeed.

From that day onwards, although I did visit the demonstration a couple of times later on, I never quite experienced that feeling of adventure or excitement I had before. The thrills had faded. I don’t want to say that I lost my innocence or something like that, but I’d certainly become more serious, which ultimately, and regrettably, transformed into a nasty form of cynicism. About demonstrations but also about the whole conflict in general.

The second injury or pathology deals with guilt. I’ve met many friendly people while doing fieldwork and often I’ve asked a lot of them. While being there, I called them my friends. Because, why else would they be so hospitable and open? Or why did they want to be a translator during interviews, free of charge. Yes, I called them friends and rightly so. But now, being back in Holland, I hardly have contact with them. Why? I’m actually not sure. But I simply seem to be unable to just send them an e-mail or even ‘like’ a picture they’ve uploaded on Facebook.

In the end, I think it’s because of guilt. I’m here, living my luxurious life, and practically the only thing I have to worry about is whether I charged the battery of my iPad, so I can listen to my favorite songs on the bus. Alright, true, I also have a PhD dissertation to write but all in all, it’s nothing compared to the living circumstances of my Palestinian friends, who often have to face checkpoints, random arrests, shootings, Kafka-style bureaucracy and a whole range of other nasty stuff that comes with a belligerent occupation. Also, and this sounds terrible, however true it may be, I simply do not WANT to know about their daily predicaments. We simply live completely different lives, are completely different people and maybe it should stay that way. Or so my unconscious self has decided for me. Of course, as an anthropologist I know that it’s all relative. My suffering may by no means be less but just different, so get over it. And besides that, surely they will appreciate my stories and inquiries. Still, I cannot put myself to contact the people I left behind in Palestine, out of a misplaced feeling of guilt. And the fact that I also feel guilty about that, makes it even worse. It’s a vicious circle, indeed.

The last malady I want to discuss is what I call the “go it alone mentality”. This will probably sound very familiar to many of you: the fact that you all have to do it on your own. Sure, people may tell you that’s not true, because there’s for instance your supervisor, or your peers who are suffering from the same self-imposed loneliness. Yes, we can even have nice conferences together, like this one, but your research project, your dissertation or thesis, remains a struggle you have to fight on your own. In the end it is YOU, who has to write those thousands of words.

Doing fieldwork, especially abroad, doesn’t help much. In fact, it makes the whole experience all the more solitary. I’ll gladly admit that there were times when I felt extremely lonely during the months I was away. But the worst of it all, and that’s something you only find out when you return, was in fact coming back home. The feeling that you can’t really share what you’ve experienced, despite the pictures, the e-mails, the weblog or the late-night phone calls, is quite difficult to explain.

When I came back, everything that used to seem so familiar, my home, the food, my friends, they actually appeared rather strange and alien. In fact, everything I longed for while being away, turned out to be quite a disappointment. And what about finding out that the distance between me and my girlfriend turned out to be not just of a geographical nature.

Obviously, such experiences also have other consequences. Physical ones, for example. I picked up smoking only two years ago; and my habit of having a couple of drinks during the weekend has now basically been extended to the whole week. Or what about the roughly 20 pounds I’ve lost abroad…they’re still gone. And probably the strangest thing, I actually came back with a tattoo, much to the surprise of basically everyone who knows me a little.

But, luckily there is a but. In the end, obtaining my PhD entails much more than just reading books and writing papers. The whole process of doing research has taught me valuable things about life. And yes, that includes a lot of difficult and painful things. But, as the cliché goes, what doesn’t kill you, only makes you stronger. In the end, I hope to have not only become a better or smarter scholar but, because of the occupational hazards and life experience, also a better and more sensible person in general.

Martijn Dekker has studied Social and Cultural Anthropology at VU University Amsterdam and currently is a PhD Candidate at the Political Science Department.

By Linda van de Kamp In 2007, Madam Gracelina (45 years old) was going to open a business with her husband in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. She had managed to rent a nice building for their company at a central location in the city centre and had bought all the necessary equipment. There were also some possible future customers Dona Gracelina was in contact with and she was all ready to start. However, after having dealt with the right government department in Maputo for several months, government officials would not hand over the required licence. She suspected that the officials were waiting for her to pay them an additional sum of money to proceed, but she refused. In the Brazilian Pentecostal God is Love Church that she frequented, she handed over the project file with the company plans and copies of all the papers she had to arrange for the licence to a Brazilian pastor. He would take it with him on his travels until he was back in Brazil where the church’s founder was going to pray for her. During the service it was revealed that an evil spirit stood behind Dona Gracelina and this was following her wherever she went. The pastor expelled the spirit and proposed a programme of prayer, offerings and fasting to defeat the demon.

Studies on religious transnationalism have addressed the role of religion for migrants in maintaining the link between the home and host society. A central question is how transnational religion plays a role in preserving a sense of cultural continuity or in encouraging cultural change in contact between migrants and the new society in which migrants are subjected to a forceful public agenda that usually emphasizes integration. In this context, it has been argued that transnational Pentecostalism encourages stability in situations of mobility and provides for cultural continuity by offering migrants a ‘home away from home’.  

In the case of Brazilian Pentecostalism in Mozambique we are not, however, dealing with a migrant community. Mozambican converts continue to live in their own society while participating in a setting where relations are developed and maintained that link Brazilian and Mozambican societies. What exactly is the relevance of transnational religion and related questions on cultural (dis)continuity and (dis)integration in such an environment?

In the case of transnational Pentecostalism in Mozambique, converts’ cultural nearness to the local society appears critical. Brazilian Pentecostalism in Mozambique demonstrates the locally embedded meaning and development of transnationalism. Being part of the local society, unlike in situations of migration, many converts struggle to understand how their Pentecostal morality and spirituality can remain unaffected or even ‘uncaptured’ by local circumstances, powers or cultural realities. They want to become independent of locally binding forces, i.e. to become more culturally and socio-economically mobile and to cross boundaries. One example is the case of Dona Gracelina.

Madam Gracelina felt paralyzed because of the power the government officials had over her: she was being kept by ‘evil national powers’. It was through transnational Pentecostalism that she would be able to break out of this situation, something that was made real with the business papers that would leave the country to receive a blessing in Brazil. In this context Dona Gracelina was made aware of the negative impact of national spiritual connections: through her possible links with ancestral or other spirits her project was failing but by engaging in transnational Pentecostalism she could move away from these ‘origins’.

As outsiders, Brazilian pastors confront Mozambicans in a variety of ways with what their culture or life looks like. To question the power of local healers, the pastors mimic the behaviour of the healers when they are in a trance. They bring objects into church that local healers work with and show that they can touch them without any negative consequences. In the traditional Mozambican context this is considered offensive and dangerous but the pastors show that one should not be afraid if one is in the sphere of influence of the borderless power of the Holy Spirit. Another example is the so-called therapy of love (‘terapia do amor’). The therapy is a public meeting that resembles a church service but is dedicated to the subjects of marriage, love and sexuality. Thousands of people participate every week and most of them are young (aged 15-35). During one therapy session, the pastor imitated the behaviour of Mozambican couples who, according to Brazilians, are shy, do not have the courage to look each other in the eyes or to touch their partner in public spaces. Then the pastor held hands with his wife, embraced her and gave her a kiss to show what love is but also to demonstrate the shortcomings of local customs. By doing all this openly, the pastors want to force open cultural values as a way of bringing about transformation. They urge converts to cross cultural and spiritual boundaries, extending the tradition that spiritual practices involve boundaries that can be transcended.

Mozambicans do not travel literally to cross boundaries. Brazilian pastors have done so and it is their trajectory that creates a space of mobility. The dislocation by Brazilian pastors within and outside Brazil who leave their homes and families to preach the gospel  is valued as an important strategy of spiritual development because, by leaving one’s family, it is possible to be fully dedicated to the missionary project. The geographical journey facilitates a radical break with one’s former life and allows for the formation of a new person. During services in Mozambique, Brazilian pastors often used their personal journeys as an example of what faith looks like and what it can achieve. To transform, one has to travel and transcend the familiar, including one’s family and culture, and suffer hardships to create new possibilities. By participating in Brazilian Pentecostalism one embarks on a journey. Mozambican believers leave elements of local culture behind, begin to experience their lives differently and see things in a new light. Since converting, Dona Gracelina had started to walk through the city with a particular attitude, alert to all the (evil) influences that could affect her. Even though bodies remain in the same location physically, the subjective dislocation and the transnational positioning have the same effect as embarking on a real journey regarding social and cultural perceptions, values and practices.

Between 2005 and 2008, Linda van de Kamp did research in Mozambique as part of the research programme ‘Conversion Careers in Global Pentecostalism:  A Comparative Study in Four Continents’, funded by the ‘The Future of the Religious Past’ programme of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and hosted by the department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and the African Studies Centre, Leiden. On September 16^th, she successfully defended her thesis ‘Violent Conversion: Brazilian Pentecostalism and the Urban Pioneering of Women in Mozambique’. 

by Gea Wijers

The GMS cooperation is characterized as based on the increase of connectivity, competitiveness and community. Please note, not necessarily on the cooperation  or even integration that our European Union is based on. Cooperation or integration would rather be the aim of ASEAN. The challenge, on the other hand, for a small open economy like Cambodia is to maximize its opportunities within the GMS by building its infrastructure and trade facilitation yet also increase its competitiveness through investments in skills and human resources.

Regional competitiveness may hold promising results for a developing nation. It’s all about creating opportunities, which is hard. But when successful  it generates short-term results in terms of growth of private investment and employment. The number of foreign banks mushrooming in the streets of Phnom Penh over the last years is telling. So far the economic growth in the sub-region has averaged 6 per cent while Cambodian economic growth has averaged around 10 percent during the last years. Not a bad performance.

On the down side, health concerns such as the spread of HIV/AIDS and the increase of, for instance, illegal logging have been clear side-effects of this greater connectivity in the region.  Inequality within this regional community makes Cambodia vulnerable to these negative effects while there’s little capacity to counter them.  Moreover, the abuses of power and grand corruption so abundant in Cambodian society seem to act as barriers to growth and slow down the progress made.  Sounds familiar?

Of course, finally, an anti-corruption law has now been passed by the government.  It is received with very mixed reactions. As George Boden of Global Witness states: “Corruption tends to permeate through societies. Unless corruption is tackled at the very top, it seems very unlikely that it will ever be stamped out.” The central government is in full control of the anti-corruption bodies and this will severely undermine the law’s implementation. It seems Cambodian society itself could do with increased connectivity between its institutions and social groups as well as a building of an anti-corrupt community if it is to make the most of regional cooperation. An easy parallel is drawn with the Greek situation. There too, there are marked differences between the hard-working citizens paying the bill of the upcoming bankruptcy, and the responsible governmental officials that seem to escape unharmed.

In conclusion: if you want to go anywhere as a regional program or project, you better find a way to deal with institutional weaknesses in your most vulnerable members. Their open economies will be the first to profit from success, but the vulnerability of their societies will suffer most from the negative side effects and impede progress. If there’s any lessons to be learned from Cambodia it’s that economic and social transformation need to go hand in hand.  That would suggest that Greece cannot be left to its own devices, it’s too easy to boo and throw tomatoes at the weakest performer on the European stage.  Now is the time for European solidarity.

Gea Wijers is a PhD candidate at the Department of Organizational Science, specializing in Cambodian returnee migration, transnationalism and institutional entrepreneurship

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mplemmon/1314495959/sizes/o/in/photostream/

By Pal Nyiri Kenya’s Sunday Nation reports that a Chinese government delegation “led by State [Administration] for Religious Affairs minister Wang Zuoan is in Kenya to ‘copy good practices’ that could help it grow Christianity.”

“Religion is good for development,” the minister reportedly said at Bishop’s Gardens in Nairobi, at a meeting with Kenya’s Anglican archbishop. He also said that “he was happy with the localisation of Anglican Church in Kenya after independence, so that all its bishops are locals.”

Well. Where to begin?

China has used religion, including exchanges of clerical delegations and references to religion in official meetings, in its diplomacy before, notably Buddhism (especially in relation to Thailand) and Islam (with the Middle East and Indonesia). In fact, in the Indonesian case — as documented by Johanes Herlijanto –the image of China as a country that protects Islam and has even propagated it in the past, in the person of the famous Admiral Zheng He, has contributed to a surprisingly widespread view of China as a reliable developmental patron in the context of increasing Chinese investment in Indonesian infrastructure. Something similar is clearly going on in Kenya.

The link to this article reached me via the weekly news bulletin of Peking University’s Centre for African Studies, directed by Li Anshan, a researcher of overseas Chinese who rose at an opportune moment to become the main voice of China’s official Africa research. In Chinese, the link is entitled 中国向肯尼亚学习处于里宗教事务的经验 （China learns from Kenya’s experience of dealing with religion), a very different message that de-emphasizes the somewhat risque suggestion that China actually wants to promote the growth of Christianity, and stresses instead that China is learning from Kenya. This is in keeping with the official line — untiringly represented by Li — that Chinese exchanges with Africa take place on a basis of equality.

Still, I think Wang’s statement is more than mere diplomatic posturing. That a Chinese minister says he wants to promote Christianity, or religion in general, and that this declaration is picked up by a research centre that positions itself as very close to the government’s ears, suggests an increasingly clear trend in China, namely that the government, or at least parts of it, really does promote religion, as long as it is hierarchically organised under government control. One of the reasons is the government’s concern with social morality; another is that the religious hierarchy provides an additional channel of ensuring Chinese people’s identification with the official discourse of nationhood and weeding out subversives. A third is the reason Wang suggests: the religious subject, and perhaps the Christian subject more than any other, in many ways fits the description of the self-disciplined, community-oriented Chinese citizen desired by the state. The prosperity gospel (the idea that getting rich is a sign of the Lord’s blessing), embraced by many African politicians and churches, is influential in China (see Cao Nanlai’s ethnography of Wenzhou “boss Christians:” Constructing China’s Jerusalem: Christians, Power, and Place in Contemporary Wenzhou).

Pál Nyiri is Professor of Global History from an Anthropological Perspective at the VU University. See his earlier posts on Standplaats Wereld. He also writes regularly for the Culture Matters and China Can’t Stop Saying No weblogs.

At the end of February, armed Libyan rebels assembled in front of the work site and commandeered two trucks. The Chinese workers assembled into units armed with crowbars and bricks; they barricaded the entrance with more trucks and threw stones over the wall. The attackers retreated, but the offices at another, unguarded work site were looted. The article refers to these Libyans as thugs and provides no political context, but the engineer is quoted as saying that Chinese workers have encountered hostility and have even been thrown stones at before. He attributes this to causing a rise in the price of consumer goods such as cigarettes: the price of Rothmans has doubled since Chinese visitors have been buying them up. The article quotes a Chinese researcher, Liu Zhirong, as saying that the Chinese media’s portrayal of African friendliness towards Chinese is skewed. The reality, it suggests, is more mixed, just as Chinese see Africa in a mixed light (they like that cars let pedestrians cross the road).

The engineer featured in the article makes $1,700 a month, or 3-4 times what he made in China, plus a “substantial” living allowance, and has almost no expenses since accommodation, meals, and transportation are provided by the company. In less than a year in Libya, he has saved over 100 thousand yuan, while his total savings before he left China were just 5,000 yuan. An ordinary construction worker makes 4-5 thousand yuan a month, while a skilled carpenter makes around 10 thousand, or over $1,500.

Workers have 2 days off in a month. At these times, the company sometimes organised a barbecue at a nearby restaurant, a shopping trip to Benghazi, or a trip to the sea. They are not allowed to leave the site on their own — to avoid incidents such as a mass fight between Chinese workers and Algerians in Algiers in 2009. (Another article says that at a work site in Mali,  there is also a sign saying ”It is not allowed to become too close to local women.”)

It is not clear if the reporters, Zhou Peng and Wu Guixia, actualy visited  Africa, or if the article is based on interviews. The fact that Lome, the capital of Togo, is described as being on the Mediterranean coast raises suspicions of the latter.

Obama on the news (by JoshMcConnell)

By Mohammed Amer The immediate reactions of Pakistanis on hearing of the murder of Osama bin Laden were divided – between those showing disbelief and condemning the Americans, and those condemning bin Laden for causing calamity for Pakistan. However as the news emerged, I did not find any emotional outburst in the neighborhood where I stayed.

On the 1^st of May, it was late in the evening when me and my family returned back to our apartment after attending the wedding reception of a relative. Everybody was tired after the preparation and enactment of three day long wedding rituals, usual for Pakistani marriages. Just after midnight  began the ‘load-shedding’ – a compulsory power cut that occurs many times during day and night in Pakistan, and we all fell asleep. Although the power cut usually means more mosquito attacks, that night we were so tired we didn’t even notice.

 If the load-shedding began here in Rawalpindi, an adjacent city of Islamabad, where we were staying with family, it would have been the same time that it ended in Abbottabad – a garrison town about 60 kilometer to the north and where bin Laden was hiding out, presumably for several years now. Around that time US Navy Seals started their military action under the name ‘Geronimo’, and attacked the hide-out compound in Abbottabad. American commandos had already left the hide-out, taking with them the dead body of bin Laden, before the Pakistani military or intelligence agencies could make an assessment about the incident.

 It was late in the morning when I was awoken by a phone call from a friend who teaches in a local government College. He asked ‘if I was watching the TV’ and told me about the killing of bin Laden as a result of the American covered military action in Abbottabad. ”Sad thing is that the Americans came in helicopters, killed Osama and left, while our military kept sleeping” he said. I sensed anger and distress in the tone of voice of my friend. I hurriedly searched for the remote control of the TV but becaue of the hectic chaos of the wedding nobody had watched the TV for the last couple of days and so it was no easy task. Under the dirty laundry spread across beds and sofas, finally I found the remote and turned the TV on. Different local channels showed  the image of a half-furnished ‘compound’ with streams of incoming news running on the screen regarding the American action. The news obviously caused curiosity among the residents of the house now gathered around the TV: some were hurling abuse at the Americans while others said ”He was also responsible for several bomb blasts in Pakistan” reminding them of the daily terrorist attacks in Pakistan. Curiously not a single person used the word shaheed or martyr for Osama.

 In the afternoon I had an appointment with a colleague at the International Islamic University in Islamabad. I took a taxi from Rawalpindi and it crossed through the streets of Cantonment where the headquarters of the Pakistani military are located. I did not observe any unusual security measures or gatherings of people along the road or on the squares. The taxi-driver, a retired soldier in his 50s, moaned about the hot weather while adjusting a wet piece of cloth on his head to keep himself cool. Obviously I wanted to talk with him about today’s incident: “how is it possible that he was hiding-out in Abbottabad—a military city? Where is the proof of his murder they didn’t show any proof of how they killed him”. On my suggestion that the announcement was made by the American President himself and that this is significant in showing that they might have really done it ‘this time’, he turned less assured about his position. ”Babu sahib (a term used for educated people) you know we do not know; these things are played at higher levels and about those decisions we are uneducated”, he tried to conclude this talk on a note of his powerlessness.

 Such a helplessness augmented in the wake of total silence from the civil or military institutes to inform people about the actual events. This situation translated into a narrative of convulsive rage that I found in the words of a student at the Islamic University in Islamabad: ”as a Pakistani I am confused and shocked regarding the Osama incident, and how angry I am with this state of my mind?” There was an element of evaporated jingoism when people like him asked ”what was our military  doing?”; therefore there was anger at the failure of the military and intelligence agencies. Somebody said ”If they knew, they should have taken an action of their own, and if they did not know, they are also guilty of negligence: in both cases they are incompetent”.

 Whether or not the world will ever become enlightened about the actual position of the Pakistani military in Osama’s murder, in the days following the military had to clear its position through its presentation in the Pakistani Parliament where it apologized for its failure. For some Pakistanis this confession was a big thing on the part of the military, however for the majority it added to the mystery of how it was possible that the military, which determines the internal and external policies of Pakistan, could be unaware of such an incident.

 M. Amer Morgahi is finishing his PhD at the SCA at the VU. He is interested in Islam in Europe, multicultural issues, Pakistan and Pakistani migrants in Europe. Read also his earlier posts on the war against terror and the politics of names.

By Ali Taher, visiting researcher from Iraq at the SCA-department of the VU  To begin with: It gives me a strange feeling when I see how the people in the Netherlands openly express their emotions. As a visitor from Iraq it is really interesting for me to see “lovers” and “couples” walking together in the center of Amsterdam, embracing each other, and nothing preventing them to interchange very hot kisses amidst the noise of a busy market !

Every day walking in the beautiful city streets, I continue thinking about all the differences  between Iraqi and Dutch society.  One of the differences is the kind of everyday embarrassing feeling I have at lunch time. You cannot imagine how shocked I was when I saw one of the girls in VU University choose only one apple as her lunch, although we had been together from early morning… It was unbelievable to see one of the professors who behaved no better than the girl, when he chose some soup with only three pieces of biscuit!  I really don’t know how the people here stay alive when they eat almost nothing! It is embarrassing for me to realize I need to eat three times more than what they eat (at least), to feel saturated! Also the taste of the food here is far removed from the taste in Iraq, which is known for its fatty and salty food.

I also smile when I am observing the high discipline of the people at the station when they are waiting for the tram towards “Dam Square”. I asked myself: who forces them, or makes them use this “chipcard” without any sergeant or other official controlling their every movement? And why is there not any kind of fighting when there is overcrowding at the station?

In the meantime, one day I was so fortunate to see hundreds of people gathering at “Dam square” to protest against nuclear energy. The form of the protest was really interesting for me: a music concert, two short speeches (without screaming and emotion!), and the showing of pictures on a huge screen. All urged to stop using nuclear energy. More than a thousand demonstrators, including old men and women, danced with the songs and were influenced by the pictures. That day I had a very nice story to tell my family whom I meet almost daily on “Messenger” about the way of protest, the issue itself, and the fact that women played a role in the protest too, etc. Indeed, I tried to explain all of that to my mother and my little smart sister Zahra (8 years old) who was staring at the laptop screen and replied with simple words and sentences. During my explanation my father joined us on Messenger, and Zahra started talking:

-      Daddy, do you know? Ali said that the people in the Netherlands do not have any kind of problems, and that is the reason they create their problems, and then they demonstrate against their imagined problems!!

I honestly didn’t use this theoretical level of words! Now I wondered: who is the sociologist in my family??!!

Ali Taher is a PhD-student at the University of Baghdad, currently a visitor at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the VU, thanks to the Academic Freedom Program for post-conflict countries’ scholars. 

At the hospital, the staff soon discovered his background and found out that his work permit had expired. The hospital turned him over to Thai immigration authorities who, despite Charlie’s injuries, made plans to deport him. He was transferred to the Police General Hospital where he was kept behind bars shackled to his bed1.

Charlie’s case demonstrates the insecurities undocumented migrant workers face. His situation changed dramatically once the Thai government found out about his illegal status. Where he was first treated nicely, after this discovery he was discriminated, imprisoned for weeks and on the verge of deportation. Only after human rights organizations filed complaints successfully did Charlie get a chance to defend his case. In Thailand unrecognized refugees from Burma like Charlie are forced to negotiate their everyday lives while facing discrimination and the constant threat of being discovered and deported.

Unrecognized refugees from Burma often express the pressure that security issues bring upon them in relation with their wish to preserve their ‘culture’. ‘In situations of forced migration, ‘culture’ is often revalued and particularly cherished by migrant communities. One of the most common issues for migrants is striking a balance between the preservation of that ‘culture’ and assimilation into the local one.

However, for unrecognized refugees from Burma in Thailand, the situation is more complicated. Their illegal status forces them to hide their ethnic background because of security concerns and fears of being deported. They must strike a very different balance: expressing one’s cultural identity and survival.

Concerns for their own personal security force many people from Burma to hide their cultural identity in Thailand. Fears over being deported make it impossible for them to wear traditional clothing or celebrate their culture in public. A young illegal migrant woman explained: “When I want to go to the temple I cannot wear my longi, because if the police sees me, they will know immediately where I am from. I will take my clothes with me in a bag, go to the temple, look around if there is no police and if so I will change into my traditional dress. When I leave I will change back into my ‘normal’ clothes. Often police will be waiting outside the temple on a festival day and they arrest many people, if we are not careful enough.”

These security risks make many see assimilation as not simply a choice but the only way to survive. A Shan (ethnic group in Burma) community leader said: “Now we live in Thailand, but we must not fight with the people we are living with. We have to be able to adapt to the culture where we live. If we don’t assimilate with the people we live with, there will be confrontations and misunderstandings.”

But unrecognized refugees survival in Thailand depends on their ability to adapt to a community that is hostile towards them. The authorities label people from Burma as alien workers and illegal migrants which creates discrimination. Nang Lao, an illegal migrant, notes: “It is difficult to adapt here in Thailand we are not treated in a nice way.”

Policies and public discourse make life for people fleeing Burma to Thailand very complicated. The need to hide cultural identity because of security issues creates an internal struggle and a strong urge to protect what is “left behind” in their country of birth. Living every day lives under these circumstances is stressful and complicated. However under these circumstances their spirit is tremendously strong, as proven by Kham Yin, a young unrecognized refugee woman: “I am not afraid. I do many good things so good things will return to me.”

Ursula Cats is the founder of the We women foundation located in Chiang Mai Thailand. We women is dedicated to promoting equality in Burma by empowering unrecognized women and their communities through higher education.